Why Former Obama Fundraiser Now Backs Trump
Virginia Allen /
Allison Huynh was a fundraiser for then-Sen. Barack Obama before he was elected president in 2008, but she now supports former President Donald Trump.
Huynh (pronounced like “win”) and her husband were attracted to Obama’s message of “hope and change” in 2007.
“It was the hope and the image that he projected” that led Huynh to not only support Obama herself in the 2008 election, but encourage others to do likewise.
As an entrepreneur and successful computer scientist in Silicon Valley in California, Huynh hosted fundraising dinners for Obama with tickets costing $50,000 a plate. But after Obama won the election and took office in 2009, Huynh says, disillusionment began to set in.
“I think he is great at messaging,” Huynh says of Obama. “He talks the talk, but he doesn’t walk the walk, right? And so I became quite disillusioned over time.”
Obamacare was one of the key issues that made Huynh reconsider her support for the 44th president.
After a divorce, Huynh found herself cut off from her health insurance plan. She only had a few days to find new health insurance and ultimately had to spend more than $6,000 a month for insurance for herself and one of her children.
She was also troubled to see the nation become “more racially divided” under Obama’s leadership.
A Vietnamese immigrant, Huynh says the disillusionment “started with Barack Obama and this lack of logic in terms of how he led,” but it didn’t end there.
Then when you see, with Kamala Harris and the emergence DEI, that really kind of broke my bond with the liberals and the Democratic Party because that no longer made any sense, perhaps because I have a science background, and I came from a communist country, a Marxist country, so I and my friends who are from Cuba, from Vietnam, from former communist countries, were very opposed to these Marxist ideas.
Huynh calls diversity, equity, and inclusion “Marxist and doublespeak” because “equity is what you get when you work for something.”
Equity is not won because of the “color of your skin” or “identity politics,” Huynh contends. “This doesn’t make sense. It erodes away from what it is to be an American, right?”
Asked why she is now supporting Trump, Huynh says that after meeting Trump, she found him “very open” to considering policies that serve tech entrepreneurs like her.
Huynh joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to share her story of disillusionment with the Democratic Party.
Watch the interview below: