Despite Trump Lies, African American Support Still Solidly Democrat
Trump’s racism is crafted so that it is usually just out of view so he can have plausible deniability of being racist.
But he can’t escape from the blatantly racist message he gave when he falsely claimed that polls in September showed that support in the African American community quadrupled or quintupled since his mug shot went viral after he was indicted in August for racketeering and related charges.
CNN reported that national polls do not show anything close to an increase of “four and five times” in African American support for trump since the mug shot was taken.
“Most polls conducted after the release of the mug shot did find a higher level of Black support for Trump than he had in previous polls — but the increases were within the polls’ margins of error, not massive spikes, so it’s not clear whether there was a genuine improvement or the bump was just statistical noise,” CNN reported. “In addition, one poll found a decline in Trump’s strength with Black voters in a race against Biden, while another found a decline in his favorability with Black respondents even as he improved in a race against Biden.”
A Washington Post/ABC News poll last year showed that African Americans continue to support Democrats by clear margins, although the percentages have declined significantly. When African Americans were asked last year if they would support Biden or Trump if the 2024 presidential election were held then, about 70 percent indicated they would vote for Biden, while 23 percent said they would support Trump. That is nearly double the 12 percent of African Americans who voted for trump in 2020.
In trying to boost his popularity in the African American community, Trump infamously claimed that he had done “more for the Black community than any president in the United States, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.” To think that the African American community would believe such a fabulist is an insult and an afront to the community.
Despite making racist comments or inferences time after time after time, trump has won support from a handful of well-known African American rappers and one prominent Black Lives Matter activist. The support is completely counterintuitive given trump’s racist history. A partial list includes:
- His comments of “good people on both sides” after the white supremacist, neo-Nazi demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. in August 2017. One counterprotester was killed and other inured when a white nationalist drove into a crowd.
- His support for white supremacist Christian nationalists and the so-called replacement theory which claims that Democrats are promoting illegal immigration to bring about a majority of people of color in the nation.
- His opposition to removing monuments that glorify those who fought during the Civil War to maintain enslavement.
- His potential support for invoking the insurrection act to arrest those involving in civil protests if he is re-elected.
- After George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25,2020, trump warned protesters, with the warning “when the looting stats, the shooting starts.” He also said that demonstrators protesting racial injustice are “looking for trouble” and that companies supporting BLM are “weak” and led by “weak people.”
- In 2020, trump called the Black Lives Matter movement a “symbol of hate.”
- He overturned an Obama-era housing rule intended to fight racial segregation by linking funding to the reduction in housing inequality.
- Before the 2016 election, trump repeatedly questioned President Barack Obama’s citizenship, promoting a racist disinformation campaign.
- Dining at Mar-a-Lago with an avowed white supremacist and an unswerving anti-Semite.
- Supporting those arrested for the Jan. 6, 2020, attempted insurrection by trump supporters at the Capitol. Many of the rioters carried white supremacist signs.
Leading the latest outspoken trump supporters in the African American community is Kanye “Ye” West, a popular hip hop artist and longtime trump supporter. Others include hip hop artists and rappers Lil Wayne, DaBaby, Kodak Black, Chief Keet and Benny the Butcher
On his last day in office, trump pardoned Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., also known as Lil Wayne. Carter had pleaded guilty to illegal possession of a loaded, gold-plated handgun on a private jet that was en route to Miami. Carter had faced up to 10 years in prison. Trump also commuted the sentence of Kodak Black, 23, whose real name is Bill Kapri. Black was serving a four-year sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty to possession of multiple illegal firearms last year.
Ye cited the Pay Check Protection (PPP) program as a reason that “Black people forgave him (trump)”. Ye apparently was mistaken about the benefits that accrued to minority businesses through the loan program.
The $963 billion business loan program was established to help certain businesses, self-employed workers, sole proprietors, certain nonprofit organizations, and tribal businesses continue paying their workers during the COVID -19 pandemic.
Some economists have found that the PPP did not save as many jobs as purported and aided too many businesses that were not at risk of going under. Racial disparities also were reported among recipients. In July 2020, a National Geographic article, citing the Center for Responsible Lending, reported that 95 percent of Black-owned businesses and 91 percent of Latino-owned businesses were unlikely to receive loans because they were very small businesses with few employees and because they did not have existing relationships with banks.
The U.S. Department of Justice also charged more than 500 people with illegally claiming PPP loans, collectively totaling hundreds of millions of dollars
Rapper Sexyy Red, whose real name is Janae Nierah Wherry, pledged her allegiance to trump because she said that he started “getting Black people out of jail and giving people their free money, oh baby we love Trump, we need him back in office.” Wherry apparently was referring to the First Step Act, a bill signed by trump in December 2018. The act aimed at reforming federal prisons and sentencing laws in order to reduce recidivism, decreasing the federal inmate population, and maintaining public safety.
