Donald Trump pitched himself as the cure for a blighted black America in an interview taped this month during a trip to a Detroit church.
Impact Ministries aired the interview taped Sept. 3 on Wednesday night. In the talk with Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, Trump hailed back to his remarks that the African-American community has nothing to lose by voting for him.
“I say it proudly, you have record-setting crime, poverty that is horrible, bad education in inner cities. Everything is bad,” Trump told Jackson, who runs the television network.
“What do you have to lose?” Trump continued. “I’ll fix it. 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 pointed to Detroit in particular: “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.
Asked how he’d heal racial divisions, Trump said “the president of the United States has to be a cheerleader for the country, you have to bring the black and the white and the everything, you have to bring everybody together.”
Trump also told Jackson that he’s the “least racist person you have ever met.” Trump said he’s been labeled a racist by Democrats as the race with Hillary Clinton has narrowed.
“They called Romney a racist, they called McCain a racist, they call everybody that’s a Republican a racist,” Trump said. “Usually when they start to lose. I am the least racist person that you’ve ever met.”
He said boxing promoter Don King and other friends would vouch for him: “So many of my friends who are black, they say ‘You are the least racist person.”