Trump’s HBCU claims ring false
Here is my op-ed from July 12, 2024 which sums a thread I posted on Twitter/X. I make it plain and simple.
With the presidential election in full swing, the candidates are making their best pitches. They tailor their messages, trying to convince voters that their platform matches voters’ concerns. Uniquely, each has a presidential record that can be verified.
Yet one candidate continues to hallucinate accomplishments that are far from reality.
In his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump shared a mantra we’ve seen daily since 2015. He wrote, “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration and a very effective form of promotion.”
Maybe in 1987, it was innocent exaggeration, but today, it is mendacious manipulation. Nowhere have these half-true hyperboles been more frequent than when Trump talks about historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.
Trump has four simple African American talking points: He cites the lowest unemployment ever, ignoring that it reached new lows under President Joe Biden. He brags about criminal justice reform but never tells how it was reformed and the tangible impact. He notes the creation of opportunity zones, but we never hear who benefits and how.
Then there are some of his favorite claims about HBCUs. “We gave record funding to historically Black colleges and universities.” “I got them actually more money than they asked for by far.” “We got them long-term financing.” “I funded the black colleges and universities. Nobody else did that. Nobody else even thought of it.”
The average Trump supporter knows little to nothing about HBCUs, but his “hyperboles” give them permission to support with clear conscience a man whose history with African Americans is questionable. What they don’t know is that these statements are really half-truths, and in some instances, lies.
HBCU federal funding increased during the Trump years in office as they have pretty much under every administration (as the federal budget has also increased). But when you look at his budget requests for HBCU funding through the Department of Education, Trump proposed over $100 million in cuts to HBCU programs. The funding increases during the Trump administration were proposed and passed by the House and Senate due to HBCUs’ broad bipartisan support.
Trump supporters often cite an Associated Press article that indicates Trump signed a bill that provided permanent funding for HBCUs. Trump never mentions that this funding was for just one program, which had been funded for 10 years under President Barack Obama. When it concluded, Trump zeroed it out. U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, D-North Carolina, wrote a new bill which restored the funding. Nor does Trump say it passed both chambers with veto-proof majorities, making his signature performative. This funding, $85 million, is less than 7% of all federal HBCU funding.
When Trump recently said he funded the schools when no one else did or even thought about it, he told a blatant lie. HBCUs started receiving annual funding in 1966.
Trump weaves these phrases into an ever-changing story about the “heads of the schools” coming to the White House every year to beg for money. The famous photo from 2017, showing Trump in the Oval Office with HBCU presidents, helps give these narratives plausibility. But as someone who was there, having led two HBCUs, worked at two others and served in leadership with the United Negro College Fund, his stories are more accurately called fairy tales.
The sad part of his half truths is that his administration has a tangible HBCU accomplishment. It forgave loans to the four HBCUs (Dillard included) that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Yet only once have I ever heard him mention that.
That act, both significant and truthful, for Trump cannot compare to his fantastical claims of saving HBCUs as the president who did more for Black people than any before him, as he often says.
That too, is a lie. And in Louisiana, a place where the Ten Commandments belong in our schools, we certainly won’t support a prolific liar.
Walter Kimbrough is the former president of Dillard University and Philander Smith College and was recently appointed the interim president of Talladega College in Alabama.
