So Help Me God, page 46
Taking a knee, repeating a phrase: those were easy, cathartic responses to difficult problems. They didn’t improve the lives of any Americans living in struggling communities. The truth was that for four years our administration had worked to improve the lives of African Americans. And we had made real progress.
In August 2016, during a campaign stop in Michigan, Trump had veered off his prepared remarks and made an unvarnished appeal to African Americans, asking, “What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump?” It wasn’t exactly Jack Kemp, and of course it produced the usual outrage in the media. But he was right to ask the question, to point out that for too long Democrats had taken African Americans and their votes for granted at all levels of government, resulting in disproportionally high rates of unemployment, failing schools, and communities with little opportunity for advancement in life.
It was also a recognition that if the party of Lincoln wanted to earn back the support of African Americans, it had work to do. And we went to it. By cutting taxes and regulations, we let the US economy and labor market kick into overdrive and saw the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for African Americans. Labor force participation increased, resulting in more income for African Americans: during the first two years of the Trump administration, the median income of African Americans grew by 15.4 percent.
Opportunity Zones, a provision of our tax bill, also made a difference. Championed by South Carolina senator Tim Scott, the first African American member of the Senate from the South since Reconstruction, those designated economically struggling communities—with an unemployment rate nearly 1.6 times higher than the national average—were meant to benefit from private-sector investment encouraged by tax benefits. Former NFL great Scott Turner led our administration’s effort to promote Opportunity Zones across the country. Through 2019, they attracted $29 billion in investments in impoverished areas across the country, according to the Government Accountability Office. And during our term multiple initiatives provided billions of dollars to help start and expand Black- and minority-owned businesses. We were improving economic opportunities for African Americans all across America.
And then there was criminal justice reform. Ever since Bill Clinton had signed the 1994 Crime Bill, African Americans had been disproportionately incarcerated and little progress had been made to solve the problem. But in December 2018, all that changed when Congress passed the First Step Act, the first major criminal justice reform in a generation. Jared Kushner and his right-hand man, Ja’Ron Smith, led the administration’s efforts with Congress to rethink sentencing and incarceration in the United States.
Early on, Jared approached me for advice because Indiana had reformed sentencing laws when I was governor. I had always said that Indiana should be the worst place in America to commit a serious crime and the best place, once you’ve done your time, to get a second chance. But there were too few pathways to personal reform, and we were squandering the opportunity to help people lead productive lives once they left prison.
The bill I signed in 2013 had reformed sentences for nonviolent offenders and allowed Hoosiers to expunge their criminal record once they had demonstrated good behavior for a designated amount of time. But, as I explained to Jared, the only way we had been able to pass the first major reform of Indiana’s criminal justice system since the 1970s was because we had worked with and earned the support of law enforcement.
During 2018, Jared hosted summits at the White House with law enforcement personnel and advocates of reform regardless of their political affiliation. A key supporter was former Obama administration official Van Jones. After a year of collaboration between Congress and the White House, when the president signed the bill, which allowed prisoners to earn time credits in order to earn early release from prison and created programs to aid in successful reentry, it was another instance when Trump had done what other presidents had promised but never accomplished. After the bill passed, Van Jones called it a “Christmas miracle” on CNN, adding “You had, for the first time in more than a generation, both parties coming together to do something for people at the bottom.” And he was right.
It didn’t end there. In 2019, Trump also signed a bill permanently providing more than $250 million a year to historically black colleges and universities. He reversed an Obama-era decision and doubled funding for Washington, DC’s, school choice program. In our first three years, we had improved the lives of African Americans in tangible ways: more jobs; more investments; expanded opportunities in education; and criminal justice reform. The work was unfinished, to be sure, but we had made real progress, and when in 2020 our ticket received the highest percentage of African American votes of any Republican ticket in sixty years, it was evident that many African Americans knew what we had done. But it didn’t seem to diminish what was to come.
On May 27, the president ordered the FBI and Justice Department to open investigations into Floyd’s murder. But regardless of what the president did, Biden and the Democrats would try to make what had happened in Minneapolis about Trump; when riots erupted across the country in the summer of 2020, Joe Biden declared, “This is Donald Trump’s America.” In fact, as the leader of the party calling to defund the police and looking the other way at the violence engulfing our cities, it was a preview of Joe Biden’s America.
During the weeks that followed, protests continued across the country. There was violence in Seattle, New York City, Chicago, Indianapolis, Portland, Oregon, and many other cities. All in all, there were more than five hundred riots in two hundred American cities, causing twenty-five deaths and more than $1 billion in property damage.
The first obligation of a government is to protect its citizens and secure its streets. Some sixty-two thousand National Guard were mobilized in response, but many mayors and governors were failing in those most basic responsibilities of governing.
