Trump Never Did An Honest Day's Work In His Life
In a post about Jewish-Americans yesterday, I noted something Trump said about Jews… which was also about American Blacks. I think we have to look at that quote again, but from a Black perspective, not a Jewish one per se. In his 1991 book, Trumped, John O'Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, reported that Trump made offensive comments about Black accountants and said he preferred to have Jews counting his money. “I think that the guy is lazy. And it's probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It's not anything they can control... Don't you agree? The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
Trump has a long history of virulent, consistent and public anti-Black racism. And now, incongruously, he’s half-heartedly courting Black voters. Exit polling in 2016 indicate that around 8% of Black voters went for Trump. In 2020 it was around 12%. Trump’s idea of campaigning for African-American votes has been to remind rich rappers and other influencers he will allow them to not pay taxes and pardon them if they get convicted of any crimes. He’s had some success with a small number of Black voters. An increase from 8% to 12% is actually gargantuan— a 50% increase.
Yesterday, Kadia Goba reported that Trump’s campaign is having a hard time to build up any kind of an infrastructure to chase Black votes, “scrambling to build an organization to take advantage of promising signals of support from Black and Latino voters, after hiring a young rising Republican star to manage its outreach to minority voters— then parting ways with him just as the general election began.”
Last October, the Trump campaign hired Derek Silver, once DeSantis’ director of Jewish outreach, as its executive director in charge of coalitions but he was fired last month, raising “questions,” wrote Goba, “about the GOP’s ability to seize the opportunity and chip off a foundational block of the Democratic base. On paper, Trump seems well-equipped to make a run at Black voters. Not only are recent polls promising, with a number showing him cracking 20% support with Black voters, there’s a historic number of Black lawmakers who can serve as surrogates, including Reps. Byron Donalds of Florida and Wesley Hunt of Texas. There’s also a high-profile potential running mate in South Carolina Senator Tim Scott… But there’s also increasing doubt about the party’s ability to capitalize on these opportunities amid concerns about funding, organization, and basic competence. Democrats have decades of experience turning out the vote in their more diverse coalition and the Biden campaign is staffing up early while Trump’s operation moves more slowly.”
The campaign’s struggles to tap into Black communities aren’t going unnoticed, especially among Black Republican Trump supporters who have created their own vehicles to recruit voters who’ve fallen out of favor with Biden.
“We’re going to have roundtable discussion groups, boots on the ground,” Pastor Darrell Scott, a Trump supporter and co-founder of the Garfield Project, a new conservative Black outreach program. “We’re going to do a lot of the things that need to be done, but we’re going to target the Black community with them, whereas the Republican Party has not historically targeted the Black community.”
If there really is a rapid society-wide shift away from Democrats among nonwhite voters, the quality of a campaign can only do so much to stem the tide. Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini makes the argument in a new book, Party of the People, that the same education split that Trump fostered between white voters in 2016 is spreading to Black and Latino voters who feel increasingly alienated by the more left-leaning, college-educated Democratic party.
A memo shared with Semafor by the Trump campaign emphasized Trump’s policy accomplishments, including opportunity zones for struggling neighborhoods and increased funding to historically black colleges and universities, and suggested emphasizing how crime, immigration, and pandemic closures disproportionately impact Black voters. The document included mention of the First Step Act— a criminal justice reform bill Trump signed that he has emphasized less since the 2020 election. It also referenced Biden’s support for COVID vaccine mandates.
But the campaign has not reintroduced a pledge similar to the so-called “Platinum Plan” Trump put out in 2020, which contained a number of specific proposals aimed at Black voters.
“Donald Trump was a fraud as a businessman, he was a fraud as a President and he’s a fraud as a presidential candidate— which explains why his outreach to Black voters continues to be insulting, thoughtless and insincere,” the Biden campaign’s Black Media Director, Jasmine Harris, told Semafor. “Black voters remain some of the most informed and engaged voters every election and come November they will get behind Joe Biden and Kamala Harris who put Black Americans at the forefront of their administrations work: protecting our health care, helping Black unemployment hit a record low and Black businesses starting up at the fastest in thirty years.”
Yes, Black voters remain some of the most informed and engaged voters, and those who are, are aware that Republicans are trying to make it tougher for them to vote at all. In Democratic states like Michigan, voting will be simpler and easier— 9 days of early voting, prepaid return postage of all absentee ballots, and every community will have at least one drop box for absentee ballots. That’s what a Democratic legislature and governor accomplished. The opposite was in North Carolina, where the Republican super-majority is forcing people to show IDs for the first time, tougher absentee ballot return deadlines and, likely, fewer early-voting sites. “[W]hether Americans will have an easier or harder time casting a ballot than they did in 2020,” wrote Patrick Marley, “will depend on where they live and, often, whether Democrats or Republicans have been in charge. ‘It’s really kind of a tale of two democracies,’ said Liz Avore, a senior adviser at the Voting Rights Lab.”
Georgia and North Carolina Republicans are working furiously to prevent working class voters, especially Black working class voters in urban areas, and younger voters from being able to cast ballots. Democrats in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan, three swing states, have made voting easier since 2020 and Arizona hasn’t changed (thanks to the Democratic governor blocking GOP attempts to limit voting). Wisconsin is caught in judicial battles between the GOP legislature trying to limit Black voting and the Democratic governor, who wants to encourage it.
Historically, fear has often been used as a tool to justify and perpetuate racism, particularly during periods of social change or upheaval. For example, during Reconstruction, fears of economic competition and social upheaval fueled the rise of white supremacist ideologies and the enactment of Jim Crow laws aimed at disenfranchising African Americans and maintaining white supremacy. Similarly, during the Civil Rights Movement (1950s and ‘60s), fear of social change and racial integration led to widespread resistance and violence against efforts to dismantle segregation and secure civil rights for Black Americans. Recall the Southern Manifesto (1956). Conservatives used fear-mongering tactics to rally support for racism, portraying integration as a threat to white supremacy and social order. Even today far-right evangelical churches may use racialized rhetoric that portrays racial minorities as threatening or dangerous— including framing immigration as an invasion, associating certain ethnic or religious groups with criminality and promoting conspiracy theories about minority communities, all framed as threats to traditional values and traditional ways of life. They’re still demonizing minority groups and reinforcing racist stereotypes— and promoting an “us vs them” mentality straight from the GOP-MAGA playbook that reinforces racial divisions and distrust of outsiders.
Yesterday, John Pavlovitz noted that “It must be awful to go through life terrified: to believe that you are perpetually in danger; to always be threatened by encroaching predators lurking in the shadows, around corners, beneath the bed, in the bathroom, at the border. What a draining experience it has to be walking through every day looking over your shoulder, certain that attack is inevitable and that you are soon to be violently overtaken. I feel sorry for these people of faith because I know they can't understand or reflect the compassionate, expansive love of Jesus, having been weaned since birth on a bastardized and heretical theology—a tiny, fragile faith made entirely out of fear:
fear of an angry God dispensing damnation,
fear of Mexicans stealing their jobs,
fear of immigrants overrunning their borders,
fear of refugees families bringing terrorism in a Trojan Horse,
fear of Muslims smuggling in Sharia Law,
fear of Transgender people lurking in public restrooms,
fear of Atheists assailing their religious freedoms,
fear of brown people brandishing violence,
fear of Hollywood perverting their children,
fear of drag queens converting their children,
fear of teachers reading History to their children…”