Donald Trump appeared to put his foot in his mouth Friday when he interrupted a story to point out a black man at a California rally at Redding Municipal Airport and said, “Look at my African-American over there! Look at him. Are you the greatest? You know what I’m talking about? OK!”
Yet the particular gentleman in question was anything but offended by Trump’s words. “That was me, seriously. I got two autographs out of that,” Gregory Cheadle told the Redding Record Searchlight newspaper.
Cheadle is in fact a candidate for Congress from California’s first district whose website advertises him as “an 1856 Republican” who is “not a puppet of the filthy rich … not owned by corporations … [and] not part of the old guard, good ‘ol boy, statist Republican Party.”
According to his campaign website, he’s also a vegan, an early Tea Party fellow traveler, a luxury toy house builder and a substitute teacher. And though he doesn’t want to quibble, he prefers “black” to “African-American.”
Cheadle noted to the paper that Trump had signaled him out in a positive way, in the middle of an overwhelmingly white crowd of about 4,000 people. He didn’t find it embarrassing. He found it heartening that, unlike most politicians in that setting, Trump had bothered “to give the black folk the time of day.”
“I was happy,” Cheadle added, and it didn’t stop there.
When Trump was getting ready to leave, Cheadle managed to get his attention. The billionaire Republican candidate signed two placards that Cheadle was holding and chatted with him for a bit.
Cheadle tried to recount that conversation to the Record Searchlight before admitting, “It’s all a fog. I’m glad I’m not on the witness stand. But it means a lot to me when a person of his stature can come to Redding.”
