Trump: ‘New deal for black America’
Education, jobs, crime are focus of nominee’s plan.
Donald Trump on Wednesday pledged what he called a “new deal for black America” as he attempted to make late inroads with a voting bloc that polling shows favors Democrat Hillary Clinton by a vast margin.
“I will be your greatest champion,” Trump said during an campaign rally here. “I will never ever take the African-American community for granted. Never, ever.”
In a speech heavy on policy specifics, the Republican presidential nominee laid out a plan that he said is built on setting up better schools, lowering crime in inner cities and creating more high-paying jobs.
He told the largely white audience that “massive numbers” of black Americans have been ignored and left behind, and he blamed Democrats and Clinton for the “crippling crime and total violence” in the nation’s inner cities.
Trump was speaking in a city that was rocked by protests last month after police killed an unarmed black man. In his speech, he accused Clinton of waging a “war on police” that he said puts black lives at risk, and he called for police and residents to work together.
The GOP nominee pledged to remove gang members from inner cities and continued to assert that the national murder rate is the highest it has been in 45 years, although it has in fact declined.
“Some of our inner cities are more dangerous than the war zones we’re reading about and seeing about every night,” Trump said.
The real estate mogul said he wants to allow cities and states to declare disaster areas in blighted communities and give micro-loans to black entrepreneurs to help spur jobs. He championed school choice, which he called the “great civil rights issue of our time,” and increased funding for historically black colleges and universities.
He proposed tax holidays for inner-city investment and incentives for foreign companies to invest in “blighted American neighborhoods.” He also said that black communities have had their civil rights violated by illegal immigration.
“No group has been more hurt by decades of illegal immigration than African-Americans,” he said.
Despite his appeals, Trump’s candidacy has drawn little support from African-American voters. Trump had 3 percent support among African-American voters in an ABC News tracking poll released Sunday, compared with Clinton’s 82 percent.
Earlier in the day, Trump made a detour to Washington to officially christen a downtown hotel bearing his name, even as his campaign sets its sights on Florida as its make-or-break battleground state less than two weeks before Election Day.
Clinton marked her 69th birthday by making campaign stops in Florida. Her campaign also released two new television commercials it described as “closing arguments” to viewers in several battleground states. One of the ads is voiced by Morgan Freeman.