John James had a full week to clean up the worst moment of the Michigan governor’s race. Instead, he’s doubling down.
It started on the debate stage. Pressed by Perry Johnson on the $107,000 that flowed to his campaign from interests tied to the AI data center buildout, James had no answer on the money. So he reached for the race card: “Perry, I know when you were born, Black people could still be bought and sold in this country, but no one owns me.”
Watch the exchange again. Nobody was talking about race. The question was about donors and what they expect in return. And the race card is the only answer James has managed to produce. When he was later asked point blank whether he denies the $107,000 figure, the best he could do was “Um, I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten, um.” Johnson, who has largely self-funded his campaign, demanded James “apologize and retract the most pathetic, unfortunate, and desperate candidate mistake Michigan has ever witnessed on a debate stage.”
Given the chance to walk it back during a stop in Holland on Friday, James offered two words: “Perry’s desperate.” Still no apology, and still no answer on the donors.
And now the criticism is coming from inside President Trump’s own coalition. Kwame Kilpatrick, the former Democratic Detroit mayor who crossed over to endorse Trump and spent 2024 campaigning for him across Michigan, went on camera reacting to James’s campaign-trail video invoking his family’s Jim Crow history and his father watching “his uncles be lynched.” Kilpatrick didn’t hold back. “You better be right about this,” he warned. “This is not something that you should offer and proffer in an interview to gain votes.” That history, he said, is too important to America and to Black people to be trivialized in a political campaign. He compared the move to stolen valor, invoked “race-baiting,” and closed with this: “It’s so important and it’s so rich to this country’s history that you don’t trivialize it for votes.”
A Republican congressman running for governor is now getting lectured on race-baiting by a man who stumped for Trump in Detroit. When you’ve lost Trump’s own Michigan surrogates on the race card, you’ve lost the argument entirely.
James would “be better off talking about himself and how he grew up and how he engages people and what he wants to do as governor,” Kilpatrick added. Except every time James talks about his record, whether it’s the data center money, the kill-switch vote, or the donors, the questions get harder. So the race card keeps coming out. Michigan voters saw it on the debate stage, they saw it in Holland, and they’re seeing it now on the trail. At this point it isn’t a campaign message. It’s a meltdown.
