You may recall that when Donald Trump came to West Michigan on Friday, he admitted that he wasn’t really serious about having Hillary Clinton jailed, despite his followers taking up the chant of “lock her up!” for most of the campaign. But that wasn’t the only thing he said that should send a chill down the spine of any fair-minded American. He boasted that he only defeated Hillary Clinton thanks to black voters staying home.
Don’t take my word for it. Watch it here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZswFlXLDk_s
Trump won eight percent of the black vote to Hillary Clinton’s 89 percent–pretty anemic, but slightly better than Barack Obama’s 93-6 margin over Mitt Romney. Despite this, Trump gloated that the African-American community “came through big league, big league” for him. I’d have a hard time calling eight percent of the vote “big league.”
However, Trump was almost as grateful to black voters who didn’t even go to the polls.
“And frankly if they had any doubt, they didn’t vote. And that was almost as good because a lot of people didn’t show up, because they felt good about me.”
What Trump didn’t mention–or rather, didn’t need to mention, considering the audience–was that a considerable number of those missing black voters didn’t vote due to voter suppression efforts. In my state of North Carolina, for instance, state Republican officials openly boasted about how much the black early vote had cratered since 2012–thanks to systematic efforts to limit early voting. In Wisconsin, partly because officials failed to provide the IDs required under the state’s complicated new voter ID law, turnout in the Badger State fell to its lowest level since 1996. In Milwaukee alone, 41,000 fewer people turned out than in 2012–far more than Trump’s margin of victory.
There’s no way in the world Trump wasn’t aware of this. Indeed, he took part in these efforts himself by recruiting “poll watchers” to stop Hillary from “rigging” the election. The conclusion is obvious–Trump knows bloody well that he won thanks to systematically keeping blacks from voting. The fact that he was openly reveling in it should make any fair-minded American, regardless of race, want to retch.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
