Fox host Martha MacCallum ihopes that with black unemployment at a record low, Black America will shrug off all the ways Donald Trump has disrespected and belittled it and embrace the coming “welfare reform” as an opportunity to start working hard and stop being “catered to.”
On Friday, MacCallum hosted Fox Business’ Charles Payne, an African American, to use the new black unemployment statistics as a sales pitch to other African Americans on behalf of Trump. She started by asking Payne whether those “very strong numbers” can be “sustained.” As if we’d have any doubt what he’d answer.
“Absolutely,” Payne predictably assured her. “The momentum is getting stronger and stronger and stronger … It is absolutely a marvel.”
Statistics of the black vote for Mitt Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016 (6% and 8%, respectively) were displayed for the viewers. “Is there any chance that that changes based on any of this?” MacCallum asked hopefully.
“I think there is a chance that it changes,” Payne said. His reasoning was, “The same tide lifts all ships.” However, he mentioned that some of the vote will depend on “how they handle welfare reform because remember, the mainstream media is gonna portray him as being cold and mean.”
Apparently, the possibility that welfare reform might actually be “cold and mean” was inconceivable to this crew.
“That’s the ticket there!” MacCallum exclaimed excitedly in response. Then she blew the “blacks get unfair privileges” dog whistle, a common Fox refrain: “There are people who believe that that group has been sort of catered to and not – you said the tide lifts all boats but they’re talked to in a different category sometimes by candidates and that, perhaps, needs to change.”
Payne agreed. “The American DNA across the color spectrum is about success,” he said. He opined that Trump should offer the same message to black Americans as others: “Hard work, pull yourself up by the bootstraps – if I create the right economic backdrop, you can start a business.”
Payne acknowledged that “some” of Trump’s rhetoric “can hurt the message to the community,” but, he added, “I really believe on the economic side of it, all people are feeling it.”
So African Americans should just shrug off Trump’s admiration for “some very fine people” in the white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville; his onslaught against black NFL players who #TakeAKnee on behalf of racial justice and his insulting behavior toward the family of a fallen African American soldier – not to mention the coming “welfare reform” – and embrace Trump… if they know what’s good for them.
Good luck with that!
Watch MacCallum’s thinly disguised disdain below, from the January 5, 2018 The Story with Martha MacCallum.