A friend just now emailed me and said that, in the wake of the recent unrest in North Carolina, the news is now spinning Donald Trump as more sympathetic to black people than is Hillary Clinton. My friend wanted to know if I've been seeing similar spin on other news coverage.

Well...yeah. It was heading in that direction on CNN. Chris Matthews gave a fair amount of air time yesterday to a black Trumper who repeated the argument that we might as well try Trump because Obama and Bill Clinton were just hell, hell, HELL on the black community.

Are you seeing that kind of spin on the news? If so...wow. One would have thought that Trump would have lost the black vote entirely after he hired as Steve Bannon to be the new campaign head honcho. Bannon is the guy many are calling a leader of the Alt-Right movement -- the new name for white supremacy. Trump has heretofore championed profiling, "stop and frisk" and giving the cops total license to do as they please.

And yet there really do seem to be a small but significant number of black people who think that Hillary is the problem, even though her very first speech of the campaign was a condemnation of the way many cops have behaved toward black citizens. Is Clinton Derangement Syndrome really that powerful? The Clintons have become a Rorschach blot onto which many members of the public project all of their fears and resentments.

Any black people gravitating toward Trump should first consult the folks -- both black and white -- who live in Flint, Michigan. Ask them how they feel about Trump's grand scheme to get rid of the EPA. Perhaps anti-Hillary black voters should also ask themselves about the advisability of Trump's plan to get rid of the Food And Drug Administration -- the "food police," as Trump calls them. Rich people can afford to shop at Whole Foods and other upscale markets; poor people are the ones who are going to get sick from tainted meat and produce.

I must admit that Trump's new ploy makes electoral sense: North Carolina is a tossup, and now there are even rumblings that Virginia may be in play.

Perhaps no battleground state is as polarized along demographic lines as North Carolina. Mr. Trump has a lead of 53 percent to 28 percent among white voters, most likely his best tally with that group in any of the battleground states. Mrs. Clinton holds the overwhelming support of black voters, at 86 percent to 3 percent in a three-way race.

Peeling off even a tiny, tiny fraction of the African American vote -- or depressing that vote -- could assure that the state goes into Trump's column. Hillary absolutely cannot afford to lose it.