In White House correspondent Annie Karni’s “Political Memo” in Wednesday’s New York Times, “A Dizzying Effort to Pitch Trump to Black Voters, Despite Divisive Remarks,” she seemed quite perturbed with black Americans getting together in support of Donald Trump:
Nearly every week this spring, President Trump’s re-election team has held one of the most peculiar events of the 2020 online campaign: “Black Voices for Trump Real Talk.” It’s a dizzying effort by Mr. Trump’s black advisers to put their spin on his record -- often with a hall-of-mirrors quality, as they push false claims about opponents while boosting a president who retweets racist material.
The most recent session, on Saturday night, was one of the most head-spinning yet. For an hour on a livestream, three black Republicans tried to portray former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as a racist, while ignoring decades of racially divisive behavior by Mr. Trump, from his remarks on the Central Park Five to birtherism to Charlottesville.
It's actually pretty normal for a politician’s supporters to discuss opponent's flaws while downplaying the flaws of their own candidate.
Katrina Pierson, a campaign adviser, led the discussion from her living room, wearing a white sweatshirt with a recent gaffe by Mr. Biden printed in block letters: “#YouAintBlack.”...
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Still, on Saturday night, the Trump surrogates were trying to make the most of Mr. Biden’s latest gaffe, hoping they could use the moment to drive down African-American turnout, the same way they used Hillary Clinton’s comment about “superpredators” as a cudgel against her in the 2016 presidential election.
Karni admitted Biden “had managed to deposit his foot directly into his mouth” on The Breakfast Club show when he said, “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
But she dismissed any concerns as old news, since Democrats had already hashed them out: “But the Trump campaign’s performance on Saturday night also showed that on issues of race, Trump advisers had no lines of attack, or policy arguments, to use against Mr. Biden that were not fiercely interrogated in the Democratic primary just months ago, when black voters breathed life back into the former vice president’s anemic campaign.”
Karni did her own hostile interrogation of Trump supporters, while doing her best to minimize Biden’s gaffe, with Democratic operatives in tow:
“At the end of the day, conversation reveals character,” T.W. Shannon, the former speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, said on the broadcast, conveniently ignoring Mr. Trump’s own command to four congresswomen of color to “go back” to countries where they came from, when three of them were born in the United States.
Mr. Trump’s own record did not deter his campaign from dedicating almost a full hour to slicing and dicing Mr. Biden’s three unfortunate words...
Karni doesn’t just question black conservatives -- in December 2019 she went after Trump supporters in the military, dismayed upon seeing Trump paraphernalia during the president's first trip abroad to greet troops.
