by Keith Boykin
First, superficial association with famous Black people provides a convenient shield to protect white people from critique and allows them to gain access to social and economic opportunities that could enrich their lives. What successful white man would not want a photograph with Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson or a well-known Black sports hero or celebrity? This performative tolerance has been the linchpin of the Southern strategy, facilitating generations of modern white politicians to enact racist policies as long as they speak in race-neutral terms and make efforts to be seen in the company of “respectable” Negroes.
Second, racism is not the unwillingness to associate with Black people. It is, instead, a belief system in a social order that ranks Black people as inferior to white people. Nineteenth-century slave owners interacted with Black people and raped Black women while perpetuating racist lies about Black beauty. Twentieth-century segregationists, like Senator Strom Thurmond, slept with Black women and had their own Black children. Their association with Black people did not negate their racism.
Donald Trump may have epitomized the hypocrisy of performative tolerance better than any modern politician. He made little effort to speak sensitively about race or to pursue substantive policies of racial reconciliation, but he did seem to relish the performance. “Look at my African American over here,” he called out during an airport rally in California in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign. A few months later, he stood for a photo opportunity with game show host Steve Harvey in Trump Tower during the transition before he took office. Months after that, he sat with former football player Jim Brown and rapper Kanye West for a public relations meeting in the Oval Office. He invited almost every Black person he had ever met to vouch for him on camera at his 2020 Republican Convention. And, of course, he hired reality TV star Omarosa Manigault Newman to work for him in the White House as his top Black aide.
When Trump took actions that did help Black people, his motivations were often suspect. Thankfully, he commuted the life sentence of a sixty-three-year-old great grandmother named Alice Johnson. But he did so, not to reexamine discriminatory federal drug policy—as Obama had done when he granted clemency to nearly two thousand people during his administration—but because his celebrity friend Kim Kardashian West asked him to help Johnson. When three UCLA basketball players were released from a Chinese jail after being arrested on suspicion of shoplifting during a 2017 team trip, Trump all but demanded a public expression of gratitude from the young Black men for whatever role he claimed he played in securing their release. And when Kanye West informed Trump that rapper A$AP Rocky had been arrested in Sweden in 2019, Trump boasted on Twitter that he would call the prime minister of Sweden to try to secure the rapper’s release.
Helping Americans in need is the president’s job. No president had ever been so boastful or demanding of acknowledgment in the execution of this basic function of office as Donald Trump. When A$AP Rocky returned to the United States and declined to thank Trump, one of the president’s most prominent Black surrogates, Pastor Darrell Scott, publicly complained about the lack of credit given to the White House. “All I’m asking for you guys to do is say thank you,” he said.
The demand for adulation was not surprising given Trump’s transactional approach to politics. With the exception of his nativist policies toward trade and immigration, he had changed his position on nearly every major issue in his lifetime and seemed to be motivated by no other goal as much as self-aggrandizement. By all accounts, he had never bothered to think deeply about the issues that face Black people in America or to study African American literature or even to consult with the people who had devoted their lives to understanding issues of race. Trump’s thinking seemed to be frozen in time at the year when he was sued by the Nixon administration for discrimination. His rhetoric reflected a 1970s mentality about race in America.
After alienating African Americans throughout his entire 2016 campaign, Trump made a belated, perfunctory, and disingenuous appeal to Black voters in August of 2016. “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed—what the hell do you have to lose?” Trump asked. The fact that he posed the question to a nearly all-white audience in a nearly all-white community in Michigan suggests that he was never particularly serious about reaching Black voters. Instead, his appeals were largely targeted to assuage the concerns of white swing voters in the suburbs who did not want to believe they were supporting a racist candidate. Trump promised his white audience that day, in a fatuous, self-delusional boast, that “at the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African American vote.” He never came close.
What made Donald Trump so dangerous is not that he missed the target on his unrealistic 2016 campaign promises to Black people. It was far worse than that. He didn’t just passively fail to help us; he actively tried to hurt us. Generations of presidents of both parties had paid lip service to Black voters while prioritizing white voters. We were already painfully familiar with that song-and-dance routine. But before Trump, no president in more than a century had governed with such callous disregard to the expressed concerns of African Americans.
Trump’s repeated attacks on Black communities in Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, and Detroit perpetuated racist stereotypes of Black inferiority by failing to interrogate the root causes of persistent racial inequities in America. “Crime and killings in Chicago have reached such epidemic proportions that I am sending in Federal help,” Trump tweeted in the summer of 2017. He unfairly characterized Representative Elijah Cummings’s Baltimore congressional district as “rat-infested” and Representative John Lewis’s Atlanta congressional district as “crime infested” and never asked why the government had orchestrated a decades-long transfer of wealth from mostly Black and brown cities to mostly white suburbs. Nor did he examine why so many “red states” that consistently vote Republican in presidential elections repeatedly rank at the bottom of the nation in socioeconomic conditions. If the poor conditions of cities represented the failure of urban Democratic leadership, then surely the poor conditions in states like Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina must also represent the more dramatic failure of Republican governors and legislatures. And unlike those Republican states, the Democratic cities were left relatively powerless to enact structural change to improve their condition. Many cities lacked the legal authority to raise new revenue without authorization from their state governments, leaving them at the mercy of conservative state legislators who often did not share their interests.
