Joe Biden incorrectly claims that Trump is America's first 'racist' president

• Former VP Joe Biden falsely said at an event on Wednesday that President Trump is the first "racist" to serve as president, the Washington Post reported.
• "No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We've had racists, and they've existed, they've tried to get elected president. He's the first one that has."
• A total of 12 former US presidents owned enslaved people, including eight who did so while in office, as the History Channel noted in 2017.
• Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, openly racist presidents who instituted discriminatory and sometimes deadly policies, like Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, also served in the office.

Former Vice President and 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden misleadingly and incorrectly suggested that President Donald Trump is the first "racist" to serve as president of the United States, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

The Post reported that Biden made the remarks at a virtual event for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in the context of Trump referring to the novel coronavirus as "the Wuhan virus" or "the China virus," terms many advocates say unfairly stigmatize Asians and Asian-Americans.

After calling Trump's usage of the term "sickening," Biden then said, "No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We've had racists, and they've existed, they've tried to get elected president. He's the first one that has."

Several open racists and slaveowners have, in fact, served in the office of the United States presidency.

The History Channel wrote in 2017 that a total of 12 former US presidents owned enslaved people, including eight who did so while in office. The most prominent US presidents to own enslaved workers include founding fathers George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe.

And in the process of developing the US Constitution, Madison also devised the 3/5 compromise that counted enslaved people as only 3/5 of a person for population purposes, giving outsize political representation to states with large slave populations.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, other presidents pursued policies that openly subjugated, oppressed, and killed people of color, particularly Black Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.

President Andrew Jackson, who served in office from 1829 to 1837, made the forced displacement of Native Americans one of the key components of his domestic policy agenda, now part of his lasting legacy.

Jackson ignored laws and court decisions to forcibly remove Native Americans from their tribal lands in the southeast and created the "Trail of Tears," an over 5,000-mile route spanning nine states that tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced to travel westward across the Mississippi River. In addition to those forcibly removed, many Native Americans did not survive the treacherous and difficult journey.

In the early 20th century, President Woodrow Wilson re-implemented racial segregation in the federal government, openly used racist and dehumanizing language against Black Americans, and publicly sympathized with the Klu Klux Klan and even held a screening of "The Birth of Nation," a pro-KKK white supremacist film, at the White House in 1915.

Later in the 20th century, former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order requiring Japanese Americans to be rounded up and kept in internment camps in the wake of the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, a policy that lasted from 1942 to 1946.