St. Louis rapper Chingy said he would vote for Donald Trump on Friday only to follow up days later saying that he did not mean to endorse the billionaire businessman.
“Politics vs society. People should innerstand that politics is a business jus like the job you work at. I vote for @realDonaldTrump ‘YEP’ 3” Chingy initially tweeted.
But after a wave of criticism that led to the St. Louis rapper trending nationally on Twitter, he rescinded his endorsement, issuing a public apology video over the weekend.
The “Holidae In” rapper tweeted that his initial tweet has been “taken completely out of context.”
And in the public apology video that followed, titled “I DO NOT endorse Donald Trump,” Chingy said, “I didn’t know about some of the negative things he had to say about some of the races out here and about the hip-hop community.”
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“I didn’t know a lot of the negative things, I was kind of commenting off reading that article and reading some of the good things that he said, so that’s kind of where my comments came from,” he said, adding that he has seen bits and pieces of the presidential race but, “I’m not familiar with exactly how it’s going down.”
Trump, who closely connected to many in the hip-hop community in the 1990s, has been blasted for his handling of “Black Lives Matter” protesters and his comments on Mexicans and Muslims.
Even his close friend, hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, wrote a letter to Trump pleading with him to “stop fueling fires of hate.”