Ice Cube and President Trump Team Up on Plan To Empower Black Americans
The Trump campaign announced Tuesday that rapper/actor Ice Cube, whose legal name is O’Shea Jackson Jr., has been working with President Donald Trump’s team to build out its Platinum Plan to economically empower African-Americans.
“So @icecube has officially given the Trump campaign permission to reveal that he has been helping us develop President Trump’s groundbreaking black Trump platform: The Platinum Plan!” tweeted Black Conservative Federation founder Diante Johnson, who also serves as a Black Voices for Trump advisory board member.
So @icecube has officially given the Trump campaign permission to reveal that he has been helping us develop President Trump’s groundbreaking black Trump platform: The Platinum Plan!
“Leaders gonna lead, haters gonna hate! Thank you for leading,”- @KatrinaPierson pic.twitter.com/gutHEMqSAv
— Diante Johnson (@BCFPresident) October 14, 2020
“Leaders gonna lead, haters gonna hate. Thank you for leading,” Trump campaign senior adviser Katrina Pierson added.
Shoutout to @icecube for his willingness to step up and work with @realDonaldTrump Administration to help develop the #PlatinumPlan
ICYMI: https://t.co/V0qOAp0lwR
Leaders gonna lead, haters gonna hate. Thank you for leading! ✊?
— Katrina Pierson (@KatrinaPierson) October 13, 2020
Black Voices for Trump board member Paris Dennard tweeted in response that The Platinum Plan “will be life changing for so many people in the Black Community.”
“Pres. @realDonaldTrump is an inspirational leader and it’s great to see more seemingly unlikely allies like @icecube willing to work w/ him to #MAGA for everyone!”
[firefly_poll]
The #PlatinumPlan for Black Economic Empowerment will be life changing for so many people in the Black Community!
Pres. @realDonaldTrump is an inspirational leader and it’s great to see more seemingly unlikely allies like @icecube willing to work w/ him to #MAGA for everyone! https://t.co/87jAv050wF pic.twitter.com/PaNjJXt3CI
— PARIS (@PARISDENNARD) October 13, 2020
Ice Cube has come a long way from saying he “can’t wait” to see Trump in handcuffs during a March interview to suggesting in a TMZ interview last month that he could vote to re-elect the president if Trump backs the rapper’s Contract with Black America.
“Facts: I put out the CWBA. Both parties contacted me,” he tweeted Wednesday. “Dems said we’ll address the CWBA after the election. Trump campaign made some adjustments to their plan after talking to us about the CWBA.”
Facts: I put out the CWBA. Both parties contacted me. Dems said we’ll address the CWBA after the election. Trump campaign made some adjustments to their plan after talking to us about the CWBA.
— Ice Cube (@icecube) October 14, 2020
Every side is the Darkside for us here in America. They’re all the same until something changes for us. They all lie and they all cheat but we can’t afford not to negotiate with whoever is in power or our condition in this country will never change. Our justice is bipartisan. https://t.co/xFIXXpOs8B
— Ice Cube (@icecube) October 14, 2020
Last month in Atlanta, Trump unveiled his “Platinum Plan” for black economic empowerment, which does include of some of the policy concepts found in Ice Cube’s contract.
The Platinum Plan is a $500 billion initiative aimed at bringing 3 million new jobs to the black community and helping create 500,000 new black-owned businesses. It also calls for universal school choice and criminal justice reform.
Black conservative commentators Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson — better known by their stage names, Diamond and Silk — explained on a recent episode of The Western Journal’s podcast “WJ Live” why they chose to support Trump.
“We can no longer vote for a system that keeps handing us crumbs, that wants to hand us tyranny, that wants to put socialism and communism down our throat,” Hardaway said.
An Investors Business Daily/TIPP poll conduced following last month’s presidential debate between Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden showed Trump’s support among black respondents had nearly doubled since 2016 to 15 percent.
CNN exit polling from the 2016 election showed Trump with just 8 percent support among black voters.
A Hill-HarrisX poll released in late August found the president’s approval rating among black registered voters had jumped 9 percentage points from a survey taken earlier that same month to 24 percent.
All this bodes well for Trump to garner the highest percentage of the black vote of any Republican nominee going back to the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
Nixon, who served as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, was probably riding in part on the goodwill African-Americans had for his World War II hero boss, who had a strong record on civil rights.
Ike garnered 39 percent of the black vote in his 1956 re-election bid, which is the high water mark for any Republican presidential candidate in post-World War II America.
Nixon won 32 percent of the black vote in 1960, and it has been downhill since for the GOP.
Trump’s 8 percent in 2016 topped Mitt Romney’s 6 percent in 2012 and John McCain’s 4 percent in 2008 as they faced off against Barack Obama, who became the first black president.
George W. Bush secured 11 percent of the African-American vote in 2004, which helped make the difference in states like Ohio, where he actually won an even higher 16 percent of the demographic.
Ice Cube has been promoting his Black Contract with America since unveiling it in July.
“Instead of looking for incremental reform, the Contract with Black America tries to address the root causes of racism in our society and develop a roadmap for a comprehensive solution,” the artist wrote in an Op-Ed for The Hill.
“Beyond the obvious, we need to focus on the areas of banking and finance, justice, policing, education, Hollywood depictions, as well as a system of reparations. None of these work in isolation, this plan looks at the systemic core of racism as a whole, and only in that way can a true solution be born.”
“The objective is not handouts to assuage white guilt, nor do we want White’s equality diminished either,” Ice Cube continued.
“We need [Whites] to look within and be honest about how they benefit from white privilege, and always will, unless our society reimagines what America should have looked like in the beginning and does the hard work of reform to get our country where it should be.”
The goal, the celebrity explained, is equal justice for all and harmony for the country.
The Platinum Plan does not call for reparations, but it does build on some of the major Trump accomplishments for African-Americans during his first term, including the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded, funding for historically black colleges and universities, opportunity zones and criminal justice reform.
Though Democrats consistently try to label Trump a racist, the truth is his record in support of black America is the strongest of any president going back to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
