Night after night, the Republican National Convention invited Black speakers to the stage to testify that President Donald Trump is not a bigot. “It hurt my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald,” said the former NFL player Herschel Walker, who once worked for a team owned by Trump. “The worst one is ‘racist.’ I take it as a personal insult that people would think I’ve had a 37-year friendship with a racist.” These speakers framed their support for Trump as the product of independent thinking. “As you can see, I’m a man of color,” said Georgia State Representative Vernon Jones, who was condemned by his state’s Democratic Party this spring when he announced that he would be backing the president. “The Democratic Party does not want Black people to leave their mental plantation.”
To Michael Steele, the only Black person who has ever served as chair of the Republican National Committee, this message is “just not believable.” Donald Trump has spent the past four years making comments that Black Americans have found wildly offensive, Steele told me this week: claiming that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the white-nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia; disparaging immigrants from “shithole countries”; calling Baltimore a “disgusting, rat-and-rodent infested mess.” After a summer of national protests against police violence toward Black people, RNC speakers have been pushing this message: They’re coming for you. “It is a little bit dark—in some cases, a lot dark,” Steele said. Watching the party then send Black speakers out to offer a “happy-go-lucky, isn’t America great” narrative is deeply frustrating, he said. “Black folks are sitting there going, ‘Yeah, when they’re not killing our kids.’”