Black Trumpers: “What do you have to lose?” Everything.
Pollsters say Black voters, especially Black men, are considering voting for Donald Trump. This matters now more than ever. Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters in 2016. But with this election promising to be even tighter, the Trumps and Harris campaigns are scrambling for the so-called Black Vote.
Earlier this month, Kamala Harris made a point of saying she doesn’t take the Black Vote for granted.
“Black men are no different from anybody else,” she told Charlamagne tha God. “They expect that you have to earn their vote.” [“The Breakfast Club” host shares his reflections on his conversation here.]
And Kamala’s right.
Given the long, hard fight for the right to vote, I support our right to vote however we choose. But Black people who plan to vote for Donald Trump either don’t know our history or don’t know Trump. I know both.
My Black Father’s Vote
When I was little, I asked my father, who’d spent many a night in jail for his civil rights activism, why we were Democrats. As a child of the '60s, with 100 cities burning across America, I wanted to know why Black people like us weren’t voting Republican, like President Lincoln.
“We were Republicans once,” he said.
“After Lincoln’s assassination,” my father explained, “after Republicans in Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to set our right to vote in stone, we joined the party of Lincoln.” African Americans began to amass power, especially in the South, where they (including my father’s grandparents) had been enslaved.
Then, my father taught me what it’s all about. Power.
White supremacists were not about to share power with blacks. The backlash was swift, ugly, and extreme. As my father’s namesake, Frederick Douglass, had warned, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” The Black Vote didn’t last a decade.
The Ku Klux Klan rose from the ashes of the Civil War, murdering thousands of Black people and our allies for daring to demand equal rights, especially the most cherished of all, the vote.
My father grew up in Indiana, where the KKK loomed largest. “If you just looked at a white person the wrong way,” he often said of his childhood home, “it could get you killed.”
The Voting Rights War
But these tactics of white supremacy went beyond night rides, cross burnings, and lynchings. Across the South and as far west as Oklahoma and Texas, white supremacists formed Democratic Party clubs specifically designed to keep Black people from voting.
Decades of black pushback ensued. It was a Voting Rights War.
Martin Luther King led marches. John Lewis very nearly died. Reverend James Reeb, Jr., a white Unitarian minister who answered Dr. King’s call for clergy to join a voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, was clubbed to death by white supremacists for his trouble.
Thurgood Marshall partnered his NAACP Legal Defense Fund with Black lawyers in the worst of these places to challenge their poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. It took lawsuit after lawsuit, over decades, to break this “Dixiecrat” system.
Yet, the Voting Rights War continues to this day. The modern battles are racial gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the fight to keep the Voting Rights Act viable. It echoes in Donald Trump’s anti-democratic rhetoric: “The ballots, that’s a whole big scam.”
Dixieland to Trumpland
S o how did we get here? With a racist election denier in control of the party of Lincoln and a Black woman at the top of the ticket for a party once aligned with the Klan?
The changeover started when the markets crashed. With the Great Depression came a new kind of Democrat: FDR
My father was a boy, and the Depression scarred him deeply. People all around were losing jobs, homes, and even lives. Most politicians were unwilling or unable to solve the crisis. But Franklin D. Roosevelt promised the people government assistance and won the 1932 election in a landslide. With Republicans against everything FDR stood for, the switch was on. Black Americans, in more dire circumstances than most, migrated to FDR’s New Deal.
By the time I was born, amid the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats were divided. Northern Democrats supported civil rights, but their Dixiecrat cousins were vehemently opposed. The Grand Old Party, founded by Thomas Jefferson, reverted to its roots, aligning with Dixiecrats to oppose power-sharing with Black Americans.
Into this clamor stepped Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texas Democrat, who defied the Dixiecrats to sign the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act came on its heels the following year. A Fair Housing Act was enacted in 1968. Any remaining Black voters loyal to the Republican Party left.
Thurgood Marshall's lawsuits laid the groundwork for equal education, housing, and voting. Now, the sweeping impact of the laws Johnson signed promised an end to the remaining legal forms of white supremacy. Black voters have been loyal to the party ever since.
Not the Party of Lincoln
Donald Trump is not entirely to blame for the Republican abandonment of Black America. It started long before Trump came on the scene. The year I was born, when Trump was still in high school, Republican Barry Goldwater ran for President, actively campaigning against civil rights. He lost, but Richard Nixon won four years later, with a subtler race-baiting “law and disorder” message for Americans to “Vote As If Your Whole World Depended on It.” [As CNN has reported, Trump simply borrows from these 1960s messages.]
By 1980, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign captured, if not created, a shift in the Republican Party. More genteel but no better friend to African Americans, Reagan’s “trickle-down” economics were bad for all but the wealthiest among us. His vice president, George HW Bush, famously paraded Willie Horton across TV screens, a boogeyman of race and crime, as he campaigned to replace Reagan in ’88. But none of these conservatives, not even Neo-Cons George W. Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney, compare to Trump.
‘MAGA’
MAGA is an ideology, not a party. It’s rigid and not aligned with traditional GOP principles. It is not about patriotism. It is not about Lincoln, republicanism, or freedom. It is about one thing — Donald Trump.
Any Black person who is thinking about voting with MAGA this November 5th ought to think twice.
Trump is a misogynist (proved in court). He is a fraudster (proved in court). He silences his critics (promising to use the full force of the Justice Department to lock them up if elected). He is the first U.S. president ever to be convicted of a felony.
But above all, where Black people are concerned, Trump is a racist. He doesn’t care about Black people. He’s demonstrated antipathy for all but a few of the wealthiest African Americans. And his policies will not benefit Black America. At all.
Trump on Black America
Money. Ice Cube and 50 Cent are one thing. They’ve got millions. So too, Dr. Ben Carson and NFL players like Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell. But what about average, hardworking, everyday folks? What’s Trump gonna do for us? Nothing.
His “Platinum Plan” for Black Americans is only two pages long. That should tell us all we need to know.
But in case not:
Jobs. Trump takes credit for improving the Black unemployment rate during his time in office. But he shouldn’t. The rise was due to the economic growth achieved by President Obama. It was underway when Trump took office.
COVID wiped out those gains. And lots of Black people, too (one in 1000 Black people died of COVID), a disease Trump spent months downplaying instead of attacking head-on.
Crime. Trump takes credit for signing the First Step Act. But that was a bipartisan criminal justice reform act. And he’s lying when he credits the law for the decline in violent crime. The trend has been downward for years before Trump was on the political scene.
Education. Trump claims he “rescued HBCUS.” Another lie. Historically Black Colleges and Universities, of which Kamala is an alum, were woefully underfunded, so Congress threw them some money in a bipartisan funding bill–before Trump’s 2016 election. Trump merely signed the funding reauthorization package, as President Obama had before.
Moreover, year after year, Trump proposed steep cuts to higher ed.
And his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, refused to cancel student loan debt for tens of thousands of borrowers eligible for relief (many of them Black and brown).
Race. Trump will set us back decades on racial progress.
Just think back on his first term of anti-Muslim bans, “shithole countries,” and “very fine people on both sides.”
His HUD Secretary Ben Carson rolled back rules designed to combat discriminatory mortgage-lending practices — redlining.
Under Trump, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dramatically reduced the enforcement of fair lending laws.
And just before he left office, Trump tried to end an Obama fair housing regulation that required local governments to track patterns of segregation and poverty. (A judge stepped in to stop the rollback).
‘Make America White Again’
But worst of all, as every Black person should know by now, Trump stokes racism and violence.
I’ve interviewed Donald Trump twice, both times at Trump Tower in the early 2000s. He was affable, smart enough, a real estate mogul who knew his stuff for interviews for ABC News about the thing he understood best. Business.
In the two decades since, he’s convinced himself, if no one else, that he has “done more for the African American community than any president except Abraham Lincoln,” a claim that reveals a man who either doesn’t know his history or is no longer tied to reality.
Here’s the reality:
Trump engaged in discriminatory housing practices as a New York City landlord.
He used his notoriety and capital to help take out full-page ads calling for New York State to adopt the death penalty after the wrongful arrests of five Black and Latino boys for the rape of a Central Park jogger. Even after the five were exonerated (another man confessed, and DNA confirmed his guilt through DNA), Trump failed to admit his error.
From his first political announcement at Trump Tower in 2015, Trump has unleashed his racist rhetoric to divide. He weaponizes hate speech at his rallies and campaign stops. He deploys it as a tool to manipulate the masses.
As President, Trump never addressed the millions of people marching in the streets to protest police inhumanity and criminal injustice systems after the 2020 murder of George Floyd on his White House watch. But he did call Kyle Rittenhouse “a really nice young man,” after Rittenhouse shot three people at a Black Lives Matter protest.
I miss my father every day, but I’m grateful he died before Trump was elected.
The Choice
Trump’s MAGA movement is rooted in violence and hate. It is a call out to “proud boys” who are feeling spiritually and economically displaced, who feel their American dream has been stolen — an American Dream rooted in unsustainable systems of subjugation and oppression. The America Trump seeks to Make Great Again is a white supremacist nation of old. Not the More Perfect Union we aspire to be–one with room for everyone to aspire to the American Dream.
Black people–of all people–must lead the way in rejecting Trump and Trumpism. We have suffered to secure the right to vote. Trump and his brand of politics are antithetical to our history.
“What have we got to lose?” Our sense of ourselves as Black people. And Americans.
