By Jesse C. Nelson
With under two months remaining before the U.S. presidential election, it's quite interesting to visit YouTube and type three simple words: "black," "support," and "Trump." You'll find video after video of Black Americans speaking in support of the president and against the Democrats. The likes that these videos garner and comments in the comment section are revealing. While certainly not a majority, a sizable percentage of blacks in the U.S. no longer buy the "Trump is a racist" mythology.
In an allegedly tight presidential race, this voting bloc, once a given for Democrats, can and will make a difference. What the left media called a lighthearted jest made by Joe Biden back in May, when he said, "if you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black," is no joke to many in the black community. Picking Kamala Harris as his vice-president doesn't remedy what some perceive as Biden's decades in public office representing little more than lip service to the black community, in contrast to concrete actions taken by Trump in only three and a half years as president.
A cynic might claim that Trump's recent well-deserved pardoning of Jon Ponder and Alice Johnson, both of whom created programs to help former prisoners reintegrate with society after serving their time, was just to get votes. The problem with this claim is that Trump pushed for and ultimately signed the prison reform bill into law back in 2018. In addition to this, his reform to make directly available SBA-backed loans for black-owned businesses, and his signing of the Future Act this past December, guaranteeing $250 million annually to historical black universities, all flies in the face of the Democrats' fictional racist story line.
Many black celebrities endorse Trump, regarding the left's unproven "racist" mantra as rubbish. Basketball legends Shaquille O'Neal and Dennis Rodman, football legends Jim Brown, Shawne Merriman, and Herschel Walker, boxing legends Mike Tyson, Adrien Broner, and Floyd Mayweather, actress Stacey Dash, rapper and actress Azealia Banks, and the niece of Martin Luther King, Alveda King, have all praised Trump's actions in support of the black community. Beyond that, actual Democrats in power are endorsing Trump, such as black Georgia State Representative, Vernon Jones.
The fact is that many in black communities don't support defunding the police or Black Lives Matter's anti-traditional families. The Democrats' tactic of blaming unrest in cities under their control for decades on Trump, as opposed to their own decades of mismanagement, has backfired. Candace Owens and Brandon Tatum are just two of many black voices easily heard in the media and online opposing BLM. With groups like Black Voters for Trump, one easily sees Republican inroads made in the black community that won't be erased.
The message is best crystallized by black Republican candidate Kimberly Klacik, whose campaign ad about decades of corrupt leadership in Baltimore has gone viral. "The days of blindly supporting Democrats," she states, "are coming to an end."
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