The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
Looks like he's leaving the Trump plantation, and he's not happy.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politic...publican-partyGregory Cheadle, the black man President Donald Trump once described at a rally as "my African American is fed up.
After two years of frustration with the president’s rhetoric on race and the lack of diversity in the administration, Cheadle told PBS NewsHour he has decided to leave the Republican party and run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representative as an independent in 2020.
Now, the 62-year-old real estate broker, who supported the Republican approach to the economy, said he sees the party as pursuing a “pro-white” agenda and using black people like him as “political pawns.” The final straw for Cheadle came when he watched many Republicans defend Trump’s tweets telling four congresswomen of color, who are all American citizens, to go back to their countries, as well as defend the president’s attacks on Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and his comments that Cummings’ hometown of Baltimore is “infested.”
“President Trump is a rich guy who is mired in white privilege to the extreme,” said Cheadle, of Redding, Calif., who switched from being an independent to a Republican in 2001. “Republicans are too sheepish to call him out on anything and they are afraid of losing their positions and losing any power themselves.”
Thursday afternoon, when asked by NewsHour on the White House lawn about Cheadle leaving the Republican party, President Trump claimed he has a lot of support from African American voters.
“We have tremendous African American support,” Trump told NewsHour. “I would say I’m at my all-time high. I don’t think I’ve ever had the support that I’ve had now. I think I’m going to do very well with African Americans. African American support has been the best we’ve had.”
When pressed about whether he thought Cheadle was wrong to say Trump was pursuing a “pro-white” agenda, Trump said he didn’t know who Cheadle was. After NewsHour recalled the 2016 moment to Trump, the president continued to tout his popularity among African American voters. “I think this–it’s very simple,” Trump said. “We’ve had the best numbers we’ve ever had for African Americans in terms of employment and unemployment. So I think we’re going to do very well.”
The White House and Trump have fiercely defended the president’s comments as fair criticism of the lawmakers’ liberal policies. But for Cheadle, the incidents were too much. A few weeks ago, he was scrolling through posts written by fellow Republicans, who are his Facebook friends, and reached a breaking point.
“They were sidestepping the people of color issue and saying that, ‘No, it’s not racist,’” he said. “They were saying these people were socialists and communists. That’s what they were saying. And I thought this is a classic case of whites not seeing racism because they want to put blinders on and make it about something else.”
Cheadle became widely known in June 2016 when Trump, then a presidential candidate, pointed to him at a rally in Redding, Calif. and said, “Look at my African American over here. Look at him. Are you the greatest?”
At the time, Cheadle took the president’s comments as a joke and laughed along with the president and the crowd of largely white supporters. Now, his view of that moment has changed. “I’m more critical of it today than I was back then because today I wonder to what extent he said that for political gain or for attention,” he said.
While P.T. Barnum was right about the American people, so was Abe Lincoln.
My money is on Abe.
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Originally Posted by texan
