Kathleen Gray

Detroit Free Press Lansing Bureau

The way to heal the nation's racial divide, according to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, is to be a cheerleader for the country's people and to bring jobs back to the United States.

"The President of the United States has to be a cheerleader. You have to bring the black, the white, different income groups together … There’s tremendous division right now and a lot of it has to do with the fact that in the inner cities, there are no jobs," Trump said during an interview with Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, that was taped Sept. 3 and aired on the Impact Network Wednesday night.

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"The jobs have left our country to such extent. We’re not doing that here, we’re losing our manufacturing jobs. It puts people in a very bad position."

He repeated his refrain to minorities voters: "What do you have to lose" by voting for him? He added: "I say it proudly, you have record-setting crime, poverty that is horrible, bad education in inner cities. Everything is bad. What do you have to lose. I’ll fix it," Trump said.."That’s actually a statement of hope. You can go to war torn countries like Afghanistan and it’s safer than being in some of our cities."

He also said that Detroit is not reaching its potential.

"You see the closed doors and you see the trouble. I’m a real estate person and I can look at a place and see the trouble," he said. "I’ll bring the inner cities back. No politician is going to do it. It’s a different mind set.

"From a real estate mind set, I see wow, you can see this area thriving 30 years ago," Trump added. "But for the most part, it’s in such trouble. You see such potential, but the potential isn’t being recognized."

The interview was filmed in conjunction with a visit Trump made to Detroit on Sept. 3, when he attended a church service at Jackson's church - Great Faith Ministries International, accompanied by retired pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, who dropped out of the presidential race in March and became an adviser to Trump. The pair stopped by the southwest Detroit home where Carson grew up.

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Trump also addressed the shootings of unarmed black men in cities across the nation.

Police, he said, "have to have training, obviously better than they already have," he said. "You’re always going to have some bad apples."

Getting to the interview on the Impact Network, a television network founded by Jackson in 2010, was not without controversy. Jackson admitted submitting the questions he planned to ask Trump in advance, so the New York businessman could prepare answers. After the revelation caused a mini-uproar, Jackson said he came up with new questions that Trump would not see in advance.

The visit to the Detroit church was Trump's first foray into an African American church as a presidential candidate and was billed as outreach to the black community, which has traditionally voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. In Detroit, President Barack Obama got 98% of the vote in 2012 against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and 97% of the vote in 2008 against Sen. John McCain.

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In polls this election cycle, Trump has been polling in the single digits among black voters, who recall that Trump has been the leader of the so-called birther movement, questioning the citizenship of President Barack Obama.

But when Jackson asked about charges that he was racist, Trump replied, "I'm the least racist person that you have ever talked to." Trump urged Jackson to talk with people like boxing promoter Don King, who supports him.

Since the interview, Trump also has held events in other cities with large populations of African Americans, including Philadelphia and Cleveland, as well as a trip Wednesday to Flint, which was his fourth visit to Michigan since the Republican National Convention.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was last in Michigan on Aug. 11 when she gave a speech on jobs and the economy in Warren. She also gave the keynote address at the NAACP's Fight for Freedom dinner in Detroit in May.

Contact Kathleen Gray: kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal