Less Certain Both Times
The German press has spent years building a case against Donald Trump for me, and it’s been thorough: racist, sexist, politically stupid, a Russian puppet, the kind of man who talks about grabbing women by the pussy on tape and stays in power anyway. I believe most of it. What the coverage never quite managed to explain was why a meaningful number of Black Americans rejected the case entirely—and did so proudly, publicly, with signs and hats and organized rallies.
VICE made a documentary—The Young Black Conservatives of Trump’s America—and watching it is a genuinely disorienting experience. Not because the people in it are confused or manipulated or inexplicable, but because they’re not. They’re clear about what they believe and why. They attended rallies, made videos, organized. They do so from a community that, from any straightforward historical and structural reading, should be among Trump’s sharpest critics. The daily scandals—the shutdown, the wall, the tape, all of it—land as irrelevant to them. The film doesn’t explain that away. It listens to it.
What comes back from the interviews is a mix: religious conviction, economics, an explicit rejection of what they describe as Democratic condescension—the assumption that Black voters owe the party loyalty simply by being Black. Some carry a deep and specific anti-Obama feeling that has nothing to do with birther myths and everything to do with policy grievances. The through-line, if there is one, is that identity doesn’t determine political alignment, which sounds obvious until you see how rarely the coverage of this kind of voting actually operates on that premise.
It reminded me—uncomfortably—of Jewish voters in Germany supporting the AfD, the far-right party that runs on thinly veiled nationalist rhetoric while maintaining its historical distance from the label. The comparison that keeps forming in my head is: how do you back the people who would erase you? But the documentary kept pushing back at me on exactly that framing. The question presupposes an answer. Presupposing the answer is already the condescension being complained about.
I don’t know what to do with that. I watched it twice and came out less certain both times. Which is probably the most honest thing I can say about it.