All indicators show that Donald Trump is set to return to the White House for a second stint in January of next year after emerging victorious over his Democrat rival Kamala Harris in the 5 November elections.
Trump gave a victory speech from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after projections indicated that he was on course to win the critical battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.
Because of how the outgoing Joe Biden administration has treated people in the Global South – from enabling Israeli war crimes in Palestine, to placing unilateral sanctions on progressive African leaders, to curtailing pan-African independent media outlets such as our own – many might be tempted to celebrate the Trump victory over the Democrats.
However, the reality is that Trump is no better.
The businessman-cum-politician is known for his controversial statements, and Africans, in particular, have been on the receiving end of some of Trump’s most derogatory vitriol – for example, his branding Haiti and African nations ‘sh*thole countries.’ He’s pledged to curb immigration from countries he deems beneath America’s dignity.
In this clip, we get a taste of Trump’s deep disrespect for and devaluation of Black lives. You hear him expressing hate for a group Black and Latino teenagers – the so-called Central Park Five – who were falsely accused of assault and rape in 1989. At the time, he took out full-page ads in several newspapers to advocate for the death penalty – in the hope that it would be applied to them. The accused each served between five and thirteen years after a jury convicted them, based on a confession they said was obtained through coercion by the police – before being exonerated in 2002 when the actual attacker confessed. His DNA matched that found at the crime scene.
However, despite the confession and DNA evidence clearing the Five of the crime, Trump still insists that they were guilty and that New York City’s 2014 decision to pay them $41 million to settle their case for wrongful imprisonment was a ‘disgrace.’ In 2019, when asked if he would be willing to apologise to the men for calling for their execution, Trump said he would not do that.
It is not hard to guess why Trump was so determined to label the men guilty despite the legal system (ultimately) saying otherwise.
This is the mentality that Trump will take with him to the White House and highlights why we stated that we had no horse in this presidential race months ago, as none of the two parties have our people’s best interests at heart.
1 Comment
Nothing new here, Trump is just a typical American bigoted president