In an attempt to win over a portion of the electorate that has previously overwhelmingly supported Democrats, Donald Trump’s team on Saturday created a coalition group targeting Black voters while the former president campaigned in Detroit.
At a community discussion that Trump hosted at Detroit’s 180 Church, which is home to a sizable Black population, two Black Republicans, former HUD secretary Ben Carson and Florida Representative Byron Donalds, were present. Donalds and Carson were involved in launching the “Black Americans for Trump” group.
Speculation has it that Trump is considering a number of people, including Donalds and Carson, for the role of running mate. On Saturday, the former president gushed over Donalds, calling him a “incredible guy.”
I took note that he was named among the candidates for vice president. Would anyone be interested in having him serve as vice president? Trump put the question to the assembly. Donalds, he continued, would be “a good one, too.”
Incidentally, he is on a list. I have no idea how he will fare. Still, he’s on the radar of a select few, isn’t he? “Not a crazy amount of people,” Trump decreed.
At the same time that Trump is trying to win over Black voters, surveys reveal that Black men are more likely than in the past to back the Republican candidate for president. More than 20% of Black voters in a two-way matchup with Biden would be a historic high if it correlates to votes in November, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll of battleground states that was released last month. Numerous estimates have Trump’s 2020 national win among Black voters at around 1 in 10, with 12% of Black voters agreeing with this assessment in AWN’s exit poll.
Black voters are likely to go with President Joe Biden, but if Trump can steal even a small percentage of their support, he might change the game in key states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan.
Cities with large Black populations have been Trump’s target for quite some time. He called a congressional district in Baltimore that is overwhelmingly Black a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” in 2019. During a private meeting with Republican lawmakers in Washington this week, he allegedly called the city of Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention will be held in August, “horrible.” (According to Trump’s campaign, Obama “was talking about how terrible crime and voter fraud are” in the capital of Wisconsin.)
Trump notably implored Black folks to vote for him in 2016 by asking, “What the hell do you have to lose?” after claiming that Democrats had failed Black voters for a long time.
The Biden campaign emphasized Trump’s remark Saturday in reaction to Trump’s Black coalition launch, which Trump used in a recent interview with Semafor to refute racial claims. Trump said that he had “so many Black friends” who would not endorse him if they thought he was racist.
In a statement, Jasmine Harris, the Biden campaign’s director of Black media, addressed Donald Trump’s belief that having’many Black friends’ justifies his lifetime of demeaning and disrespecting Black Americans. Harris added that Black voters are aware of this, and that Trump’s last-ditch effort at Black ‘outreach’ isn’t fooling anyone.
Falsely accusing Biden of making the same statement that Trump once criticized Hillary Clinton for, Trump brought up Biden’s participation as a US senator in authoring the 1994 crime bill on Saturday.
“Biden discussed’super predators’ in his devastating 1994 crime bill.” Joe Biden was that. The Black vote is something he constantly brings up now. One thing Trump mentioned during the roundtable was that he is the “super predator” monarch.
Biden did not use or support the term “super predators” in any public setting, as AWN has already pointed out. Supporters of the criminal bill who were “beyond the pale” were something that Biden did mention in a 1993 address. However, he solely employed the term “super predators” in a 1997 lecture in which he argued that most juvenile offenders were not aggressive and “not the so-called super predators.”
In a book he wrote in 2000, Trump advocated for stricter penalties and more police presence on the streets, citing a statistical study that has since been discredited and associated with the “super predator” crime theory to back up his claims about “wolf packs” of juvenile offenders.
Trump continued his tirade against Biden on Saturday, claiming that the former president had done “nothing” and was “all talk” in regards to the Black community, while asserting that he had done “more for the Black population than any American president since Abraham Lincoln.”
Trump went on to address a gathering in Detroit that was organized by Turning Point Action. Carson praised his former boss’s capacities to connect with Black communities before the former president joined the stage at the conservative event.
This is not your ordinary politician, Carson remarked; “President Trump is. “He doesn’t frantically scan the sky to determine the direction of the wind.”