If they wouldn’t protect America’s neighborhoods, we would. During the summer of 2020, the president deployed federal law enforcement personnel to stop the violence, and I supported him wholeheartedly. As the riots went on and cries from the Left to defund the police grew louder, I made a point of meeting with law enforcement officers as I traveled around the country. I spoke at “Back the Blue” rallies in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Arizona before the summer was out. I spent time with law enforcement officers, attending a police roll call in Youngstown, Ohio, and visiting the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #5 in Philadelphia. It was important that the men and women serving on the thin blue line knew that they had a president and a vice president who had their backs.
But I also knew that there were millions of Americans, incensed by Floyd’s death, who had concerns about how our communities were policed. The president was leading on (and tweeting about) law and order. In June, he signed an executive order creating a database to track police officers with records of misconduct and abuse of public trust. But there was much more to do to move our nation forward.
With the blessing of the White House, our office opened a dialogue with inner-city Americans who wanted change for their communities but had had nothing to do with the rioting and had in many cases been hurt by it. So during the summer, I traveled the country, meeting with Americans to hear their ideas about how to reform community-police relations. The first thing I wanted everyone I met with to hear was that justice would be served for the man who had killed George Floyd. And that America could not ignore the historic, underlying inequities that have beset minority communities—particularly the African American community.
In Pittsburgh, where rioters had thrown rocks at police and beaten a cameraman, I met with Black faith leaders in Bishop Joseph Garlington’s Covenant Church. I asked them to unburden their hearts, and they did. Cheryl Allen, a retired judge and Republican, told me that her sons had been stopped dozens of times by the police with no provocation. It wasn’t just White officers, she told me, but Black ones, too. None of her sons had ever been arrested. She had even gone to the station to confront the police. But the violence and rioting were solving nothing, she said. “Just as murder is sin, so is violence, looting, and destruction.”
“I’m tired. I’m mentally, physically, and spiritually tired,” Pastor Ross Owens told me. He had grown up in one of the poorest areas of Pittsburgh, the Hill District, and he made clear: “I’m still tired because of the racism I see.” When his children were in middle school, they saw so much racism at the ages of thirteen and fifteen that he had to comfort them when they came home every day. He rightly pointed out that covid was disproportionately impacting Black Americans and the local decision to shut down schools was causing children to fall behind in their education and development, particularly in disadvantaged districts with less access to the computers necessary for remote learning. “At the same time I’m optimistic,” he continued. The church he attended had once been all White; Black people had been told to worship at a church down the street. But over the years it had integrated and was now equally split between the races.
The most tragic element of the strife that summer was that its greatest victims were people who lived and worked in minority neighborhoods that were left in ruins. Minority-owned businesses that had served their neighbors for decades were left boarded up, their shelves emptied. At Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, I talked to Dr. Michael Kim and his wife, Joan. The children of immigrants, they owned four drugstores in the Washington, DC, area. They are the embodiment of the American Dream. During the pandemic, the White House Coronavirus Task Force directed covid tests to pharmacies in minority communities, including the Kims’ Grubb’s Pharmacy. It was one of only three drugstores in the city to offer covid testing. “We are there to help and serve the community and do whatever we can,” Michael said. When riots broke out in Washington in early June, he and his wife had a late-night phone call from their alarm company. They rushed from their home in Maryland into Washington only to discover that two of their stores had been broken into. Over the next few nights, the rest of their stores were damaged and robbed. They watched it all on their surveillance videos. A U-Haul van had been driven through one store wall, and people had swarmed into the building, taking whatever they wanted, including the medicines that the Kims provided for people on disability and welfare.
Later in the summer, when I visited Minneapolis along with Ivanka Trump to attend a forum on community-police relations, I spent time with a wonderful African American woman named Flora Westbrooks. Since 1985, she had owned and run Flora’s Hair Designs. More than a thousand Minneapolis businesses were damaged in the riots that erupted after George Floyd’s murder; Flora’s had been burned to the ground. I asked her to show me what was left of her shop. We jumped into the motorcade and drove to a vacant lot full of ashes and rubble behind a chain fence. Flora told me that in desperation someone had spray-painted “Black Owned” on her building, hoping that it would be spared by the rioters. It wasn’t.
What inspired me was that the Kims and Flora weren’t angry. They were heartbroken, yes, but not vengeful and not discouraged. It brought to mind what I had seen in April 2019 after an arsonist had set fire and razed three Black churches in Port Barre and Opelousas, Louisiana.
Flying to Louisiana, we had gone to what was left of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Opelousas and joined hands with the pastors and parishioners of the three churches. I could have been out of place, the conservative White Republican vice president coming to visit with the congregations of three largely Black churches. But I wasn’t there as the vice president; I was there as a brother in Christ. And they knew it. After we exchanged a few words, there was a connection. I looked over the remains of the church; all that was left was a brick foundation, ashes inside.
Then as now, what struck me most about those communities was that after three churches were burned, there was no talk of retribution or anger. There were sadness and disbelief, but there was also a determination to rebuild. Two years later, Mount Pleasant Baptist Church was standing again, with donations from all fifty states, and of this writing was preparing to host services once again.
