Trump Ad Targets Black Voters With Inflation, Anti-Illegal Immigrant Message

Plus, Biden bashes Park Avenue; Yellen versus Allison; what Kristof hid

A theme around here is that the Republicans are making a big play for Black votes—and Hispanics, and Jews—in 2024. Check out this commercial, embedded above, from a pro-Trump political action committee that is reportedly airing in rural Georgia. It features a glasses-wearing white woman Biden-campaign phone-bank worker, wearing a rainbow pin, reading from a script with the word “Latinx,” talking to a voter who on the phone replies, “I’m strugglin’ to pay my bills, but Biden’s payin’ rent for illegals? They get handouts, and I’m payin for it!” The ad then flashes a headline about polls showing Black and Hispanic voters are abandoning Biden for Trump.

As a preview of the coming campaign, it’s compelling material.

Biden could denounce this ad for demonizing asylum-seekers or for playing on anti-gay bigotry (the rainbow lapel pin), but in so doing he’d call attention to it in a way that would guarantee getting it in front of millions more people. You’d think Biden would have some urgency about getting control of the border to defuse this sort of messaging, but he seems to think that he can get away with somehow blaming Congressional Republicans for it, in a Washington-insider sort of way.

Anyway, you can look at it as bad news about America, that Trump would be appealing to prejudice. But you can also look at it as sort of an amazing thing, that Trump, who Biden defeated in 2020 partly by demonizing as a racist related to the “very fine people, on both sides” Charlottesville rally, seems totally sincere and serious (or at least his superpac does) about winning Black votes in 2024.

There’s a certain kind of creative genius behind the making of an ad like that, just sheer skill in execution, that is not to be minimized, either. This is not a Trump cheerleading newsletter at all, and as I hope I’ve made clear, I have my reservations about aspects of the messaging, but I also couldn’t help but smile at the ad. Am I wrong?

Biden Bashes Park Avenue: President Biden today said he will keep fighting “for Scranton, not Park Avenue,” signaling a political campaign theme that will pit Americans against each other along class and regional lines.

Biden’s statement on the April jobs report declared, “I will keep fighting for the middle class and hardworking families I grew up with—for Scranton, not Park Avenue.”

It’s a theme Biden has voiced intermittently in the past, especially when an election is approaching. In September of 2020, Biden said, "I view this campaign as a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue...All Trump can see from Park Avenue is Wall Street. All he thinks about is the stock market." The Democratic presidential candidate then amplified it in a tweet: "This election is Scranton vs. Park Avenue."

In November 2023, a presidential tweet promised, “I don't look at the economy through the eyes of Wall Street and Park Avenue. I look at it through the eyes of the people I grew up with in Scranton, Pennsylvania or Claymont, Delaware.”

For the Empire State in particular, the approach is not without risks. President Trump has been publicly declaring he thinks New York state’s electoral votes are in play in 2024. That could be a combination of misdirection and wishful thinking. Yet the more Biden goes around bashing Park Avenue, the more it creates an opening for someone—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump, a Trump vice presidential candidate like New Yorker Elise Stefanik or relentlessly cheerful Tim Scott—to say, you know what, America is better when Wall Street, Park Avenue and Scranton all prosper. It doesn’t need to be one against the other. It can be a “both and.”

Park Avenue runs all the way up into Harlem and the Bronx. Even in the fanciest blocks of the Upper East Side, Park Avenue includes plenty of doormen and building workers and immigrant taxi-drivers and even residents who grew up in Scranton and worked hard and took risks and created value and earned their way onto Park Avenue. So the idea that Park Avenue residents aren’t “hardworking,” but the people in Scranton all are, is just divisive, inaccurate nonsense.

As I’ve pointed out in the past, Biden has no hesitation fundraising on Park Avenue for his campaign bashing Park Avenue. It’s the sort of thing—like making fun of Trump’s hair while also blathering on about dignity and decency—that makes Biden seem like a phony.

Yellen Versus Allison: Back in April 2023, I was sharply critical of the Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, for giving a speech about China in which she failed even to mention the word “freedom.”

It looks like Yellen is adjusting her public position for the better. In a speech prepared for delivery May 3 at the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum, Yellen spoke of how “economies benefit from the free flow of people and ideas.” She said, “As Treasury Secretary, I benefit from engaging with public, private, and non-profit stakeholders who are unafraid to speak openly and a free press that amplifies diverse perspectives. Democratic governments rely on this freedom of speech and freedom of the press to make wise decisions that benefit every member of our democracy.”

The speech includes this passage about China:

As for China, there is no denying that China’s catch-up growth lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty. This is one of the great global economic achievements of the past century and it is a result of its market liberalization and opening up. But China’s future growth is far from certain. Its GDP per capita is currently one-sixth of America’s and less than one-third that of the European Union. I believe that the absence of some of the pillars I have described will continue to pose challenges as China navigates the transition to an advanced economy. Limits on transparency and censorship give companies reason to doubt the information they receive. Coercive actions against firms undermine fair competition.

Yellen is still pulling some punches. “The absence of some of the pillars I have described” is mealy-mouthed bureaucratic mush designed to make sure her speech doesn’t get quoted anywhere. If she’d simply said, “the lack of freedom, lack of democracy, and lack of rule of law,” she’d have made her point with greater clarity, and perhaps increased the chances of progress toward those values.

Meanwhile, on X, a professor at Harvard, Graham Allison, 84, has become a fawning public booster of Communist China after traveling there earlier this year (see “Harvard’s China Cheerleader.”). Allison is out with a new thread of tweets (or X posts, as I guess they are now called) “In the Auto Race, who is Number 1?... the answers are: China and China. Indeed, China made and sold twice as many automobiles as Americans.” Asks Allison, “Is the world’s green future destined to be red?”

Perhaps Professor Allison could benefit from some direct feedback from Secretary Yellen about the economic risks posed by absence of democracy, rule of law, and freedom.

Recent work: “What Nicholas Kristof Is Hiding From His New York Times Readers” is the headline over my latest column for the Algemeiner. Please check it out there if you are interested.

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