Gregory Cheadle, the black man Donald Trump once described at a rally as “my African American,” has decided to leave the Republican party and run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as an independent in 2020, according to PBS NewsHour [1].
Cheadle said that the Republican party has a “pro-white” agenda and uses black people like him as “political pawns.”
He said that the breaking point was Trump’s tweets telling four congresswomen of color to go back to where they came from.
Trump faced fierce backlash after he tweeted in July that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., should leave the United States.
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump wrote. “Then come back and show us how it is done.”
That same month, Trump said Cummings’ Maryland district which includes parts of Baltimore was “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
Cheadle, a 62-year-old real-estate broker, became known in 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?”
Cheadle says that at the time he took the president’s comments as a joke but now his opinion 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.
From PBS NewsHour [1]:
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.”