Carlos Osorio/AP
Former President Donald Trump attended a roundtable discussion at 180 Church in Detroit on June 15, 2024.
CNN
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Former President Donald Trump’s campaign launched a coalition group targeted at Black voters on Saturday as it campaigns in Detroit, hoping to win over a voter base that has long been overwhelmingly Democratic.
Trump held a roundtable with community members at 180 Church, a predominantly black community in Detroit, which included two black Republicans, Rep. Byron Donald of Florida and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who helped launch the group “Black Americans for Trump.”
Donald and Carson are among several candidates being considered to be Trump’s running mate, and on Saturday Trump praised Donald as a “fantastic guy.”
“I noticed he was on the list of potential vice presidential candidates. Does anybody want him as your vice president?” Trump asked the crowd, before adding that he also thought Donald would be a “good candidate.”
“He’s on the list, by the way. I don’t know if he’ll win, but he’s on a few lists, right? Not many people,” Trump said.
Trump’s efforts to court black voters come as polls show black men are showing a historic surge in support for Republican candidates in this year’s election. A New York Times/Siena College survey of battleground states released last month showed Trump winning more than 20% of black voters in his matchup with Biden, a record if reflected in November’s vote tallies. Trump won the support of about 1 in 10 black voters nationwide in 2020, according to several estimates, including 12% in a CNN exit poll.
President Joe Biden is likely to win among black voters by large margins, but if Trump loses even a small amount of support, it could tilt the outcome in several battleground states, including Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Guests offer prayer at the end of a roundtable discussion between community leaders and former President Donald Trump at 180 Church in Detroit on June 15, 2024.
Trump has long been a critic of cities with large black populations. In 2019, he called Baltimore’s majority-black congressional district a “rat- and rodent-infested filthy place.” In a private meeting with House Republicans in Washington this week, he reportedly described Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention will be held in August, as “horrible.” (The Trump campaign said the former president “talked about how bad the crime and voter fraud are in Wisconsin’s largest city.”)
In 2016, Trump famously urged black voters to turn out to vote, saying Democrats had let them down for too long: “What have you got to lose?”
Trump has pushed back against accusations of racism, saying in a recent interview with Semaphore that he has “a lot of black friends” but wouldn’t support him if he believed he was racist — a statement the Biden campaign emphasized in its response to Trump’s Black Coalition launch on Saturday.
“Donald Trump thinks the fact that he has ‘lots of black friends’ justifies a lifetime of disrespect and belittling of black Americans, but black voters know better, and Trump’s last-minute attempts to ‘reach’ black people will not fool anyone,” Jasmine Harris, the Biden campaign’s black media director, said in a statement.
Trump also referenced Biden’s role as a U.S. senator in writing the 1994 crime bill on Saturday, falsely accusing his opponent of making the same comments he once blamed Hillary Clinton for.
“Biden talked about ‘super predators’ and wrote the devastating crime bill in 1994. That was Biden. You know, he goes around now talking about the black vote. He’s the king of the ‘super predators,'” Trump said during the roundtable discussion.
As CNN previously noted, Biden never publicly used or endorsed the term “super predators.” In a 1993 speech, Biden warned about “errant” and “street predators” while endorsing a crime bill. But he only used the term “super predators” to disprove the theory. In a 1997 speech, he argued that the vast majority of young people involved in the criminal justice system are not violent and “are not what we call super predators.”
In a 2000 book, Trump supported tougher sentencing and street policing, warned about “wolf packs” of young offenders roaming the streets, and cited statistical analysis linked to the since-discredited “superpredator” theory of crime.
As he has done in the past, Trump claimed on Saturday that he has “done more for black people than any American president since Abraham Lincoln,” while accusing Biden of “only paying lip service” to the black community and not “doing anything” for it.
Trump later spoke at a rally hosted by Turning Point Action in Detroit. Before Trump took the podium at the conservative rally, Carson praised his former boss for his ability to engage with the black community.
“President Trump is not your typical politician,” Carson said. “He’s not running around with his finger in the air trying to see which way the wind is blowing.”
