Over the past two days, President Trump has twice been asked how he plans to address the systemic racism in U.S. police departments spotlighted by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and both times he has made clear that he believes the solution is a healthy economy.
In a Thursday radio interview with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, Trump was asked about his reaction to the fact that just 36 percent of African-Americans say they trust local police, compared with 70 percent of whites. “How do you change things?” Kilmeade asked the president.
“Well, I think it’s a very sad problem,” Trump replied. “As you know, as a Republican I’m doing very well with African-Americans and with the vote, with the — in polls and everything — especially, I mean, I haven’t seen one very recently because you had the plague come in from China, so that changed things up, but we had the best economy ever. We had the best numbers for African-American employment and unemployment in history. Best homeownership, best everything. We had the best numbers in everything — not only African-American, but the African-American numbers were great.”
Kilmeade, who is friendly to Trump, briefly pressed the president further. “But how do you handle the law enforcement part of this? How do you handle the law enforcement part of this?”
Trump went off on another tangent in his answer, complaining that he didn’t get enough credit for his remarks about Floyd’s death during an unrelated speech about space exploration. He did not address Kilmeade’s question about systemic changes.
“Well, I think you have to get better than what they’ve been doing. I mean, obviously that was a terrible thing,” Trump replied. “And I’ve spoken about it numerous times in various speeches. And you know, it’s interesting, I spoke about it when we launched a very successful rocket — a tremendous program that culminated on that day and obviously it goes on from there. But I then made a speech and it was a speech about the rocket, and I devoted 25 percent of the speech, probably, to what happened — or more — to what happened with respect to George — George Floyd — and it was ... and then you listen to news, ‘He doesn’t talk about George Floyd.’ The rocket went off, then I made a speech and I talked about George Floyd, but they said he didn’t talk about George Floyd. Half, maybe even almost half of the speech, but a large portion of the speech was devoted to that.