N Word, please! – Trump’s Black male voting strategy

“Do I have to say his name?” He had held his hand up to indicate to the host he intends to vote for Trump, as did a couple of others in the focus group of undecided voters. I had seen the same reluctance in other focus group panels – they’re shifting in their chairs, they’re shaking their heads in disbelief at what they’re about to say on national television, but they’re now in front of a hot mic and they have to articulate their reasoning. They avoid eye contact with the rest of the group – they can feel the heat, they heard the gasps and sighs when the host said “I see a few hands go up.” With great difficulty, with varying levels of rationalising, through pained expressions betraying inner turmoil, the Black men reveal their socially carcinogenic confession: they will vote Trump.

These were Black men who may have held their nose and voted for that phony, shrill shill, Hillary the first time round out of the pressure of expectation and my guess is – voting against their gut – had regretted it. Did they feel like whipped little whimpering bitches for having being nagged and cajoled and guilted and fooled into voting for such a repulsive doyen of the beltway? – surely. He wasn’t nearly as bad, or even as insufferable, as Hillary would have been. Maybe they even voted Biden/Harris out of misplaced partisanship. This time however there seems to be shift. Those Black men aren’t towing that rope until they’re dead, those homies aren’t playing that game no more; and the message that Kamala Harris is a change candidate, brings joy, and is a middle class saviour is being met with something akin to “whatya talkin’ ‘bout Willis!?”

Oprah’s big show with Harris last week cemented Oprah as an incredible class act unlike anything in her field, however by comparison Harris was eclipsed as a faint, weak, wannabe starlet. Even in a highly scripted forum Harris’s responses were unconvincing. Maybe to women the grinning and the chuckling and the superficiality were compelling, but to a man? Huh. Nah-uh. A young Black man asked her what specifically are you going to do to strengthen the border? Her answer to that simple and direct question started with a typically patronising female response: “what a wonderful and important question…” She’s lost the men before she’s begun by the infantilisation. She immediately attacked Trump and drifted off into some nonsense. Oprah had to bring her back to an answer – Christ, how embarrassing, the ineptitude of it. Totally scripted and she still couldn’t answer a straight question – astounding.

Her answer was that if Congress presented her with a Bill the same as what Trump had phoned up the Republicans earlier this year to defeat then she “would proudly sign it” into law. She emphasised proud as if her pride was the key factor. Cue applause. The women might be applauding, but my guess is the men are thinking: nah-uh. What sort of a bullshit answer is that? As vain as Trump but with even less comprehension. Every answer she had was either: Congress will write a Bill and I’m going to sign it into law, or I will prosecute them. Those are not thoughtful answers, not practical answers and they are not answers fit for anyone who seeks to be President. They are answers you give when you don’t know how or what you are doing. I think men saw this for what it was – flaky as fuck – did women?

Her background, or “career” as she frames it, is as a prosecutor, but reality is those jobs were political offices elected in a Democrat one-party state where success cannot therefore be measured in election or re-election and her one-trick pony mentality of assuming the answer to everything is prosecution is perhaps the worst answer as that deals only with the very end of the chain and addresses nothing of the cause and prevention. Her answer to the cost of living was to prosecute price-gouging corporates… but everyone knows that isn’t the cause of inflation. Same to the bluster about proudly signing things into law – that entails leaving everything up to a Congress that odds on will not be Democrat-controlled. All she has to do is sit in the Oval office and sign Bills? That is patently ridiculous and yet that is her stock reply. She doesn’t mention Presidential executive orders at all! She failed so cripplingly badly on the answer to the border it is staggering. Her approach to the two major issues, cost of living/affordability and border/immigration, is to be proud as Congress writes a Bill and the DoJ prosecute food producers. It is laughable. I think the men can see this farce for what it is, I think women on the other hand just want to see a woman in the oval office regardless of competency.

From a male perspective the gender barrier was breached when Hillary won the popular vote in 2016 – that cherry has been popped at least psychologically. Obama won first in 2008 so the racial ceiling has been breached. So to a man’s way of thinking the novelty of a Black woman is not so much of an issue, those hurdles have already been taken by increment. Moving someone who happens to be a Black woman from VP to P is not a circuit-breaking game-changer in a Black man’s mind as it may be in a Black woman’s mind.