The Kims’ customers and community had come together in the aftermath of the riots to raise money to repair the pharmacies. And Flora Westbrooks had raised more than $250,000 on GoFundMe by the next year to reopen her salon. Faith restores, faith overcomes. As Michael Kim said, “We need to do more good, to shine the light on the good that is happening,” as he remembered Romans 12:21: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” And that was just what America was doing: neighbors helping neighbors. This was America at its best.
Of course, the mainstream media continued to take every opportunity to divide us and make the strife across the country about Donald Trump. On June 1, I walked into a crowded Oval Office where President Trump, Ivanka, General Mark Milley, Mark Esper, and staff were gathered. There had been rioting across the street from the White House in Lafayette Park, and the historic St. John’s Church, known as the church of the presidents, had been set on fire. Mark Meadows informed me that the president would be walking to Lafayette Park and visiting the church as a show of support. I thought it would be a strong symbolic gesture of our commitment to law and order and religious freedom, as my visit to the Black churches in Louisiana in 2019 had been. I asked the president if he wanted me to join him, but he waved me off.
Back in my office, I watched on live television as Trump crossed the park and held up a Bible. Soon thereafter I watched as the media went wild, suggesting that the US Park Police had tear-gassed protestors to clear the way for a photo op for the president and even saying that he had held the Bible upside down. A year later, the inspector general of the Department of the Interior, Mark Greenblatt, confirmed that the US Park Police had not used tear gas and had been planning to clear the area for days to allow contractors to safely install fencing in response to the rioting and attacks on police officers. The president hadn’t held the Bible upside down, either.
Amid all the strife, there was a brief respite of inspiration at Kennedy Space Center on May 30. That day, for the first time in nearly a decade, American astronauts returned to space on an American rocket from American soil. Much as the space program in the 1960s had happened during times of civil strife, that launch took place while the nation was reeling from the murder of George Floyd and during a pandemic. I believe that Americans watching on their phones and computers were inspired in the same way a previous generation had been fifty years prior, watching the launch of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo on their black-and-white television sets.
It was the culmination of three and a half years of incredible work, resulting from the revival of the Space Council, and the fruition of Trump’s vision to usher in a new era of American space exploration. The rocket that carried NASA’s astronauts to the International Space Station, though, had been built by a private company, SpaceX. It was the first time that America’s astronauts ventured into space aboard commercial rockets. The president had made it clear when the Space Council announced the United States’ return to space that if the private sector could get us there quicker than NASA’s contractors could, we would collaborate. Elon Musk’s company took us up on the offer. We streamlined the regulations for the commercial use of space, and our astronauts and engineers got to work.
Standing between Karen and the president, I watched the rocket, trailed by a white flame, climbing the blue sky. I’m not in the business of taking credit; that belongs to the men and women of NASA and SpaceX. But I couldn’t help but think in my heart of hearts that that epic day had just a little something to do with a boy sitting raptly in front of a black-and-white television set in Columbus, Indiana, watching the moon landing in 1969. As the rocket launched, a White House photographer snapped a photo of Karen, Trump, and me from behind. Aware that the moment was being captured for posterity, the president and I remained stoic and still. Karen, on the other hand, didn’t care. I think she captured the emotions of the American people that day, raising both her fists in the air triumphantly as the rocket rumbled into the heavens.
It was an important day in the life of the nation and one that was much needed. This was our America.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT Running the Race
Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.
—Hebrews 12:1
As the nation attempted to see its way through all those challenges—the pandemic, the riots and strife, the bitter election campaign—I was reminded that even when it doesn’t seem that way, God is still working. In the summer of 2020, I received a letter from Chip DeWitt, a pastor who led a church not far from Jacksonville, Florida. In 1977, he and his new bride, he wrote, had been attending Asbury Seminary in Kentucky, where a Christian music festival was held each spring.
That year, he told me, the seminary had been considering canceling the next year’s event, and DeWitt and his young wife had been asked if they would be willing to organize it. Even though they were warned by friends that it would be a great amount of work and hard on their new marriage, they answered the call. He told me they had worked the whole year arranging the festival in 1978. After all their efforts, he wrote, on the culminating Saturday night of the concert, clouds moved over and poured rain on the campground where the festival was taking place. As the young couple walked through the camp area, he recounted, they had been so disappointed. They thought it all had been for naught. Then he wrote words I will never forget: “That’s because we didn’t know a future vice president of the United States would be giving his life to Jesus Christ that night.” He wrote that he could not “write that without tears,” and I could not read it without tears because I remember that night, sitting in the rain, when I made a decision that changed my life. He ended the letter by telling me that learning of my experience on that rainy night had reminded him that “even when things aren’t going like we expected, they are always going like He expected.” It was just what I needed to hear.
