Georgia Republican state Sen. Michael Williams said Saturday that while he would disapprove of President Trump saying the N-word on a personal level, the president should not be “berated” if he said it before taking office.
“It would matter [to me] as an individual. It would not necessarily matter to me as the person that is running our country,” he said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“He has his personal beliefs, his personal ideas. I truly believe he is able to separate those from how he is running the country,” he added.
“I don’t have a problem with Donald Trump having used it in the past as my president. I always say using the N-word is wrong and is bad and should never be accepted in our society. But just because he might have done it years ago, not as our president, doesn’t mean we need to continue to berate him because he used it,” he continued. {mosads}
Speculation that Trump may have used the racial slur in the past has swirled for years, but was reignited after former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman claimed to have heard a tape of Trump saying the N-word while he was on NBC’s “The Apprentice.”
“When he talks that way, the way he did on this tape, it confirmed that he is truly a racist,” she said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The White House says Manigault Newman’s new book, in which she makes a number of claims about Trump and the existence of an alleged tape, is full of lies.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders also said, however, that she couldn’t guarantee there wasn’t a tape of the president saying the N-word.