Black community leaders who approached Trump in order to get help for Black America have not only found that Trump kept none of his promises and used every Black person he could get close to as a photo op, but that Trump is actively eliminating what Barack Obama did to help Black America, one checklist point at a time.
On Martin Luther King’s Birthday in January 2017, Donald J. Trump, then the president-elect, welcomed a group of civil rights leaders, led by Dr. King’s eldest son, into his office in Trump Tower.
After a tour of Mr. Trump’s celebrity curio collection (Shaquille O’Neal’s sneakers, size 22, were a highlight), the visitors presented him with a proposal intended to prevent state voter identification laws from disenfranchising people of color.
The delegation had low expectations. Mr. Trump had championed the lie that President Barack Obama was not born in America and, in their view, played to racial fears during the 2016 campaign. He quickly dashed even those modest hopes. Low turnout among Black voters, Mr. Trump declared, had helped him defeat Hillary Clinton.
“Many people didn’t go out — many Blacks didn’t go out — to vote for Hillary because they liked me. That was almost as good as getting their vote,” Mr. Trump said, lowering his voice to say the word “Blacks,” on a recording provided by a meeting participant and confirmed as authentic by three others. (A White House spokesman did not dispute the veracity of the recording.)
Mr. Trump promised he would seriously consider their proposal. It went nowhere.
“I will be better to the African-American people than anybody else in this room,” he declared just before heading down the elevator to appear before the cameras with his guests, according to the recording, which was shared with several news organizations last month.
To Mr. Trump, this was little more than a photo op: Two former aides recalled that he wanted to be seen with a group of Black leaders to rebut an assertion made by Representative John Lewis, the late civil rights paragon, who at the time had said he did not “see this president-elect as a legitimate president.”
As the 2020 campaign hits the homestretch, Mr. Trump has been claiming that he is the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln and papering over his history of racist remarks by having Black supporters at the Republican convention back his boast that he “is the least racist person in the world.”
In fact, Mr. Trump has hired very few Black officials to positions of authority in the White House and for his re-election effort. And his campaign has stoked racial divisions to an extent not seen since George Wallace’s run in 1968. He has tried to block or hamper efforts to expand ballot access. He has said Black people were “too stupid” to vote for him, according to his estranged former attorney, Michael Cohen.
When asked about Mr. Cohen’s charge, a White House spokesman emailed a statement by Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany calling Mr. Cohen, “a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer, who lied to Congress.”
And as the 2017 meeting illustrates, many of Mr. Trump’s interactions with Black leaders have followed a similar pattern: He has turned opportunities for reconciliation, or even to debate policy differences, into empty-calorie encounters in front of the cameras, according to interviews with more than 30 Black officials, civil rights leaders, and former and current administration officials.
Trump campaign officials told reporters last week that they were working hard to slightly exceed their performance with Black voters in 2016 when they won about 8 percent of their vote. The president has also tried to mollify white moderates who might be turned off by his racial rhetoric.
The result is a jarring, split-screen approach: The president talks up his friendships with Black Americans (often famous ones like Kanye West) while running a campaign whose objective is to frighten white suburban voters into thinking a Biden presidency will bring problems from inner-city America to their front lawns.
What Trump wants is worship, adoration, and fear. Those he cannot control, he destroys. He asked us what we had to lose by supporting him. Obviously, the answer is everything.
When we told America this, we were dismissed as hysterical, hyperbolic, and crazy. The system wouldn't allow anyone as racist as "The Trump in our heads" to become President.
The system has obviously failed. We have one chance left to correct it.
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