Donald Trump has a whole new problem
Donald Trump’s bizarre friendship with Kanye West has been one of the media’s favorite distractions – it was largely a pointless thing to cover on slow news days, and not really all that surprising that they would be friends – as narcissists tend to gravitate towards each other. The only practical purpose of these two being seen together, in Trump’s eyes, was the possibility that Kanye might be able to help him win over black voters – a voting bloc he fared poorly with four years ago, when not even Kanye voted for him but said he would have.
Since Kanye West’s well-publicized visit to the Oval Office, the Trump campaign has ramped up an effort to reach out to black voters – with Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina encouraging him with the ridiculous notion that if he can capture up to 12% of the black vote, he can easily win re-election and hopefully capture the popular vote that he lost by three million votes last time.
This is of course, preposterous. Even without Donald Trump’s long and well-documented record as a racist, who launched his political career on a racist smear against America’s first black president, there’s the ongoing Republican Party’s effort to suppress minority voters.
Donald Trump’s embarrassment of an outreach effort is just a distraction from that – as the Republican-majority Senate continues to appoint conservative judges who will rule in their favor. The problem, however, is that the Trump campaign’s effort to reach black voters has so far backfired in an embarrassing way. He managed to capture 8% of their vote in 2016. A new poll from NBC News shows him doing even worse – with 7% support, a number that could get worse by the time of the election. His outreach is a joke and no one’s falling for it.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making