Condoleezza Rice had a striking moment yesterday when she shut down a reporter who was trying to suggest that race relations are worse under Trump:
Here’s a transcript from Newsbusters, but you should really watch it:
JONES: There are people who will say it feels worse now when we’re talking about race, or it just feels like a divisive environment.
RICE: Look, it sure doesn’t feel worse than when I grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, okay? So let’s drop this notion that we’re worse race relations today than we were in the past. Really? That means we’ve made no progress, really? And so, I think the hyperbole about how much worse it is isn’t doing us any good. We still – this country’s never going to be color blind. We had the initial original sin of slavery. It’s still with us.
JONES: So for people who say, you know what, it’s top down, it starts with the President, it starts with the words that he speaks.
RICE: Oh, come on, alright. I would be the first to say we need to watch our language about race. We need to watch that we don’t use dog whistles to people who – but when we start saying, “Oh, you know, it’s worse today,” no, they’re not.
I love that. It almost sounds like from the way she answered it that this might be a pet peeve of hers.
Race relations took a serious toll during the Obama years after the phony Ferguson outrage and they’ve been going downhill ever since. But no one in the media would ever suggest blaming Obama. Yet they are so quick to blame Trump. It’s almost like they have an agenda.
In a different exchange during the interview, Rice also shut this reporter down when talking about Trump’s comment about listening to ‘dirt’ from a foreign entity:
JONES: As the first African-American woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice has been breaking barriers her entire career. And a decade after leaving Washington, Rice is just as engaged in foreign affairs as ever.
President Trump said last week that he would be open to listening to foreign entities if they had dirt, if you will, about some of his adversaries. Critics have suggested that he’s almost put a for sale sign on the upcoming election. Do you worry that he’s done that?
RICE: Let’s not overstate this, alright? People say things, the President has a tendency to want to say provocative things. The fact of the matter is we have laws about this. If someone approaches you with information from a foreign entity, particularly an adversarial foreign entity, the first thing you should do is call the FBI and let them know that it happened.
That wasn’t the best explanation I’ve heard but I’ll take it, because she’s not wrong. We do have laws in place and if Trump didn’t violate them in his first political campaign, he’s not going to violate them going forward.