The implication that black male voters will warm to Trump only because he is the target of law enforcement betrays a sordid assumption about black men.
Donald Trump has been criminally processed four times now, culminating in the release of his Fulton County prison mugshot. Some credible political analysts see Trump’s arrests as a net benefit to his primary campaign, but fewer believe Trump’s ordeal will prove to be anything other than a drag on his political prospects in a general election against the incumbent Democratic president. That does not describe “militant activist and bank robber” Craig Scott, who insists that the former president now can lay claim to something his likely Democratic opponent cannot: “street cred.”
Scott, a beneficiary of the clemency provided to certain offenders under the 2018 First Step Act, offered this observation in a Newsweek op-ed. “Trump’s repeated run-ins with the law, and what seems like an unfair obsession with catching him and punishing him disproportionately for his so-called ‘crimes,’ reminds a lot of us of what was done to us,” the “formerly incarcerated actor, militant activist, and filmmaker” wrote. “Just ask any popular public figure how to establish ‘street cred.’ They’ll tell you: Get arrested!”
Scott concludes by asserting that the former president’s “arrests have made Trump relatable to the 5 million people in America under some form of supervision by the U.S. criminal legal system.” The writer’s gratitude to Trump notwithstanding, there’s an unbridgeable gulf between Trump’s alleged misdeeds — mishandling of classified documents, misleading investigators, and conspiring to defraud government agencies, among dozens of other criminal charges — and being convicted of conspiracy to distribute more than 100 grams of heroin.
Moreover, the idea that there is no “better way to make a billionaire relatable” than arresting and releasing him on a six-figure bond is doubtful. Six in ten arrestees are detained pre-trial because they cannot afford bail. And when their sentence concludes, people “on probation are much more likely to be low-income than those who aren’t, and steep monthly probation fees put them at risk of being jailed when they can’t pay,” the Prison Policy Initiative observed.
What Scott implies throughout his piece, he makes specific in the final paragraph: “In 2020, President Trump got the votes of 18 percent of Black men,” he writes. “Don’t be surprised if he gets more in 2024 if he’s the GOP nominee for president.” The implication that African-American men will warm to Donald Trump only because he is the target of law enforcement betrays a sordid assumption about African-American men. Even if we take his stipulation at face value, it is not well supported.
A Quinnipiac University poll conducted between Trump’s third and fourth arrests found that two-thirds of black Americans agreed with a majority of America’s voters that Trump’s “federal criminal charges” were “very serious.” Still more African-American voters (74 percent) said a person who has been convicted of a felony should not be eligible to assume the presidency of the United States. A mid-August Fox News Channel–sponsored survey produced similar results. Sixty-three percent of nonwhite (as opposed to white or Hispanic) voters said Trump made his own mess when he did “something illegal.” Fifty-seven percent of “non-white men” agreed.
But doesn’t that still suggest that a sizeable minority of black voters remain open to Trump’s candidacy? Perhaps, but that’s not an impression that Trump’s past electoral performance can support. He drew 12 percent of the African-American vote in 2016 and 13 percent in 2020. Both were substantial improvements from the GOP’s performance in presidential elections when Barack Obama appeared on the ballot, but they are less impressive when compared with the 11 percent of the black vote George W. Bush secured in 2004.
A steady erosion of the Democratic position among black voters was observable before Trump’s arrest, and that trend may continue in 2024. It could be attributed to any number of factors, all of which have more explanatory power than the notion that running afoul of the law has made Trump more appealing to black voters. Indeed, that theory compels its theorist to reduce black voters to one-dimensional caricatures, all of whom, the theory suggests, have had some bad interaction with law enforcement and harbor lingering resentments over it. The thesis says more about its author than its subjects, and what it says isn’t flattering.