The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)

Another View Here’s what African-Americans have to lose if Trump is elected

- By Jennifer Rubin

Donald Trump went to a lily-white Dimondale, Michigan on Friday to lecture African-Americans on why they should be voting for him:

“To those hurting, I say: What do you have to lose by trying something new? I say it again, what do you have to lose? Look, what do you have to lose? You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs. 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose? ...

“By contrast, the one thing every item in Hillary Clinton’s agenda has in common is that it takes jobs and opportunit­ies from African-American workers. Her support for open borders. Her fierce opposition to school choice. Her plan to massively raise taxes on small businesses. Her opposition to American energy. And her record of giving our jobs away to other countries.”

Clinton, of course, is not for open borders nor for “giving our jobs away.”

He continued with his antiimmigr­ant spiel: “Hillary Clinton would rather provide a job to a refugee from overseas than to give that job to unemployed African-American youth in cities like Detroit who have become refugees in their own country.”

Where to begin? The 58 percent figure has been debunked previously. In July, the unemployme­nt rate for all AfricanAme­ricans was 8.4 percent. So, contrary to Trump’s cockeyed view, more than 91 percent of African-Americans looking for work do have jobs. Moreover, not all African-Americans live in poverty or go to schools that “are no good.” This does not mean all liberal policies have worked or that policy innovation­s are not needed, but the real world bears only a slight resemblanc­e to Trump’s dystopia. In making exaggerate­d and downright false accusation­s, Trump distracts from solid conservati­ve arguments against liberal policies that do adversely impact AfricanAme­ricans.

The Clinton campaign put out a statement castigatin­g Trump’s remarks: “Trump painting the entire community as living in poverty with no jobs continues to show he is completely out of touch with the African-American community.”

Trump doesn’t say, for example, if he’d be willing to spend more on worker training, education and other targeted programs that might address youth unemployme­nt; he does, however, favor a tax plan that hugely benefits the rich. Until Friday, he hadn’t talked much about his plans to fight poverty and discrimina­tion and we still don’t know what he would do, for example, to increase the success rate of African-Americans in college or increase access to capital for African-American entreprene­urs. In the past, he’s said he wants to eliminate the Education Department. Does that mean dispensing with Title I support for schools serving impoverish­ed students?

Let’s, however, return to the question he posed: What do African-Americans have to lose by electing Trump? Let’s count the ways.

Trump has championed a strict law-and-order agenda that rejects the suggestion there are legitimate complaints in the African-American community about policing. He is a lightning rod for racial animus and tension, falsely accusing cities with large African-American population­s to be crime havens. With Trump, we’d lack a president who had any conception that there is a problem with policing in minority communitie­s or any desire to bring communitie­s and police together.

This is someone who declines to speak at African American gatherings (e.g., the NAACP). He’s someone who just brought on to lead his campaign the former head of a website pandering to the altright -- that means white supremacy. Only after prodding and a growing controvers­y did he figure out that he should denounce David Duke and the KKK. And, of course, this was a man heavily invested in birtherism, asserting the president was born in Africa, not in the United States. It’s ironic that in the very speech asking what minorities have to lose, he pits African-Americans against immigrants. And let’s not forget his shout-out at a California rally: “Look at my African-American.”

There is a reason Trump is getting in some polls 1 percent of the African-American vote.

In addition, he may not realize it, but his Muslim ban, support for racial profiling and lies about Muslim-Americans’ complicity in terrorism have a particular resonance with African-Americans. A 2011 Pew study found: “Among the roughly one-in-five Muslim-Americans whose parents also were born in the U.S., 59% are African-Americans, including a sizable majority who have converted to Islam (69%). Overall, 13% of U.S. Muslims are African-Americans whose parents were born in the United States.” So when Trump demonizes all Muslims, he’s demonizing many African-Americans.

Aside from his repugnant rhetoric, Trump’s “solutions” for the country will make life harder for the poorest Americans, of which African-Americans are a disproport­ionate share. In May, CNN reported:

“The tariffs would cost the average household $2,200 a year, or 4% of their after-tax income, according to a new study from the non-profit National Foundation for American Policy conducted by David Tuerck, Paul Bachman and Frank Conte, all of Suffolk University. This is largely because imports under Trump’s policy would become more expensive, raising the price of competing American-made goods by 11%. That would effectivel­y levy a consumptio­n tax on purchases and cut into the incomes of shoppers.

“‘All of the benefits for producers would be extracted from consumers,’ said Tuerck, who heads the economics department at Suffolk. ‘It’s using a blunt sword to do brain surgery. It would cost consumers an awful lot for rather small benefits for U.S. producers.’”

Moreover, all voters, African-Americans included, stand to lose with a president who fawns over dictators, demonstrat­es abject ignorance about our nuclear arsenal and undermines NATO. All Americans lose when the president declares he is going to order the military to commit war crimes or clamp down on a free press. And all Americans lose when the president plans to add billions to the debt.

As a final note, at first glance it might seem odd for Trump to go to a nearly allwhite community to declare how much he cares for African-Americans. Well, it is doubtful that he or his advisers think they are going to do much better with African-Americans than they are now. But, plainly, his divisivene­ss and associatio­n with racial bigots bother a lot of white voters. They view him as intolerant and hostile to nonwhite Americans. Many are embarrasse­d to support him for precisely this reason. This is Trump’s way of telling white voters, Look! I’m not so bad! I love African-Americans!

In other words, in a campaign built around playing into the fears and resentment­s of whites, Trump is now trying to assure more sensitive voters that, hey, he’s not a racist after all. African-Americans are props for him as he seeks to repair his rotten standing in the polls. It’s far from clear many Americans are going to fall for this. If you find an error in The Register Citizen, send an email to or call so we can correct our mistake. We are committed to correcting all errors or making clarificat­ions that come to our attention, and encourage readers, story sources and the community at-large to point them out to us. Send an email to factcheck@registerci­tizen.com and let us know if there is more to add or something to correct in one of our stories. Also see our fact check blog http://registerci­tizenfactc­heck. blogspot.com for some of our clarificat­ions, correction­s and additions to stories. You can report errors anonymousl­y, or provide an email and/or other contact informatio­n so that we can confirm receipt and/or action on the matter, and ask you to clarify if necessary. We can’t guarantee a mistake-free newspaper and website, but we can pledge to be transparen­t about how we deal with and correct mistakes. Letters to the Editor: Email editor@registerci­tizen.com or mail to Letters to the Editor, The Register Citizen, 59 Field St., Torrington, CT 06790; ATT: Letter to the Editor. Rules for getting published: Please include your address and a daytime phone number for verificati­on purposes only. Please limit your letters to 300 words per Letter to the Editor and one letter every fifteen days. We reserve the right to edit for length, grammar, spelling and objectiona­ble content. Talk with us online: Find us at Facebook.com/registerci­tizen and twitter.com/registerci­tizen. For the latest local coverage, including breaking news, slideshows, videos, polls and more, visit www.registerci­tizen.com. Check out our blogs at www. registerci­tizen.com/blogs/opinion.

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