Trump is a wolf in sheep’s clothing
In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama earned 95 percent of the black vote.
President Obama beat Mitt Romney with 93 percent of the black vote in 2012.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton might pitch a shut-out with black voters.
Why?
Donald Trump!
A recent Quinnipiac national poll has Mr. Trump only managing to get the support of 1 percent from black voters.
And worse, in Pennsylvania and in Ohio, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll, Trump is getting 0 percent of the support from black voters.
Here’s another way of looking at that.
Right now, there’s a greater chance that Trump could get more votes from Martians in Ohio and Pennsylvania, than from African Americans.
That’s providing Trump doesn’t promise to deport all Martians if he’s elected.
There’s a reason why he has such soft, and even nonexistent support among black voters.
In the 427 days since he announced he was running for president – he’s ignored them.
They’ve decided they’ll rather vote for the unlovable Hillary, than to vote for the unlikeable Donald.
Plus, that 95 percent of black voters who supported Obama in 2008, are fully aware of the fact that Trump went out of his way to discredit Obama with that “birther” nonsense in 2011.
“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” he asked the panel on ABC’s “The View” back then.
It wasn’t good enough for him to have been made to look foolish when the President released his valid birth certificate, Trump would also question the president’s worthiness to have been much more than an affirmative action enrollee at Harvard and Columbia.
“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” he asked in an Associated Press interview.
There’s been no proof that Obama had been anything but a model student.
By Trump going out of his way to discredit the nation’s first black president, he was almost assuring himself of getting little support from black voters – if any.
Yet, Trump can read the polls.
And he sees that, except for white, working class males, he’s increasingly leaking votes among most segments of the voting public.
So he hatched a plan.
On day 428 of his campaign, he decided to make a ham-handed pitch for black votes.
Oh, he’d certainly had that opportunity before, but he ignored it.
While Hillary Clinton spoke before the NAACP’s national convention last month, Trump declined to honor his invitation.
While Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, spoke to the National Urban League, Trump passed on the opportunity.
And on the day that Clinton spoke to black and Hispanic journalists at their annual National Association of Black and Hispanic Journalist convention – Trump spoke to the National Association of Home Builders.
So it was surprising that Trump would go to a suburb of Milwaukee (with a 94.8 percent white population) and pay lip service to the issues confronting African Americans, with few, if any African Americans even being in the room.
He took the occasion of the current hostilities in Milwaukee, after a young, armed, black male had been killed by a police officer.
Regardless of the circumstances, emotions are still raw enough that they couldn’t be soothed by the careless words of a presidential candidate who, to them, is nothing more than a wolf in sheep’s clothes.
“We reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton which panders to and talks down to communities of color and sees them only as votes, not as individual human beings worthy of a better future,” he told his mostly white Milwaukee suburbanites.
He’d intended to speak directly to potential African American voters.
Instead he was talking right past them.
It’s the height of arrogance that when Trump discovers he’s falling fast in the polls, that he’d accuse his opponent of merely pandering to black voters, while he’s actually guilty of pandering to them – without bothering to pander to them face-to-face.
Clinton freely embraces black voters, while Trump talks down to them.
That doesn’t qualify him to become a commander-in-chief, unless it’s the commander-in-chief of a Burger King.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net