Is this the biggest blunder in Black history?
Self-proclaimed pioneer of the Trumpist hip-hop genre MAGA rap US rapper Kurt Jantz, professionally known as Forgiato Blow, attends the third day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 17, 2024.(Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)
Boston Guardian publisher William Monroe Trotter, who earned his graduate and postgraduate degrees at Harvard University, was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key there.
In 1912, Trotter endorsed Woodrow Wilson for president, but felt betrayed when Wilson segregated federal employees. In a historic meeting at the White House between the two on November 12, 1914, Trotter pointed out that “Black and white Federal employees had been integrated for over thirty-five years without calamity (even as they shared bathrooms and lunchrooms and breathing space).” Wilson accused Trotter of impudence. One version of the incident has Wilson ordering Trotter out of the White House. Following the encounter with the president, Trotter became a hero to Black Americans. He received sustained applause when he appeared before Black audiences.
The election of Donald Trump has been calamitous for millions. Though the media show Africans as suffering from the discontinuation of USAID, the end of USAID by Elon Musk was a catastrophe for 135 countries. It’s estimated that 14 million will die because of these cuts. If that were not enough, a program devoted to reducing HIV cases in Africa was ended. And in a fiendish attempt to own the Blacks, it was ended on Juneteenth, which must have been met by chuckles in the Oval Office.
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has criticized the cost-cutting regime, much of which was enacted under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. As of May 2025, Gates has accused the world’s richest man of causing the deaths of the world’s poorest children by cutting US foreign aid for health initiatives, specifically HIV medicine funding. As a result of chaos in the supporting agencies, an Ebola outbreak is occurring in Uganda and the Congo.
It’s spreading. The dismantling of USAID has led to starvation in Somalia and Ebola in Africa, and Trump’s “war of choice” has led to a rise in food costs in Africa and elsewhere as the closing of the Strait of Hormuz has halted fertilizer shipments.
If the Trump administration’s cruelty were not enough, the expanded Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium subsidies expired on December 31, 2025. Without congressional action to extend them, millions of Americans are seeing their health insurance premiums increase.
The largest cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in history means that 4 million people will lose access to food, many of them children.
After months of fighting and countless proposals for a bipartisan compromise, a Republican Congress eliminated the expiration date for the ACA’s enhanced premium tax subsidies. Thousands will die because they can’t afford the high costs of insurance premiums.
While Trump promised to deport Hispanic gangs, Hispanic citizens have been caught in the net, as well as Black Americans. I found the helicopter attack on a Chicago apartment building chilling, especially the removal of naked Black and brown children to the street. At least when the Confederate soldiers marched Black children from Pennsylvania to the South and slavery, the children were fully clothed.
The president has unleashed his personal storm troopers on brown and Black citizens, and Vice President JD Vance says they have “immunity.” Now that the killing of poet Renée Good shows they will kill white women too, will most white women continue to vote for those who want to limit their reproductive freedom? Who will kill them if they make the wrong turn?
Some of his domestic policies are harmful not only to Blacks and browns but also to his MAGA base, but cult members are willing to make any sacrifice to please the leader.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Nation elevates progressive ideas, movements, and elected officials achieving real change across the country into the national conversation. At the same time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded super PACs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on attempts by red states to quickly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
About a Supreme Court that is opposed to civil rights, Justin Jouvenal wrote in The Washington Post on April 9: “The sharply conservative Supreme Court that President Donald Trump’s three appointees remade is the first since at least the 1950s to reject civil rights claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities.” As if to prove the article’s tenor, on April 29, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.
Not only are the Trump Congress and the Trump Supreme Court hindering the advancement of Blacks, women, Hispanics, and members of some Asian American groups like the ones I see lined up for free food every weekend, but Trump delighted his base by insulting prominent Blacks. He referred to a Black journalist as a “bitch.” Previously, he called the Black football players who followed Colin Kaepernick’s example of taking the knee “sons of bitches.”
Trump believes that Blacks have low IQs, proof that eugenics supporters have gotten access to the president. Musk also belittled the intellectual capacity of Black students. Indeed, Science magazine reports that the Trump administration deviates from the scientific consensus that views race as a social construct. The administration sees race as a biological reality.
Though 80 percent of Black voters and the majority of union household members supported Kamala Harris, of the 17 rappers who persuaded their millions of fans to vote for Trump meant that Harris received 12 percent fewer votes from young Blacks than Biden. They voted for a man who suffers from what author Darius James calls “Negrophobia.” And despite the endless hours of uninformed television commentary about a mass defection of Black male voters to Trump, he received only 5 percent of the Black male vote.
Rapper “Little Pump,” whom President Trump misnamed “little Pimp,” said he’d leave the United States if Kamala Harris were elected.
