Bulletin: events in Charlotte NC today have pre-empted planned showing of this Town Hall, tentatively re-set for broadcast tomorrow at 10pm.
CLEVELAND HEIGHTS OH — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spent the morning at New Spirit Revival Center today for what was billed as a “town hall meeting to discuss issues confronting urban America”.
CLEVELAND HEIGHTS OH — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spent the morning at New Spirit Revival Center today for what was billed as a “town hall meeting to discuss issues confronting urban America”.
No surprise to those who pay attention,
but it turns out it was anything but a Town Hall meeting. More on that later.
There were actually two campaign events
this morning at the New Spirit Revival Center. The first was a meeting with
black pastors that was open to the media. I was busy claiming a seat on the
other side of the huge NSRC complex. The clergy meeting was likely well covered
by other reporters, who focused on Don King’s extemporaneous talk that featured
his accidental [?!] use of the N-word.
I suspect but don’t as of this writing
know that the pastors’ meet up was almost as phony and scripted as the pseudo
town hall gathering. You can watch that event on Fox News tonight at 10p in the
year-long Trump for President infomercial known as the Sean Hannity Show.
Suffice to say that while this will be put in the column of outreach to the
black community, fully 80% of the audience was white, overwhelmingly suburban
GOP faithful.
The entire event was scripted, the black
attendees were corralled in the front row “reserved seat” section, and the
dialogue with the community consisted of two, pre-approved questions, neither
one of which did Trump actually answer. To the first question, which was about
black-on-black violence, Trump called for the nationwide implementation of the
“stop and frisk” policies that were notoriously used by the Giuliani
administration in New York City in the 1990s. The policy led to phenomenal
police incursions in communities of color, the detainment of tens of thousands
of black and brown people, and ratcheted up police community hostility. Trump
today called the policy “very successful”, either unmindful or disdainful of
the fact that a federal court ruled the policy unconstitutional.
The second question came from a disabled
US Army veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq war theatres. His question was
about what could be done with respect to the criminalization of returning
veterans who became addicted to opioids [legal or illegal] and whose lives
deteriorate as a result. Trump’s response was to talk about his fantasy wall
along the Mexican border.
I will have more to report on this event
but it will have to wait for later in the week. I will say that the cast of
characters on stage with Trump and Hannity did raise my eyebrow. In addition to
Don King, there was Trump running mate Mike Pence, Dr. and Mrs. Ben Carson,
former Cleveland attorney turned right-wing west coast media personality Larry
Elder, Niger Innis, and the ubiquitous Omarosa.
The show airs at 10p tonight on the Fox
News cable channel. Show host Sean Hannity hardly asked Trump any questions,
preferring instead to condemn and ridicule Hilary Clinton and the Democrats,
cite deplorable statistics about the black community that were totally devoid
of any context, and then tee up an opening for Trump to utter a few
well-rehearsed lines.
I can’t end without saying that I found this
not-Town Hall event to be simultaneously hypocritical, condescending, and
phony. Still, there was a certain skill to its execution, designed as it was to
create a false image of outreach.
They might have done better had they
told the white suburbanites to stay away. Those folk could not have been
happier as they led the cheers for virtually every Hannity inanity.
