Thursday, September 22, 2016

Trump, black people, and spin

A friend just now emailed me and said that, in the wake of the recent unrest in North Carolina, the news is now spinning Donald Trump as more sympathetic to black people than is Hillary Clinton. My friend wanted to know if I've been seeing similar spin on other news coverage.

Well...yeah. It was heading in that direction on CNN. Chris Matthews gave a fair amount of air time yesterday to a black Trumper who repeated the argument that we might as well try Trump because Obama and Bill Clinton were just hell, hell, HELL on the black community.

Are you seeing that kind of spin on the news? If so...wow. One would have thought that Trump would have lost the black vote entirely after he hired as Steve Bannon to be the new campaign head honcho. Bannon is the guy many are calling a leader of the Alt-Right movement -- the new name for white supremacy. Trump has heretofore championed profiling, "stop and frisk" and giving the cops total license to do as they please.

And yet there really do seem to be a small but significant number of black people who think that Hillary is the problem, even though her very first speech of the campaign was a condemnation of the way many cops have behaved toward black citizens. Is Clinton Derangement Syndrome really that powerful? The Clintons have become a Rorschach blot onto which many members of the public project all of their fears and resentments.

Any black people gravitating toward Trump should first consult the folks -- both black and white -- who live in Flint, Michigan. Ask them how they feel about Trump's grand scheme to get rid of the EPA. Perhaps anti-Hillary black voters should also ask themselves about the advisability of Trump's plan to get rid of the Food And Drug Administration -- the "food police," as Trump calls them. Rich people can afford to shop at Whole Foods and other upscale markets; poor people are the ones who are going to get sick from tainted meat and produce.

I must admit that Trump's new ploy makes electoral sense: North Carolina is a tossup, and now there are even rumblings that Virginia may be in play.
Perhaps no battleground state is as polarized along demographic lines as North Carolina. Mr. Trump has a lead of 53 percent to 28 percent among white voters, most likely his best tally with that group in any of the battleground states. Mrs. Clinton holds the overwhelming support of black voters, at 86 percent to 3 percent in a three-way race.
Peeling off even a tiny, tiny fraction of the African American vote -- or depressing that vote -- could assure that the state goes into Trump's column. Hillary absolutely cannot afford to lose it.

5 comments:

Michael said...

Suggested clarification:

...on CNN. [And on MSNBC,] Chris Matthews...

prowlerzee said...

I did not think of this. it's gone from annoying to serious alarm. Not only are they spinning Donald as being more sympathetic to the man shot with his hands up, while Hillary is more "cautious" but they are also not emphasizing that she called the event appalling and unacceptable. This they do to suppress the turnout, as you note.

I heard Obama's recent speech on the radio and saw it online, but did the TV news organizations put his call to black voters on repeat? That he would take it as a "personal insult" if his community did not turn out for Hillary? That the best send off they could give him was to go vote? Hopefully, Obama himself will be out there repeating it, because he was on fire!

Anonymous said...

I saw the opposite spin. I thought I just saw a story where the Donald suggested implementing stop and frisk nationally.

Of course that's not quite what you asked but it was what I saw.

Jesus what an election!

ColoradoGuy said...

I don't think this will work: people in the black and hispanic communities know a hater when they see one, and it's perfectly obvious that Trump, and his father, have been racists all their lives. Along with his two sons.

What it does show is that the media barons that run CNN and MSNBC are great pals with Rupert Murdoch, and would be perfectly OK with fascist con-man running the country. As in 1932 in a certain central European country, the billionaire class have convinced themselves they can control the crazy man with the funny hair.

prowlerzee said...

"As in 1932 in a certain central European country, the billionaire class have convinced themselves they can control the crazy man with the funny hair." Great line, Colorado Guy