6/28/2023 0 Comments Trump old black lady photo policePatton first came to the public’s attention when she landed a primetime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. Taking the podium in a crisp white blazer, she talked about racism and black men who had been killed by police. “I regret that vote with every fiber of my being.” She voted for Obama in 2008, only to have second thoughts when he began to focus on health care reform. But for Republicans, it’s our lifestyle,” she told me. “It was at that moment that I realized that patriotism was simply a punchline for Democrats. When I asked her when she became a Republican, Patton invoked 9/11. In 2015, she was named Trump’s liaison for “minority engagement.” She later clarified that she attended summer courses at Yale.) She worked as a paralegal before joining the Eric Trump Foundation as vice president following an introduction by Michael Cohen, the president’s then-fixer, eventually becoming a Trump family senior aide in 2012. (Her official resume listed both Quinnipiac and Yale, suggesting she’d graduated from both. Patton graduated from Tabor Academy, a tony boarding school, in 1991 got an English degree from the University of Miami in 1996 and enrolled at Quinnipiac University School of Law but never finished. Patton’s path to Trump family insider started in New Haven, Connecticut, a place she’s said “ used to be a shithole.” Her parents are Democrats her father, an epidemiology professor at Yale, knew Ben Carson before the brain surgeon became HUD secretary. Why do they stick by a president who makes openly racist statements and inspires white supremacists? But Patton insisted that she’s worked for Donald Trump and his family for a decade and truly believes that if they were racist, “one of the children would have slipped up by now.” She continued, dropping one of her many well-rehearsed lines, “I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: Trump sees things as success or failure, not color, race, gender, or creed.” “I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: Trump sees things as success or failure, not color, race, gender, or creed.” Yet as I watched Patton with fascination, what I really wanted to know was this: Is the most prominent black woman in the Trump administration for real? Or is she just playing the role of the loyal black friend in a reality TV presidency?īlack conservatives like Patton, long confusing to liberals, are positively confounding in the age of Trump. I could not argue with that: In reporting on her rise from Trump family aide to a key official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, I’ve covered her one-month stay in public housing and her Instagram post scoffing at Rep. “You have not been the kindest journalist to me,” Lynne Patton told me over the phone.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |