The first day of the Republican national convention featured an unexpected guest speaker on the schedule: Amber Rose, a model, reality star and former girlfriend of Kanye West.
“The truth is the media has lied to us about Donald Trump,” she said during her five-minute address to the audience. “I believed the leftwing propaganda that Donald Trump was a racist … Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re Black, white, gay or straight. It’s all love.”
Hers was a common refrain espoused throughout the past week, with politicians extolling Trump’s virtues and touting conservative ethics. The names and faces used to push this party line, however, are becoming increasingly diverse, with a bevy of Black and brown public figures leading the charge. On the same day as the remarks from Rose, who describes herself as a person of multiracial heritage, the Michigan congressman John James took to a podium in Milwaukee, proclaiming: “If you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you ain’t Black.”
James is part of a roster of Black and brown Republican convention speakers enlisted to help the party prove Trump isn’t a racist. Despite the former president’s history of anti-Black and xenophobic legislation, as well as his recent conviction for 34 felonies, politicians were out in droves in Milwaukee to brand Trump as the vanguard of a diverse, united Republican party who advocates for the working class.
At an event billed as “Republican Lawmakers Honor African American RNC Delegates”, speakers included the South Carolina senator Tim Scott, the Florida congressman Byron Donalds, the Utah congressman Burgess Owens and the Texas congressman Wesley Hunt. Other politicians of color showed their kinship as well: Virginia’s Republican candidate for Senate, Hung Cao, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Nikki Haley. The extensive lineup is the party’s most visibly diverse schedule to date – strategically aiming to rebrand the right as a party of racial unity.
As tensions surrounding the upcoming election reach a fever pitch, Black and brown figures, entertainers and celebrities are being trotted out by the Republican party to push a sensationalist narrative of race-blind coalition building. Just this past May, the Brooklyn drill rappers Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow made appearances at a Trump rally in the Bronx, an effort coordinated by the Fyre Festival organizer Billy McFarland, who is reportedly helping Trump with outreach to rappers. The St Louis rapper Sexyy Redd has notoriously structured her entire tour aesthetic around the Trump campaign, with imagery and merchandise featuring large red hats and the messaging “Make America Sexyy Again”.
Her bit extends further – in a 2023 interview on Theo Von’s podcast, This Past Weekend, the 26-year-old rapper expressed her affinity for the scandal-plagued Republican nominee. “I like Trump,” Redd said. “Once he started getting Black people out of jail and giving people that free money, aww baby, we love Trump.”
Similar points have been spouted by Black members of the media. Jamil “Mal” Clay, a former co-host of the Joe Budden Podcast and a current co-host of the New Rory & Mal podcast, recently tweeted: “[Trump] was just president and there were no wars and the economy was doing way better than it is now” – a statement that is demonstrably false, but is also a persistent narrative that has proliferated throughout the public.
Rose does not claim to have had her mentality changed by any specific financial incentive – in her speech, she mentions her father, who has long been a devotee of Trump’s movement, being critical in her evolving ideology towards the right. In the time since her public support of the Maga revival, she has publicized her interactions with the embattled former president and his wife Melania, the latest in a series of highly scrutinized appearances from influential celebrities.
Lil Wayne and Waka Flocka Flame have publicly endorsed Trump in recent months. And in January the California legend Snoop Dogg said that he had “nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump” – a stark departure from his comments disavowing the former president just a few years ago.
Beyond a misinterpretation of Trump’s tenure in office, much of the narrative seems predicated on creating a false sense of kinship between Trump’s extensive legal battles and the hyper-criminalization of Black people. During a June trip to Capitol Hill, 50 Cent told reporters that Black men were identifying with Trump “because they got Rico charges [too]”.
It is a strategy that the Trump campaign and Republicans have repeatedly employed as a means to ingratiate themselves with Black voters: taking racist messaging that disavows poor Black people as prone to illegal or dangerous behavior, and suggesting equivalence to Trump’s own criminal charges and convictions. Also in service of its counter-narrative is the GOP’s engagement of everyday citizens such as Madeline Brame, a Black woman who spoke at the convention on Tuesday to blame the New York district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for failing to properly punish her son’s murderers. The tacit implication is that Trump’s tough-on-crime policies will offer relief in Black voters’ daily lives – lives that are assumed to be shrouded in violence – despite reports that over-policing puts Black communities in danger.
Even the recent attempted assassination of Trump is not exempt from such machinations. Not long after the 13 July shooting in Butler county, Pennsylvania, 50 Cent, who famously survived a shooting in which he was hit nine times, placed an edited photo of Trump’s face on the cover of his album Get Rich or Die Tryin’ during a performance that same night. While rumors that 50 Cent planned to appear at the Republican national convention ultimately were proven false, he has continued to use his platform to spread the propaganda of the Trump message.
There are many reasons why Black and brown working-class citizens have felt underserved by the Democratic party – president after president has overpromised and underdelivered on commitments to marginalized communities during each campaign season.
That neglect has created fertile ground for Republicans to traffic in the very identity politics they so often denigrate. The GOP is weaponizing the language and cultural impact of various Black public figures to sell an illusion of investment in Black communities, while neglecting these needs in policy and legislation. It is a clever sleight of hand being executed by Trump’s campaign and a tactic that requires proper cultural ambassadors to make serious inroads. Tragically, the number of Black public figures who are willing to participate in this propaganda seems to be increasing – and voting constituents will need to work harder to separate political reality from such a brazen public rebrand.
