Trump Needs His Own Civil Rights Act

Spread the love



President Trump needs to hit the streets with an ambitious civil rights
act based on the following principles: School choice is a civil right.  A college education is a civil right.  And a good job is a civil right.

With a little more than 500 days remaining
before the next presidential election, President Trump finds himself in an
opportune, though not entirely firm position. 
While Trump’s approval has recently reached a new high, that high is
only 46%, and he
remains the only president Gallup has ever tracked (dating back through Truman)
who has never been at 50% at all
(though Gerald Ford was close). 

Meanwhile, polls repeatedly show the
stronger of his Democratic challengers with modest leads
in hypothetical head-to-head matchups
: Biden is +7, Bernie is +3, Beto is
+6, and Booker is +4.5.  Second-tier
candidates Buttigieg, Harris, and Warren, draw roughly even.  And all of them will benefit from a lot of
free and fawning press over the next year or so, as their primary process plays
out.  This will not only improve their
exposure and fundraising, while polluting the airwaves with non-stop vitriol
slung at President Trump, it will also give a lot of voice to bad ideas that
need a strong rebuke, and viable alternatives.  

Trump must take these challengers
seriously and campaign as though he is behind, which, he arguably is.  That means finding voters from outside of the
Republican Party, from which he already draws a 90% approval rating, meaning
there are not many more votes to mine from that group.

Trump is at his best when he
campaigns, but to reach new voters, he needs something beyond himself for which
to campaign, especially considering that he will not have any real primary challenger
with whom to spar.  He needs a bold
stroke to grab headlines, and move the needle, and put non-traditional
Republican voters on notice that he means business.  It has to be, in an eponymous word, Trumpian:
big, audacious, and impossible to ignore. 
And that means he should stop going to pep rallies for his monochromatic
base, and start going into Democratic cities, campaigning not for reelection, but
for a new Civil Rights Act of 2020. 

Make that the election.  Democrats
expect 2020 to be a single-issue election, and they expect that issue to be
Donald Trump himself.  But if Trump
advances a historic civil rights act, and really makes it his own, then
attacking Trump would be attacking civil rights itself.

And “historic” is the right
word.  We haven’t had a civil rights act
of note since the heyday of the movement, in 1968, and yet there is much more
to be done.  That’s the sort of messaging,
and imagery we need to evoke.  Announce
it in front of the Martin Luther King Memorial, surrounded with leaders from
the black community.  Yes, there will be
reflexive criticism from the (mostly white liberal) Left, who will complain
hysterically about the optics and co-opting of King’s legacy.  So what? 
Trump’s message needs to be that he will judge his presidency by the
extent to which he can complete the work that King started.  And there is every indication that
African-Americans are ready to support President Trump — heck, anybody! — in
greater, meaningful numbers, if he shows his support for them.  There is no better way to do that than to
become the Civil Rights President of this generation.

Current polls show Trump’s
popularity increasing with African-Americans, who give him now an
18% approval rating
, compared to the 8% of the black vote
he received in the 2016 election.  In raw
numbers, Trump received 1.3 million African-American votes out of 16.4
million
cast in 2016, which accounted for 12% of the vote.  If Trump receives 18% of the black vote in
2020 (assuming the same turnout) he’d not only win an extra 1.6 million votes,
his Democrat opponent would also lose that amount, meaning it would have a net
effect of 3.2 million votes in favor of Trump.  Considering that Trump won the Electoral
College while losing the popular vote by nearly two million votes, a swing of
this magnitude would all but ensure his reelection. 

So Trump needs to lock in those
voters already supporting him, and push forward to make even more substantial
gains.  The Democrats plan to play
offense during the primary season.  Put
them on the defensive.  African-Americans
are tired of being taken for granted by Democrats.  And while Trump has done a lot to help the
economy in general, and certainly African-Americans have benefitted, they need
to hear the President speak to them directly. 
According to the NAACP, eighty-five
percent of black women and 81 percent of black men have felt disrespected by President
Trump, with roughly the same number believe his statements will cause a major
setback for racial progress, and is using toxic rhetoric to divide the nation.
 They need to feel respect, and that means prioritizing
them, and campaigning to them specifically.

Trump is, in an odd way, uniquely qualified for this task.  Trump’s greatest skill as a campaigner is playing the role of bully on behalf of those who feel bullied, and no group of people have been more bullied than African-Americans, whose staunch loyalty to the Democratic Party has gone unrewarded with any meaningful progress in the last half-century.  Their schools continue to fail, their cities continue to be unsafe, and jobs are harder to come by for them than any other group.  So to cut into the black vote even deeper, and start talking about maybe even winning it (why not?), Trump’s Civil Rights Act of 2020 needs to be ambitious, and based around these three central principles and talking points:

1. School Choice is a Civil Right

In every city run by Democrats, black
children continue to be warehoused in failing public schools, with high dropout
and low achievement rates, that serve as little more than pipelines to minimum
wage jobs, welfare, and too often, jail. 
Yet, these schools often cost much more than private and charter schools
in which these same children are shown to succeed, but which Democrats keep
them out of because they’ve sold out these kids out to the teacher’s unions.  Instead of rewarding failing public schools
with more money, we need to put the money into the hands of parents in failing
school districts to let them choose which school to send their child to.  No longer should the neighborhood that a
child is born into, or the family he is born into, or the economic situation
that he is born into, determine whether or not he has the opportunity to succeed.

