Sessions will chair foreign policy team

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, stands next to Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., as Sessions speaks during a rally Sunday, Feb. 28, 2016, in Madison, Ala. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)

(Philip Rucker and Robert Costa The Washington Post WASHINGTON)

What the hell do you have to lose?

That's what the Donald asked African-American voters last week, but not before letting loose a Tommy-gun-like litany of generalizations that were, in a word, racist.

"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?" Trump said Friday before a predominantly white crowd in the predominantly white suburb of Lansing, Mich.

Sure, some African-Americans live in poverty, but not all. Some live in rotten school districts, but not all. Some don't have jobs, but not all. But the Donald doesn't just paint with a broad brush. He blasts the canvas with a firehose.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that all that is true.

What the hell do you have to lose?

Luckily for Hillary Clinton, Sen. Jeff Sessions made it clear on the Matt & Aunie radio show just what African-Americans, among many others, have left to lose.

Maybe their lives.

According to Sessions, who won't skip a chance to be a Trump cheerleader, some folks don't think the Donald is a real conservative. (That list would seem to include every living Republican president and GOP presidential nominee except for Bob Dole, but whatever.) But as Sessions sees it, Trump is conservative because he's a real law and order kind of guy, and he's not talking about that TV show.

"He bought an ad -- people say he wasn't a conservative -- but he bought an ad 20 years ago in the New York Times calling for the death penalty," Sessions said on the show. "How many people in New York, that liberal bastion, were willing to do something like that?"

Indeed, 27 years ago, Trump reportedly paid $85,000 to run ads in New York newspapers advocating the death penalty and pushing a mob mentality in reaction to the city's crime epidemic, including the brutal rape and beating of a young investment banker, and ahead of the teenaged defendants in that case -- the Central Park Five -- going on trial.

There's a twitch that develops in my typing fingers when I write words like "the System," a phrase that is at once too vague and too certain, but there's no other way to explain it. The System swung into action and the System -- media, cops, prosecutors, judges and juries -- put the Central Park Five in prison.

There was just one problem. They didn't do it.

In 2001, a serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, confessed to raping the Central Park jogger. After the statute of limitations had passed, he told authorities that he had committed the crime and that he had acted alone. The convictions were vacated and in 2002 the district attorney there moved the convictions be vacated, and in 2014, the city settled a lawsuit brought by the defendants for $41 million.

Trump called the settlement a "disgrace" because in his mind the Central Park Five got what they deserved, no matter if they were innocent of the crime.

So when Sessions says Trump's activism 26 years ago is proof of his conservative credentials, take a moment to understand what that really means. It was classic Wallace-era code language -- "law and order" -- indulging revenge fantasies and lynch mob mentality.

To Jeff Sessions, that's what passes for conservatism.

And let's face it, when Trump asked "What the hell do you have to lose?" was he really trying to appeal to black voters?

Or, rather, the horde around him cheering when he said it?