Meet the Black Artists Flocking to Donald Trump

As former President Donald Trump vies for another term in the White House, he approaches 2024 with a growing contingent of hip-hop artists as vocal supporters.

While former presidential candidate Kanye "Ye" West has a years-long history of expressing admiration for Trump—and sporting a red Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat to erase any doubt—he hasn't stood alone among rappers.

Lil Wayne, DaBaby, Kodak Black, Chief Keef, Benny the Butcher and Waka Flocka Flame are just a few of the stars who have shown their support for the Republican front-runner, with each announcement becoming less of a shock than the one before it. Lil Wayne and Kodak Black were pardoned by Trump for separate firearms offenses.

Even YG—known for his anti-Trump anthem "F*** Donald Trump"—has dramatically softened his stance on the former host of The Apprentice, citing the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as a reason "Black people forgave him" after a period of skepticism.

"I'm speaking about these motherf***** in the hood. I am speaking on their behalf. This is what they say. 'S***, [Joe] Biden ain't did nothing for us, that n**** Trump is passing out money,'" he said on comedian Theo Von's This Past Weekend podcast in August.

Rapper Sexyy Red was among the most recent to publicly pledge her allegiance to Trump, when she said during an appearance on the same podcast last month that she wants to see him back in office.

"I like Trump...they support him in the 'hood," the Pound Town hitmaker said.

"At first, I don't think people was f****** with him like they thought he was racist, saying little s***, and you know, against women. But once he started getting Black people out of jail and giving people their free money, oh baby we love Trump, we need him back in office."

Since the last election cycle, rapper Lil Pump has been an avowed Trump supporter. Last week, video footage emerged of the musician leading attendees of his concert at the University of Mississippi to chant "we want Trump" in unison.

The footage caught the eye of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, who wrote on X, formerly Twitter: "One of my favorite people in the world is in that fraternity at Ole Miss. They absolutely love President Trump!"

The Trump Train now having hip-hop artists among its passengers is of particular note because of how the erstwhile real estate mogul has been viewed in recent years. Before his 2016 election victory and years after taking office, Trump was accused of everything from racism to xenophobia to Islamophobia.

However, in the few short years since Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election, there has been a measurable shift in the Black vote. While a Washington Post/ABC News poll last year revealed that Black Americans continue to support Democrats by clear margins, the percentages have declined significantly.

When Black Americans were asked last year if they would support Biden or Trump if the 2024 presidential election were held then, about 70 percent of respondents indicated they would vote for Biden, while 23 percent said they would support Trump, who won about 12 percent of Black votes in the 2020 race. That shows Trump doubling his numbers from the previous election.

Countercultural Outsider

So what is the appeal, and why are so many rappers—traditionally championed as the collective voice of all things antiestablishment—backing Trump?

Performance artist A.D. Carson, Ph.D., associate professor of hip-hop and the global South at the University of Virginia, told Newsweek that Trump's unlikely rise from political outsider to bona fide power player is aspirational for a demographic historically made to feel as though they don't belong in certain high-profile circles.

"I think that there are people who look at someone like Donald Trump as sort of countercultural, like being an outsider figure," Carson said. "I think that that appeals to hip-hop in all the ways that hip-hop appeals to the broader culture."

Looking back on the early years of hip-hop, Carson said that Trump's prominence as a real estate magnate in New York City—the birthplace of the genre, where his name gleamed on skyscrapers—represented the wealth and success often boasted of in rap verses.

"There's a longer history of Trump being known as a rich dude," Carson said. "And Trump, along with being a rich dude, [defined] wealth. And so people would sort of say his name as a way to signify wealth."

"We are also in the same timeline where Jay Z and Nas made [the 2006 track] Black Republicans. That idea doesn't seem to be very far off from the lives that rappers sort of live in their songs. The characters that they're playing in those songs definitely are voting for the Donald Trumps of the world."

With rappers like West seeing a round of backlash for his initial support of Trump, Carson added that the seeming taboo of backing the GOP powerhouse appealed, "because you're being told that [something is] not good or that you shouldn't like it, or you shouldn't want to be a part of it."

Racism Allegations

Is all of this enough to surmount the claims of racism? Trump has repeatedly denied the claims made by others, and said at one point that he was the "least racist person."

However, a 2021 report by Reuters revealed some instances that happened between 1972 and 2011 in which Trump was accused of racism, including the time when the FBI investigated alleged racial discrimination at residential units that were owned by Trump Management Co., which he presided over at the time, in the early 1970s. The report also mentioned that the former president called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in a one-page ad in several city newspapers following the so-called Central Park Five case.

The case involved five non-white young men who were named as suspects in assaulting a white woman in New York City in 1989. Their convictions were overturned in 2002 after a DNA test was matched with another man who confessed to the crime.

Trump made a number of controversial remarks during his 2016 presidential campaign where he repeatedly called Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. He also banned individuals from countries with a Muslim majority from entering the country during his presidency.

A 2019 report by the Brookings Institution, a U.S.-based think tank, said "there is substantial evidence that Trump encouraged racism and benefited politically from it." The report cited data showing an increase in hate crimes in areas where Trump held rallies.

"First, Donald Trump's support in the 2016 campaign was clearly driven by racism, sexism, and xenophobia. While some observers have explained Trump's success as a result of economic anxiety, the data demonstrate that anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and sexism are much more strongly related to support for Trump," the think tank's report read.

Carson said that Black Americans voting for Trump in spite of this is a result of them having long lived and operated in spaces where racism has been prevalent.

