Black MAGA ends 2024 among the year's biggest losers

With all of far-right Republicans' electoral and legislative wins this year — chief among them the election of Donald Trump in November — a subsect of the Make America Great Again camp didn't quite come out on top: Black MAGA.

Black ultraconservative elected officials like Florida Rep. Byron Donalds and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott frequently joined Trump on the campaign trail, boosting the then-candidate's outreach to the Black electorate as they sat on the shortlist for his vice presidential pick. While Trump successfully picked up a sizeable share of Black male voters as he notched his electoral victory in November, their efforts to curry favor with the would-be president-elect didn't materialize in sought-after Cabinet positions despite the president-elect's promises to reward his most loyal supporters with high-ranking roles in his administration.

After weeks of rolling out Cabinet picks, Trump nominated only one Black person: Scott Turner, a relatively unknown former Texas lawmaker, ex-football player and motivational speaker. Turner, who worked under then-Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson in the first Trump administration, will return to lead HUD, which has had the largest number of Black secretary appointments out of any federal department.

Mix all that with the escalation in scandal — and subsequent snub — of once-Trump-supported North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, and Black MAGA's 2024 political performance has left much to be desired. 

Veteran Republican political strategist Leo Smith told Salon in a phone interview that Trump's use of Black interests as a way of gaining and maintaining political power has "come to a head" this election cycle. 

"So here we are [with] him having made commodities of both candidates and campaign processes in a way that has benefited him and his reacquisition of the White House," said Smith,  the CEO of Atlanta-based political consulting firm Engaged Futures.  

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott 

Scott's year began on the heels of his failed presidential bid, following the South Carolina senator's withdrawal from the Republican presidential primary in the final months of 2023. Shortly thereafter, he endorsed Trump and became a vocal supporter of the 78-year-old's campaign.

"I just love you," Scott told Trump during the candidate's January remarks after he won the New Hampshire primary. Trump had quipped that Scott must "really hate" then-GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who appointed Scott to the Senate while serving as South Carolina's governor, to decline to endorse her. 

Scott had long been considered a top contender for Trump's vice presidential pick, and his ardent backing of Trump made clear his interest. The South Carolinian even went on to launch a $14 million outreach effort to mobilize voters of color in seven swing states as the Trump campaign ramped up its appeals to Black and Hispanic voters over the summer.

That bid also failed. Trump chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate — and, well, the rest is history. 

Smith said that Scott, along with other GOP candidates, has learned to appeal to Trump's interest in the "cult of personality, performative person who raises Trump's profile" and has taken advantage of it.

"They've learned to do that performative presentation quite well, and they learn to have dialog — sometimes thoughtful — in dealing with journalists and public appearances," he said. "But sometimes their dialog is completely gaslighting and raising the performative measure so that they can go viral."

For his part, Scott signaled a lack of interest in assuming a Cabinet position should he be offered one, telling attendees at a Punchbowl News event that he'd prefer to head the Senate Banking Committee should the Senate claim a majority during the election.

The Senate's only Black Republican also didn't end the year empty-handed. His Senate colleagues elected him in late November to lead the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which Smith notes is a "pretty powerful position" in its own right.

Scott has been supported by not an "exceptional" political talent but an "opportunistic" one, Smith said, and "he's made good use of the opportunity" in passing policy.

In a press conference following his NRSC win, Scott said he aims to help Trump by working to maintain a GOP Senate majority through all four years of the president-elect's term.   

"My passion is making sure that we defend our current seats and expand the map and expand our majority so that President Trump does not have two years with a Republican majority in the Senate — that he has four years in control of making sure that America's agenda comes home to each and every household," Scott said. 

The South Carolinian, currently the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, is also expected to become committee chairman in the next Congress following the electoral defeat of the current chairman, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.

Florida Rep. Byron Donalds

Like Scott, Donalds, a staunch ally of the president-elect, made frequent appearances on the campaign trail with Trump, ultimately becoming something of a fixture at rallies and a surrogate at events for the now-president-elect as he attempted to court Black voters in swing states.

During a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in September, Trump praised Donalds as one of the "smart ones," a supposed compliment that many read as a racist jab as Trump didn't clarify who the "ones" was referring to.

“That one is smart," Trump told the Johnstown, Pennsylvania crowd after calling their attention to the Florida Republican. "You have smart ones and then you have some that aren’t quite so good.”  

