Al Sharpton noted that Donald Trump delivered remarks “with hardly no blacks in the audience” in his Wisconsin address. | Getty Sharpton trashes Trump’s message for black voters 'I think that he’s trying to appeal to white voters that he’s not racist,' he says.

Donald Trump declared on Tuesday night that the Democratic Party had “failed and betrayed” black voters. But the Rev. Al Sharpton and other liberal black leaders are saying it’s Trump who’s full of false promises.

“If he cares about black voters, he certainly has shown a complete disregard and disrespect for addressing them and their issues,” Sharpton told POLITICO in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. “I don’t know what’s in his head, but I know where his body has been. And it’s been absent in terms of black concerns and black people and black audiences throughout his campaign.”


While a shakeup of Trump's campaign on Wednesday largely overshadowed his apparent attempt to improve his meager standing among African-American voters, Sharpton and others said his effort was no overture to African-Americans anyway.

Sharpton, who has endorsed Hillary Clinton, noted that Trump delivered remarks “with hardly no blacks in the audience” during his late-night rally in West Bend, Wisconsin, where he blamed Clinton for poverty and crime in America’s inner cities, called for more police on the streets and vowed to appoint the nation’s top prosecutors and judges and to increase enforcement of federal laws.

“To put more police out there without changing policing and without dealing with the issues is to increase the tension and increase of potential problems, not decrease,” said Sharpton, who called Trump’s rhetoric on policing the “antithesis” of what should be done. “So either he has no understanding of the issue or he’s taking an absolute, adversarial position to where the country’s moving, or a combination of both.”

Symone Sanders, a Democratic strategist and former Bernie Sanders press secretary, blasted Trump for verbally attacking protesters and calling Clinton a bigot in his speech.

“Donald Trump’s speech last night was not only disingenuous, it was dangerous, the numbers were bungled and it lacked facts,” Sanders said during a CNN panel discussion. “I don’t know Donald Trump personally, but I do know that the words coming out of his mouth reek of racism and bigotry.”

DeRay Mckesson, a Black Lives Matter activist, tweeted that Trump’s speech was intended to be polarizing, summarizing his pitch to black voters as “‘rioters, robbers, looters’ are bad,” “black people are dumb democrats” and Trump isn’t Clinton.

In a phone interview with POLITICO, Mckesson said Trump has made no attempt to connect with the black community and slammed his remarks as racist, problematic and devoid of the truth.

“He was talking about black people to a non-black crowd. That was his intent,” Mckesson said. “He was racist even in those remarks. Saying that immigrants are gonna take the jobs of black people is racist. That is a problematic and racist statement.”

What Trump has done, he continued, is create “an alternate reality and forced everybody to meet him there. He is not engaged in the act of truth telling.”

Sharpton, Sanders and Leah Wright Rigueur, a public policy professor at Harvard, pointed to invitations for Trump to speak to the NAACP, National Urban League and the joint convention of black and Hispanic journalists as places the real estate mogul should have spoken if he cared about reaching out to African-Americans and getting their votes.

“I think there’s a misperception that just because we’re frustrated with the party, that means we’re going to turn around and vote for the candidate that we’re even more frustrated with,” Wright Rigueur told POLITICO. “There is an opening right there, but part of getting that opening means doing the things that are necessary in order to win over those highly skeptical voters who already hold unfavorable views of Donald Trump for a number of different reasons. That speech wasn’t it.”

Trump, who trails Clinton by a whopping 90 percentage points among black voters, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, spoke late at night in a city with a black population of 1 percent located less than an hour outside of Milwaukee, where a black man was killed by a black police officer last weekend. And the crowd he addressed as he delivered remarks from a teleprompter was overwhelmingly white.

While Republicans have traditionally performed poorly with black voters, Trump’s rhetoric has especially inflamed tensions with minority voters. He also has failed to spend time in black neighborhoods, and he received significant blowback after he called out to a black supporter at a rally in June, calling him “my African-American.”

That’s not to say he’s ignored black voters to date. He has appointed Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” as his director of African-American outreach, and in November held a much-hyped event at Trump Tower with black religious leaders.

But even that, Wright Rigueur said, is not enough.

“Donald Trump has yet to make a major policy or even rhetorical speech to primarily black audiences anywhere in the country, and I’m not necessarily talking about, you know, meeting with 200 black pastors in Trump Tower,” she said. “I’m actually talking about going to Harlem and speaking, going to Chicago and speaking on the south side of Chicago.”

View The future of the black Republican party A look at what it's like to be an Black Republican in America. Produced by Beatrice Peterson.

The Trump campaign on Wednesday defended the Republican presidential nominee’s appeal to the African-American community and again blasted Clinton as no friend to black voters.

“The cruel policies supported by Hillary Clinton deny opportunities for millions of African-Americans. Open borders, offshoring trade deals, and pro-crime policies are taking jobs, safety and prosperity from America's inner cities to line her pockets,” senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said in a statement to POLITICO. “Mr. Trump has outlined real change from decades of policy failure, taken on the entrenched interests, and proposed a platform that rejects the bigotry of Hillary Clinton and offers jobs and security to all Americans.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump surrogate, credited the Manhattan mogul for starting a conversation with black voters that could yield results in terms of his limited support.

“I think speeches like last night begin to make a difference,” he said during a Facebook Live post. “Trump going into inner-city Philadelphia and offering a better future could have an amazing result. Because the truth is, no Republican has ever had the courage to offer African-Americans, face to face.”

But he predicted “enormous demonstrations” would try to bar Trump from speaking “because the left-wing activists cannot allow a Republican to have a genuine conversation in the black community,” he said. “They understand this is a mortal threat to their power and they will do almost anything to stop him.”

Pastor Mark Burns also defended Trump during an appearance on CNN, insisting that the typical reaction to someone who’s politically incorrect is to label that person a racist.

“Obviously he’s not a racist, but this is what has been created about his personality, as being this racist when he’s politically incorrect,” said Burns president and CEO of the NOW Television Network and pastor of The Harvest Praise & Worship Center in Easley, South Carolina. “The way to combat political incorrectness is to call somebody racist. So almost anything Mr. Trump does is going to appear as though he is really not sincere when I know the man’s heart and I know him personally and I tell you: He has a desire for all Americans.”

But Sharpton cast doubt on Trump's true intentions.

“I think that he’s trying to appeal to white voters that he’s not racist,” Sharpton said, citing a poll in which voters questioned his temperament and whether he’s a racist. “I think that he’s trying to modify his image to whites and particularly independents because if he was really trying to go after black voters, he would have went into Milwaukee or went anywhere. He has not gone to any black audience.”

“He’s not trying to talk to black voters because he would then have to defend his policies,” Sharpton added. “He’d have to defend his business practices. If you are running as a business mogul, what black businesses have you subcontracted? Who have you done business with? Where are the blacks in the Trump Organization? He can’t answer those questions.”

Trump has been known to respond to criticism with heated rhetoric, which doesn’t address the issue at hand, Sharpton said.

“Call me whatever name you want. The issue is you’re running for president,” he said, adding that he had to constantly lay out issues during his White House run in 2004. "He hasn’t laid out anything. He just calls some of us that are high-profile names. That’s not a policy.”

Louis Nelson contributed to this report.