Donald Trump told an African-American pastor in Detroit he was "the least racist person that you have ever met" and he would heal the deep racial divide in America by creating more jobs, by encouraging better training for the police and by "being a cheerleader for the country."
"My policy is jobs — and my policy is that I'm going to be a cheerleader for the country," the Republican nominee told Bishop Wayne Jackson in an interview broadcast Wednesday on the pastor's Impact Network on cable television. "The president has to be a cheerleader for the country, aside from everything else.
"There's a lot of things happening, but I think the President of the United States has to be a cheerleader for the country. You have to bring the black and the white — you have to bring everybody together."
The half-hour interview was taped Sept. 3 at Jackson's Great Faith Ministries International Church. Trump spoke earlier to the congregation, saying "wrongs will be made right" if he won the White House in November.
At the beginning of the program, Jackson cautioned "in this interview, I did not get every answer or every question that everybody would be asking, but I did the best I could."
He added he was not endorsing any presidential candidate and the Trump campaign was not involved in the production or editing of the interview — nor saw it — before it aired.
After Jackson and Trump prayed at the outset of the interview, the candidate talked openly about his Presbyterian faith and how he went to Sunday school as a boy in Queens, N.Y., "religiously."
In reviving inner cities and bringing the races together, Trump said the key to both was jobs.
"We just don't have jobs," Trump told Jackson. "There's tremendous division right now, incredible. A lot of it has to do with that the fact that, certainly in the inner cities, there's no jobs."
Regarding better police relations with the black community, Trump acknowledged "you'll always have bad apples" but said "you need training. You have to have training."
Trump told Jackson he stated "proudly" the question "What do you have to lose?" in appealing to African Americans because of the toll Democratic Party policies have taken on inner cities.
"Everything is bad," he said. "I said to people: 'What do you have to lose? I'll fix it.'
"That's actually a statement of hope."
Trump added he would meet with such groups as the NAACP and other African-American leaders "if I think they can be fair.
"Absolutely," he added. "I'd be willing to do that and would have no problem whatsoever."
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