A navy-colored bus emblazoned with the phrases “I’m not with her” and “Black voters for Trump” received a cheer from the crowd of fewer than a dozen Black Republicans, many of them members of the local Republican Central Committee.
Passer-bys offered up jeers as the bus pulled into a corner lot near a Chipotle and a closed-for construction McDonald’s at the Havenwood Commons next to Morgan State University.
Baltimore marked the final stop of the Black Conservative Federation’s weeklong bus tour aimed at mobilizing Black Republican voters.
“No one knows how bad the Democratic Party has been then the people in Baltimore, then the people in Chicago, then the people in these liberally-run areas,” said Diante Johnson, BCF president.
Former President Donald Trump lost the state of Maryland by a landslide in 2016 and 2020, which puts the pressure on down ballot Republican races like the state’s U.S. Senate race, which remains competitive between former Republican Governor Larry Hogan and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks — a Democrat and Black woman.
“What's important is having the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. And so that's up and down the ticket,” said Johnson, speaking to WYPR ahead of his prepared remarks.
Christopher Anderson, who is running as a Republican for Baltimore City’s 7th city council district, said he supports Trump because of the “Platinum Plan”. That plan, released in 2020, says Trump will increase access to capital in Black communities and that the former president will reduce Black unemployment to historic levels.
Trump has often criticized communities with large Black populations and in 2019, tweeted that former Representative Elijah Cumming’s district, which included almost the entire city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess.” Trump also claimed earlier this year at a BCF gala that Black voters are drawn to him because of his criminal indictments and mugshots.
While those comments have been disparaged as racist by some, the Black conservatives gathered on Thursday dismissed them.
“As a Black woman, I don't see the racism… I look at his policies,” said Brenda Tchaim, a former Republican in the Maryland House of Delegates who now serves as the leader of the Maryland chapter of the BCF.
“When [Trump] was a Democrat, they love him… Jesse Jackson loved him, Oprah Winfrey loved him, all of these elite Black people loved him but now that he’s a Republican, all of a sudden he’s a racist.”
Each stop of the bus tour featured a “special guest” which in Baltimore was District 2 Republican Congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik. Klacik is running against Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr., a Democrat, who is favored to win that election.
