On the eve of Juneteenth, Joe Biden made the perplexing decision to praise two long-dead segregationist senators for their civility. “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” he told a room of donors at a New York fundraiser, referring to the racist Mississippi Dixiecrat. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’” He also praised Herman Talmadge, a Georgia Democrat who staunchly opposed civil-rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s. “At least there was some civility,” Biden said. “We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

I’ve written before on how the former vice president is mounting a surprisingly Trumpian campaign for the White House. Both men built their campaigns on nostalgia for a bygone era that may have never existed. Biden also shares Trump’s habit of never admitting error or apologizing for mistakes. His remarks on Wednesday show how he’s mirroring another strategy that propelled Trump to victory—one that sets him far apart from any of his Democratic rivals.

That Biden would praise rather than condemn Eastland is jarring. Whatever civility the Mississippi senator extended to a young white Northerner like him did not reach his own black constituents. Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate recounts how Eastland spoke to a crowd during the Montgomery bus boycott with the language of a would-be genocidaire. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used,” he said. “Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives.... All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of dead niggers.”

Biden’s rivals took the opportunity to criticize the frontrunner. “You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys,’” Cory Booker said in a statement, calling on Biden to apologize. “Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity.” Bernie Sanders shared Booker’s statement on Twitter, adding that Booker’s point was “especially true at a time when the Trump administration is trying to divide us up with its racist appeals.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio offered perhaps the most visceral response. “It’s 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of ‘civility’ typified by James Eastland,” he wrote on Twitter. “Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal & that whites were entitled to ‘the pursuit of dead n***ers.’” Booker and de Blasio won’t be sharing the debate stage with Biden next week, though Sanders will.