So,
after weeks of preaching his sinister sermon of black pathology to
mostly white audiences as part of his utterly fake “black outreach” —
which is in fact the effort of a bigot to disguise his bigotry — Donald
Trump finally brought his message before a few mostly black audiences.
He spoke Friday to a handful of African-Americans in North Philadelphia, and as described on philly.com,
told them that “he is not a bigot, and blamed the media for portraying
him that way, according to people who attended a private event.”
No
sir, stop right there. We are not going to allow any deflection or
redefining of words here. You are a bigot. That is not a media narrative
or a fairy tale. That is an absolute truth. No one manufactured your
bigotry; you manifested it.
You
have proudly brandished your abrasiveness, and now you want to whine
and moan about your own abrasions. Not this day. Not the next day. Not
ever. You will never shake the essence of yourself. Your soul is dark,
your character corrupt. You are a reprobate and a charlatan who has
ridden a wave of intolerance to its crest.
You were a chief birther against President Obama.
You have maligned Mexicans and slandered Muslims. You have treated
women with disdain. You have mocked the handicapped. You have displayed a
staggering lack of basic knowledge about governance. You have applauded
dictators. You have encouraged the assault of protesters at your
rallies.
You are a prime example of the worst of humanity. You are what happens when incuriosity meets intolerance.
You are not to be praised for your fourth quarter outreach, but reviled for it, because it contains contempt, not contrition.
Trump
wants to demonstrate to white moderates that he’s not a
dyed-in-the-wool racist and to demonstrate to his base that he’s
unafraid to walk through the valley of the shadow.
Then
on Saturday, Trump traveled to Detroit and visited with a church
congregation, or at least with a fraction of that congregation, judging
from an image of the nearly empty venue.
Before Trump read his remarks, he said, “I just wrote this the other day knowing that I would be here, and I mean it from the heart.”
That’s the first thing that sounded like a lie. The New York Times reported last week that Trump’s advisers had gotten the questions Trump
was supposed to answer during an interview in Detroit and prepared a
script for him. What makes us think that they didn’t also write his
pandering speech?
He
told the gathering, “Our nation is too divided,” while not
acknowledging that he is a principle source of that division. He said:
“We talk past each other, not to each other. Those who seek office do
not do enough to step into the community and learn what is going on.”
And yet he never acknowledged that until now, when his poll numbers have
dipped and worrisome numbers of people said they believed he appeals to
racism and bigotry, he has avoided coming into the black community like
one might avoid the plague.
The
speech was feather-light on policy, but what was there was just
repackaged Republican claptrap that reinforced negative perceptions
about liberalism and blackness.
Trump
said, “I believe we need a civil rights agenda of our time, one that
ensures the rights to a great education and the right to live in safety
and in peace and to have a really, really great job, a good-paying job,
and one that you love to go to every morning.”
Translation:
I want to further weaken public education through more charters and
vouchers. I want to flood your neighborhoods with more police because
you can’t control yourselves. I want you to stop freeloading, get off
welfare, and get a job.
Everything
about this spectacle was offensive: that a black pastor had invited
this money changer into the temple to defile it; that Trump was once
again using the objects of his aggression for a last-ditch photo-op;
that news media continue to call this an “outreach to black voters,”
when it’s clearly not.
Trump has no real chance in Detroit, and he knows it. During this year’s Michigan primary, Trump got just 1,679 of the total 132,602 votes cast in the city of Detroit.
But
again, the citizens of Detroit — or black people in general — are not
the intended audience for this pageant of perversity. You can’t
earnestly court the black vote while at the same time your party is
enacting laws in multiple states to suppress the black vote. The whole
thing is a logical fallacy.
Trump
closed his speech in Detroit by quoting a passage from First John,
Chapter 4 in the Bible: “No one has ever seen God but if we love one
another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
I
too would like to close by quoting a passage from 1 John 4: “Dear
friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see
whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out
into the world.”
Everything about Trump reads to me as false, and I hope that on Election Day, America exercises the gift of discernment.
“What in the hell do you have to lose?” indeed.
