New ad highlights Trump’s history of insulting Black women

The president rarely holds back an insult, but reserves special scorn for Black women, a new ad argues

As the election enters its final two weeks, a new ad highlights the president’s lengthy record of insulting Black women, whether it’s calling vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris a “monster” after her debate or bashing California congresswoman Maxine Waters as having a “low IQ.”

“Donald Trump has a long history of racism,” a narrator says. “He especially hates black women. That’s not hyperbole,” she adds, as the video highlights the president’s repeated insults towards Black women, especially those in the media and politics.

Don Winslow, a popular novelist and activist who often writes about the U.S.-Mexico border and War on Drugs, released the ad on Friday. It quickly racked up more than 60,000 views on YouTube.

It struck a similar tone to another spot out the same day, from the Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans aiming to defeat the president. Their ad, “Girl in the Mirror,” has more that 275,000 views, and shows young women looking in the mirror as Mr Trump’s various insulting comments about women play in the background. “Imagine that little girl in the mirror, because that little girl is yours,” a narrator says.

Black women are the Democratic Party’s most loyal voters, with 94 percent of them voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016, compared with 80 percent of Black men, though many Black women have expressed the feeling that the party sometimes takes their support for granted. How much a new set of ads will sway even more people from this group—or anyone to change their vote at all—is still an open question, according to research.

President Trump made a name for himself politically by repeatedly making racist comments towards people of color. He announced his campaign for president in a speech labeling Mexican migrants as “rapists." Before that, he helped popularize the birther movement, which questioned whether President Obama was really born in the US. And earlier in his life, as a tabloid-loving New York real estate developer, he took out full-page newspaper ads across the city calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty to punish the Central Park Five, a group of  black and Latino men who were wrongly convicted of a brutal rape, writing that “they should be forced to suffer.”

The president won just 8 percent of black voters in 2016, which was actually an improvement over now-Senator Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential bid. Since then he has tried to make the case that the strength of the pre-coronavirus economy and his criminal justice reform efforts are both a boon to the Black community, but his support remains low. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from mid-September showed former Vice President Biden with 90 percent of the Black vote, compared to Trump’s 5.