Love when it counted

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Columnist

The first Black female Republican Congresswoman passed away last week at the age of 49. Mia Love began her public life as a neighborhood activist who got involved in politics for all of the right reasons, just as she stood up as a voice of integrity against Donald Trump’s hijacking of the moral center of the GOP.

The daughter of Haitian immigrants, she understood – and articulated – the critical importance of those who come to this country seeking a better life. She took on the president when he denigrated immigrants who share her skin color – Haitians particularly. Mia Love fearlessly pointed out the racist underpinnings of some of Trump‘s rhetoric, and she paid a huge political price for her integrity.

Love started out as a community activist in Saratoga Springs, Utah, in an effort to persuade the developer of her neighborhood to spray against flies. Then, in 2003, she won a seat on the Saratoga Springs City Council. She was the first Black female elected official in Utah County, fixed a massive budget deficit and went on to become mayor of the town. She ran twice for Congress, winning on her second bid in 2014.

When Trump won the presidency, Love very openly questioned his rhetoric and policies. As a direct consequence of the hostility emanating from the Oval Office, she lost her reelection in 2018 to Salt Lake Democratic Mayor Ben McAdams by just 694 votes or razor thin margin of .258 percent – due to GOP defections. Following her defeat, President Trump mocked Love, saying, “Mia Love gave me no love, and she lost.”

In her concession speech, Love hit back at Trump, saying that he and others in the Republican Party had not done enough for minority voters, arguing, “This election experience…shines a spotlight on the problems Washington politicians have with minorities and Black Americans – it’s transactional. It’s not personal. Because Republicans never take minority communities into their home and citizens into their homes and into their hearts, those voters stay with Democrats and bureaucrats in Washington because they do take them home, or at least make them feel like they have a home.”

Congresswoman Love observed how far her party had come from Reagan’s “city upon a hill” inspirationalism as well as George W. Bush’s welcoming attitude towards immigrants by embracing MAGA and Trump. To the dismay of some liberals, she also observed that denigrating decent men like Reagan and the Bushes as “fonts of selfishness and malignancy on the republic” made Democrats seem to be “crying Wolf” when they used the same arguments against Donald Trump. At the historical moment when those warnings were most needed, few swing voters were willing to believe them since they had been so overused and abused by progressives.

Mia Love stood out as one of the only major Black politicians who could make that argument consistently, as both a supporter of both Reagan and Bush as well as a child of minority immigrants herself. The personification of American exceptionalism, her death at the age of 49 to brain cancer leaves the American body politic far poorer.

This article originally published in the March 31, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.