President launches 'Black Voices for Trump' campaign in Atlanta
Donald Trump launched his “Black Voices for Trump” campaign to win votes for his re-election, on Friday in Atlanta, Georgia, addressing a few hundred supporters in the city considered the cradle of the US civil rights movement.
Atlanta is also the home of the civil rights era activist and Democratic congressman John Lewis, whom Trump once dismissed as “all talk”.
“The Republican party was the original home for African Americans,” Trump told the small gathering, adding: “And now you’re returning.”
Donning “Blacks for Trump” shirts, some wearing giant red Make America Great Again hats, and holding signs telling people to text “Woke” to a certain number to get more information about the campaign, the crowd booed when the president referred to the Democratic
party.
However, black voters, who overwhelmingly support Democrats, are an elusive demographic for the 45th US president.
Trump received only 8% of the black vote in 2016. According to a recent
Gallup poll, his approval among black voters remains below 10%.
To those gathered at Friday’s event – a number of whom were white – he said he would campaign for every last African American vote in 2020, even though he has spent much of his three years in office antagonizing black politicians.
He has called Baltimore, a predominantly black city and home of the late, prominent congressman Elijah Cummings, a“disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess” and has called Chicago an “embarrassment to the nation” based on gun violence, often related to poverty, in majority black neighborhoods.
And after white nationalists targeted Charlottesville, Virginia, in violent clashes in 2017, and later killed a counter-protester, Trump said there had been good people “on both sides”. He was endorsed by a Ku Klux Klan leader in 2016 and failed to vigorously denounce such support.
Trump has also targeted the congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somaliborn US citizen, beaming as crowds at one of his recent rallies chanted “Send her back!”
On Friday, he referenced his words at an August 2016 rally in Michigan, asking the crowd – a mix of attendees from a handful of southern states – at the Georgia World Congress Center: “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Trump spent much of his 2016 campaign denigrating the country’s first African American president, Barack Obama. He had long promoted the lie that Obama wasn’t born in the US.
Echoing remarks from 2016, on Friday he said: “You have the worst