Bill de Blasio: Of Course Trump Is a Racist

DE BLASIO: "He separates us, he divides us very openly and for his own pushes politically, for his own purposes strategically. Look what he's said about the KKK. At first when he was asked if he would accept support from David Duke, you saw how long he hesitated. He'said nothing about what KKK has done in our history. So he is basically suggesting that people who like the KKK, that he's their candidate. Look what he said about Muslims, look what he said about Mexicans. It's a clear pattern of division and using race as a wedge and using it as a strategic tool. That's racism. And by the way, this is the worst kind of racism. It's cynical racism for his own political gain."
CAMEROTA: "You're talking about his words, but don't actions speak louder than words? Do you have illustrations of Donald Trump say not hiring someone because they were black or passing someone over because they were Hispanics? When you say he behaves like a racist, is that going too far?"
DE BLASIO: "No, I think in this case he on the national stage, a front runner for the Republican nomination. His words are his actions in this case. He is literally encouraging people to feel negative things about people other than them. In fact, he is taking advantage of it politically. He's trying to encourage people who have negative feelings towards other kinds of people to see him as their standard bearer and then he is encouraging violence toward people who are different, whether they have different political beliefs, or let's face it. If you look at these rallies, the division in the rallies is clearly a lot of times demographic as well. He's openly stoking that violence. He's encouraging it, supporting it, he is lauding it when it happens. We've seen these kinds of historical parallels before, the xenophobia, the racism, the call to violence. This is when democracies start to break down a little bit when someone like this emerges and they are not stopped and they are not countered. So this is the moment when people need to stand up and say Donald Trump doesn't represent our democracy."