Former President Donald Trump has recently claimed that his support among Black and Hispanic communities has surged since his mugshot was taken last summer. This assertion was made during a “Barber Shop Roundtable” voter event on Wednesday, hosted by former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and GOP Representative Byron Donalds. Trump, who joined the event via a call, is also preparing for the first presidential debate of the year.
“Since [the mugshot] happened, the support among the Black community and the Hispanic community has skyrocketed,” Trump said. “It has been amazing, really been amazing.”
The mugshot in question was taken in August at the Fulton County Jail in Georgia, where Trump was processed on racketeering charges related to an alleged plot to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. Trump has often praised the mugshot, calling it “the best” and claiming it has surpassed the popularity of iconic images of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. “It just beat Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra by a lot, by the way. Beat it by a lot. But it’s the number one mug shot of all time — it’s really an amazing thing,” he said.
Trump’s comments about increased support from Black and Hispanic voters have been met with skepticism and criticism. In a previous interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Trump claimed that his support among Black Americans had quadrupled or quintupled since the mugshot was released. However, national public polls do not support this claim. Most polls conducted after the release of the mugshot did show a higher level of Black support for Trump than previous polls, but the increases were within the polls’ margins of error, making it unclear whether there was a genuine improvement or just statistical noise.
CNN identified five national public polls that included data on Black respondents and were conducted after Trump’s mugshot was released on August 24. Four of these polls showed gains for Trump among Black respondents, but the gains were much smaller than the quadrupling or quintupling he claimed. For instance, Trump gained 3 percentage points with Black respondents in polling by The Economist and YouGov, going from 17% against Biden in mid-August to 20% in late August. However, Trump’s favorability with Black respondents was down 9 percentage points to 18%.
Similarly, Trump gained 3 percentage points with Black registered voters between a Messenger/Harris X poll in early July and a survey by the same pollster in late August, edging up from 22% against Biden to 25%. He gained 6 percentage points among Black adults in polling by the firm Premise, going from 12% against Biden in an Aug. 17-21 poll to 18% in an Aug. 30-Sept. 5 poll. He gained 8 percentage points among Black registered voters in polling by Republican firm Echelon Insights, going from 14% against Biden in late July to 22% in late August. All of these changes are within the margin of error.
One of the five polls, by Emerson College, showed Trump’s standing with Black registered voters worsening after the mugshot was released. In Emerson’s mid-August poll, Trump had about 27% Black support in a race against Biden; in its late-August poll, he had about 19% support.
In addition to these polls, The Wall Street Journal conducted a poll from Aug. 24-30, for which detailed demographic results have not yet been released. Aaron Zitner, a Journal reporter and editor, stated that Trump’s level of support with Black voters “didn’t change at all” between the paper’s April poll and this new poll, though Biden’s standing declined slightly within the margin of error.
Exit polls estimated that Trump received 12% of the Black vote in the 2020 election, while a post-election Pew Research Center analysis found that he received 8%.
Trump’s claims have not only been scrutinized for their accuracy but also criticized for their tone. Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC called Trump’s remarks “unbelievably racist” and urged viewers to understand why such comments are problematic for democracy. “Please, please share [these clips] with your Trump-loving friends,” Capehart said. “These clips, well, they actually might like it. Well, have them understand why what we just heard is so unbelievably racist, but also problematic for a democracy. That man should never be president of the United States again.”
Trump’s praise for his mugshot came just hours after he falsely claimed he was tortured at the Fulton County Jail last year. “They tortured me in the Fulton County Jail, and TOOK MY MUGSHOT,” he wrote in a campaign email. However, Trump has turned the situation into a fundraising opportunity, selling coffee cups bearing the infamous mugshot with a suggested donation of $47 or $100, a nod to his chances of becoming America’s 47th president this November. Trump said in September that his campaign had raised $10 million from the image.
Despite these claims, Trump’s history with Black and Hispanic communities has been fraught with controversy. In 1973, his real estate company was sued by the Justice Department for discrimination against African American renters. In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York newspapers urging the state to “bring back the death penalty” in reference to the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino men wrongly convicted of a brutal rape. Even after the men were exonerated, Trump refused to apologize.
Trump launched his political career by becoming the most prominent advocate of the racist “birther” conspiracy theory, falsely alleging that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. During his first year in the White House, after a rally by white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville led to the death of a counterprotester, Trump said there were “some very fine people on both sides.” In 2018, referring to immigration figures, Trump referred to Central American, Caribbean, and African countries as “shitholes” that “send us the people they don’t want.”
Trump won 12% of the Black vote in 2020, more than GOP presidential candidates usually get, but still just 12%. Republicans have been optimistic about recent polls showing more African American support for Trump this time around, along with relatively tepid approval of President Biden. However, in the Democratic primary in South Carolina earlier this month, Black voters showed greater enthusiasm for Biden’s reelection than other Democrats did.
In election after election, the African American vote has been elusive for the Republican Party. The problem is not that there are no Black conservatives; in fact, there are many. It is that the GOP has often faced African Americans with cluelessness or outright hostility. When Republican officials like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis try to censor African American history or when GOP candidate Nikki Haley insists that “America has never been a racist country,” the party’s credibility among Black voters tends to evaporate.
Trump’s crude rhetorical pandering is certainly a different approach, but not in a good way. In his speech Friday, Trump boasted of getting a better deal on the cost of a new Air Force One than the Obama administration had negotiated, a claim that turns out to be utterly false. He asked, “Would you rather have the Black president or the White president who got $1.7 billion off the price?” The crowd of African American conservatives applauded, and Trump boasted, “I think they want the White guy.”
Obviously, I can’t speak for all African Americans. But my prediction is no, not really. No, we don’t.
Source: CNN, The Independent, The Washington Post
