Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is being advised by a political consultant who has worked to promote the fraud-ridden Obamaphone welfare program and suggested entitlement program opponents hate the poor.
Trump adviser Barry Bennett was hired by telephone companies who profit on Obamaphones to set up a front group to disguise the giveaway as something Republicans could be fooled into supporting. Bennett’s company created an advertising campaign that tried to paint Obamaphones as a program to help veterans.
In truth, the Obamaphones program has nothing to do with veterans, but Bennett deluged the Washington, D.C. airwaves with commercials rolling wartime footage as an elderly hero indicated he would die of cancer unless Congress let him have a free phone.
The ads were intended to convince Republicans to look the other way despite massive growth and undeniable fraud in the free-cell-phones program.
“Of course I support these programs, because I don’t hate poor people,” Bennett said of food stamps, welfare and housing projects when asked about the ads by the Washington Examiner in 2014.
“As conservatives, we can’t hate Obama so badly that we hate something just because he put his name next to it. If it were called Obama-food stamps, would conservatives want to do away with them?”
Bennett’s firm is BKM Strategies. The “B” stands for Bennett, while the “M” stands for Mary Cheney, daughter of the decidedly “establishment” former vice president Dick Cheney.
The Washington Post reported last month that Bennett had become a “counselor and resource to Trump’s top aides.” Politico quoted him Tuesday as an adviser opining on Trump’s strategy for clinching the Republican nomination.
Trump is fending off charges that his entire campaign is essentially a public relations effort designed to cast a liberal as a conservative by employing crude caricatures and misrepresentations.
Trump has never voted in a Republican primary and several of his top advisers have liberal pasts.
Trump’s spokesperson, Katrina Pierson, spent years delivering liberal talking points, including saying Republicans are racist, calling Malcolm X her idol, and mocking conservatives as the “so-called moral party.”
Bennett did not return a request for comment.
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