To hear the mainstream media tell it, Donald Trump has spent the last week in a stumbly and maybe not terribly effectual outreach to black people. As I noted over the weekend, Republican faux-outreach to African-Americans with the goal of mollifying moderate or educated white voters is a tried and true political move. There's nothing remotely new about it. The problem for Trumpers, as I noted in this piece, is that they have a hard time even staying in character, randomly blurting out angry slurs while trying to execute their faux-outreach. But there's something a deeper and darker going on with Trump himself. It's not just off-tone. It's not just rants at African-Americans from lily-white suburbs. What Trump's doing amounts to trying to rebrand dehumanization verging on hate speech as 'outreach'.
Trump first got attention with his "What do you have to lose?" line to African-American voters. But as he's refined the vocabulary, tuned them with his diehard audiences, he's built a vision of African-American life as a kind of violence porn.
Consider some of Trump's recent statements about African-American life in this country....
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/fear-and-loathing-of-black-people
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