If the racial tension underlying the 2016 presidential race could be distilled into a single cable news moment, this was it.
On Tuesday night, CNN contributors Van Jones and Jeffrey Lord became locked in a fiery and emotional debate that served as a microcosm of the national discussion over racial divisiveness and the increasingly negative tone of the presidential campaign.
“There’s a lot of blame to go around for the tone of this campaign,” David Axelrod, the chief strategist on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, said when their intense but respectful on-air faceoff was over. “You’re seeing a preview of it here.”
The debate started when Jones, a Democrat, criticized Donald Trump for refusing to unequivocally condemn white supremacist David Duke and the Klu Klux Klan.
“The things that Donald Trump has done, and not just in this race, are horribly offensive,” Jones, a Democrat, said to Lord. “There is a dark underside here…he is whipping up and tapping into and pushing buttons that are very, very frightening to me and to a lot of people.”
“You need to take a serious look at the fact that this man is playing fast and loose. When he talk about terrorism, he gets passionate, he says, ‘No, this is wrong,'” Jones continued, at one point putting his hand on Lord’s shoulder as he was talking, their faces inches apart. “When he talks about the Klan, [he says] ‘Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know.’ That’s wrong!”
Lord, a Trump supporter, responded by accusing Jones and liberals of trying to divide the nation up into racial groups.
“This whole attitude of dividing by race is still here, and this is how Democrats do the deal,” Lord said.
“What you’re doing here is dividing people. We’re all Americans here,” he added. “You are dividing people — this is what liberals do — you are dividing people by race. This is what liberalism is all about.”