Diverse And Perverse: The Coalition That Trump Built
Rick Perlstein
September 10, 2016
The convention began with a prayer for God to bless his chosen political party, from a black preacher who announced it was fitting and proper to do so “because we are electing a man in Donald Trump who believes in the name of Jesus Christ.” And because “our enemy is not other Republicans, but is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.”
Rev. Mark Burns is a devotee of the “prosperity gospel.” At a Trump rally in March, he had said: “There is no black person, there is no yellow person, there is no red person, there’s only green, people! Green is money!”
The game Trump and Burns are playing is an old one. A candidate, party, or movement can’t be racially divisive if black people are out front spouting its praises. Early in the 1960s, the John Birch Society toured a black former Communist Party member who affirmed that, yes, Moscow did really intend to turn America’s Southern states into a black-run colony of the Soviet Union—and that this whole civil rights thing was all a communist plot. In the 1970s, Ronald Reagan had a black loyalist on the Republican National Committee, Dr. Gloria Toote, to help him make his case that the “Negro has delivered himself to those who have no other intention than to create a Federal plantation.”
Even George Wallace kept a pet Negro for the same purpose: Clay Smothers, a state legislator from Texas who once introduced a bill to ban homosexuals from public university campuses. In 1977, when the federal government sponsored a historic national women’s convention in Houston, chock full of feminist and gay rights activists, Smothers spoke at the massive counter-rally Phyllis Schlafly organized across town. “I have enough civil rights to choke a hungry goat. I ask for public rights. . . . Let’s do something about these misfits and perverts over in the Sam Houston Coliseum. I want to segregate my family from them!”
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