Watch Live: Donald Trump Appeals to Black Voters at Mostly Empty Church

DETROIT, MI — Donald Trump offered prepared remarks at a Detroit church Saturday in a swing through the city aimed at shoring up support among black voters, his first direct appeal to African-American voters.

“I will always defend your church … so important … and defend your right to worship,” he told the congregation at the Greater Faith Ministries International church, where he also a taped an interview with the congregation’s leader, Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, that is expected to be aired Thursday on Jackson’s Impact Network.

Trump, who hadn’t been expected to speak, was subdued in his 10-minute address to the congregation and read from prepared remarks at the mostly empty church after members of the public were kept out by security guards, according to media reports.

“This has been an amazing day for me,” Trump said, calling the African-American Christian community “one of God’s greatest gifts to America.”

“We’re all brothers and sisters,” he said, noting a nation that is too racially divided for meaningful discourse. “We must love each other and support each other and we are all in this together.”

The New York real estate developer said America is sidelining “young black men with tremendous potential” and said “our entire country misses out when we are unable to harness the potential energy of these folks.”

He told the congregation that he was in Detroit “to listen to your message — and I hope my presence here today will help your message reach new voices.”

He also noted economic depression in the area near the church and people sitting on the street.

“We’re going to turn it around. We’re going to turn it around, Pastor,” Trump said.

At the end of his remarks, Trump was given a Jewish prayer shawl by Jackson.

Outside the nearly empty church, Trump encountered protesters by community, religious and labor leaders who denounced his visit as pandering to the African-American community. “What do we have to lose?” they chanted, repeating Trump’s pitch to black voters in a campaign appearance in Michigan last month. “Everything.”

The Rev. Lawrence Glass told The Detroit News that he doesn’t believe Trump is truly interested in helping the African-American community and said “minorities of all kinds have much to lose taking a chance on someone like” Trump, whose rhetoric Glass said is the “politics of fear and hate.”

The event was advertised as free, but some who showed up to see Trump were denied entry because they didn’t have tickets.

Among them was Les Chambers, 59, of Bloomfield Township, who told the Detroit Free Press that he was disappointed in the heavy security that kept him and others out.

“I have to support Trump because I don’t want to see the Clintons back in the White House,” Chambers told the newspaper.

During his brief stop in the Motor City, Trump took a tour of some of Detroit’s poorest ZIP codes, including a stop near the childhood home of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a former primary rival who grew up in poverty in southwest Detroit and is now a Trump adviser.

Carson told The Detroit News that Trump will “provide a ladder of opportunity” in urban areas he believes have been neglected by Democrats, who have long been favored by African-American voters.

“If we really, truly want to make America great again, we can’t have big pockets of dysfunction,” Carson told The Detroit News. “We can’t have large inner cities where you have high (high school) dropout rates and broken families and, you know, high crime and incarceration — this leads to non-functionality, and we just can’t have it.”

Though Carson insisted that Trump was “not pandering” to black voters, Democrats questioned the sincerity of the visit.

“The fact is no matter what Donald Trump says when he arrives, there is no pivot. There is no new Donald Trump,” Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon said Thursday. “He’s the same divisive presidential candidate he’s always been.”

Screenshot and video via YouTube