After the 2012 election, when the Republican party lost the popular vote for the fifth time in the previous six elections, GOP elders and intellectuals conducted an "autopsy." You can read the full report here; the recommendations range from expanding the GOP message beyond its talk-radio bubble base to doing significant outreach to minority communities and investing heavily in field staff.

As it happens, this blueprint for changing the party's electoral fortunes reads like a negative image of the Donald Trump campaign. Where the post-mortem suggests Republicans zig right, Trump has zagged left.

This makes sense: Trump and Trumpism emerged not from strong state parties or coalitions of established conservative interest groups, but rather from the fever-swamps of birtherism and white racial anxiety. In 2012, he funded an investigation into whether Barack Obama was a U.S. citizen. In the speech announcing his campaign, he slandered Hispanic immigrants. He has repeatedly echoed the sentiment white male Republican voters express that this country is "losing" because white men no longer have their hands on the levers of power.

This past week, though, brought a different Donald Trump. In a visit to Wisconsin, Trump actually seemed to borrow a page from that GOP report by reaching out to African-American voters. He spoke after the unrest in Milwaukee's Sherman Park neighborhood, protests which propelled Milwaukee's long-standing racial strife to the front pages of newspapers everywhere. If Trump were going to make a play for African-American votes, this was the time and almost the place to do it.

I say almost because Trump spoke from West Bend, a city with fewer than one percent black residents and in the heart of the WOW counties (Washington, Ozaukee and Waukesha) which are, collectively, some of the whitest and most reliably Republican areas in the entire country.

But worse than his choice of venue was the clumsy and tone-deaf way Trump made his appeal. In many ways, what Trump said in West Bend and in other speeches on race last week was exactly the same failed appeal that suburban white legislators and pundits have made about Milwaukee for as long as I've lived here, probably longer. You keep electing Democrats, they say, and you get nothing in return. "What have you got to lose?" Trump literally asked of black voters, by trying Republicans for a change?

Democrats have given African Americans "no health care, no education, no anything," according to Trump – and according to countless white Republicans around the country trying to make inroads with black voters.

I don't understand it, but there is a genuine belief across the Republican Party in the truth of Trump's argument here, that Democratic lawmakers are bad for African-American communities and everything would be great for them if they would just vote for the GOP. You hear it from talk radio, from the comments sections of any article at all about race, from suburban legislators who think they know what's best for city residents. Black voters, they think, are living with a "plantation mentality" that keeps them in the thrall of Democrats who do nothing for the black community.

Take Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke (please!). He argued exactly that in an opinion piece for Fox News just weeks before the Sherman Park uprising. "Democrats are continuing their 50-year assault on the black community," he wrote, arguing that African-Americans are raising "their children on the Democrat plantation of welfare, dependency and animosity toward their neighbor."

Though Clarke is only able to win election in Milwaukee County by running as a Democrat, he concludes, "It’s time for Black America to divide itself from" the Democratic Party.

Clarke is a perfect example of everything the post-2012 autopsy diagnosed as being wrong with the Republican Party. As Eugene Kane points out in his own response to the protests in Sherman Park, Clarke "has built a career as a right-wing pundit (and) has shown no inclination to work with city police or residents to deal with the deteriorating relationship between law enforcement and those who feel intimidated by police shooting suspects before arresting them."

Besides the whole section about more authentic outreach to minorities, youth and women (a section that pointedly leaves out the "plantation" line), the GOP's self-diagnosis noted that the party has "become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people." That's the role Clarke plays on Fox News and even at the Republican National Convention in July. That's the role of Fox News in general, and of talk radio, the Wall Street Journal opinion pages and right-wing web sites like Breitbart News, whose CEO Stephen Bannon has just taken over the Trump campaign.

Bannon's hiring completes the circle: Trump's rise was impossible without the kind of racism, slander and conspiracy theorizing for which Breitbart became famous. (Remember Shirley Sherrod? Tip of the iceberg!) Now his campaign is literally being run from that extreme end of the Republican Party.

