Don Lemon may have thought he heard everything when it comes to Donald Trump and racially charged rhetoric. After all, Lemon was the journalist who famously listened to Trump vilify Mexican people as drug dealers while he shrugged, “Somebody’s doing the raping.” Since that July 2015 interview, Trump has uttered similar sentiments about several minority communities, but during his last campaign stretch, he’s attempting black outreach again.
Recently in Charlotte, North Carolina, he tried to propose a “new deal for black America” that went largely unnoticed because, well, few people believe Trump can be the “greatest champion” of minorities as he claims. And on Thursday night, Trump continued painting his gloomy portrait of African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods as urban hellscapes that only he can fix. Here’s how he managed to one-up himself in Toledo, Ohio:
“We’re going to work on our ghettos. You take a look at what’s going on where you have pockets, areas, of land where you have the inner cities, where you have so many things, so many problems, so many horrible, horrible problems.
“The violence, the death, the lack of education, no jobs. We’re going to work with the African American community and we’re going to solve the problem of the inner city. We’re going to solve the problem.”
In response to this, even Don Lemon can’t believe Trump continues to say this junk. While speaking with the Washington Post‘s David Swerdlick, Lemon wondered, “Why does he continue to do this, and why aren’t his advisors educating him?” In response, Swerdlick seemed just as puzzled and dismissed the thought that they were simply being politically correct: “A part of being able to talk to a slice of the electorate is being able to sort of speak their language at least a little bit.”
Since there’s no rational explanation for what Trump’s doing, the two men could only conclude, “The ‘ghettos’ was just …” and “Yeah.”
