Trump V.P. Contender Sparks Uproar With Shocking Historical Comparison

Representative Byron Donalds, one of Trump’s possible vice presidential picks, seems to believe that Black families were better off under the segregation of the Jim Crow era.

Donalds was speaking Tuesday at a “Congress, Cognac, and Cigars” event at a cigar bar in Philadelphia with Representative Wesley Hunt, which was meant to promote “Black Americans for Trump.”

Sports journalist Michelle Tafoya, who moderated the event, was leading a discussion on the GOP’s outreach to Black Americans when Donalds began claiming that Democratic policies  have eroded Black family values. Specifically, Donalds said that Black voters had embraced those policies after becoming loyal to the Democratic Party when the Civil Rights Act passed.

“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative—Black people have always been conservative-minded—but more Black people voted conservatively,” Donalds said, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“And then H.E.W., Lyndon Johnson—you go down that road, and now we are where we are,” Donalds added, referring to the former U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Donalds’s remarks the next day, calling them “factually inaccurate” and an “ignorant observation.”

Connecting desegregation to the decline of the Black family is probably not the best way for the Republicans to win more Black voters, even if the message is coming from a Black conservative like Donalds. Plus, the social programs that Donalds laments were rolled back by Democrats in the 1990s, led by President Bill Clinton.

But it’s only the latest example of Donalds saying something he shouldn’t have. Also on Tuesday, he attempted to criticize Democrats on Newsmax, only to inadvertently describe the GOP’s propensity for gaslighting. He continues to back Trump, even when the Republican presidential nominee and convicted felon spouts outlandish conspiracy theories. And Donalds went as far as to declare that the federal government should not be involved in managing elections.

Is this the kind of devotion Trump is looking for in a vice president, a sycophant who can defend Trump and the Republican Party’s racist history by the virtue of his own identity?