Raphael Warnock: Trump Is Unleashing 'Unabashed, Unvarnished Bigotry'

Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) said President Donald Trump was unleashing “unabashed, unvarnished bigotry.”

Host Jake Tapper said, “Do you pray for the president?”

Warnock said, “Oh, absolutely. He needs a lot of prayer.”

Tapper said, “What do you pray for? What do you ask God?”

Warnock said, “Well, I pray, I pray, inasmuch as he has influence and power over people I care about. I affirm his humanity as I affirm the humanity of anybody and everybody. But part of that prayer is about accountability. I have to be honest about what he’s doing. His kind of unabashed, unvarnished bigotry, the cruelty that he is unleashing on American streets, through his version of ICE. Those things have to be condemned. And so, for me, prayer and prophetic speech, which holds power accountable, those two things go hand in hand. I am not about to be the chaplain blessing that which is ungodly and unjust.”

Tapper said, “There are a lot of religious leaders who go to the White House and not only pray for the president, but make a show of suggesting that he was chosen by God for this mission.”

Warnock said, “Yeah, they’re wrong. And they were Christians who thought that slavery was, you know, somehow Godlike American chattel slavery. And they justified it. And they used scriptures to support their position. It just so happens that that I’m the product of a countervailing tradition, that was literally born fighting for freedom. That understood that God didn’t create us to be slaves. That’s why the black church was in America. When we say the black church, we never meant anything racially exclusive about that. We are literally talking about the anti-slavery church.”

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