Do American Conservatives Believe in Anything Anymore?
Trump embraces a perceived Black Lives Matter endorsement, and the grifters are silent.
Donald Trump picked up an endorsement this week from an unlikely source: Mark Fisher, co-founder of the Rhode Island chapter of Black Lives Matter. You know, the racist socialist group and financial scam that set cities ablaze in 2020 based on a blood libel of American police officers.
From what he's telling interviewers, Fisher is definitely not representative of the national BLM organization or the vast majority of those who embrace the label, and in fact BLM-RI has already said he is “no longer affiliated with” them:
“It’s the duplicity of the Democrats, the hypocrisy,” Fisher told Lawrence Jones on Tuesday. “We’re not stupid. The brothers are not stupid. We understand when someone’s for us and when someone is not, and it’s obvious that the Democratic Party is not for us.”
“The policies actually strike at the heart of the black family and the nuclear family,” he continued.
Fisher argued that Democrats “don’t value” the black vote during an interview with “The Kim Iversen Show” earlier this month while praising Trump for advocating policies to uplift the community.
“We’ve been used and abused for so long by that party, they don’t value our vote,” Fisher said. “Their policies are basically racist policies. I believe it’s a racist party. Donald Trump is just the opposite. He’s going to tell you how it is. He’s going to give it to you straight.”
“Trump has done more for the black community than any president I can think of in my lifetime,” he continued.
So what we have here appears to be a former BLM activist who parted ways with the group after it became clear their values weren’t aligned backing Trump as part of his dissent from left-wing orthodoxy. It’s something Trump could have legitimately touted, albeit while taking some care to address Fisher’s past association with a group Trump rightly condemned as a “symbol of hate” in 2020.
Alas, Donald Trump doesn’t do nuance, least of all when his ego is being fed. So instead, he took to Truth Social and said...this:
Spoke with Mark Fisher yesterday, a great guy, very honored to have his and BLM’s support. I have done more for Black people than any other President (Lincoln?), including 10 year funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, where they had none, Opportunity Zones, Criminal Justice Reform, and much more. Thank you to Mark! [Emphasis added – CF]
It’s bad enough that the man is suggesting that a better economy and putting a bunch of violent felons back on the streets (because his idiot son-in-law convinced him it would be good politics to engage black voters as if their primary political interests relate to being crooks, thugs, and potheads) are on par with ending slavery, extending citizenship, the right to vote, desegregation, the Civil Rights Act.
But, just like his bromance with Gavin Newsom, his narcissism is so overpowering that it led him to say he was “honored” to (supposedly-but-not-really) have the support of a leftist, anti-Republican, and anti-him hate group that can be credibly described as domestic terrorists.
Ron DeSantis pounced with one of his better campaign statements:
BLM praising Donald Trump — and Trump celebrating it — makes perfect sense.
When BLM was burning down cities and assaulting police officers in cities across this country, Trump did nothing but sit in the White House tweeting “LAW & ORDER!”
We did it differently in Florida. I didn’t just tweet. I took action and called up the National Guard. We were not going to let our cities burn.
As President, I will not sit idly by and watch rioters torch American cities.
But the real story here should not be that there’s no bottom to the outrages and absurdities that Donald Trump’s pathologies will take him to; it’s that there’s no limit to what the Conservative Infotainment Complex will put up with from him in the interest of monetizing his fans.
As of the time of publication, a full day after the story broke, searches for any criticism of Trump’s embrace of BLM from Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Mollie Hemingway, Charlie Kirk, Steven Crowder, Michael Knowles, Clay Travis, Buck Sexton, Jesse Watters, Sean Davis, Dinesh D’Souza, John Nolte, or Joel Pollak have turned up empty. The Federalist didn’t cover the story at all; Breitbart has one brief news story on the endorsement, but not Trump’s reaction.
[Update] The original draft of this story also included Dan Bongino, who earlier Thursday angrily lashed out at people for asking him about the story, while claiming that he already addressed it on his show the day before. I was skeptical, but did not have the time to listen through the episode to verify, so in the interest of fairness I dropped his name.
Sure enough, however, it turns out Bongino—who has a significant financial stake in Trump’s success—was lying. Starting at the 48-minute mark of the episode in question, he downplays the significance of endorsements, denounces BLM but says it’s a good thing if Fisher has seen the light, and endorses accepting votes from anyone. All that’s true enough…except he didn’t at all discuss the thing he knew damn well his questioners were talking about, which was Trump’s reciprocation. [End Update]
Trump has already embraced liberal stances and/or undermined conservative ones to varying degrees on crime, abortion, marriage, guns, entitlements, spending, ethanol subsidies, and corporate wokeness, and now he’s legitimizing BLM for no other reason than because someone nominally associated with the hate group said nice things about him.
How much more do the conservative infotainment types need to see? What principle would he have to jettison for them to finally cut the cord? Is there anything that matters to them more than maximizing their short-term content revenue? And how do they think their grifts will fare when, one way or another, Trump collapses and takes the GOP and the conservative movement with him?
For decades, the stereotypical liberal knock against the Right was supposedly that it cared more about making money than about people or the common good. That was always a poisonous misrepresentation of both the purpose and fruits of free-market economics, of course. But as a matter of the real values animating the Right’s professional class, the Trump era seems on track to prove the Left correct.