Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) urged Black people and especially Black men to “consider” Donald Trump’s role in the case of the acquitted Central Park Five before voting for him on Sunday in an urgent call for action.
“Black men know, when they see him deal with his own criminal issues and concerns, that the criminal justice system certainly doesn’t treat them the way it treats him,” the Georgia senator said in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash.
Warnock responded according to a recent poll in The New York Times showing Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump with the support of 78% of likely black voters.
Bash noted that the VP’s figure is more than 10 percentage points lower than how President Joe Biden is estimated to have done with Black voters in the 2020 election, based on exit polls and post-election assessments.
“So 1 in 5 black men say they support Donald Trump. Why do you think that is so?” she asked Warnock.
Warnock said black men will “not vote for Trump in significant numbers,” before adding that some of them will vote for him because “we are not a monolith.”
He then referred to the former president placing full-page newspaper advertisements calling for the death penalty for “criminals of all ages” before the trial of five black and brown teenagers wrongfully convicted in the 1989 Manhattan rape case involving a white woman.
“And when it was proven that the acquitted five, the Central Park Five, were in fact innocent, Donald Trump has shown no concern for what they went through, not an ounce of remorse for it,” Warnock said.
‘He has doubled his position. This is who he is,” he added.
Warnock later pitted Harris against Trump, adding that she found ways to give people “a path to a better life” in her career as a prosecutor.
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“[She’s] “has put the concerns of everyday people at the heart of her life as a lawyer, as a senator and now as vice president,” he said.
“Again, we are not a monolith, but the idea that large numbers of black men will vote for Donald Trump is not going to happen.”