Gregory Cheadle, the black man President Trump once described at a rally as “my African American,” has decided to leave the Republican party and run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as an independent in 2020, according to PBS NewsHour. Cheadle said that the Republican party has a “pro-white” agenda and uses black people like him as “political pawns.” He said that the breaking point was Trump’s tweets telling four congresswomen of color to go back to where they came from. Cheadle, a 62-year-old real-estate broker, became known in 2016 when Trump, then a presidential candidate, pointed to him at a rally in Redding, Calif., and said, “Look at my African American over here. Look at him. Are you the greatest?” Cheadle says that at the time he took the president’s comments as a joke but now his opinion has changed. “I’m more critical of it today than I was back then because today I wonder to what extent he said that for political gain or for attention,” he said.
