Former RNC Chair: Trump’s Birtherism is ‘Bullshit Racism’

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele makes his remarks during a Republican National Committee Winter Meeting in Oxon Hill, Md., Friday, Jan. 14, 2011. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
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Former RNC Chair Michael Steele said Trump’s focus on “nonsensical” issues like birtherism was “nothing more than bullshit racism — excuse my French.”

Appearing on David Axelrod’s podcast “The Axe Files,” Steele, whose reign as RNC chair was marred by lackluster fundraising and his own foibles, didn’t hold back when it came to Trump and race.

“You cannot say to me that given the 400 plus years of this country, that at the very moment the country decides to elect the first Black man president of the United States, you going to ask for his papers? Seriously? Seriously?” said Steele. “I can go all day long about what’s wrong with Syria and economic policy and foreign policy with this administration. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and say ‘You need to show me your papers first.’ That’s not how this works.”

Steele was Republican National Committee chairman from 2009 to 2011 and is now a political analyst for MSNBC. On the podcast, Steele and Axelrod talked about the way Trump’s candidacy has exposed fractures in the Republican Party.

“Ronald Reagan, if he were a candidate running for any office today, would not win a Republican primary,” Steele told Axelrod. “Because the things that he would espouse, the policies, the values, the principles that he would lay out there, would be rejected,” Steele said, alleging that Reagan’s comparatively moderate position on taxes and immigration would now be rejected by hard-line Republican conservatives.

“The Axe Files” podcast is produced by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN.

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Notable Replies

  1. Don’t be such a racist, Michael Steele ! You are just an ‘establishment goon’ trying to stop a succesful business man overturning status quo in DC.

  2. Trump Supporter: Well, if a white person says it, I might listen. Who gave HIM a microphone?

  3. Avatar for mjv135 mjv135 says:

    “You cannot say to me that given the 400 plus years of this country, that at the very moment the country decides to elect the first Black man president of the United States, you going to ask for his papers? Seriously? Seriously?”

    To quote the Little Man from Oh Brother Where Art Though -

    He ain’t lyin’.

  4. That’s right. We want REAL racism!

  5. “Ronald Reagan, if he were a candidate running for any office today, would not win a Republican primary. Because the things that he would espouse, the policies, the values, the principles that he would lay out there, would be rejected.”

    But the GOP is still the party of Lincoln. Because we believe that the Government of the United States will do no act or acts to repress persons held as slaves in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. Because we believe the president has the Constitutional authority to issue an executive order to declare that all persons held as slaves are, and henceforward shall be free. That’s why the GOP unanimously supports DACA and praises President Obama for his bold action to protect the freedom of Mexican immigrants.

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