“I know that he built his political career knowing what he was doing — on questioning the legitimacy and the birthplace of the president of the United States,” Brown said.
The White House has not yet responded to Brown’s statements.
Brown, who was in Iowa the past three days as he considers a bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, criticized Trump after he called for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam to resign following revelations that as a medical student in 1984 he may have been photographed in either black face or a Ku Klux Klan outfit.
Northam, a Democrat, has insisted he was not either of the two people in the photo, although he acknowledged as a young man he once darkened his face with shoe polish as part of a dance contest where he imitated Michael Jackson.
“He should resign now,” Brown said. “This country hasn’t dealt well with the issues of race.”
Brown, who plans to travel to South Carolina later this month, has yet to decide whether he will run for president.
Although a longtime member of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, Brown has steered away from promising to scrap the country’s private insurance system and adopting a Canadian-style government health-care approach.
Under that plan, endorsed by a number of Democratic presidential contenders, the government would guarantee health coverage for all Americans and finance it through increased taxes.
In essence, they would extend Medicare – the federal program which pays health costs for the elderly – to all Americans. But independent studies have suggested such a system could cost anywhere between $15 trillion and $32 trillion during the next decade.
Declaring that “nobody’s accused me, in my career, of being an incrementalist,” Brown said while “we’ve worked for Medicare for all,” he said he wants “to help people quickly” by having Congress approve a plan to allow people age at “55 or even 50” to buy into Medicare.
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