Donald Trump took to Twitter this morning to use the tragic shooting death of NBA star Dwyane Wade's cousin as an advertisement for why black voters should pick him over Hillary Clinton this November. After misspelling Wade's first name in a tweet Saturday morning, Trump tweeted again with the correct spelling.
The basketball player's 32-year-old first cousin, Nykea Aldridge, was pushing a baby stroller in Chicago's Parkway Gardens neighborhood on Friday when she was hit by gunfire in her arm and head, ABC News reports. Aldridge was not the target, but was hit by accident as two men exchanged gunfire nearby.
Wade, a Chicago native, tweeted this following the shooting.
"What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump? You're living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed -- what the hell do you have to lose?"
Trump's tweet almost immediately started getting critical responses for not offering condolences to Wade or his family. Among those popping up in the subtweets was actor Don Cheadle.
Trump seems to have stepped up his focus on black voters this week in campaign speeches, but has been criticized for his generalizations of the black population as a whole as living in poverty, violence and desperation. Here's how he addressed black voters at a rally in Virginia, according to the New York Times:
Meanwhile, Trump is polling historically poorly with black voters and has pulled in only a reported 2.3 percent share of the black vote. For context, George W. Bush got 11 percent of the the black vote his last time out. Mitt Romney got 6 percent, and that was against Barack Obama. Even Ronald Reagan got 9 percent in 1984.
