“It’s unbelievable the damage that’s been done, but we’ll get it fixed, and it will be fixed quickly – if I’m elected, but it will be fixed quickly and effectively and Flint will come back”. “Flint’s pain is a result of so many different failures”.
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Trump visited the traditionally African American church in the impoverished city to pay tribute to the city’s resiliency. But instead of admitting that he made a mistake, Donald Trump attacked the Pastor, stoked the fires of a conspiracy against him once again, and suggested that indeed the Pastor had set him up.
However, in his response, Mr Trump accused Ms Green-Timmons of playing politics.
“I mean, everyone plays their games”, he said. “I apologize”, she said.
“Something was up”, Trump told Fox and Friends on Thursday morning, calling the Rev. Faith Green Timmons a “nervous mess”. In her remarks after the event, Timmons said, “I wanted him to see the best of Flint. So she had that in mind, there’s no question”, Trump said. By his recollection, he said to Fox & Friends, Timmons was trembling in awe of him when she first met him.
As [Trump] continued on to talk about the economy and China, he turned to attacking his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“She’s failed on foreign policy, everything she touched didn’t work out, nothing”.
“Thank you. Thank you, pastor”, Trump responded.
Trump was also heckled by a few of the congregation, one of whom said he “discriminated against black tenants”, referring to the 1973 Justice Department civil rights lawsuit against Trump and his father for trying to keep African-American tenants from renting or leasing in their NY properties.
When Trump departed, about 100 people gathered outside the church to boo him, as his motorcade drove away. “The Republican nominee made a quick visit to a water plant and a local church”, PBS Newshour reported.
That isn’t true – in fact, several audience members began to heckle Trump, asking pointed questions about whether he racially discriminated against black tenants as a landlord.
“No, I never – never would never would”, Trump said before the church’s pastor stepped in to defend Trump.
He promised the problems in Flint – a city of just less than 100,000 people that has been under the cloud of a lead-contaminated drinking water crisis for more than two years – “can be corrected and corrected by people who know what they are doing”, but didn’t say exactly how he would do that.
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“We will get it fixed and it will be fixed and effectively and Flint will come back”. And these are mostly African-American people, phenomenal people. But Trump’s short-but-messy visit is the latest evidence of the difficulties he faces in making headway with African-American voters, a bloc that has nearly completely written him off according to polls showing him winning under 5 percent of the black vote.
