Former TMZ personality Van Lathan on Friday said that one reason black voters are backing former President Donald Trump is because he embodies the “American dream.”
CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten on Monday said Trump is “careening towards a historic performance” among black voters as polls suggest President Joe Biden is hemorrhaging support among younger African Americans. Former CNN host Don Lemon on “The Don Lemon Show” said Trump represents what people “would like to say and like to have,” to which Lathan concurred, noting that “even some of the brothers that we see celebrating Trump” appreciate the former president for this reason.
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“In a lot of ways, Donald Trump is, I should say for a lot of people, Donald Trump is the most crystal-clear example of the American dream,” Lathan said. “He is somebody who does whatever he wants, no matter who he hurts. He is somebody who says whatever he wants and he’s only stronger because of it. Like, there’s a freedom that some people aspire to in America, and it only comes with the ability to crush something.”
“A lot of people’s idea of the American dream isn’t us all doing well and having what we want; it’s dominance. It’s ‘we’re number one, we’re the best, we’re at the top of the food chain, we are sharks.’ And Donald Trump seems like an apex predator because he eats everything around him, even the people closest to him and no one calls him into question for it. And I think that’s what a lot of people want,” he added.
Lemon followed up by asking more specifically why black voters in particular are moving to Trump, with Lathan answering that the Democrats have not been “inspiring.”
“They don’t feel particularly inspired by Joe Biden,” he said. “They don’t see things changing in their neighborhoods, and the political promises they’re aware of from Joe Biden, they can see very obviously that they didn’t happen. And sometimes that runs at cross purposes with some of the other things the president has done, but if you say, ‘Hey, he didn’t give us voting rights,’ or ‘Hey, he didn’t give us police reform, that’s what he said he was going to do and it didn’t happen.’ Those are very big holes in what has happened in the last three years for Joe Biden.”
“When you’ve gotten all your social cues from different hip-hop artists [and] luminaries, those people are essentially capitalists that are waging their own PR wars and it’s hard to tell Donald Trump apart from them,” Lathan said. “I’ll just be honest with you, if you really look, it’s hard to tell Donald Trump from Jay-Z. That’s not saying that Jay-Z looks at the world like Donald Trump does. I’m not saying that at all. But what I’m saying is, you have a guy who is charismatic to the people that follow him, who acts in the interest of capitalism [and] making money, and who everybody else around him worships him and people look at it and go, ‘Well, that’s America. I want to be that guy.’”
CNN national politics correspondent Eva McKend recently claimed she can “say with certainty” that Democrats are “worried” about Trump gaining black voters.
