Robert Reich Deletes FDR-Biden Comparison After Remembering FDR’s Internment Camps

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Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich deleted a Twitter message comparing President Joe Biden to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt after recalling the late president rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in internment camps.

“Biden could be as transformative a president as FDR,” Reich wrote in the missive late on Wednesday. “But FDR didn’t have to contend with a paranoid, xenophobic, racist opposition drenched in lies and extremist propaganda from right-wing media.”

FDR literally rounded people up and put them in camps because of their ethnicity. Literally. https://t.co/fojzUvDBze

— Stephen Gutowski (@StephenGutowski) April 29, 2021

More than 110,000 Japanese American prisoners were imprisoned during World War II in FDR’s internment camps, which opened in 1942. They closed in March 1946, three months before Reich’s birth.

Reich, 74, served as former President Bill Clinton’s labor secretary from 1993-97.