A Black pastor is preaching support for Trump – but can he win over voters?

default

In the summer of 2011, Darrell Scott, a Pentecostal minister from a Black church in Cleveland, the New Spirit Revival Center, was asked by a televangelist friend to come to Trump Tower in New York for a meeting shrouded in mystery. Scott was ushered up to a ballroom on the 26th floor where he found a group of about 15 other pastors waiting.

Donald Trump, then star of The Celebrity Apprentice, swept into the room. “I’m thinking about running for president,” he told the astonished gathering. “I’m hoping you guys can pray on me, that God gives me the wisdom to make the right decision.”

The former president held his fire on that occasion, but not before Scott had shared with him some blunt home truths. As a plain-talking born-again former drug dealer, and one of the only Black pastors present in the room, Scott gave it to Trump straight.

“What makes you think Black people will vote for you?” he told the real estate tycoon. “Word on the street is you don’t like Black people.”

Thirteen years later, and less than six months away from another presidential election in which Trump is running, Scott now finds himself at the receiving end of the very same question he posed to Trump. He was so impressed by the TV celebrity’s response to his challenge in 2011, in which Trump invoked unemployment as the main hurdle for African American communities, that he became an instant acolyte.

His conversion has been so total that the 65-year-old pastor now has a reputation – and notoriety – for being Trump’s earliest, and one of his most dependable, Black apostles. In 2016, Trump publicly thanked Scott for encouraging him to run for the White House; two years later the pastor returned the compliment by calling him “the most pro-Black president we’ve had in our lifetime”.

Scott co-founded the National Diversity Coalition, Trump’s spluttering attempt in 2016 to demonstrate that he had traction with African American and Hispanic voters. Ironically, his co-founder was Michael Cohen, who was the main state’s witness at Trump’s New York hush-money trial. (Scott’s name was mentioned in the trial, when Cohen was cross-examined over private requests he made to the pastor to put in a good word for him with Trump.)

Now, as the 2024 presidential year thickens, Scott is once again occupying the barricades. Though he lacks a formal title within the Trump campaign, he identifies himself as the former president’s “senior adviser”, and is determined to see his “friend” back in the White House.

Scott believes the traditional Democratic loyalties of African Americans is starting to turn. By his reckoning, as many as 25% or 30% of Black voters could back Trump in November – which would be a seismic shift were it to come even close. (In 2020, a mere 8% of Black voters cast their ballots for the incumbent president, according to the Pew Research Center, with 92% siding with his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.)

“I hear a lot of positivity regarding President Trump in the Black community. Very little negativity. Those I speak to have changed their tone against him. ‘Trump’s not so bad after all,’ they say.”

Opinion polls suggest, very tentatively, that there might be something to the pastor’s optimism. A small but potentially significant slice of the African American population appears to be hazarding a switch to Trump.

A new Pew poll, for instance, puts him at 18% and the latest New York Times/Sienna survey of the six key battleground states likely to seal the outcome in November shows 23% of Black voters leaning towards him.

It would be a fool’s game to read too much into this data, given that the election is still months away and it is not clear how many African Americans who are disappointed with the Biden presidency will actually end up casting a vote for Trump. But in the event of a close election in November, even a relatively small defection from Biden’s base could be fatal to his re-election hopes.

What is definite, however, is that Scott has paid a high price for his public allegiance to Trump.

It’s not easy as a Black pastor being a champion for a man who has called the majority-Black city of Baltimore a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess”; told American-born progressive congresswomen of colour to “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came”; and exhorted NFL owners to fire “son of a bitch” players who took the knee in protest against racism.

For speaking out on Trump’s behalf, Scott has been labeled an Uncle Tom, a sell-out a money-grabbing opportunist. And that’s just the start.

On the Sunday in May that the Guardian attended the service at his New Spirit Revival Center, a repurposed synagogue in Cleveland Heights, the vast nave was about a third full with some 300 worshippers. Has that been one of the costs – in congregation?

“Oh yeah, a lot of people left,” he said frankly, referring to the reaction to his very public coming out for Trump during the 2016 cycle. “It was kind of disheartening. I would have expected them to have more faith in me, that if their pastor supports him, there must be something good there.”