But is Trump right? When he is telling the nearly all-white crowds at his speeches and rallies that Democrats are bad for African-Americans, that black voters have nothing to lose by voting Trump in November, does he have a case? Goodness, no. I mean, sure, if you go back in time to the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln – a Republican – freed the slaves. Republicans supported Reconstruction against southern Democrats who opposed lifting those freed slaves out of poverty and into positions of political power.

Since then, of course, there has been a complete political re-alignment. The last 60 years has shown that Republicans, now, are the ones about whom African American voters should be concerned. Look at the Trump campaign itself. His rallies often feature chants of "All Lives Matter," the ignorant, if not racist, rejoinder to the Black Lives Matter movement. At Trump's West Bend speech, someone was selling Confederate flags outside, also a regular occurrence. Dark-skinned people are also commonly escorted from Trump events even when they are, in fact, Trump supporters.

And though support from unapologetic white supremacists does not make Donald Trump one, it should really make him reconsider what he's doing and saying to attract them so openly.

Hang on there, Jay, you're saying, Trump is an outlier. When you've lost Charlie Sykes and Jennifer Rubin – yes, that Jennifer Rubin – you're not really a mainstream Republican anymore. Well, mainstream Republicans aren't much better.

We can start with voting rights. Though appeals courts have halted, at least temporarily, some of the most extreme restrictions on voting, the record is pretty clear that Republicans don't want black voters to vote. We've seen it here in Wisconsin, where lawmakers allegedly pushed voting restrictions specifically to disenfranchise African-Americans. Even more explicit were Republicans in North Carolina, who asked for data on voting patterns and then changed the law to eliminate as many black votes as possible.

We can also talk about health care. Republican governors, including our own, have generally refused the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid. That has left many poor African-Americans (and other poor adults, too) without access to health coverage and, undoubtedly, suffering unnecessary adverse health outcomes like illness or death.

We can move on to criminal justice reform. While the anti-Hillary Clinton left liked to blame her and her husband for the fact that a disproportionate share of African-American men are in jail, the real blame lies in state legislators who pushed hard for "three strikes" laws and "truth in sentencing." These were overwhelmingly Republican, though prior to Trump's ascent, there was a sense even among the GOP that they were wrong on that. Trump is, of course, "the law and order candidate."

We can probably skip education; unless this is your first time reading my column, you have undoubtedly seen me document repeatedly the way Republicans have destroyed Milwaukee's public schools.

But we can go directly to the core of Trump's new appeal: economics. Trump has flat-out lied in his recent speeches, telling African-American voters that Clinton supports "open borders" and "giving our jobs away to other countries" (that's one way he's lost Jennifer Rubin, by lying like that on issues like this).

In reality, some of the smartest commentary on the recent unrest in Milwaukee has focused on the way Republican policies over the last 50 years have left this city segregated and its black community economically distressed. For example, former Milwaukeean and current Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson wrote about how Milwaukee is surrounded by "an invisible racial cage," a cage formed when Republican lawmakers at the state and suburban level refused to connect the city's black residents with suburban jobs through transit options. This is a painful irony, considering the way Milwaukee's black community was systematically dismantled to build the freeways that connect the city to those suburbs in the WOW counties.

Look, I don't know if Trump is serious or not about really appealing to minority voters. It's at least as likely that Trump is making this pitch to insulate himself from the kind of criticisms that followed Mitt Romney's loss in 2012. Trump is a horrible person and should not be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office, but he is not stupid. He knows he's losing, and he or someone in his organization may feel he ought to take at least a cursory swing at the list of strategies recommended in that autopsy after Romney's loss.

But whether or not the party's current standard-bearer is a true believer, it's still just flatly false that Republican leadership would be better for African-Americans. The GOP has had its chance to help black voters, and they have chosen not to do so. Indeed, the history of the last half-century is Republicans pushing one strategy after another to damage and destroy black communities.