Trump’s con-man hustle for Black vote
Donald Trump’s con-man hustle for the African American vote is cringeworthy, cynical, infuriating, insulting, racist, super-racist — take your pick. Just don’t call it sincere. And don’t expect it to work.
Last week, speaking to an audience mostly of Black conservatives in Columbia, S.C., Trump likened his indictment on 91 felony charges to historic discrimination against African Americans. “A lot of people said that’s why the Black people liked me, because they had been hurt so badly and discriminated against. And they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against,” Trump said.
He added that “the Black people” are “on my side now because they see what’s happening to me happens to them.” Presenting himself as some sort of martyr for civil rights, he claimed that “I am being indicted for you, the Black population.”
And there’s more: Trump claimed that African Americans are especially drawn to him by the mug shot that was taken when he surrendered to custody on felony charges in Fulton County, Ga. “The mug shot, we’ve all seen the mug shot, and you know who embraced it more than anybody else? The Black population. It’s incredible. You see Black people walking around with my mug shot, you know, they do shirts,” Trump said.
In honor of Black History Month, let’s review a bit of Trump’s history with Black people. In 1973, his real estate company was sued by the Justice Department for discrimination against African American renters; the company entered a consent decree promising to end the practice. In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York newspapers urging the state to “bring back the death penalty” in reference to the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino men wrongly convicted of a brutal rape; even after the men were exonerated, Trump refused to apologize.
During Trump’s first year in
the White House — after a rally by white supremacists and neonazis in Charlottesville led to the death of a counterprotester — Trump said there were “some very fine people on both sides.”
Trump won 12 percent of the Black vote in 2020. That was more than GOP presidential candidates usually get — but still, just 12 percent. Republicans have been salivating over recent polls showing more African American support for Trump this time around, along with relatively tepid approval of President Joe Biden.
In election after election, the African American vote has been fool’s gold for the Republican Party. The problem is not that there are no Black conservatives; in fact, there are many. It is that the GOP, broadly, has faced African Americans with cluelessness or outright hostility. When Republican officials such as Florida Gov. Ron Desantis try to censor African American history so that no one feels uncomfortable, or when GOP candidate Nikki Haley insists that “America has never been a racist country,” the party’s credibility among Black voters tends to evaporate.