Trump leverages high-profile shooting to try to gain votes

The shooting of Nykea Aldridge on Friday afternoon is a death of the sort that’s become sadly familiar in Chicago this summer. A young mother fatally shot on the street — this time accidentally, after hundreds of others that were intentional. What made Aldridge’s death unusual is that she had a famous relative, Chicago Bulls guard Dwyane Wade.

Wade tweeted about his cousin’s death, in a call to address the gun violence that has plagued the city.

Wade’s hashtag, #EnoughIsEnough, was a slogan used at the start of ESPN’s annual awards show this year by Wade and other basketball stars to try to draw attention to the problem of gun violence.

Wade wasn’t the only one to tweet about Aldridge’s death. So did Donald Trump, on Saturday morning.

Trump’s message was different.

He tweeted: “Dwayne Wade’s cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!”

About noon Saturday, Trump deleted the original tweet. Shortly afterward, he tweeted it again. The problem? He’d spelled Wade’s name wrong.

Then, about two hours later, Trump offered his condolences.

“My condolences to Dwyane Wade and his family, on the loss of Nykea Aldridge. They are in my thoughts and prayers.”

Trump has been regularly using gun homicides in Chicago as a broader representation of an increase in violent crime across the nation — an increase for which there isn’t evidence.

Moreover, he’s been using gun violence in Chicago as a way of arguing somewhat circuitously that he deserves more support from black voters. In most national polling, Trump gets the support of a handful of black respon- dents, usually in the low single digits. It’s probably in part because Trump has been seen as appealing to bigotry in his campaign rhetoric, as Quinnipiac University showed in a poll earlier this week. That belief is one that extends well beyond black voters.

It’s also probably in part because black Americans have been supporting Democratic candidates by wide margins for decades.