No, Trump, ‘the Black people’ aren’t on your side
Just in case Donald Trump hasn’t been clear during the past 50 years of his life, this is what he thinks about Black people: During a speech Saturday at the Black Conservative Federation Honors Gala in Columbia, S.C., the former president claimed that his myriad legal problems have made him more appealing to Black voters. “A lot of people said that that’s why the Black people like me because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against.
And they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against. It’s been pretty amazing.”
It’s not amazing because “a lot of people” who aren’t on Fox News have never said such a thing.
“I think that’s why the Black people are so much on my side now because they see what’s happening to me happens to them,” Trump said. “Does that make sense?” No. It doesn’t. It’s a safe guess that a majority of “the Black people” do not equate the legal wages of Trump’s self-inflicted sins — 91 federal felony counts from four indictments in four jurisdictions — with the more than 400 brutal years of legalized, systemic, and institutional discrimination that Black people in America have always faced. Trump’s comments are offensive and nonsensical coming from a man who, along with his father, Fred, was sued by the Justice Department in 1973 for discrimination for refusing to rent apartments to Black people in Trump Management-owned properties.
Not to mention that it was Trump who took out full-page ads in several newspapers demanding the restoration of New York’s death penalty after five Black and brown teenagers were wrongly accused of beating and raping a white woman who was jogging in Central Park in 1989.
But aided by his 24-7 communications team known as Fox News, what Trump said to that mostly Black audience was also racist. He implied that Black people find kinship in his alleged criminality. Or as Raymond Arroyo, a Fox News pundit whose love language is racist and antisemitic tropes, recently claimed, Trump now has “cred among a new block of voters” who see him as “a rebel, an outsider with swagger.”
With President Biden’s support among Black voters allegedly softening, Arroyo thinks Black America will be swayed by Trump’s “gangsta” mugshot and his new tacky “Never Surrender” brand of sneakers because, as he exclaimed, “They love sneakers!”
Asked whether footwear would be enough to sway Black voters from Biden to Trump, Arroyo said, “Anybody willing to put 400 bucks down for a pair of sneakers? Yeah, I think that’s commitment and love.”
Resorting to magical thinking and base stereotypes of Black people is how Trump and Republicans think he will win their allegiance. But what plays in a friendly roomful of conservatives who are Black will not sell among most Black people who recognize that Trump’s only “cred” lies in his devotion to sustaining white supremacy at any cost.
They see the man who as president denigrated predominately Black and brown nations as “sh*thole countries” and incited a white supremacist insurrection — complete with Confederate flags — at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, because he could not accept that he had lost the 2020 presidential election.
It’s hardly uncommon for politicians to code switch and tailor their message or even their persona for a particular audience. When then-President Barack Obama crooned the opening lines of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” during a 2012 fundraiser at New York’s famed Apollo Theatre in Harlem, he knew it would be appreciated by an audience of mostly Black luminaries and supporters.
But Trump doesn’t code switch — there’s no code to switch. When he thinks he’s appealing to people who aren’t like him, he defaults to racist condescension. Trump can’t speak to the issues that concern many Black people, like the vilification of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on college campuses and in corporate America or Republican-led attacks on reproductive rights, because he doesn’t care about those things except in how his opposition to them deepens the support of his white followers. Even more pointedly, his own fingerprints are all over these problems.
Trump and his cronies regard Black people as easily swayed by, in this case, shiny gold sneakers. He attempts to connect to Black people by way of his shallow impressions of them. Or, perhaps, he’s taking his cues from Black conservatives like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Representative Byron Donalds of Florida who will tell the presumptive Republican presidential nominee whatever he wants to hear as they vie to be his running mate.
But Trump is deluding himself if he thinks Black people see his legal problems as proof that, like them, he’s “being discriminated against.” Let’s be clear —Trump is not nor has he ever been a victim of discrimination. But even a hint of overdue accountability feels like an egregious injustice to a man accustomed to being insulated from the rule of law by his wealth and whiteness.