The big picture for Trump was to fulfill a campaign promise to his base. They were not particularly concerned about the minutiae of government policy. They were, instead, invested in Trump’s appeal to their fears. What Trump offered was a plan to slow down the forces of time that threatened their privilege in society, and his entire campaign and presidency were animated by this desperate race against time. The MAGA slogan, the Muslim ban, the repeal of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the separation of immigrant families, the reversal of President Obama’s policies and initiatives, the voter suppression efforts, the Census rigging, and the rushed judicial appointments had all been designed to do one thing—to protect a fragile, dwindling white majority from extinction. It was all a scheme to turn back the clock to some glorified time in the past, or, at the very least, to stop the clock from moving forward toward a more diverse and inclusive future.
For five decades, the GOP had championed a particular set of American values that united the various elements of the party. The modern Republican Party had often been likened to a three-legged stool, consisting of moral conservatives, economic conservatives, and national security conservatives. The moral conservatives wanted to bring God back into public life and to uphold Christian values. The economic conservatives demanded fiscal discipline to reduce government spending, balance the budget, and bring down the debt. And the national security conservatives wanted to use
the military to extend American hegemony throughout the globe. Trump swung a hatchet at all three legs of the GOP stool, and, in so doing, he brought down the entire facade of the party.
It began with the moral conservatives, when Trump sat down for a televised discussion with Republican pollster Frank Luntz in 2015 and told an Iowa audience that he had never asked God for forgiveness and mocked the Christian sacrament of communion as simply a time where “I drink my little wine” and “have my little cracker.” Later in the campaign, when asked to name a favorite Bible verse, Trump said, “I wouldn’t want to get into it because to me that’s very personal.” In the same interview, when asked if he preferred the Old Testament or the New Testament, he hedged: “Probably equal.” And although he had claimed the Bible was too personal for him to disclose his favorite passage, he had no problem bringing and waving a Bible at campaign events and bragging about how much he loved it. In one infamous incident, he even mispronounced the New Testament book of “Second Corinthians” during a speech at Liberty University. “Two Corinthians, three seventeen,” Trump announced to the audience. “That’s the whole ballgame.”
If Trump truly believed in Christianity, his conduct suggested otherwise. He told supporters at his rallies to “knock the crap out of” protesters. He threatened to “bomb the shit out of” other countries. And he told businesses at a New Hampshire campaign event “to go fuck themselves.” This was a man who had been caught on tape saying that he had grabbed women “by the pussy,” kissed them without their consent, and pursued married women “like a bitch.” He had repeatedly cheated on his wives and been divorced two times before marrying his third wife. He had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money to conceal his affairs and had been credibly accused of rape by dozens of women. And unlike Obama, Trump had no public record of church attendance as an adult, little evidence of any acts of Christian charity, and seemed bereft of even a basic understanding of Christian worship. He was the living embodiment of nearly all of the seven deadly sins—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Any single one of these transgressions of personal conduct would have brought condemnation against President Obama from white evangelicals, but not Trump.
At the October 2016 Al Smith dinner in New York, Trump was photographed staring aimlessly at the crowd while Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Hillary Clinton, and other dignitaries bowed their heads in prayer. At the February 2017 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, President Trump asked the audience to pray for the TV ratings of his former show, The Apprentice. “They hired a big, big movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to take my place,” Trump said. “And we know how that turned out. The ratings went right down the tubes. It’s been a total disaster.” This wasn’t a celebrity-roast gala. It was a speech from the president of the United States at an annual national prayer event. But the trend continued at the December 2018 state funeral for former president George H. W. Bush, where Trump sat in silence, rocking back and forth in apparent boredom, while Presidents Obama, Clinton, and Carter and the rest of the congregation all read the words of the Apostles’ Creed. And when Trump finally staged his infamous Bible photo op after gassing peaceful protesters outside St. John’s Church in 2020, he didn’t even have the self-awareness to be ashamed of his sacrilege.
In example after example of Trump’s misbehavior and misconduct, it became increasingly clear that Trump either did not understand Christianity or did not practice it. Yet, this glaring truth had virtually no impact on his approval rating among white evangelicals. Prominent white evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. turned a blind eye to Trump’s depravity. Televangelist Paula White told Fox News that “Christianity is such a large part—his faith is such a large part of his life.” Trump’s energy secretary Rick Perry called his boss “the chosen one.” And conservative radio host Wayne Allyn Root compared the president to “the second coming of God.” Rather than ask Trump to conform to their “Christian” values, they appeared to adapt Trump’s values to their own belief system. Yet no hypocrisy was as audacious as that of Vice President Mike Pence, who had once proclaimed, “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican—in that order.” He stood by Trump’s side after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. He remained by the president’s side after evidence emerged showing that Trump paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels and $150,000 to Karen McDougal to conceal his affairs. He provided Christian cover to an administration that locked migrant children in cages and separated them from their families. He never chastised the president for praising racists in Charlottesville, extorting a foreign government for his personal benefit, or telling nearly thirty thousand documented lies in office. And for all the decades of right-wing complaints about the immorality promoted in the secular liberal media, almost no one said a word as the supposedly Christian president of the United States attacked his critics with decidedly un-Christian words like “human scum,” “son of a bitch,” “horseface,” “lowlife,” and “enemy of the people.”
