CLARENCE PAGE: Trump’s bizarre pitch to Black voters is martyrdom marketing

How about this for a novel campaign pitch? “I’m being indicted for you, the Black population.”

Yes, that’s Donald Trump, the former, and possibly future — Heaven help us! — president, in full roar during his recent and stunningly insulting speech billed improbably as a targeted appeal to Black voters.

In the annals of political spin, Trump seemed to reach new heights — and depths — in a spirited and, to many ears, inflammatory address in late February to an audience at a gala thrown by the Black Conservative Federation in Columbia, South Carolina.

Trump suggested that Black voters support him not so much in spite of his 91 felony counts (and various other court troubles) as because of them.

“Black people are so much on my side now because they see what’s happening to me happens to them,” Trump said about his various indictments. “Does that make sense?”

Sure, it does, if you see Black voters as more fundamentally criminal than we really are. This is martyrdom marketing of the most offensive kind.

The real message here is that Trump sees himself as a victim and a martyr, persecuted because he supposedly stood up for us, the little people, and we should put him back in the White House because, well, he’s doing it all for us Black folk.

Behold, Trump the huckster pitchman. He operates in the tradition of the medicine shows, traveling by truck, horse or wagon teams while peddling patent “miracle cure” medicines and other products throughout the Old West. Reviving at least the spirit of that old shtick and, just maybe, some of the new profits from the merchandise, Trump boasted of how potential souvenirs, such as those featuring the mug shot that immortalizes his arrest in Georgia, have been embraced by “the Black population,” more than any other group.

“You see Black people walking around with my mug shot,” he said. “You know, they do shirts and they sell them for $19 apiece.”

I expected him to whip out a pair of his recently announced $399 gold Trump sneakers, which look like they were very much designed with the hip-hop crowd in mind. But it’s only February. Give him time. I’m sure we’ll see many more Trump marketing opportunities, if he’s not convicted of something else first.

Come to think of it, perhaps even then.

Predictably, Trump did not go into any detail on the charges he faces such as allegedly mishandling classified information, obstructing justice, conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and falsifying business records in connection with hush money paid to a star of adult films.

But Trump drums up sympathy by refusing to run and hide and has maintained prominent Republican supporters in ways that still astound me, even given the cynical world of American politics.

Trump was flanked onstage by prominent Black Republicans such as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida and, in a speech before Trump’s arrival, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. They all were basking in the man’s orange glow.

The most recent Quinnipiac University poll, published in late February, found President Joe Biden leading handily among Black voters with 79 percent, as compared with 19 percent for Trump. Those results were similar to what a January poll yielded. But it’s also true that 19 percent is far from no Black support at all.

Of course, there’s still time for a lot of new Trump entreaties to Black voters.

I don’t expect we’ll see an admission of guilt or an expression of contrition (or both) become part of the former president’s campaign pitch anytime soon, though.

More’s the pity.

Contact Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.