Then-President Donald Trump regretted not taking a harder line against protesters in the wake of the late George Floyd’s death, lamenting that “the Blacks” hated him and would never vote for him anyway.
According to Wall Street Journal reporter Mike Bender’s upcoming book “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” excerpted by Politico Playbook, Trump was seething in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s murder, and regretting the meager criminal justice reform he had reluctantly supported.
“For Father’s Day in 2020, what DONALD TRUMP mostly wanted was to avoid his son-in-law. It was JARED KUSHNER who had talked the president into hiring BRAD PARSCALE to run a campaign that was now, just months before the election, in freefall. And when most Americans rejected Trump’s unreasonably truculent response to the civil unrest that was sweeping the country, the president also blamed Kushner. … Trump privately told advisers that he wished he’d been quicker to support police and more aggressive in his pushback against protesters.
“Trump had staked nearly his entire campaign in 2016 around a law-and-order image, and now groaned that the criminal justice reform that Kushner had persuaded him to support made him look weak and — even worse — hadn’t earned him any goodwill among Black voters.
“‘I’ve done all this stuff for the Blacks — it’s always Jared telling me to do this,’ Trump said to one confidante on Father’s Day. ‘And they all f—— hate me, and none of them are going to vote for me.’”