An analysis of former President Donald Trump's past statements by the Associated Press has identified a go-to trick that he employs when confronted with evidence of his own racism.
The analysis begins by recounting Trump's reaction to critics who argued that he was aping the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler when he accused immigrants of "poisoning the blood" of the United States — namely, he claimed ignorance about Hitler.
But as the AP shows, this wasn't a one-time occurrence.
In 2016, when asked by CNN's Jake Tapper about the support he'd received from infamous racist David Duke, Trump claimed he didn't know who Duke was, and even went so far as to proclaim ignorance of the Ku Klux Klan of which Duke had been Grand Wizard.
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Similarly, when asked to denounce the far-right Proud Boys gang that would go on to violently storm the Capitol on his behalf, Trump claimed he had no idea who they were before asking them to "stand back and stand by."
Trump's purported ignorance is not limited just to extremist groups but also to well-known historical events, the AP found, as he also professed to know nothing about the Reconstruction period in the aftermath of the Civil War.
"They say the first time since Reconstruction. You know what Reconstruction means? That means the Civil War,” Trump told a crowd at a recent rally. “I said, ‘Give me a definition, governor, of Reconstruction. You said I’m the first one to win all of these towns since Reconstruction.’ He said, ‘Well, Reconstruction: since the Civil War.’ That’s a long time ago. That’s pretty good.”
