Donald Trump has embarked on a cross-country tour to proclaim – to mostly white audiences – that he alone can solve what ails the black community.
“So many in the African-American community are doing so badly, poverty and crime way up, employment and jobs way down: I will fix it, promise,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. And the day before, in Mississippi, Trump called Hillary Clinton a “bigot” because she supposedly only cares about African Americans for their votes, and he told them to “reject” her “bigotry” and vote for him instead.
What he continuously fails to recognize is that he is the bigot – and the problem that the black community intends to solve by not voting for him.
Trump has shown no desire to reach out to African Americans during this election until it became abundantly clear that he needs their votes to win the presidency. Before now, he has spent months rebuffing invitations to speak at black events while hesitating to disavow the likes of former Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.
All his sad, pathetic and misguided attempts at black voter outreach have occurred after he polled at 0% among black voters in both Ohio and Pennsylvania — two states he must win to assure victory.
The other day in Dimondale, Michigan, a city 90 miles from Detroit that is 93% white, he said, “To those [African American voters] I say the following: what do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose? You live in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”
A lot. A vote for him isn’t so much a vote for something “new” as a return to a more bigoted and regressive past, an allegedly idyllic America that wrapped white Americans in a comforting blanket of privilege and left black Americans out in the cold. He never acknowledges that America has created structures that are intended to impede black advancement, and he’d probably scoff at the data supporting the seismic gap in black and white wealth inequality.
Trump rarely visits black communities, and his company has a history of legal action taken over allegations of not renting to African Americans. Trump’s political and professional business empires both perpetuate America’s racial inequalities.
And we cannot overlook how his rise to political prominence began by attempting to legitimize the discredited birther movement. Trump has spent seven years attempting to undermine the intellect and accomplishments of America’s first black president. I believe his underlying political philosophy stems from the premise that a successful black American is either not truly successful or is not actually American and has taken a job that “rightfully” belongs to a white person.
Trump has made all of these claims from a pedestal built upon a business model based around concealing large sums of debt, underpaying contractors and underplaying his inherited wealth – while presenting his brand as pristine luxury, the result of honest hard work and American ingenuity.
Black America does not need the dishonest, obtuse and false promises and generosity that Trump espouses. Instead we need to deconstruct his ignorant, oppressive argument and reveal it for what it really is: in the apt words of another journalist, nothing but a “turd tornado”.