Five months after naming Samuel Pierce secretary of Housing and Urban Development, President Ronald Reagan shook the hand of his lone Black cabinet member and said, “Hello, Mr. Mayor.”
Forty-three years later, another Republican president has filled his Cabinet with only one Black nominee, former NFL cornerback and pastor Scott Turner, who would be the sixth Black person to lead — you guessed it — the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 2017, Donald Trump’s first Cabinet included only one Black member: HUD Secretary Ben Carson, the sixth Black person to lead the department.
“Why is every Black person given HUD?” an unnamed Black Southern Republican told ABC News, adding that it was “the literal Black job of the administration.”
Black Republicans expected more from Donald Trump, as young Black male voters played a big role in the president-elect’s victory. Winning votes from roughly 3 out of every 10 Black men under 45 in 2024, Trump nearly doubled his support from that demographic compared to 2020.
The shift was most pronounced in battleground states like North Carolina and Georgia, where Trump’s share of the Black vote rose by 5 percentage points from the previous election.
But Black Republicans have been mostly silent on the apparent slight for reasons partly of their own making.
“I can’t tweet that we need more Black conservatives because the left will attack me saying it’s a DEI hire,” a Southern Republican told ABC News.
Trump has led the Republican charge against DEI (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion) programs in both the public and private sectors, arguing they promote an ideological agenda that prioritizes identity politics over qualifications.
Florida congressman Byron Donalds, one of Trump’s more effective surrogates and a finalist to be the Republican candidate’s running mate said he wasn’t surprised he was bypassed for a Cabinet position.
“All I will say is I am not surprised that I have not been named, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to do other things in the future,” Donalds said recently.
Donalds also criticized President Joe Biden’s focus on diversity within his administration, saying “if you look at how the Democrats filled Joe Biden’s cabinet, they wanted to have a piece of every identity. But did they get the job done? Did they actually serve the interest of the American people?”
Donalds said Trump’s election sent a statement about “bringing competency and reality back to D.C. in the White House, regardless of their race, regardless of their religion, regardless of their creed.”
One possible explanation for Trump’s lack of diverse appointments is his distance from traditional Republican institutions, said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a nonpartisan organization that studies diversity in government and congressional staff.
Because of that, “there isn’t a kind of pipeline, long-term relations,” Asante-Muhammad said.
And Black Republicans, with few exceptions, have been reluctant to embrace Trumpism.
“Being a part of Trumpworld isn’t easy,” one Black Republican strategist told ABC News. “It is almost a personal blacklist thing in the outside world. So it is risky, in my opinion, to be a part of this organization for Black people that may want to be a part of the cause, but it’s not worth their bottom dollar.”
While the Cabinet has been filled out, key positions remain. Black Republicans are hopeful Trump will diversify his administration within the ranks of presidential assistants. In his last administration, Trump had but one Black personal assistant: reality show star Omarosa Manigault Newman.
“The Republican Party has never really fallen into the category of ‘representation matters,'” an unnamed Republican operative told ABC News. “Our strength comes from diversity, but that is not our bumper sticker slogan. We’re not going to nominate Black folks for the sake of nominating Black people.”
