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Nov. 1, 2016
Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote for the New York Times Magazine about Donald Trump and the dynamics of race in the 2016 election:
With the race for the presidency entering its last days, Donald J. Trump last Wednesday once again made his pitch to black America: a new deal aimed just at them. “I will be your greatest champion,” Trump said at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina. “I will never ever take the African-American community for granted. Never, ever.”
The hyperbolic remarks elicited the same collective eye roll among black Americans and white progressives that they have since Trump began regularly including black Americans in his platform in August. It was then, following days of unrest in Milwaukee after the police killed a black man there, that Trump flew to Wisconsin to give a speech on race. He headed not to the heavily black city where the embers of outrage still smoldered but instead, as his critics noted with glee, took the stage at the county fairgrounds of a bleached-out, deeply conservative Milwaukee suburb in order to address the problems of the “inner city.”
There was, of course, the usual and expected “law and order” and pro-police rhetoric that elicited hoots and cheers from the crowd. But then Trump, as he is known to do, added an unexpected twist.