If there’s a silver lining so far with the Trump presidency—and one attribute that I’m honestly grateful he possesses—it’s that Donald Trump has a nose for trash black people.
He has a way of sifting through the sea of blackness and sniffing out those who are the most shameless, the most feckless, the most hypocritical, the most impressionable, the most triflin’, the most likely to be taken by status and shine, the most susceptible to flattery, the most intoxicated by proximity to power, the most narcissistic, the least tethered to reality, the least self-aware, the least concerned with facts, the least empathetic and the least invested in a progress that extends beyond their eyesight and wallet. He beckons them, he dog whistles for them, he DMs them, he calls for them, he speaks to them and they come and sit and smile and shake for him. He is, effectively, a canary in a trash can. The Pied Piper for putrid niggas.
Steve Harvey. Kanye West. Omarosa Manigault Newman. Ray Lewis. Ben Carson. The groups of silly church negroes willing to break bread with him. The list goes on. They see themselves in him. To them, he is not pitiable or detestable. He’s aspirational. And in their thirst, they reveal themselves to people who perhaps haven’t been paying close enough attention to who they really are.
Jim Brown, for instance, has been granted some sort of Pinnacle Black Male status—existing in the zeitgeist as a man whose integrity and grit and commitment to blackness is a standard we should aspire to reach. And this exists despite his history of terrorizing the (mostly black) women he’s romantically involved with. Allegations have been made against him in four separate decades. Basically, he is exactly the type of nigga who’d want to eat salad with Donald Trump. And then tell everyone how great the dressing was.