Gregory Cheadle went to a Trump rally out of curiosity and left it as an international headline.
The infamous moment, like many at Donald Trump’s rallies that summer in 2016, seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Trump was telling a story about an African American supporter when suddenly he spotted Cheadle in the front row at the Redding, Calif., event, and paused to single out the black man.
“Oh, look at my African American over here!” Trump exclaimed, pointing at Cheadle. “Look at him! Are you the greatest?”
Cheadle laughed at Trump’s outburst then.
Now, citing the president’s “white superiority complex,” Cheadle isn’t in the same party anymore.
On Wednesday, Cheadle revealed he has abandoned the GOP to launch a bid for Congress as an independent in California’s 1st Congressional District, saying he’s had enough of Republicans’ failure to condemn Trump’s comments denigrating black people. Cheadle doesn’t identify any one moment as his breaking point, but rather a deflating succession of them. Somewhere between Trump’s feud with former NFL star Colin Kaepernick and his attacks on Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), between his “shithole countries” comment and his “go back” tweets, “I said, ‘Enough is enough. I’m sick of it,’" Cheadle said.
“I just hope this is a wake-up call for the GOP,” Cheadle, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress four times as a Republican, told The Washington Post. “The GOP is going to be in the Smithsonian the way they’re going. Their only concern is for whites. They don’t care about the poor. They don’t care about anybody else."
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