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2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumNY Mag - Trump’s Appeal to Black Voters Was Actually Directed at White Voters
It is a bit odd that Trump's outreach to the black community was conducted in an all white community before an all white audience.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/08/trumps-bleached-appeal-to-black-voters.html
If all you knew about Donald Trumps speech in Wisconsin yesterday was harvested from a headline or a quick TV report, it might have really amazed you: The GOP nominee goes into violence-torn and racially divided metro Milwaukee and makes a direct appeal to African-American voters! And before saying anything else, let it be duly noted that any gesture of personal interest in African-Americans, or of determination to compete for their votes, coming from any recent Republican presidential nominee, much less this one, is an impressive and welcome development.
But when you look at Trumps speech more closely, much of the value of the cross-racial gesture by the candidate of white-identity politics is eclipsed by the context and details of what he said:
First of all, the speech was delivered in West Bend, Wisconsin, a nearly all-white exurb of Milwaukee, and thus at the honkified end of the spectrum in one of Americas most racially polarized metropolitan areas. West Bend is the county seat of Washington County, a jurisdiction that gave 70 percent of its votes to Mitt Romney. Trump was introduced by one of the great symbols of that polarization, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. So its not like Trump waded into an inner-city neighborhood to speak truth to power or anything. As ABCs David Caplan noted, the GOP nominee has recently turned down opportunities to speak directly to African-American audiences at the NAACP and Urban League.
Second of all, there was no hint in the remarks as prepared for delivery (and it was delivered from a teleprompter) of any request that white Americans other than Hillary Clinton and other Democrats had a single thing to do with the plight of inner-city black families and children or the racial tensions gripping places like Milwaukee. Trump stood unambiguously with the forces of law and order in every racially charged incident in the news, and called unambiguously for more police deployed more aggressively in every city. To the extent he was reaching out, it was to a purported segment of African-Americans who do not support protests about police brutality or, indeed, the liberal policies favored by virtually all African-American elected officials. He was basically telling his all-white audience that he and they were in solidarity with a silent majority of the black people for whom he presumed to speak.
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NY Mag - Trump’s Appeal to Black Voters Was Actually Directed at White Voters (Original Post)
TomCADem
Aug 2016
OP
unblock
(51,974 posts)1. Duh. Trying to appeal to the bigot-in-denial vote
Trying to somehow get back the thin veneer of pretense that republicans aren't bigots by pretending to address blacks.
catbyte
(34,174 posts)2. Of course it was. Don the Con doesn't give a rat's ass about African Americans. If he did,
he wouldn't have ignored all those invitations to speak to the NAACP and various other groups, nor would he have given his "speech" in West Bend, which is 98% white, but in Milwaukee, the site of the unrest. In addition to being a world class con artist, he is also a pathological liar.
TommyGfromTheD
(44 posts)3. I think he really cares.....
....about African Americans. Isn't Orange the new Black