"Trump didn't invent racism, even if he has been an innovator of the weaponization of it. And I don't even think that he's been necessarily inventive or ingenuitive in his deployment of racism," Carson said. "Any racialized person, any minoritized person, who's lived in this country knows that you're already living inside of a system that prioritizes whiteness, prioritizes the ways that people might have access to whiteness.

"For the same reasons that people who know that universities are [historically] racist still go and get bachelor's, master's and Ph.D.s and in J.D.s. Or they still show up at their job, like at the bank or the insurance firm, that has been proven to be racist, or made their money off of selling, or trading people of color.

"You don't really have much of a choice to deal with racists and racism as a person of color in this country. To make to make racism exceptional is to pretend as though it has not spilled over into every aspect of your life. So looking at a particular racist as exceptional doesn't seem to make much sense.

"That's the context through which we get somebody like Donald Trump. Someone might say, 'Why vote for Trump, when Trump has done these things that are incredibly xenophobic or [said] these things that are racist?'

"If the election is going to be Democrats versus Republicans, it will be down to who was more recently racist or who is the least racist. That's going to be the only calculation that you have, because it's not like either of these political parties are blameless. They're two wings attached to the same bird."

Appealing to Black Americans

Jeffrey R. Dudas, Ph.D., professor of political science at the University of Connecticut, told Newsweek that while Trump, like many candidates before him, has made efforts to connect with Black Americans, he's not particularly convinced.

"I don't take the claims that Trump is some sort of friend to the African-American community seriously," UConnPopCast co-host Dudas said. "Biden's anti-poverty program—in the form of significantly richer pandemic payments and child tax credit payments—was vastly more consequential in this way than anything that Trump championed."

So why, then, does he believe Trump has growing appeal among hip-hop musicians? Dudas said Trump's image as a rebel appeals to those who prefer to march to the beat of their own drum. His plethora of legal issues has only strengthened this appeal, he said.

"There is a bravado and outlaw aesthetic that Trump has self-consciously sought to cultivate—especially with that mugshot, which was very clearly intended to play up his supposed tough-guy credentials and for marketing purposes—T-shirts, mugs, coins, etc., to sell his fans) that some of these hip-hop artists are connecting with.

"There is, of course, a long tradition in hip-hop of valorizing outlaws as anti-heroes—think of how Al Pacino's character in Scarface was adopted by many hip-hop artists as somehow representative of ruthless, yet laudable, ambition.

"Related to this, I think, is Trump's obsession with showing off his material wealth...and his insistence—against the evidence, of course—that his fortune is self-made. Trump is thus a classic American striver, a confidence man willing to do whatever it takes...in order to pursue and satisfy a bottomless material ambition. This, or some version of it, is what I suspect certain hip-hop artists are connecting with."

Speaking of Scarface, the rapper and producer bearing the stage name said in an interview in 2015: "I love Donald Trump... He's f****** rich and he's f****** lawless....He's wealthy and lawless. He don't give a f*** about [what people think]." That sentiment appears to have since changed, as Scarface, whose real name is Brad Jordan, slammed Trump on X in 2020 over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rebel Image

As Trump fights fraud charges in court in New York, he has—as with every other misdeed he has been accused of—repeatedly expressed his innocence. The idea that he has been treated unfairly by the law is a theme that is all too familiar in the Black community.

Evan Nierman, CEO of global PR firm Red Banyan, told Newsweek that this area of relatability may be of particular appeal to potential voters who feel that they have also been systematically wronged by the law.

"Finding yourself unfairly persecuted by the police is a celebrated theme in rap, and that's precisely the tune Trump has been singing since the former commander-in-chief has faced a string of indictments," Nierman said.

However, Nierman, author of The Cancel Culture Curse, added that while the numbers point to a growth in Black support for Trump, with prominent musicians also backing him, this doesn't necessarily reflect the results Americans will be seeing come 2024.

"Those artists have massive followings on social media, but I don't believe that their pro-Trump posts will translate to legions of fans following their lead and shifting affinities and votes toward him," he said.

"Don't make the mistake of reading into these comments for clues about how the Black community at large sees the former president. Pro-Trump tweets from a select group of artists are not an indication that he is making serious inroads in the Black community."

A study unveiled last year by Tufts University's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found that the turnout of voters aged 18-29 in the 2020 midterm elections was the second highest it has been in almost three decades. Among this group of voters, it was found that they preferred Democrats over Republicans by a 28-point margin.

With Biden being the oldest sitting president at 80 and his likely 2024 Republican challenger Trump being 77, neither major party has a lock on young voters through relatability. However, issues like abortion, gun violence, LGBTQ+ rights and climate change—see Democrats take the edge as Republicans champion viewpoints that stand at odds with those of many younger voices. This could also sway how minorities cast their ballots.

Carson said that presidential candidates putting in effort to appeal to minorities during election cycles "is absolutely playing the game that one has to play in order to be successful in the arena of politics. And that has very little to do with people. It has everything to do with signifying that you have the interest of the voting public at heart.

"And so, sadly, it doesn't even really matter whether you care for the people, it matters whether the people believe that you care for them at the moment that they are empowered to go vote. I have no assumptions or beliefs that any of these people have sincere care or genuine concern for Black folks until they give me something more than a photo opp."

While Nierman doubts that Trump's support from the hip-hop fraternity will translate into flipping vital districts and states, he does relish the idea of the politician including his high-profile supporters in his would-be post-election celebrations.

"If he does end up being elected president again, then Trump can invite them to perform at the inaugural balls in D.C.," Nierman said. "Watching Trump dance to the sounds of Chief Keef or Benny the Butcher would certainly be a sight to behold."

Newsweek has reached out to representatives for Trump via email for comment.