Axios recently cited polls showing former President Donald Trump gaining support among African Americans. CNN said its own poll and others indicate that “Trump’s share of the Black vote is ticking into the double digits.” Such reports are not new but Democrats were worried enough to dispatch Vice President Kamala Harris to make the case to them for a second Biden administration. That should not be necessary.

Trump’s record in and out of the White House has been one of hostility towards the nation’s 40 million African Americans. Other Republican leaders have followed his lead, polarizing the country with a nonsensical “culture war,” rebranding their racism as “anti-wokeness” and creating roadblocks to voting.

The former President provided a reminder in a Time Magazine interview, saying “there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country.”

“Anti-white”? Really?

“Anti-Black hate crime was the most common category in the FBI register of reported hate crime in 2022; it was more than three times more common than antiwhite hate crime,” Time reported.

But Trump’s claim is not surprising. His family real estate company refused to rent to African Americans. He paid $85,000 for a newspaper advertisement denouncing five teenagers, four of them African Americans, falsely accused of sexually assaulting a European American woman and he demanded New York reinstate the death penalty.

Trump insisted that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen and could not run for President. The eventual first African American President found it necessary to produce a copy of his Hawaii birth certificate.

Time also recalled that, during Trump’s presidency, “his Justice Department investigated universities over affirmative action admissions policies they believed could discriminate against white applicants.” Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget and a close ally, followed up by launching a frontal attack in all agencies under him.

Axios recalled that, last year, Trump called the push for equity a “Marxist concept.” If elected, he “will get this extremism out of the White House, out of the military, out of the Justice Department, and out of our government."

That policy, Axios said, is embodied in the “Project 2025” plan which the Heritage Foundation drafted. It “envisions a second Trump administration ending what it calls ‘affirmative discrimination’."

Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, also calls for executing all 40 federal death row prisoners, 15 or 37.5 percent of whom are African Americans; African Americans are 12 percent of the general population.

Trump told oil company CEOs during a recent dinner that if they raise $1 billion for his campaign, as president he will, on Day 1, scrap dozens of environmental rules and policies which President Joe Biden issued to help curb global warming and he will prevent new ones from being enacted, The Washington Post stated. The industry “is drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders,” Politico reported.

Prosecutors have charged Trump with four indictments involving more than 90 criminal counts, one of which is currently being tried in a Manhattan courtroom. He is charged in the storming of the U.S. Capitol, mishandling secret government documents and election interference. He claims that all those charges were fabricated and he used his mug shot from his arraignment to raise more than $7 million for his campaign.

In the ongoing trial, prosecutors accuse Trump of paying $130,000 to adult film actress and businesswoman Stormy Daniels to hush up a sexual encounter so it would not affect his chances of winning in 2016.

He boasted of grabbing women’s genitals, was convicted of sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll and a $150,000 payoff went to former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal who says he had a lengthy affair with her while being married.

Despite all of this, including being the first former President facing criminal charges, Trump’s support remains firm, with some polls showing a virtual tie with Biden. Evangelicals, in particular, are sticking with him, although religion requires a high moral standard. Politico found an explanation for the contradiction.

Samuel L. Perry, an assistant professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Oklahoma, said Trump’s “sinful behavior may actually reinforce his support among at least some of them.”

Politico summed up Perry’s analysis: “Trump’s sexual misdeeds may break religious doctrine but they also affirm his masculinity — at least in the evangelical view. They demonstrate that Trump is a virile, red-blooded man, afflicted by God — like all ‘real men’ — with lust. Not just lust for sex but for power. And much like Biblical warriors who themselves struggled with sexual temptation, Trump can wield that power to lead the faithful to glory.”

Really?

Really?

Trump moved the “racist and white nationalist alt-right movement” from being a fringe group in the Republican Party “into the GOP’s mainstream,” commentator Ayman Mohyeldin recently stated on MSNBC.

His morally corrosive impact on those around him is on display as he decides on a running mate. The most important qualification: promoting his lie of a stolen 2020 election. They include Florida Senator Marco Rubio – whom Trump belittled as “Little Marco. Another is South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, perhaps the biggest sycophant of them all.

Still another is Ohio Senator J.D. Vance who, by his own account, grew up in a dysfunctional family and was raised by a grandmother in a very poor community in Appalachia. But he rose above his circumstances, enlisting in the U.S. Marines, graduated from Yale University, getting a job as a high-tech company executive and becoming a venture capitalist. He pledged that he would use his experiences to help others left behind and he became a strong critic of Trump. That was then.

Trump’s speeches are laced with lies, probably in the belief that, as the English novelist George Robert Gissing wrote in his book “The Crown of Life” in 1869, “If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.” That quote, in one form or other, was used by Hitler and his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and Vladimir Lenin, father of the Soviet Union.

Biden, too, has some political baggage. As a U.S. Senator, he worked with segregationists especially in opposing school desegregation. He backed a Clinton administration bill blamed for starting mass incarceration. He enabled Clarence Thomas’ confirmation as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Currently, critics accuse him of complicity in Israel Pime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Harris, his Vice President, while serving as California’s state attorney general, was accused of defying Supreme Court orders to reduce prison overcrowding and of blocking the release of thousands of nonviolent offenders.

But Obama picked Biden as his Vice President and Biden chose Harris, who has African and Indian parentage. Now, they are advocating and implementing policies far removed from their past and their several major achievements are being compared favorably to those of the Lyndon Johnson administration.

In the Biden-Trump II contest, the contrast between the two candidates are, therefore, obvious. Trump remains bitter over his loss in 2020 and offers few details about his policies for a second term, except to take revenge on political enemies. His speeches leave no doubt that he will take a wrecking ball to the institutions that buttress American democracy and create an autocracy along the lines of Hungary under Viktor Orbán.

Biden pledges to continue shaping a future in which all Americans are treated as equals. He would, in essence, continue to serve in the dual role of partisan political leader and non-partisan head of state, as it should be.

It is evident that some African Americans are still planning to vote for Trump, which is their right. But those considering staying home should remember that, if they do, Trump will have fewer votes to worry about.