Trump’s campaign had originally promoted today’s meeting, which reportedly involves almost 100 African-American pastors, as an endorsement, sending out a news release Wednesday using that language.
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Donald Trump claimed Monday that a group of prominent black pastors meeting with him backed out of formally endorsing him due to pressure from Black Lives Matter.
After news of the meeting became public, over 100 leaders in the African-American community published an open letter to the ministers, urging the attendees to consider Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail, which they called “overtly divisive and racist”. “I don’t know if it’s an endorsement…I think probably it will be an endorsement by some”, Trump said.
Trump has ignited a number of racial controversies on the campaign trail, such as when he suggested a Black Lives Matter heckler “should have been roughed up”.
Morton of the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship tweeted on Friday that he had refused to meet with Trump, saying that the candidate lacks “respect for people”. I said “I don’t remember it” and I wanted to qualify that day not that I thought it happened but just to remind people that that was a very emotional day for me.
When asked, neither Trump nor Scott would say how many of those who attended had now made a decision to back his campaign.
But Trump has been courting the support of evangelical black clergy members and other African-American leaders as he works to broaden his appeal in a crowded Republican field.
“We had a wonderful time in the meeting”, said Darrell Scott, the senior pastor of New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who helped to organize the meeting. “I think that’s a real thing to talk about”. This election cycle, Trump isn’t the only one going after the black evangelical demographic: His opponent Ben Carson is seeking 13 percent, or double of Mitt Romney’s share, of the black vote to beat Hillary Clinton.
US Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is so “cruel” in his rhetoric that he has frightened other right-wing Republican candidates, said an American political analyst in NY.
There are many black pastors and clergy who nearly always vote Republican because they consider values the most important issue in the campaigns. But Trump has said he doesn’t remember meeting Kovaleski. “They find out that he’s not the person that the media has depicted him to be”.
Several of the pastors who were invited to meet with the GOP candidate declined their invitation or noted their attendance did not equal an endorsement.
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The Trump camp blamed the kerfuffle on Black Lives Matter, the social movement that sprang up in response to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer.
