Donald J. Trump – Page 2 – Anthony G. Flood

Black Americans and the GOP: An Inflection Point?

The following review was published on Amazon today. If you find it “helpful,” please take the link in the previous sentence and rate it accordingly.

Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberle, Coming Home: How Black Americans Will Re-Elect Trump, New York, Humanix Books, 2020.

Mention the Black Republican vote, and a certain smugness (or despondency) almost always colors the conversation: it never cracked 20%, so goes received opinion; it never will. But one liberal pundit on FoxNews confessed that the African-American outreach of President Trump’s re-election campaign keeps him up at night. Coming Home lays out reasons for liberal concern and conservative hope in sixteen engagingly written and information-packed chapters.

Conservative activists Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberle, who were at first skeptical of Trump, don’t overstate the increase in Black support for the GOP in general and for Trump in particular. They do, however, show how it put him over the top in 2016 in Pennsylvania, a swing state, garnering 20 electoral votes: 140 thousand Black Keystone Staters gave him his margin of victory. That gets the skeptical reader’s attention.

Blacks may be only 12% of Pennsylvania’s population, but more than 20% of them voted for Trump. That was “not supposed” to happen; he was “not supposed” to be the Republican nominee; once nominated, “not supposed” to win the general election. Should Trump replicate this inroad across America by election day 2020, the authors argue, he’ll win re-election in a landslide. (All things being equal, of course, which COVID-19 ensures are decidedly not). To beat him, Democrats will have to do more than intone, “But that’ll never happen.” Republicans need shave only a few points off the Black voting bloc to reduce the Democrats to minority-party status. President Trump Addresses 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit At White House

“One of you will be president!” Donald Trump, Young Black Leadership Summit, White House, October 25, 2019

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To govern is to steer: demonstrably, we cannot govern

“Look also at ships: although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires.” James 3:4

Ships of state are ever careering off the courses set by their human pilots.

Their “governors” can hold things together for, maybe, a generation and stave off annihilation; at worst, they steer the people, wittingly or no, into armed conflict.

By a kind of dialectical irony, they inexorably undermine the very order they depend on.

They manipulate currencies, thereby distorting the signals of markets. They do all of these things for perceived short-term gain.

And the governed go along with their governors whom, ironically, they sometimes have the high honor of electing to high office.

President Donald Trump, America’s kybernesis (1 Corinthians 12:28), is attempting to decelerate social and civilizational decline and reverse certain evil tendencies. Enjoying partial success, he may get re-elected.

(I don’t deny the relevancy to Trump of the Apostle James’s next verse: “Even so the tongue is a little member and boasts great things.”)

But the transient enjoyment I experience is a function of my self-centered projection of my expected lifespan. I’m hoping that the worst possible outcome will occur only after I’m safely dead.

Beneath the waters on which Trump steers the ship of state from one superficial “victory” to another, however, is an undertow of evil. It consists of (to name but a few horrors): slavery, including child sex-trafficking; the African diamond trade; drug trafficking; the predations and designs of the fascist ethnostate of China; radical Islamic terrorism and its state enablers. Let’s not forget the barbarism-promoting communists who are currently vying to replace Trump. There is no permanent escape from any of these scourges in this dispensation.

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“By any means necessary”: pragmatism on stilts

Malcolm X’s contribution to the erosion of American political rhetorical standards lives on, most recently in President Trump’s speech at a rally in Tennessee. But at least he was characterizing the expediency of his enemies.

In 1963 Communist-sympathizer Jean-Paul Sartre penned the words that in English become “by any means necessary.”

Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Ernesto Che Guevara, 1960, Cuba

Their African-American popularizer employed it to everlasting effect the following year. (He was assassinated the next.)

Conflating the necessary with the sufficient, it’s literally nonsense. “Any” doesn’t go with “necessary.”

There is, for example, more than one way to get to Times Square from Grand Central. One can walk a few blocks; or hop on the westbound M42 bus; or take the subway, either the shuttle (one stop) or the No. 7 (two). Each of them will do, but none of them is necessary.

The seductive power of the phrase overrides logic. “By the one means necessary” or “by any means sufficient” lacks punch. What the hackneyed phrase’s users mean is: “What I want is imperative, and whatever achieves it is permissible.” “Whatever it takes,” or “The end justifies the means,” which evacuates “justifies” of meaning.

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