Trump Says He Has ‘So Many Black Friends,’ He Can’t Be Racist

Former PresidentDonald Trump defended himself in a recent interview against those who think he’s racist, saying he can’t be because he has “so many” friends who are Black.

“I have so many Black friends that if I were a racist, they wouldn’t be friends, they would know better than anybody, and fast,” he said in an interview with Semafor published Friday. “They would not be with me for two minutes if they thought I was racist — and I’m not racist!”

Several Black male celebrities came to his defense in separate interviews with the news outlet. Those men included heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, retired MLB slugger Darryl Strawberry, boxing promoter Don King, and former NFL star Herschel Walker, who lost a 2022 Senate race in Georgia.

Trump listed his “strength” and others’ desire to be like him as reasons that these men speak so warmly about him.

“They see what I’ve done and they see strength, they want strength, okay,” Trump said. “They want strength, they want security. They want jobs, they want to have their jobs. They don’t want to have millions of people come and take their jobs.”

Trump’s response follows along history of race-baiting. In the late 1980s, the now-presidential candidate called for the death penalty in full-page advertisements, after five Black New York teens were accused of rape. (All were later exonerated.)

More recently, after President Barack Obama’s election, he helped spearhead a conspiracy that the first Black U.S. president was born in Kenya and not the U.S. He defended attendees of the infamous white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people.” Heindiscriminately smeared Mexican immigrants coming to the U.S. border as criminals and rapists and hechampioned a ban on