Yamiche Alcindor:

Well, President Trump's outreach to black voters has long been something that has been criticized and controversial, going all the way back to 2016.

This time around, the 2020 Trump campaign is saying that, we're not affiliated with any of this.

I had a long conversation with Katrina Pierson. She's a senior adviser to the Trump campaign and also someone who's working on black voters for Trump, Black Voices for Trump. And she says, look, even if this was part of the campaign, this looks like it would be illegal.

So that's an admission on the campaign's part that there shouldn't be cash giveaways at these events. But when you look at what the Trump campaign is actually doing — and there are two things going on. The campaign itself, officials, surrogates of the president, they're talking about the economy, they're talking about school choice, they're talking about bettering the lives of African-Americans and going around the country making that pitch.

When you listen to the president himself, though, he's still going back to the 2016 question that got into him into a lot of controversial conversations, which is, what do you have to lose as African-American voters?

He says his campaign thinks that that's not something that he should be saying. But the president said, look, I did better than both the last Republican nominees, talking about the late Senator John McCain and Senator Mitt Romney, with African-American voters. So I'm going to continue to do the things that I think will work.

And, as we saw in 2016, it worked.