Buckle the hell up: Donald Trump and Ben Carson, two men stuck making strained conversation in the deserted waiting room of a Jiffy Lube, will be campaigning together. Specifically, they’ll be hitting community spots in black and Latino neighborhoods, after Trump described those neighborhoods as “war zones” where everybody is always getting shot.
Trump’s uniquely racist worldview is also uniquely ‘80s, in that he has an obsession with talking about the chaos of the “inner city” and finds it socially acceptable in normal conversation to reference his good friends “the blacks.”
All that has made for an awkward wooing of black voters, in which he’s claimed to be trying to appeal to them while refusing to visit black neighborhoods. That’s because they’re basically first-person shooter video games, as he keeps telling people at his very white rallies. Here is some beautiful, bone-dry commentary from the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Trump continued his appeal to black voters on Friday at a rally outside of Lansing, Mich. In a county that is 88% white, Mr. Trump said African-Americans have “nothing to lose” by supporting him, because their plight in America’s Democratic-run inner cities is so dismal.
He continued his pitch Monday night, saying the nation’s inner cities are like “war zones.”
“What do you have to lose?” Mr. Trump asked in Akron, Ohio. “Look, it is a disaster the way African-Americans are living.…We’ll get rid of the crime. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”
Former and/or current Trump employee Corey Lewandowski defended Trump’s refusal to visit black people where they actually live, telling CNN you can’t possibly expect him to go to those dangerous places.
Lewandowski specifically referenced Chicago, a city that conservatives love to use as a very audible dog whistle:
You know what’s amazing to me is that no one remembers Donald Trump went to go have a rally in Chicago at the university. And do you remember what happened? It was so chaotic and it was so out-of-control that the Secret Service and the Chicago Police Department told him you could not get in and out of the facility safely. And that rally was cancelled. And you’ve shown the footage many times of the individuals that attended that rally.
(As Wonkette points out, the Trump campaign decided to cancel that rally without consulting the Chicago PD. Trump later claimed they’d been advised to cancel the rally by the police which is, again, a lie.)
But anyway, now all that is in the past: the Washington Post reports that Trump and Carson are hitting the streets to visit community centers and churches in black and Latino neighborhoods, including a planned tour of Detroit, where Carson grew up. Trump will also be relying on a cast of “black surrogates,” as the WaPo puts it, to make his extremely not-racist case. That means the return of Diamond and Silk, two of the presumably tens of black voters who are lining up to support Trump.
It’s hard to see what could go wrong here! Or, anyway, more wrong.