Trump is an Existential Threat to Young Men of Color

And Why Trump won't apologize to the Central Park Five

With less than two weeks before the most consequential election of our lifetime, one that could signal the dissolution of the American experiment, Vice President Harris is finally taking her support among young African-American men seriously. Let’s leave aside, however, the Dadaist campaign promise to protect the crypto wallets of black men. That Trump is a threat to democracy has been well documented; that Trump is a threat the lives of young men of color, less so. The question of how many black men will vote for Trump is something the Harris campaign is taking seriously this week and her schedule provides the evidence. The Vice President this week unveiled her “Opportunity Agenda For Black Men” on The Shade Room; she agreed with radio host Charlemagne tha God that Trump is indeed a fascist; she discussed Trump’s dismal record in real estate with Roland Martin.

Trump’s business acumen, as every New Yorker knows, is what can only be properly construed as doubtful. Harris pointed out on Roland Martin’s show this week that Trump was handed $400 million “on a silver platter,” yet filed for bankruptcy six times. The Vice President stretched the truth here a smidge — but not by much. That figure covers the length of his life with his father; the number of bankruptcies, however, is perfectly on point. “The Times’ investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day,” was the conclusion of the paper of record.

The Harris campaign today got some favorable news, after Trump’s Univision Town Hall debacle. A poll released by The Economist/YouGov showed Harris leading Donald Trump by 60 percent to 35 percent among Hispanic U.S. adults, a 25 percentage point margin. It will be interesting to see if that number tilts further Harris, considering that Trump doubled down on the lie that Haitians are eating pets, “and other things too that they're not supposed to be,” in front of the Univision town hall with Latino voters. I am fairly sure that Trump’s University of Pennsylvania education did not impress upon the dunce the fact that Haiti is, in fact, in Latin America. (Averted Gaze)

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign’s outreach to black men comes as the Times this week warns that black voters are shifting, “imperiling” her campaign. A little breathless, Gray Lady, but let’s delve! MSNBC’s Joy Reid yesterday argued that the Times/Siena poll contradicts September’s Howard University poll on black swing state voters, as well as the CBS/YouGov poll, which found that the Harris campaign is on track to do as well as Biden did with black voters. Reid makes a solid point on the Times’s oversampling, concluding:

“Clinton — Dole got 15% (of the black vote); 2000 when Al Gore was running, Bush got 12%; you can go to 2004, McCain got 5%; Romney got 11%; Trump got 14%; Trump got 12% in 2020. There are simply 11 to 14% of Black men who have been Republican since ‘68. So you can keep finding those same brothers over and over again. But that is not a trend.”

Quite right — and a head nod to the 11 to 14 percent of African-Americans that — how does one put this kindly? — think different. But, two points: One, when Barack Obama ran in 2008, he held McCain to 5%, and Two: This race is going to be breathtakingly close, so every vote matters, more so than in those other races Reid brought up. And Trump’s outreach to black men is an ongoing, though dubious project that has made some significant and disturbing gains among young black men in particular, of late. Further, the Howard University poll cited also bears this out. From Stephanie Penny and Curtis Bunn of NBC News:

The data, from a new Howard University Initiative on Public Opinion poll of 963 likely Black voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the seven core battleground states in the election — show 82% say they’ll vote for Harris, while 12% say they’ll vote for former President Donald Trump. 

… Meanwhile, Black swing-state voters with college degrees support Harris over Trump by 73 points, while Black voters who aren’t college graduates support Harris over Trump by 68 points. The poll finds that younger and less-educated voters are more likely to support Trump.

Just over a quarter (26%) of men under 50 without college degrees said they’ll vote for Trump, compared with 67% who said they’ll vote for Harris … When it comes to Trump, voters said his positions and agenda on the economy (18%), his positions and agenda on immigration (17%), his record in business (16%) and his record as president (16%) will make them more likely to vote for him. 

The Harris/Walz campaign has been hugely effective in highlighting the threat to reproductive freedom that a second Trump Presidency poses to women, but far less so regarding his threat to the autonomy of the bodies of young men of color, especially on the matter of stop and frisk policing. And it should — every day, not just this week — because those young, black and brown votes in swing states could tip the election Democrat, even more so than moderate Republicans on the fence. “Trump has a long history of racism—and his Project 2025 plan would give him virtually unchecked power over Black Americans’ lives and bodies,” the Kamala Harris Twitter account stated on Indigenous People’s Day.

So much to unpack here. And, yes, while Howard University’s polling sample is small, it shows a problem with Black men that clearly the Harris campaign feels the need to address. Latino men, bless them, appear to have come around from previous vote erosion. However, Trump-curiosity among young African-American men — a quarter of them, according to the  Howard University Initiative on Public Opinion poll — is particularly confounding considering that Trump is literally evangelizing a nationalized stop-and-frisk policy. This is even after the fact that in 2013 a judge found stop-and-friskiness to be against the US Constitution. Not that Trump has ever cared a whit about the US Constitution, but still …

What is Trump’s plan for black America? “Trump-curiosity” as a mode of being for young African-American men is a venture in triviality. “He will be dangerous every time you get in the car and you deal with the issue of driving while Black,” Senator Warnock said at a Georgia rally this week. Trump will unleash all of the anti-black and anti-brown forces that lurk within law enforcement like poisons in the mud against black and brown men. Donald Trump is, quite frankly, an existential threat against young men of color.

The infamous ad

This is the same thuggish Trump who in 1989 paid for and placed a full-page advertisement in four New York City newspapers calling for the execution of five innocent teenagers! The so-called Central Park Five — Korey Wise, 16, Kevin Richardson, 14, Raymond Santana, 14, Antron McCray, 15 and Yusef Salaam, 15 — were all kids of color. None of the boys had previous criminal records. Despite the fact that there were no eyewitnesses connecting the boys to the crime scene or even DNA evidence, all were convicted. "I recently watched a newscast trying to explain the 'anger in these young men,' Trump wrote of these innocent young men of color. "I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid."

They spent hard years in prison for crimes they did not commit. A decade later, serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed to attacking the 28 year old woman, Tricia Meili. DNA evidence ultimately confirmed that confession. It was further found that the confessions of the Central Park Five had been coerced. In 2002, their convictions were vacated and the city paid $41 million in 2014 to settle their civil rights lawsuit. Trump, to this day, refuses to apologize for the atmosphere of fear he helped create. What do Republicans have against apologizing when they are, as human beings are from time to time, wrong? Even worse — not just wrong, but a poisonous wrongness amplified to hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers against young black and brown men.

TrumpWorld exists almost entirely to appeal to men, but his appeal to black and brown men should be called out for its absurdity. “Any African American or Hispanic that votes for Kamala … you’ve got to have your head examined, because they are really screwing you,” Trump said this week. And yet Trump cannot be man enough to apologize to the so-called Central Park Five. From Politifact:

During Trump’s presidency, on June 18, 2019, a reporter asked him, "Will you apologize to the Central Park 5? They've been exonerated. There have been videos and movies shown about the case, and you came out with a full-page ad saying that they should die, that they should have the death penalty. Do you apologize?"

Trump responded, "Why would you bring that question up now? It's an interesting time to bring it up." 

When the reporter noted the recent release of Ava Duvernay’s Netflix documentary "When They See Us," Trump continued, "You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt. If you look at Linda Fairstein, and if you look at some of (the) prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case. So we'll leave it at that." 

Black and brown men who are considering voting for Donald Trump should, at the very least, demand an apology for Central Park Five. If Trump was man enough to call for their execution in the pages of every daily newspaper in New York City, he should be man enough to apologize to Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray and (NYC Councilman) Yusef Salaam. Finally, this also might be a question for journalists — or Bro podcasters — to ask of Trump.

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“Elon Musk has given nearly $75mn to help Donald Trump’s bid to win back the White House, as the world’s richest man tries to influence the outcome of next month’s US presidential election. Musk made several multimillion-dollar donations during the third quarter to America Pac, his political action committee, according to a federal filing released on Tuesday, giving the group a huge budget to support Trump’s re-election bid. The group already spent more than $96mn boosting Trump, according to the independent non-profit OpenSecrets, and about $10mn more helping Republicans in congressional races … Trump also gained major financial backing from Miriam Adelson, wife of the late casino developer Sheldon Adelson, who gave $95mn to her pro-Trump super Pac Preserve America, according to another filing on Tuesday …Other top donors to Musk’s America Pac include billionaire tech entrepreneurs Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss; early Tesla investor Antonio Gracias; Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale; Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire; and Doug Leone, a former managing partner at the firm. America Pac has hired canvassers in battleground states including Pennsylvania and Michigan. Its website claims that pay starts at $30 an hour. The group is also offering people $47 — the next US president will be the 47th — ‘for each registered voter you refer that signs a petition pledging support for the First and Second Amendments’ of the US Constitution, which protect free speech and the right to bear arms respectively.” (Alex Rogers and FT)

“NBC's Brandy Zadrozny is out with a remarkable ‘window into the disinformation pipeline: where the most successful false claims originate and how they spread.’ She shows how Russian disinfo is reaching the U.S. and in some cases finding ‘enormous American audiences, top political influencers and even members of Congress.’” (Reliable Sources)

“The ‘Japanification’ of China continues to be a big theme, with a lot of eerie parallels right down to stimulus proving wanting … Yep, the 30-year government bond yields of China and Japan are on the cusp of crossing paths for the first time (ever, we think, but LSEG data for both 30-year benchmarks doesn’t go further back than 2009). At pixel time there’s still a 10 basis point spread between the two long-term bond yields, with the Chinese 30-year yielding 2.245 and the Japanese 30s trading at 2.144 per cent. But it looks like that won’t last long. Shorting Chinese government bonds really has been the new widow-maker trade. The fading yield curve differential is another stark manifestation of China’s growing economic and demographic malaise, and Japan’s (for now) success in finally winning a three-decade battle against deflation.” (Robin Wigglesworth/FT)

“At the start of the month, in a broader announcement about its latest AI features, Microsoft quietly unveiled Copilot Daily which ‘helps you kick off your morning with a summary of news and weather, all read in your favourite Copilot Voice’. It goes on to explain how ‘Copilot Daily will only pull from authorised content sources… such as Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazines, USA Today Network and Financial Times’. Publishers are being paid – although on what terms we do not know – for content when it is used in Copilot Daily. This low-key announcement represents a real moment of significance for the news industry. For some time it has been clear that generative AI can be used to create highly-personalised information services; the technology is really good at selecting and synthesising content from a large dataset, based on a set of parameters. But this is the first time these capabilities have been deployed in a news context by a major AI developer, with financials attached for the content creators. This matters for three reasons. Firstly, services like this give rise to a new set of intermediation risks. Secondly, these risks bring to the fore licensing decisions for publishers which are strategically consequential in the era of AI disruption. Finally, it adds to the pressure on Google’s faltering relationship with publishers, particularly around AI Overviews.” (David Buttles/Press Gazette)

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