[On October 31, 2024, Halloween, Word In Black first published this story. But with less than two months till Donald Trump takes office as the 47th President of the United States, it remains incredibly pertinent.]
Keith Boykin and Word In Black collaborated to create Black Vote, Black Power, which explores the topics, candidates, and stakes for Black America in the 2024 presidential election.
Donald Trump is dressing up for Halloween once more.
His most recent outfit is that of an agarbage worker. Prior to that, he posed as a McDonald’s employee at a closed location.
Trump wants you to believe that, despite their lavish lifestyle and private jet travel, he and his family are just like you. However, they don’t like us, as Kendrick Lamar reminds us. Trump was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth, was chauffeured around New York City by a black man in his father’s Cadillac as a child, and lived in a gaudy, gold-plated mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York as an adult.
His actions over the past two weeks indicate that he is losing, however I am not sure what the internal polling of the Trump campaign look like. In an attempt to get his supporters to blame him if he loses, he is frantically thrashing around, dressing in costumes he would never dare wear, intensifying his hate speech that doesn’t broaden his support, and publishing angry posts about fictitious election frauds.
However, Trump’s reality is actually at odds with all of those picture ops from his recent appearances.
Instead of concentrating on how he might support independent contractors, he went to a barbershop and propagated false information about transgender children.
When police officers are nearby, he acts tough, but when they execute an authorized search to get stolen documents from his Mar-a-Lago residence, he complains. Additionally, on January 6, he did nothing to assist the Capitol Police and the DC Police in defending the capital against his gang of insurrectionists.
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Despite dressing like a McDonald’s employee, he refused to respond to a straightforward inquiry regarding whether he is in favor of raising the minimum wage, which has remained at $7.25 per hour since 2009.
For a photo op, he is now costumed as a garbage worker, but he refuses to back labor unions who are fighting for fair salaries. Additionally, Trump declined to issue an apology when questioned about a speaker at the recent Madison Square Garden hate rally who referred to Puerto Rico as garbage.
So what’s the point of dressing up?
Although Trump’s actions imply that he believes his own fans are racist bigots, the MAGA cult members detest being called racists. This is why his campaign advertisements in swing states focus on ludicrous falsehoods about Kamala Harris forcing children to become transgender and sending illegal immigrants into the nation to take your job instead of his economic program.
For this reason, Trump never expressed regret for his bigoted comments in Springfield, Ohio, regarding Haitian immigrants consuming dogs and cats. He won’t apologize for the insults on Latinos at his event in New York because of this.
Trump is aware that the working class does not accept Project 2025, his plans to repeal Obamacare and cut taxes for billionaires, or his pal Elon Musk’s proposal to put Americans through temporary suffering.
He wants to use fear to divert his voters because of this. He proposed tariffs that would increase inflation by taxing consumer goods, but he never came up with a plan to address the problem. And this guy only has ideas for a health care plan after campaigning for president for almost ten years.
Trump focuses on performance rather than policy. And for years, he has been following this pattern.
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He first appeared on The Apprentice as a prosperous businessman. When he inherited $400 million from his father and squandered it all in his six bankruptcies and other failed businesses, NBC placed him in a fictitious office with a fictitious board room and allowed him to host a reality TV show to give the impression that he had some business acumen.
Then, despite his inability to pray, his inability to name a Bible verse, his mispronunciation of Second Corinthians, and his forced admission that he had never asked God for forgiveness, he appeared to be a Christian.
However, his role as US president was the most obnoxious costume he ever donned. From the moment he entered the White House and disregarded the emoluments clause, which forbids presidents from accepting foreign funds, to the time he was removed from office and attempted to rig the election by refusing to attend his successor’s inauguration, Trump repeatedly broke the Constitution, despite taking an oath to uphold it.
He is not a serious man, as Kamala Harris claims. However, Donald Trump is a clown, therefore it’s the one costume that matches him the most. Not the president.
Keith Boykin is a former CNN political analyst, TV and movie producer, and New York Times bestselling author. Keith, a Harvard Law School and Dartmouth College alumnus, taught at Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies in New York, cofounded the National Black Justice Coalition, cohosted the BET discussion show My Two Cents, and worked in the White House. He is a seven-time Lambda Literary Award-winning novelist and editor. Los Angeles is where he resides.
On Word in Black, the article “Trump Doesn’t Have to Wear a Clown Costume to Be One” initially surfaced.
