(For four years, Donald Trump’s media castle appeared unbreachable. Black women won the House of Representatives for Democrats in 2018; they are coming across the moat in much bigger droves in 2020. He is the one trembling now, and for a good reason.)
Here are some election year stats to print out and paste on your refrigerator door when you wake up at night sweating and trembling over Trumpism and the November election. If you watch the corporate media, you will not be familiar with them:
Since 2000 the citizen voting-age population of women of color has increased by 59 percent – a gain of more than 13.5 million potential voters. By contrast, none-Hispanic white women voters increased by just 8 percent during the same period. In 2018, turnout among women of color surged by more than 15 percentage points compared with that of the previous midterm elections in 2014.
This makes women of color and especially black women of color, one of the largest single voting blocs in America. And the single greatest threat to President Trump’s re-election. They are more than a threat. They are a giant bulldozer roaring right toward his throat.
By contrast, Fox News, the angry old white men’s prime news source and President Trump’s personal cable news network, reaches approximately one percent of all Americans, averaging 2.5 million total viewers in prime time and peaking at 3.3 million viewers for Sean Hannity.
Those numbers are a reliable indicator of what is happening in American politics right now.
Black women have perhaps given up on waiting for the men to grow some more balls, and have gone after Trump themselves, and with skill, savvy, and ferocity.
Trump is being challenged by some tough, relentless, and fearless women. Most of them happen to be black.
Washington, D.C.Mayor Muriel Bowser is one, there are others: PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor, former secretary of state Condoleeza Rice, Sen. Kamala Harris, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and former Georgia Gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams. A fair list ought to include Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who is white, but who also has stood up to Trump and made him look week and powerless.
I have news for you, useful if you dislike Donald Trump, bad if you love him. Black women are about to wipe up the floor with him in November.
The challenge for people depending on corporate media to understand this country is that corporate journalism no longer spends enough money so reporters can talk to real people.
Their corporate owners are too busy writing fat checks to stockholders, and the reporters are left to reading one another on Twitter and hoping to be interviewed cable, which is about all they can afford to do.
Most of these media institutions richly deserve to die, pecked to death by digital media, and their inability to cope with a President elected to break all the rules.
You can watch cable news for a very long time and not see anyone remotely like yourself. Or have any decent idea about what is happening in politics.
As a result, every single element of the news we depend on was stunned by Donald Trump’s presidency and by the scope and depth of the Democratic victories in 2018. That was journalism’s shabbiest hour.
What precisely is the point of our media if they can’t tell us what is happening?
Since reporters mostly sit behind computers if studios these days, prepare to be stunned once more this year. The corporations defanged them long before the President arrived.
Donald Trump has made a revolution all right, but not the one he intended.
When President Trump began his campaign, and after taking office, he began a savage attack on journalism, calling any criticism of him “fake news” and labeling reporters “enemies of the people.”
He explained to friends and reporters he knew that it was nothing personal – Trump reacts out of self-interest, not a conviction. “I do it,” he told one interviewer, “so that when they say bad things about me, nobody will believe them.”
And that, good and patient readers, was a prophecy that came to be true.
Almost everything critical about Trump that was reported in the media was ignored or disbelieved by nearly every one of his millions of followers.
That wall is cracking also.
Stuck to their he-said, she-said traditions of “objectivity,” the media mostly paralyzed themselves, turning outrage into argument, bigotry into debate and corruption into routine. His angry face and orange next are everywhere, all the time
The coverage of Trumpism has been frightening, not informative, a 24/7 Super Bowl that has gone on for years now.
The Trump presidency degenerated into a cloud of left-right rhetoric and rage and argument; the poor voters have no way to understand what is happening.
And Trump himself has suffered from avoiding different opinions and challenging ideas. A leader can’t grow that way; he can only shrink.
Trump ended up believing his own propaganda and confusing it with reality. Political reporters say that his lean and bold campaign machine in 2016 has been replaced with a huge, bloated bureaucracy much like elements of the government itself.
Everyone who works there says it’s no fun.
Trump was utterly unprepared for the truth all around him now. He just wants to win the same kind of victory he won four years ago. Sadly for him, it doesn’t work that way.
Black journalists all over the country are in rebellion, not just about Trump, but about what remains of journalism itself. Time to speak some truth, they say.
