COOPER: “No. I’m asking now, do you say that President Obama was born in the United States?” TRUMP: “No. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I mean, I don’t know why he wouldn’t release his records. But you know, honestly, I don’t want to get in it. He came up with this thing, all of a sudden. Remember this one thing. I’m only going to get one thing because I’m about jobs, the economy, and I’m about the military and taking care of all that.”

A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. And I think sometimes a black may think that they don’t really have the advantage, or this or that, but in actuality, today, currently, it’s a great – I’ve said on occasion, even about myself, if I was starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage today.

I have a great relationship with the blacks. I have always had a great relationship with the blacks.

‘We had a case where we had an African-American guy who is a fan of mine,’ Mr. Trump said of an event in Arizona in March. ‘In fact I want to find out what’s going on with him.’ As his voice trailed off, Mr. Trump noticed a man in the crowd. ‘Oh look at my African-American over here,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘Are you the greatest? Do you know what I’m talking about?’ Mr. Trump then returned to speaking about the Arizona episode. The man he had pointed to, Gregory Cheadle, a local real estate broker running for a Republican nomination for a congressional seat, said in an interview Friday night that it was ‘surreal’ to be called out by Mr. Trump.

“For instance, a former Trump associate, John O’Donnell, wrote that Trump would often describe black people as being lazy and stupid; he would bemoan the ‘black guys counting my money.’ He would prefer the ‘short guys that wear yarmulkes.’ It wasn’t only African-Americans who had earned Trump’s derision. Years later, Trump told Playboy that these remarks were ‘probably true.’”

At a June 23 Maryland Republican Party fundraiser, reporters asked GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump about his views on race relations. Trump said that black youths are at ‘a point where they’ve just about never done more poorly. There’s no spirit, there’s killings on an hourly basis, virtually, in places like Baltimore and Chicago and many other places,’ according to The Independent. The real estate magnate didn’t stop there, adding, ‘I thought that President Obama would be a great cheerleader for the country. And he’s really become very divisive.’

GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Tuesday night said he supported all lives and suggested that supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement are promoting ‘hate.’ ‘I think they’re trouble. I think they’re looking for trouble,’ the tough-talking tycoon said during a Fox News interview with Bill O’Reilly. ‘I looked at a couple of people that were interviewed from the group. I saw them with hate coming down the street last week talking about cops and police and what should be done to them. That was not good,’ Trump said.

Mercutio Southall Jr. — a well-known local activist who has been repeatedly arrested while fighting what he says is unfair treatment of blacks — interrupted Trump’s rally and could be heard shouting, ‘Black lives matter!’ A fight broke out, prompting Trump to briefly halt his remarks and demand the removal of Southall. ‘Get him the hell out of here, will you, please?’ Trump said on Saturday morning. ‘Get him out of here. Throw him out!’ At one point, Southall fell to the ground and was surrounded by several white men who appeared to be kicking and punching him, according to video captured by CNN. A Washington Post reporter in the crowd watched as one of the men put his hands on Southall’s neck and heard a female onlooker repeatedly shout: ‘Don’t choke him!’ As security officers got Southall on his feet and led him out of the building, he was repeatedly pushed and shoved by people in the crowd. The crowd alternated between booing and cheering. There were chants of ‘All lives matter!’ ‘Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,’ Trump said on the Fox News Channel on Sunday morning.

Donald Trump’s call for volunteer election monitors is raising fears about voter intimidation at the polls this fall. ‘We’re going to watch Pennsylvania,’ Trump told a crowd in Altoona, Penn. Friday night. ‘Go down to certain areas and watch and study and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times.’

Trump’s campaign also has set up a web page asking for volunteers to monitor polling places in an effort to ‘stop crooked Hillary from rigging this election.’ Trump’s call to action is now being promoted by white supremacists on Stormfront, the world’s leading neo-Nazi website, something that’s not particularly surprising given how Trump has been embraced by the likes of David Duke. […] Trump’s poll watchers aren’t going to uncover any voter fraud. What they’re more likely to do, given the violence we’ve seen at Trump rallies and the support he’s getting from avowed white supremacists, is intimidate people and suppress the vote. And that, not surprisingly, is the same goal behind so many of the voter ID laws that have been enacted across the nation.

I just left a great place, North Carolina. And they just had a tremendous loss — voter ID, voter ID. They lost voter ID. How do you lose voter ID? You mean, you don’t have to show identification? You don’t have to show that, hey? And then you say — you know, I’ve been talking about the rigged system for a long time. And I get hammered in the press for talking about it. Oh, I can’t believe he’d be talking about the rigged system. And then in the meantime, voter ID, you don’t have to do.

Earlier in the week, Trump also sounded the voter identification alarm in North Carolina, a state whose controversial voter ID law was recently struck down in a federal appeals court, which found the legislation intentionally discriminated against African-Americans when it was passed. The law had reduced the opportunity for early voting as well as same-day registration and excluded certain IDs as acceptable documents to be shown at polling places.

Today, a federal court struck down North Carolina’s voter-ID law, one of the strictest in the nation. In addition to requiring residents to show identification before they can cast a ballot, the law also eliminated same-day voter registration, eliminated seven days of early voting and put an end to out-of-precinct voting. The federal court ruling reinstates these provisions, for now. […] The federal court in Richmond found that the primary purpose of North Carolina’s wasn’t to stop voter fraud, but rather to disenfranchise minority voters. The judges found that the provisions ‘target African Americans with almost surgical precision.’

In particular, the court found that North Carolina lawmakers requested data on racial differences in voting behaviors in the state. ‘This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID, those issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV),’ the judges wrote. So the legislators made it so that the only acceptable forms of voter identification were the ones disproportionately used by white people. ‘With race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans,’ the judges wrote. ‘The bill retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess.’

CHUCK TODD: “–do you want to see the voting laws changed to make it easier to vote?” DONALD TRUMP: “I want to see voting laws so that people that are citizens can vote. Not so people that can walk off the street and can vote, or so that illegal immigrants can vote–” CHUCK TODD: “So you’re not for same-day voter registration?” DONALD TRUMP: “No, no. I want to make the voting laws so that people that– it doesn’t make any difference how they do it. But I don’t think people should sneak in through the cracks. You have to have — And whether that’s an ID or any way you want to do it.