Donald Trump has hit back after his presidential election opponent Joe Biden branded him the "first racist" to hold the office.
Biden had fielded a question from a healthcare worker concerned about the Republican president calling the coronavirus pandemic the "China virus."
He responded by saying it was "absolutely sickening" how Trump "deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they're from."
He added: "No sitting president's ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We've had racists, and they've existed, and they've tried to get elected president. He's the first one that has."
The Trump campaign's senior adviser Katrina Pierson fired back, calling Biden's comments "an insult to the intelligence of black voters" given the onetime senator's past work with segregationist lawmakers.
She said Trump "loves all people" and "works hard to empower all Americans."
Trump himself later said at a press conference, when asked about Biden's comments: “I’ve done more for black Americans than anybody with the possible of exception of Abraham Lincoln.
“Nobody has even been close.”
The Biden-Trump exchange marks an escalation in what had already been a heated clash on race in the campaign being waged between the two candidates, who are both white, ahead of the November 3 election.
Biden previously criticized Trump for stoking racial division, often saying that he was motivated to run for office by his outrage over Trump's assessment that "both sides" were to blame for violence between white supremacists and counterprotesters at a 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Race became an even more central issue as protests raged over unarmed African Americans being killed by police in the aftermath of the May death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police office pressed his neck into the pavement for more than eight minutes.
Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser for Trump’s reelection campaign, said in a statement that ”no one should take lectures on racial justice from Joe Biden."
Biden has vowed that, if elected, he will begin addressing institutional racism within his first 100 days of taking office. This was not the first time he's suggested Trump’s actions were racist.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has vowed to send a "surge" of federal security forces to US cities in a crackdown on crime.
Chicago and two other Democrat-run cities are being targeted by Trump after a spike in crime.
The US president is battling plunging poll ratings after criticisms of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
He has conceded that things will "get worse before they get better" as the daily death toll rises back above 1,000 in the US as a second wave ravages California, Texas and Florida.
