‘The party of the Bushes and McCain is dead’: Inside the black Super PAC raising millions for Trump
Vernon Robinson has a prediction for 2024. “Tucker Carlson will be the Republican nominee,” he tells me over Zoom, a ceiling fan spinning in the background, “and he will solidify America First… If I have anything to do about it, I will try to create a draft committee to make sure there are shock troops organized. He’s a television personality which means he has a lot of people who like his show and watch it but they’re not organized on the ground, and we have over 39,000 volunteers who did 900 events in the run-up to getting Dr Carson to run and also raised a bunch of money… We’re not in the crystal ball business, we’re in the ‘changing objective reality on the ground’ business, and it looks like some of that reality is changing.”
Right now, Robinson runs a Super PAC in support of Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign called Black Americans to Re-elect the President. It’s spent almost $2m (£1.5m) on fundraising alone, and on the day that Robinson and I speak, he’s celebrating the launch of pro-Trump radio ads targeting black voters in 24 cities across the US as well as the launch of his book Coming Home: How Black Americans Will Re-elect Trump, which he co-wrote with communications executive Bruce Eberle.
Robinson has been in the game a long time. A former US air force captain and (unsuccessful) candidate for Congress, his 2016 Super PAC for Ben Carson raised $12m and put out adverts described by Mother Jones as “so out-there that political science professors use them to illustrate mudslinging at its dirtiest”. In 2018, he was criticized for a commercial which depicted two women discussing the allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and featured the line: “We can’t afford to let white Democrats take us back to the bad old days of race verdicts, life sentences, and lynchings when a white girl screams rape.” Robinson has been described – and has described himself – as the “black Jesse Helms”, after the North Carolina senator immortalized by the New York Times as a man “who turned his hard-edged conservatism against civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art”. And this year it’s his mission, in his own words, “to get black voters to not vote for Biden and to vote for Trump”.
“The party of Bob Dole, the Bushes, Mitt Romney and John McCain is dead and regardless of what happens in this election, it’s not coming back,” Robinson tells me confidently. “You know, Mitt wants to be the presidential nominee in 2024 and that’s not going to happen. It’s just not.” He’s not interested in the party stalwarts; the future of the Republican Party is Trumpism, he says. “I’m sure the deep state guys will try and inflict another Bob Dole on us but I don’t think it’s going to work.”
Robinson is just as critical of the old guard GOP as he is the “out-of-touch elites” in the Democratic party. “The president has aimed his vitriol at the Republican swamp monsters too,” he laughs. “The Republicans who are in that category have not escaped opprobrium. So there is a struggle and there are some Republicans who are defenders of the swamp and defenders of the deep state.” It’s the end of their era, he believes.
One of Robinson’s latest campaigning tactics for Black Americans to Re-elect the President has been to push out booklets with “Keep Black America Great” on the front, next to an image of Ben Carson. And although Carson himself declined to back up Trump’s claim that he has done more for the black community than any president since Abraham Lincoln, Robinson feels that that is true. Trump has invested more in historically black colleges than Obama, he says, and has done more for “the life issue” (abortion) and “school choice”. Does he believe the election is going Trump’s way? “Well, I went to my first convention when I was a second lieutenant in 1980,” he says, and at this year’s Republican National Convention he saw “more black speakers than all the other conventions combined”. He believes this means black people will come out in force to vote for Trump and upset the usual statistics. “A Democrat has to get 90 percent of the black vote and 65 percent turnout to win,” he says. “Hillary got over 90 percent but it wasn’t a 65 percent turnout.” Just a few weeks ago, he adds, he was on a radio show when a young black woman called in “and she said she didn’t like Trump and didn’t like Biden… That is a similar view to black millennials across the country, and if [those people don’t turn up to vote] then there’s no way Biden’s getting in.”
Robinson believes that the reason black voters tend to vote Democratic is simply because the Republican Party didn’t bother communicating with them until very recently. The only people who specifically targeted black voters were Democrats for “56 years” he says, adding that the adverts could be summarized as: “Vote Democrat because the Republicans want to kill your mom and your dog”. “The ads are not much more sophisticated than that,” he adds. How do his ads differ? “I’ve started running radio in 21 markets, very tough ads on the life issue, on school choice and on the economic engine that Trump created and the negative impact of Democratic governors in regard to having twice as many people die [of coronavirus] in the red states as in the blue states,” he says, adding that “draconian shutdowns have fallen on black businesses more harshly” because they are “least able to withstand the shutdown and take the cash flow hit”. “You’re more likely to die in a state run by Democratic governors and you’re more likely to have your business crushed as well. We point out in an ad that the business environment was great prior to February… Bad things have happened [since then] but mostly they’re happening in blue states rather than red states.” (Truthfully, most analysis attempting to divide the US into “red states vs blue states” for the pandemic has shown that it’s a pointless exercise, considering that issues of underreporting, population density and timing obscure what will probably turn out to be a fairly equitable spread of cases per million people across the country.)
