Trump’s Bizarre Pitch to Black Voters is Martyrdom Marketing
How about this for a novel campaign pitch? “I’m being indicted for you, the Black population.”
Yes, that’s Donald Trump, the former, and possibly future — Heaven help us! — president, in full roar during his recent and stunningly insulting speech billed improbably as a targeted appeal to Black voters.
In the annals of political spin, Trump seemed to reach new heights — and depths — in a spirited and, to many ears, inflammatory address in late February to an audience at a gala thrown by the Black Conservative Federation in Columbia, South Carolina.
Trump suggested that Black voters support him not so much in spite of his 91 felony counts (and various other court troubles) as because of them.
“Black people are so much on my side now because they see what’s happening to me happens to them,” Trump said about his various indictments. “Does that make sense?”
Sure, it does, if you see Black voters as more fundamentally criminal than we really are.
This is martyrdom marketing of the most offensive kind.
The real message here is that Trump sees himself as a victim and a martyr, persecuted because he supposedly stood up for us, the little people, and we should put him back in the White House because, well, he’s doing it all for us Black folk.
Behold, Trump the huckster pitchman. He operates in the tradition of the medicine shows, traveling by truck, horse or wagon teams while peddling patent “miracle cure” medicines and other products throughout the Old West. Reviving at least the spirit of that old shtick and, just maybe, some of the new profits from the merchandise, Trump boasted of how potential souvenirs, such as those featuring the mug shot that immortalizes his arrest in Georgia, have been embraced by “the Black population,” more than any other group.
“You see Black people walking around with my mug shot,” he said. “You know, they do shirts and they sell them for $19 a piece.”
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