August 19, 2015
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No offense intended to Dr. Ben Carson, but Trump is, by far, the blackest candidate running for either party’s nomination. Trump’s nouveau riche tastes offend old money, while impressing hip-hop fans. Trump was Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind“ avant la lettre. (Not surprisingly, Jay Z and Beyoncé pay $65,000 per month to rent an apartment in Trump World Towers, which Jay Z brags on “Success“ that he’s “only slept in once.”)
Moreover, Trump has a rap star’s love for personal feuds. Normally that’s tiresome and distracting, but Trump picking fights with his fellow billionaires over their mercenary hypocrisy on immigration policy may be the best way to get across just how absurd the conventional wisdom has become:
Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program.
It will be interesting to see whether even Trump can draw attention to how tech billionaires like Zuckerberg use visas to avoid hiring American women and minorities:
Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.
The 31-year-old Zuckerberg, the Facebook czar, who has made about $10 million for every day of work he’s done in his life, is a particularly worthy target for Trump’s ire, since Zuckerberg launched an entire pro-billionaire lobbying group, FWD.us, to push for lower pay for Americans through increasing the supply of immigrant labor. (And there was even a well-made hit about what a jerk Zuckerberg was way back in college.)
Trump’s emphasis on the Mexican government’s role in promoting mass immigration to hand their problem people off to the U.S. is perhaps a warning shot to Jeb Bush that Trump could emphasize Jeb’s vacations with some of the worst of the Mexican oligarchs, including Raul Salinas, the “Mr. Ten Percent” bagman for his brother, Carlos Salinas, with whom Jeb’s dad worked out NAFTA. In 1995, future Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castaneda wrote in the L.A. Times:
There has also been a great deal of speculation in Mexico about the exact nature of Raul Salinas” close friendship with former President George Bush’s son, Jeb. It is well known here that for many years the two families spent vacations together”the Salinases at Jeb Bush’s home in Miami, the Bushes at Raul’s ranch, Las Mendocinas, under the volcano in Puebla. There are many in Mexico who believe that the relationship became a back channel for delicate and crucial negotiations between the two governments, leading up to President Bush’s sponsorship of NAFTA.
Raul Salinas spent ten years in prison, charged with the murder of his former brother-in-law.
The Democrats will be heavily dependent in 2016 upon the black vote in swing states like Ohio, so they are risking a 1968-style electoral disaster by encouraging black rioters. But Trump’s reality TV personality could threaten the Democrats” basic strategy of piling up huge margins among minorities, rather like the 2003 California gubernatorial race in which Republican strongman Arnold Schwarzenegger easily defeated Democratic lieutenant governor Cruz Bustamante, who foolishly ran on a Latino Power platform. The celebrity Schwarzenegger did relatively well by California Republican standards among both Hispanics and blacks. Notably, blacks didn”t turn out in large numbers to vote against Schwarzenegger.
Obviously, blacks aren”t going to vote heavily for any Republican; but a Hillary-Trump election sounds like the kind of thing a fair number of black guys might not get around to showing up for, which has to worry Bill Clinton.
What about Hispanics? We are constantly told that Hispanic racial resentment is a relentless juggernaut. But that’s mostly just Jewish journalists projecting their fantasies and personal issues about blacks” attitudes onto Latinos whom they”ve never found interesting except in the abstract.
Trump could try asking Hispanic voters to demonstrate their American patriotism, rather than their knee-jerk racialism, by voting for him in order to help their country by limiting immigration. It would be an audacious sales pitch, even for Trump, but what’s the fun in not trying?
