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CNN’s Stelter: Trump Telling Asian Reporter to “Ask China” Was Racist

BY May 11, 2020

For the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump held daily press conferences where he did most of the talking. The pressers did not go well. Eventually the President’s handlers told him the briefings were hurting his chances of reelection.

Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for WarnerMedia

That doesn’t mean, though, the Trump has stopped taking questions from the media about the illness. And they’ve remained controversial. CNN’s Brian Stelter ripped the President for an incident on Monday when he refused a question from an Asian reporter, telling her to “ask China.”

The reporter in question, CBS’ Weijia Jiang, asked, “Why does that matter? Why is this a global competition to you if every day Americans are still losing their lives and we’re still seeing more cases every day?”

“They’re losing their lives everywhere in world,” Trump said. “And maybe that’s a question you should ask China. Don’t ask me. Ask China that question, okay?”

Stelter was asked about the exchange by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. He responded:

“It is racist to look at an Asian-American White House correspondent and say, ‘ask China.’ This isn’t happening in a vacuum. This is part of a pattern of behavior from the president that goes back many years. He doesn’t have the benefit of the doubt that someone might have if for the first time in their life, they made a comment like that to a reporter. But the president has been rattled by Weijia Jiang’s questions in the past. He has treated her and other female reporters differently in the past. And he’s also had this pattern of reacting to minority journalists in a very specific and different way, Wolf.”

Watch a video of Stelter’s comments below:

 



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