White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said that Black Americans have to “want to be successful” in order for Donald Trump’s policies to be effective.
Kushner was speaking to Fox News when he weighed in on his father-in-law’s actions concerning minorities in the United States. The video where he made these remarks can be viewed here .
“One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about,” he said. “But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”
He added that Black Americans have begun to rally around Trump in recent days.
“What you’re seeing throughout the country now is a groundswell of support in the Black community because they’re realizing that all the different bad things that the media and the Democrats have said about President Trump are not true and so they’re seeing that he’s actually delivered.”
His comments were met with backlash from people who felt that they were disrespectful.
Jared Kushner speaks as if Black people are lazy complainers who don’t want to be successful. This blatant DISRESPECT shows he has NO understanding of the Black community and its challenges that have spanned centuries. You can’t “fix” these problems from this level of ego. pic.twitter.com/fmILMVbrzY
— Ben Crump (@AttorneyCrump) October 26, 2020
The White House defended Kushner’s comments, with press secretary Kayleigh McEnany saying that they were being taken out of context in order to control the narrative around Trump’s work on criminal justice reform and funding for historically Black colleges, according to The Hill . She also touted “record high income increases.”
Kushner added that he acknowledged Trump didn’t always say the right things, but his actions spoke for him when it comes to his treatment of minorities in the country.
Black Americans didn’t turn out to vote in as large numbers as they had in the past during the last presidential election, as The Hill also reported. In 2016, their voting numbers hit a 20-year-low. Turnout appears to have been increasing and recent polling shows that Black voters are supporting Joe Biden by a wide margin, with 90 percent of respondents in a recent poll saying that they had voted — or were going to vote — for the Democratic presidential nominee. Only 4 percent expressed support for the current president.
The statement comes as the Trump campaign has been working to push back on the claims that he is racist.
Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have been facing scrutiny in recent days after the Lincoln Project posted a pair of billboards in Times Square in New York City, calling the couple out for their treatment of the novel coronavirus pandemic. As The Inquisitr previously reported, they threatened to sue over what they called a defamatory ad.