For people who care about politics, and for the once proud and powerful national press corps, this new kind of politics has taken a frightening turn.
Donald Trump’s own ironclad personal media machine – his 80 million person Twitter account (many of those “viewers” are believed to be computer bots, not people) and Fox News, the country’s first state media channel, changed the way politicians communicate with the public.
These were innovative twists on media by Trump and his advisers. They also doomed him, because they shut out so many other kinds of people.
He never understood or tried to persuade anyone outside of his incestuous circle, and no one out there understood him.
For him, fawning media coverage and drooling Fox News acolytes was self-defeating and destructive; it just fueled his narcissism and hubris. He depends on long and often nasty speeches and stadium rallies to fire himself up. They are tired, same old song.
Trump has no tools to deal with this new reality. Whatever he tries looks insincere and programmed. We know him too well, he just talked to us too much
You just can’t win over a nation overnight, especially if you can’t get away with conquering them with soldiers.
I always liked Theodore Roosevelt’s meditation on what it takes to be a leader.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Politics is about many things, and one of the most important is character. Trump’s character is taking an awful beating these last few months.
He’s paying for that now, big-time.
Until this year, this media wall – Trump’s private universe – held fast. That is changing. And those smart and “nasty” black women are breaching the walls.
Women in general and black women, in particular, have broken through this wall and crossed this moat, sparked by the coronavirus Pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and the President’s very foolish and public challenge of black women in power.
Writing in the Washington Post, Petula Dvorak reminded us this week – I hadn’t quite put all the pieces together until now – that one of Trump’s Achilles Heels is that he “absolutely cannot deal with a smart, accomplished black woman doing her job. It’s not hard to bring out the worst in Trump, but black women do it well simply by being who they are. And speaking the truth.”
He’s called NPR’s Alcindor “nasty,” and “rude” and “something else,” part of the reason people hate the media. He called Muriel Bowser “incompetent,” and a whiner and beggar.
Mayor Bowser is now one of the most prominent black women to challenge Trump and turn his instincts for drama and publicity against him. She’s mastered the art of the reality show as political theater.
No other national political figure had yet figured out how to do it against Trump.
It was striking to see how much Trump dislikes powerful women, but it was as or more striking to see how he defanged and deflated powerful men.
That is not working with black women, many of whom are coming to power because of him. And many, if not most, have come to see him as both a sexist and a racist.
The chickens are coming home to roost and at a critical time. It is way too late for him to re-invent himself, and his growing detractors will make sure he can’t.
The thing is, these women are smart, and they are tough. I gather that being black in America can prepare one for that.
Trump’s decision to insist he was a Law and Order President after the heartbreaking and wrenching national protests of Floyd’s shooting was a severe error, political as well as morally.
I was wrong about one thing regarding Trump: he doesn’t seem able to change. He only has one act in his repertoire, and it isn’t working anymore. Efforts to be a presidential fail, and efforts to show empathy are pathetic.
He knows he can’t do it, that’s why he often doesn’t bother to try.
And when he does try to do it, that just makes it worse. It’s too late for a President fighting a weakened economy, a scary Pandemic, and revolution over race relations, and after years of division and chaos.
After Trump’s unfathomable decision to run off protesters with gas and noise grenades so he could hold daughter Ivanka’s own Bible up in front of the church of St. John’s, Mayor Bowser showed up the next day to name the intersection where the protests occurred just across from the White House: “Black Lives Matter Plaza.”
It was a slap in Trump’s face and in his front yard.
Then, she painted “Black Lives Matter” in giant yellow letters right near the White House.
Donald Trump now lives right in front of “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and his limos will ride right over Bowser’s defiant and yellow paintings on the very spot he held up his Bible and said nothing.
He looked like he was having an enema.
When Trump tried to take control of the D.C. police and call in U.S. Army troops to take control of the city to prove his manhood, it was Bowser who single-handedly blocked the move, both humiliating and stopping him, even though he has vastly more power than she does.
She became a hero overnight; she showed everyone was it means to be tough.
And I had to smile at the new and quite unprecedented new coalition forming – black women in powerful positions, retired generals fighting for their Constitution. When they say politics makes for strange bedfellows, they are n not kidding.