Trump succeeded by converting self-described “values voters” into “nostalgia voters,” according to Robert P. Jones in The End of White Christian America. Personally, I’m not sure if they needed to be converted. When Barack Obama was president in 2011, only 30 percent of white evangelicals said that an elected official could fulfill his public duties if he had committed an immoral act in his personal life, according to a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution. But by October 2016, after Trump became the Republican presidential nominee, the figure had jumped to 72 percent of white evangelicals, who were suddenly willing to overlook a public official’s immoral activities.
Given the differences in behavior and values between Trump and his predecessor, it became abundantly clear, for those who did not already know, that morality was not the guidepost of the modern Republican Party. In Trump’s case, Republicans overlooked his blasphemy, his vulgarity, his infidelity, his avarice, and his lack of basic human empathy because it suited their political needs. With Obama, they started questioning his faith as soon as they heard his name. Trump’s quick hatchet job had completely destroyed the first leg of the GOP stool. Those who remained loyal to Trump and pretended to be motivated by Christian morality were exposed as frauds. After all of Donald Trump’s moral transgressions and his refusal to grow, learn, or apologize for them, if your faith allowed you to believe that he was a God-fearing Christian and Barack Obama was not, your faith was white supremacy.
Next came the economic conservatives. During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to balance the budget “relatively quickly.” Without offering any detailed plans or specifics, he assured Fox News host Sean Hannity you just need to “have the right people, like, in the agencies and the various people that do the balancing.” But instead of reducing the deficit, Trump nearly doubled it, even before the coronavirus pandemic struck. In President Obama’s last full fiscal year of 2016, the national deficit was $585 billion. By 2017, the number had jumped to $666 billion. In 2018, it reached $779 billion, And by 2019, the federal deficit soared to nearly $1 trillion. The steep rise in the deficit during the Trump administration started long before the pandemic forced the nation to shut down.
Trump also promised he would magically eliminate the entire $19 trillion national debt in two terms by renegotiating trade deals and stimulating economic growth. But at the end of his only term in office, the national debt had grown from $19 trillion to nearly $28 trillion. Even before the coronavirus epidemic hit in 2020, the debt had already grown by $4 trillion during a period that Trump falsely described as having “the greatest economy in the history of our country.”
Trump was never particularly concerned about “out of control spending,” which had been the alleged sin of the Obama administration when the Tea Party was formed in 2009. Trump boosted defense spending, demanded billions of dollars for a new wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for, launched a new “Space Force” program, pledged not to cut Social Security or
Medicare for seniors, and promised an elusive but significant $1 trillion investment in the nation’s infrastructure. This pattern, along with his $1.9 trillion tax cut that primarily benefited corporations and the wealthy, contributed to the staggering rise in federal deficits in his administration. The only two ways to balance a budget are by increasing revenue or decreasing spending. Trump refused to do either. His tax cuts reduced government revenue, and his funding priorities allowed government spending to continue unabated. But where was the Tea Party when all of this was happening? Where were the angry protests in the streets of Washington? Where were the CNBC commentators ranting about rising deficits from the floor of the nation’s trading exchanges? They were gone, waiting for the next Democrat to enter the White House before they would rise again.
Just as Trump’s personal depravity exposed the hypocrisy of the moral conservatives, the rise in government spending, debt, and deficits in the Trump administration revealed the economic conservatives to be frauds as well. They were never truly concerned about fiscal discipline, and the only government spending that seemed to bother them was spending on low-income people or people of color or on any other Democratic Party priority.
Trump’s final attack on the three-legged stool came with the national security conservatives. For decades, Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush had argued that Republicans were resolutely devoted to national security, while Democrats were portrayed as weak on defense. In the 1970s, they blamed Jimmy Carter for surrendering the Panama Canal and failing to retaliate against Iran during the hostage crisis. In 1988, they questioned Army veteran Mike Dukakis’s patriotism. In 1992, they attacked Bill Clinton for a Vietnam War–era letter he wrote explaining “how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military.” By 2000, they continued the argument even as Democratic Vietnam War veteran Al Gore faced George W. Bush, who had avoided service in the war. In 2004, they attacked Vietnam War hero John Kerry. And in 2008, when Republicans nominated Vietnam War hero John McCain, they boastfully compared his military service to Barack Obama’s failure to serve, even though Obama had been only four years old when the war began.