Monday, MSNBC host Al Sharpton reacted to a Politico report saying President Donald Trump celebrated a low black voter turnout in 2016, helping him win the presidential election.
Sharpton on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” said Trump’s strategy is “clearly” to not try to appeal to black voters, but rather “suppress them.” He claimed as long as the election is fair, there will be “overwhelming turnout from the black community.”
“If this is a fair election, I think you will clearly see overwhelming turnout from the black community, which is why people are rallying and galvanizing,” Sharpton outlined. “The Trump strategy is clearly not to try to appeal to black voters or to deal with their interests. It’s to suppress them. When you see this audio come out that he’s celebrating a low back voter turnout in 2016 saying it’s good for me. Well, anything that I have seen that has shown the energy went up over the weekend when people heard him say out of his own mouth what we always thought he felt — out of his own mouth, he’s celebrating, they didn’t vote therefore it’s a vote for me.”
He continued, “It couldn’t have been a better gift for the Biden campaign than for him to say to blacks that your voting, your not voting is a vote for me. Donald Trump said that. And he can come up with all that he wants about criminal justice reform and all. In the era of George Floyd, in the era of yesterday a shooting in Wisconsin, him not to deal one time with policing and not deal with interest of blacks being disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and other issues in our community, his only way is to try and suppress the vote by messing with the post office and by suppressing us at the polls, purging voters, moving voting sites, and that’s why we must rally and do all we can to stop that from happening.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
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