In a presidential campaign season that has been a roller coaster ride of the absurd, the latest tactic employed is a dangerous one indeed.

Recently, GOP nominee Donald J. Trump has assailed Democrat nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton with charges of bigotry. Besides the conspicuously erroneous nature of this claim, Trump is employing this accusation as an instrument to curry favor among the minority communities.

Consistently mind boggling, Trump – who heretofore is polling in single digits with black voters – believes by implanting the idea of chronic prejudice in the mindset of the far-left liberal Clinton, he can prevail in gaining a majority of minority support.

Of all the troublesome facets of this ploy, the most repellant is the notion of trivializing the remnants of bigotry that still poison a portion of our nation’s people and institutions. Also, considering that Trump’s capture of the nomination was in no small part predicated upon the demonization of certain minorities, his turn-about is to say the least surprising.

Civil rights leaders have been appalled by Trump’s statements in the primary and are confounded by his assertions now. Challenged in interviews, Trump defends his claim of Clinton’s supposed alienation of minorities with arguments that defy explanation. In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump changed his justifications in the same paragraph. His argument was nonsensical, bewildering, and without foundation.

Overriding in concern is the trivialization of such an essential issue to the fabric of America. Trump’s campaign prior to this new strategy has been saturated with nativism and separatism, which has rallied a hardcore base and won him the nomination. To change tactics so dramatically might alienate his core devoted followers in an attempt to garner minority or white suburban female voters.

Whatever Trump’s motivation, he is discounting a heartfelt and important issue by using it as a device to baselessly bludgeon a political opponent.

These accusations have raised the heat of mudslinging back and forth between the two candidates. In a contest in which both major party competitors have the highest negatives in political polling history, this new imbroglio will only further generate more distrust of both of them.

Perhaps most puzzling about Donald Trump’s accusations of prejudice by Hillary Clinton is that her political record belies the claim. As first lady of Arkansas, she was actively involved in revamping education in minority communities. Then as first lady of the United States, she was the ramrod behind the passage of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, in 1997. This law provided insurance for urban poor children. Also, the Inner City Immunization Program was Hillary Clinton’s idea. Further, she pushed the Adoption and Families Act in 1999. This law streamlined orphaned children’s ability to be adopted, and most candidates for adoption are minority kids.

In the U.S. Senate, Clinton – while serving on the Health, Education, and Labor Committee – consistently favored the funding of urban-centered programs designed to create opportunities for minorities.

Thus, to target Clinton on the issue of presumed bigotry when her record is the converse of those accusations is not only erroneous. It is a ridiculous strategy.

Yet for some unexplained reason, Trump is attacking a woman with more legitimate baggage than occupies the carousel at Green Airport with charges that are totally illegitimate. With real deplorable incidents of verifiable deceit in her history like Cattlegate, Travelgate, Whitewater, the Lewinsky affair, the faked sniper fire incident in Bosnia in 1996, Benghazi, and the email server scandal, why is the Donald choosing to prosecute her about a total fiction?

Furthermore, the statistics that Trump is using to buoy his race argument are entirely incorrect. He stated the following in a speech to an all-white audience in Dimondale, Mich., this past week: “Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.” He added: “What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose? You’re living in 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?”

Actually, according to federal statistics, the overall Black unemployment rate is 9 percent, while the overall national unemployment rate is 5.4 percent. Among black youth ages 18 to 25, the unemployment rate is 15 percent, not 58 percent.

For that matter, over a period from 1975 to 2015, the black middle class has increased fivefold, and the black poverty rate has been lowered from 42 percent in 1975 to 27 percent in 2015. Certainly, a 27-percent poverty rate among African Americans is nothing to crow about, although the graph is moving in the right direction. An interesting aside, the white poverty rate is around 10 percent, the same range it was four decades ago. So, one could argue that African Americans have made more strides to the positive than the rest of society.

But Donald Trump’s assignment of culpability did not stop there. He lambasted Clinton with the following: “Hillary Clinton would rather provide a job to a refugee from overseas than to give that job to African American youth in cities like Detroit who have become refugees in their own country.”

Perhaps Trump does not understand the definition of the word refugee.

Considering that Real Clear Politics, the national polling monitoring website, has Trump polling between 1 percent and 2 percent with African Americans, what is this effort all about?

Furthermore, if his intent is to try to build voting numbers in the black community, why not address an audience that has actual black people in it?

Civil rights leaders U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and MSNBC host the Rev. Al Sharpton have all decried Trump’s race campaign tactic as a cheap trivialization of an important issue.

Of course, his opponent Clinton had to respond with her own brand of mudslinging: “A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military.” She added: “From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. He is taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party.” Her coup de grace was the following statement: “Trump’s lack of knowledge or experience or solutions would be bad enough. But what he’s doing here is more sinister.”

Specifically, the reason the Democrat nominee wins this particular battle is that Trump’s argument is not even remotely speculative. It is absolutely and provably wrong. The soiled Clinton, in regard to service and concern for the minority community, is pristine clean. Trump’s choice of this tactic is the most strategically foolish thus far in this campaign.

Moreover, he trivializes an essential legacy issue in our society. The treatment of African Americans in our society in the 50 years since the Great Society programs has improved markedly, to the betterment of all of us.

However, we need to be vigilant. With the advent of the internet and social media, myopic, bigoted fools are accumulating followers. Hatred and intolerance will always be malingering specters attempting to poison our nation. Furthermore, some of those despicable bigots have to date supported Trump because they believe he has most reflected their beliefs.

An unexpected consequence of Trump’s new tactic may be the alienation of those true believers.

To sum up, when a major party candidate for the presidency trivializes such an important social problem in a misguided attempt to dissuade African American voters, he only diminishes the office he seeks. He insults those who have strived so arduously, accomplished so much, and found their productive place in our society. Trump should not discount their successes by lessening them and using them as a moronic campaign ploy!