New Hillary Clinton Ad Again Trump Is So Timely

On Friday, the Clinton campaign released a new ad targeting Donald Trump's positions on race. The next day, Donald Trump angered the Internet when he used the death of Chicago Bulls player Dwyane Wade's cousin Nykea Aldridge as some sort of bizarre campaign ploy for African-Americans to vote for him. The timing of the tweet either shows a stunning sense of self-awareness or none at all, and is basically the epitome of what Clinton was saying is wrong with Trump's approach to black and minority voters.

In the ad, Clinton's team uses footage of Trump's last-ditch attempt to woo black voters, in which the mogul basically asks them how it could possibly get worse for black communities. "What do you have to lose?” the ad shows Trump saying. “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs." Cut into the ad is footage of Trump pointing into the crowd at a rally saying, "There's my African-American" and a woman at a Trump rally seemingly being jostled by Trump supporters. At the end of the ad, Trump asks again, but this time more forcefully: "What the hell do you have to lose?" before a the screen turns black and white text appears—"Everything."

The ad was clearly supposed to show that Trump doesn't actually care about black communities. After all, asking people how it could possibly get worse for them isn't exactly an impassioned pitch to make things better. But the footage of Trump using tokenism is a transparent way for to act like black voters are in any way a priority to him, or a part of his campaign at all.

And then, as if proving Clinton's team right, Trump came back and used the death of Wade's cousin, without initially bothering to call Aldridge by name or spell Dwyane correctly. Over the series of a few tweets (one which was a corrected version spelling the basketball player's name correctly), Trump finally had a somewhat sober attempt at expressing condolences for the family and actually says Aldridge's name.

So, what does this say about Trump? Mostly, that Clinton's ad was spot on, and that he absolutely has no interest in doing actual good for anyone, much less the black community. For him, African-American voters are nothing but a voting bloc, and one that he is currently pulling single digits on. Unfortunately, I can't give Clinton's team too much credit for being omniscient. This was bound to happen eventually, the timing was just pretty absurd.