Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been attempting to win over African American voters since the start of his campaign – and has been wildly unsuccessful in this endeavor. In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump described black voters as having “no education” and indicated that the African American populace “could not do any worse” than they were already, citing this as a reason for African Americans to vote him into office and promising improvements.
Trump’s campaign, from the start, has been hallmarked with racist ideology and American Conservative ideals – which is to say pro-white, pro-Western, anti-diversity and anti-social welfare. He has openly spoken against Latino and African American citizens and residents, and cast non-white Americans as being universally impoverished, ill-educated, and lazy. During another interview, he cited the Industrial Revolution as one of the greatest eras of American history, while failing to point out that African-Americans, then still enslaved, were largely responsible for bringing about the Industrial Revolution in the United States.
Trump also refers to the US’ slave era as “the good old days” along with Reagan’s presidency, under which African Americans suffered immensely. Ronald Reagan, like Trump, embraced racist ideology during his presidency. His efforts to turn back the gains made by the Civil Rights Act and the introduction of cuts for programs that benefited many African American citizens, such as school lunches, subsidized housing, worker training programs and TANF resulted in higher levels of unemployment and poverty for African Americans during the Reagan years.
Despite the fact that African Americans – particularly African American women – now constitute the largest group of college-educated citizens in the US, Trump’s assessment of African Americans as having “no education” is not only insulting to the African American collective, but grossly misinformed. Trump’s claim that he can win 95% of the black vote – and currently he only has 2% of African Americans in support of his candidacy – is indicative of either a poor grasp of reality, or else willful ignorance of how hateful his message is to non-white Americans.