GOP Representative Byron Donalds was a nobody who became almost, sort-of-famous. He had a good gig going for himself in the House and in the GOP overall, especially after his ‘fifteen minutes’ during the fiasco with Kevin McCarthy. A MAGA, he pleased Trump to no end by being a black guy who unabashedly racially smeared Kamala Harris. He had a good gig going but decided he wanted more and made replacing Ron DeSantis as Governor of Florida seemed the way to go. Trump actually returned a favor and endorse him even! Alas the race has gotten ugly. There are Floridians, including in the GOP unwilling to coronate Donalds and one of them has unleashed a ‘racial smear’ on HIM. Like his hero Trump (and most conservatives) he loves to dish it out but can’t take it.
Let’s backtrack. I suspect most people like me reacted with “Who? Who the hell is Bryon Donalds?” when his name was put into nomination during that dumbass fight to be Speaker of the House. Outside of Florida and even within the state most people had never heard of hm. I’m not even sure most of his fellow GOPers knew him beyond being a hard core conservative and evident MAGA from Florida. I also suspect most of them wouldn’t have taken any notice of all except he was black on THEIR side which let’s face it isn’t typical (being Black) for elected Republicans. However he took his proverbial fifteen minutes and spun it into more, including as I said in the 2024 campaign. Being a stone cold racist himself Trumpty just had to love a black guy willing to trash Kamala Harris on racial grounds.
However Donalds did and cemented himself as a rock-solid MAGA. Not exactly a major player in the GOP but someone worthy of considerable support. He’s also a young guy and an ambitious one. Governor, with Trump’s backing seemed like a good idea while this is speculation on my part I’m betting that his long-term goal is to parlay a stint as Governor of Florida into a Presidential run. First things first though. He’s got to win that Governor’s race and avoid any major scandal. In politics image is important, often too much so but Donald’s biggest selling point to GOP voters was being a political unicorn – an articulate black man and hard, HARD core conservative.
Having become well-known and working to get Trump back in the White House Donald’s made some comments about blacks being better off in the Jim Crow era, claiming they were actually mostly conservatives and then LBJ came along and created the former Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare adding a ‘and look where we are’ type thought to his statement. The firestorm he ignited led him to say his words were ‘taken out of context’ but that wouldn’t turn out to be his only foray into injecting racism into the 2024 campaign.
As Raw Story tells us the Florida GOP primary is off to an ugly start. It sure looks to me like it’s going to get worse. Any thoughts Donalds had of riding a Trump endorsement to a coronation are gone. He’s getting hit and hit hard by a fellow GOPer. Getting a dose of his own medicine is the way Raw Story puts it. Conservatives all the way up to Trump liked him for more than his ‘whitewashing’ of racism (not that Donalds is the only black elected Republican to do so) and him smearing Harris over HER heritage (only ‘half-black?’) went over well with Republicans. Now it’s coming back to bite him in the ass:
GOP candidate James Fishback has fired off some odious smears against front-runner Byron Donalds, a Republican congressman and MAGA ally of President Donald Trump, whom he slurred as a “slave” to “corporate interests,” and he refused to apologize when confronted over his remarks, reported MS NOW.
“Fishback doubled and tripled down on his racist slur, telling Florida Politics that Donalds ‘has no right to complain’ and shouldn’t be offended by the slur because, Fishback said, the representative’s ancestors weren’t enslaved in the United States,” wrote MS NOW columnist Ja’han Jones. “His quote invoked themes popularized by some Black conservatives in the extremely online ‘American Descendants of Slaves’ movement, who’ve sought to drive a wedge among Black people by differentiating those with recent immigrant histories from those without such history.”
Fishback later shared a story on social media about the congressman’s fundraising with a caption calling him a “SLAVE who was auctioned off for $31 million.”
Donalds and his supporters no doubt are furious. Like I said most conservatives love dishing out attacks, including and especially unfair and even odious ones. Yet are at best mystified but more commonly angered when someone does it to THEM! Donalds wouldn’t have place placed into the driver’s seat for the GOP nomination for Governor. Since it’s Florida that GOP nomination means likely being elected. Now the GOP primary is shaping up to be a sh*t show and who knows? With a good candidate Democrats might force the GOP to spend a lot more resources protecting their solid control of Florida and not just at the state level.
The GOP surrendered to Trump long ago and in the coming year that submission could turn into an anchor around the neck of anyone running for office with an R next to their name. Independent voters are up for grabs and racism takes more than one form. It’s currently about brown people and Trump’s cruel deportation policies. But racism directed at black people is still there too. It’s tough to measure because people have grown comfortable lying to pollsters. However anyone who doesn’t think it plays a factor in elections is kidding themselves.
