Unreality TV: 'The Donald' Meets 'the Blacks'

Awk-ward. Shortly after Donald Trump's presidential campaign team announced that he would be endorsed by a group of 100 black pastors, several pastors vigorously protested that they were not endorsing Trump after all.

Team Trump scaled back their plans over the Thanksgiving weekend. The billionaire Republican candidate would have only a closed-door meeting with dozens of pastors for two hours Monday at Trump Tower in Manhattan.

Welcome to another episode of the unfolding reality TV show that Trump calls a presidential campaign. I call this episode "The Donald and the Blacks," in honor of his often-repeated declaration: "I have a great relationship with the blacks. I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."

And that's not all. "I have a great relationship with the Mexican people," he told NBC News after causing an international uproar over his characterization of illegal immigrants from Mexico as criminals, rapists and drug dealers. "I love them, they love me."

Plus, "I have a great relationship with many Russians," he told Real Estate Weekly in 2013 after his Miss Universe contest took place in Moscow.

In fact, "I get along with everybody," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper this summer. "And you know what? I've been very successful. Everybody loves me."

Not everybody. The Rev. Darrell C. Scott of the Ohio-based New Spiritual Revival Center, who organized the meeting, said on CNN Monday night that some of the pastors who had initially agreed "got scared" after receiving negative backlash from their own parishioners and others.

Part of that was generated by an open letter from more than 100 black ministers, theologians and religious activists posted Friday on Ebony.com. The signatories were "deeply confounded" that their colleagues would meet with a candidate who "routinely uses overtly divisive and racist language on the campaign trail" and whose politics are "so clearly anti-black."

The letter raises issues of intolerance that the clergy in Trump's meeting say they discussed with him. They included a fracas last weekend in which a Black Lives Matter protester was punched and kicked at a Trump campaign rally in Alabama, after which Trump responded, "Maybe he should have been roughed up."

The open letter also mentions how Trump tweeted a chart of bogus black murder statistics that wildly overstated the percentage of white murder victims killed by blacks.

I agree with this well-argued letter that "siding with a political candidate whose rhetoric pathologizes black people" sends a questionable message. But that, to me, is a reason to meet with Trump, not avoid him.

You negotiate with your adversaries to bring peace, as an old saying goes, not your friends. Maybe exposure to the truth will break through even Trump's iron resistance to inconvenient facts.

Besides, as dangerously ridiculous as Trump's campaign often seems to me, I am pleased to see him and some courageous black clergy take a step toward restoring at least some of the vigorous competition both parties used to wage for the black vote.

I also am pleased to see him remind his own hyper-conservative base that conservative principles are not for white people only. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, another contender for the Republican nomination, demonstrated that last year when he won re-election with 26 percent of the black vote (33 percent of black men and 20 percent of black women) according to CNN exit polls.

Those numbers contrast sharply with the Grand Old Party's black support presidential elections, which rarely has risen above 15 percent since 1960, when it was 32 percent, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that specializes in black issues and keeps tabs on black voting patterns.

Kasich is one of many Republicans who have done well with the black vote in state and local races. It is on the national level that a different picture emerges: We African-Americans have not left the party of Abraham Lincoln as much as the party of Lincoln left us.

Even so, Trump remains the party's frontrunner and Kasich hasn't been able to rise out of single digits. Unfortunately, a lot of it has to do with how well he stirs up, often with Mussolini-like vigor, the frustrations of conservative Americans about a government and political parties that don't seem to be listening to them. Black folks know that feeling, too.

I await evidence that Trump really can build "great relationships" with "the blacks," although I'm not holding my breath.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)