Donald Trump was ridiculed Saturday after attending what his campaign called a Black roundtable at a Detroit church — with photos showing a largely white audience.
Trump’s campaign reached out to the 180 Church to set up the event at which attendees asked a handful of questions before bursting into a rendition of Happy Birthday.
The evangelical church is in the heart of Detroit’s west side and has a mainly Black congregation.
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But photos caught by the media, and shared widely online, showed a lot of white people in the audience.
“It’s all lies, smoke, and mirrors,” wrote Jeff Timmer a Republican and senior adviser at the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, on X.
Jeffrey Evan Gold, a frequent legal analyst on networks including CNN and ABC, wrote, “MAGA whites in the hood for Trump."
And Ben Meiselas, the co-founder of the progressive Meidas Touch, wrote, “Everything is a scam!!!!”
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Trump arrived at the event bragging about meeting the church’s pastor, Lorenzo Sewell, but then failed to recognize that the man was sitting beside him.
Sewell told Reuters that, when he was contacted by Trump’s campaign and asked to host the event, he thought it was a scam.
“I was thinking ‘Am I being punked?’” he said.
But he chose to host it to give the Black community a voice, he said.
“That began to move my heart because people that are disenfranchised, pushed aside, and marginalized typically don’t have a voice at the table,