(C) Common Dreams
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‘They see strength’: The Black sports icons shaping Donald Trump’s take on race, politics, and masculinity [1]

['Https', 'Www.Semafor.Com Author Kadia-Goba']

Date: 2024-06

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — The road to understanding Donald Trump’s appeal to a segment of Black America — and his hopes of winning back the presidency by pulling a few precious votes away from Democrats — runs through Trump’s Black friends, a loose set of iconic sports figures from the 1980s.

That, at least, was the impression I got from his campaign when I set out to interview Trump about his apparent gains with Black men, a group of voters who some public polls show are more likely to consider backing him this year. Trump’s aides wouldn’t promise a meeting with the former president just yet — instead, they started setting up interviews with older athletes who are supporting his campaign.

Not long after, I got a call from Mets and Yankees slugger Darryl Strawberry. That was the beginning of an odyssey through the heroes and villains of my childhood: Over the next few weeks, I chatted with heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, stood backstage at a Trump rally with retired NFL star Lawrence Taylor, and traveled to meet boxing promoter Don King in person. Eventually, I talked to Trump himself.

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These men, now aged 57 to 92, would make unlikely spokespeople for almost any other candidate and they mostly aren’t known for their politics. But they do have a lot in common with Trump. They were household names at the same time as Trump’s New York heyday. They were frequently in the tabloids, often for the wrong reasons, and it took a push from the campaign to persuade some of them to talk to a strange reporter. Nearly all of them had faced serious legal issues, including several criminal convictions.

I met Trump six days after his own felony conviction, in the “Great Room” at Mar-a-Lago. He had just finished a sit-down with Dr. Phil. I asked him, among other things, what I should take away from his warm relationship with the Black men who had been singing his praises to me.

“They see what I’ve done and they see strength, they want strength, okay,” he said. “They want strength, they want security. They want jobs, they want to have their jobs. They don’t want to have millions of people come and take their jobs. And we — that’s what’s happening. These people that are coming into our country are taking jobs away from African Americans and they know it.”

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I reminded him I was talking about millionaires, not working stiffs worried about immigrant labor. He conceded, jokingly, that Don King was not at risk of being replaced.

Their relationships came up more directly after my next question, when I asked how he responds to Black voters who call him racist.

“I have so many Black friends that if I were a racist, they wouldn’t be friends, they would know better than anybody, and fast,” he told me. “They would not be with me for two minutes if they thought I was racist — and I’m not racist!”

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We’ll find out in November if Trump wins this argument. He lost Black voters by a 92-8 margin in his last election, according to a Pew Research study, despite high hopes for a breakthrough that cycle. In 2016, he settled for boasting that fewer Black voters had showed up to the polls that year, which he said was ”almost as good” as their support.

But while he hasn’t succeeded yet, Trump was getting at something noteworthy in our conversation. A common obstacle to outreach for Republican politicians is that they’re often from cloistered, white spaces where they don’t have many interactions with Black people. That’s not Trump’s issue: He’s had famous “Black friends,” as they say, throughout his career, even as he was constantly dogged by accusations of racism at the same time. The people I spoke to weren’t passing acquaintances, either. They had made deals together, weathered crises together, and shared family gatherings together. One had even chaperoned Don Jr. on a trip to Disney World.

And while a handful of aging Reagan-era celebrities obviously aren’t a stand-in for all Black people, and especially the rank-and-file voters who actually decide elections, they do represent a recognizable part of Black culture that Trump has long been plugged into. His success in the election may partly depend on whether, in this shifting cultural moment, there are enough Americans thinking about the election the way Mike Tyson does.

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[1] Url: https://www.semafor.com/article/06/13/2024/they-see-strength-the-black-sports-icons-shaping-donald-trumps-take-on-race-politics-and-masculinity

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