WSJ: Trump’s Bid for the Black Vote
Excerpt: The media have focused on the Nancy Pelosi-Donald Trump feud on display at Tuesday’s State of the Union address. But for our money the most notable part of the evening, and perhaps the most politically consequential, was President Trump’s pitch for African-American support. Progressives cast all Republican politicians as avatars of racial resentment, and Mr. Trump has sometimes made himself an easy target. He once trafficked in birther conspiracies about Barack Obama, and he botched the response to the Charlottesville white-supremacist march in 2017. Joe Biden dines out on this campaign theme in every speech. Yet Mr. Trump is working hard to defy this Democratic narrative, and good for him. The Trump campaign spent half of its $10 million Super Bowl ad-buy highlighting Mr. Trump’s commutation of a black woman’s life sentence for a drug offense. Then on Tuesday African Americans were front-and-center. Some of Mr. Trump’s appeals were symbolic, such as recognizing 100-year-old Charles McGee, who served in the all-black Tuskegee Army Air Force unit in World War II, and his great-grandson, who wants to be an astronaut. He mentioned Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King Jr. in his appeal to American greatness.
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