Forbes faced significant backlash on Sunday after publishing—and subsequently deleting—an article titled “Will Surviving Gunfire Be Donald Trump’s Next Appeal To Black Voters?”
The piece, written by Forbes contributor and “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) expert” Shaun Harper, was published just hours after an assassination attempt on former President Trump during a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania.
In the controversial article, Harper speculated that Trump might use his survival of the shooting as a means to connect with Black voters.
He floated the hypothetical statement, “And the Blacks, they love me because they know the terrifying sound of gunshots,” emphasizing that while Trump hadn’t actually made such a claim, it wasn’t entirely unimaginable given his past rhetoric.
Harper referenced Trump’s comments from a South Carolina rally last August, where Trump suggested that Black voters “embraced” his mugshot from Fulton County Jail in Georgia.
“The mug shot, we’ve all seen the mug shot, and you know who embraced it more than anybody else? The Black population. It’s incredible. You see Black people walking around with my mug shot, you know they do shirts,” Trump said at the rally.
Harper also speculated that Trump could liken his post-shooting fist pump to the “Black Power Salute” from the 1968 Olympics or the 2020 George Floyd marches. “Let’s hope not. That would be revisionist history,” Harper wrote, cautioning that such a narrative would not likely endear Trump to Black voters nor address the broader issue of gun violence in America.
After facing criticism, an edited version of the article was posted, removing many of these contentious paragraphs but retaining the notion that Trump might use the shooting as a campaign strategy. “Hopefully, being shot doesn’t become a similarly problematic strategy to link Trump with an experience that far too many (not all) Black people have,” Harper wrote in the revised version.
Ultimately, Forbes decided to delete the entire piece. Fox News Digital reached out to Forbes for comment but has yet to receive a response.
