Donald Trump Fights Back, Retweets A Tweet That Claims Hillary Clinton’s ‘Mentor’ Was A Ku Klux Klan Member
Donald Trump, on Saturday, retweeted a tweet by the account @DiamondandSilk which claims that Hillary Clinton’s mentor was a member of the infamous Ku Klux Klan (KKK). With this tweet, Trump has effectively lashed out at claims made by Clinton’s running mate and Virginia Senator Tim Kaine that Trump was pushing the values of the KKK. The KKK is the name of a movement in the U.S. that promotes white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration.
Speaking in Des Moines, Iowa, Trump also claimed that he was the best candidate for African-Americans as the next president of the U.S.
The tweet by @DiamondandSilk read, “Crooked Hillary getting desperate. On TV bashing Trump. @CNN, she forgot how she said a KKK member was her mentor,” Trump tweeted Saturday.”
Diamond and Silk are nicknames of two African-American sisters — Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson — who support Trump and regularly talk at his rallies. The sisters later confirmed to CNN that the tweet referred to the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who used to be Clinton’s mentor. Clinton had in fact mourned at Byrd’s death in 2010 that he was “a true American original, my friend and mentor.”
“Donald J. Trump can’t help who embraces his campaign but Hillary Clinton could’ve helped who she embraced,” the sisters, Diamond and Silk, told CNN.
Good reporting confirms that it was Donald Trump's father arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927 https://t.co/9szTFG6CJt via @vice
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) August 27, 2016
As a matter of fact, Trumps surrogates have always highlighted Clinton’s relationship with Byrd whenever accusations have been leveled against the Republican nominee’s campaign had blatant undertones of racially charged comments.
Trump supporter Scottie Nell Hughes also mentioned Byrd to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “(Clinton) sat there and praised Sen. Byrd saying that he was her mentor, that he should be respected and he was a leader of the KKK.”
Byrd’s association with the KKK dates back to the 1940s. He was instrumental in starting a 150-member chapter of the Klan in Sophia, West Virginia, in the early 1940s, and he was chosen as the leader of the group at that time. However, talking to CNN’s Dana Bash in 2006, Byrd had mentioned that joining the KKK was “the greatest mistake of my life.”
“I saw the act in the kaleidoscope of life, liberty and property. That was a different time. I’m from the South, grew up in a Southern home… and it was that Southern atmosphere in which I grew up and with all of its prejudices and its feelings.”
The campaign speeches of Trump and Clinton have been filled with ugly and racially charged accusations between the two presidential candidates. On Wednesday, Trump had called Clinton “a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.” Clinton immediately lashed back saying Trump “courted white supremacists” and “is someone who is very much peddling bigotry and prejudice and paranoia.”
Kaine associates Trump w/ KKK: "Ku Klux Klan values, David Duke values, Donald Trump values are not American values" https://t.co/0sPQGUlGjB
— Los Angeles Lawyer (@AnLALawyer) August 26, 2016
Trump appealed to the African-American community on Saturday to vote for him as the next president of the U.S. because the “Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln.”
“Nothing means more to me than working to make our party the home of the African-American vote once again,” Trump claimed while speaking before a nearly all-white audience at Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” event.
He also shone a light upon the fact that Clinton called the black youth “super predators” and said, “By the way, how quickly people have forgotten that Hillary Clinton called black youth ‘super predators.’ Remember that? ‘Super predators.’ And they were very, very insulted, but now people have forgotten.”
However, recently Donald Trump also faced a huge backlash after tweeting about the murder of Dwyane Wade’s cousin where he said, “Dwyane Wade’s cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!”
This gave his detractors, including some news outlets, some ammunition against him, according to the Daily Beast.
“In an attempt to salvage his abysmal standing with minorities, Donald Trump is accusing liberals of being the racists who caused violent crime and poverty in America. It might be the most dangerously ignorant argument he’s made yet.”
[Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images]
