In the immediate wake of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, rapper Kanye West sounded off with a blunt assessment of the President: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
I’ve long lost interest in relitigating anything about W., but Republican nominee Donald Trump doesn’t care about black people, as demonstrated by his recent and ironic minority outreach events.
Trump ostensibly tweaked his campaign to compete for the minority vote. But Trump will never get the minority vote. And he, or at least all of his senior campaign strategists, know that fact. There is a reason some polls have put him at zero percent of the black vote. That ship has sailed. And sunk. And was dredged from the sea and burned. Trump knows he has only one narrow path to victory (assuming he actually cares about victory in this campaign that is also the most popular reality show in the history of American television).
The sole road to the White House for President Trump requires a clean sweep of the ignorant white vote. And there is enough white idiocy that Trump will be the 45th President of the United States if he can fully assemble what I would term the “blank bloc.”
There is a crafty reason why Trump pretends to court the minority vote that he will never get or give a damn about: the showman is putting on a show. There is a chunk of his targeted bloc that wants to vote Trump, but struggles to gloss over the racism required. So now Trump hopes to offer just enough conciliatory words to soothe the better angels of their nature, as Abraham Lincoln might put it.
With customary Trump bravado and factual error he told a nearly exclusively white audience in Wisconsin his purported message to black people, and why he deserves their vote:
“You live in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”
In a similar charade outside Lansing, Michigan, Trump gave another crowded audience of white people more vague, unsupported and preposterous reassurance to reassure his potential votes.
“At the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get 95 percent of the African-American vote,” he said. “I promise you, because I will produce for the inner cities and I will produce for the African-Americans.”
His recent and cloaked white outreach is massaging the consciences of white fence-sitters who want to vote for him. But his words to white people, about non-white problems, are just his typical brand of dishonest nuance. Because Donald Trump doesn’t care about black people.
