Yes, Trump is an Enemy of Black People

Responding to a Street Vendor

Walking over to participate in a Refuse Fascism event outside the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History in Washington DC last Wednesday, I bought a bottle of water from a very vocal and sharp Black female street vendor who told me that she was “not concerned about the Donald Trump presidency” for three reasons:

· “He’s going to implode and fall apart any day now.”

· “This is on whites. White folks voted for his ass and now they need to vote him out in 2028. White people did this and white people need to fix it. It’s all on you-all.”

· “Trump’s going after brown-skinned Spanish-speaking people mainly. Ain’t got nothing to do with me. Trump’s not coming at me and my people. He’s not coming at Black people.”

I have heard pretty much the same things from a certain small number of Black people on the outskirts of anti-Trump rallies in Chicago.

It’s bullshit.

Let’s dig into this nonsense….

1. “He’s going to implode and fall apart any day now”?

Trump is not close to “imploding.” He’s on a roll and the fascist movement heads from atop the world’s most powerful and dangerous state has shocking direction and momentum. I have been reporting and commenting upon this here at the Paul Street Report (PSR). See my last two posts: “Big Protests and Bad Polling: Trump Doesn’t Care” and “The Big Fascist Budget Bill.”

Americans are in now in grave danger of adjusting to Trumpism-fascism as the new normal. As the liberal anti-authoritarian expat and New York Times columnist Russian Masha Gessen recently observed:

“[There is]…a very human, and in a way very beautiful, desire to normalize, to habituate, to find our footing in any situation, and to keep on living. It’s sort of a great, life-affirming ability that we have, except it has a way of normalizing things that we really shouldn’t live with. I think I first became aware of how it works when I was a war correspondent…you go into a country — if you get there at the beginning of a conflict — for the first few days, people are just shocked. They’re literally and figuratively shellshocked. Their entire way of life has vanished and they can’t believe it’s happening. Then, two, three days in, people are cooking on the sidewalk or having classes in bomb shelters, and it’s routine, and it’s as though it’s always been like this. And it’s this incredible human ability, but it’s also in itself shocking to me…it scares me from the psychological point of view because I think that [Trump] has made a whole bunch of things thinkable in a very short amount of time: summary deportations — well, summary deportations existed before, but these particular deportations that are just spectacularly and intentionally brutal, with people being stuffed into unmarked vans. The attack on the judiciary, the attack on the universities, the attacks on the media, all the stuff that’s stuffed into his ‘big, beautiful bill.’ The decimation of the federal government...None of that is unthinkable anymore because it is actually happening, and so I’m afraid it will be like the effect of habituation to war, where there comes a point very quickly where it’s only military analysts who look at how the front line is shifting this way and that way over the course of days or weeks…Trump has opened all the fronts. I really fear that most people will look at it and, first of all, respond to their subjective feeling that their own lives haven’t changed that much. Or if they have changed, they can still live with it and then stop paying attention.”

Trump and Trumpism will not collapse from within: it will take millions upon millions of Americans to reject normalization of the fascist abnormal and then getting and staying in the streets to remove this maniacal fascist malignancy from power.

2. “This is on whites” + “white folks voted for his ass and now they need to vote him out in 2028” + “white people did this so it’s on white people need to fight Trump.”

White people constructed, imposed, and enforced Black chattel slavery and the proto-fascist racial terrorism of the southern Jim Crow regime (1877-1965). Should Black people therefore not have arisen against slavery and Jim Crow?

Germans backed Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. Was it therefore on Germans alone to defeat the Nazi Third Reich?

Most white voters voted for Trump, yes, but most white American did not. Many tens of millions of US whites hate what Trump is doing to the country and the world. And the neo-Confederate white supremacist Trump (see below) got a significant new level of Black and Latino voter support in 2024.

As Refuse Fascism correctly argues and as I have been insisting here at the PSR, moreover, waiting until 2028 (really until 2029) for the removal of Trump is far too late given the many-sided existential threat he poses to humanity and all prospects for a decent, much less liberated future. The destruction that the Trump regime will inflict on humanity and he planet by then will be too great to justify staying stuck in the US electoral quicksand at present.

At the same time, it is by no means clear that Americans will be free to vote fascists out of office in 2026 or 2028. The Republi-Nazis are working hard and effectively at the federal, state, and local levels to subvert and cancel future elections that threaten their power.

(Here I might add that Trump is constitutionally limited to two terms, though – as the water vendor may or may not know – he is making real threats to run for a third term.)

3. “Trump’s going after brown-skinned Spanish-speaking people mainly. Ain’t got nothing to do with me. Trump’s not coming at me and my people – at Black people.”

