Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump was in Detroit on Saturday, where he attended worship service at Great Faith Ministries International Church on the city’s west side.
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“Our nation is too divided”, he told the receptive congregation of Great Faith Ministries.
“I dug deep and looked at the Constitution, and I just think he has a genuine love for the country”, Carletta Griffin, an African-American adjunct professor at the University of Detroit Mercy told The Daily Beast.
Inside the church, Trump delivered a short speech that mentioned discrimination and the marginalization of young black men; he also stressed the importance of family.
“I will always support your church always”.
If Trump was actually serious about wanting to win over African-American voters he would answer the following questions during his interview with Bishop Jackson on the Impact Network.
Neighborhood resident Felicia Reese, left, talks with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Dr. Donald Trump’s faux outreach campaign to black and brown voters is the worst type of cynical and dishonest ploy.
Ahead of his trip, Toni McIlwain said she believes that as a candidate, Trump has a right to go anywhere he wants. They seized on Trump’s assertion Friday that Afghanistan is “safer than some of our inner cities” and that African-Americans in major cities fare the worst: “they get bad education, they have no money, the jobs are a disaster, majority don’t have jobs”.
“I am here today to listen to your message and I am doing that”, said Trump, who told the congregation that he had written his remarks and meant them “from the heart”. “And that there are many wrongs that must still be made right”.
“I want to make race disappear as a factor in government and governance”, Mr Trump was advised to say at some point.
And in Detroit, where the manufacturing sector has seen an uptick after significant investments by President Obama’s administration, the real estate mogul laid out his own vision for the recovering city, though he avoided revealing specifics for his plan.
Sounding his campaign’s standard stump theme, he said, “Nothing would make me happier or more fulfilled than to use what I have learned in business to bring wealth and prosperity and opportunity to those who have not had those opportunities before”.
“Factories everywhere, new roads and bridges, new schools – especially schools – and new hope”, he said.
“He enjoyed it”, Carson told The Daily Beast about Trump’s visit.
Jackson presented Trump with two gifts: a prayer shawl and a ‘Jewish Heritage Study Bible.’ Trump (above) put the shawl on, draping it around his back and over both his shoulders.
On Friday, he met with black religious, business and civic leaders in Philadelphia, and days earlier he met with Republican blacks and Latinos at his NY headquarters.
Hours before the 11 am church service began, protesters, close to 800 people, had gathered outside to loudly voice their disdain for Trump’s presence in the city and at the black church, as well as his overall presidential bid and platform.
“Donald Trump as our president would take us in a very unsafe direction for our nation”, said Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi, from the Dearborn Heights -based Islamic House of Wisdom.
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Moreover, the “color blind”, free market, neoliberal, “small government” policies advocated by Trump and the Republican Party are in many ways responsible for the institutional and systemic inequalities that they purport to correct.
