Rep. James Clyburn forcibly refuted assertions by Donald Trump and his Republican allies that Trump’s done great things for the African American community.

The debate comes as Americans are turning against Trump for his response to the nation wide protests which sprang up immediately after the May 25 murder of George Floyd, an African American man who was in police custody in Minneapolis, Minn.

“For some strange reason, every Republican United States senator seems to feel that Trump is bigger than this country. That Trump is more important than the foundations upon which this country was built,” said Clyburn, an African American Democrat from South Carolina. “Constitutional principles, even when we didn’t live up to them, those principles were there. We’ve always been in pursuit of what we thought a perfect union. To misrepresent facts like that, that is absolutely not true.

“Aside from the fact that we now know that they made a 4.5 million error in determining what the employment is to do and what the job creation is all about, I don’t know why they keep mimicking this president who will not tell the truth about anything,” added Clyburn, referring to an error in how the federal government calculated the May jobs numbers released Friday. “‘I’ve done more for blacks than any president since Abraham Lincoln.’ Give me a break. I would like for this president and any of his senators to show me what he has done that would equate to Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Elementary Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Higher Education Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid. They’re dedicated to taking all that stuff away, privatizing Medicare, getting rid of the Affordable Care Act.”

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