“What do you have to lose?”. “You’ve lived 40, 50 years in this community with schools you’re having problems with. What the hell do you have to lose?”.
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Here was a man who made his foray into politics by accusing America’s first black president of being a Kenyan-born, Muslim usurper and demanding to see his “papers”, ostensibly courting the black vote in the most insulting and condescending way possible.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will hold a rally this afternoon in the crucial battleground state of New Hampshire, where Hillary Clinton is now ahead in the polls. Oh, and he wants your vote.
He had a lot to say about how he wants to help African Americans and Hispanics, but he said it in front of a mostly white crowd of thousands. The black poverty rate is about 27 percent. That’s far too high – the poverty rate for whites is about 10 percent – but the fact is that most African-Americans lead comfortable middle-class lives. If you calculated white youth unemployment that same way, it would be almost 50 percent. You know what I’m talking about. From the evidence, no. In his first term, Dwight D. Eisenhower desegregated the U.S.military; publicly praised Brown v. Board of Education; appointed many pro-civil-rights federal judges in southern states; and appointed record numbers of African-Americans.
While many have been fooled into thinking that Trump is making a serious attempt to gain Black voters, Roland Martin views Trump’s Black voter outreach attempts as a way to prove to White voters that he is not racist. Many black voters, however, hear the appeal differently. But to get a sense of how brazen the Republican nominee is in his flights of mendacious fancy, it’s worth a quick look at exactly how insane that projection is. Those efforts began anew last week, when Trump’s campaign chairman departed and he named GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager.
At a rally later Wednesday in Jackson, Mississippi, he said only that “any immigration policy I support as president must pass these three tests”, before broadly saying it must improve the wages, safety and quality of life of US citizens. “I was very moved by his comment”.
Speaking to Sean Hannity of Fox News, Trump reiterated his opposition to “amnesty” but seemed to advocate for letting law-abiding illegal immigrants who have been in the country for a long time pay a fine so they can remain in the country.
If elected, Trump could never actually carry out such a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing. But antipathy toward Latinos who are “flooding” across the border, allegedly to take Americans’ jobs and commit terrible crimes, is a central tenet of Trumpism.
“My plan suspends visas when we can’t support effective screening, and it puts forward a new ideological screening program to keep out people from our country who don’t support our values”, said Trump.
“I’ll tell you what”.
Poor Conway had better get used to explaining what her candidate must have meant as opposed to what he actually said.
Trump also made a major economic speech in Detroit earlier this month, where he said Detroit is an example of Clinton’s failed agenda.
Trump then measured the responses via applause. And Monday morning, he lobbed even nastier personal insults at the show’s co-hosts.
Trump’s pivot turned out to be a 360-degree pirouette: Back into the mud, where he feels most at home. That being said, I don’t think it’s reasonable to say you’re going to round up and deport 11 million people.
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It stands to reason that the opposite would also be true – that characters who are more than caricatures might train viewers to see their fellow citizens as more than racial stereotypes. It’s delusional to pretend otherwise.
