”Donald Trump at Benedict College was beneath contempt.

”Donald Trump at Benedict College was beneath contempt.

Benedict College is a historically black college in Columbia, S.C. Trump spoke there on Friday at the 2019 Second Step Presidential Justice Forum organized by the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center, a “group of over eighty African-American mayors, city, county and state officials, prosecutors and defense attorneys, political strategists, community leaders, activists, police chiefs and other law enforcement executives,” according to the group’s website.

The irony was that there are over 2,000 students at the school, yet only a handful were allowed to attend the event. The others were on lockdown, told to stay inside. Their lunches were delivered to them in their dorms.

The 20/20 group gave Trump its “Bipartisan Justice Award” for his signing of the First Step Act, criminal justice reform legislation which, among other things, allowed for the early release of a relatively small number of nonviolent federal inmates. The vast majority of inmates, however, are not federal, and therefore not affected by the law.

Still, for this group to give Trump an award of any type was an affront to anyone who has paid attention to his full record on criminal justice and to black people insisting on justice. 

As the Brennan Center for Justice pointed out in March, not only did Trump not include any money for implementing the First Step Act in his executive budget, but the budget also sought “yet again, to eliminate J.R.I., a program that provides technical assistance to states seeking to safely reform their justice systems.”

Trump doesn’t care about justice, criminal or otherwise. He cares about moments, images and monuments. He wants to be able to plaster his name across any big, important thing, stand proudly before it and take credit.

This is the same Trump who responded to the case of the Central Park Five by taking out newspaper advertisements calling for New York State to adopt the death penalty. The black and Latino boys were just teenagers at the time, and he refused to apologize or change his position on their guilt even after they were exonerated.

He consistently gushes over the morally abhorrent and dramatically racially skewed Stop-And-Frisk program in New York City. At its height, hundreds of thousands of people — mostly young black and Latino men — were being caught in this dragnet, many being stopped and frisked multiple times for no reason other than the hue of their skin, texture of their hair and ZIP code of their home.

In 2013, a federal judge ruled New York’s way of using Stop and Frisk unconstitutional because it was a “policy of indirect racial profiling.” In the last lines of her 195-page decision the judge quoted one of my columns:

“The idea of universal suspicion without individual evidence is what Americans find abhorrent and what black men in America must constantly fight. It is pervasive in policing policies — like stop-and-frisk, and … neighborhood watch — regardless of the collateral damage done to the majority of innocents. It’s like burning down a house to rid it of mice.”

And yet, Trump couldn’t let it go. In 2016, Trump said: “You understand, you have to have, in my opinion, I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk. In New York City, it was so incredible, the way it worked.”

Chicago already had Stop and Frisk, and that city’s rate of stops was even higher than in New York. Trump wanted to nationalize Stop and Frisk to combat violence in the black community.

This is the same Trump who told a gathering of police officers that they should rough people up more when they arrest them. “Please, don’t be too nice,” he said.

This is the same Trump who repeatedly chastised N.F.L. players who knelt to protest police brutality on black people. At a political rally, he said: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’”

And, as CNN reported in 2016, Trump said that “he believes the Black Lives Matter movement has in some cases helped instigate the recent killings of police officers, and suggested he might direct his future attorney general to investigate the civil rights activist group.”

Not only is he not deserving of an award, he turned the event into another self-serving political speech, complaining about the Mueller investigation and the impeachment inquiry, seemingly trying to align efforts to contain and push his corruption with the people whose lives have been crushed by the criminal justice system. Republicans like Trump bemoan victimhood, but secretly — or not so secretly — demand a slice of it.

Later in the speech, Trump made this proclamation:

“I will always fight against abuses of power from any source. And I will always champion the right to due process, the right to a fair trial, the right to good legal representation for every American, regardless of race, background, position, right?”

Wrong. This is exactly the opposite of what Trump has done. Witnessing this spectacle was like falling under the glamour of a vampire.”