While Donald Trump has actually attempted some real outreach to the black community, his campaign is decidedly dismissive towards other minorities. One of Trump’s advisers, Michael Cohen, gave a summary of how Trump “plans” to reach out to the Latino community here, and it’s, well, pretty sick:
The truth, yeah, I’m trying to coordinate it because I am mindful of the fact that, you know, there are coalitions and I’m talking about now like Hispanic coalitions that … will not support Trump. And that’s OK because the ones that don’t like Trump aren’t even here legally and they can’t vote, so it doesn’t really matter, right? And I understand their point of view. They’re — they do not want to be asked to leave right? And go back where? Go back to their homes? You know they don’t want to. So I understand.
He understands why they won’t vote for someone who has vowed to deport them. Cohen literally just said that Latinos like Trump, unless they’re here illegally. Gee, the owner of a Chicago microbrewery that abandoned Trump Tower in Chicago must be here illegally, then. Univision? They must only cater to people here illegally, too.
Those are some pretty powerful delusions under which Cohen is laboring.
Trump has said that everyone loves him, even minority groups. Latinos love him. Muslims love him. The black community loves him. They allegedly recognize that what he’s saying is somehow good for them, or, at minimum, not racist at all – a notion that is absurd on its face. Trump is either lying, which means he knows exactly what he’s saying, or he suffers from delusions, which is also possible given his I’m-so-wonderful narcissism.
Cohen said that Trump needs to go beyond his base, which is why he reached out to the black community via a meeting with a lot of African-American clergy. A lot of the ones in that room told him he needed to tone it down, so he did…for that community. Remember all his ridiculous comments about Muslims, though? Ever wonder if Trump cares whether he alienates them? Mark Burns, one of the black pastors supporting Trump, said:
This, by any means, is not an attack on the Islamic faith, especially the Muslim-Americans or the black Muslim-Americans here in the United States of America. This is simply an opportunity, a chance to weed out those who are abroad, who are immigrants. Not Muslim-Americans, but immigrants that have infiltrated using the Islamic faith to infiltrate the United States of America and to … cause damage, you know, using the Sharia law here in America, create terrorism.
More than 25 percent of African-Americans are Muslim, so that presents an interesting problem for Trump when it comes to winning over that community. Even though he’s backpedaling furiously on his all-Muslims ban, and saying that any ban he enacted wouldn’t apply to Muslim-Americans, or to diplomats or a select few others, it is anti-Islamic and crosses the line between protecting the homeland and vilifying an entire segment of the world’s population.
This man keeps sitting atop the polls when he should have long since crashed and burned. Heck, Ben Carson’s idiotic statements about everything from the pyramids to how to control ISIS knocked him down quite a few notches, and he hasn’t been nearly as inflammatory as Trump. That’s a sad, sad testament to what the Republican party really represents. If they represented anything sane, Trump would have been gone a long time ago.
Featured image by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr
