Gregory Cheadle announced Wednesday he is planning on abandoning the GOP to run for Congress as an independent candidate.
Many people will know Cheadle as the man Trump pointed out during a 2016 campaign rally saying, “Look at my African American over here!”
According to The Washington Post, Cheadle saw Trump’s remark as something that was lighthearted and easy to laugh off.
“The only difference now, though, is I question his motivation for making that statement,” he said.
Cheadle said his motivation to leave the GOP comes from his frustration toward many Republicans’ failure to condemn Trump for his racist remarks towards black people.
According to PBS NewsHour, Cheadle said his final straw was watching Republicans defend Trump’s tweets telling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.; and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. to go back to the countries where they came from.
“Very few Republicans spoke out, and that’s part of the problem,” Cheadle said. “I just found myself in amazement with the GOP just remaining silent when this was just so wrong. These things are wrong. I’m tired of blacks being denigrated and disrespected. I’m sick of it. And the GOP has done an excellent job of fueling my disgust by the way they have been treating us.”
Trump’s tweets came the same month as his demeaning comments about Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., claiming he had done nothing to help Balitmore as it was “rodent-infested” and the people living there were “living in hell.”
When asked about Cheadle on the White House lawn on Thursday afternoon, Trump claimed he had no idea who Cheadle was and asserted that he has support from the African American community.
“We have tremendous African American support,” Trump told NewsHour. “I would say I’m at my all-time high. I don’t think I’ve ever had the support that I’ve had now. I think I’m going to do very well with African Americans. African American supports has been the best we’ve had.”
According to The Washington Post, Cheadle expressed worry in the lack of diversity in Trump’s judicial appointments. There was additional fear the courts would become filled with white guys who had never interacted with African American people and had their minds set on stereotyping them.
“When you look at his appointments for the bench: white, white, white, white, white, white, white,” Cheadle said. “That, to me, is really damning to everybody else because no one else gets a chance because he’s thinking that the whites are superior, period.”
A recent Associated Press analysis found that 91% of Trump’s nominees are white and 81% are male.
Cheadle has already run for Congress four times and has been unsuccessful. When asked by PBS NewsHour what his response would be to critics who claimed he was leaving the Republican party for publicity, Cheadle said running as an independent is even harder than running as a Republican or a Democrat. He said his decision was purely driven by his disgust with the president’s character.
“We just haven’t had people called the names publicly that we have had with this administration,” he said. “To stay on this ship now, as a black Republican, I couldn’t do it.”