It’s time for former president Donald Trump’s annual pilgrimage to visit “the Blacks” in North Philadelphia. This time, the landing spot is my alma mater, Temple University.
By Denise Clay-Murray
Now that Philadelphia City Council has ended its regular sessions, there will be a little more focus on the fact that Pennsylvania is known as a “swing state” in national politics.
Because it is a “swing state”, Pennsylvania will be playing host to just about every major player in the Republican and Democratic parties in an attempt to get the state’s residents to come around to their way of thinking in the voting booth.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have visited the Philadelphia area several times. And next Saturday, Temple University’s Liacouras Center will play host to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trumpfor a campaign rally.
Yep. Donald Trump is making his annual campaign visit to Philadelphia to talk smack about the city and to ask the city’s “Blacks” once again, “What have you got to lose?” by voting for him.
(Unfortunately, one of the problems that I have as a journalist is that I remember almost everything that’s ever said to or around me. That’s why I’m able to remember all of those quotes from Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign outreach to the Black community. It’s a curse…)
Now, North Philadelphia is probably the last place you’d expect to see the man who was a defendant — along with his father — in one of the largest Fair Housing complaints in New York history, put a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, and doubled down on it once they were exonerated, and who spent the entirety of the eight years that Barack Obama was president calling for copies of his birth certificate because Hawaii, where the former president was born, couldn’t possibly be a state, but there is precedent here.
Back in 2016, Trump came to the People For People charter school building on North Broad Street to meet with a group of carefully curated Black Republicans. I was there to cover the event, but the press was kept out. Or at least the Black press was.
I knew some of the people who were a part of that pow-wow. The late Renee Amoore, a woman that I had a lot of respect for, was there. Calvin Tucker, former Deputy Chair of the Pennsylvania GOP was there. Renee Toppin, daughter of the late Milton Street was on the premises. But despite extolling Trump’s virtues on various cable television networks before this meeting, Toppin wasn’t invited to the party and said to a group of gathered reporters that the gathering itself was a “sham”.
I’ve read more than one poll detailing the 2024 Presidential Race that says that Trump could make some inroads in Black and Brown communities, especially among Black and Brown men. Thus, the Trump campaign has opened campaign offices dedicated to the Black and Latinx communities in Philadelphia, which has a large Black population, and Reading, Pennsylvania, which is unofficially 80% Latinx.
(I wonder how the members of the Ku Klux Klan in Reading feel about this. I guess it’s kind of gutsy for Trumpto tick off one of his most reliable constituencies.)
There are also a lot of evangelicals that believe that Trump, in spite of being recently convicted on 34 felony counts related to paying hush money to the porn star he had an affair with while his third wife was pregnant, is a godlier man than the practicing Catholic whose only other wife died in an automobile accident that is our current president.
But that’s neither here nor there.
In a “swing state”, like Pennsylvania, every vote counts. And it’s probably a good idea to hear what everyone who comes to your town to campaign is saying. So, while it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be at the Liacouras Center at 7:30pm next Saturday night, I might try and catch Donald Trump’s presidential campaign rally on television.
I mean, hey, there’s probably nothing more potentially hilarious than seeing a bunch of White guys in Blacks ForTrump t-shirts walking through North Philadelphia.
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