Trump says his indictments help him attract black voters

Former President Donald J. Trump said in a speech to a black conservative group Friday evening that he believed the four criminal cases he faces won him the support of black voters who saw the legal system’s historical unfairness reflected in his legal woes .

“I think that’s why black people are on my side so much right now,” Mr. Trump said at a gala hosted by the Black Conservative Federation in Columbia, S.C. ​​“Because they see what happens to me, happens to them too. Does that make any sense?”

At another point in his speech, he suggested that black voters felt for him “because they have been hit so hard and discriminated against, and they actually saw me as being discriminated against. It was pretty amazing.”

Mr. Trump has long used “law and order” to unite his conservative base, as well as coded racist language to attack political opponents. His comments on Friday came in a speech full of explicit overtures to black voters, a group that has voted overwhelmingly Democratic for decades but whose support he and his campaign are eager to win.

As the former president has shifted his focus from the Republican primaries, where he is the dominant front-runner, to the general election, he has increasingly mentioned black voters in his speeches.

Typically, Mr. Trump claims that Black Americans did better economically under his administration than under President Biden’s. He has also argued that the influx of migrants at the southern border disproportionately affects Black workers, who are at risk of losing their jobs to immigrants willing to work for lower wages.

But during Friday’s speech, Trump tailored his comments specifically to Black voters. In particular, he combined one of the central grievances animating his campaign — that the 91 crimes he faces are the work of politically motivated prosecutors and an unfair justice system — with a race-based appeal.

At one point, Mr. Trump brought up the mug shot taken of him last August when he was indicted in Georgia on charges related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in that state.

The Trump campaign has used the photo in fundraising efforts and plastered it on clothing, as have a number of independent vendors from across the political spectrum. Mr. Trump noticed black people wearing shirts with his booking photo.

“You know who embraced it more than anyone else?” Mr. Trump asked the crowd. “The black population.”

Mr. Trump also spoke at length about his signature criminal justice reform bill, the First Step Act. He rarely mentioned that law — which, among other things, aimed to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for some crimes — while campaigning before overwhelmingly white crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Mr. Trump has long been accused of racist comments and behavior. The Justice Department sued him in 1977 for discriminating against potential black tenants. He was criticized for stoking racial tensions when he took out newspaper ads in New York in the 1980s urging the state to introduce the death penalty after the rape of a jogger in Central Park, a crime wrongly blamed on five black and Latino teenagers was attributed.

And he first emerged as a conservative political figure when he stoked hostility toward President Barack Obama by becoming a prominent figurehead of the so-called “birther” movement, which wrongly cast doubt on whether Mr. Obama was born in the United States.

Trump continues to emphasize Obama’s middle name, Hussein, when referring to him during his campaign. And he continues to question the eligibility of political opponents who are people of color to run for office, most recently Nikki Haley, his only remaining rival for the Republican presidential nomination.

But Trump often heralds his improved standing among black voters on the trail. He won just 8 percent of Black voters nationally in 2020 and 6 percent in 2016, but polls show him gaining support, especially in crucial battleground states.

During Friday’s speech, as he thanked supporters and friends in the crowd — a hallmark of Trump’s campaign speeches — he noted that he had trouble spotting them.

“The lights are so bright in my eyes that I can’t see that many people,” Trump said, drawing laughter from the audience. ‘But I can only see the black one. I don’t see any white ones, you see?’

“I’ve come this far,” he added as the crowd cheered. “I’ve come this far. That’s a long way, isn’t it?

He also focused on identity politics, even as he repeatedly tried to cater to black voters.

While telling a story about negotiating the price of an overhaul of Air Force One, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Obama for not doing enough to reduce costs.

“Would you rather have the black president or the white president who got a $1.7 billion cut?” Trump asked the crowd, who cheered in response.