Thanks to Trump, with plenty of help from Donalds it likely injected just enough doubt in the minds of some voters that might have prevented Harris from catching up to and passing Trump. It doesn’t get mentioned much but even Harris’ internal polls show she never quite caught up to him. There were other factors of course. But it was there and we all know it. Donalds went all in on playing a race card against Harris. If you want to read an example of him doing so yet trying to claim he wasn’t Politico has a lengthy back and forth between Donalds and George Stephanopoulos. Donalds will be lucky to pull five percent of the black vote in a statewide election in Florida but BROWN people will be taking their own lessons from his stances.
It’s often been noted that Hispanics in Florida aren’t the same as elsewhere because of the influence of the anti-Castro Cubans. The attitudes of those who escaped Cuba have been passed down to descendants. However Florida is a state that would be in deep trouble without immigrants to do all that manual labor. Add in Trump’s zeal to deport anyone not white and you have to wonder how many who aren’t citizens yet living here worry they’ll find themselves sent to Cuba.
Why you should keep an eye on this is simple. This isn’t just a state Party engaging in a biker bar brawl. Florida is a huge electoral prize and it’s been as solidly Republican as Texas has been. This could all easily spill over into most races there next November regardless of whether Donalds winds up being the GOP nominee. If, as I think this story develops legs and the primary is months of ugliness it will get noticed nationally. It’s going to take a lot of resources to patch things up for the general election campaign. Money and political talent that’s needed all over the country for GOPers. It could even linger on because if the Florida GOP sustains the kind of political wound I think is possible it will matter when 2028 rolls around.
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Well that’s certainly true.
Like all republicans he’s a ‘slave’ to corporate interests.
With all that entails.
Got to this point and had to stop ’cause something just didn’t seem right:
“Donald’s made some comments about blacks being better off in the Jim Crow era, claiming they were actually mostly conservatives and then LBJ came along and created the former Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare adding a ‘and look where we are’ type thought to his statement.”
After doing a 2-second Google search, I found that the “articulate black man” ain’t very intelligent or very well-informed about US history, particularly with the Cabinet. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare was created by–get this–REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT Dwight David Eisenhower in 1953, becoming the first new Cabinet post since the Department of Labor was established in 1913. (It should be noted, however, HEW was largely built on the existing framework of the Federal Security Agency, established in 1939.)
Now, I’ll get back to the story and see how much more stupidity Donalds provides and how much of the racial animus he was happy to sling at Kamala Harris he’s now receiving from his “fellow” MAGAt/GOoPers.
From the block quote:
“Fishback doubled and tripled down on his racist slur, telling Florida Politics that Donalds ‘has no right to complain’ and shouldn’t be offended by the slur because, Fishback said, the representative’s ancestors weren’t enslaved in the United States,” wrote MS NOW columnist Ja’han Jones. “His quote invoked themes popularized by some Black conservatives in the extremely online ‘American Descendants of Slaves’ movement, who’ve sought to drive a wedge among Black people by differentiating those with recent immigrant histories from those without such history.”
Not to give Donalds any support but Fishback and this “American Descendants of Slaves” movement are so woefully, well, STUPID. Slavery doesn’t really care about WHERE you or your ancestors were enslaved. According to his Wiki article, Donalds has Panamanian and Jamaican ancestry, and both countries were deeply dependent on the African slave trade well into the 19th century (slavery officially ended in Panama during the independence movements throughout Latin America in the 1820s though there was still quite a bit of “second-class” status for Afro-Panamanians who generally comprised a majority of the country’s population–though Panama itself wouldn’t become an independent country until 1903, being a part of Colombia from the 1820s till 1903; Jamaica’s slavery officially ended in 1833 though not fully effective till 1838 though indentured servitude–aka “contract slavery”–continued for decades after that). And conditions for slaves in both countries were NOT any less brutal or harsh than they were in the US. Post-slavery conditions were somewhat mitigated (Britain’s abolition was combined with an “apprenticeship” deal where freed slaves could be treated as “hired workers”–even by the plantation owners–for years or even decades; in Panama, former slaves could also get an “apprenticeship” deal but Panamanians whose ancestry was primarily African, with little to no other ethnic composition like European or Native American, were typically at the bottom of the country’s hierarchy even below immigrant Blacks from the West Indies–and when the Panama Canal was being built, “pure” African Panamanians were frequently subjected to brutally racist conditions by the largely Southern-born American supervisors).