Just a few days after comparing himself to a Russian dissident who was poisoned, jailed, and likely killed by the Kremlin, Donald Trump took his delusions of grandeur to a new level on Friday night by suggesting he has special insight into the lives of Black Americans because he, too, has “been discriminated against.”
Speaking at the Black Conservative Federation Gala in Columbia, South Carolina, the former president leaned into all the criminal charges against him, telling the crowd about how he’d been indicted, and then “indicted a second time, and a third time, and a fourth time.”
He went on to claim that “a lot of people” told him “that’s why the Black people like me, ’cause they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against. And they actually viewed me as, I’m being discriminated against, it’s been pretty amazing. But possibly, I don’t know, maybe there’s something there.”
ADVERTISEMENT
It was not immediately clear who those “lot of people” were.
Heading into the 2024 election with a string of criminal indictments against him—including two cases that concern his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—Trump has increasingly sought to portray himself as an underdog figure fighting against repression.
His latest “discrimination” claim, however, may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with his track record. Allegations of racism against Trump date back to the 1970s, when he was sued by the Justice Department for allegedly discriminating against Black apartment seekers in a case that ultimately ended in a settlement.
After famously taking out a full-page newspaper ad in 1989 demanding the death penalty for the five Black and Latino teenagers in the Central Park Five case, he refused to apologize in 2019 after they were exonerated of the brutal rape for which they’d been wrongly imprisoned.
And who could forget his baseless claims that the first Black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the U.S., or his suggestions that Vice President Kamala Harris was somehow not eligible for office because her parents were both immigrants?
