Condoleezza Rice Cautions Trump on Race Issues: ‘The President Needs to Be A Lot More Careful’
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told CNN she isn’t happy with how President Donald Trump is handling race issues, saying “the president needs to be a lot more careful.”
Rice was speaking with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria Sunday to promote her book To Build a Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth.
Zakaria asked about how Trump speaks about race.
“This seems to me such a contrast from President Bush–Bush II, the man for whom you served, in terms of having — he had the first black Secretary of State, he had the first female black National Security adviser,” Zakaria said. “The way he talked about Islam after 9/11 was so thoughtful, in trying to not demean the Islam as a religion. When you hear Trump, this must — this is the repudiation of everything you and Bush were trying to do.”
“The president needs to be a lot more careful in the way he speaks about these things, because race is a very delicate and raw nerve in America. We have a birth defect of slavery, we have a birth defect of a number of people being treated badly, so you have to be careful,” Rice said.
However, Rice went on to say she didn’t like how the left talked either.
“But I’ll tell you, Fareed, it’s not all coming out of the White House. I hear a lot coming out of the left on these issues, too, that I don’t like the language that is used about people, the notion that because somebody looks a certain way or is of a certain color, they ought to think a certain way, and if they don’t think a certain way, then they’re really not black,” Rice said.
“We need to start to apply that Golden Rule. Don’t say something about somebody that you wouldn’t want to be said about you. And I think we’ll all be better off,” she continued.
Rice did stress again she did not like a lot of the things Trump says.
“I think everybody understands that I don’t like a lot of the language that this president uses. I especially don’t like the language about immigrants,” she said.
Watch above, via CNN.
