openpolitics.com

How a pair of video bloggers became Trump’s most infectious pitch to black voters.

.. two North Carolina sisters are on a mission to stud that tarnished brand with diamonds and wrap it in silk.

.. Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson

.. Even Pope Francis hasn’t escaped their wrath. “Listen, we respect the pope,” Diamond told POLITICO on Thursday, hours after Trump tangled with God’s representative on Earth. “But here’s the deal: There are too many problems going on in the Catholic Church for the pope to stick his nose in what’s going on over here.”

.. asked whether they receive money from Trump, made it very, very clear they do not want to talk about the mogul’s effect on their personal finances.

Like Trump himself, Diamond (the talkative one) and Silk (the quiet one) are natural entertainers with camera-pleasing instincts that make it difficult to turn away. They also have a knack for shrouding themselves in mystery.

.. Diamond, who sports longer hair, and Silk with a blond streak not far from the hue of Trump’s own coiffure, were born in North Carolina and returned to the state in their teenage years. They declined to say where they lived in between. “That’s none of your business,” Diamond said.

.. Though the pair allows that they have other siblings, they declined to say how many. “We don’t want to disclose that,” Diamond said.

.. Today, the sisters blog and “stump for Trump” full time. Before that, they were engaged in other occupations, which they also declined to disclose. “That’s none of your business,” Diamond said.

.. Their journey on the Trump Train goes back to the beginning—June 2015—when Silk called Diamond during Trump’s televised presidential announcement and told her, “Girl, this is going to be the next president of the United States.”

Soon, the “trickery of the media” compelled the pair to speak out on Trump’s behalf.

.. Their candidate is a “motivator, a job creator and a good negotiator.”

.. “We just thought it was hysterical,” a Trump insider said of the video. “We saw them and we were like, ‘Wow.’ And then Michael Cohen started retweeting them.

.. The campaign started blasting it out to Drudge.

.. In December, Trump called them onstage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina. Since then—in addition to their prodigious output of videos with titles like “Donald Trump is the only one that has the balls to hit a home run for the American People” and “We are not giving Jeb the Keys to the White House. That set of keys is going to Donald Trump” — the pair have traveled to Mississippi, Iowa and now South Carolina to stump for Trump.

.. They see in the businessman qualities that many others miss. “He is very meek,” said Diamond. “He’s humble.”

.. “It’s time for blacks to stop segregating themselves,” said Silk.

.. What about the saga in the 1970s when Trump was the face of a landmark patterns-and-practices lawsuit brought by the Justice Department against his family for housing discrimination?

“Don’t tell me what happened in 1973,” said Diamond. “Was I even born then? I don’t even know.” (“I was,” she clarified. “But I was very, very little.”)

.. For their part, Diamond and Silk, former Democrats themselves, promote ditchandswitchnow.com to get black voters (and Democrats of all races) to switch their voter registrations in states with closed primaries so they are eligible to vote for Trump.