Many people call Donald Trump a racist, and he’s popular among some white nationalists. But he has actually had very little to say about African-Americans during the campaign. PHOTOGRAPH BY GERALD HERBERT / AP

If you visited the Drudge Report on Tuesday, you might have noticed that the top story was a countdown to a confrontation. The headline read, “TONIGHT: TRUMP TAKES ON THE RIOTERS! LIVE FROM MILWAUKEE.” Donald Trump is, after all, a “law and order” Presidential candidate—he used the phrase in one of the first sentences of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. And Milwaukee had been unsettled in the wake of the police killing, on Saturday afternoon, of an African-American man named Sylville K. Smith; protests and violence followed, some of it racially charged. A video journalist named Tim Pool reported hearing shouts of “Fuck white people,” and mentioned a “white kid” who had been shot in the neck; Pool said, “For those that are perceivably white, it is just not safe to be here.” Many Drudge readers might have expected that Trump—sworn enemy of political correctness, and frequent transgressor of political norms—would be ready for a fight.

During Trump’s tour of Wisconsin on Tuesday, one of his first engagements was an interview with John Roberts, of Fox News, who asked him, “Did the policeman do the right thing?” The city’s chief of police had defended the officer involved, saying that video footage (which has not been released) showed the victim turning toward the officer “with a firearm in his hand.” Trump’s response was strikingly tentative, almost equivocal. “Well, I guess, you know, if you believe a gun was pointed at his head, maybe ready to be fired, what is a person supposed to do?” he said. “That’s what the narrative is. Maybe it’s not true. If it is true, people shouldn’t be rioting.”

Later that night, he addressed the matter more thoroughly, during a speech in the city of West Bend, a suburb roughly forty miles north of Milwaukee, in Washington County, which is eighty-eight per cent white, and in which President Obama won just twenty-nine per cent of the 2012 vote. Trump was relatively subdued, though, reading dutifully from a teleprompter. And he strained to strike an inclusive note, addressing himself not to the people in the room but to the beleaguered African-American citizens of Milwaukee. “The main victims of these riots are law-abiding African-American citizens living in these neighborhoods,” he said. He suggested that Hillary Clinton was guilty of “bigotry,” saying that she had cynically exploited black communities for votes. And when, inevitably, he turned to the subject of international trade, he sought to position himself as a defender of African-American interests. “We opened our markets, they’ve taken our jobs, they give us our products that we don’t make anymore, and African-American neighborhoods—along with many other neighborhoods—have suffered greatly,” he said.

This was a “big” speech, with potentially lasting consequences—such, at any rate, was the judgment of Newt Gingrich, one of Trump’s most committed supporters among the political élite. Major Garrett, the chief White House correspondent for CBS, predicted that Trump’s words would “resonate,” tweeting that this was his “best drafted & best delivered” speech of the campaign. But the speech seemed unlikely to have much, if any, effect on Trump’s popularity with African-American voters, which is so low that it barely registers in polls: a recent Fox News poll showed Trump drawing four per cent of black voters; in a poll of Ohio, from July, Trump recorded a perfect zero with black voters. Even the vigorous efforts of Diamond and Silk, the African-American pro-Trump YouTube stars, seem not to have made a difference.

In many ways, this makes sense. Throughout the campaign, a number of observers on the left and the right have suggested that Trump practices a kind of white-identity politics that may be indistinguishable from racism. He was reluctant, earlier this year, to disavow the support of David Duke; he is popular among some white nationalists; and he has had to defend himself against accusations of anti-Semitism. Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, sent a memo to his staff about Trump, assuring them that it is “entirely fair to call him a mendacious racist.” Even Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who endorses Trump, said that Trump’s criticism of a judge was “sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

But what’s surprising about Trump’s strategy of racial provocation is that African-Americans have played a relatively small role in it. In his campaign-announcement speech, fourteen long months ago, he set the tone for much of his campaign when he suggested that Mexico was sending its least desirable citizens across the border. (“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”) And the judge he criticized was Gonzalo Curiel, who he suggested was biased against him because Curiel’s parents are from Mexico. (“This judge is of Mexican heritage—I’m building a wall,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper, in reference to his plan to fortify the Mexican border.) When people call Trump racist, they are often thinking primarily of incidents like these, in which he has singled out Latino immigrants and their descendants.

They are often thinking, too, about Trump’s series of remarks about Muslims, including his call—which he seems to have modified—for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Or, for that matter, his portrayal of China as a menacing threat; during a rally in Iowa last year, he adopted a clipped accent to impersonate negotiators from Japan and China; he imagined them saying, “We want deal!” In these cases, Trump is seeking to protect an American “we” from an invading “they”—the kind of language that would once have drawn accusations of nativism and xenophobia instead. But these days a wide range of prejudices are commonly subsumed within the expansive term “racism”; you might call a politician “racist” without meaning (at least not exclusively, or even primarily) that he is anti-black.

When it comes to African-Americans, Trump has a long and sometimes grim history. In the nineteen-seventies, he was sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against black tenants. In 1989, after five black and Latino boys were arrested for a horrific attack on a jogger in Central Park, Trump published a pro-death-penalty advertisement in the New York Daily News. (Trump also criticized the city’s forty-one-million-dollar settlement with the five, who were convicted and then, more than a decade later, exonerated.) And then there were his demands, in 2011, that Obama produce his birth certificate, to prove he was born in America. (Birtherism is often described as a species of anti-black racism, though of course it is inspired by the fantasy that our cosmopolitan President is not really African-American.) And, last year, Trump retweeted an image showing bogus crime statistics that suggested African-Americans kill many more whites than is actually the case.

In general, though, Trump has had relatively little to say about African-Americans during this campaign. In December, he criticized Justice Antonin Scalia, who had suggested, during a hearing, that affirmative action might harm some African-American students by steering them toward colleges that are “too fast for them” when they might be better off at “a less advanced school—a slower-track school.” Trump seemed genuinely offended. “I thought his remarks were very tough,” he said. “I don’t like what he said.” During his Convention speech, he mentioned the murder rate in Chicago, but then swiftly pivoted, singling out a group not typically blamed for the city’s violence. “Nearly one hundred and eighty thousand illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens,” he said.