OP-ED: Trump Doesn’t Have to Wear a Clown Costume to Be One
“Black Vote, Black Power,” a collaboration between Keith Boykin and Word In Black,
examines the issues, the candidates, and what’s at stake for Black America in the 2024 presidential election.
It’s Halloween, and Donald Trump is once again playing dress-up.
His latest costume is a garbage worker. Before that, he pretended to be a McDonald’s worker at a franchise that wasn’t even open.
Trump wants you to think that he and his family, who fly around in a private plane and live in opulent luxury, are actually just like you. But as Kendrick Lamar reminds us, “They not like us.” Trump grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, spent his childhood being driven around New York City by a black chauffeur in his daddy’s Cadillac, and spent his adulthood living in a tacky, gold-plated penthouse on New York’s Fifth Avenue.
I don’t know what the Trump campaign’s internal polls look like, but his behavior in the last few weeks suggests that he’s losing. He’s desperately flailing around, putting on fake outfits he would otherwise never dare to wear, doubling down on hateful messaging that doesn’t expand his base, and rage-posting about nonexistent election fraud so he can prime his voters to cry foul if he loses.
But all those photo ops from Trump’s recent visuals actually contradict Trump’s reality.
He visited a barber shop and spread lies about transgender kids instead of focusing on how he can help self-employed workers.
He speaks like a tough guy around police officers but whines when law enforcement conducts a lawful search to obtain stolen documents from his home at Mar-a-Lago. And he did nothing to help the Capitol Police and DC police who tried to protect the seat of government from his mob of insurrectionists on January 6.
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He dressed up like a McDonald’s worker but won’t answer a simple question about whether he supports raising the minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.
And now he’s dressed up like a garbage worker for a photo op but won’t support labor unions fighting for fair wages. And when asked about a speaker who called the island of Puerto Rico “garbage” at the recent Madison Square Garden hate rally, Trump refused to apologize.
So why even bother to get dressed up?
The MAGA cult members hate it when people call them “racist,” but Trump’s actions suggest he thinks his own supporters are racist bigots. That’s why his campaign ads in the swing states don’t focus on his economic agenda; they focus on outrageous lies about Kamala Harris bringing “illegal immigrants” into the country to take your job and forcing kids to become transgender.
That’s why Trump never apologized for his racist remarks about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. And that’s why he won’t apologize for the attacks on Latinos at his New York rally.
Trump knows that working-class voters don’t support Project 2025, Trump’s plans to cut taxes for billionaires and repeal Obamacare, or his friend Elon Musk’s plan for “temporary hardship” for Americans.
That’s why he wants to distract his voters with fear. He complained about inflation but never produced a plan to fix it and introduced tariffs that would drive inflation higher by taxing consumer products. And after nearly 10 years of running for president, this guy only has “concepts of a plan” for health care.
Trump doesn’t do policy; he does performance. And he’s been doing this routine for years.
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First he pretended to be a successful businessman on “The Apprentice.” NBC put him in a fake office with a fake board room and let him host a reality TV show to pretend that he knew something about business when, in reality, he inherited $400 million from his daddy and lost it all in his six bankruptcies and numerous failed businesses.
Then he pretended to be a Christian, even though he didn’t know how to pray, couldn’t name a Bible verse, mispronounced Second Corinthians, and was forced to admit that he had never asked God for forgiveness.
But the most offensive costume he ever wore was that of president of the United States. Although he took an oath to uphold the Constitution, Trump violated it repeatedly from the moment he walked into the Oval Office and refused to comply with the emoluments clause prohibiting presidents from receiving foreign money to the moment he was kicked out of office and still tried to overthrow the election as he refused to attend his successor’s inauguration.
As Kamala Harris says, he is not a serious man. But there is one costume that fits him perfectly: Donald Trump is a clown. Not a president.
Keith Boykin is a New York Times–bestselling author, TV and film producer, and former CNN political commentator. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, Keith served in the White House, cofounded the National Black Justice Coalition, cohosted the BET talk show My Two Cents, and taught at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. He’s a Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of seven books. He lives in Los Angeles.
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