Lynnette Hardaway, of pro-Trump social media duo Diamond and Silk, dies at 51 (2024)

The two sisters — Ms. Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson — gained prominence during Trump’s first presidential campaign as rare examples of Black women vocally supporting the candidate’s policies and encouraging Democrats to flee the “Bowl of Stupid” of the Democratic Party. According to polls, Trump’s standing among Black women was negligible for much of his tenure.

At Trump campaign rallies, Diamond and Silk parroted the Republican nominee’s slogans to “build the wall” on the border with Mexico to keep out people they described as terrorists.

“He’s gonna build that wall!” Ms. Hardaway yelled at a Trump rally in 2015 in Raleigh, in the sisters’ home state of North Carolina.

“He’s gonna build it!” Richardson echoed.

“He’s gonna build it tall!” Ms. Hardaway said. “He’s gonna protect us all!”

“He’s gonna build it tall!” Richardson repeated. “He’s gonna protect us all!”

“They have a cadence and rhythm that is entertaining to the broader audience of Donald Trump,” Leah Wright-Ri­geuer, author of the book “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” told The Washington Post in 2018. “But they largely don’t appeal to Black audiences.”

The sisters said they had never been paid by the Trump campaign, but they received nearly $1,275 for what the campaign told the Federal Election Commission was “field consulting.” Diamond and Silk said the money was travel reimbursem*nt. They also hawked Trump merchandise on their website and sold tickets to their speaking tours.

At other events, the sisters labeled the Democratic Party “a plantation,” called 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “a slave master” and defended Trump against accusations of racism. “Trump is not a racist, he is a realist,” Ms. Hardaway told “Fox & Friends.”

They became a GOP cause celebre in 2018 after Facebook, in what the social media network later said was a message sent in error, began to block their videos and notified them in a letter that their messaging was “unsafe to the community.”

“We don’t belong to no gang, so how are we unsafe to the community?” Ms. Hardaway said on a “Fox & Friends” segment that April. “It bothers me. It’s offensive. It’s appalling. … Why are you censoring two women of color? … They’re trying to become a dictator.”

That same month, House Republicans invited the duo to testify before the House Judiciary Committee after they accused Facebook of discrimination for their support of Trump. Their testimonies highlighted Republican concerns of an anti-GOP bias on social media platforms. Yet, if anything, their social media numbers climbed.

Personal information about the sisters was scant. They rarely consented to interviews and, when pressed on basic biographical details, tended to reply, “None of your business!” Ms. Hardaway, whose name was sometimes rendered Lynette, was reportedly born on Thanksgiving Day in 1971, and grew up in Detroit before the family moved to North Carolina.

Their parents, according to The Post, became pastors who made religious videos and sold weight-loss remedies.

The sisters, who said they were once Democrats, switched to making videos in support of Trump when he first ran for president, in what they described as the “Ditch and Switch Now” movement.

On their website, they described themselves as conservative women who were not “politically correct” in speaking their mind, especially on perceived liberal media bias. They attended Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and soon found a spot on Fox Nation, a subscription-based video site of the Fox network.

But the network cut ties with the pair in 2020 for pushing conspiracy theories and disinformation on the coronavirus pandemic. Diamond and Silk also began to broadcast on Newsmax, a conservative digital media outlet. They wrote a book, “Uprising: Who the Hell Said You Can’t Ditch and Switch?” (2020).