Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones recently had a conversation with Michaelah Montgomery, a grassroots activist in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a supporter of former President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, she was asked what drew her and other young, Black voters to Trump, Montgomery stated that “they feel like he’s honest” via Mediaite.
Montgomery, who is the founder of Conserve the Culture, was the woman who got a hug from Trump when he visited an Atlanta Chick-fil-A and could be heard on camera saying to him, “I don’t care what the media tells you, Mr. Trump, we support you.” Jones talked to Montgomery about how more Black voters are turning to Trump and away from President Joe Biden:
Jones: What is it about him that is gravitating these young people toward the president? And a lot of people traditionally, Republicans, don’t do well in Black America. But a lot of young Black Americans like the former president. What is it about him?
Montgomery: I think, and this is a sentiment I get a lot coming from the young people themselves, is that they feel like he’s honest. They feel like this is somebody who, while we might not agree with how he says things, how he goes about things, at least he’s telling us what it is. We don’t feel like this is a snake in the grass waiting for his chance to bite us. This is somebody who’s telling us, “This is what my plan is. Here’s how I plan to execute it. Here’s the people involved, and here’s how you can get involved.”
So they just feel like he’s more relatable. And I don’t say that to say that, like, you know, they all relate to him. But again, he gives you that relatable feeling to where it’s like, “Hey, I’m just like you. You know me. This is what you said you wanted. Here’s what I’m going to try to do about it.” They really feel like this is somebody who’s talking to them and not just saying what they want to hear.
Then Biden’s name came into the mix.
Jones: What has Biden done for our community? What has he done for Black America?
Montgomery: Well, he locked up a lot of people that look like me, and they’re still sitting in jail waiting for, you know, justice, an appeal of some sort. So when it comes to what Joe Biden has done for Black America, if we look specifically at his record as a senator, it wasn’t something that benefited us at all. If anything, one could argue that he dedicated his entire senatorial career to disrupting the way of life, you know, for Black people. He didn’t want Black kids going to the same school as his kids. He didn’t want Black people walking on the sidewalk along with his mother and grandmother.
So the fact that we ignore these things that were said on the Senate floor, like this is somebody who passed legislation with the sole intent of oppressing a certain community, and we’re going to act like that didn’t happen, or we’re going to act like we can be overshadowed by somebody’s comments a few years down the line that made us feel some type of way. Feeling some type of way is completely different when you can feel a certain type of way at home versus people who are, you know, as of right now, spending the rest of their lives in jail because, you know, Joe Biden thought that they deserved it, as if there isn’t retribution. And then you had somebody like Trump come in and give us the First Step Act to try and right the wrongs that were done with this three strikes rule, and nobody’s talking about that.
While Trump did sign the widely-supported, overwhelmingly bipartisan criminal justice reform First Step Act into law in 2018, he has since distanced himself from it, especially after the death of George Floyd in 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed it. A former Trump official told Politico in 2022: “President Trump was always skeptical that it was the right policy and that it would be received well by voters, and he has remarked to almost anyone who’d listen that it was something [Jared Kushner] talked him into.”
