Trump gave the Blacks for Trump group a shoutout at his Ohio rally on Wednesday night. He called two Black supporters in the crowd his “favorite,” said he didn’t know who they were, and then asked why there were only two of them there.
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The moment happened in Chillicothe, Ohio, where Trump held a midterm rally at the Shoemaker Center on the Ohio University Chillicothe campus. He was campaigning for Senator Jon Husted and Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican running for Ohio governor, six days before the November 3 midterm elections. It was his third trip to Ohio this month.
Partway through his speech, Trump spotted the two men and called them out.
“Oh, my favorite. Will you two guys stand up, please?” he said. “Everyone thinks they’re my best friends. I don’t know.”
Then he named the group they represent. “Everyone thinks that these guys have a whole group of them. Blacks for Trump. I love you guys,” Trump said. “I don’t know who the hell they are, but they’re around.”
He also pushed back on the idea that the group’s appearances are staged. “Now, people think, oh, it’s some kind of a game. It’s not a game,” he said.
Then came the question. “And they have a whole group. Say hello to all your friends. How come there’s only two tonight? What’s going on?” Trump asked. After the men responded, he thanked them again and said, “Big progress. Big progress. Thank you very much. It’s an honor.”
Blacks for Trump is a Florida based group that has been showing up at Trump events since his first presidential run. Its members are known for wearing shirts that read “Trump & Republicans Are Not Racist” and holding signs in the stands. The group’s best known face is a man who calls himself Michael the Black Man, who became a fixture behind Trump’s podium at rallies in 2016 and 2017.
Wednesday was the second time in less than a week that Trump called out the group. At a rally in Florida last Friday, he praised Blacks for Trump, thanked its members for voting for him, and said, “It’s an honor.”
Trump has been singling out Black supporters from the stage for a decade. At a June 2016 rally in Redding, California, he pointed into the audience and said, “Oh, look at my African American over here.” The man turned out to be Gregory Cheadle, a Republican congressional candidate. In 2019, at the Atlanta launch of his Black Voices for Trump coalition, Trump asked the crowd whether they preferred “Blacks for Trump” or “African Americans for Trump,” and the room broke into a Blacks for Trump chant.
The Chillicothe rally comes as Trump makes a final push through Republican leaning states before Election Day. In Ohio, both the Senate race between Husted and Democrat Sherrod Brown and the governor’s race are considered close.
