President Donald J. Trump participates in a listening session with African American Leaders Thursday, May 21, 2020, at the Ford Rawsonville Components Plant in Ypsilanti, Mich. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
Originally posted June 3, 2020.
At The American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. explains that, until the unpredictable effect of the coronavirus, President Donald Trump was the best jobs creator ever for America’s minority citizens. He writes (abridged):
As I watched the television last week and listened to the learned sages pronounce about America, I wondered what country they were living in. America is a vast land filled with middle-class people, working-class people, and those who speak different languages.
It is now a land that Lincoln could not imagine, and that King could only hope for. It is a land with poor people, to be sure, but that number of poor people has been shrinking. We, until a month or two ago, had the lowest rate of minority unemployment since unemployment began being quantified.
The administration that allowed that to happen, that encouraged that to happen, was the administration of Donald J. Trump.
To listen to the sages talking on the tube, you would think that America was still two-tiered: the white class on top and the black class on the bottom. That is also how the rioters envision America. It is not the case. There is a growing black middle class in America, and a growing black working class. As a matter of fact, black prosperity has been spreading in America since World War II.
If you listen to commentators on television you would think that the black underclass only needed one thing, money, to become working class or middle class. Well, we have given the poor — both white and black — money, and we have today about the same number of people living beneath the poverty line as when we began the war on poverty back in the 1960s. There ought to be a more certain way to overcome poverty.
There is. President Trump demonstrated it successfully until the coronavirus interrupted. Yet the coronavirus is not going to last forever. In fact, it might well be on its way out now. Then it will become time to try something new. That is to say, a growing economy.
Of course, a lot of jobs and job opportunities were lost last week when the demonstrators began destroying property. Ironically, my guess is that much of that property belonged to the less well-off, many of them black.