How closely does Robinson work with the official Trump campaign? “I’ve been talking to people who deal with the political ads for various networks and found out the president’s campaign has bought one of the most expensive radio markets in the country,” he says. “I can’t call the [Trump] campaign and ask them because that’s coordination but I heard from the guys who are selling time [to me] that Trump’s campaign has also bought the time.” He’s referring to advertising slots in “Miami and Orlando and Tampa and Michigan,” he says, which are the most expensive and coveted slots during an electoral cycle besides perhaps New York and Washington DC (“and they’re not swing states”.) And the ads themselves? “They’re going to criticize Democrats or at least make comparisons,” he says. “…I heard that the ads are a bunch of testimonials. My ads are a little bit different, they’re a lot tougher.”
Robinson holds a number of views which many would consider outrageous – “The UN is possibly the greatest abuser of children on the planet”; the World Health Organization “subscribes to a far-left ideology”; Sweden has a high suicide rate because “everything is free except the citizens”; the abortion rate in the US is a “hidden holocaust” of “black babies”; too many progressive-leaning sportspeople these days are “Lenin’s useful idiots,” transgender-inclusive policies will stop black girls from getting track scholarships to college; people born to illegal immigrants in the US shouldn’t get citizenship; people are being fired from their jobs in Dallas because they don’t speak Spanish; “The Democrats want open borders because they need new voters” – but it’s worth noting that most are in line with what the president has said himself. Indeed, Robinson was doing shock tactic conservatism long before Trump: in 2006, one of his campaign ads for Congress attacked feminism, same-sex marriage and “aliens” who “come across our unguarded Mexican border by the millions”. In the same cycle, he made waves by climbing that if his opponent had his way, “America would be nothing but one big fiesta for illegal immigrants and homosexuals”. Little wonder he has embraced Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” with unbridled enthusiasm.
Now Robinson, the man who once had a one-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments placed right outside Winston-Salem City Hall, is raking in the millions once again – and he believes he has the interests of most black Americans at heart. “Democrats want to disarm the country and defund the police,” he says. “But 81 percent of black respondents to recent polls” want to keep police funding as it is or even add more. While this statistic is true, it leaves out the fact that 84 percent of black people (and 63 percent of white people) also believe that black people are not treated equally by the police, and the vast majority (83 and 87 percent, respectively) see excessive force and the killing of black people by police as a serious problem in their community. Robinson believes that other black Americans “intuitively understand that if you reduce police presence, more black people will be killed by black people, more black people will be raped by black people, more black people will be robbed by black people.” There is no evidence to suggest that this is a view held by a majority of black Americans.
Robinson and his co-author’s book has been endorsed by former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich – who called it “remarkably insightful” – and former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell, who said it “contains truths about the relationship between African-Americans and Donald Trump that will not be reported by the media”. So far, just under $550,000 has been donated to his Super PAC by individual donors giving $200 or more. His unabashed theorizing about the “deep state” and his views on race, women’s rights, LGBT+ rights and shady political organizations pulling the strings in the background might once have been seen as the fodder of fringe conspiracy theorists. But this is no fringe: this is a campaign for the sitting president of the United States.
We wrap up our conversation on the day that Nikki Haley has been criticized for defending Trump after allegations that he referred to American troops as “suckers” and “losers”, but Robinson has great faith in Haley. Her speech about the US moving its Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem while ambassador was “one of the greatest speeches ever made at the UN,” he says. “She said: we’re tired of being disrespected and you still want money so we’re going to take names. The State Department was probably horrified, but the rest of America was cheering.” He smiles, then adds in explanation, “If we’re going to buy influence then at least [you’d think] the bought individuals would stay bought a little longer. But that’s not the case.” Whether or not he can successfully buy influence on behalf of Donald Trump this election cycle remains to be seen.
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