Some of those who quit the church have since returned, he said, while diehard Democrats haven’t. But this year he remains convinced that there is change in the air.

“People in the Black community are like: ‘Wait a minute, this boogeyman that we were told about, this monster didn’t materialize.’”

***

Scott is talking with a hoarse voice in the back office of the church having delivered an hour-long fire-and-brimstone sermon. The narrative of his preaching follows closely the arc of his own life.

He evokes the “pain of affliction” suffered by his almost exclusively Black congregants, recognising their struggles with money, relationships, housing.

In the early 1980s, Scott had his own pain of affliction as a cocaine dealer. He was keen for the Guardian to know, in true Trumpian fashion, that even then, he wasn’t a loser. “I wasn’t down and out, I was up and out. I was making a lot of money, doing good. I had my own operation.”

He was saved from that life of crime when a neighbor brought Scott’s girlfriend, his now wife, Belinda, to church where she was baptized. She in turn led Scott to the pulpit.

There was no overt politics in his sermon, and the word “Trump” is never mentioned; “this is God’s time”, he said. But he did monologue on the evils of inflation, bemoaning the cost of a hamburger – another very Trumpian note.

The economy was a big reason why Scott embraced Trump all the way back in 2011. After the pastor challenged the TV star over his racist image, Trump looked him straight in the eye and said: “I haven’t a racist bone in my body,” before going on to identify unemployment as the root of much anguish in the Black community. “I liked his answers,” Scott said.

Now Scott contends that Black voters, for so long unshakably Democratic, are moving towards Trump largely because they are struggling under Biden’s economy. It’s those hamburgers, stupid.

“Black Americans want the same thing white Americans want, a healthy economy, safety, money,” he said.

Trump’s take on the economy – putting the individual first, stressing hard work over government handouts – chimed with Scott’s inherent conservatism that he says stemmed from his Christianity. Christianity? Wasn’t Jesus on the side of the poor, the Guardian asked.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he shot back. “Jesus didn’t multiply bread and give it to a bunch of poor people. He didn’t multiply fish for the poor – he did it for those who followed him and listened to him.”

In the pastor’s analysis, Trump proved himself in his four years in the White House through actions – some ceremonial, others policy-oriented – directed at African Americans. He posthumously pardoned the first Black heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, upgraded Martin Luther King’s birthplace into a national historic park, and signed into the law the First Step Act to chip away at mass incarceration.

By contrast, Scott blames Biden for his role in passing the 1994 crime bill that helped pave the way to that mass incarceration. “You talk about fatherlessness in the Black community,” he said. “That can be traced to that bill that removed Black men from their homes.”

But what about Trump’s track record of racist statements and associations? At the precise same moment Scott was preaching his Sunday sermon, Biden was speaking at an historically Black college, Morehouse in Atlanta, Georgia, where he railed against the “poison of white supremacy” in a clear dig at Trump.

“That narrative is tired, it’s old, it’s disproven,” Scott said. “To go to a Black college, and the only reason Biden can give a Black person for not voting for Trump is racism, that insults our intelligence and it ain’t flying no more.”

Trump’s litany of racist comments and actions grows longer by the day. About 24 hours after the Guardian attended Scott’s sermon, Trump shared a video on his Truth Social account that echoed Adolf Hitler by speculating that he would usher in a “unified reich” if he won in November.

There’s his dining with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago; his reference to Black nations including Haiti as “shithole countries”; his travel ban on majority-Muslim countries.

The Guardian put just a few specimen cases to Scott. In May 1989, Trump took out a full-page newspaper advert in which he called for the death penalty to be brought back after an horrific rape in New York’s Central Park. The ad heightened the furor around five young Black teenagers who had been arrested and were later imprisoned for up to 13 years, only to be exonerated after their confessions were found to have been coerced.

The case of the Central Park Five – five innocent Black boys who would have gone to their deaths if Trump had his way – must surely be a cause for concern? “There’s still a large faction in the police in New York city that thinks those guys are guilty,” Scott replied.

In 2011, Trump worked hard to convince the US that its first Black president, Barack Obama, was born in Kenya (he was in fact born in Hawaii). Any qualms about Trump’s leading role in the so-called birther movement, given that Scott voted for Obama in 2008 (though not in 2012, saying he’d gone off him by then)?

“The doggone birther story came out of Hillary Clinton’s camp – they originated it,” Scott said. Numerous fact-checking outlets investigated the claim, articulated by Trump himself, that Clinton’s campaign initiated the birther lie and found it to be wholly untrue – individual Clinton supporters did circulate the rumours, but they had no links to Clinton or her people, and the fact-checkers concluded that Clinton had nothing to do with it.

What about Charlottesville, Trump’s statement after the deadly 2017 white-supremacist riot in Virginia that there were “many fine people on both sides”? “The Charlottesville remark was edited, they left the part off when he said: ‘I’m not talking about the white supremacists,’” Scott said.

It is true that later in the same press conference in which Trump made his “both sides” remark, he said he was referring not to neo-Nazis but to those peacefully protesting the removal of a statue of confederate general Robert E Lee. But Trump has continued to grant moral equivalence to white supremacists, including his exhortation to “stand back and stand by” to the Proud Boys militia that went on to participate in the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

The insurrection that day raises Trump’s role in rocket-charging longstanding Republican efforts to suppress Black and other minority votes by claiming fraud in elections. How can a Black leader endorse someone who embraces anti-democratic tactics that have for decades diminished the political participation – and hence power – of African Americans?

“I myself believe there was election chicanery. I believe there was fraud, in mail-in ballots,” he said, adding that in his view Trump wasn’t trying to suppress votes so much as “legitimize” them.

No evidence has ever been presented, in court or anywhere else, that the 2020 election was distorted by fraud.

***

After Scott’s service ended, the Guardian took a straw poll of African American customers in the Starbucks franchise over the road from the church. It wasn’t faintly scientific, but it did underline how much work Trump must do if he is to effect his Black wave.

“Trump’s a psychopath, he’s not getting my vote,” said Leshelle, 30.

“I would never vote for Donald Trump,” said Charles, 60. “He’s a criminal and not a good person.”

Ernest, 76, who has voted Democratic all his life, said he would not cast his vote for a man he blamed for the injuries inflicted on scores of police officers during the January 6 insurrection. “Our democracy is at stake because of Trump’s rhetoric,” he said.

Given the task ahead, it is notable that Scott reserves his fiercest invective not for Democratic voters like Ernest, but for people on his own side of the political divide. Members, like him, of Trump’s inner circle.

Scott’s Culprit Number One is Charlie Kirk, the hard-right founder of Turning Point Action who has made a career – and a fortune – out of sticking tight to Trump while making racist statements that go viral.

Kirk has denounced Martin Luther King Jr as an “awful” person, dismissing the civil right leader’s achievements as a myth. He professes to worry when entering a plane should he see a Black pilot because “I’m going to be like: ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified’.”

Scott is Kirk’s harshest critic, denouncing him in terms far sharper than liberal commentators. He has accused Kirk of inspiring a new generation of Hitler Youth and of wanting to return to the days when “we would still be drinking at separate water fountains”.

Why does the Turning Point chief get him so riled up? “It’s already hard enough for Black conservatives without Kirk making shit worse for us by crapping on Martin Luther King,” the pastor said.

“I live in the Black community, my church is in the Black community, I’ve got Democrats in my family. And I’m going to sit back like some Uncle Tom and stay silent and let Charlie Kirk shit on our Black icon? Not me. I’m not built like that.”

The tirade is stunning, especially as it is directed at one of his own, and raises that question again: why do it? Why does Scott stick with Trump when all he seems to get for it is grief? What’s in it for him?

“To this day, I’ve not received one dime from Trump, not one free hamburger at the Trump hotel,” he said.

So if it isn’t hamburgers, what is it?

“Donald Trump is my friend,” he said. “He was my friend then, he’s my friend now. My friend is running for president, so I endorse my friend.”