An Atlanta Black barbershop owner said on Friday that he lost business after he was misled into hosting a campaign event for former President Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, a day before Trump debated President Joe Biden on the CNN stage in Atlanta, the former president’s surrogates held an event, the Black American Business Leader Barbershop Roundtable, at Rocky’s Barbershop that included a surprise phone call from Trump himself.
According to local news outlet 11 Alive, the number of customers flowing into Rocky’s Barbershop has dwindled since the campaign event.
The shop’s owner, Rocky Jones, told the outlet in an article published Friday, “We had some calls Thursday. We definitely got some calls, some backlash, some angry people that don’t know me and I have to deal with that.”
Jones said that he has “no involvement in politics” and added that he was under the assumption that the event was meant to be a forum for small Black-owned businesses.
“I thought it was going to be something real private,” he said. “I’m thinking about Black businesses in Atlanta, small Black businesses in Atlanta. And I’m like, ‘Ok, so when are we gonna start talking about this?'”
When Trump phoned into the event, Jones was shocked. “I’m like, why is the ex-president calling somebody in my barbershop? This has nothing to do with small Black businesses,” he said.
Meanwhile, Jones told another local news outlet, Atlanta News First, that he feels like he’s “been betrayed” by how the event turned out. He also claimed that no one mentioned it would be a political event when coordinating it and that he never spoke to a Trump campaign representative.
A Trump campaign source, however, told Newsweek via email on Saturday night: “The business owner signed an agreement with the Trump campaign and received payment for the time spent in his location for this event.”
Newsweek reviewed a copy of the agreement, which was signed by shop “owner” Javier Jones and Bradley Crate from the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign agreed to pay $4,800 to rent Rocky’s Barbershop for two-and-a-half hours on Wednesday afternoon “for the purpose of DJTFP24 [Donald J. Trump for President 2024] holding a political event,” according to the document.
Jones told Atlanta News First that he was paid to close his shop for the event, but said he will now pay the money back.
Newsweek has reached out to Jones via telephone on Sunday for comment.
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Trump has been working on getting the Black and Hispanic vote in his 2024 campaign.
A New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,226 register voters conducted between June 20 and June 25, revealed 30 percent of the Black people surveyed would vote for Trump and 59 percent for Biden. The poll has a margin error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
This poll indicates an improvement for Trump among Black voters. In an earlier Washington Post/Ipsos poll of 1,331 non-Hispanic Black adults conducted between April 9 and April 16, found that 66 percent said they would either probably or definitely vote for Biden, while only 14 percent said they would support Trump in a hypothetical race including third party candidates. The margin of error of the poll was plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
According to CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten, Biden’s support among young Black voters has dropped significantly.
During a broadcast earlier this month, Enten showed polling data that found Biden’s lead among Black voters under the age of 50 has declined over the past four years from 80 points in 2020 to 37 points in 2024.
Meanwhile, Trump recently drew backlash after saying that migrants, many of whom have been illegally coming through the U.S.-Mexico border in high numbers, were taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” from Americans during Thursday night’s debate.
“The fact is that his [Biden] big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border. They’re taking Black jobs now,” Trump said. “They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs. And you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”
There is no evidence to suggest hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants are taking jobs that would otherwise go to American citizens.
Former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Michael Steele rebuked Trump’s remarks on Saturday during MSNBC‘s The Weekend, which he co-hosts: “So what precisely, what jobs would those Black and Hispanic jobs be, I wonder?”
He also criticized Trump’s call into Jones’ barbershop on Wednesday, saying, “You want to make a play to Black folks, you can’t even show up at a [Black] barbershop…You call into a barbershop, and you’re going to talk to us about Black jobs? Shut the hell up. Why do we even entertain this crazy from this fool?”
Meanwhile, Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), said of Trump’s “Black jobs” remarks: “There is no such thing as a Black job. That misinformed characterization is a denial of the ubiquity of Black talent. We are doctors, lawyers, school teachers, police officers and firefighters. The list goes on,” according to the Associated Press.
He continued: “A ‘Black job’ is an American job. It’s concerning that a presidential candidate would seek to make a nonexistent distinction. But the divisive nature of this comment is not surprising for Donald Trump.”
Trump’s allies, like the Black Conservative Federation President Diante Johnson, defended the former president’s message: “He meant the jobs of Black people. And we’ve been using that term for a while. It’s any job. Instead of Black people having unlimited accessibility to all types of jobs, illegal immigrants are taking their jobs from them,” the AP reported.
Update 6/30/24, 10:41 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from the Trump campaign.