How do rappers like Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, who said he had “nothing but love for Trump,” and other rappers who are pro-Trump feel about Trump’s weird obsession with insulting Black women who have official positions? Three hundred thousand Black women have lost their jobs because of the antics of Elon Musk.
El País published my op-ed about how Trump won the election by depicting Kamala as a slut in one of the vilest campaigns against a presidential candidate in history, with the possible exception of the 1828 campaign when Andrew Jackson supporters referred to John Adams as a “pimp.” Trump’s lurid campaign appealed to the puerile minds of the manosphere. He did the same to Hillary.
During the campaign, Vance called Vice President Harris “trash.” But the media, including her white-media sisters, ignored the crass, racist, and sexist attacks on the vice president.
While white male pundits posing as Hispanic whisperers gave high prices as a reason for Hispanic men voting for Trump, Hispanic men who called into a San Francisco talk show moderated by a Hispanic man said they didn’t want a woman running things. Once again, the Democrats behave as the proverbial last ones on the block to know, releasing an “autopsy” of why the Democrats lost without mentioning racism and sexism as factors in Kamala Harris’s defeat.
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This is because they continue to hope that some members of the MAGA cult will defect to the Democrats and don’t want to alienate those who support neo-Nazis by calling them racists and antisemites.
The ambitious vice president has welcomed Nick Fuentes into the big-tent Republican Party. Fuentes says he wants the party to nominate a real Nazi in 2028.
The line that has been adopted by the networks in order not to embarrass their advertisers’ customers who voted for Trump is that millions voted for Trump for economic reasons, when, according to one study, it was because he “shared their prejudices.”
How do these rappers feel about Trump’s advocating immunity for police actions or his pardoning of insurrectionists who assaulted Black guards with the N-word and displayed the Confederate flag at the White House, something that Robert E. Lee failed to accomplish? Some of them mocked Auschwitz and were among those pardoned by a president who says he’s concerned about antisemitism on campus.
Now Trump wants to reward the insurrectionists with reparations amounting to nearly $1.8 billion.
A president whom the ADL has repeatedly criticized for his antisemitic remarks and who retweets Nazi posts. How would the rappers respond to the FBI director cutting ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League? “Late last year, the FBI director, Kash Patel, announced that the bureau was severing its ties with the SPL, calling it a ‘partisan smear machine’ because of its use of a ‘hate map’ displaying what it described as anti-government and hate groups. Mr. Patel also cut his agency’s ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights antisemitism.”
The head of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has proposed that Black children should be removed from their families and “re-parented,” which was the message of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s great novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the breaking up of Black families is another indication of the administration’s antebellum style in which wealthy white men control the lives of women and minority men.
The Roberts Supreme Court wants to return to the 19th century by eliminating Black representation in the South.
Will there be a return to segregated lunch counters? The Trump administration removed the ban on “segregated facilities” in federal contracts.
At least Thomas Dixon (The Clansman) was forthright in giving reasons for using force to oppose the Black franchise. About the first opportunity for Black men to vote, he wrote: “The next two weeks and this election will decide whether white civilization shall live or a permanent negroid mongrel government, after the pattern of Haiti and San Domingo, shall be established. If we submit, we are not worth saving. We ought to die and our civilization with us! We are not going to submit, we are not going to die, we are going to win.”
When JFK was shot, he was on his way to the Texas mart to deliver a speech that emphasized learning and reason. He said, “America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.”
Now we have a president who says it should be left up to him what people should learn. He makes decisions based on what goes on in his bloated guts. The most ignorant president since Andrew Jackson wants to eliminate Black Studies when he doesn’t even have White Studies nailed.
So why would rappers who view themselves as the avant-garde support such a regime?
The media that gave us Trump elevated rappers over traditional civil rights leaders. They and the corporations gave us P’Diddy as a role model. The New York Times just about named P’Diddy the entrepreneur of the year.
You can still find him doing Pepsi commercials on YouTube.
MSNOW’s Ari Melber, who believes that every trite line penned by a rapper is profound, asked Mayor Mamdani to answer questions posed to him not by a Black intellectual or legislator but by Trump supporter Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. Jackson fronts for the Starz network, which makes money refashioning all of the stereotypes about Blacks cast over the last 200 years. Of course, Melber isn’t the first member of the Manhattan cognoscenti to embrace thugs. In the 1960s, it was Joey Gallo.
Many of the rappers are informed, but others, judging by their expressed opinions, are ignorant, and their endorsement of Donald Trump constitutes the biggest blunder by a Black group in Black history.
Do they feel betrayed enough to request a meeting with the president as Monroe Trotter did with Wilson?
To remind him, as Trotter did to Wilson, that they delivered votes to him and are outraged by his policies? Who would be the Monroe Trotter of 2026? Snoop Dogg or 50 Cent?
Ishmael ReedIshmael Reed is the publisher of Konch. His The Complete Muhammad Ali will come out next spring.