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The former Democratic candidate said Trump is “desperate” and “grasping at straws that aren’t actually keeping him afloat.” Former presidential contender Andrew Yang said Donald Trump’s repeated use of the racist term “kung flu” to refer to the coronavirus “is the desperate thrashing around of a losing candidate.”

Trump uses derogatory and offensive slurs to “distract attention from the fact that the administration has completely botched and mishandled the coronavirus pandemic,” Yang, who quit the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination in February, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Trump’s divisive rhetoric is “like the desperate thrashing around of a losing candidate,” argued Yang, who is Asian American.

Trump revived his “kung flu” slur during his underattended rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday, and repeated it at a rally in Arizona on Tuesday. “He shows up to a rally that has a small fraction of the people they are projecting and he’s somewhat desperate, in my opinion,” Yang continued.

Trump is “just degrading himself and the office of the president further by grasping at straws that aren’t actually keeping him afloat,” said Yang, who said he wished the president could “figure out a path that did not involve racist comments that end up throwing millions of Americans under a rhetorical bus.”