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WASHINGTON: At one of his final rallies before the 2024 election, then-candidate Donald Trump warned that Black Americans were losing their jobs in droves and that things would get even worse if he did not return to the White House.
“You should demand that they give you the numbers of how many Black people are going to lose their job,” Trump said. “The African American population, they’re getting fired at numbers that we have never seen before.”
But with Trump back in office since January, an already fragile financial situation for Black Americans has worsened. Upset by inflation and affordability issues, Black voters had shifted modestly toward the Republican last year on the promise that he could boost the economy by stopping border crossings and challenging foreign factories with tariffs. Yet a recent spate of economic data instead shows a widening racial wealth gap.
Black unemployment has climbed from 6.2 percent to 7.5 percent so far in 2025, the highest level since October 2021. Black homeownership has fallen to the lowest level since 2021, according to an analysis by the real estate brokerage Redfin. Earlier this month, the Census Bureau said the median Black household income fell 3.3 percent last year to $56,020, which is roughly $36,000 less than what a white household earns and evidence of a bad situation becoming worse.
That creates a major political risk for the president as well as an economic danger for the nation because job losses for Black Americans have historically foreshadowed a wider set of layoffs across other groups.
“Black Americans are often the canary in the coal mine,” said Angela Hanks, a former official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Labor Department who is now at The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank.
The Trump White House stressed that some of these downward trends, such as a relative decline in Black wealth, began under Democratic President Joe Biden. It emphasized that the “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies pushed by Democrats failed to deliver economic gains.
“Despite his lunatic obsession with DEI, Joe Biden’s disastrous economic agenda reduced the Black share of household wealth by nearly 25 percent,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. “His inflationary policies caused interest rate hikes that froze Americans out of homeownership, and his open borders policies flooded the country with tens of millions of illegals who drove down wages.”
Some Black voters see Trump’s policies as doing more to hurt than help
Some Black voters who stayed on the sidelines in 2024 feel they need to be more engaged politically.
Josh Garrett, a 30-year-old salesperson in Florida, said he could not find a candidate last year with whom he agreed. He is frustrated by Trump’s layoffs of federal workers and sees a government more geared toward billionaires than the middle class.
“I don’t understand how you could be for the American people and have Americans lose their jobs when they have families, have bills,” Garrett said.
While the financial outlook for Black Americans is deteriorating, the net worth of white households is largely holding steady or increasing, largely due to stock market performance.
Hanks notes that the “chaotic effects” of Trump’s tariffs and spending cuts are hitting more vulnerable populations right now but that the damage could soon spread beyond.
Black leaders see Trump’s policies as discriminatory based on race
The federal layoffs appear to have disproportionately hit Black Americans because they make up a meaningful share of the government workforce. The administration maintains that its income tax cuts, tariffs and deportations of immigrants who are in the United States illegally will help Black Americans, but there is little evidence so far in the data of that.
At the same time, Trump has said that he would like to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore and Memphis, Tennessee — cities led by Black mayors. The president has called for redrawing congressional districts to favor Republicans, which could dilute the ability of Black voters to shape elections. He has sought to diminish the legacy of slavery and segregation from the Smithsonian museums.
“The message that they are sending is very clear: In these places, these people are incapable of governing themselves,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said. “They are incapable of helping to solve their own issues. And make no mistake about it, it’s partly due to how we look.”
The Democrat warned that the mounting economic challenges could contribute to crime in the future, reversing progress that cities have made in recent years to lower homicide rates.
Trump might not be able to afford alienating Black voters
Black Americans are the dominant core of the Democratic base, though Trump has improved his standing with them. In 2024, Trump won 16 percent of Black voters, doubling his 2020 share, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of the electorate. One of the key differences appeared to be frustration over inflation and affordability.
Roughly one-third of Black voters (36 percent) in the 2024 presidential election said the economy and jobs was the most important issue facing the country, up from 11 percent in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was the top issue.
In a July poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, about half of Black adults (52 percent) said the amount of money they get paid was a “major” source of stress in their life right now, slightly higher than for US adults overall (43 percent) and significantly higher than for white adults (37 percent).
When it comes to incomes, some associated with the conservative movement suggest that Black households are more vulnerable because fewer of them are in married families, which generally tend to have higher incomes.
Delano Squires, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the “connection between family structure and financial stability is one that is fairly consistent across time.”
The immediate political reality is that Trump had a mandate to improve the economy for the middle class, including Black voters. But many of those voters now see an administration more focused on deporting immigrants and expanding its own grip on power, possibly threatening Republicans’ chances of holding onto the House and key Senate seats in next year’s elections.
“We’re in a new era,” said Alexsis Rodgers, political director at the Black to the Future Action Fund. “There are people who obviously believed his promises, that Trump was going to do something about the cost of eggs, the cost of housing. They’ve seen the focus instead is on ICE raids and downsizing the government.”

