Majority of Black Men Prefer Trump. Suicide By Vote?

Screengrab from a Blacks for Trump Rally in DC, August 2023.

Only when she read a book review in Ebony magazine did my mother believe I was a writer. Blacks had every right to be suspicious of the white mainstream media. They trusted the Black media. Ebony magazine, Jet, and great newspapers like the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Afro-American. These newspapers have gone online or out of business. Now for information, Blacks rely upon the mainstream media and its predominately white personnel. In the hands of a segregated media, the telling of the American story is always incomplete. For example, in three puff pieces about Nikki Haley, The Times failed to mention her support for a white subway vigilante who sneaked up from behind a homeless Black man and placed him in a “self-defense” chokehold that killed him.

While the media criticize social media as harmful to children, the legacy media have been detrimental to Blacks, Browns, Native Americans, and Muslims. This might account for Black men being in the dark about what’s in store for Blacks in the event of a Trump administration. If they knew, they’d realize that a vote for Trump is suicide by vote.

Another source of news for Black men is Hip Hop lyrics. CNN found that between 1989 and 2016, Trump was mentioned at least 318 times in rap lyrics. Between 2015 and 2016, 83 songs mentioned Trump; most of the mentions have been negative, but “Rappers were enamored with Trump, or at least what he stood for. His wealth alone was enough to attract the admiration of rappers, who gloated about apartments at Trump Tower they’d only slept in once. To be affiliated with Trump or his properties was to include oneself in the elite class of citizens with enough money to do so.”

Players like Donald Trump appear in Black folklore. Men with lots of women and wealth. They are outlaws who outwit the authorities. They have all of the women and their fingers and necks are covered with bling, diamonds, and other jewelry. Of course, his Hip Hop fans got played because it turns out that Trump is not as wealthy as he conned Hip Hoppers into believing. It took a Black Attorney General, Letitia James, to expose the con job that he and his children pulled on the banks and the public, yet Trump still has Hip Hop support. “Former president Donald Trump, plagued with four indictments, is gaining support from rappers like Badman Kevo, Chief Keef, and Benny the Butcher while President Joe Biden’s popularity among nonwhite voters craters.”

But lacking consciousness, many Black men are often played, just as those rappers who Trump conned. Before that they were pimped by Ronald Reagan and Colonel Oliver North, when many became mules on behalf of their effort to fund the Contras. Crack dealing led to the gentrification of our neighborhoods as older neighbors became so intimidated by crack dealers who sometimes threatened them that they sold their homes below their market value. The media entertains its prime customers with images of Black crime.

If anybody would take the time to look at the graph, they’d discover that there was a sharp decline in Black-on-Black crime before Reagan’s tapping into the Black underground economy for money. Incidents of Blacks murdering each other shot up when the Contras peddled drugs in our neighborhoods. The graph about Blacks killing Blacks looks like a V. There is a deep decline and then a dramatic upsurge when thousands of Blacks fundraised for Reagan and North by marketing crack. So not only did many Black men become salesmen for Reagan and North, an effort that was exposed by the martyr Gary Webb, but they produced a culture that praised their exploitation. Ice-T says many Rappers began by selling drugs; with Rap, they advanced or went legit. Such is the competition between Rappers, with a casualty list that continues to grow; Ice-T calls Rapping “the most dangerous occupation” as rivals continue to gun down the competition. He said this follows the death of Rapper Young Dolph’s death.

Now, thousands of Black Trump supporters are at risk of being chumped again.

When Trump uses the term “vermin,” for him, they are among the vermin. They haven’t heard that Trump plans to occupy Black neighborhoods with troops?

The leading cause of death among children is gunshot wounds, with high numbers among Black and Brown children. Do you think that legislation banning assault weapons will occur under the Trump administration? Do these Black Trump supporters believe that white gun owners own weapons of war to shoot game? Are these Black Trump supporters so ignorant of history that they are unaware that they are the game? The fear of a Black uprising has lingered in the American psyche since Haiti revolted against the French enslavers (who were supported by “ardent abolitionist” Alexander Hamilton), an act that gave Southern slave owners the willies. Robert Crumb places this fear tersely in his cartoon, “When The N-word(pl.) Take over America.” Google it.

Because they receive inferior treatment not only in the United States but also in the hemisphere, according to the U.N., Black infants have difficulty surviving birth. Would that change under Trump? Despite the worldwide reaction against the police murder of George Floyd, police behavior hasn’t changed. They’re still gunning down Black, Brown, and Red men. The corporate media paint racist policemen as confined to a few “bad apples” and have hired ex-policemen to support the Police Unions in cases where a policeman has gunned down a Black person. However, judging by postings of thousands of police on social media, many police officers harbor disturbing attitudes about Blacks, Browns, and members of the LGBTQ+. Will that change under Trump or get worse? And what about climate change, which will devastate the global south and Black and Brown lives in the United States? Do they believe that climate deniers in a Trump administration will turn around a trend that has passed the point of return? What would happen if Obamacare is eliminated? Medicaid, Social Security? The social safety net will become the corporate safety net as Trump bails out his corporate buddies with lavish tax cuts and guarantees that ensure their prosperity because they are too big to fail. Black women are dying because of their lack of access to abortion. These Rappper’s hero, Trump, brags that it was his Supreme Court that ended Roe vs.Wade

There are a number of Hip Hoppers who get it. Who are philanthropists. Who contribute to Black uplift. Some of the prominent ones may have street smarts, but they fall short when it comes to critical thinking. Trump supporter Kanye West has millions of followers and a reckless tongue. He and Alice Walker, who is a fan of Holocaust denier David Ickes, believe that for Hitler, Jews were the only ethnic group on his hate list. They should read Hitler’s Black Victims by Clarence Lusane.

I’ve only listed a few of the hazards for Blacks if Trump excites white nationalists’ fervor and manages to steal another election as he did in 2016 with the help of the media and Steve Bannon, the most dangerous character on the American scene today. So those Black men who were pimped by Reagan and Colonel North risk of being put on the stroll again.

What on earth attracts the majority of Black men to Trump? The 16 women who accuse him of sexual assault, including a woman who was 13 years old at the time? Do they want their children to consider a liar and a grifter as a role model? He says that he wants to put millions of immigrants into camps. Thousands of these immigrants are Black. Do you think that Trump only plans to place immigrants in camps? By supporting Trump aren’t the Black celebrities who endorse Trump marketing a form of political fentanyl to the ill-informed and unsuspecting? This is a president who wanted to shoot Black Lives Matter protestors.

Yes, there are problems with Biden, about which white progressives and their proxy, Cornel West, remind us. For his part, West views undermining Biden as an act of revenge against President Obama, who, in his eyes, disrespected him. He doesn’t care what happens to Blacks under Trump as long as he can do a payback on Obama. The other charge against Biden is that he’s old. I’m older than he is but still prolific. As an honorary member of the Tlingit tribe, I have noticed how they revere older people as carriers of tradition. The typical image of older people on American TV is that of an unpaid babysitter.

If a Trump administration prevails, white Nation magazine progressives can always choose anonymity or go right, which is how Max Eastman and Norman Mailer ended their careers. For Blacks, choosing the lesser of two evils is appropriate, and Donald Trump, who is so dizzy that he thinks that he defeated Barack Obama twice, is evil.

Ishmael Reed’s latest product is “Blues Lyrics by Ishmael Reed,” featuring David Murray and Ronnie Stewart and his West Coast Blues Caravan of All Stars available from Bandcamp.com

Notes.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ishmael Reed.

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