President Donald Trump’s prospective Federal Reserve Board pick Stephen Moore once joked that President Donald Trump’s election booted “a black family out of public housing,” just the latest in a long string of damaging comments.
“I just love that one,” Moore said at the time in 2016, laughing. “It’s a great one.”
PBS’ Margaret Hoover pressed him on the joke during an interview released Tuesday.
“So, you know, that, that is a joke that I always made about, Obama lives in, you know, the President lives in public housing,” Moore said, stumbling over his words. “But I didn’t mean it like a black person did.”
He dug the hole deeper.
“I just meant that, you know, you know, being in the White House, you know, for example, when I was working with a lot of women in families who were involved in the education voucher program here in DC, and people would say, well, you know, these were blacks who would say ‘why does Barack Obama get to send his kids to any school that he wants to and we can’t?’ And they’d say, he lives in public housing, and it was just kind of a joke,” he continued.
He conceded that he “shouldn’t have said it,” but shrugged, saying that he has a rich history of saying offensive things.
“Again, you can, you go back 30 years, you’re going to be able to find clips over and over and over again about me,” he said. “I have a long paper trail. I mean there’s no question about it. And I say things that are kind of jokes that if people want to pick them apart, then I probably won’t get on the Federal Reserve Board.”
Moore’s viability as a Fed nominee is looking increasingly imperiled as Republicans turn against him and the White House “reviews” his history of sexist comments.
Watch here via PBS:
.@StephenMoore explains his 2016 joke about Donald Trump moving into the White House and kicking “a black family out of public housing.” Moore says, “That is a joke I always made,” adding he didn’t mean it “like a black person” lived there. “I shouldn’t have said it,” he says. pic.twitter.com/9EO9JzBgtW
— Firing Line with Margaret Hoover (@FiringLineShow) April 30, 2019
