In his pitch to Black voters, Trump is counting on short memories

One of the first big hints that Donald Trump wasn’t a great presidential candidate came roughly eight years ago, when he spoke at a forum hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition. Trump told attendees, “You’re not gonna support me because I don’t want your money. You want to control your politicians.” He added, “I’m a negotiator — like you folks.”

In other words, the then-candidate tried to appeal to Jewish voters by peddling antisemitic rhetoric, as if the audience would find it compelling.

Roughly eight years later, Trump is now running a third campaign, and as NBC News report suggested, the Republican appears to be repeating his mistakes: Instead of making antisemitic comments to a Jewish audience, Trump brought a racist message to a Black audience.

I was taken aback last week when Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo said — out loud and on the air — that Trump would fare well with Black voters because the former president is now selling sneakers, and as Arroyo put it, “they love sneakers.”

But in case that weren’t quite head-spinning enough, consider the Republican’s Friday night remarks at the Black Conservative Federation’s annual gala. It was a speech in which Trump:

• Compared his alleged criminal activities to African Americans’ centuries of struggles. (“I got indicted a second time and a third time and a fourth time, and a lot of people said that that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against.”)
• Claimed he’s “being indicted for you, the Black population.”
• Claimed “the Black population” has embraced his mug shot more than others. (“You see Black people walking around with my mug shot, you know, they do shirts, and they sell them for $19 apiece. It’s pretty amazing — millions by the way.”)
• Declared during his speech, “The lights are so bright in my eyes that I can’t see too many people out there. But I can only see the Black ones. I can’t see any white ones, you see? That’s how far I’ve come. That’s how far I’ve come. That’s a long — that’s a long way, isn’t it? Ah, we’ve come a long way together.”

The Republican’s pitch is rooted in an offensive assumption: that Black voters will have exceedingly short memories. As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim noted after his remarks, “Trump was sued for systematically turning away Black tenants in the 1970s. He took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the (now-exonerated) suspects in the Central Park Five case. He breathlessly promoted a racist ‘birther‘ conspiracy theory about former President Barack Obama, and about now-Vice President Kamala Harris (and most recently about Nikki Haley, for that matter). He called Haiti and African nations ‘s---hole countries.’”

This is, of course, just a sampling from a lengthy and overtly racist record.

It’s also a timely reminder that Trump apparently can’t help himself. There were plenty of ways in which the former president could’ve tried to make a compelling pitch to Black voters, but he apparently settled on his most ridiculous option.