Congressional Black Caucus leaders will meet today with Donald Trump despite pressure not to
By James Hohmann March 22 at 10:30 AM
THE BIG IDEA: Friends, House colleagues and even his own staffers have urged the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Cedric Richmond, not to sit down with Donald Trump this afternoon.
“I have family members who say, ‘Don’t go meet with him. He means you no good,’” Richmond, a Democratic congressman from New Orleans, said in an interview. “But, as policymakers, we cannot let the only opinions that he’s getting about the African American community … come from entertainers and people who he’s comfortable with that only tell him what he wants to hear.”
Richmond and a delegation of five other African American House Democrats feel duty-bound to go to the Oval Office to see the president and vice president at 3 p.m. “Part of it really is an education thing,” he explained yesterday afternoon. “Some of the things they say out of the White House are just not factual. But, even more than that, what they’re saying just doesn’t make a lot of sense. So instead of just criticizing, we will try to give them the benefit of our experience. … There’s a strong feeling, and I think a valid feeling, that the people around him are not in a position to do that. One, it’s not a very diverse group. Two, I don’t think they have the policy bona fides … I don’t think somebody’s connecting the dots for him.”
-- Despite routinely describing himself as “the least racist person,” Trump has done a great deal to antagonize the African American community. After years of trying to de-legitimize the first black president by insisting that he was born in Kenya, the 70-year-old now clings to a discredited conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower and refuses to apologize for falsely accusing his predecessor of the worst political crimes since Watergate.
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