President Joe Biden’s media allies are so desperate to stop him from hemorrhaging black voters that they have resorted to regurgitating a race hoax against former President Donald Trump that also failed in 2016 and 2018.
Bill Pruitt, who was a producer for “The Apprentice,” published a piece in Slate alleging Trump used the N-word during the taping of the first season. Pruitt said he waited until now to share his claim because he was under a nondisclosure agreement that conveniently expired at the same time that Biden is flailing in the polls among black voters in particular.
Pruitt’s allegation was allegedly “caught on tape,” yet Slate doesn’t provide any audio evidence. “Those tapes, I’ve come to believe, will never be found,” Pruitt writes.
Nor did Slate provide any evidence in 2016 when they ran a piece entitled “Is There Apprentice Footage Of Trump Saying the N-Word?” that acknowledged the lack of evidence but justified spreading the hearsay claim by citing a former producer who posted on Twitter that he was “hearing” about an instance involving the word but also noted that former Apprentice employees were subject to a $5 million “leak fee.” Slate concluded its hit piece by begging someone who is “eager to leak the Apprentice tapes” to “please write” to the outlet.
No one ever leaked the tapes. No other outlet has been able to independently confirm the authenticity of the claims either.
But just as there was no tangible evidence in 2018 when Omarosa Manigault Newman tried to promote her book by claiming she heard a tape of Trump using the slur, there is none now. CNN also acknowledges they are also unable to confirm the existence of that tape as well.
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Biden’s campaign responded in a statement calling Trump a “textbook racist who disrespects and attacks the Black community every chance he gets.”
“It’s why Black voters kicked him out of the White House in 2020, and it’s why they’ll make him a loser a second time this November,” the statement continued.
Biden’s campaign is well aware that their path to victory could be jeopardized by Trump’s growing support from black voters. While only 12 percent of black voters align with the Democrat Party, 18 percent told Pew they would vote for Trump or lean toward voting for Trump in a poll earlier this month. Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal poll from March also found that across Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Biden is winning roughly 68 percent of the black vote — a historically low number.
Biden’s waning support among a demographic that helped him secure his victory in 2020 is top of mind for his campaign, as made apparent Wednesday when Biden visited a majority-black school in Philadelphia.
Biden’s team knows the president cannot misjudge his chances the way failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did in 2016 when she lost by razor thin margins after millions of voters — including black voters — either sat out the race entirely or voted for Trump.
Take, for example, what happened to Clinton in Wisconsin, where The New York Times noted “Clinton had assumed she would win.” Trump won the state by just 27,000 votes after the state saw its lowest voter turnout in 16 years. But it was Wisconsin’s District 15 that saw the biggest decline in turnout in the state in 2016 when compared to 2012, the Times reported. The district is 84 percent black.
Similarly to Clinton, Biden fails to inspire enthusiasm among voters — especially black voters. CJ Sampson, 31, told NPR that while he considers himself a liberal, Biden does not inspire confidence and that he’s not sure if life is better under Biden than it was under Trump.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
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