Clearly there’s a failure to feel for others at the heart of this comment. Does the street vendor know what “solidarity” means? Does she know what “divide-and-rule” means? Has she encountered the old radical labor slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all”? Has she seen the vides of ICE gendarmes, the Fugitive Slave Catchers of the 21^st Century, ripping Latina mothers out of their cars and homes while their children scream and cry in terror?

Even from her limited perspective, where all she cares about is herself and the racial group with which she identifies (instead of with humanity as a whole), the streety vendor needs to learn from the famous poem by the German Protestant minister Martin Niemoller about how he got played by Nazi divide-and-rule during the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

The street vendor’s version might go like this:

First they came for the trans people, and I did not speak out—because I was not trans.

Then they came for the Arab campus anti-genocide protesters, and I did not speak out—because I was not an Arab campus anti-genocide protesters.

Then they came for the Latin American immigrants and I did not speak out—because I was not a Latin American immigrant.

Then they came for the African immigrants and I did not speak out - because I was not an African immigrant.

Then they came for me—and a whole lot of people were no longer around to speak for me.

Not Attacking Black People?!

At the same, the street vendor and other Black folks caught up in her bullshit do not seem to properly understand that Trump47 and his fascist regime are in fact attacking Black US Americans quite viciously and in many ways. To establish the rule of virulent anti-Black white supremacy, Trump has:

re-exalted the slaveowners’ Confederacy; renamed US military bases after Confederate “war heroes”; pardoned white supremacists who carried Confederate flags into the US Capitol on January 6; purged Black generals and racial diversity programs from the military; appointed white supremacists to key positions; appointed as Secretary of Defense an open Christian white nationalist who belongs to a church headed by a pastor who holds up the time of Black chattel slavery as the best period in the history of American race relations; racially whitewashed government websites and offices; made comments animalizing Black Haitian immigrants; boasted that he has made it so “you can’t even think about” racial injustice in the US military; removed Dr. Martin Luther King’ Jr.’s bust from the Oval Office; suggested that the nation’s first Black president face a “military tribunal”; assaulted the teaching and study of Black and Native American history; granted refugee status to white South African heirs of racist apartheid on the false claim that they are victims of “white genocide”; repeatedly spewed racist lies about people of color being unskilled and unqualified; created a Supreme Court that ended anti-racist affirmative action in college admissions; removed references to Black heroes from US military sites and cemeteries; removed Black literature from federal libraries; commanded the US Justice Department to stop evaluating the disproportionate negative impact of federal policies on Black communities and people when evaluating charges of racial bias – this while slashing federal jobs and social program in ways that disproportionately and significantly harm Black people and communities; issued an executive order making it more difficult for federal authorities to prosecute racist police for killing and maiming Black people; required some law firms to provide pro-bono legal assistance to police accused of racist brutality; ordered the removal from Washington DC streets of a "Black Lives Matter" street mural installed during the 2020 George Floyd protests.

During Trump’s first term, it should be recalled, he praised white supremacist Nazis and Klansman as “good people” and wanted to deploy the US military in the streets to drown the Black Lives George Floyd protests in blood. He praised Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen fascist who murdered two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Black Lives rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin and made a telling special point of visiting Kenosha on the last night of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Trump’s current Defense Secretary, the virulent Christian white nationalist Pete Hegseth, holds his job in no small part because he would do what Trump’s Defense Secretary refused to do in the summer of 2020: send out regular duty armed forces to murder Black Lives and other racial and social justice in “the homeland.”

The street vendor is off base to suggest that Trump is not a virulent enemy of Black America.

King’s Warning

Did I mention that Trump removed Dr. King’s bust from the Oval Office? While leading the Poor People’s Campaign shortly before his death in 1968, King warned that failure to overcome racism, militarism, and savage capitalist inequality through a people’s revolution would bring fascism to the US. “They’ll throw us into concentration camps,” King said. “The Wallaces and the Birchites will take over. The sick people and the fascists will be strengthened. They’ll cordon off the ghetto and issue passes for us to get in and out.” King warned of “a rightwing takeover and a fascist state that will destroy the soul of the nation. To prevent this,” he said, “we’re going to be militant.”

The street vendor is free to think that “me and my [Black] people” people will be exempted from the racist terror of the white supremacist fascist state Trump and his minions are bidding to consolidate this summer. But she’s wrong: the “sick people and the fascists” around Trump and in Trump’s base would love to re-impose full-on Black chattel slavery if they thought they could pull it off.

Just to be clear, I shared most of this counter argument this with the street vendor in question and we ended our discussion on a friendly note and with a fist bump.