While Symonette was photographed wearing a Trump campaign VIP pass outside one event, he has denied that Trump’s aides place him in prominent positions so that he can appear on camera behind the president. Not acceptable, it’s not going to happen.” They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it. When the president launched his reelection campaign in Orlando in 2019, Symonette was again on camera, gesturing in agreement when Trump said, “Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage. Before the 2018 midterms, he stood behind Trump at a rally in Cleveland and mimed vomiting when Trump mentioned Waters, the California representative. In August 2017, Symonette was seen nodding in agreement with Trump at a rally in Phoenix when the president defended his comment that there “were very fine people, on both sides” at the extremist Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, that month. Since then, Symonette has attended rally after rally, seemingly always standing in prime position to get on camera. Two weeks later, Symonette was invited to Trump’s election night victory party at the New York Hilton. “The Democrats, they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the Black man.”ĭespite numerous press reports on his past ties to the cult and his current delusional beliefs, Symonette has been a constant fixture at Trump campaign events since the final days of the 2016 campaign, when the then-candidate praised his “Blacks for Trump” sign at a rally in Sanford, Florida. “Remember Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and all of them were all Republicans,” Symonette sang. Others displayed signs with references to Bible passages and messages including, “Obama for Gay Marriage, Against God,” “Obama for Abortion (Murder),” and “Obama Endorsed by KKK.”Īhead of the 2012 Republican presidential primary in Florida, Symonette appeared under the stage name Michael Warns as the lead singer in a band opening a campaign rally for former Republican Sen. Symonette was photographed holding up a handmade sign that read “Blacks Against Obama,” above the web address. Before turning over this cure, he added, “we must remove the Conquered Pharaoh Magician’s FAUCI.”įor years before Trump emerged as a candidate, Symonette had been trying with less success to use campaign rallies as a vehicle to spread his strange hybrid of politics, religion, and delusion.ĭuring the 2008 presidential campaign, Symonette and about a dozen followers disrupted a speech by then-Sen. Trump the Conquerer of Pharaoh the gift from YAHWEH BEN YAHWEH which is the true cure for Corona,” Symonette wrote. “I Michael can teach & give the World & Pres. In July, for instance, he declared on Facebook that he had received a divinely inspired cure for Covid-19 from the late cult leader. His online sermons and writings suggest that he still sees himself as a follower of the cult leader, who died in 2007. After the trial, he changed his last name to Symonette, which was his father’s surname, before eventually reinventing himself as Michael the Black Man, a pirate radio preacher who delivered broadsides against gays and Democrats.
Woodside was among the Miami-based Nation of Yahweh cult members charged in two of the murders, but he was acquitted. Symonette was known as Maurice Woodside until 1992, when the black supremacist cult leader he followed, Yahweh ben Yahweh, was jailed for leading a conspiracy to murder 14 white people in initiation rites.