Recently, Donald Trump sat for an interview with Rachel Scott, an ABC News Congressional Correspondent and member of the National Association of Black Journalists. During some tense exchanges, Rachel sought to expose Trump for what he is: a racist, mediocre, piece of manure. A flummoxed Trump responded by spouting venomous falsehoods, arrogantly insisting that black people are best suited for certain employment opportunities, drawing scoffs and jeers from a justifiably skeptical audience. Those jobs Trump referred to, the so-called “black jobs”, are traditionally occupied by desperate migrant workers.
In the spring of 1989, when five young black and Latino teenagers, derisively referred to as the Central Park Five, were railroaded by the American justice system, Donald Trump, then a reputed genius real-estate broker, paid the New York Times, then a paper of great esteem, eighty-five thousand dollars to write an advertisement on the paper’s back page. Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police, was the title of the piece, the eight words reflecting the hysteria that gripped New York City. After shrilly calling for the deaths of the teenagers, Donald Trump scrawled his grotesque signature on the bottom right-hand corner.
Three decades later (2019), Netflix released When They See Us, a four-episode miniseries about the plight of the Central Park Five, pushing the story of the five exonerated men to the forefront once again. When pressed for an opinion on the group, President Trump doubled down on his 1989 opinion, saying the following: “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt. If you look at Linda Fairstein and if you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case — so we’ll leave it at that.” Even after being confronted with the indisputable truth, Trump could not accept its validity, because his contempt for black and Hispanic people was just too much for him to overcome.
Shortly after losing reelection in 2020, former President Trump was formally adjudicated as a rapist, the same crime that prompted the unjust conviction of the Exonerated Five. Though he was not required to spend significant time in prison, Trump was fined ninety million dollars for defaming E. Jean Carrol, his victim; a blow to his finances and already tattered reputation. The defamation case was one of three big cases being prosecuted in New York against Trump over a year.
Two of those cases were prosecuted by two high-powered, African American lawyers, both based in New York City. Letitia James, the first black female to serve as the New York State Attorney General, prosecuted Donald Trump for business fraud this past September, won the case, and extracted nearly half a billion dollars from the Trump organization. Alvin Bragg, the first black Manhattan District Attorney, prosecuted Donald Trump for election fraud in April, overwhelmingly won the case, and plastered Trump with the convict label thirty-four separate times.
Alvin Bragg’s victory was more impactful for a few reasons, the most salient being that he was the first lawyer in United States history to successively prosecute a former President of the United States for felonies. Secondly, Alvin Bragg is only fifty years old, three years older than I am. He was fifteen years old in 1989, approximately the same age as the five members of the Exonerated Five. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a former denizen of Harlem, New York, once fit the profile of the type of teenage boy who’d elicit an adverse response from a typical New York resident. Donald Trump, and others of his ilk, would have gladly incited the murder of Alvin Bragg as a teenager. Hell, even now, Trump endeavored to stoke violence against Bragg for simply fulfilling his oath to the residents of New York City.
Nevertheless, Bragg persisted, stitching together an airtight case against Trump before ultimately garnering a conviction, one that will survive a likely appeal. Alvin Bragg, along with Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, are three black prosecutors who are striving to inject some accountability into Donald Trump’s life.
And they are winning.
Donald Trump is running for president for a third time, an unfortunate decision for many reasons. He’ll face another famous and tenacious former black prosecutor, Vice President Kamala Harris.
I must admit that I had not followed Harris’s political career until she eviscerated Joe Biden on the debate stage in 2019, picking apart the former senator’s record on busing and race in the 1970s. It was akin to the flawless execution of a boxing combination. First, she softened him up with the jab, offering Joe Biden, a former U.S senator, some faint praise by saying she knew that the former Vice President was not an overtly racist person, and he was someone who should be lauded for his attempts to find “common ground” with senators operating on the other side of the political spectrum.
Then Senator Harris followed that verbal jab with a figurative haymaker that I must quote:
“But I also believe, and it’s personal — it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and careers on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
It was a devastating line of attack, a moment comparable in scope to some of the most noteworthy debate moments in American presidential history. Kamala Harris, former California Attorney General, had used her experience as a black woman to pick apart a perceived vulnerability of Biden, honing in on his perceived racial blind spots.
For a short while, I thought Harris would be the eventual Democratic nominee in 2020. But alas, her campaign collapsed in the subsequent weeks, hemorrhaging money and support until she ultimately dropped out of the race on December 3, 2019.
Biden won the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 after riding the endorsement of Jim Clyburn, the renowned black United States congressman based in South Carolina. If not for the Clyburn endorsement and alacritous support from the black South Carolinian electorate, Biden would have endured a spectacular defeat during the Democratic primary.
Realizing that black Americans (black women, especially) were the backbone of his candidacy, Biden selected Kamala Harris as his running mate, further boosting his appeal to the black masses. After Biden won the presidency in November 2020, he acknowledged black America, promising to “have our back” because we had his.
During her tenure as the first black Vice President, Kamala Harris has grown into the job, spending nearly four years refining her skills as an executive and a communicator. Immediately after Biden halted his quest for reelection and endorsed Kamala Harris, making her the first black female to lead one of the two major American political parties, Harris did what her boss, the Great Joe Biden, could not. Instead of rambling, mumbling, and occasionally losing a thought, shared traits of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Harris has proven to be a focused and incisive Trump opponent, routinely and effectively tying her experience as a California prosecutor to her campaign against Trump, correctly labeling him as an adjudicated sexual abuser, fraudster, and convict.
Kamala Harris is a high-profile black person who performs the most important job in America: taking Trump to task for his sins. She does this job brilliantly, occupying the role of explainer, deftly tying, connecting, and intermingling her laudable past with the present, and speaking optimistically about a future without Donald Trump. Amazingly, Harris has only been a candidate for less than a month.
There are approximately three months left until the national election commences, leaving Harris with plenty more time to fillet Trump with the sharp truth. As Yusef Salaam, one of the members of the Exonerated Five and New York City councilman tweeted, Trump will eventually have to endure a comeuppance.