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With white men already occupying many positions of power, a Trump campaign aide said the presumptive GOP presidential nominee is only considering white men to serve as his vice president.
During an interview with The Huffington Post, Trump’s campaign chairman and chief strategist, Paul Manafort, spoke briefly about the tough task of choosing a qualified vice president. Trump probably won’t chose a woman or minority for his vice president though, according to Manafort.
“In fact, that would be viewed as pandering, I think,” he told the interviewer.
“He [Trump] needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do,” Manafort continued. “He seems himself more as the chairman of the board, than even the CEO, let alone the COO.”
Not only is Trump’s method limiting, but it also implies that minorities are simply unqualified for the job.
Even after his outwardly discriminatory strategy for choosing a vice president was made public, Trump doesn’t seem too worried about how it might affect voters who don’t quite fall into the “white man” category. Per Complex, Manafort says Trump’s numbers are down 12 percent among women but up 20 percent among men. Despite this decrease in support among women, Trump’s campaign aide asserts that he’s not the one having problems reaching female and minority voters.
“Hillary is the one who’s got a gender gap,” Manafort said. “And while we are behind among women over all, we’re ahead among white women even now. We’ll get some Black and Hispanic women as we go along.”
According to Fusion, the real estate tycoon’s campaign echoes a larger issue within the American political arena. A 2014 report titled, “Who Leads Us?: A Project of the Reflective Democracy Campaign,” found that 71 percent of men hold elected offices, yet they only comprise 49 percent of the population. And 65 percent of those men happen to be white, despite the fact that white men make up just 31 percent of the population. Lastly, only 10 percent of those elected officials are people of color.
“This imbalance is unsustainable,” the study states. “Our history has shown us that when power is not shared, things break down. We need look no farther than places like Ferguson, Missouri, to see that in order to successfully govern us, our elected leaders must look like us and live like us. We need a reflective democracy.”
Fusion reports that the GOP currently has four people of color as top contenders for the VP seat and two women of color who serve as governors (South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez). Trump has already rubbed both of them the wrong way.
According to the news site, the Republican presidential candidate unleashed a series of verbal attacks on Gov. Haley in March and called Gov. Martinez “lazy’ at one of his rallies last week.
