The first time Darrell Scott, a pastor at Cleveland’s evangelical New Spirit Revival Center, met Donald Trump, he didn’t beat around the bush.

“Why do you think black people will vote for you?”

It was five or six years ago, Scott says, at a meeting with Trump and a few other black preachers. The real estate mogul was thinking of running for president and had come to introduce himself and ask a pious favor: spiritual guidance. Scott recalls him saying, “I want to know if you guys could pray for me, that God gives me wisdom and leads me in the right direction in my decision-making as far as running for president.”

But before he could do that, Scott needed to get the obvious question out of the way—of how the white billionaire could possibly appeal to minorities. Trump didn’t dwell on his answer, noting all the different kinds of people he worked with in his business deals. Scott was impressed. “This guy was probably one of the most charming, gracious, hospitable, friendly, down-to-earth, easygoing, engaging guys you’d ever want to meet.”

Trump, himself known for his brazen, say-anything chutzpah, liked Scott’s style. Years later, in an election for the history books that has mystifyingly vaulted the billionaire to front-runner status—and that threatens to throw the Republican Party into pandemonium—Scott has taken up the cause of spreading the answer to his own question to voters across America. He’s the CEO of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, a group launched this week with the principal goal of battling the prevailing wisdom that Trump is a raging xenophobe.

The idea for the diversity coalition started in March, when longtime Trump adviser Michael Cohen was watching TV one Friday night. It was a news special, he tells me, on CNN or MSNBC (he can’t remember which) going over the lowlights of his boss’s campaign thus far: his claim that Mexico is sending drugs, crime, and rapists over the border; his assertion that Senator John McCain is not actually a war hero; his habit of calling women dogs and fat pigs. And it pissed him off. “It was one after the other, after the other. It was ‘racist,’ it was ‘misogynist,’ ” he says of the labels levied at Trump. So he called Scott and floated an idea: a public-facing, multicultural flock of his supporters whose very existence would prove Trump’s distinctly unprejudiced nature.

The indeed diverse coalition—“We have whites, we have Ecuadorians, we have almost every—blacks!—almost every ethnic group you can think of,” Scott says—insists the idea that he’s a bigot is a media conspiracy. “Trump doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” Cohen tells me.

When I talked to Omarosa Manigault, the memorable contestant from the first season of The Apprentice whom TV Guide once anointed one of “the nastiest villains on TV” (she was very nice!), she seemed resigned to the notion that the media would never get it right on her former boss. “If you listen to the mainstream media’s narrative, you would think that women didn’t vote for Donald Trump, that African-Americans didn’t vote for Donald Trump, that Hispanics didn’t vote for Donald Trump! And that’s just not the case. Take Florida, for instance, and look at the demographic breakdown of the people who voted. And not only did they vote, but he won 66 of 67 counties in one of the most diverse states in the union.” She chuckled, apparently amused by how obtuse reporters could be. “If you listen to mainstream media, you would think that the only people who were voting for Donald Trump were white; older white men. And that’s not the case.”

As further proof that Trump isn’t a misogynistic racist, both Manigault and Scott pointed out The Donald’s diverse executive workforce. When Scott visited Trump Tower, he was struck by how many women, “all of different ethnic groups,” worked for him. Even more admirable, Scott says, is that he doesn’t flaunt them as a campaign selling point—the “but I have a black friend!” of twenty-first-century politics. He doesn’t need to, he says, “because that’s his ordinary world.”