Joe Walsh Confronted With Racist Tweets in Wild MSNBC Interview: ‘I’ve Said Racist Things’

Joe Walsh is the former Illinois congressman who is challenging President Donald Trump in the Republican primary on a simple platform: Trump is nuts, unfit, a bigot.

But Walsh was confronted on his own, many instances of bigotry in an interview on Monday, by MSNBC host John Heilemann.

“You know, you’ve apologized for helping to spawn Trump, you apologized for going too far,” Heilemann asked Walsh on Deadline: White House. “For a lot of people, the president is stone-cold racist and so are you. I can sit here and read off tweets, ‘Barack Obama is a Muslim,’ ‘Barack Obama’s born in Kenya.’ I have tweets [of you] using the N-word not that long ago.”

“There’s no way someone, who to many African Americans looks like as much a racist as Donald Trump, has the moral standing to challenge Donald Trump!” Heilemann said.

“Yeah, and I wouldn’t call myself a racist but I would say, John, I’ve said racist things on Twitter,” Walsh said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

Walsh went on to address specific tweets:

“And an apology is not enough. When I said Barack Obama was a Muslim, that was a horrible thing to say. And I said it because I was so disgusted with Obama’s policy towards Israel, that I went a bad, ugly step. The Sandy Hook moms, I took a cheap shot against them three years ago because they were suing gun manufacturers, an issue that I disagree with. So I took a bad, cheap shot against them. I’ve done that. But, John, again context, I’ve probably sent out 40,000 tweets in the last six years, no excuse, you and I could sit down and find 200 to 300 that you’d would say Walsh, what were you thinking? All I can do is own them and explain them and apologize as sincerely as I can for those that deserve an apology.”

Walsh added that he used the N-word in a tweet to make a point about the Washington Redskins football team.

Watch the wild interview above, via MSNBC.