Trump Claims He’s Not Racist Because He Has ‘So Many Black Friends’
(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
Former President Donald Trump pushed back on accusations he is racist, telling a reporter that he had “so many Black friends” and they wouldn’t be his friends if he were racist.
Trump made the comments in an interview with Semafor’s Kadia Goba that she conducted as part of a deep-dive into the ex-president’s re-election effort and issues of “race, politics, and masculinity.”
Goba was digging into the topic because of polling showing that Trump had been making gains in winning over Black voters, specifically Black men, despite a long history of accusations of racism because of his “birther” allegations against President Barack Obama, accusations against the Central Park Five, and other incidents.
“The road to understanding Donald Trump’s appeal to a segment of Black America — and his hopes of winning back the presidency by pulling a few precious votes away from Democrats — runs through Trump’s Black friends, a loose set of iconic sports figures from the 1980s,” she wrote.
During her interview with the former president at Mar-a-Lago — six days after he was convicted of 34 felony counts for hush money payments to cover up extramarital affairs from being exposed during the 2016 campaign — Goba brought up the friendships he had with a number of prominent Black sports celebrities since the 1980s, nearly all of whom “had faced serious legal issues, including several criminal convictions.”
The interviews with Trump’s celebrity friends, described by Goba as “an odyssey through the heroes and villains of my childhood,” included chats with baseball star Darry Strawberry, boxer Mike Tyson, boxing promoter Don King, retired NFL linebacker Lawrence Taylor, and former football star Herschel Walker — who lost a Georgia Senate race in 2022.
When Goba asked Trump why these Black sports stars supported him, he replied that it was about “strength” and “jobs”:
“They see what I’ve done and they see strength, they want strength, okay,” he said. “They want strength, they want security. They want jobs, they want to have their jobs. They don’t want to have millions of people come and take their jobs. And we — that’s what’s happening. These people that are coming into our country are taking jobs away from African Americans and they know it.”
Goba then questioned Trump about “how he responds to Black voters who call him racist.”
“I have so many Black friends that if I were a racist, they wouldn’t be friends, they would know better than anybody, and fast,” he replied. “They would not be with me for two minutes if they thought I was racist — and I’m not racist!”
A Pew Research study found that Trump lost Black voters 92 to 8 in 2020, Goba noted, so he was deeply underwater with this segment of the American electorate, but he had an advantage many other wealthy white Republican politicians didn’t have, who were more “cloistered” in their elite circles. Trump, on the other hand, she wrote, had his “famous Black friends” who had been around him for decades, “throughout his career, even as he was constantly dogged by accusations of racism at the same time.”
Read the full article at Semafor.
