Donald Trump has been on a thing recently of trying to make himself seem less racist, directing his message toward black Americans in particular. This Saturday he is taking his pitch (which Slate’s Jamelle Bouie has described, incidentally, as “patronizing, ahistorical nonsense”) to a Detroit church in what will be his first actual physical appearance in front of an audience of black people since he began campaigning.
As it happens, the New York Times got its hands on a copy of the scripted Q&A that Trump is set to perform in Detroit with pastor Wayne T. Jackson. The script mostly doesn’t sound like Trump on a verbal level—I will eat my Bible hat if he actually says anything remotely like “I have a strong faith enriched by an ever-wonderful God”—and, in its ideology, it reads more like the work of a free-market economic think tank than the populist Trump campaign. In particular, it instructs Trump to imply that black people should not only reject affirmative action but in fact stop talking about racial discrimination altogether:
As President, I must serve all Americans without regard to race, ethnicity or any other qualification. I must approach my task with the utmost wisdom and make sure that all Americans have opportunities to achieve to their potential. If we are to Make America Great Again, we must reduce, rather than highlight, issues of race in this country. I want to make race disappear as a factor in government and governance.
“Reduce, rather than highlight, issues of race?” Not only is this basically the same conservative-intellectual pitch that Republicans have been making ineffectively to black Americans since the Reagan era, it runs contrary to Trump’s recent rhetorical strategy of constantly highlighting issues of race to the point of tastelessness:
(Trump’s argument is, or at least has been, that black Americans’ many terrible problems, such as not being “able to walk down the street without getting shot,” are Democrats’ fault.)
So … I don’t know. In any case, Donald Trump is probably not going to win the black vote in November.
