A Black, gay conservative insisted he's sticking by Donald Trump despite facing racial and homophobic harassment by the former president's supporters.
Podcast host Rob Smith published a column in Newsweek explaining that he was still backing Trump despite leaving the Republican Party last year after far-right extremists inspired by white supremacist Nick Fuentes chanted slurs at him at an event hosted by the right-wing Turning Points USA.
"My vote for Trump in the 2024 election was not guaranteed," Smith wrote. "I am a two-time Obama voter who did not vote in 2016, as I felt at the time that neither Trump nor Clinton had earned my vote. I voted for Trump in 2020, the first time I had ever cast a vote for a Republican presidential candidate.
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"Biden was never an option. RFK, Jr. was eliminated as even a remote possibility very early on for me. One option was not voting, as I had done in 2016. That was a decision I thought long and hard about."
"I am done thinking," he added. "Trump has my vote in 2024. No matter what I think about the fringes that are still very much active in the Republican Party, I cannot let my negative experience with a few color the larger issues that are facing America."
The Iraq War veteran cited border security, inflation and the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan as reasons he's voting against President Joe Biden and offered a contrarian take on so-called identity politics to justify his opposition to the Democratic Party, even after his confrontation with right-wing bigots last year in Phoenix.
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"It is time for our politics to move beyond the idea that because someone looks or loves a certain way, they are somehow chained to liberal policies," Smith wrote. "My experience of harassment was horrific in ways that I haven't really fully discussed in depth, but as hard as I thought, as much as I struggled, I still could not bring myself to run back to the Democrat Party."
Smith, who has visited Mar-a-Lago in the past, was also offended by the reaction by some Democrats and liberals to the racist abuse he faced.
"The lie that Democrats and liberals are somehow the party of love and compassion is easily exposed by their reaction to my incident of racial and homophobic harassment," Smith wrote. "In essence, that is why I made the decision to share the incident via my social media. I was not only exposing the White Supremacists that have infiltrated the grassroots of the Republican Party, but the hypocrisy of the liberals who profess to love all Black and LGBT people ... as long as our beliefs don't make them too uncomfortable."