WASHINGTON — Not every female member of Congress would volunteer to stand next to President Trump. But Diane Black is happy to do so.
Whether this Republican congresswoman is part of a high-stakes budget meeting in the White House or traveling on Air Force One to a campaign event, Black can often be seen alongside the president despite criticism of his coarse language and colorful past with women.
“Yes, he is a different personality, different than any president I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Black told me. “He says things like he sees them. Now, do I always agree on how he says things? No, I don’t, but that is his style and who he is, and there is so much more to him and his accomplishments than his style.”
Black was the first female chair of the powerful House Budget Committee. Often, she’s been the only woman present in critical budget meetings where health-care reform or the tax bill were discussed.
She is very much like that Trump supporter whom pollsters missed during the 2016 election. Wealthy, successful and conservative, pundits would look at Black and think in no way she connects with Trump.
But Black and Trump have similarities. He was born into a well-off family and is comfortable moving in a world of blue-collar hard hats. Black comes from a world of hard hats and now is well off.
Originally, however, Black comes from nothing.
Sitting in her home in Washington, just 38 miles from the public-housing complex where she spent her early childhood, she attributes her success to her stubborn determination. “I never back down,” she admits in her soft drawl.
Even her own mother cautioned her ambitions. When Black told her she wanted to become a nurse, her mom replied, “ ‘Honey, we don’t have money for you to go to college. You just need to get married and have babies,’ ” remembers Black.
“I told her I want to have babies one day, but I want to be a nurse first.”
Now 67, she is on a quest to become the first female governor of Tennessee. She joins 77 other women across the country, both Democratic and Republican, who are seeking the chief-executive office in their individual home states in 2018, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
“When I was 5 years old, my family moved outside Baltimore,” Black said. “There was a lot of love in that home. It was when I got to high school I realized how poor we were.”
But in that first year of high school she also discovered hope for a life beyond the safety net of marriage. Her guidance counselor Richard Whiting saw her spark and pushed her, Black says. “I reminded him my family had no money. But he persisted,” she explains. “After four years of just pushing me all of the time, I was called into the principal’s office one day in my senior year and given a check from a local charity to pay for my first year of college. I think it was in that moment that I knew I could never back down from whatever I faced in life.”
Black attended school full-time and worked nights and weekends cleaning houses, ironing other people’s clothes “and any other little job I could find to pay for books, transportation and the next year’s tuition.”
She graduated, started working, fell in love, got married and had two children. “He had problems with alcohol, and he decided that he wanted to move on when I announced that I was pregnant with our third child. He left me with two babies, 3 and 6, and one on the way.”
Black threw herself into 16-hour shifts, determined that her family was “going to make it.”
‘He is a different personality, different than any president I’ve seen in my lifetime’
- Diane Black
Along the way she found love with a man called David Black, whom she’d first met at a local dance when she was 16, and he had just enlisted in the Marines. They reconnected 11 years later and hit it off.
“As the friendship grew closer, we discovered how much we had in common. We both come from very poor families, we have both been working since we were 12 and we both found ways to get educations when our circumstances conspired against us,” she says. “Just before we married, David adopted all three children, and we settled in Tennessee, where he had just got a job at Vanderbilt University.”
As she moved up in nursing, he earned a doctorate in forensic toxicology, and they eventually started a drug-testing company that grew to 900 employees. The sale of that company began in 2010 and made Black one of the wealthiest members of Congress, with her and her husband’s wealth estimated at $77.8 million in 2014 by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Frustrated with Tennessee’s approach to health care, Black felt driven to run for state office. Despite zero political experience, she won a state house seat in 1998 and a state senate seat in 2004. Six years later she ran and won the sixth congressional district seat of Tennessee, the first time the territory has been represented by a Republican since 1923.
In December, Black recalled her earlier experiences as a Tennessee lawmaker that included one member always trying to corner her and press against her and another member rarely calling her by name, instead only addressing her as “Nurse Goodbody.”
“It was objectifying, disrespectful and highly inappropriate for any work setting,” she wrote in an op-ed.
As for how Trump has treated her as often the only woman in the room, Black says the president is not only incredibly respectful, he never fails to ask her to weigh in. “He has always asked me how I see the problem or how I would fix something,” she says.
Black’s grit and determination make her feel comfortable as a woman defying conventional wisdom on Trump. “All of my life, people have presented reasons why I could not or should not do something,” she says. “And all of my life I have worked to prove I could.”