Herman Cain Says Black Americans ‘Brainwashed’ by ‘Certain News Outlets’ to Hate Trump

Herman Cain speaks to the media outside of Trump Towers before a scheduled appearance with real estate mogul Donald Trump on October 3, 2011 in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s former nominee to the Federal Reserve Board, Herman Cain, said black Americans are conditioned to hate the president due to biased media coverage.

Cain, the former head of Godfather’s Pizza restaurant chain, made the remarks to TMZ while leaving Reagan National Airport on May 14. He was asked about why many African Americans appear to be quite anti-Trump even though the president has addressed important issues like criminal justice reform and unemployment rates.

“They’re getting brainwashed according to the news that they watch,” Cain told the TMZ reporter. “It’s been statistically shown that certain stations, certain news outlets, they simply are not telling the entire truth. And in some cases, people are being brainwashed.”

Cain also said that he continues to support Trump because he looks at what the president has achieved rather than other people’s perceptions.

“He should have been given credit for the entire nation,” he said. “They don’t want to talk about that. They only want to talk about those subjective intangible things.”

“They don’t want to talk about the real results that he’s been able to achieve.”

Last year, the unemployment rate for black American men fell to its lowest at 6.3 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Meanwhile, the unemployment among black Americans of both genders fell to 5.9 percent.

However, those numbers did not include workers who haven’t sought a job in the past four weeks from the date the monthly survey was conducted. The unemployment rate for black Americans in April this year was 6.7 percent.

Black Entertainment Television founder, Robert Johnson, told CNBC that Trump is bringing back jobs for African American workers and creating a thriving business environment.

“You have to take encouragement from what’s happening in the labor force and the job market,” the African American billionaire said. “When you look at African-American unemployment, you’ve never had African-American unemployment this low and the spread between African-Americans and whites narrowing.”

Last month, Trump said he was nominating Cain, who is a vocal critic of the Fed’s fiat currency and fractional reserve banking system, for the empty seat on the Federal Reserve Board, but the businessman withdrew himself from consideration on April 22.

“My friend Herman Cain, a truly wonderful man, has asked me not to nominate him for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board,” Trump said in a Twitter post. “I will respect his wishes. Herman is a great American who truly loves our Country!”

Cain’s nomination faced opposition from four Republican U.S. senators, which was likely enough to deny Cain the support he needed to secure Senate confirmation for the post.

One of the senators, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said he didn’t think Cain would be able to be confirmed by the Senate.

Cain served as chairman of the Kansas City Fed’s board in the mid-1990s in a role that also provides the regional bank with input on the local economy. He has also been a public advocate of many of Trump’s policies.