After his campaign tooted last week about an event in which “Mr. Trump will be joined by a coalition of 100 African-American evangelical pastors and religious leaders who will endorse the GOP front-runner after a private meeting at Trump Tower,” the campaign canceled the scheduled Monday presser after many of the pastors involved said they had no intention of endorsing him, the AP reports:
“It’s a miscommunication,” said Darrell Scott, the senior pastor of New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who has helped to arrange meetings between Trump and black pastors in recent months. Trump’s campaign “thought it was going to be a press conference for an endorsement when it wasn’t,” Scott said Sunday in an interview.
Mr. Scott, who has been friends for years with Michael Cohen, an adviser to Mr. Trump who works for his company, rejected the idea that the meeting was simply for show or that he had been asked to “go get some black people for a publicity stunt.”
And he expressed dismay at the negative reactions: “They said we’re Uncle Toms, sellouts, every derogatory black term you can think of they’re calling us that. Members of our own community.”
