Trump rallies MAGA base, courts Black voters in Detroit

DETROIT — In a span of two hours Saturday, Donald Trump walked onto stages twice in this battleground state — once as pyrotechnics flashed around him before some 8,000 MAGA loyalists, and earlier, in a predominately Black church where he is still laboring to make gains.

For Trump, who is trying to rally base voters while also cutting into President Joe Biden’s support among people of color, the appearances at two different ends of the city — and with two starkly different demographics — illustrated the ground Trump still has to make up here.

Unlike with his base at the mostly white Turning Point Action conference inside a downtown convention center, Trump’s reception at the church in a low-income neighborhood, while mostly warm, was at times reserved — or, in one case, worse.

A lone heckler seated in the back, wearing a medical mask beneath her nose, spoke back to Trump throughout his remarks about how he “would not address Covid,” shouting at one point for him to “drink some bleach.”

And some of Trump’s harshest rhetoric on illegal immigration — including that Black people should repel what he called an “invasion of your jobs” — drew only tepid applause, though the crowd rose to its feet as he bashed “radical left wing gender ideology,” among other topics that resonated.

“This is a nice church, by the way. Very nice,” Trump said after arriving at 180 Church on the west side of Detroit. The afternoon sun beamed into the sanctuary through panels of stained glass, the cracks in some of which were patched with pieces of tape.

Trump’s campaign that afternoon had announced a “Black Americans for Trump” initiative to coincide with the upcoming Juneteenth holiday, sharing endorsement messages from prominent Black politicians, entertainers, athletes and faith leaders. Among those included in Trump’s new Black voter coalition was former Democratic Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who served time in prison for felony fraud and racketeering convictions, and whose sentence Trump commuted before leaving office.

And inside the sweltering church, a Black Republican activist, Valerie Parker, offered Trump a welcome: “Thank you, Mr. President, for coming to the hood.”

But Trump lost badly in heavily-Democratic Detroit in 2020, and his play for Black voters here prompted rebukes from Democratic politicians and other faith leaders in Michigan. The Biden campaign on Saturday released a comment from longtime Detroit pastor James Perkins, blasting Trump for having “the nerve to waltz into our city and act like he wants to understand the struggles Black Detroiters face, but the reality is he doesn’t care.”

“Every time Trump opens his mouth to talk to Black folks, he demonizes us, insults us, and makes empty promises he’ll never keep,” Perkins said.

At the church roundtable, Trump called Biden “the worst president for Black people.” Looking around the room, sandwiched between several of Detroit’s Black community leaders at tablecloth-draped folding table, he vowed that he would come back for Sunday service someday.

The inroads Trump makes in Detroit could be critical in a battleground that is likely to be decided at the margins. And he is starting from behind here.

Wayne County, home to heavily-Democratic Detroit, went solidly to Biden in 2020 who won the county by 38 points. In Detroit itself, with a majority Black population, Biden carried 94 percent of the vote.

Trump and his campaign, however, are seizing on gains they’ve made with voters of color in the years since — or at least on a loss of support Biden has experienced with them. And even marginal improvements for Trump in the Detroit area could help propel him in a state he won in 2016, before losing four years later.

Polling by the Wall Street Journal in April found that in seven swing states, 30 percent of Black men were “definitely or probably going to vote” for Trump, which would amount to a significant increase from 12 percent of Black male voters who backed Trump nationwide in 2020.

Similar polling numbers have raised alarms among Democratic Party leaders. The president’s reelection campaign invested seven figures last month into Black media, while Biden has held a number of events specifically targeting Black voters, including speaking recently to the NAACP in Detroit.

The church’s senior pastor, the Rev. Lorenzo Sewell, said he was not taking a position on either candidate in the election. He has spoken positively about Biden in the past, but told the Detroit Free Press he was encouraged that the Trump campaign had reached out about holding the event.

During the event, Sewell criticized Biden for having merely gone to a NAACP meeting, and not visiting “the hood.”

It was a far different — and for Trump, more familiar — scene on Saturday evening at Turning Point Action’s “People’s Convention” downtown, a multi-day event held in the same convention center where Wayne County election officials were met by protesters in November 2020 as they counted absentee ballots. That year, chaos broke out as partisan activists from both sides showed up to monitor the counting, with Trump supporters chanting “stop the count!” throughout the process.

During his keynote address at Turning Point, Trump addressed his supporters for an hour and 20 minutes, railing against dishwashers and shower heads designed to use less water and the military using electric tanks, all while riling up the crowd against Biden.

He said Biden, who is 81, “should take a cognitive test like I did.” But then Trump, who turned 78 on Friday, flubbed the name of Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), his former physician, calling him “Doc Ronny Johnson.”

“Doc Ronny Johnson,” Trump said. “Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history.”

Trump claimed, without explaining how, that if elected he would make Washington, D.C., “safe from crime,” and that he will have the Ukraine war “settled” and “stop the death.”

And after the Biden administration at the G7 in Italy this week extended long-term security guarantees to Ukraine, Trump ripped into Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him “maybe the greatest salesman of any politician that’s ever lived.”

“He just left four days ago with $60 billion, and he gets home, and he announces that he needs another $60 billion,” Trump said. “It never ends.”

The crowd cheered when Trump said, “I will have that settled prior to taking the White House as president-elect.”