The ex-boxing promoter was introducing the Republican presidential candidate at a church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio when he inadvertently used the N-word.
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Donald Trump said Wednesday that he was “very troubled” by footage of an unarmed black man being shot and killed police in Tulsa, Okla., last week, suggesting the female officer involved, Betty Shelby, may have been frightened and mishandled the situation. “They told me, you’ve got to try to emulate and imitate the white man and then you can be successful so we tried that”.
Courting black voters who have long spurned Republicans, Trump’s event in Cleveland Heights’ New Spirit Revival Center took a weird turn when he was introduced by boxing promoter Don King, who used a racial slur as he made the case for black voters to support Trump. “I told Michael Jackson, if you’re poor, you are a poor negro – I would use the N-word. You know, you’re going to be a negro till you die”. I mean, what do you have to lose? So dare not alienate because you can not assimilate.
Trump was seated behind King during the address.
“Having Bobby Knight and Don King and Mike Pence – that’s a treat, having that group”, he said.
Trump, meanwhile, is attempting to chip into Clinton’s commanding lead among African-American voters overall while also appealing to white voters who tend to support the GOP but have been turned off by his rhetoric.
“I understand very well that after more than three centuries of being taught, conditioned and indoctrinated to hate the black man as your inferior, it is unrealistic to think that now you can just change to respect him”, he wrote.
But Trump said he’d seen the widely circulated video of the incident in Tulsa. “To help him, to get their rights you know”.
King previously praised Trump’s Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, calling her “dynamic” at a 2014 fundraiser for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a major Trump critic.
Trump is visiting Toledo today for a second time, following a private taping of Fox’s Sean Hannity show at a predominantly black church in Cleveland.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his statement, nor did Clinton’s. “They will lay out Donald Trump’s unsafe economic agenda that would benefit wealthy people like himself and his family and could cost the OH economy 123,000 jobs”, the Democratic nominee’s campaign said.
Trump also caused controversy Tuesday night when he told a almost all-white crowd in North Carolina that “we’re going to rebuild our inner cities because our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before”.
Civil-rights activist and commentator Al Sharpton in February described Trump as a white version of King.
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That’s something very much in line with Trump’s current pitch to black voters.
