Praise Be

Gulp.  I am about to praise Donald Trump.  Didn't vote for him and there are many things I dislike about his personality but am moved to write this because of a recent piece by Evan Barker, a young woman from a impoverished background who worked on the campaigns of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and voted for Donald Trump this year.  The article, which you can read here, explains her political journey, but it was an anecdote she tells at the end that caught my eye.

Leaving Donald Trump's official election night party at the Palm Beach Convention Center she writes:

As the night in Palm Beach, Florida, melded into Wednesday morning, and dawn neared on a new day in America, I crawled into the backseat of my cab to return to my hotel. My cabbie was a middle-aged black man. I asked him how he felt about the night. Giddily, he exclaimed: “READY to make America great again!”

When I asked him why he didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, he answered: “She just didn’t speak to me. It’s like she was pretending to speak like a black person. It felt fake.”

“Trump,” he concluded, “speaks to all of us the same.” 

Whatever else negative I think about Trump, that last sentence is completely accurate.  Donald Trump does not care if you are black, white, red, or any other color (other than green!).  He will treat you the same.  If you praise him, he'll praise you back in the same way regardless of color.  If you attack him, he'll attack you back in the same way regardless of color.  He will not stop to think, "maybe I should say something different because of this person's color".  In this regard, Trump's actions and reactions are authentic. 

I'm reminded of a study done by the Yale psychiatry department a few years ago.  It looked at the comparative speech patterns of self-identified white liberals, moderates, and conservatives when speaking with whites and blacks.  The study found that moderates and conservatives tended to speak with whites and blacks in the same way, while liberals tended to "simplify" their language when speaking with blacks.

The racist label Democrats have tried to pin on him is just wrong, and ironic considering the Democrats own views on the merits and demerits of different races.  Trump is egalitarian in both his praise and abuse of people.  He's the guy praised by Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton when he was a Democrat.  While Trump was president I read both his official White House and personal twitter feeds, because I could not trust what was being reported in the media.  On occasion I would stop reading the personal feed when Trump went on one of his bizarre middle of the night rants, but overall I found it interesting how much of both feeds was filled with events featuring black and Hispanic people.  His administration provided record funding to Historically Black Colleges & Universities.

He was subject to some deliberately outrageously inaccurate reporting by the media when it came to race, most notoriously the "very fine people on both sides" remarks regarding Charlottesville in 2017.  As I came to realize when reading the full transcript of his remarks a couple of years later, he twice stated he was not speaking about neo-nazis and white nationalists, going on to call them "bad people".  Yet, this year, Joe Biden and Barack Obama both cited the out of context remark.

I think he crossed the line in 2016 in an incident I wrote about in What Would Otter Do? in which I also noted that if Democrats were correct in their views on race, then Trump was correct in his remarks.  Since I think the D's are wrong I thought Trump was also wrong.

One other thing I remember.  In the 1990s we lived in Palm Beach County, Florida.  Donald Trump purchased Mar-a-Largo in 1985, converting it into a members only club in 1994.  Shortly after, a local magazine published an article about Trump's new venture.  It reported that the snobby, exclusionary, and conservative residents of Palm Beach island didn't like having the club, thought Trump was crude and gauche, and also didn't like the fact that he had opened membership to blacks and Jews.  As I said, the only color Donald Trump really cares about is green.