Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

CBC now on Trump’s radar, but to what extent?

Given the chance, President Donald Trump can really turn on the charm.

“Throughout my campaign, I pledged to focus on improving conditions for African-American citizens,” he said Wednesday before a closed-door meeting with leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus in the White House. “This means more to me than anybody would understand or know.”

Indeed. Candidate Trump did not always make that “focus” easy to know or understand. His orations on “inner cities” usually painted a dystopian vision of urban “carnage” and hopelessness that teetered between pity and demonization. His best argument for African-Americans to vote for him at one point was, “What do you have to lose?”

Yet this meeting was remarkable not for what it accomplished, which reportedly wasn’t much more than a get-acquainted chat, but that it happened at all.

It grew out of an awkward incident last month during Trump’s 77-minute news conference. April Ryan, a black reporter with the American Urban Radio Networks, asked the president if he was going to meet with the “CBC” and Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

At first, Trump sounded as though he did not know what “CBC” stood for. Ryan patiently told him and he immediately asked her if she would set up the meeting — as if that were a proper role for a reporter to play.

CBC member Rep. Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, said later that he detected “an element of disrespect” in Trump’s comment. Clyburn wasn’t alone. But in the spirit of the CBC motto — “Black people have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies ... just permanent interests” — the news conference episode led to last week’s meeting at the White House.

Rep. Cedric L. Richmond of Louisiana, the CBC’s chairman, was joined by Clyburn and five other members of the organization’s executive board: Reps. Karen Bass of California, Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, Brenda Lawrence of Michigan, Andre Carson of Indiana and Anthony G. Brown of Maryland.

They presented the president with a 130-page policy memo titled with a response to Trump’s campaign question: “A Lot to Lose.”

The report offers a broad list of the CBC’s priorities, predictably geared to New Deal liberalism at odds with Trump’s new brand of post-Reagan conservative populism. Yet CBC leaders assured reporters afterward that there were important areas on which both parties could work together, such as Trump’s proposed infrastructure repair projects and violence-reduction measures in cities like Chicago, one of the president’s favorite urban talking points.

Yet I could not help but notice how much the relationship between Trump and other Washington players, including black congressional Democrats, has changed.

The White House meeting took place while House Republicans were trying in vain to hammer out an Obamacare replacement bill on which they could agree.

What a difference an election makes. Suddenly it is President Trump who is trying to do what President Barack Obama failed to do: win cooperation from Republicans who don’t think his health care goals are conservative enough.

In another significant coincidence on the day of Trump’s CBC meeting, the Brookings Institution announced a new follow-up to a 2015 report by Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton that made global headlines after documenting a shocking rise in the proportion of white non-Hispanic Americans dying in middle age.

In a finding that matches the national conversation about the uprising of Trump voters, Case and Deaton discovered that midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world — except for middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less.

Noncollege whites have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s at such a high rate, say Case and Deaton, that their mortality rates have grown from being 30 percent lower than those of African-Americans in 1999 to become 30 percent higher than blacks in 2015.

Add that to the growing body of evidence that noncollege whites in particular have been passed over by today’s global economic change and we can see the income inequality and other problems on the CBC agenda are by no means limited to blacks only.

With that in mind, Trump might find the report from the CBC, which likes to call itself “the conscience of the Congress,” to be helpful in bringing struggling people of all races together around our shared economic challenges — if he ever gets around to reading it.

Clarence Page is a columnist for The Chicago Tribune.

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy