Kwame Kilpatrick committed so many crimes during his time as mayor of Detroit that his administration was blamed for accelerating the city’s fall into bankruptcy.
Why should you care?
Opinion Columnist
LZ Granderson
LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports and navigating life in America.
Because now he’s a leader of a group called Black Men for Trump.
In 2013, as the city was entering Chapter 9, Kilpatrick was sent to prison for 28 years for 24 federal felonies, including fraud and racketeering. However, in 2021, Donald Trump commuted his sentence. Now Kilpatrick is paying him back by doing what he does best — gaslighting voters.
“Black Americans are not a monolith, and we don’t owe our votes to any candidate just because they look like us,” the group said in a statement recently. “It’s demeaning to suggest that we can’t evaluate a candidate’s track record.”
Let’s look at Kilpatrick’s record: He accepted nearly $10 million in kickbacks from city contracts he awarded to a close friend. The disgraced former mayor also took money he raised for charity to buy golf clubs, spa treatments and luxury vacations. There’s also the 27-year-old woman who in a deposition said she stripped at a drug-fueled party at the mayor’s mansion for $1,000 — a witness who, by the way, turned up dead before she could testify in court.
Trump went to Detroit last week and trash-talked the city while being advised by Kilpatrick, who actually trashed the city during his nearly seven years as mayor. One of the other voices who has his ear, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), has repeatedly said Black people had it better under Jim Crow. When I interviewed campaign surrogate Bruce LeVell back in 2016, he was in charge of Trump’s National Diversity Coalition. However, now that “diversity” is a four-letter word in conservative circles, he’s part of this sad group of Black men helping Trump to mislead their community.
At a recent stop in Nevada, Trump boldly told the crowd that he loves Black men.
Really?
Apparently he doesn’t consider Haitian immigrants to be Black, because he isn’t showing love for them in this campaign season. Nor has he ever shown contrition over calling for the execution of five Black and brown children who were falsely accused of a horrific crime in Central Park in 1989; the Black men of the Exonerated 5 aren’t feeling the love from Trump.
After Randal Pinkett, a Black man, won Season 4 of “The Apprentice,” he wrote in his book: “I was not aware until I joined the Trump Organization that there were absolutely no ethnic minorities in any executive capacity for any of his companies.” Where was the love for Black men as Trump built his businesses and staffed the C-suites?
Sure, he enjoys being around Black athletes and entertainers, but what evidence is there that Trump sees the humanity of the migrants at the border as being equal to himself? President Lincoln was against the institution of slavery but did not see Black people as equal. Frederick Douglass said “he was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.”
When Trump targets cities like Detroit for criticism, he’s not interested in policy that can uplift, only rhetoric to get him elected. That’s why he doesn’t mind offending Black folks with his racist tropes while campaigning.
However, we tend to forget Trump was president and that his words are secondary to his actions.
Of the 226 federal judges picked by Trump, 189 are white. Only nine are Black, the fewest since Reagan’s seven. Trump was also the first president since Richard Nixon to not even nominate a Black person as an appeals court judge. One Latino made the cut in Trump’s only term. (For comparison, President Biden has selected more nonwhite judges than any other president, including Barack Obama. Biden also has the most diverse Cabinet in history, while Trump had the least diverse in 30 years.)
From being sued by the Justice Department in the 1970s for refusing to rent apartments to Black people, to selecting a reality TV show villain to be the face of diversity efforts during his time in the White House, Trump has shown little interest in improving Black folks’ lives.
If the Black men advising Trump believe any of this is acceptable, then we know the kind of Black men Trump loves to have around.