Ex-president Donald Trump has supposedly been making inroads with Black voters. That’s over now.
The reason: Trump went full-throat racist grandpa on Kamala Harris, DEI and “Black jobs” in a Q and A with the National Association of Black Journalists (full video) on Wednesday.
It got so bad that, at one point, he even offended Fox News personality Harris Faulkner, and that’s hard for any Republican to do.
How he did it – first, this was Trump on Harris:
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” said Trump, pretending that he doesn’t know that Harris, whose mother is from India, and whose father is from Jamaica, and is a graduate of Howard University, a HBCU, has always identified as Black.
Trump went on:
“I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn, she went, she became Black. Somebody should look into that,” Trump said.
They did look into it. What they found: you’re a racist.
Next, Trump brought up the fact that Harris didn’t pass her first try at the bar exam in 1989, and used that to claim that she couldn’t pass a cognitive test.
“I’m just giving you the facts! I’m just giving you the fact! She didn’t pass her bar exam, and she didn’t think she would pass it, and she didn’t think she was going to ever pass it. And I don’t know what happened, maybe she passed it,” Trump said.
Um, yeah, she did – and went on to serve as a prosecutor in the Bay Area before being elected to serve as district attorney in San Francisco in 2005, then being elected to serve as the attorney general in California in 2010.
Trump’s “cognitive test” that he keeps bragging that he passed isn’t an intelligence test, but rather, a screening for people thought to be suffering from dementia.
Passing that cognitive test just means the doctor who administered it doesn’t think Trump is yet suffering from dementia.
Next, on DEI: Trump claimed not to know what DEI even is.
He oddly went back and forth on that with ABC News reporter Rachel Scott.
TRUMP: How do you how do you define DEI? Go ahead.
SCOTT: Diversity, equity, inclusion.
TRUMP: Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. Is that what your definition is?
SCOTT: That is.
TRUMP: Give me a definition. Would you give me a definition? Give me a definition.
SCOTT: Sir, I’m asking you a question.
TRUMP: You have to define it. Define it for me.
Later, asked by Scott to define a “Black job,” Trump has this to say:
“A Black job is anybody that has a job. That’s what it is. Anybody that has a job.”
Trump has been trying to make the claim that immigrants are taking “Black jobs,” which was why Scott asked the question.
Trump used the opportunity to go on with his usual rant on the topic.
“They’re taking the employment away from Black people. They’re coming in, and they’re coming in, they’re invading. It’s an invasion of millions of people, probably 15, 16, 17 million people. I have a feeling it’s much more than that. And everybody’s been seeing what’s happened. The first group of people, the Black population, is affected most by that. And Kamala is allowing it to happen.”
So, immigrants are taking “Black jobs,” but not “White jobs.” Got that?
How this will play with the Black mainstream is maybe best told through the eyes of CNN political commentator Shermichael Singleton, a Republican strategist who is a Black man with a degree from Morehouse and a background that includes having worked on the Ben Carson presidential campaign.
I’m going with Singleton to appraise the Trump-NABJ disaster precisely because Singleton is a conservative who works for CNN – and knowing how TV talk news works, with the liberal commentators always praising the Dems and blasting the Rs, and vice versa, the conservative commentators always taking up for their team and going at the other.
“To question the vice president’s ethnicity, I can’t even really say what I want to say about this, but I just think this was a calculated mistake, and I would not have advised that,” Singleton said on a CNN panel after the NABJ event.
“Overall, I just don’t see what the net gain here was, and I think a lot of Black people will watch this appearance, and then they will point to the former president, and they will point to the Republican Party, and say, this is exactly why we will never give you all the majority of our support,” Singleton said.
“It would be ridiculous for me as a Black man, regardless of my political beliefs, to come on this network and pretend that was a great moment when I know it wasn’t,” Singleton said.
Keep in mind, that’s what the guy that CNN pays to say nice things about Trump had to say.
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Chris Graham
