Best President for Minorities Since Lincoln

It's hard to see how the left can run against Donald Trump on policy. On two of their biggest issues, opposition to war and ameliorating the condition of the poor, especially African American poor, Trump has been extraordinary.

On the matter of war and peace, libertarian senator Rand Paul in his speech at the RNC the other night averred with good reason that President Trump has been the most antiwar commander-in-chief in a generation.

On the question of helping minority poor it can honestly be said that it's hard to think of any president since Abraham Lincoln who has done more to benefit African Americans.

Consider this from Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal (paywall): [I]t’s passing strange that the GOP president who has been relentless in promoting policies that benefit minorities is the one the media brands most racist of them all.

There was the First Step Act, which reformed [criminal] sentencing laws; more than 90% of those who have had their sentences reduced are black Americans. The president in 2018 made historically black colleges and universities a priority, putting new money into loans and funding. His tax law created opportunity zones that funnel private investment to inner cities.

He has doubled down on school choice, an issue with 68% support among blacks and 82% among Latinos, according to a Federation for Children poll. His economic policies produced record-low black and Hispanic unemployment.

That last fact is perhaps the most significant of all. Next to strong families, having a job is the surest way to get out of poverty. Strassel points out that Trump's policies toward blacks and Hispanics may swing the election:

In 2016 he scored only 8% of the black vote, 28% of Hispanics, and 27% of Asian-Americans. Yet the polls also show a growing awareness and frustration among minorities that the Obama-Biden years didn’t deliver for their communities. Despite his putative lead nationally, Mr. Biden has less black and Hispanic support at this point in the race than Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did.

Does that softness translate into a giant Trump minority pickup? No. But it doesn’t have to. Democrats like to point out that Mr. Trump won the election by a margin of 80,000 votes across three swing states. The Trump campaign knows that increasing its support—even a little—among minority communities in those and other key battlegrounds could prove huge.

Take Michigan, one of the three, where Mr. Trump won an estimated 6% of the African-American vote in 2016. A recent Trafalgar poll showed his current support at nearly double that, which would translate into tens of thousands of votes. Recent polls have also shown Mr. Trump doing better with Latinos, with one Marist poll showing him up 11% over 2016. Consider what that might mean in Arizona or Florida.

Whether all this translates into a Trump victory in November or not it's simply not credible for his opponents to accuse him or his administration of being "racist," not when he has done more to improve the state of black life in America than any president since Lincoln.