But African-Americans were sceptical. In the 2016 election, Trump won only eight per cent of the black vote, failing to dent the long-standing ‘black wall’ of support behind the Democratic Party. Few, doubtless, had forgotten that Trump had launched his political career during the Obama administration by peddling the ‘birther’ conspiracy that the nation’s first black president was a Kenyan-born Muslim ineligible for the White House. Nor did the Republican Party itself inspire confidence in African-Americans. A striking feature of the GOP convention in 2016 was the near absence of black faces: fewer than twenty of the nearly 2,500 delegates, and only three of the sixty-three speakers, were black.

There was a history behind this lack of black representation. Republican outreach efforts to black America had failed miserably in the preceding decades. Notwithstanding the rise of a number of prominent black Republicans, most African-Americans continued to view the GOP as wholly unsympathetic to their interests. Having been loyal to the Republican Party as the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Fifteenth Amendment – the 150th anniversary of which is marked this year – African-American electoral support for Democrats was once as unthinkable as many today imagine it to be for Republicans. Alliances began to change in the 1930s with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s largely symbolic politics drawing many African-Americans towards the Democrats, and further consolidated in the 1960s when Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson passed Civil Rights legislation aimed at undoing segregation and ensuring the exercise of voting rights in the South. From here the new constellation of loyalties crystallised, with Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate in 1964, running almost exclusively on an anti-Civil Rights Act platform, and Republican leaders since then prioritising southern white conservative support over the political issues that mattered to most African-Americans. Such a ‘Southern Strategy’, initiated by Goldwater and extended by Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, succeeded in bringing disaffected whites into the party, but alienated black voters.

President Trump supporter wearing a Black Voices for Trump shirt at the rally in the Bojangles Coliseum, 2 March 2020 (Jeffery Edwards/Alamy)

Over the past four years, despite his pledge, Trump has failed to make clear inroads into the black community. In 2020, his approval ratings with African-Americans remain unimpressive, with racial turmoil one of the main storylines of his presidency. Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests have exploded across the nation and received worldwide attention. Never one to shy away from a fight, Trump has sprayed rhetorical fuel on these racial fires. He has presented himself as the law-and-order president (an allusion to Nixon) who will quash the BLM ‘anarchists’, ‘terrorists’, and ‘looters’ and restore calm to the nation’s streets. He has condemned BLM as a ‘symbol of hate’, despite the fact that eighty-six per cent of African-Americans ‘strongly support’ or ‘somewhat support’ the movement as a legitimate response to racial injustice. Trump has also provoked the ire of African-Americans in other ways: for example, defending the heritage of the slave-holding South; retweeting a video of a supporter yelling ‘white power’; implying widespread voter fraud in cities with sizeable black populations; and denigrating Caribbean and African nations as ‘shithole countries’, when more than fifteen per cent of black Americans are the children of immigrants.

In 2019, the sole black Republican in the House of Representatives, Will Hurd, announced that he would not seek re-election in 2020. Solidly conservative and widely viewed as a future star in the GOP before Trump’s election, Hurd’s explanation for stepping down was clear: ‘The party is not growing in some of the largest parts of our country … Why is that? I’ll tell you. It’s real simple. Don’t be an asshole … Don’t be a racist … These are real basic things that we all should learn when we are in kindergarten.’ According to polls, at least eighty per cent of African-Americans share Hurd’s view that the president is racist (at the time of writing, there has been no formal poll on whether the president is an asshole). Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham went further, declaring Trump one of the two most racist presidents in American history alongside Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.

For his part, Trump insists he is ‘the least racist person in the world’ and has done more for black Americans than any president since Lincoln. He points to the strong backing he has received from a vocal band of black supporters who have chided his critics and lauded his achievements throughout his presidency. Yet close attention to black voices within the Republican Party and to those around him reveals that, rather than uniting black supporters, he may have brought further division within his own ranks between traditional black conservative GOP supporters and a new cadre of black Trump loyalists.

For decades, conservative African-Americans aligned with the Republican Party have laboured in the wilderness as ‘a political minority within [their] racial group, and a racial minority within [their] political group’, as historian Leah Wright Rigeur reflected in a recent article by Afi Scruggs for USA Today. As such, they have often found themselves the focus of suspicion and unfair derision. Being ‘black and Republican was about as compatible as being black and aspiring to leadership in the Ku Klux Klan’, quipped the editors of the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, in 1976.

