Michael “Harry-O” Harris, co-founder of the popular Death Row Records, endorsed the former president, who granted him clemency on a 33-year sentence, because he said the Republican nominee has a track record of taking action on not making empty promises, Fox News reported.

“It’s about his track record,” he said to Fox News. “The former president, while president, enacted some initiatives that speaks to my community specifically and other people as well.”

The record company founder also spoke about the former president’s actions, such as creating permanent funding for HBCUs, the First Step Act, legislation to combat sickle cell anemia, and opportunity zones promoting investment in low-income neighborhoods.

“People have more confidence that he will keep his word, and I think it’s kind of based on some of the same research that we did, that when somebody doesn’t campaign on something but actually enacted laws . . . that wants to double down on what he did in the first administration,” the music mogul said.

“I haven’t heard that from the other side as much. I mean, what I’ve heard, I believe, frankly, came a little bit too late, too little, too late. And so, when it comes to a balancing act, and you have to make a decision, the critical decision that could affect your life and the life of your family, you have to go based on facts, and the facts are that for the last three and a half years, the previous, the present administration hasn’t really focused on our community,” Harris added.

He said that “there’s nothing to refer to of substance” that was done by the current administration to “help elevate our community.”

“But even with that said, I still put the challenge out to both candidates and President Trump tapped in and that support meant a lot to our organization but more importantly to our community that somebody is committing to working with us to deal with real issues in the community,” he said.

Fox News questioned the music mogul as to why he believes the vice president has struggled to gain the support of black voters the way previous Democrats have.

“I think that, people at large, I just want to be honest here. Don’t understand the intelligence of the black community,” Harris responded. “I think that they put them in a box and just think that everybody suffers from the herd mentality, that just because certain parts of our community say we should do this, then everybody should do it.”

“I’m not saying that some people don’t fall into that bracket, but a lot of people go back to reality. They have to go back to reality, because they are living in reality that their groceries is triple or double the gas is double or triple that just to be able to rent or pay their mortgage is double. Things have changed for them in a dramatic way in the last four years,” he said.

“So when somebody starts saying ‘vote for me just because,’ it is insulting, and I think that that’s what the fallback is, somebody is going to vote for you for a double-up of what they just had. I think people are too intelligent for that,” he said.

He also praised the former president for changing his life by pardoning him on the sentence he was serving on drug trafficking charges.

Advertisement
“I’d been gone for 33 years and President Trump decided to make a difference, and what some people don’t know, I had put in a request for clemency twice under President Obama’s administration and never heard anything back and the fact that President Trump on his way out was able to provide that relief to me and others, I can’t even put words around it,” he said. “It changed everything for me. It changed everything for my family. It gave me an opportunity to re-engage in society and try to do my part. To make it a better place.“

He also mentioned a conversation he had with the former president an hour after he left prison.

“We just sat and talked about issues and about family, and I remember me asking him, you know, because I’m so grateful, you know? ‘What can I do for you?’ He said you don’t owe me nothing, the only thing you owe me to be honest with you is to be successful,” Harris said. “I read your file. I saw what you had done while you was away, and it was commendable, and I just didn’t think that you should do another day in prison.”