The copycat rhetoric and tactics that the Harris campaign has adopted to match Trump and to neutralise policy have also failed. And we know they have failed because they have been muted or down-graded shortly after, which has left the impression of the Harris team being both devoid of policy and insincere in executing what they claim they now endorse. The “no tax on tips” being the most obvious example policy-wise and there are plenty of examples slogan-wise including the hypocritical use of “fight” (as in “when we fight we win”). Hillary had done much the same shameless flip-flopping in her campaign with the repudiation of the Trans-Pacific trade agreement she had worked on for years. There is just zero credibility in this. Do women think there is credibility in it – is that the difference in explaining this phenomenon? Galvanising women does not seem to me to be the pathway to victory for Harris – I think she has that female vote locked down already – and some of the positioning and her continued weak performance is turning off men and in particular Black men. This is where it gets interesting.

My guess is Trump taking a bullet proved his metal, his character – for all the faults, chronic through to comedic – to a Black male voter. He gave them the Covid cheques – that is a refrain heard in most focus groups. Prices of everyday goods were lower under Trump – everyone acknowledges that. He ended the endless wars that Bush and Hillary (and Harris-endorsing Cheney) and the Washington establishment had foisted on the American taxpayer and no-one doubts Biden’s war in the Ukraine will be ended swiftly by him if he wins in November. Trump, despite his temperament, is still a known, predictable force. Harris is known for what? For not knowing. For refusing to do interviews because she is a giggling empty-headed bimbo – tell me it ain’t so? We know it is so. There is no other reason for not doing interviews. It is a plain self-evident fact. She couldn’t even give reasonable answers in her own orchestrated Oprah sit-down for fuck sakes. The question is whether the unknown depths of Harris’s ineptitude and incompetence is better or worse than Trump’s known depths of dystopian administration.

After reviewing the last few weeks I have firstly come to the conclusion that Trump’s campaign has identified Black men as the key to victory and this explains some otherwise inexplicable decisions, and secondly that his courting of the Black male voter is progressing better than can be measured. The polling undercounts Trump because people – especially Black people as mentioned above in the televised focus group example – are unlikely to disclose their intentions.

What else was Trump’s interview session with three Black women at the National Association of Black Journalists last month if not an appeal to Black men? How else to account for such an unconventional and on the face of it suicidal encounter? The kamikaze gambit with its predictable outcome only makes sense if it was an appeal to the Black male voter. Anthony Scaramucci (the 11-day wonder as Trump’s communications head) thought whoever booked him into that gig should be fired – and at the time I concurred.

No Black woman would ever change their vote off the back of a white man calling a black woman nasty – as he did, and more – it doesn’t make sense. But to a Black man I suspect the impression is totally different. A white guy such as Trump going into the den of the lion – or panthers in this case – takes balls, very large, hairy – and in this case orange – balls. A woman wouldn’t appreciate that arrogance, they would view it as evidence of misogyny – a man (the type without painted fingernails) however respects it. And a Black man even more so if we are to believe the stereotype they hold of a Black woman’s ‘tude.

It was like a live TV battle sequence of saving Private Ryan – a voluntary and completely unnecessary and hopelessly doomed mission. It was a glorious train wreck, but I have since appreciated what it was and what it has achieved: the dig at Harris not being Black was straight out of a Black focus group and a tickle up of Black male reticence. Several vox-pop and focus groups I have seen since from Black men has confirmed they did not previously know she was Black and were leary about her presenting as such. Shitty – but play it he did. How the cats and dogs and the racial edge in the debate played is less certain, but Trump’s baseline being so extreme his more wild accusations tend to get swept into the brush.

His headway with Black men is steady from what I can garner from the media and socials and I can’t see anything the Harris camp is doing that can change that trajectory. Trump did better in states where they were a deciding factor, like Wisconsin in 2016 when the Clinton’s arrogance took their votes for granted. Trump will be similarly rewarded this time if the Harris campaign dares make the same mistake because he is going all out for their vote.

