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Trump
Updates to the Midterms:
Russian
President Vladimir Putin went to Helsinki earlier this week to make
a political ‘booty call’ on U.S. President Donald J.
Trump at their alleged summit. Although Putin was two hours late in
arriving, his date was not concerned because Putin had already paid
Trump for his services which he delivered with a smile on his face.
Trump’s
performance at the supposed summit was so disgraceful that several
of his Republican allies privately labeled him Putin’s bi**h,
c**t, and belly warmer. Putin has taken control of Trump’s
mind and body, turning him into a Manchurian candidate that he has
unleashed on America.
Chuck
Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leaders in the U.S. Senate and
House, respectively, have refrained from criticizing San Bernardino,
California Deputy District Attorney Michael Selyem for a Facebook
post urging violence against Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA)
after she encouraged civil disobedience against Trump’s staff
and cabinet members, stating, “you would think someone would
have shot the bitch by now.”
Donald Trump has added
a new tool to his political arsenal—pardons and commutations of
those charged and convicted of crimes. He has reached out and
distributed them to several members of his rabid white base: pardons
for former Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of
criminal contempt of court; and E. Scooter Libby, chief of staff to
former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was convicted of obstruction
of justice and perjury.
Trump
also commuted the sentences of Harney County, Oregon ranchers
Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond, who were convicted of starting
fires on public lands; Dinesh D’Souza, convicted of illegal
campaign contributions, who is a highly regarded conservative
commentator and filmmaker; and Sholom Rubashkin, convicted of money
laundering. These efforts were widely praised by Trump’s
working- and upper-class supporters, energizing support for
Trump-backed local, state, and national candidates.
In an attempt to
improve his image among African Americans, who only gave him eight
percent of their votes in 2016, Trump pardoned the deceased Jack
Johnson, America’s first black heavyweight boxing champion who
won the title in 1908. Johnson was falsely convicted of transporting
a white woman across state lines for sexual purposes, under the Mann
Act in 1913, a law designed with him in mind. White America’s
rank and file and power elite were angry at Johnson for violating the
racial norms of that time by openly dating and marrying white women.
Trump also commuted the life-without-parole sentence of Alice Marie
Johnson, a first-time offender, who had served twenty-two years in
prison for her peripheral involvement in cocaine trafficking. He
also eagerly pointed out that former President Obama had refused the
clemency petitions of both individuals.
After Trump’s
apparent show of compassion, Kwame Kilpatrick, former Mayor of
Detroit, Michigan, who is serving a 28-year term for committing 24
federal felonies, while in and out of office, posted a thousand word
petition on Facebook asking Trump to commute his sentence. An
emissary of Ray Nagin, former New Orleans Mayor, convicted of wire
fraud, money laundering, and bribery followed suit with a request for
a commutation of Nagin’s 10-year sentence. Neither request was
acknowledged after Trump’s advisors determined that these two
men are largely reviled in the African American community for their
crimes.
But the recent proposal
of the U.S. Justice Department to reopen the investigation of the
1955 kidnapping and lynching of 14-year old African American
teenager, Emmett Till, in Money, Mississippi has generated positive
feelings in the black community. Like Jack Johnson conviction 42
years earlier, Till’s abduction and murder was based on his
alleged flirting with and supposed proposition of a white woman,
Carolyn Bryant, a clerk in a general store in violation of the
existing social code.
It is indeed ironic
that Emmett’s father, Louis Till, was court martialed and
hanged in Pisa, Italy in 1945 by the U.S. Army towards the end of
World War II for the professed rape and murder of an Italian white
woman (see John Edgar Wideman’s book, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File , in which he questioned the
sentence). The information on Emmett’s father’s outcome
was later used to “… to tar
(him) with his father's (claimed) crimes … and …
essentially portrayed Emmett as a serial rapist after the fashion of
his father, thereby justifying his murder.”
Dr.
Harry Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of
California, Berkeley and Dr. Timothy Tyson, Senior
Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke
University, who got Carolyn Bryant Donham to admit that her
accusations against Emmett Till were untrue, have concluded that the
Justice Department’s reopening of the Till case is “…
a political mirage of Trump racist regime’s hucksterism and
fraud” and
“…
a
calculated attempt on behalf of the Trump administration to improve
its civil rights profile in the face of negative news about immigrant
children …
and
with continued efforts to undermine minority voting rights,”
respectively. Meanwhile, Cedric Richmond, chair of the Congressional
Black Caucus, has endorsed the Justice Department’s action.
Emmett Till’s
murder is broadly credited as the event that launched the 1950s civil
rights movement. It has been written that Rosa Parks was thinking of
him when she sat down in the white section of an Alabama bus in 1955,
sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
As an add-on, the Trump
Administration’s Education Department has
fully forgiven loans granted to four historically black colleges and
universities (HBCUs), Dillard University, Xavier University, and
Southern University in New Orleans and Tougaloo College in
Mississippi that were substantially damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita in 2005. They had collectively taken out more than $360 million
in loans in 2007 to recover from the destruction caused by these
storms.
Trump
had earlier used HBCU Presidents as a photo-op when he invited them
to the White House to discuss HBCU funding (which he did not do)
during the first months of his Presidency. Perhaps, this action was
a belated payback. All four HBCU Presidents praised Trump for his
forgiving their loans which removes pressure from their cash flow.
Trump has a two-pronged
political strategy with these pardons and commutations and loan
forgiveness. The first is to gin up voter turnout among his white
working-class voters, the white economic elite, and those white
independents and moderates who provided him his victory margins in
2016 in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, ensuring his election
by the Electoral College. He and his advisors believe that these
actions will further endear him to these groups and enable him to
stimulate fundraising for House, Senate, and state legislative
members standing for reelection in the 2018 midterms and to enable
Republicans to retain political control at the federal and state
levels.
The second component of
the political strategy is to neutralize African American anger at
Trump for his harsh anti-black statements and toxic policies in
social welfare and public education (spearheaded by Education
Secretary Betsy DeVos). By issuing a pardon and commutation to two
well-known African American figures and forgiving loans of four
HBCUs, it is hoped that black voter turnout in the midterm elections
will be depressed as there will be less anger toward Trump. In
addition, Democrats have yet to put forth a galvanizing message or
coherent strategy to increase black enthusiasm to vote. However,
their biggest missteps are to treat several of their minority and
female candidates with disrespect in terms of financial and human
resource allocations and the failure to invest funding in getting out
the vote.
There is an opportunity
for Democrats to take back the House, but that possibility is fading
quickly as the Democratic leadership remains in disarray.
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