Book: Trump assumed Daniel Cameron was ‘obviously’ aware of case to free rapper
.jpeg "Kentucky Republican attorney general candidate Daniel Cameron meets with President Donald Trump in the White House prior to receiving Trump’s endorsement.")
A new book chronicling Donald Trump’s political rise and presidency documents what it portrays as a racially-tinged interaction with Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron.
When Trump was introduced to Cameron, who was then running to be the commonwealth’s first Black attorney general, one of the president’s first questions concerned a rapper whose release from a Swedish jail the White House had just helped secure.
“Daniel, you’ve obviously heard about what we’ve been doing with A$AP Rocky,” Trump told Cameron, according to “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and The Breaking of America,” by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.
Cameron’s response isn’t reported by Haberman and a spokesperson for Cameron did not respond to an inquiry.
But the passage is included in a section that outlines Trump’s often rocky dealings with race, including his harsh critiques of Black Lives Matter and the protests that emanated from the killing of George Floyd.
Rocky, a Black U.S. rapper, had been taken into custody in 2019 for an alleged assault. Trump tried unsuccessfully to pressure the Swedish prime minister to free Rocky. Rocky later revealed in a documentary that he thought Trump’s intervention would jeopardize his ultimate release, but he was ultimately freed in August 2019.
Just before the reporting on Cameron, Haberman notes Trump’s opinion on his lone Black cabinet member, Ben Carson, who was charged to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Carson was dogged by controversy surrounding costly furniture he had ordered for his government office.
“I can’t fire him,” the book quotes Trump telling one conservative at the time. “You know why.”
Cameron, a star speaker at Trump’s 2020 Republican National Convention, is now running in a crowded Republican primary field for governor. In June, Trump announced that he was endorsing Cameron in the governor’s race, describing the attorney general as a “young star.”