Trump had been going all out earlier than I had realised. Trump’s invitation to Kanye West to the White House demonstrated his relish for risk-taking for the sake of Black male kudos and although sans a balaclava and professions of love towards Hitler the dialogue in the Oval office still ran like an “Infowars” broadcast, however the association was (at that time) a successful one. He strategically (maybe it was just out of spite) pardoned a Black man that Obama had not around that time from my recollection and this also upped his street cred. The most important alliance though that cut through to Black men was undoubtedly his pick of Ben Carson as Secretary for Housing and Urban Development. The Black audience reaction to Carson is universal warmth. America’s brain surgeon, like Dr Cliff Huxtable without the self-prescribed Quaaludes lurking ominously at the back of the drinks cabinet. He got through the whole term without scandal, he had the temperament not to fall out with the nation’s most irritable chief executive. Carson caught hell from Trump during the Primaries in 2016, but gained Trump’s respect for having survived it with his ethereal calmness. For this and his loyalty I had him picked as a potential VP to Trump this time round and I remain convinced he would have made a better choice than the Hillbilly mascara man he ended up with.

Not all his Black male promotions have turned out so well – two in particular. Trump has made efforts, but I can’t help but think the equal opportunities are more ethnically opportunistic and focused on the colour of a man’s skin and not the content of his character – one comes to mind, the other more goose-steps to mind.

The Black audience reaction to the oft-touted South Carolina Senator Tim Scott is in stark contrast to Carson. In one video I have watched the large audience reacted to each person mentioned by Trump: most spontaneously and affectionately to Carson and most unresponsively to Scott – in fact his name was greeted with complete silence, as in not a single clap, nothing. Have you ever heard a room of hundreds of people just sit in total quiet? It’s unnerving – not even a pity clap, a golf clap, nothing. What level of disdain is it for hundreds of your own people to withhold all generosity of spirit? No booing, I’m guessing out of courtesy for Trump, but they must absolutely despise this guy. The sound of silence has descended too on another Carolinian Trump endorsement, self-described Black Nazi and would-be slave owner Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson. A Black Boss Hogg with a decade-old digital fingerprint left on the “Nude Africa” message board incriminating enough to make “Martin Luther King on steroids” now persona non grata at Trump’s last rally in the state and to make Kanye his new BFF.

As Trump has courted Black men – and more assiduously over the campaign period – Harris has rather neglected them. Abortion has been held up as Harris’s strong point, but that in particular cuts. I think Black men average just as much time as White men in America considering the Roman world. We think back to the Roman law. The man as the patriarch – the ruler. The power to take the life of his wife or his children resting solely in his hands. Harris wants the power to wantonly murder a couple’s children to rest solely in American law with the woman, like it used to under Roe v Wade. Because: my body.  How’s that reversal of unlimited rights to kill his unborn child working out for him? How is her main selling point looking like to him? Is he supposed to just go along with her infanticidal inclinations is he? I wonder.

As I finish this column Harris has just done an interview with Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC now uploaded to Youtube. It’s only 24 minutes. Harris still can’t go even half an hour! That is ADHD-level disability. Last interview she had to have her support St Bernard, Tim Walz, along to sit in, this time it was solo, but Ruhle was supine and gushing the whole way through, throwing in supportive comments and smiling and nodding to every response. She was even mirroring her hand gestures, finishing her sentences. Not an interview so much as a collaboration. So soft and lacking journalistic integrity. The mainstream media are giving Harris the easiest ride imaginable purely because they loath Trump. The artificiality of the hype cannot alone keep her afloat against the currents of events of the next five weeks to polling day. Her runway is limited and Trump is hovering able to block her approach.

Her answers were once again avoidant, once again undetailed, and once again uncritically received. To a man – Black, White or whatever – is her whiney voice, her patronising tone, her idiotic cackle and her desperately underwhelming competency and judgement anything to be joyful about being subject to for the next four years?

Regardless of the actual result this election is set to have the most extreme gender gap ever. In this situation the Black male voters in the swing states will have a disproportionate effect on the outcome and that favours Trump.