Why Andrew Gillum deserved his humiliation

A surefire way to remove oneself from the short list even of Democratic vice-presidential candidates is to get caught by the police vomiting in the bathroom while your naked gay male escort is overdosing on crystal meth, surplus bags of which are strewn everywhere.

This past Saturday morning, Florida politico Andrew Gillum had a lot of splainin' to do. Talking to the wife and kids would be hard enough. The real challenge for the famously black Gillum was explaining to his racially charged base why his "date" was white.

In 2018, the former Tallahassee mayor came within 32,000 votes of becoming the governor of Florida. Race was his ticket from the beginning of his career to the very end.

"I've always been black, I was born black and as far as I know I will die black," said Gillum during the 2018 campaign, throughout which he insinuated Republican Ron DeSantis was a racist.

"I'm not saying Ron DeSantis is a racist, I'm just saying the racists think he's a racist," said the much too clever Gillum during a televised debate.

As filmmaker Joel Gilbert documents in his film and accompanying book, "The Trayvon Hoax," Gillum built his career by ruthlessly and dishonestly exploiting the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.

To make the gambit work, Gillum had to defame George Zimmerman, the man who shot Martin, and lie about the circumstances surrounding the shooting. Gillum was always up to the task.

Said Gillum during a Democratic debate in 2018, "George Zimmerman was able to interpret the very presence of Trayvon Martin to be a threat. And because of Stand Your Ground laws, which have no place in civilized society, was able to engage him, snuff out his life and get away with it."

As Gillum knew well, Florida's Stand Your Ground law had nothing to do with Zimmerman whose case was a classic example of self-defense. In 2013, after Zimmerman's acquittal, even Barack Obama acknowledged, "The stand your ground laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case."

For Gillum, however, the lie worked better than the truth. A Tallahassee city commissioner at the time of the acquittal, Gillum staged a town hall meeting to deal with the "unease" around the verdict.

A day after Gillum's announcement, student activists known as "Dream Defenders" began a sit-in at the Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee. The group had formed to protest Martin's shooting long before any facts were known. They had an agenda.

The Dream Defenders were not your run-of-the-mill student crazies. A publication by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) told of how the Jerusalem-born, co-founder Ahmad Abuznaid was "empowering the next generation of Palestinian-American youth organizers to mobilize alongside other communities of color."

The IMEU article approvingly spoke of the Dream Defenders as a "non-profit organization that provides trainings for youth (primarily ages 13-35) around Palestine, campaign strategy, power mapping, mass incarceration, the school to prison pipeline, and more."

During a primary debate, Gillum gave a shout-out to the Dream Defenders. "When you all slept in for 30 days on the cold, hard marble floors of the state Capitol, I was pleased and proud to sneak food into you every night so you could eat," he said proudly.

Gillum praised the group for "standing in the gap on behalf of marginalized communities, shaking up the political process, having politicians across this state run scared because they are afraid of your power."

During the campaign, Gillum even signed the Dream Defenders so-called "Freedom Pledge." By their lights, Florida was "a for-profit police state."

"We can live in a state where parents and teachers are given everything they need to support the raising of our children," reads the manifesto. "We don't have to let another parent lose their child to a bullet, a badge or a dollar sign."

The "child" they referred to, of course, was Trayvon Martin. To keep the Dream Defenders stoked, and other African Americans alarmed, Gillum had to lie relentlessly about the facts of the Zimmerman case.

Gillum could never admit that the wayward Martin gratuitously and viciously attacked a man half-a-foot shorter and might have killed him had not Zimmerman fired a single shot.

Gillum could never tell his supporters how Trayvon Martin's parents split when he was 3, how the boy's father abandoned Trayvon's loving stepmom when Trayvon was 15, how the biological mom kicked Trayvon out of her home for fighting months before the shooting, how Trayvon's life devolved into a maelstrom of street fighting, burglary, guns, sex and drugs.

No, Gillum could not say any of this. He lied so often and so effectively about the case a City Lab article after his primary win began, "Last night Andrew Gillum became the first African American candidate to win the Democratic Party nomination for Florida governor, and it's not out of the question to say that he can thank Trayvon Martin for that."

Unfortunately for Gillum, Florida's racist "for-profit police state" chose not to arrest him on a drug charge. He doesn't even get to be a martyr.