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One man is facing up to 33 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. Another is tied up in former President Donald Trump’s racketeering indictment and faces a host of unrelated federal charges as well. Such is life for stalwarts in the MAGA movement’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, I suppose.
Enrique Tarrio and Harrison Floyd wedded their fortunes to Trump — and have tried to convince their cultural kin to do the same. Tarrio is the former leader of the Proud Boys extremist group and is awaiting his federal sentence after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and other crimes for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. He also was a leader of Latinos for Trump, an organization that supported the former president’s re-election bid in 2020.
On Wednesday, Floyd was released on $100,000 bail after being charged in Fulton County, Georgia, for allegedly helping Trump pressure a Black election worker — Ruby Freeman — to lie about election fraud. Floyd formerly was the executive director of Black Voices for Trump. (An attorney for Floyd did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News.)
In an interview with Steve Bannon, Floyd claimed that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had “decided she wanted to send me what we call a ‘Negro wake-up call’” after he dared to support a Republican. (How convenient ... and unconvincing.)
Floyd’s purported wokeness aside, I don’t imagine that he or Tarrio thought their quests to diversify MAGA’s rank and file could ultimately find them in legal trouble.
Floyd’s purported wokeness aside, I don’t imagine that he or Tarrio thought their quests to diversify MAGA’s rank and file could ultimately find them in legal trouble. At the same time, they’re both aligned with a movement that largely denounces the value of diversity and efforts to promote it. So it stands to reason they may not have the best strategies for reaching Black and brown folks.
I’d venture to say they clearly don’t.
And while I’m not inclined to offer Republicans free advice on minority outreach, there is one basic rule I don’t mind sharing: If your minority outreach ends with you behind bars, you’re probably doing it wrong.
To me, Tarrio’s and Floyd’s mug shots are visual representations of how forlorn the conservative movement’s outreach to nonwhite people has become under Trump. It speaks volumes that these are the types of people the MAGA movement has entrusted with winning over Black and Latino voters.
I think what Trump has done, in a general sense, is invite people known for their hard-nosed, spiteful or acerbic politicking — “firebrands,” we used to call them — to drive his movement forward.
And Tarrio and Floyd embody that trend. Trump himself appeared at the launch of Floyd’s Black voters group in 2019, according to The Guardian, while The Washington Post recently reported on Tarrio’s close ties to the Trump White House.
As the two men sat behind bars, ruminating over their work for Trump, I wonder if they ever considered that they have been used as cannon fodder. They put everything on the line for Trump — even their cultural currencies as self-identifying Black and Latino men.
And all they’ve gotten in return are criminal cases.