Former President Donald Trump said during a recent black-tie event for Black conservatives in South Carolina that his legal troubles have endeared him to Black people.
As the Associated Press reports, the event was held in advance of the South Carolina Republican primary on Feb. 24.
“I got indicted for nothing, for something that is nothing,” Trump rambled. “And a lot of people said that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against. It’s been pretty amazing but possibly, maybe, there’s something there.”
Trump also claimed that Black people are why his Atlanta mugshot became so popular with his supporters: “You know who embraced it more than anyone else? The Black population.”
Trump, who was accused of housing discrimination in 1973 alongside his father, Fred Trump,
and Trump Management, claimed during his remarks that he knew Black people because they worked as construction workers at his properties. Trump would settle with the Justice Department after making a promise not to discriminate and later failing in his attempt to countersue the DOJ for making false statements.During her run for President in 2016, as NPR reported, Hilary Clinton brought Trump’s discrimination suit back up. “Donald started his career, back in 1973, being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination—because he would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African Americans, and he made sure that the people who worked for him understood that was the policy.”
Nikki Haley, who faced her own backlash after she said that America has never been a racist country, saw Trump’s recent comments as “disgusting” before noting in her own speech in South Carolina,.
“That’s what happens when he goes off the teleprompter,” Haley said. “That’s the chaos that comes with Donald Trump.”
Black voters, meanwhile, told the AP that they did not believe that Trump would be wooing very many of them with his rhetoric or agenda.
Ebony McBath, a Columbia resident and transportation worker, told the outlet she would rather vote for Joe Biden “because Trump has his own agenda.” Meanwhile, Issac Williams Sr., a retired cook from Columbia, said that though he disliked both parties, Trump has “mobster tendencies” and that “he’s only out for himself.”
Black Conservatives, meanwhile, are aiming for more Black people to find Trump relatable.
Samuel Rivers Jr., a former Republican state senator for South Carolina, told the AP,
“In order for the Republican Party to win more of the African American community over, we’ll have to invest a lot of time
and more money into really letting people know our platform, because the truth of the matter is a lot of them, they agree with our platform but they don’t associate that with the Republican Part,” Samuel Rivers, a former Republican state senator for South Carolina, told the AP.Rivers added that Black voters see Republicans “in a negative way based on emotional triggers of racism that no longer exists.”
But Howard University Political Science Professor Clarence Lusane wrote in an op-ed reprinted by The Nation from the TomDispatch.com in October 2023, there is a reason why racists are flocking to the GOP.
“Time after time, key Republican figures have leaned into the ethos and ideological aims of white nationalism,” Lusane said. “It’s no wonder that America’s racists, including the KKK, have fallen in love with the modern Trumpublican version of the Republican Party.”
Lusane continued, “Once upon a time, of course, and for decades thereafter, the Klan was deeply linked to the Southern wing of the Democratic Party—the Dixiecrats, as they were then known—but began to switch to the GOP as presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and then presidents Richard Nixon (with his infamous “Southern strategy”) and Ronald Reagan exploited white feelings of resentment toward the civil rights movement and the national Democratic Party’s support for racial equality.”
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