Don’t be duped by Trump’s claims of Black support

The big news in Black politics is about young Black voters supposedly abandoning President Biden. Last week, former President Donald Trump took advantage of this, celebrating on his website after a Black Lives Matter activist endorsed him.

Don’t fall for it. This frenzy is an example of “gaslighting” — of fumes being pumped into the air by conservatives to dizzy, distract, and make you doubt reality itself.

Black voters prefer Biden over Trump by a ratio of at least eight-to-one in most polls.

The real threat to Biden among Black voters is low voter turnout. And efforts to discourage Black people from going to the polls are being fueled by voter suppression efforts coming out of Republican legislatures.

Those GOP legislatures are making it harder to register voters, limiting the use of ballot drop-off boxes and cutting the number of voting sites. Their goal is to lower minority turnout.

The latest evidence of this behind-the-scenes war on non-white voters comes from a right-wing group, the Honest Elections Project.

They appear to stand with Trump Republican voters, who continue to believe false claims that the 2020 election was stolen due to voting irregularities in areas with lots of minorities who vote for Democrats. 

Jason Snead, the group’s executive director, told the New York Times that the Voting Rights Act was “never intended” to stop Republican-majority legislatures from enacting “election integrity laws and redistricting practices.”

“So far this year,” the Brennan Center for Justice reported in October, “at least 14 states have enacted laws making it harder to vote….Over the past three years, states have enacted restrictive voting laws at breakneck speeds, and that trend continues in 2023.”

And now Republicans want to stop liberal activist groups from going to court to fight the suppression of minority voters.  

The Voting Rights Act is being “misused by private plaintiffs,” to maximize the power of the Black vote, the Honest Elections Project argued to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The organization blamed aggressive protection of Black voting rights for “a precipitous drop,” in trust among Republicans in the fair outcome of elections.

The irony here is that the people who are being charged with interfering with the 2020 elections are Republicans, including Trump. Just last week, two Republicans in Arizona were indicted for trying to delay certification of the 2022 midterm results.

But two conservative federal judges on the Eighth Circuit last week gave Republicans a win by agreeing that only the U.S. Attorney General, and not citizens or civil rights groups, can bring lawsuits protecting minority voters.

Arkansas’ Republican legislature was being challenged by the state’s NAACP, for drawing a map of state legislative districts that failed to reflect the Black population of the state. Their map had only 11 state legislative districts with a majority of Black voters. The NAACP argued that proportional representation for the state’s Black population required 16 such districts.

Black voters in Alabama won a similar case that went to the Supreme Court in June. The high court ordered Alabama to redraw its congressional districts to better reflect the state’s Black population by creating a second Black majority congressional district. 

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled earlier that anyone — including left wing legal groups and Black activists — can bring lawsuits challenging voter suppression under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is supposed to protect the rights of Black voters when they face voter suppression tactics.

Ten years ago, the Republican-nominated majority on the U.S. Supreme Court had already weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act by ending Federal “pre-clearance” of changes to voting rules in states with a history of voter suppression.

That ruling inspired the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s famous dissent: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Last week, Trump celebrated his endorsement by the Black Lives Matter activist by boasting that he has “done more for Black people than any other president [Lincoln?]…”

It is worth keeping in mind that, in 2020, Trump had called a “Black Lives Matter” sign a “symbol of hate.” Later, he said the group was “discriminatory,” and “bad for Black people, it’s bad for everybody.”

Trump and his acolytes have launched vicious personal attacks against the two Black women prosecuting him, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis. He has called them “racists.”

As race once again comes to the forefront of a presidential campaign, it is worth remembering that Trump began his political career as a viable presidential candidate by pushing racist, false conspiracy theories about President Obama’s birth certificate. 

Trump’s recent pledge to “root out…vermin” in his second term calls to mind authoritarians who disenfranchise and inflict violence upon racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. 

Trump has enabled violent racists such as the Proud Boys and the rioters from January 6 who carried the Confederate Flag as they stormed the Capitol.

The GOP’s attempt to keep Black voters away from voting will be an important story about race next year.

Don’t be “gaslit.” 

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.