Then she came up with a campaign slogan you will hear again and again: “Today we say no. In November, we say next.”
I am no authority on the nature of black women, but I am struck by the smarts, guts, and directness of these people. They are true leaders; they inspire and defy and articulate. They are fighting for their people and their country, a fight that should have been waged long ago by the people elected to do that work.
Their courage makes a patriot want to cheer, and social media has gone mad for them. They are empowered now. It’s as if women all over the country have been waiting for them.
And you know what? They have.
When Trump gave a speech and once again stunned the nation by saying, “Hopefully, George (Floyd) is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing for our country. It’s a great day for him, it’s a great day for everybody,” Senator Kamala Harris, a leading vice-presidential choice, responded:
“Keep George Floyd’s name out of your mouth until you can say, Black Lives Matter.”
They were stinging and to the point, while all the men around her in the Senate were huffing and puffing, looking like they had wool in their mouths.
These were words and deeds people have waited for a long time to hear.
I was also interested to see that Joe Biden, who everyone feared had vanished into the coronavirus haze, has been smart, timely, and effective in his now daily responses to President Trump.
He made sure to go to Floyd’s funeral while Trump is demanding to go to his political rallies without social distancing. In contrast, he seems rational, decent, and actually is empathetic. He doesn’t have to pretend. He won’t set the world on fire, but if elected, he might put some fires out.
When the Minneapolis City Council voted to disband its police department, just minutes after Trump started ranting about leftist democrats, Biden’ said simply in one sentence that he was not in favor of de-funding the nation’s police departments.
In one quiet sentence, he defused Trump’s new attack line before it had a chance to root.
Whatever the merits, it was a deft and forceful political move. Lots of Americans would not be happy to see their police departments abolished.
Black women are vastly more powerful than Fox News voters, and I mention this because Fox News voters represent a tiny fraction of American voters, especially when compared to female minority voters.
Fox News is entertainment as much as it is politics, and the network is not much more potent than the battered media itself. It draws vastly more attention than it’s demographics warrant. The average age of the Fox News viewer is 65 years old.
As one can see watching what’s left of the news this week, Trump continues to do just what the Greeks said he would do – help bring about his own destruction.
He has awakened the black women of America – sick and outraged at seeing one son after another killed in this awful way.
In contrast to them, the other politician’s diddle and dither.
He has awakened an army a lot bigger and more determined than his.
Great! I can’t even find the word to tell you how strong this article is..and those you addressed. POWER has arrived and when we need it most, in the most colorful way! THANK YOU! BLACK LIVES MOVE MOUNTAINS!
Thank you Jon, for another yet moving article and one I’m proud to read and share!
Thanks Alli..
Jon, this is an inspiring piece of writing. I only hope you are right. Women throughout the centuries have been debased, they have had no voice. Hard to believe that women just achieved the right to vote less than a century ago or thereabouts. I am not a black woman but I hope there are black women out there reading your blog and who will gain courage and inspiration from what you’ve written. As a child growing up watching my mother cater to my father, something that unfortunately my generation of women inherited as well, I wondered why men and women were not equal. I pray for the strength of black women to make themselves heard, white women haven’t had much luck. Or as my good Jamaican friend refers to us whites’ as ‘pasteurized wasps” …a phrase that just broke me up when she called me that…
Keep on writing these pieces, you’re making us think, you’re challenging us to think. And I pray that you are right.
Sandy Proudfoot
Sandy, I don’t know if I’m write or not, I’m not a wizard or a seer, I just write about how I feel at a given time. I do sense a turning tide, but tides go in and out. All I can do is write from the heart as I see things, I feel good about the piece but I can’t know any more than you if I’m right or not. I love the line from your Jamaican friend…
I am aware that you don’t take lightly to corrections, but could you perhaps see your way to fixing Mr. Floyd’s name in the 3 places you wrote Lloyd. Out of respect for him and his family.
Barbara, I’m sorry you have the impression I don’t like being corrected. As I work alone and write a lot, I often make mistakes and am often corrected, as far as I know, I have never objected to people pointing out mistakes, especially if they are not retired English teachers. I need no encouragement or excuse to fix a mistake. This one was important, I spotted it soon after I wrote the piece and had the chance to proofread it, I corrected the four, not three times it was misspelled. I didn’t know George Floyd, but he surely deserves to have his name spelled correctly, out of respect yes, but even more, because it’s accurate. Thanks for alerting me to ti.