In his own efforts, Donalds at times took unconventional methods in spurring Black voters to action. At a "Congress, Cognac and Cigars" event in June, Donalds said during a discussion with a rightwing reporter that Black people had better lives under Jim Crow segregation, in part, because "the Black family was together" and Black people "voted more conservatively." The lawmaker later walked these comments back. 

Donalds, who was also on Trump's shortlist (and passed over), was similarly excluded from the gamut of ardent allies the president-elect nominated to leadership roles in his administration — a curious fate to pundits who expected the Floridian to at least be considered for a senior role for all the prostrating he did for Trump in 2024. 

In a November interview with CNN's Laura Coates, Donalds said that Trump did not personally ask him to fill any Cabinet position and that he wasn't "surprised" that he wasn't nominated for a role. He also defended Trump from criticism that he had not then chosen any Black appointees. 

"If the Cabinet picks help deliver the America First agenda that Donald Trump wants, this will be an unmitigated success, and every American will be happy with that," Donalds said, in part, when Coates asked if he'd be satisfied if Trump didn't select a single Black appointee. 

(After Turner, the ex-lawmaker from Texas, was announced as the HUD secretary nominee, Donalds urged his colleagues in the Senate to support his confirmation.)

Smith said that Donalds likely wouldn't see his exclusion from Trump's administration picks as a snub. Instead, he argued that Donalds is likely waiting to use his rapport with Trump for a potential run for Florida governor in 2026.

"Byron Donalds is the leading candidate to become governor of the state of Florida, and that is what I think he is waiting to cash in his cards on and that he has contributed his influence, his ability to actually do well In journalistic interviews," Smith said. 

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mike Robinson  

Despite regularly being steeped in scandal over inflammatory remarks, the North Carolina lieutenant governor started 2024 seemingly at the top of his game. He had strong support among the MAGA base and staunch backing from top Republicans. Trump, who had previously praised him, promised him an endorsement early in the primary cycle, and the state's Republican voters awarded him a sweeping victory in the race for the GOP gubernatorial nomination. 

And then CNN dropped a bombshell report revealing yet another Robinson scandal. 

In mid-September, the outlet linked Robinson to an old profile on an online porn forum that made a series of problematic posts. The user, named "Mark Robinson" with a similar handle and email to the official's other social media accounts, called himself a "black NAZI," expressed support for reimplementing slavery, praised Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and described spying on women bathing in a locker room twice as a teenager, among other sexually explicit conduct.

Robinson strongly denied that he authored the posts, telling CNN, "This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me."

"I’m not going to get into the minutia of how somebody manufactured this, these salacious tabloid lies,” added Robinson, who had repeatedly quoted Hitler while campaigning. 

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Still, the damage to his campaign was swift and insurmountable. 

GOP support for Robinson began to slough off shortly thereafter, with North Carolina Republican officials distancing themselves from him, Republican Party operatives pressing him to drop out and a sizeable chunk of his staff resigning from his campaign. Robinson also appeared to lose backing from Trump, who, while failing to condemn Robinson's alleged conduct, also declined to say whether he would urge voters to support the candidate. 

But Smith argued that Robinson never really had full-breasted backing of the state and national GOP, in large part because he was such an inflammatory character. Instead, he said he believes the North Carolina and national RNC were committed to the "fundraising, the attention grabbing and the pure delightful entertainment" that Robinson provided. 

"He's found a home in not being judged for [his character flaws] by being a great performer for an audience that likes the performance of Black people before it likes the morality of Black people," Smith said, adding: "In other words, the brother is just being a great minstrel for the sake of exchanging dollars for the show."

The lieutenant governor's political career only plummeted further during the election. Robinson handily lost the North Carolina gubernatorial race, trailing Democratic Governor-elect Josh Stein by nearly 15 points, and was also excluded from the list of Trump's nominees. 

This year's election cycle has shown that Black Americans are realizing to a greater extent that they face a double-edged sword when working to obtain political and policy gains as well as resources from the political system, Smith said. 

"I think Black Americans are well aware that those gains come with deals with the devil," he said. "Racism in politics and being used in politics as pawns is part of that process."

The new critique of politicians of color like Donalds, Scott and Robinson should be, Smith argued, "are these people performing like minstrels?" Or "are these people actually political negotiators who are putting themselves at the table of power at whatever means necessary in order to deliver some results, some critical results, to Black America?"