NewsNation host Chris Cuomo on Tuesday pushed back against racism accusations following his recent criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris.
On the Oct. 22 episode of “The Chris Cuomo Project,” Cuomo claimed Harris is neither a “godsend” nor “black female Jesus” and accused her supporters of trying to stifle criticism to improve the vice president’s chances against former President Donald Trump in November.
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In Tuesday’s episode, Cuomo denied being “racist” and doubled down on his critiques of Harris and her supporters.
“I am being accused of being racist by some unserious people because I said Kamala Harris went from being someone ‘you people don’t like and never talked about’ to being ‘black female Jesus,’” Cuomo said Tuesday. “All right, where am I coming from on that? … One, ‘you people’ isn’t black people — I would never do that. I am an ally of the black cause in America … the idea that I was saying ‘you people’ about blacks is not true.”
“And by the way, blacks aren’t the people who motivated Kamala Harris’s candidacy — party officials are, who believe that they couldn’t pass over a black female and hew to their diversity-by-identity mandate,” he continued. “So my point was, when [President Joe] Biden said he was going to run again, which no one really thought he should, why didn’t they say, ‘No, you got Harris’? Because they didn’t have confidence in Harris. And when it was ‘Biden’s on the down, Biden’s on the down,’ how come people weren’t talking about Harris? Because Harris wasn’t popular with them, that’s why.”
Harris’ popularity was below 40% before she launched her presidential campaign on July 21, after Biden dropped out and endorsed her, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average.
“But now that she has to be their pick, in their estimation, and they completely didn’t allow any kind of process within the party for that — which I think hurt Harris — now they can’t say anything bad about her,” Cuomo said Tuesday. “And if you say anything critical of her, you’re some kind of traitor and you’re empowering Hitler. And that’s what I’m getting hit with, but that’s not true.”
“Kamala Harris is not a godsend. Of course, Trump isn’t a godsend, but Kamala Harris isn’t a godsend. She is not beyond criticism,” he said. “What are you talking about? That is not how you win, okay, by trying to punish or censor or degrade anyone who questions what you’re about.”
The clip of Cuomo criticizing Harris posted by the Daily Caller News Foundation went viral, receiving three million views on X. HuffPost subsequently published a piece on Wednesday saying Cuomo’s analysis was a “hot take that is yikes.”
One X user responded to the clip by accusing Cuomo of “racism and misogyny,” calling it “so fucking gross.” Another accused Cuomo of referring to “Black folks” when he said “you people.”
Trump currently has narrow leads over Harris in all of the top seven battleground states, according to the RealClearPolling average.
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