“I have done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Donald Trump has claimed on multiple occasions. “Nobody can dispute it.”
Well, lots of people have examined his record and drawn a dramatically different conclusion. Here’s what they have found.
The economic recovery from the Great Recession that started under the Obama administration continued during the first three years of Trump’s presidency, benefiting Black as well as white Americans. In 2019, Black unemployment fell to 5.9 percent, a historic low.
That same year, the poverty rate for all Americans plummeted to 10.5 percent, the lowest since 1959. The rate for Blacks, who comprised 13.2 percent of the population and 23.8 percent of America’s poor, however, remained stubbornly high at 18.8 percent, in part because the Trump administration tightened eligibility requirements for food stamps. Jobs held by Blacks were still concentrated in industries offering lower pay, inadequate health insurance and sick leave, and fewer opportunities to move up.
Touted by the Trump administration, “Opportunity Zones” failed to benefit Blacks living in low income and undercapitalized neighborhoods, with most of the funds subsidizing high-end apartment buildings, hotels and student housing. And regulations issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development made it more difficult for Blacks to prove discrimination in housing.
Trump’s botched response to the pandemic fell disproportionately on Black Americans. Holding one out of every six “essential” front-line jobs (in health care, grocery, public transit and warehousing sectors), they were at higher risk of exposure and severe disease. 40 percent of Black-owned small businesses shuttered during the early months of the pandemic. In May 2020, Black unemployment reached 16.8 percent.
As the Trump administration worked to undermine Obamacare — cutting in half the enrollment period, slashing the advertising budget for the ACA by 90 percent, ending federal appropriations to reduce deductibles and out-of-pocket medical expenses — the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 3 million between 2017 and 2020, many of them Black. Blacks were six times more likely than whites to be denied hospital treatment, and their death rate was twice that for whites.
In many areas, the Biden administration has delivered more for Black Americans than the Trump administration did. When the peak pandemic period (April 2020 to October 2021) is excluded, Black unemployment averaged 5.86 percent under Biden and 6.65 percent under Trump. Black homeownership averaged 42.2 percent under Trump and 45.4 percent under Biden. Black labor force participation was higher under Biden. Contrary to false claims by some Republicans, take-home pay adjusted for inflation rose three times faster for Black workers when Biden was president. The percentage of Blacks without health insurance fell while Biden has been president, hitting a record low in 2022 of under 10 percent.
The First Step Act, claimed by Trump as one of his signature achievements, was designed to help rehabilitate incarcerated Americans and reduce recidivism. Trump’s Department of Justice, however, tried to set higher standards for and freeze applications from those seeking early release. Thus far, the program has had a negligible effect on the prison population.
Trump opposed renewal of the Voting Rights Act and continues to support restrictions on voting access that affect millions of Black citizens, including an end to mail-in ballots, a return to one-day in-person voting and a requirement for an ID that one out of every 10 Americans say they do not have or cannot readily produce.
Most important, perhaps, Trump has trafficked in race-based stereotypes for decades. In 1989, after a brutal assault on a jogger in Manhattan’s Central Park, he took out full-page ads demanding the death penalty for the five Black and Hispanic teenagers accused of committing the crime. Although DNA evidence and the confession of a convicted rapist and murderer resulted in their exoneration and release from jail in 2002, Trump has doubled down. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty,” he declared in 2016. “The fact that the case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.” Trump repeated this claim in 2019.
Trump also spread the lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. In 2018, Trump derided immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, Africa and other “s—hole countries,” while expressing a strong preference for encouraging Norwegians to come to the U.S. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, he wanted the military to “crack skulls” and “beat the f—” out of protesters demanding social justice. “Can you just shoot them?” he asked Attorney General Bill Barr and Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When Barr and Milley pushed back, Trump said, “Just shoot them in the legs or something.”
“I know what it is to be a young Black man without a voice,” Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, wrote in 2016 (Salaam is now a member of New York City Council, representing Harlem). And, no doubt, he knows what it’s like to have a president of the United States who doesn’t respect Black people or want to help them attain the rights and opportunities granted to their fellow citizens.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
