Andra Gillespie:
He sometimes pulls on threads that are accurate within African American communities, but then he usually takes them out of context, and so that he’s missing an opportunity to actually effectively message to Black communities.
So, on immigration, there are African Americans who have concerns about undocumented immigration. My friend Neon Bicardi (ph), at the University of Maryland wrote a great book about this, right?
But their reasons for opposing immigration are not the same reasons that whites oppose immigration. And so you have to be really sensitive to the message and not paint with a broad brush. The concerns that Trump is trying to raise about criminal justice reform are so personalized to himself that it ignores the larger structural problems that he could address and use his own story to talk about effectively.
But he’s not doing that, right? He’s not talking about the things that he did do during his term as president in terms of the First Step Act, in terms of trying to sort of dismantle certain types of structural aspects of the criminal justice system.
That would actually be a more effective message that he seems to be incapable of doing. Instead, he plays to tropes, and they end up being offensive and turning off more voters than they will attract.