Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
President Trump holds a roundtable discussion with African American supporters in the White House Cabinet Room, June 2020.
Republican Rep.-elect Byron Donalds of Florida’s 19th Congressional District plans to join the Congressional Black Caucus. He is an unreconstructed Trumpista: “I’m everything the fake news media tells you doesn’t exist: a strong Trump-supporting, gun-owning, liberty-loving, pro-life, politically incorrect Black man,” Donalds has said. Joining Donalds in the House is another Black Republican Rep.-elect, Burgess Owens of Utah’s Fourth Congressional District. The district has been a hospitable enclave for Black Republicans; Mia Love, the first Black female Republican in congressional history, served two terms in the district before losing to Democrat Ben McAdams, who served just one term before losing to Owens.
Unlike Donalds, Owens wants “nothing to do with the CBC.” Both he and Donalds have announced that they plan to join the “Freedom Force,” the new GOP group set up to square off against “evil Marxists and socialists” like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and the Squad, and fight for truth, justice, and the American Way.
Or something like that.
Lawmakers like Donalds and Owens reflect the powerful and often-overlooked conservative streak that animates Black Trumpians, despite the president’s embrace of white supremacy and his indifference to the dead and the dying in the COVID-19 pandemic. Black Republican support for Donald Trump is incomprehensible only if one clings to a stereotype of Black America that never existed.
“The idea that somehow 20 percent of African American males supporting someone who is a male like Donald Trump [is unusual] just arises because we tend to have a false consensus about how Blacks tend to vote,” David Wilson, a polling and public-opinion expert at the University of Delaware, told a recent National Conference of Black Political Scientists meeting on African Americans, polling, and the 2020 election.
Black Trump supporters are not products of spontaneous generation. They have a long lineage in America, so to be surprised by Trump’s success requires a certain amount of historical amnesia. It’s too often forgotten that African Americans’ allegiance to the Democratic Party is of recent vintage. Before the 1960s, the Republican Party was the redoubt for African Americans who could exercise their right to vote.
Sixty years ago, Richard Nixon captured 32 percent of the Black vote in his loss to John F. Kennedy. Most middle-class Blacks voted for Nixon. The civil rights victories of the period propelled African Americans into the Democratic Party, and Nixon’s 1968 law-and-order crusade made Democrats out of anyone who hadn’t already made the switch. Only 10 percent of Black voters cast a ballot for Nixon that year. But by 1972, he had recovered to gain 23 percent of the Black vote.
Historically, about 10 percent of Blacks vote Republican.
Trump’s margins among Black men are consistent with those of recent Republican presidents, ranging from his 13 percent in 2016 to nearly 20 percent this year. In 1980, 14 percent of Black men voted for Ronald Reagan; in 1984, 12 percent did. In 1988, George H.W. Bush got roughly 15 percent of Black men. In 2000, 12 percent of Black men voted for George W. Bush; in 2004, 13 percent did.
“If you are getting one of every ten in every presidential election for the last five or so decades, the question might be what’s going on with that?” said Ray Block, a professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University. “That’s a different question than why did Trump get x number of Black voters? That’s a question about what is it about the Republican Party that has an enduring appeal to African Americans.”
In the late 1800s, Booker T. Washington touted vocational education and accommodation to whites interested in keeping Blacks in certain low-status jobs, goals that incensed activist-educator W.E.B Du Bois. Fast-forward to today, and conservative political activist Alan Keyes glides effortlessly from Reaganism to Trumpism, and Clarence Thomas holds down the Scalia wing of the Supreme Court. So the president’s appeal to politicians like Donalds and Owens, as well as rappers 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, and Ice Cube, is less than shocking. Remember, Herman Cain died for Trumpism.
The reasons for the appeal range from Trump’s in-your-face bluster; machismo and misogyny; defiance of tradition; and reality TV–style outrageousness. In the eyes of Black Republicans, Trump focuses on values and issues they hold dear. “Government didn’t get me off the streets,” Donalds said in a campaign ad. “Trust in God did, love of family, personal responsibility, and hard work.” Trump checks all those boxes, and the fascism is beside the point, especially if the alternative is a Democratic Party viewed as just as racist, if less overt about it.
The hand-wringing over Black men’s votes parallels the amazement over Republican popularity among some Latino ethnic groups and the rural white working class. Whether it’s because of misogyny, a rejection of cosmopolitanism, or an enduring belief that Democrats have shied away from working-class issues, some more sophisticated thinking about the persistent and widening gaps among these groups is necessary. Until then, Black Republicans in the House are ready to disrupt the Democratic power structure. The prospect of two years of posturing in a superhero comic book “Freedom Force vs. the Squad” version of a legislature instead of a deliberative body focused on re-establishing some workable version of the common good is another ominous sign for the 117th Congress.
