Donald Trump’s black outreach hustle

Last Week, Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, made an appearance at an African-American church in Detroit in his latest bid to heal the rift with minority voters created by, well, every last thing he’s said and done since beginning his campaign.

Trump’s “outreach” to minority communities is as empty as the pews in Great Faith Ministries International.

To say that The Donald has lost the black vote is nonsensical, because to lose something, you first need to have had possession of said thing. Trump has never had the support of blacks, Latinos, the LGTBQ community, or any other minority group. Indeed, since last June, he has done everything he can to position himself as their nemesis. Going back even further, Trump was one of the most high-profile supporters of the Birther movement, which boiled down to nothing more than a racist attack on our nation’s first African-American President.

Meanwhile, as Trump spins hollow comparisons to Abraham Lincoln, the party he hijacked leads the way in attacking the voting rights of black Americans with “(S)urgical precision,” to quote the Fourth Circuit Court in their rejection of North Carolina’s discriminatory new voting laws.

“What have you got to lose?” Trump asked black voters while standing in front of white people in Ohio two weeks ago, apparently unaware he was stealing directly from every 1850’s patent medicine salesman’s pitch. And just like those snake-oil charmers, Trump’s promised panacea for the minority community is a placebo at best, or a lethally toxic brew of “Invigorating Radium Water” at worst. Trump bemoans the disheveled state of black schools while touting an education plan that will cut an estimated 490,000 teachers from an already overtaxed public school system, a disproportionate number of which will likely come from already underfunded and overstressed schools in low-income urban districts.

Black people know exactly what they’ve got to lose under another four to eight years of GOP national leadership; all hope of any progress for their communities and children. Which is why even after his recent outreach efforts, Trump’s popularity among blacks hovers somewhere between David Duke and the death of Michael Jackson.

In short, black Americans not named Ben Carson are seeing right through Trump’s hustle on race, and have from the beginning. So who, then, is the real target audience for these theatrics?

The answer was obvious in Ohio. Trump’s outreach isn’t for keen and suspicious black folks, it’s for blinkered white people. It’s to everyone’s passively racist uncle who pouts that he can’t tell that great joke about picking cotton during Thanksgiving anymore. Or our second cousin who had to get punched in the face twice before it sunk in that he can’t throw the ‘N’ word around the bar without consequences.

Trump is speaking to these people, our coworkers and neighbors who supported him in private all along, but feared the social consequences of coming right out and saying so publicly.

He’s trying to give them enough cover to weather the storm. Trouble is, it’s like wearing a plastic poncho in the middle of a Cat 5 hurricane. It’s just not going to cut it.

The point of pivoting back to the middle during the general election is supposed to be finding ways to appeal to a larger electorate, not to give a wink and a nod to the base you already have. Besides, just how many of these people can really be left to coax out into the open? Recent surveys have shown Trump already commands the support of some ninety percent of likely Republican voters as they’ve predictably and reliably fallen in line post-convention.

In short, there doesn’t seem to be a clear path to victory for Trump.

In the end, Trump’s race hustle isn’t netting him any new converts. It’s only hardening his opposition among minorities, and increasing the odds that they find a way around all of the GOP’s state-level attempts to disenfranchise their vote and turn up to the polls in a wave, just like they did in 2008, and again in 2012.

And that, dear readers, isn’t something a poncho can protect him from.

Tomlinson is an author and comedian. Follow him@stealthygeek.

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.