A day devoted to making inroads with the black community and combating allegations of racism achieved just the opposite Wednesday, when Donald Trump flew to Ohio to convince African-American voters that his campaign has minorities’ best interests at heart. Trump himself spoke at a black church in Cleveland, and later participated in a forum with Fox News host and Trump acolyte Sean Hannity focused on African-American issues, while his surrogates blanketed the airwaves to cast Trump as the leader of a veritable rainbow coalition.

But rather than achieving racial harmony, Trump, who is currently polling at 5.9 percent with black voters, according to one recent survey, incited just the opposite. The trouble for the Republican presidential nominee began at the New Spirit Revival Center, where Trump was introduced by infamous boxing promoter Don King. King, who was kept from addressing the Republican convention for a prior manslaughter conviction, introduced Trump by dropping the N-word nearly immediately. “I told Michael Jackson, I said if you’re poor, you’re a poor Negro—I would use the N-word—but if you rich, you are a rich Negro; if you are intelligent, intellectual, you’re an intellectual Negro; if you’re a dancing and sliding and gliding nigger, I mean, Negro,” King said.

“Ah, there’s only one Don King,” Trump said when he took the stage. He went on to acknowledge the recent shooting of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man who was killed by a police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While Trump has been vocally pro-law-enforcement during his campaign, he admitted that “it looked like [Crutcher] did everything you’re supposed to do” when confronting police.

Whatever goodwill that ackownlgedgment might have engendered was likely undone when Trump went into another room in the church to film a “town hall” with Hannity—a television event, airing Thursday, that was ostensibly focused on addressing “African-American concerns” but appeared to draw an almost entirely white audience. There, Trump reportedly proposed reducing inner city crime by implementing so-called “stop and frisk” nationwide—a profiling-based policy that has been ruled racially discriminatory and unconstitutional for disproportionately targeting minorities.

“I think you have to,” Trump said. “We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind automatically, you understand. You have to, in my opinion—I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago. I think stop and frisk—in New York City, it was so incredible, the way it worked. Now, we had a very good mayor, but New York City was incredible, the way that worked, so I think that could be one step you do.”

“American hands will rebuild our nation. Not the hands of people from other nations.”

Trump’s advocacy of the controversial program is only the latest in a series of racially-charged comments that critics have suggested are more directed toward reassuring white voters than winning over black ones. Trump’s latest campaign to court the black community kicked off in August, when the G.O.P. nominee famously said, “You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed—what the hell do you have to lose?” Then, last week, Trump attempted to bury his role in mainstreaming the birther conspiracy theory, widely seen as a racist attack on Barack Obama, by admitting that the president was born in the United States—a glancing acknowledgement of his 5-year campaign to delegitimize Obama.

Later on Wednesday, at a rally in Toledo, Ohio, Trump managed to offend other minority groups, too, when he doubled down on his argument that the United States should not accept immigrants whose values or culture might be un-American. Preventing Syrian refugees from entering the country, Trump told his supporters, is not “only a matter of terrorism, but also a matter of quality of life”—a turn of phrase that immediately raised eyebrows online. “American hands will rebuild our nation,” Trump said at another point during the rally, echoing the “America first” theme of his campaign. “Not the hands of people from other nations.”

If Trump’s attempt at minority outreach Wednesday was full of mixed messages, one assumes that he and his campaign didn’t notice. “I’ve lost count as to how many times the disgusting, liberal, mainstream media have attempted to label Mr. Donald Trump as racist, a xenophobe and a bigot. And let’s not forget, sexist, misogynist, narcissist, Islamophobe, anti-Hispanic, anti-Semite demagogue,” Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, thundered earlier in the day at the New Spirit Revival Center. “It’s disgraceful. Not only is Donald Trump not a racist, he believes that all people are part of one race: the human race.”

But Trump himself appears to be struggling to stick to his non-racist talking points. As the day closed, Trump appeared on an Ohio television station and was asked to explain how he had reversed his opinion and come to the conclusion that President Obama was, indeed, born in the U.S. Instead of outlining his revelation, Trump brushed off the issue once again. “Well, I just wanted to get on with, you know, we want to get on with the campaign,” he shrugged. “And a lot of people were asking me questions.”