Trump Suggests Black Voters Like Him More Because of His Mugshot and Criminal Charges: ‘What Happens to Me Happens to Them’

Former President Donald Trump claimed Friday evening that black voters like him more now that he has posed for a mug shot and has been criminally charged 91 times.

Trump headlined the Black Conservative Federation’s Honors Gala in Columbia, South Carolina, on the eve of the state’s Republican primaries.

The ex-president and 2024 hopeful has an average lead of 30 points over the former UN ambassador. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, received the support of black Senator Tim Scott last month.

“When I took the mugshot in Atlanta, that mugshot was No. 1. You know who was embraced more than anyone else?” Trump asked the crowd. ‘The black population.’

He complained that he was being sued for “nothing” — claiming that black voters understand that because they see that “what happens to me happens to them.”

Trump’s mugshot from Fulton County, Georgia. He said the “black population” embraced it more than any other group

“Does that make any sense?” Trump asked.

He received cheers and applause from the audience.

‘And “A lot of people said this is why black people like me, because they’ve been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they basically saw me as being discriminated against,” Trump said.

“It was pretty amazing, but there may be something there,” the former president added.

Rival Nikki Haley told reporters she found Trump’s comments “disgusting” as she left her polling place in Kiawah Island, South Carolina, on Saturday after voting with her family in the Republican primary.

“But that’s what happens when he leaves the teleprompter, that’s the chaos that comes with Donald Trump, that’s the insult that will happen every day between now and the general election,” Haley said. “That’s why I keep saying Donald Trump can’t win a general election. He won’t do that.’

“We can make him the primary candidate if we want, but the Republicans will lose in November, this is a huge warning sign,” Trump’s latest rival added.

The Biden campaign did not specifically address these comments, but Trump’s decision to address the predominantly Black crowd at all.

“Trump’s audacity to address a room full of Black voters during Black History Month as if he is not the proud poster boy for modern racism,” Jasmine Harris, Black Media Director for the Biden campaign, said in a statement on Saturday.

“This is the same man who falsely accused the Central Park 5, questioned the humanity of George Floyd, compared his own impeachment trial to being lynched, and caused the unemployment gap for Black workers to skyrocket during his presidency,” she continued.

“For years, Donald Trump has been showing Black Americans his true colors: an incompetent, anti-Black tyrant who holds us in such low regard that he publicly dined with white nationalists a week after declaring his candidacy for 2024,” Harris added .

Trump launched his 2024 presidential bid on November 15, 2022.

Days later, he sat down for a controversial dinner at Mar-a-Lago with rapper Kanye West, who is black but has come under fire for making anti-Semitic comments, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

“Come November, no matter how many insincere voter engagement events he attends, Black Americans will show Donald Trump that we know exactly who he is,” Harris said.

Trump hopes to chip away at some of the support President Joe Biden had with Black and Latino voters in 2020.

Biden won about 90 percent of the black vote in 2020.

While high, that is a decline from the support black voters gave to Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 rival, which stood at 93 percent.

President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, received 97 percent of the vote during his 2012 re-election.