Why Trump’s Road to the White House Runs Through His Four Black Athlete Friends

EPISODE 124: The Eighties.

I believe that the single worst place to process the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump is the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Which is exactly where I was on Saturday night, obviously, watching people grandstand and argue and use a horrifying shooting in Pennsylvania to spread conspiracies and propaganda.

But there was one viral story I came across, from Forbes, that I wanna tell you about, in particular. Because it provoked what I can only describe as a refreshingly and even inspirationally bipartisan level of disgust.

The headline:

Forbes had published this story within hours of the shooting. And they then took it down the very next day, after insulting both leftists and MAGA Republicans (for their own obvious reasons).

But the underlying premise spoke to a larger story — a sports story, in fact.

You should know that we’ve actually been working on this story for more than a month now, long before the chaos of this weekend. Back when most headlines were about Joe Biden’s alleged senility or Trump’s felonies.

Because another enduring condition of American democracy — besides guns — is that for all the twists and turns of another one of the most batshit news cycles of my lifetime, the actual outcome of this election may well hinge, once again, on the question of Black voters.

Which is why Biden had a sitdown with B.E.T. scheduled to air tomorrow, during the Republican National Convention, which is happening in Milwaukee (which the GOP chose in no small part because it’s almost 40% Black).

And it’s why Hillary Clinton also talked about hot sauce on the Breakfast Club back in 2016, in one of the worst appearances in recorded history.

But while Biden did win the Black vote in 2020 by a margin of 92 to 8 — 92 to 8! — the problem now is that Biden, in 2024, is so old that his own party is very understandably turning on him.

And Trump — the 8 in that aforementioned blowout — clearly senses the opportunity.

To be clear: Trump is still the guy who repeatedly demanded the birth certificate of Barack Obama. And repeatedly demanded the death penalty for the Central Park Five — the five teenagers who were wrongfully convicted for assaulting a white woman who was jogging in Central Park 35 years ago.

But now Trump’s strategy is shifting. He’s apparently gotten rid of his so-called “Platinum Plan” for Black empowerment, which flopped in 2020. And the Trump campaign just told The Atlantic that “suburban women might be less a priority than young men of color.”

And so what I wanted to do was sit down with a journalist who had personally experienced Trump’s newly reimagined Black outreach strategy — and even talked to Donald Trump about it, herself.

Because what Semafor’s Kadia Goba found out is that this new strategy is also an old story.

About sports.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Regularly,

Pablo