Donald Trump nominee to the Federal Reserve board Stephen Moore spent 62 excruciating seconds trying to defend a racist joke he made in 2016 about Trump “kick(ing) a black family out of public housing” by succeeding then-President Barack Obama in the White House.

During a speech on November 13, 2016, Moore regaled the crowd with a political cartoon he had seen.

“By the way, did you see, there’s that great cartoon going along?” Moore said. “A New York Times headline: ‘First Thing Donald Trump Does as President Is Kick a Black Family Out of Public Housing,’ and it has Obama leaving the White House. I mean, I just love that one. Just a great one.”

In an excerpt from an upcoming episode of PBS’ Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, Hoover asked Moore about the joke, and after playing the clip for him, let Moore perform the news equivalent of an extended sad trombone.

“So, you know, that is a joke that I always made about, you know, Obama lives in, you know, the president lives in public housing,” Moore began, deploying the solid strategy of defending a racist joke by saying you make that racist joke all the time.

“But I didn’t mean it like a black person did,” Moore continued, despite the fact that the joke literally says “kick a black family out of public housing.”

“I just meant that, you know, you know, being in the White House, you know, for example, when I was working with a lot of women in families who were involved in the education voucher program, you know, here in DC, and people would say, well, you know, and these were blacks who would say, you know, why does Barack Obama get to send his kids to any school that he wants to and we can’t?” Moore continued, because nothing defuses a racist joke like claiming you got it from black people, and explaining that by using the phrase “these were blacks.”

“And they’d say, he lives in public housing, and it was just kind of a joke, and that was referring…” Moore said, trailing off.

“The optics, though, of a conservative white man talking about kicking a black man out of public housing have a particular resonance, especially in this moment,” Hoover said to anodding Moore.

“Yeah,” Moore said. “So I shouldn’t have said it. Again, you can, you go back 30 years, you’re going to be able to find clips over and over and over again about me. I have a long paper trail. I mean there’s no question about it. And I say things that are kind of jokes that if people want to pick them apart, then I probably won’t, you know, get on the Federal Reserve board.”

Watch the clip above, via PBS.

from Mediaite http://bit.ly/2WkFlbW