‘Think About The N-Word’: Maxwell Frost Blasts Trump Surrogates Making ‘Racist’ Attacks On Kamala Harris

Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) tore into Trump surrogates like Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) who attack Vice President Kamala Harris as a “DEI hire,” saying the slur is code for “the n-word.”

Burchett ostentatiously referred to VP Harris as a “DEI hire” in an interview Monday, but other Trump surrogates have also used the line of attack — and one ex-Trump official even paired the insult with the term “colored.”

On Tuesday’s edition of CNN Newsroom With Jim Acosta, Acosta asked Frost to decode the attack, and Frost did not hesitate to slam his colleague’s comment as “racist”:

JIM ACOSTA: And I do want to ask you about some comments that, JD Vance made yesterday, about racism in America. Let’s listen to that.

SEN. JD VANCE: Democrats say that it is racist to believe — well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today. I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too, but. It’s good! (laughs) I love you guys.

JIM ACOSTA: Yeah. Congressman, your response to that?

REP. MAXWELL FROST: I mean, what a bizarre clip. I have a lot to say about that clip. It feels like a Saturday Night Live skit with the joke about a Mountain Dew being racist and then the one distant clap.

The guy’s got no juice. And so we’ll see how he does on the campaign trail. He’s not even exciting his own voters.

The other thing I’d say is that he is going to continue to use all these racist dog whistles throughout the campaign. We’re going to see it from Trump. We’re going to see it from JD Vance. So we’re going to see it from a lot of their surrogates.

In fact, just yesterday, one of the surrogates was saying if we don’t win, we’re going to have to have a civil war to get our agenda through– a civil war.

And so this is an organization. This is a right-wing campaign that’s going to be racist, misogynistic against the vice president, but we’re going to stand on the issues. And what really matters is the fact that she is qualified.

They want to call her a DEI president, a DEI candidate. She has more experience than Trump and JD Vance combined. Times a million, right? She, she won at the state level. She was the attorney general. She was Vice President of the United States. She was a senator representing one of the largest states in the entire country. And so these are just racist dog whistles.

Whenever you hear DEI, I want you to think about the N-word. I want you to think about racial slurs. That’s what they actually mean.

JIM ACOSTA: Do you think Congressman Burchett is being a racist when he says that?

REP. MAXWELL FROST: I have a — I have a good relationship with the congressman. I think sometimes, though, he does use rhetoric that is racist. And whether people know it’s racist or not, I’m here to tell them that is racist. And I hope they won’t use that rhetoric anymore.

Watch above via CNN Newsroom With Jim Acosta.