Republican candidate’s campaign canceled press conference at which he was to announce the support of ‘coalition of 100 African American religious leaders’

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Donald Trump has attempted to repair some of the damage done by the confusion surrounding his promised endorsement by African American religious leaders by emerging from a private meeting with some pastors on Monday declaring: “There was great love in the room.”

The much-vaunted meeting between the Republican presidential frontrunner and a gathering of black evangelical leaders descended into chaos over the weekend after several of the invited participants objected that they had no intention of endorsing him. A press conference to mark the promised 100 endorsements was canceled and the Trump campaign team went into damage limitation mode, suggesting the furore was the result of “miscommunication”.

Then, on Monday afternoon, Trump followed the private discussions with a tweet saying they had been “amazing”.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Meeting with African American Pastors at Trump Tower was amazing. Wonderful news conference followed. Now off to Georgia for big speech!

One of the participants in the meeting, Pastor Steve Parson from Richmond, Virginia, told CNN that he blamed the media for the swirl surrounding the event. “You want stories, you want controversy. Anybody who knows Donald Trump personally knows that he’s not a racist,” he said.



The trouble began last week when the billionaire’s press team invited reporters to attend a press conference at which “a coalition of 100 African American evangelical pastors and religious leaders [would] endorse the GOP frontrunner after a private meeting at Trump Tower”.

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By Monday morning, the terms of the engagement had fundamentally changed. The press conference was canceled, and talk of endorsements by black leaders had been smudged in classic Trump fashion.

Katrina Pierson, national spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, told CNN that the campaign had closed the meeting and dropped talk of endorsements to avoid “confusion” between those pastors who were endorsing the frontrunner and those who were not.

“A lot of the pastors were concerned they might get backlash if they weren’t one of the pastors that were endorsing at this time,” she said.

Trump himself told MSNBC: “I was told it was an endorsement. I have fantastic relationships with the people, but I think pressure was put on them when they heard there was a meeting by people who disagree.”

Darrell Scott, the pastor of the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland, who organized the meeting, said the collapse of the public endorsement was the product of “miscommunication”. He said the event would go ahead on Monday afternoon, in private, though questions from the Guardian to the Trump campaign about the number of attendees who would be present and how many of those would be endorsing the candidate were not immediately answered.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pastor Darrell Scott arrives for a meeting with Trump at his office in Manhattan. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Several of the pastors who had been advertised as endorsing Trump sharply disputed the suggestion. Bishop Clarence McClendon put out a statement on Facebook saying that the event “was presented not as a meeting to endorse but as a meeting to engage in dialogue”, and that he would not be attending.

Hezekiah Walker, of the Brooklyn megachurch Love Fellowship Tabernacle, posted on Instagram: “I never had any intentions on endorsing Mr Donald Trump neither would I have never been persuaded to.”

When news of the “endorsement” meeting circulated, it prompted expressions of outrage from a host of other prominent African Americans.

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A hundred black pastors and academics published a joint letter in Ebony magazine accusing Trump of routinely using “divisive and racist language on the campaign trail”.

The group particularly objected to the candidate’s remarks, after a Black Lives Matter activist was punched and kicked at one of his rallies, that “maybe he should have been roughed up”.

Trump also caused uproar when he tweeted an image containing crime statistics that were demonstrably wrong. For instance, they claimed that 81% of white homicide victims were killed by black people, when the FBI statistic puts that figure at 15%.