Within the first year of enactment, more than 3,000 federal prisoners were released based on changes to the good-time credits calculation formula under the First Step Act, and more than 2,000 inmates benefited from sentence reductions from the retroactive application of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. Liberal and conservative critics, however, said the trump administration did not properly apply the law, resulting in fewer prisoners enjoying the release and sentencing adjustment reforms than Congress intended. The act authorized Congress to appropriate $75 million per year from 2019 to 2023. But trump’s 2020 budget only earmarked $14 million, leading some advocates to worry that the bill’s underfunding represented an attempt to “starve it to death.”
Among trump’s unlikely newer supporters is Mark Fisher, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Rhode Island and founder of BLM Incorporated. Fisher, interviewed on the far right platform, Rumble, said he was behind trump because “everyone else sucks.”
“You know, I like Trump personally and I think right now who we have sitting in the Oval Office is just a deep disappointment … I deeply have disdain for him and I really dislike the vice president [Kamala Harris] as well,” Fisher said.
Fisher said he believes the Democratic party doesn’t value the votes of African Americans and that their policies are “basically racist policies.”
“I believe that it’s a racist party that strikes at the heart of the Black family and the nuclear family in general. And I believe Donald Trump, he’s the opposite,” Fisher said.
Among his concerns, Fisher said the Democrats “introduced abortion” and were for “different unnatural policies that go against laws of nature” and “procreation.” He did not elaborate.
“Trump has done more for the Black community than any president I can think of,” Fisher said.
Fisher also said he supports those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, describing convicted rioters as political prisoners who were jailed for “dissent.”
Fisher also lauded trump for the First Step Act and for having given “millions and millions of dollars to HBCUs.”
“Before we had to go back every year for money,” Fisher said, referring to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
As has been trump’s habit, he exaggerated his role in extending funding for HBCUs, when he said at the final 2020 presidential debate, “President Obama would never give them long-term funding, and I did … I saved historically Black colleges and universities.”
In fact, PolitiFact found that trump’s FUTURE Act provided the same level of funding for HBCUs as under Obama.
The FUTURE Act made permanent $255 million in annual funding for minority-serving colleges, including roughly $85 million earmarked as mandatory funding for historically Black colleges and universities under a Title III program. Before the FUTURE Act, HBCUs had to ask Congress each year to renew the mandatory funding.
“But it’s inaccurate for Trump to claim that he ‘saved’ HBCUs, or that they had ‘no funding’ before him,” PolitiFact determined.
It’s also unclear how involved trump was in crafting the bill.
“The only words the president contributed were his signature, ‘Donald J. Trump,’” Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C., an original sponsor of the bill, told Inside Higher Ed in August.
“Democrats have hurt our community,” Fisher said. “All they want to do is put more cops in cities, lock people up, militarize our neighborhoods. That’s what Democrats want to do.”
Militarization sounds more like trump, who announced that if he is reelected he will enact an extreme crackdown on immigration, rounding up undocumented people into sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled. Trump said he plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport millions each year.
If trump is back in the White House, he said he would cancel the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests. People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.
The many people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be deported, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States.
Trump also has taken a racist page out of the playbooks of the likes of Hitler and Mussolini, comparing his opponents to “vermin” who will “do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.” In another nod to the Nazis, trump accused undocumented immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” through drug and alcohol use and violence.
Trump’s reference to vermin echoes an infamous 1939 speech when Hitler de-humanized Jews by calling them vermin.
“This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies,” he told the Czech foreign minister, according to historical accounts.
Trump also referred to the “blood of our country” when he said of immigrants without documents, “These people are very aggressive: They drink, they have drugs, a lot of things happening. It’s the blood of our country; what they’re doing is destroying our country.”
The words “poison” and/or “blood” appear in multiple chapters of Hitler’s Nazi manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”
The first chapter of the first volume notes, “In the north and in the south the poison of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily becoming more and more a non-German city.”
Hitler wrote in chapter four, “It seemed as if some all-pervading poisonous fluid had been injected by some mysterious hand into the bloodstream of this once heroic body, bringing about a creeping paralysis that affected the reason and the elementary instinct of self-preservation.”
And in chapter 10, Hitler wrote that because of Jewish journalists, the “poison was allowed to enter the national bloodstream and infect public life without the Government taking any effectual measures to master the course of the disease.”