Longtime Trumpworld insider Lynne Patton appeared on her boss’ favorite morning TV show to bring home her point: President Trump is not “racist.”
The HUD official created a firestorm Wednesday when she made a controversial cameo alongside Rep. Mark Meadows during Michael Cohen’s House oversight committee hearing.
“I said it before, I say it again,” said Patton, now a regional administrator in New York and New Jersey for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, told Fox & Friends. “The president does not see color, race, creed, religion. What he sees is success and failure.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“So to me that is what makes people uncomfortable,” Patton continued. “He doesn’t care what people think and he will tell it like it is.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) called out the North Carolina Republican and Patton for the stunt during the hearing, saying: “Just because someone has a person of color, a black person, working for them does not mean they aren’t racist. And it is insensitive, and some would even say that the fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman, in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself.”
Though Tlaib insisted she was not calling Meadows himself a “racist,” he did not take her criticism well, emotionally insisting to the committee—and the TV audience watching—that his nieces and nephews are “people of color.” He also claimed that it was “racist” to even suggest he was using Patton as a “prop.”
During her Thursday appearance with the Friends, Patton responded to Tlaib directly.
“What I would like to ask the congresswoman of Michigan, is why she takes the word of a self-confessed perjurer, criminally convicted white man over a black female who is highly educated, rose up through the ranks of one of the most competitive companies in real estate, spoke before 25 million people at the Republican National Convention, and now works in one of the most historic administrations in history?” she submitted.
“That is more racist than being put up there as ‘prop.’”
The increasingly knotted debacle began when former Trump fixer Michael Cohen claimed that the president had exhibited blatant racism behind closed doors for the decade they worked together.
“The country has seen Mr. Trump court white supremacists and bigots,” Cohen testified on Wednesday. “You have heard him call poorer countries ‘shitholes.’ He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a ‘shithole.’ This was when Barack Obama was president of the United States.”
