Having covered President Donald Trump’s campaign rally at the Landers Center on Tuesday, I came away thinking of hockey: It’s one thing to watch it on TV, and an entirely different thing to be in the building.
Speaking to a capacity, standing-room-only crowd of about 11,000, Trump played his “hits” — railing against Senate Democrats, defending Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and rousing the crowd in the process. But we knew all of that would happen, and that’s not why I was there.
We’ve known there are African Americans who support Trump, perhaps most notably Kanye West. But I wanted to talk to some – particularly the ones who would attend a Make America Great Again rally. I’ll dig deeper into this in this week’s print edition of The New Tri-State Defender, but in the meantime, if you ever wanted to ask an African American Trump supporter . . . “Why?” . . .
But just to prove that you can’t assume the reasons why people attend a Trump rally, I met these two U of M students, who will be voting for the first time in November. Neither are Trump supporters, but they were there to see for themselves.
