Team Trump is fanning out across the states making a big show of its outreach to women voters, black voters, and Latino voters. One of these efforts is more sincere than the other two. Sure, the Trump campaign would like to peel off a handful of black or Latino voters if he can. But white women are the real prize here—famously, 53% of them voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but the number dropped to 49% for Republicans in 2018.
The “Women for Trump” campaign deploys daughter-in-law Lara Trump ever more visibly (to do things like mock former Vice President Joe Biden's childhood stuttering) as well as a fleet of campaign aides like Mercedes Schlapp and Kayleigh McEnany.
The outreach to black and Latino voters—a “Black Voices for Trump” discussion at a Philadelphia church that the AP reported was attended by “a few dozen people,” a Mike Pence-headlined “Latinos for Trump” event in Florida—looks like a part of the outreach to white women, in fact, an effort to make Trump look less unpalatably racist to people who were okay with his 2016 levels of racism but have since developed some concerns. Because nothing about what Trump’s doing other than holding these pathetic events appears geared to win over voters of color.
Just 6% of black voters went for Trump in 2016, and he doesn’t appear to be on track to better that number: At this point, 83% of African Americans say Trump is a racist, and the same number say he has made racism a bigger problem in the U.S. But as we know, all too many white people place less weight on what people of color say about racism than on other white people’s outraged denials.
Black voters, Latino voters, and especially white women voters need to see through this. Donald Trump is racist, misogynist, and sexist, and everything about how he governs is influenced by that. No matter how hard Lara Trump campaigns, that’s not going to change.