The Michigan Republican Party is continuing to leverage its new relationship with former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was convicted of crimes related to his time in office and later granted clemency by former President Donald Trump, with a new radio advertisement that will hit the city’s airwaves over the next few weeks.
The ad was announced Tuesday by the party in a news release.
Kilpatrick, who served in the Michigan House as a Democrat and was mayor of Detroit from 2002-08, was convicted on 24 counts for the rigging of bids, extortion and unpaid taxes in 2013. In January 2021, Trump granted Kilpatrick clemency after he had served one-quarter of the 28-years to which he was sentenced.
He became a supporter of Trump following release from prison. Kilpatrick has also since become a pastor and has reemerged in politics but on the other side of the aisle in 2024.
The former mayor most recently spoke at the Oakland County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner in August (See Gongwer Michigan Report, August 13, 2024).
The advertisement released Tuesday, which will play in the Detroit metro area over the next few weeks, features Kilpatrick’s coming to grips with his own politics to see value in what Republicans and Trump have to offer voters within the next four years.
“I had to challenge everything that I used to espouse,” Kilpatric says in the radio hit. “I had to challenge my stance on abortion. I had to challenge my stance on all of the different morality issues that are in the world today. I had to challenge my stance on identity politics. I stopped thinking of people in terms of what party they’re in, or what city they’re from, or what race they are.”
Kilpatrick says he then began to “understand that God wants me to do in the government what He desires,” and the former mayor equated that supporting Trump in 2024.
“For us, this election is about the survival of our nation,” Kilpatrick says. “It’s about the survival of our children. It’s about the survival of our economy. And when people are set against us in war, it matters that you send the firefighter into the room. I want Trump in the room.”
Much of the radio ad was pulled from audio recorded at the Oakland Lincoln Day dinner, which also featured Trump surrogate and former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson.
– By Ben Solis
