Donald Trump talks like a racist. He treats refugees of color with a cruel backhand. Plus, he also called a group of white nationalists who marched on Charlotteville and killed a woman protesting “good people on both sides.” Does that make him a racist? There is a very good person to ask.
Trump singled out Gregory Cheadle at his rallies and called him “my African American” but no longer. The longtime Republican has given up on the party of his choice since 2001, and returned to being an independent. He hung in there for two and one-half years of the Trump administration.
Cheadle told PBS NewsHour he planned to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as an independent in 2020. The ultimate optimist, he ran in 2014, 2016, and 2018 as a Republican garnering only six percent of the vote in his last primary election.
The lawyer and real estate broker, 62, believed in the Republican platform on the economy. However, he has finally given in to the idea that it has a “pro-white” agenda. He said that he thinks the party used black people as “political pawns.”
Two events decided the Californian. Trump told four freshmen representatives, all women of color and U.S. citizens, to go back to their countries. Second, the president attacked the iconic Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and his hometown. POTUS called Baltimore “infested,” and later the president called the city:
‘…a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess.’
The California representative described POTUS this way:
‘President Trump is a rich guy who is mired in white privilege to the extreme Republicans are too sheepish to call him out on anything and they are afraid of losing their positions and losing any power themselves.’
The president has been adamant about being fair when it came to what he perceived as legislators’ liberal policies. As he was making his decision, Cheadle went to the Facebook sites of Republican lawmakers’ and found they were blind to racism:
‘They were sidestepping the people of color issue and saying that, ‘No, it’s not racist. 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.’
Still, Cheadle did not want to use the word “racist” when discussing Trump. Instead, he said he thought POTUS has a “white superiority complex:”
‘When you look at his appointments for the bench: White, white, white, white white, white, white. That to me is really damning to everybody else because no one else gets a chance because he’s thinking that the whites are superior, period.’
Cheadle said that he understood that he might generate criticism, but he thought operating as an independent candidate was harder than following either party. There has been no party structure for independents, he noted:
‘We just haven’t had people called the names publicly that we have had with this administration,” he said. “To stay on this ship now, as a black Republican, I couldn’t do it.’
The Mueller Report Adventures: In Bite-Sizes on this Facebook page. These quick, two-minute reads interpret the report in normal English for busy people. Mueller Bite-Sizes uncovers what is essentially a compelling spy mystery. Interestingly enough, Mueller Bite-Sizes can be read in any order.