Money shouldn’t buy the presidency or your vote

A pro-Trump non-profit has come up with a rather crass way of courting the African-American electorate for the incumbent, impeached president. “The Urban Revitalization Coalition” hands out envelopes of $300 to $500 each. Will the petty largess work to buy a portion the Black vote? Or will the vast majority remember Charlottesville this November?

Officially, the Trump administration disavows any connection to the group, yet December’s “Christmas Extravaganza” event in Cleveland featured a $25,000 giveaway and an appearance by Ja’Ron Smith, a deputy assistant to the president. A Cleveland native who worked on Trump’s criminal justice reform, Smith is among the highest-ranking Black officials in the White House.

He led the giveaway, where recipients whose winning tickets were drawn from a bin landed cash gifts in increments of several hundred dollars, stuffed into envelopes. Moreover, Urban Revitalization Coalition’s CEO Darrell Scott, a Cleveland-based pastor, has stood as one of Trump’s closest and most prominent African-American supporters. He struck up a relationship with the real estate mogul in the years before Trump’s presidential run, and – along with Trump’s former lieutenant Michael Cohen – co-founded the National Diversity Coalition for Trump to promote his Presidential bid. Subsequently, he has been a fixture in the West Wing, appearing at the signing ceremonies for Criminal Justice Reform and the Urban Opportunity Zone tax credits.

Nevertheless, a Trump spokesman claims that the president’s re-election campaign “has no knowledge of or affiliation“ with the URC’s cash giveaways. Even when the coalition’s co-founder Karim Lanier handed a wad of cash to a lady dressed as a Christmas elf, who declared, “Four more years of President Trump. Yay!,” after receiving her gift, they pled ignorance. Sure.

Even when Lanier compared the impeachment of the president to the plight of wrongfully incarcerated Black men, exclaiming, “President Donald Trump – the one that they say is racist – is the first president in the history of this country to incentivize people who have the money to put it into… urban areas,” he said. By the way, Lanier held a meeting with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as recently as February 2018, Politico discovered according to the Defender News Service, and his coalition held an event with endangered Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, whom Trump pulled out all of the stops to save his re-election, in Louisville, Ky. the following month. But, it’s an independent effort.

It’s likely that many of the recipients of the envelopes of hundreds will simply take the cash and vote for the Democrat. However, if Trump can woo just a small percentage of Black voters in key states, or persuade some of them to sit out the election rather than vote against him, it could work with a small, critical segment of the African-American electorate in closely contested races.

The president did do better with Black voters in 2016 than Mitt Romney four years before, and while his campaign’s official African-American outreach arm might not be passing out dollars, his surrogates, as they praise sentencing reform and inner city investment, also stress Trump’s anti-immigrant message.

Tragically, their words could have some effect, if the Black electorate does not remain vigilant. A portion of the African-American community historically has been somewhat hostile to Hispanics and other immigrant groups. Competition for jobs, downward pressure on wages, and decreases in the pool of affordable housing has sometimes engendered ugliness towards newcomers whose only real crime is the thirst for a better life.

For unemployed Black men under 35, whose levels of joblessness rival the Great Depression and whose rates of incarceration resemble many totalitarian states, having an ethnic group to blame is seductive – perhaps enough to stay home on Election Day.

Low Black turnout is what made the difference in Trump’s election in 2016, and might again. The wads of cash certainly do not hurt. Still, the African-American community could be devastated as a result of this apathy. Judges appointed by Trump have already catastrophically undermined voter access and civil rights protections. Ending Affirmative Action probably ranks next on the agenda, based on the results of recent lower court rulings.

The next president will appoint two Supreme Court justices and perhaps as much as a third of the federal judiciary, due to the advanced age of many of those on the bench. Who sits in the Oval Office makes all the difference to the civic future of Black Americans.

The Urban Revitalization Coalition plans a series of more cash giveaways over the next year.

This article originally published in the February 3, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.