In reality, moderate black Republicans are under no illusions about America’s racist past and the problems that African-Americans continue to face. Rather, they have worked for decades within the GOP to expand the boundaries of conservatism to accommodate and support black aspirations. In contrast to the soundbite politics of the brash black Trump supporters, moderate black Republicans draw inspiration from ideas and values deeply embedded in black history and articulated by black leaders across the generations from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington and even Malcolm X. Many have clung to a vision of the GOP as the ‘Party of Lincoln’ and support an approach to black advancement that prioritises, as Booker T. Washington did, self-reliance, educational development, economic empowerment, and moral respectability – over the ‘big government’ liberalism favoured by the Democratic Party.

Others, even if not subscribing to a ‘Booker T.’ ethos, emphasise a political calculus, as Jesse Jackson did in the late 1970s, that stresses the importance of two-party competition. African-Americans, said Jackson, need to ‘pursue a strategy that prohibits one party from taking us for granted [the Democrats] and another party from writing us off [Republicans]. The only protection we have against political genocide is to remain necessary.’ Echoes of this argument were heard at the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC) when black Republicans called out Joe Biden for his remark in May: ‘If you’ve got a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black.’

At the same convention, African-American speakers provided forceful endorsements of what they saw as Trump’s achievements for black Americans. They recounted how he had delivered the lowest black unemployment rate in history prior to the pandemic. They praised him for the record funding he had provided to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). And they celebrated Trump’s First Step Act, which has paved the way for the early release of non-violent black offenders disproportionately impacted by the harsh Clinton-era Crime Bill. For a president routinely accused of racism, the RNC was an image-softening exercise to present Trump as a true friend of black America, at least to white Republicans. And yet the show of support at the RNC obscured the dilemmas and divisions posed by the differences between the small but significant strand of traditional black conservative support for the GOP and a new group of black Trumpist ideologues and culture warriors who have come to the fore in recent years.

One of the most visible in this latter category of Trump’s black supporters has been thirty-one-year-old Candace Owens, a highly combative political ideologue who, in 2018, founded the ‘Blexit’ movement to encourage an African-American exodus from the Democratic Party. Described by Trump as ‘a very smart thinker’ who is ‘so good for our country’, Owens boasts more than six million followers on Facebook and Twitter and is a Fox News regular. She describes BLM as a movement of ‘whiny toddlers pretending to be oppressed’ and ‘a trash organisation that has nothing to do with black lives’. She accuses liberals of cultivating a ‘victim mentality’ in African-Americans to entrench black dependency and trap black voters – like modern-day slaves – on the Democratic Party’s ‘plantation’. For Owens, the key to black America’s ‘second escape’ is the seemingly all-powerful Trump. As she tweeted in 2018, ‘I truly believe Donald Trump isn’t just the leader of the free world, but the savior of it as well.’

These are unconventional views for an African-American to hold; in the case of Owens, they are especially puzzling. This is the same Candace Owens who, in 2015, railed against the ‘bat-shit crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party’, before stating: ‘The good news is, they will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope) and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen.’ In her rapid about-face, and in her use of messianic language, Owens sounds increasingly like other ‘true believers’ in a party built increasingly around personal loyalty, if not around a personality cult. African-American sisters ‘Diamond and Silk’ – two of Trump’s ‘most loyal supporters’, in their own words – have undergone a similarly dramatic political conversion from registered Democrats in 2012.

The high-volume noise from such Trump ideologues contrasts with the painful dilemmas experienced and quiet exits chosen by many long-time black GOP members. Take Gregory Cheadle, whom Trump referred to as ‘my African-American’ at a campaign rally in 2016. Cheadle did not attend the 2020 RNC. After nearly twenty years as a registered Republican, Cheadle made the decision to leave the party in 2018, dismayed by the president’s rhetoric on race and his use of black people as ‘political pawns’.

Higher-profile black Republicans, including former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, and former GOP Chairman Michael Steele, also stayed away, harbouring similar reservations about Trump’s politics, character, and fitness for office. In a decision that neither Powell nor Steele could have taken lightly, each has endorsed Biden for president. Powell explained his reasoning directly, focusing on governance and fitness for office: Trump ‘lies all the time’, disrespects the Constitution, and represents a serious threat to American democracy. Steele identified Trump’s exploitation of racism as his main concern. A member of the Republican Party since 1976, and a man with solid conservative credentials, he recently joined the Lincoln Project: a national movement of prominent Republicans dedicated to defeating Trump in 2020.

While the presence of Owens and co may convince a small portion of concerned white Republican voters that Trump is not racist, African-Americans who support the president will likely do so for other reasons. They will look past Trump’s alleged racism (if they indeed accept that charge) not because they endorse prejudice against their own people, but because they believe the president’s policies on issues such as unemployment, criminal justice reform, and judicial nominations will serve black interests more effectively.

Beneath the clamour of this chaotic presidential campaign, one unintended achievement of Trump’s first term seems clear: rather than uniting and forming a more potent electoral bloc, black Republicans find themselves increasingly divided.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.