The irony of Donald Trump is that he’s a crook who indicts the lawful. He is a criminal who convicts the innocent—a thief so audacious that he accuses his victims of robbing him.
Back in 2021, as commander-in-chief, he tried to commandeer the election. Bizarrely, he framed his theft as justice, insisting that the only way to protect democracy was to throw out votes. This year, as he devises plans to tamper with election tallies, he again argues that democracy is too important to be left to the people—especially Black people.
Yet for all of its audacity, Trump’s irony lacks originality. Over 100 years ago, at the end of Reconstruction, white politicians echoed Trump’s claims about elections being polluted by fraudulent minority voters. They too argued that destroying ballots was the only way to save democracy.
Writing of the era known as Redemption, Clemson historian Dr. Vernon Burton explains how “white Democrats blamed ‘fraudulent negro voters’ for Republican rule during Reconstruction and falsely claimed that denying African Americans the right to vote would eliminate fraud.” Or as historian James Grossman put it, these white Redeemers saw “Black disfranchisement as the key to ensuring the ‘integrity’ of their democracy.”
Writing of the dawn of Redemption in his study Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized the ferocity of the campaign to criminalize Black voters.
“The Negro vote and graft were indissolubly linked in the public mind by incessant propaganda. Race repulsion, race hate, and race pride were increased by every subtle method, until the Negro and his friends were on the defensive and the Negro himself almost convinced of his own guilt.”
Shifting blame from assailant to victim—from the election denier to legal voters—is the foundation of the Redemption playbook, and it remains the modus operandi of Donald Trump today.
They go after us after each election
Much like the former Confederates stealing southern elections while scandalizing Black voters, Trump, in 2020, sought to castigate Black election workers while trying to steal Georgia’s election. And though he failed, the taint on Black voters remained. In the wake of Trump’s failed coup, when it came time to legislate, Georgia did not pass an election bill to protect against a presidential takeover; rather, it passed an election bill designed to further inhibit Black voting. As the NAACP’s Sherrilyn Ifill put it, Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021 was “solely intended to do one thing: suppress Black votes.”
