Trump’s top black hire quits, proud of job done
The highest-ranking black person on Donald Trump’s White House staff, Ja’Ron Smith, has left his job.
Smith was a deputy assistant to the president. His departure had been long planned, and wasn’t dependent on Trump winning a second term, according to people familiar with the matter. He will be taking a job at a nonprofit organisation in the coming weeks, they said.
Smith confirmed his departure on Twitter. “I am proud to say promises made, promises kept,” he tweeted on Friday afternoon. “In four years, President Trump has delivered for Black America,” with metrics including record-low unemployment, Smith said.
He added: “Keep fighting, Mr President.” Smith acted as a liaison between Trump and the black community, working on issues including funding for historically black colleges and universities and the administration’s efforts to overhaul criminal sentencing. He helped write a Trump executive order on policing after protests over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man killed by Minneapolis police.
In meetings with minority groups, Trump has often praised Smith.
“I want to just call out Ja’Ron Smith,” Trump said in May at a roundtable event in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with black leaders.
“He’s been here for — with me, like, from the beginning. He’s not a shy man, but he’s a very capable man.”
One of Smith’s most important roles was to build support for Trump in the black and Hispanic communities, in the face of charges from critics that the administration has sown divisions between ethnic groups for political purposes.
The results from the election suggest that Trump got larger slivers of minority voters than previous Republican candidates.
Smith was among a number of prominent black men invited to speak at the Republican National Convention in August, as Trump simultaneously sought to appeal to that constituency while criticising protests over Floyd’s death and promising US suburbanites he would keep low-income housing out of their neighborhoods.
“Every issue important to black communities has been a priority for him,” Smith said of Trump in his convention speech. “Prison reform, rebuilding broken families, bringing jobs back to America, jobs in Cleveland, jobs in Detroit, jobs in Milwaukee.”—