In addition to rescuing those
children from awful schools immediately, the increased competition from school
choice will cause failing schools to either improve, or close their doors
permanently.  And with parents newly
empowered as monied consumers, specialized schools for specific needs and
specific fields will begin to appear, in order to service children with
different skills and ambitions.  Imagine,
in impoverished neighborhoods, specialized high schools tailored specifically
for entrepreneurship, or business, or pre-law and pre-med students, to name a
few.  You give kids a future by getting
them to work on it today, and when they have a future, they’re not so quick to
throw it away.

Plus, this plan should be revenue
neutral, since the federal government would only be requiring that states
simply reallocate existing money that’s already being wasted on the terrible
schools. 

And the message has to be clear: Education is power, and Donald Trump is on the side of empowering black parents and black children, whereas Democrats are on the side of corrupt special interests who want all the power to themselves.

2. A College Education is a Civil Right

Of course, a high school
education is rather meaningless without the ability to attend college for those
students who excel in academic fields.  In
today’s economy, it’s almost a prerequisite for any white-collar job.  The Democrats have taken up the mantle on
sending everyone to college, and Trump needs to steal this issue.  But rather than simply declaring all college
free, which is cost prohibitive since it places the burden on taxpayers already
$20 trillion in debt, the solution is to require that all colleges and
universities accepting federal financial aid limit their tuition to no more
than that of local community colleges, at least for students from traditionally
underrepresented, high-risk areas.

For example, in Middlesex County,
New Jersey, where tuition at the local community college is $110 per credit
hour (which works out to about $3300 per year), Rutgers University, located in
the same county, would no longer be allowed to
charge $383 per credit
if it wanted to continue to accept federal aid and
grants, which it is entirely dependent on. 
And if they, or any other college refuses, not only will they be
ineligible for federal money, then it’s time to start talking about taxing
their endowments in order to pay off student debt, and revoking their nonprofit
status.  If that means the schools can’t
have an army of administrators with six-figure salaries, and
mid-level deans making $675,000 plus bonuses and chauffeur
, and university
presidents making over a million dollars
, and all these opulent,
state-of-the-art buildings like they’re trying to replicate Apple’s corporate
campus, then that’s what it means. These colleges and universities have
nonprofit status so that they can provide quality educations at a reasonable
cost, not so that they can engage in price gouging against poor children.  The entire point of college is for kids to
have a better future, not for all these administrators and millionaire deans to
live high off of the future earnings of these kids. 

Donald Trump is on the side of black children who dream of going to college. Democrats are on the side of millionaire university administrators who are extorting poor children.

3. A Good Job is a Civil Right

We need to stop talking about
raising the minimum wage, and start talking about raising people out of the
minimum wage.  Making minimum wage, and
welfare, slightly less uncomfortable is not the goal.  Elevating people to a life of comfort is the
goal.

Many black Americans are already
past the point of going to school, and need new and better jobs today.  Part of the solution would be to reallocate
some of our existing welfare money to subsidize new hires.  This would make the cost of doing business in
America, and the cost of hiring Americans, more competitive on a global scale,
and would reanimate our manufacturing sector with fewer collateral costs than
tariffs.  In other words, when somebody
moves from welfare to a job, the business should get part of that money to
subsidize that hire as an incentive to hire that person, at least on a
temporary basis, as that business is now saving the taxpayers money, and adding
another person to the tax base who is going to pay taxes on his income.  This, incidentally, would be especially
helpful in securing employment for those with minor criminal histories, who
might otherwise be overlooked.  Again,
this adds no new cost because we’re just reallocating existing money. 

The president should also propose
targeted economic opportunity zones for impoverished cities, where businesses
and corporations can enjoy a 0% business tax doing business and hiring in those
cities, and new job training programs designed for the tech age, so anyone who
wants to work for it can have an opportunity to move out of poverty, and into
the middle class, because Donald Trump wants to Make America Great for Black
Americans, and Hispanic Americans, and for all Americans.

And by addressing these core
issues, other problems are going to solve themselves.  When we give kids a future, they are much
less likely to drop out of school, to become pregnant at a young age, to get
into drugs, and to commit crimes.  They
are also much more likely to become married, and wait until they’re married to
have children, and for that marriage to remain intact.  And when that happens, everyone wins.

It’s not enough to say “we love
black people” once every four years during a national convention speech that is
probably not watched all that much outside of Republican homes anyway.  It’s time – really, well past time – to
actually do something for this group of Americans that has been more than
patient than any other.  And we need an
answer for the invidious calls for reparations and socialism that will dominate
the next year and a half. 

So please, President Trump,
propose a Civil Right Act, put your stamp on it, and go fight for it.  Nobody fights better than you for the
American people.  Go into the cities,
bring a bullhorn and a bunch of red hats, and bring your message directly to
these people: the Democrats offer more handouts because they don’t expect you
to make it on your own.  But we offer
opportunities, because we know you will make it on your own if given a fair
chance.  Democrats offer you the scraps
from their table.  We want you to take
your rightful place at our table.  And
while it was the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln that freed the slaves, so
it will be the Republican Party of Donald Trump that frees African-Americans
from the slavery of poverty, the slavery of bad schools, the slavery of
joblessness and low wages, the slavery of broken families and unsafe streets,
the slavery of a corrupt system that keeps you from your right to the American
dream, so help us God.

You’ve waited long enough.  The wait is over. 

Related posts

Leave a Reply