©Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump delivers a speech at the Black Conservative Federation gala dinner, prior to the South Carolina Republican presidential primaries in Columbia, South Carolina, United States,
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump’s comments that black voters would be more attracted to him after his multiple criminal charges drew sharp rebukes over the weekend from his Republican challenger for the presidential nomination, activists for civil rights and others.
Trump on Friday compared his 91 criminal charges in four separate criminal cases to the discrimination faced by Black Americans and said they had come to “embrace” his mugshots. He was speaking to a black conservative group in South Carolina before the state’s primary election, which he went on to win.
“And then I was indicted a second time, a third time and a fourth time. And a lot of people said this is why black people like me because they’ve been hurt so badly and discriminated against,” Trump said. “They actually saw me as being discriminated against.”
Trump’s legal challenges, including federal charges over his alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat and his handling of classified documents, among other state charges and civil suits, differ markedly from the historic inequities that Black Americans have experienced in criminal justice system.
“It’s disgusting,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who has been the target of Trump’s racist comments and has vowed to continue challenging him for the Republican nomination, told reporters Saturday.
He reiterated his contention that Trump will again lose the 2024 general election to US President Joe Biden if he secures the party’s nomination. “This is a huge warning sign,” he said.
Biden had already won the Democratic primary in the southern state, where black voters represent a critically important constituency and are more reflective of the more diverse general electorate that will go to the polls in the Nov. 5 presidential election, a likely rematch between Biden and Trump. .
About 60% of participants in Saturday’s Republican contest were white voters who consider themselves evangelicals or born-again Christians, exit polls showed.
“Trump saying that Black Americans will support him because of his criminal charges is offensive. It’s idiotic. And it’s just plain racist,” Biden campaign co-chairman Cedric Richmond, who is Black, said on Saturday. “He thinks black voters are so uninformed that we won’t be able to see past his shameless pandering.”
Both the NAACP and the National Action Network criticized Trump’s comments to the Black Conservative Federation, saying he wrongly linked his alleged crimes to the debate over systemic racial bias in the U.S. criminal justice system.
Trump, who has called the cases against him a political witch hunt and election interference, has denied any wrongdoing. “I was indicted for you, the black population,” he said at the conference Friday.
The NAACP responded in a Saturday post on
Republican U.S. Rep. Bryon Donald, who is Black, defended Trump’s comments on Sunday, telling NBC News that Black Americans see Trump’s numerous legal entanglements as “‘if the government is going after him with stupidity, it can’t be so bad.'”