Biden and Trump campaigns call each other ‘racist’ as they seek to court Black voters

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump's campaigns are attempting to court Black voters by accusing each other of being racist.

In a pair of radio and television ads released Wednesday, the Biden campaign took aim at the presumptive Republican nominee. The television ad highlighted a decades-old clip of Trump saying, “of course I hate these people,” from a 1989 CNN interview where the future president was calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers later exonerated of convictions related to a violent sexual attack of a white woman.

“Donald Trump disrespecting Black people is nothing new,” a narrator said in the Biden ad, launched hours before Trump is set to hold a campaign rally in the Bronx, a diverse New York City borough with large populations of Black and Latino residents.

A Biden campaign account shared the video on X, formerly Twitter, by saying, "let’s remember: Trump is a lifelong racist."

The Trump campaign quickly countered, firing off a statement reminding voters of "Joe Biden's history of racist remarks," noting that he was the driving force behind the 1994 crime bill, which led to a sharp uptick of sentences and incarceration rates of Black people.

"This ad is another cheap attempt from the Biden campaign to gaslight Black voters and fails to address Biden's terrible policies that are hurting our community,” said Janiyah Thomas, Trump campaign Black media director, in a statement.

Lobbing accusations of racism at the competition used to be a relatively rare campaign occurrence. That the back-and-forth is taking place in May of an election year foreshadows a race that will be both toxic and deeply personal.

But Trump has invited these charges before, by pushing policies like a Muslim ban and disparaging judges overseeing cases involving them by pointing to their ethnicity and heritage. Biden faced blowback in the 2020 Democratic primary for his past work with segregationist senators and his efforts around that crime bill, though charges of overt racism were not leveled by his Democratic opponents.

This cycle, both Biden and Trump are competing hard for Black voters with less than six months to go before the election. And the Biden ad campaign is designed to reach and mobilize them. The audio began airing last week, according to a press release, on nationally syndicated urban radio programs including the "DL Hughley Show" and the "Rickey Smiley Morning Show." The television ad will air in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan. Black voters, traditionally the most loyal bloc of the Democratic Party, have in recent months shown signs of flagging support in polls.

A recent New York Times survey of key battleground states this month found that more than 20 percent of Black voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin say they would be backing the former president over Biden. If those figures hold, it would be the highest figure a Republican presidential candidate has earned since the Civil Rights era.

Trump has been trying to make inroads with Black voters, insisting that his criminal indictments endear him to African Americans who also have been mistreated by the criminal justice system. During a stop at a Harlem bodega last month, Trump railed against Biden’s border policies and called into question why New York Democrats have earmarked millions in assistance for recent arrivals to the county while ignoring American Black and brown communities.

“They’ve poured in and taken over parks, they took over your hotels, they take over everything, it’s no good,” Trump said in April. “They’ve destroyed so many people, the African American community is now not getting jobs, migrants are taking their jobs that are here illegally.”