Trump vs. the NAACP
J.R. Dunn, American Thinker, July 20, 2017
Credit Image: © Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA Wire
The NAACP is wailing to the heavens in response to President Trump’s refusal to attend the organization’s 108th national convention in Baltimore next weekend.
The NAACP is nonpartisan, the spokesmen indignantly cry. It serves the entire community. It has welcomed presidents to the convention for decades, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and somebody they call “Bush, Jr.” Even Barack Obama, though not raised in the U.S. and who could scarcely be considered an “American black,” saw his way to attending the annual convention.
The reason, of course, is racism. “The President’s decision … underscores the harsh fact: we have lost – we’ve lost the will of the current Administration to listen to issues facing the Black community.”
Another paragraph follows, underlining the “racism” accusation without ever quite stating it explicitly:
We fight to end racism, hatred and discrimination in the United States. Our branches fight for real issues like access to healthcare, a fair justice system, equal opportunity to education, an end to police brutality and the right to vote. When President Trump is ready to listen to us and the people we serve, we will be here. Until then, the NAACP will continue to strive for an America free from racism and continue to speak truth to power.
And of course, it has to be racism. What else could it be? What other reason could Trump possibly have to turn them down?
Well, as the record reveals, plenty. A brief examination of Trump-NAACP interaction clearly shows the organization spitting in the president’s face at every opportunity. A few examples from the past year:
From September of last year:
Wendell Anthony, President of the Detroit NAACP, spoke with Roland Martin about Trump’s attempt to woo African-American voters and the upcoming meeting, which he equated to “a wolf coming to a sheep farm saying ‘let me lead you to greener pastures.'”
On voting fraud:
President Donald Trump was slapped with a lawsuit on Tuesday by the NAACP, which is seeking to shut down the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
In the suit, the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund alleges that the commission has “an intention to discriminate against African-American and Latino voters, in violation of the United States Constitution.”
The president of the Philadelphia NAACP on Sunday harshly criticized national Republicans – including President-elect Donald Trump – for creating “an atmosphere of fear, bigotry, and racial intolerance[.]” …
Rodney Muhammad, at a news conference at his East Oak Lane home, condemned Trump and said his campaign rhetoric “did everything to practically set off a racial and class war.”
From Breitbart:
The head of the NCAAP [sic] has come out in stark opposition to President Donald J. Trump’s coming investigation into voter fraud, claiming it is “racist.”
In an interview on CNN, Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP, insisted that his organization would “resist” the president’s investigation into fraud during the 2016 election.
“The President has claimed millions of fraudulent ballots were cast. The only place you will find millions of fraudulent ballots are right beside that fake birth certificate for Barack Obama, inside the imagination of President Trump. They don’t exist,” Brooks said on Thursday.
More on voter fraud:
The chairman of the N.C. NAACP Legal Redress Committee, which successfully fought in federal court to have much of North Carolina’s 2013 voter ID law thrown out, is keeping a close eye on President Donald Trump’s insistence that there was massive voter fraud in the last election, and warns that GOP state lawmakers may leverage Trump’s false claim to institute new voting restrictions in time for the 2018 mid-term elections[.] …
“This claim of voter fraud is being pedaled by right-wing political groups and some Republican operatives as a way to enact legislation to undermine the right to vote of African-Americans and other racial minorities. These consistent and spurious claims must be vigorously challenged because when adopted, and repeated by Donald Trump and his gang, some people will believe that it exists.”
From an official NAACP statement:
Trump Budget a Nightmare for America’s Most Vulnerable
President Trump’s budget proposal in every way possible seeks to cloak a shift of the nation’s resources away from America’s most vulnerable communities and toward unfair tax breaks for the wealthy and major corporations. His budget compounds its animosity toward vulnerable and communities of color by defunding civil rights enforcement.
A North Carolina preacher who serves as the state’s NAACP chair said the Twitter photo of Evangelical leaders “laying hands” on President Trump in prayer was “theological malpractice.”
Rev. William Barber II, of the Greenleaf church in Goldsboro said the Evangelical leaders should not have “prayed” with Trump while he is “preying on the most vulnerable.”
(Barber also attacked Trump several times concerning his immigration policies.)
. . . and we could go on. Clearly, there is no rational reason for Donald Trump to meet with the NAACP to address its members, to break bread with them, or anything else.
This leaves irrational reasons, which, in fact, are exactly what the organization is banking on. Namely, there is the fact that the NAACP is a “sacred organization,” one of small number of non-government organizations – Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, the ACLU – whose goals are so idealistic, whose actions are so pure, whose tactics are so beyond reproach, as to render them immune to any type of criticism. You can only bow down to them in awe and obey when they call.
In other words, they’re sacred cows. It should be apparent by now that Donald Trump has shown little patience with these in the past, and there is no reason to make an exception now. The NAACP (which fired its current president, the aforementioned Cornell Brooks, only weeks ago) can have its little bash (in Baltimore, a failing black-majority city) without the president’s help.
