Donald Trump, Black Voters and Political Maturity.

Donald Trump, Black Voters and Political Maturity.

(ThyBlackMan.com) Plenty of presidents have come and gone in my lifetime. A few earned my vote with pride. A couple I would have crossed the street to avoid. Across all those years one lesson stuck, and I wish more of our young people held it close before they get swept into whatever the season happens to be selling. No man in that White House owns you. Not your hope, not your rage, not what becomes of your grandchildren.

A mood going around in 2026 troubles me. Some of our folks speak about Donald Trump as though heaven mailed him down to rescue the forgotten. Others talk like the man wakes each morning and schemes against every one of us before his coffee cools. Both notions are childish. Both hand him something he never earned, which is a seat inside your head where good sense used to live.

Understand where this comes from. My generation guarded the vote with our bodies while dogs and fire hoses answered back. Grown men wept the first time they slid a ballot in a box without fear of losing a job or a life. So nobody needs to teach me what this country has done to us. This much lives in my bones. Bitterness, though, left to run loose, makes a person easy to lead by the nose, and worship does the same work coming from the opposite direction.

Here is the maturity being asked for. Quit letting either party treat you like a wife who will never walk out no matter how she is done. The Democrats have leaned on our loyalty for sixty years, sometimes earning it, often just assuming it. The Republicans, for a long stretch, did not bother to ask. Now a few on the right are knocking, and some of us feel so flattered by the knock that we forget to ask what they brought to the door. A person should never be so starved for respect that he sells himself cheap to the first stranger who learns his name.

So set the savior tale down. Set the devil tale down beside it. Pick up something harder and worth more. A clear eye.

Take the measure of the man by what he does, not by how a crowd feels around him. Watch who he hands power to. An appointment tells you more than any speech, because a speech is wind while an appointment is a living person with authority over real lives. Who sits on the courts now, and how do their rulings land on a tired mother fighting to keep her apartment? Who runs the agencies that decide if your neighborhood drinks clean water or gets handed a poisoned river nobody downtown ever has to taste? Those names outlast the rally lights.

Now the money, and let us be honest about it. Donald Trump points to payroll employment and talks as though the country is roaring. In some raw numbers, work remains historically high. But step closer. Overall unemployment by the close of last year sat around the mid fours, while Black unemployment told a harder story. Across 2025, Black workers carried an average unemployment rate near seven percent, and late in the year that number pushed higher. Heading into 2026, the strain on Black households had not eased. Among young Black workers, especially teenagers, joblessness remained painfully high, often running near or above eighteen percent depending on the month. That is not a small detail. That is somebody’s son filling out applications and hearing nothing back.

Another clear share of the pain also came through the federal payroll, where better than a quarter million jobs disappeared in 2025. Our folks have leaned on government work as a road into the middle class for generations, so when that road gets torn up, we are the ones thrown off it first. Not every federal job belongs to a Black family, of course. But any honest person knows public work has long been one of the more stable doors into benefits, pensions, homeownership, and a life with some breathing room.

There was loud talk of tariffs bringing the factories home. The factories did not come roaring back. Manufacturing shed work after those tariffs landed, while tariff-related costs helped push prices higher on the shelf for households already trying to stretch a check. Set that against the corner of the economy that did grow, health services and private schooling, which added jobs even as wages in many of those places stayed too thin to cover what rent and groceries now demand. The full picture sits right there, and a grown person takes it in whole instead of grabbing one bright statistic and waving it like a flag.

Look too at where the relief went. A tax bill passed last year, and much of its sweetness flowed upward, while fresh work rules tied to Medicaid are set to press hardest on low-income people who can least afford to lose their coverage. Closer to home, Howard University had to push back against proposed budget reductions and ask that its federal support be sustained at least at the prior year’s level. That matters, because photographs with Black students and kind words about Black colleges do not mean much if the budget tells a different story. An order signed in one room and a funding decision made in another can wear very different faces.

The old wound has not healed either. As 2026 opened, Black homeownership still sat around forty-four percent, while non-Hispanic white homeownership ran around seventy-five percent. That gap was not born yesterday, and no one president created it by himself. But nothing in the current playbook seems built with the force needed to close it. A people cannot build lasting power on applause alone. We need land, equity, access to credit, fair appraisals, decent wages, and neighborhoods where our children are not priced out of the very blocks their grandparents held together.

Turn to the vote, the matter I hold closest. Anything making it harder for an old woman with no car to cast a ballot earns a cold, hard stare, no matter which party dreamed it up. Lines stretching for hours in our precincts while they melt away in the suburbs are no accident. Watch what gets signed and what gets gutted by people in robes who will never once face a voter. This is not cheering for a team. The point is keeping the single tool our grandparents bled to put in our hands.

On crime Donald Trump claims a historic drop in killings and points to his law-and-order push as proof. He is right that last year brought a major fall in murders. But honesty demands the rest of it. Those numbers were already tumbling before his current term became the headline, climbing down from the pandemic spike, and the experts who study this for a living do not all agree that federal pressure deserves the credit he wants to take. Both can be true at once. A safer street is a blessing wherever it springs from. A leader taking credit for a tide already turning before he showed up is just politics in a good suit. Maturity means carrying two thoughts without dropping one to feel better.

Here is the part no campaign wants you dwelling on. Most of what shapes your day never crosses that desk in Washington at all. Your child learning to read by third grade rests with a school board you probably cannot name. The officer on your corner sees a neighbor or sees a suspect, and the call comes down to a chief, a mayor, a union contract. Does the store on the avenue sell fresh food or only liquor and scratch tickets? A zoning meeting decides it on a Tuesday night when you were too worn out to show up. We pour all our heat into the top of the ticket and sleep clean through the elections touching the ground under our feet. All backward, and it costs us dearly.

Nobody here is telling you how to mark your ballot. Such talk would insult you. The ask is simpler. Walk in there owning yourself. When a politician courts you, make him show his work on the block where you actually live, not the block in the commercial. When someone swears one figure is your ruin or your rescue, hold it up against your own kitchen table before you believe a word of it. Feelings are real, yet they make a sorry compass in a voting booth.

Our strength was never meant to be a present we sign over to one personality. Strength is leverage, and leverage only bites when the other side believes we might truly walk. The day both parties have to compete for us in earnest, instead of taking us for granted or writing us off, is the day we start drawing real value out of this democracy. Such a day is not born of worship, nor of fear. It rises from a people too clear to be flattered and too proud to be scared.

So no, we owe Donald Trump no bowing. He stands there a politician of flesh and bone, packed with the same vanity and arithmetic as all the rest. We owe him no cowering either, no jumping at shadows, no letting dread think on our behalf. He is one figure in a long line of them, and like all the others he will pass on. What stays is us. Our families. Our blocks. Our long memory and the longer road still in front of us.

Size up the policy. Study the result. Count the people he lifts and the people he steps on. Then carry that reckoning into every election, the 2026 midterms and the small local ones most of all, with your back straight and your mind your own.

This is not loyalty to a party, nor love for a man. It is simply what growing up politically looks like, and the good Lord knows we are long overdue for it.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.