Donald Trump doesn’t believe his retweet of an inflammatory chart that inaccurately portrays U.S. murder rates among blacks and whites was racist.
“I’m probably the least racist person on earth,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Monday.
“However,
when you tweet out a thing — and this bothered me, I gotta tell you,”
O’Reilly said about the real estate mogul’s controversial post. “You
tweeted out that whites killed by blacks — these were statistics you
picked up from somewhere — at a rate of 81 percent. And that’s totally
wrong.”According to the most recent murder statistics available from the FBI, approximately 82 percent of white Americans were killed by other white Americans in 2014.
The
chart in Trump’s tweet, which purports to show 2015 crime statistics,
lists its source as “Crime Statistics Bureau — San Francisco,” which
does not appear to exist.
The
Republican frontrunner said the data came from “a radio show” and that
retweets should not be considered endorsements for his nearly 5 million
Twitter followers.
“Bill,
I didn’t tweet — I retweeted somebody that was supposedly an expert,”
Trump said. “Hey, Bill, Bill, am I gonna check every statistic?”
“You’re a presidential contender,” O’Reilly replied. “You gotta check ’em.”
The Fox News host then offered the GOP hopeful some advice: Stop tweeting.
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