‘MICHAEL THE BLACK MAN.’
• At a number of political rallies over the last two years, a character calling himself “Michael the Black Man” has appeared in the crowd directly behind Donald Trump, impossible to miss and possibly planted.
He holds signs that scream “BLACKS FOR TRUMP” and wears a T-shirt proclaiming with equal conviction that “TRUMP & Republicans Are Not Racist.”
Almost always, he plugs his wild website, Gods2.com, across his chest.
And so it was Tuesday night, before a crowd of Trump supporters in Phoenix who had come to watch another show. There was the president, whipping up the wildly cheering crowd, and then there was Michael the Black Man, chanting just beyond Trump’s right shoulder in that trademark T-shirt.
The presence of Michael the Black Man — variously known as Michael Symonette, Maurice Woodside and Mikael Israel — has inspired not only trending Twitter hashtags but a great deal of curiosity and web searches.
The radical fringe activist from Miami once belonged to a violent black supremacist religious cult and he runs a handful of amateur conspiracy websites. He has called Barack Obama “The Beast” and Hillary Clinton a Ku Klux Klan member. Oprah, he says, is the devil.
Most curiously, in the 1990s, he was charged, then acquitted, with conspiracy to commit two murders.
But Michael the Black Man loves U.S. President Donald Trump. And Trump’s campaign apparently loves him right back.
It’s unclear if the White House or Trump’s campaign officials are aware of his extreme political views, but he and his followers have stumped for the president at his inauguration and the Super Bowl.
At a campaign rally in 2016, Trump even gave the “BLACKS FOR TRUMP” signs an approving shout-out.
“Look at those signs behind me,” Trump said. “Blacks for Trump. I like those signs.”
Before he started calling himself Michael the Black Man, the man identified as Maurice Woodside joined a cult led by Hulon Mitchell Jr., who went by Yahweh Ben Yahweh and eventually turned violent. The two men met when Woodside was 21.
In the early 1990s, the New Times reported, Woodside, Yahweh and 14 other members of the cult were arrested and charged with racketeering and conspiracy in 14 murders and a firebombing.
Yahweh was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Woodside was acquitted.
In Phoenix Tuesday night, Trump turned again to the roaring crowd behind him and flashed a thumbs up.
Michael the Black Man flashed one back, smiled and mouthed, “I love you!”