A black supporter of President Donald Trump, who in June 2016 was praised by him as “my African-American,” has left the Republican Party, saying he’s “fed up” with the GOP “and the way they treat blacks.”
In an interview on CNN on Thursday night, Gregory Cheadle, who says he intends to run as an independent for Congress in California, said Trump’s criticism of Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., was “one of the straws that broke the proverbial camel's back”
“Elijah Cummings, a good person, a good person, to constantly blame a black person for these things when it was the government's programs responsible largely for the ghettos that we have today,” he said.
But Cheadle said he doesn’t believe Trump is a racist.
“I much prefer to say he has a white superiority complex more so than calling him a racist, with his white superiority complex it's reflecting in his cabinet. It's reflecting in the White House interns, it's reflected in his judicial appointments,” he told CNN.
“I’m just fed up with the Republican party and the way they treat blacks. You know, we have been denied opportunity after opportunity after opportunity, they would rather build jails and prisons than schools and so that has got to change if this country is going to progress and become quote/unquote great again.
In an earlier interview with PBS NewsHour, Cheadle laid into Trump.
“President Trump is a rich guy who is mired in white privilege to the extreme,” he told PBS. “Republicans are too sheepish to call him out on anything and they are afraid of losing their positions and losing any power themselves.”
He also told PBS that 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 side-stepping the people of color issue and saying that, ‘No, it’s not racist,’” he told PBS. “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.”
Cheadle told CNN he doesn’t think Trump’s light-hearted comment in 2016 is so funny anymore.
“I went to his inauguration. I was hoping that the humility that I saw during his speech would continue, but as time went on, that wasn't the case,” he told CNN. “There have been just tremendous things that have happened that offended me personally and I'm just sick and tired of the way blacks and other people of color have been treated by this administration and by the GOP. Period.”
He said Colin Kaepernick’s protest of social injustice “was the major thing for me.”
“I could not understand how in the world Republicans could be so adamantly opposed to this man trying to get attention to the cause of the plights of blacks. I couldn't understand it,” he said.
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