WASHINGTON: A month after an Alaskan summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump still seems surprised that his gambit did not pay off with peace in Ukraine.
“He’s let me down,” Trump said this week. “He really let me down.”
There has been no more progress in the Middle East, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is beginning a new offensive in Gaza City and lashing out across the region.
“They have to be very, very careful,” Trump said after Israel targeted Hamas inside Qatar, a US ally that has been hosting diplomatic negotiations.
Trump’s disappointment and frustration is much different from the confidence and dominance he tries to project on the international stage, especially as he trumpets his diplomatic efforts and campaigns for the Nobel Peace Prize. Asked about his goals for the upcoming UN General Assembly, the president said “world peace.” But the most high-profile conflicts appear to be escalating instead of winding down.
“This whole last nine months of peace efforts was just a merry-go-round,” said Max Bergmann, a State Department official under Democratic President Barack Obama who now works at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Bold gestures, but reaching peace deals is hard
Although Trump prizes bold gestures — a stealth bomber strike in Iran, a sweeping tariff announcement — solving a global jigsaw puzzle is a far bigger struggle.
The fundamental truth, Bergmann said, is “trying to reach peace agreements is very hard,” and that Trump has not surrounded himself with experienced diplomats and foreign policy experts.
“It’s like if you were to tell me, ‘Go do a hotel deal,’” Bergmann said. “It would be a terrible deal. I would lose a lot of money.”
In Trump’s defense, the White House has pointed to comments from European leaders who have praised his efforts working to forge peace agreements. Trump often notes that he hires “only the best people.”
Matt Kroenig, a senior policy adviser at the Pentagon during Trump’s first term, said the president’s brashness can get results, such as when he demanded increased defense spending from European allies.
Trump, however, can end up spinning his wheels on more challenging issues and eventually give up, such as when he tried to persuade Kim Jong Un to end North Korea’s nuclear program.
When it comes to making peace in Ukraine and Gaza, Kroenig wondered, “At what point does he say, ‘This is too hard, let’s move on to other issues.’”
Foreign policy is usually a team sport for presidential administrations, requiring extensive coordination among agencies through the National Security Council. But Trump has dramatically slashed the council’s staff, and Marco Rubio serves as both secretary of state and national security adviser.
“It’s one person setting the strategy and everyone else is waiting to see,” Kroenig said.
Mideast is increasingly in turmoil
In the Middle East, Trump is getting caught in the middle of an increasingly combustible situation. He has visited Arab nations, including Qatar, this year to strengthen ties, and he has backed Israel’s military operations in Gaza and Iran.
But now Israel, emboldened by its battlefield success, is striking more widely throughout the region, including the recent attack targeting Hamas officials in Qatar. That jeopardized negotiations that the United States has been trying to push along and rattled Arab leaders’ faith in Trump’s ability to influence, let alone rein in, Netanyahu.
Some of them now view Israel, not Iran, as their primary security threat, according to three Arab diplomats familiar with conversations at the last summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Doha. It’s a noticeable shift after Israel and Arab nations grew closer during Trump’s first term, when the Republican president championed the Abraham Accords. The diplomats were not authorized to publicly discuss the private conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity.
US officials have tried to assuage doubts by pointing to Trump’s expressions of displeasure with Netanyahu’s latest moves, to recent meetings held with Qatar’s prime minister and to discussions of enhanced security arrangements.
During next week’s annual high-level gathering at the General Assembly, Rubio and Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff can expect to hear a chorus of criticism, with Arab nations seeking a more fundamental shift in how the US approaches the region.
For example, the US has tried to ensure that Israel has a military edge over its Arab neighbors. But now that Israel has attacked Qatar with US-supplied weapons — a strike that Qatar was unable to counter with its own US-supplied defenses — Arab diplomats are considering demanding stronger support.
Such a move would likely be politically untenable, at least for now, with support for Israel strong among Republicans who control Congress.
Trump’s equivocal approach to Putin
In Europe, Trump has frustrated his critics with his equivocal approach to Putin, sometimes suggesting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is just as responsible for the war that Moscow started with its 2022 invasion.
Trump recently insisted that his meeting with Putin “accomplished a lot,” but “it takes two to tango.”
“You know those are two people, Zelensky and Putin, that hate each other,” he said.
Fears that the war in Ukraine could spill over have been heightened by recent Russian military incursions into the airspace of NATO members Poland and Estonia. After three Russian fighter jets entered Estonian airspace on Friday, Trump said it could signal “big trouble.”
During a news conference in the United Kingdom on his state visit, Trump said he was dedicated to stopping the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. Then he turned philosophical.
“You never know in war. You know, war is a different thing,” he said. “Things happen that are very opposite of what you thought.”