The true hip-hop president: why rappers love Donald Trump

Last Thursday, US rap superstar Lil Wayne tweeted a photograph of himself standing next to President Donald Trump to his 35 million followers. Smiling broadly, the pair posed in front of an array of American flags with their thumbs aloft. The black rapper wrote of his “great meeting” with the President and endorsed Trump’s so called “Platinum Plan” to help African-American communities.

Fellow hip-hop star Lil Pump has also come out in favour of Trump, while Kanye West and 50 Cent have thrown their weight behind the president. Ice Cube, meanwhile, has been working with Trump’s team on its plan for black Americans.

Given the racial division that Trump has sown in his four years in office, the police killing of George Floyd, the subsequent social unrest and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, it seems strange that elements of the hip-hop community continue to align themselves with the 74-year-old. This is, after all, the man who declined to condemn white supremacists as recently as September.

But Trump’s relationship with hip-hop is a long one. For decades before he became president, New York’s king of ostentatious bling was a poster boy for rappers. And it seems that his affinity with the genre endures. Reagan may have had the Hollywood lifestyle, Clinton may have had the dazzling charisma, and Obama may have shared the same African-American heritage, but Donald Trump is and always will be the hip-hop President.

It’s easy to see why. At some point in the late 1980s or early 1990s, capitalism started to replace consciousness as the driving force behind rap. The genre had started creating millionaires and wannabe millionaires. Rather than looking to the streets around them for inspiration, many rappers started looking up. Trump had it all. The success, the glamour, the fame, the money, the fantasy lifestyle, the gold and the name on the building were the embodiment of the American dream.

Already a hip-hop icon by the 1990s, Trump’s fame rocketed even further when he started presenting The Apprentice in 2004. To date, he has been name-checked in over 300 rap songs, according to analysis cited by ABC News. LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, Jeezy, Raekwon and Rick Ross are among those to have done so. The chorus of Mac Miller’s 2011 track Donald Trump summed the 2000s Trump-mania up best: “We’re gonna take over the world when I’m on my Donald Trump s--t / Look at all this money / Ain’t that some s--t?”

It was, according to Ross, the “hustler aspect, the entrepreneur side of him, the wealthy side of him” that made him an aspirational figure to rappers. Trump Tower became a totem. “When you see the buildings with the names, that’s something a young man can imagine,” Ross told NBC News. Money equals power equals influence and access.

Rapper Bobby Sessions told a recent US documentary about Trump and hip hop that the “braggadocious element” of the man resonated with the rap community. Rapper Shad, who hosts the Hip Hop Evolution show on Netflix, has said that Trump represented capitalism in its “rawest, ugliest form”, which is something that hip hop has always held a mirror up to.

Trump, of course, courted the attention of the African American and hip hop community. In 1994 he made a guest appearance on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air with Will Smith. A decade later he appeared as himself at a mock TV election rally for Eminem. The Shady National Convention saw Trump endorse the rapper at a Presidential-style hustings. (Like many rappers, Eminem has since turned on Trump, saying he’s likely to start a nuclear holocaust and threatening to drop hot coffee on him in a 2017 freestyle.)

And Trump used social media to let his followers know about his iconic status in rap circles. Research by NBC News found that Trump fired off 50 tweets about Mac Miller’s 2011 track alone. In them, he went from threatening the rapper for using his name “illegally” to boasting about the 75 million listens the song had enjoyed.

Trump’s attempts to appear “street” have also backfired, as is inevitable when a middle-aged suited white man dabbles in a youth phenomenon. In 2003 he sat down to be interviewed by Sacha Baron Cohen in the guise of his Ali G character. Trump was taken in (although he later claimed, with thumping inevitability, that he is one of the only people not to have been fooled by the actor). And in 2011 Snoop Dogg tore shreds from Trump – to his face – in a Comedy Central “roast”.

But when Trump turned to politics, many rappers turned from him. For example, Jay-Z told a crowd in Cleveland before the 2016 election that Trump was “divisive” and didn’t have an “evolved soul”. “He cannot be my President. He cannot be our President,” Jay-Z said. Some “diss” tracks started to appear. That same year, YG and Nipsey Hussle released a song called FDT (F--- Donald Trump). Trump’s tenure has also seen hip hop duo Rae Sremmurd resile from the favourable sentiments expressed in their 2015 track Up Like Trump.

Yet others continued to support him. Notoriously, Kanye West visited Trump in the Oval Office in October 2018. Surrounded by a phalanx of reporters and TV cameras, West donned a Make America Great Again cap and said that the item made him “feel like Superman”, much to a beaming Trump’s approval. (West has since backtracked somewhat, and launched, then abandoned, his own presidential campaign.)

Trump’s support among African Americans has always been low, and he enraged many in the community over his response to George Floyd’s killing in May. A survey in July of 1,215 African American voters by the American University Black Swing Voter Project found that 84 per cent considered Trump racist and 79 per cent considered him incompetent. Two-thirds of people said they’d vote for Democrat nominee Joe Biden, with only 7 per cent saying they’d vote for Trump.

Despite this, it seems that some rappers are torn between Trump’s perceived attitudes towards race and his sympathies towards the accretion and preservation of vast wealth. Some rappers seem to think that, on balance, the latter is more important than the former. Just last week, 50 Cent – aged 45, real name Curtis Jackson – urged people to vote for Trump after he heard that Biden may hike taxes for the wealthy. The rapper backtracked and claimed he “never liked Trump” after he was heavily criticised for his comments.

And so the long and complicated dance between Donald Trump and hip hop continues for now. On the one hand, it’s all a bit of a joke. The very notion that this overweight, white, septuagenarian real-estate developer has any real connection with urban street culture is ridiculous. But on the other hand, it couldn’t be more serious. A culture war is raging and people are dying, and Donald Trump – who as President has done so much to stoke that raging war – could hold the key to sorting out the problems over the coming four years. Perhaps Lil Wayne is right. Perhaps if Trump wins, his Platinum Plan to help African American communities will work.

Either way, win or lose this week, some believe that the link between the gaudy king of New York bling and the hip-hop world is entering its final stage. According to rapper and presenter Shad, a divide is emerging between hip-hop stars of 50 Cent’s age and the younger generation of Americans growing up today. While the likes of 50 Cent and Kanye West align success with wealth and power, Shad argues that the Black Lives Matter movement has pointed the younger generation to a more revolutionary and less aspirational approach to life. Shad says that “different values” are emerging among young rappers.

So as something to aspire to, Trump’s raw capitalism could be replaced by something kinder and less brash among tomorrow’s rap stars. They might stop looking up to Trump Tower and start looking around themselves for inspiration once more.