It was a top-10 hit. And it sounds a lot like a Donald Trump campaign speech.

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On Thursday night, Trump slipped. He's been talking about inner cities for months, equating “inner city” with “place black people live.” In a speech in Ohio, Trump, speaking extemporaneously instead of from the teleprompter, used the less-common term “ghettos” to describe urban areas.

“We're going to work on our . . . ghettos are in — so the — you take a look at what's going on,” Trump said, “where you have pockets of areas of land where you have the inner cities, and you have so many things, so many problems, so many horrible, horrible problems. The violence. The death. The lack of education. No jobs. We're gonna work with the African American community, and we're going to solve the problem of the inner city.”

The reason Trump uses the term “ghettos” instead of “inner cities” is because that used to be the more common term. At the time Presley's song came out in 1969, “ghetto” was the common nomenclature. We can track it by number of mentions in the New York Times. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, “ghetto” was common. By the 1990s, the more common term was “inner cities.”

Trump is a native New Yorker who was 23 years old when the song came out. He grew up in a world that called the inner city “the ghetto.” There are a lot of reasons the term is tricky, especially for a presidential candidate in 2016. Especially for this presidential candidate, given the anti-Semitic history of the term. (The spikes in at the turn of the century and in the mid-1940s are not coincidences.)

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What's more remarkable is that Trump's understanding of the inner city also hasn't been updated much since the Presley era. His conception of life for black Americans mirrors Elvis's song, down to the dead young men in the streets of Chicago. That's a fair critique at the moment, of course, given the spike in murders in the city. But the number of black people living in Chicago is about 900,000, only 2 percent of the country's black population.

And not all black Chicagoans live in the “inner city.” Black Americans make up 19 percent of cities, but 10 percent of city suburbs. Six percent of the population of rural areas is black, according to the Census Bureau.

Trump has made crime a focus of his campaign, often using Chicago as an example. He has said on the campaign trail that the murder rate is the highest it has been in 45 years, which is not at all true; in 2015, it was the highest it had been in six years. Chicago is such an outlier, incidentally, that it's responsible for much of the recent increase in the national murder rate. Chicago is a problem — but happily, most of the country doesn't look like Chicago.

It's not clear that Trump differentiates between life for black Americans in 2016 and life for black Americans in the 1970s, a time when — particularly in his native New York — things were grim. In the mid-1970s, black unemployment was often over 14 percent. Now, it's at 8.3 percent — higher than among white Americans, but black unemployment is regularly about twice that of whites. In the most recent jobs report, black unemployment was about 1.9 times higher than that for whites, one of the better monthly ratios in history (bad as it is).

It was in the mid-1970s, we will note, that Trump's father was arrested in Maryland for not maintaining a housing complex with mostly black residents. It was also this period during which the Trump family was investigated by the federal government for discriminatory practices, rejecting black applicants at apartments in New York.

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Earlier this year, Trump revisited one of the most controversial moments of his life, when he linked the rape of a white woman in Central Park to the need to reinstitute the death penalty to halt the “roving bands of wild criminals” who “roam our neighborhoods.” The young black and Hispanic men who were arrested and imprisoned for the crime were eventually exonerated thanks to a confession and DNA evidence from a serial rapist. Trump refused to acknowledge that he was wrong in his call for harsh punishment for the men wrongly convicted. “They admitted they were guilty,” he said, skipping over the part where the young men had been coerced. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”

It's hard not to see a lesson in that. Trump's vision of the exonerated men is stuck in the high-crime era of the late 1980s. His conception of the life of other black Americans is mired in the mid-1970s. His terminology for referring to black neighborhoods is pulled from a few years prior.