"Finally, the Democratic and Republican conventions are over. Democrats broke ground with the nomination of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), the first Black woman on a major-party ticket, as presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate. They promised a return to decency and public service.
Republicans cobbled together a lineup of Black speakers who observed the etiquette governing Black behavior when in the presence of a White conservative audience: Come across as agreeable and nonthreatening; soft-pedal racism, and paint President Trump as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in disguise. Bless their hearts. The GOP convention, through a tissue of lies, sought to sell the Trump administration as a thing of beauty. It was tantamount to putting lipstick on a pig.
Now to the business at hand: the Election Day firing of President Trump. Reaching that goal won’t be easy.
The Founders’ doctrine of sovereignty — that the United States is governed by the people — is threatened. Trump believes he is the government and thus can do with it as he pleases.
September and October will be battleground months in the coming war. The strategic goal — the vote: for Democrats, to preserve and turn it out; for Trump, to suppress it.
We have trod this road before.
In 2016, Trump campaign officials surreptitiously undertook a campaign to suppress the Black vote, which had favored Hillary Clinton. The suppression effort targeted three groups Clinton needed to win overwhelmingly: idealistic White liberals, African Americans and young women.
A few weeks before the polls opened, the Trump campaign started placing sly and misleading messages about Clinton to demobilize Black voters. Some went out via nonpublic Facebook “dark posts” — “Only the people we want to see it, see it,” a Trump campaign official said. The Russians pursued the same scheme.
Shrinking the Black electorate is high on this year’s Trump campaign agenda as well. They have a bag of tricks.
One that has caught my eye is a group called “Conservative Clergy of Color” founded in June by Bishop Aubrey Shines, who previously founded Glory to Glory Ministries in Tampa. Conservative Clergy of Color describes itself as “an educational nonprofit.”
The group’s expressed aim, however, is political: to show the “rot in our country . . . has festered in the very foundation of the Democratic Party, a party that was built from the ground up on the backs of oppressed blacks.”
The group also claimed on July 29 that it would unleash “a major multi-million-dollar, multi-media campaign” to “expose” Black Lives Matter as an “anti-American, anti-black, Marxist cabal.”
It charges “the Democratic Party has officially aligned itself with the Black Lives Matter agenda.”
Raising millions in one month is quite a feat for a start-up nonprofit.
Shines is no stranger to conservative politics. On the eve of the 2016 election, he told the GOP of Hillsborough County, Fla., that Trump was the candidate Black voters have been waiting for, and produced a video with the provocative title, “Black Pastors Do Not Support Hillary Clinton.” Neither was true, but, my God is a forgiving God.
Shines was not immediately available for comment, but I reached Will Hadden, who handles the group’s client and reporter relations. Hadden called the group “a work in progress” and said that he was not privy to its donor base. Hadden, who recently joined the Shirley & McVicker Public Affairs firm in Alexandria, previously held positions with the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Meanwhile, Trump is working overtime to discredit mail-in voting. He has even said he wanted to limit mail-in voting by refusing new funds for postal operations.
And under the guise of preventing fraud on Election Day, Trump said he would send law enforcement officers to the polls. He has also refused to say he would accept voting results.
Wait, didn’t we hear such noises four years ago?
From my Oct. 21, 2016 column:
“Enter Donald Trump, loudly claiming that the presidential election is ‘rigged’ against him and delegitimizing our democratic process by suggesting that he may not accept the results if he loses. But what he plans to do before votes are even counted should also raise concern,” I wrote.
“Trump has called for his supporters to stand watch at polling places in ‘certain areas,’ a tactic that could be aimed at intimidating and suppressing the votes of African Americans and other minorities,” I suggested.
“ ‘And when I say watch, you know what I’m talking about,’ Trump said at an Ohio rally in August. ‘Watch Philadelphia. Watch St. Louis. Watch Chicago. Watch so many other places.’ ” That was Trump then. He’s selling the same garbage now.
Trump is a skilled manipulator and race-baiter who gets by with coded language and outright lies, and for whom “no” has no meaning.
Will he get away with it again?
Only if voters let him. Democracy defenders, double down."
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