Perspective | Donald Trump's specific brand of racism resurfaces as he woos Black voters – The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump went into the Michigan Republican primary having just made overt outreach to Black voters. Not just any Black voters, not Detroit’s liberal electorate or Flint’s hardscrabble residents, but conservative voters in South Carolina. He did so in a Friday evening speech at the Black Conservative Federation gala in Columbia. Trump walked onstage to his usual soundtrack of Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the USA.” Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas), one of the many Black men waiting to welcome him — including Ben Carson and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) — sang along and jabbed at the air to emphasize just how proud he was to be an American.
Most of those in attendance were dressed in formal attire, but Trump arrived in a dark suit with his bright-red tie hanging below his belt. Much of what Trump discussed was familiar, such as his insistence that he won an election that he lost. Some of it was unsubstantiated, such as calling President Biden “a racist.” And a good deal of it was merely Trump wooing a Black electorate while making plain the lens through which he views Black people in general and their place in the social hierarchy. Trump’s public exhortations about Black men and women reflect a sensibility lodged somewhere between Jim Crow and late ’80s rap.
Trump began his meandering speech with a familiarity that belied his relationship with the majority of Black voters. While his share of the Black vote increased from 8 percent in 2016 to 12 percent in 2020 by some measures, he has not earned the right to speak as though he’s among family. He laughed about the spotlight being in his eyes and only being able to see the Black people in the audience. He joked about Barry Bonds and Babe Ruth and who’d hit the most home runs, and when the Black men onstage advised him that Bonds held the record, Trump acquiesced, but added, “Tonight I’m with Barry. I’m with Barry. In front of another group I may be with the Babe.” Coming from another speaker whose relationship with Black Americans was less transactional, less transparently condescending, more respectful and more truthful, these comments might have hummed with it’s-just-us humor.
But Trump has stubbornly put Black Americans in the category of “you people.” In Trump’s estimation this stalwart group of Americans is reduced to the criminals and the criminalized who he says now find common cause with him because he has been indicted on criminal charges and has been found liable for civil ones. And now that Trump believes he has been wrongly accused of a multitude of crimes, he unfurls his grievances for shared commiseration. He ignores his own recent history. He has been at the forefront of hurling wrongful accusations in service to his presidential ambition, including in Michigan where he pointed fingers at election workers in Wayne County — which has the largest Black population in the state — and said they were tampering with votes.
Trump sees “you people” as shady characters, folks who live their lives constantly entangled with police officers, the judicial system or the mythology of gangsters. Black folks, he says, love his mug shot, the one that was taken in Fulton County, Ga., when he was indicted on racketeering charges. In Trump’s telling, they adore that mug shot like it’s a shiny new health-care plan or a road map to criminal justice reform or a gift certificate for affordable, high-quality child care.
In his telling of the facts, Black people are residents of inner cities, a description that’s meant to conjure images of overcrowded high-rises scarred with graffiti and smelling of human waste, not the shiny glass and chrome skyscrapers that also exist within the cities he loves to deride such as Chicago and New York — cities where he happily slapped his name on buildings in big, shiny letters. In his pitch to Black conservatives, Trump offered no indication that he understands them to be well-educated, that they may be suburbanites or small-town folks or middle-class professionals in urban bungalows. If he sees their accomplishments at all, it is in the context of how those accolades benefit him. He noted that Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) had delivered a rousing speech earlier in the evening. “He’s better for me than he is for himself,” Trump said. So, Scott is a good person.
And by good, Trump means that Scott — the recently engaged former presidential candidate who wears his Christianity like a merit badge — exuberantly compliments Trump. He raves about Trump with the opacity and imprecision of someone who has stared directly into the blinding sunlight of ambition and is trying to convince folks that he can still see clearly and accurately. Truth floats around him like afterimages, those dark spots that bob in and out of focus.
For Trump, Black people are workers. Whether they are lazy or capable, they are not his associates. Their presence serves a purpose. They’re held up as gobsmacking examples of excellence for having chosen to support Trump, tearfully grateful recipients of Trump’s presidential largesse or pure entertainment.
But they never surpass Trump, nor are they his equals. Trump acknowledged the presence of Carson who, for a brief time, during the 2016 Republican primary season, was a leading candidate for president. But Carson is a good Black man because even when he was leading, Carson confided that he believed Trump was ordained by God to win. This is the story that Trump told. Of all Carson’s accomplishments, Trump settled on the renowned surgeon’s willingness to cede the spotlight to him.
In Trump’s description of the world, everyone is scrambling to make sure they’re not at the bottom of the ladder, that theirs is not the back on which all others stand. Those immigrants streaming across the southern border, illegally or desperately, haven’t managed to grasp the ladder at all. Black people occupy one of the lowest rungs. Trump will extend his hand to the Black men and women who understand this. He promises to raise them up. His political power can commute their sentences, lower their taxes and feed their ambitions.
As long as folks remember their place. And Trump makes it clear that place is nowhere near where he comfortably, disdainfully stands.