Presidential candidate Donald Trump loves to talk about how widely adored he is by people of color. Even after dancing around disavowing the KKK, scoffing at Black Lives Matter, insinuating that Hispanic judges are biased, and doubling down on statements equating Mexicans with rapists and thieves, Trump has maintained that people who aren’t white love him.
He has said that “many, many Blacks” plan to vote for him, but apparently, none of them were available to model his campaign clothing. Eric Ming made the following discovery:
So it appears Donald Trump’s campaign photoshopped their model to be brown: pic.twitter.com/V0DghCiQAW
— Eric Ming (@ericming5) March 3, 2016
Here is the original, plain shirt, modeled by a very fair woman. Here is the page on Trump’s website selling the v-neck with “Trump” silkscreened onto it. Another version of a v-necked shirt is available on the site and appears to be being modeled by the same white woman, though her skin is unaltered for that one. The digital altering of the image appears to be a deliberate attempt to diversify the candidate’s image, though enlisting a real woman of color might have been an easier and less dangerous way to do that.
This incident harkens back to Trump’s insistence that he can and will create jobs, all while almost exclusively hiring seasonal workers and immigrants in his own hotels. Oh, and remember the time he paraded his most ardent Latino fans at rallies but got busted for probably paying Latino Twitter users to microblog identical messages in support of his candidacy?
All in all, this revelation isn’t great for Trump considering that if he is the Republican nominee, he will need the black vote to win the election. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, won South Carolina last week with 85% of the African American vote in spite of run-ins with BLM activists.
Ming’s savvy investigation came about an hour ahead of a speech in which Mitt Romney lambasted Trump for not being very good at managing his business and affairs at all. Yikes.
[image via screengrab]
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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
