Despite the fact that Donald Trump is no longer running for high office, and despite the fact that even if Donald Trump did run for high office he’d lose badly, Trump is still talking at length in interviews about what would happen if he ran for high office. (If you didn’t already know by now, Trump loves to hear the sound of his own voice and his own name, and he loves to pretend he’s more powerful than he actually is.) But it was in one of his most recent interviews that Trump made probably the dumbest statement about his nonexistent political career yet.

In an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, Trump said that if he went toe-to-toe with President Obama in an election, he’d get a lot of the Black vote. “I think—and people smile when I say it—I think I'd do great with the African-American vote,” Trump said last week. “I think I'd do great with that. Now, I'm not going to beat him with that vote, but I would get a large number of African-Americans. I really believe that.”

What Trump is probably thinking of when he says he’d “do great” with Black voters are some NBC polling numbers from earlier this year, which said that African-Americans and Latinos had relatively high opinions of Trump. But what Trump’s forgetting is that that was before he made President Obama’s birth certificate issue his personal mission, thus becoming an imbecilic birther along with a handful of other crackpots. The racism of the birther conspiracy theories was not lost on Americans, and though Blacks may have liked to watch The Apprentice, they also know when someone’s a bigot and is attacking Obama for invalid reasons.

What’s saddest about all this is that Trump believes he could still win a significant portion of the Black vote. His assumption, it would seem, is that African-Americans either weren’t paying attention to his prejudiced birth certificate crusade or are too naïve to understand what his intentions were. Either way, if Trump is a friend to Black America, pity to any Black American who comes across an enemy.

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