Whenever I finish reading One Man’s Truth, I feel like cheering. Your writing gives me hope. What we’ve seen over the past week feels like a train on its downhill run. It started with the protesters and memorial to Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis, gathered steam and spread quickly to other cities across the nation. This Black Lives Matter train just keeps going, in part, fueled by these wonderful determined Black women you mentioned and the realization that things have got to change both politically and socially. We’d better hop on board or get out of the way. It feels like a change is coming.
Oh, how right you are. You made me remember the years I worked for the state government. The most capable, strongest co-workers and supervisors I had were black women. It was a joy to work with them and to learn from them in those Good Ole Boy agencies we called state government. Thank you for the reminder.
Love to learn from thinking people. “Dare greatly.”
I have very recently discovered your writings and I look forward to them everyday now. Today’s was absolutely extraordinary in that I just did not see it coming…hidden in plain sight, as many important things are…until they are revealed as we “open our eyes”. I love it and it gives me some hope here. Some years ago the Dali Lama said, “ The world will be saved by the western woman.” Perhaps he knew that it will be “the western BLACK woman”!! Hallelujah!!
Great insight in this article. And again got a good laugh out of me. Us white women can take some lessons from our dark skinned sisters. I’m on board this train!!! Let it roll…
While reading your article, I kept calling out to my husband to listen to me read your praise of the black women – I’m a white woman who loves the black woman’s intelligence- the way they can read a situation and have an answer that makes sense immediately- I kept saying to my husband “see, I told you so!” – BLACK LIVES MATTER!
Yes Black Lives Matter and this is a compassionate, thoughtful piece. However, as you have encouraged us to disagree, I think it is important to understand what BLM means when demanding to defund police systems. What I understand, is this demand is not to abolish the police departments, but rather create a wholistic public safety approach for communities to access services and organizations (which would be given resources) to support public safety and health along side of the police. Police neither want or have the skills for many safety issues communities face. One person I recently heard speak about this approach is Sherrilyn Ifill, the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law …In addition, as important as it is to vote out the current president, Biden (and you) missed an opportunity to be a white male ally and support black, brown, indigenous women who are on the frontlines to create transformative change in our systemic racist, socially unjust systems. Again, thank you for beginning the conversation and creating a space for us to disagree and listen and learn. In peace and gratitude, Carol
Thanks, Carol, I appreciate the perspective, I should tell you that I am in touch with a number of black and brown women (no indigenous women at the moment) and they are not telling me they are ready to defund the police as opposed to reforming them.
I don’t believe it is accurate to say all brown, black, and indigenous women are saying the same thing and feeling the same thing. If I am being honest, I also don’t believe there is any way the American public is prepared to dismantle or shrink their police departments, most of which are tied to local identity and community.
Maybe this is a question of semantics, not policy.
In my town, the police are all local sons and farmers, and their work is sacrosanct. There are no minorities here to raise consciousness in the way we are seeing. And there are no demonstrations, tanks or gas. (there was one demonstration, the police chief took a knee.)
I am not qualified to take a position on this and I don’t feel I need to make those decisions in my writing right now. I am not a pundit or a seer, I write about my feelings and what I know about.
I am quite comfortable with the idea of diverting resources from armored cars and tear gas to the black and brown communities. But I’m not Moses on the mountain eager to make pronouncements about things I don’t really know much about, and I’m not running for office. I just write what I feel. I am eager to hear more of what refunding means, and I very much appreciate your tone, candor, and prodding.
I don’t see it as my job or function to support movement and communities, it’s my job to explain what is happening by using my own experience as a media critic and political writer. I am not an activist, I am observing, although the George Floyd killing has sure moved me to a different position.
I do celebrate disagreement and the conversations we need to have will require patience, empathy, and active listening. My hospice work has helped me learn to listen. But it’s hard sometimes. I thank you for beginning a conversation I really want to have.
I will certainly keep an open mind about it, I am all ears right now, wide opening to learning, listening and changing, and I applaud you for challenging me in the right way…jon