He’s Not Going To Win This Battle Ground
We can only imagine how the strategy session unfolded at the Trump 3.0 campaign headquarters in a large tower in New York City. It’s not unreasonable to believe it went something like this:
New campaign chief Steve Bannon mentions they better have an answer ready when Hillary Clinton hits them with charges of racism.
“Why would she do that?” the candidate might have asked.
Well, start with the fact that Trump took a couple of days to disavow an endorsement he received from white supremacist David Duke. In a TV interview, Trump three times chose not to condemn Duke and his tactics. He later said he hadn’t heard the question because of “a bad earpiece.”
“What did you say?”
“Never mind. We’ve got all these other white nationalists and such backing you. And there was the whole birther thing, the Mexican thing, the Muslim ban …”
“Yeah. So what should we do about Hillary?”
“I’ve got it! Let’s call her a bigot!!”
“Genius!”
So there we have it, folks. The plan is to attack someone favored by 91 percent of black voters in a recent Pew Research poll as a bigot. In the South Carolina primary, she received 96 percent of the black vote from those over 30 years old.
She can point to a lifetime of support for issues important to black voters. She has won widespread praise from black leaders. But Trump wants to attack her on race relations.
In football, this is what we would call the misdirection play.
The idea is to get the defense out of position to one play by focusing their attention on something else. In this case, that would be Democratic attacks on Trump’s lengthy history of bigoted and divisive statements.
I guess they figure if they can raise enough eyebrows by splattering Clinton, it might deflect attention away from Trump’s easily Googled history on this issue. Instead of bringing her down, though, it likely will have the opposite effect.
It could cause black voters to take an even closer look at which candidate is more likely to care about their issues, and that can’t end well for The Donald.
A game plan like that would put a football coach on the hot seat so quickly that might cost his job. Oh wait … Trump already has demonstrated rapid reaction when his campaign bosses don’t perform to his liking.
What this seems like is desperation time in Trumpland.
Hillary Clinton has a lot of explaining to do about her lack of truthfulness, the way she conducted business in the State Department, and so on. But when he attacks her history on race relations, Trump is wasting his breath. That is one area where she owes no apology.
The only misdirection Trump will accomplish with this gambit will be to fool himself.
In case you missed this latest edition of The Politically Incorrect Podcast here it is!
