Trump spoke to a mostly white crowd at a black church in Detroit, with some claiming his crowd was brought in from outside the city.
Former journalist and Detroit native Ron Fournier wrote:
Eighty percent of Detroiters are black.
The group is sent to a city they don’t know to cheer for a felon they don’t know how to live without. https://t.co/zi0YImaPTD
——Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) June 16, 2024
As someone who has had the pleasure of spending many years in and around Detroit, I agree with Fournier. Something is wrong with Trump’s black church crowds. First, the church was packed. There are plenty of empty seats there. Second, the crowd was very white. In a city that is 80% black, Trump’s black church speaking crowd looked 90% white.
It’s unclear whether the crowd was “put on buses” and taken to the speech, as the Trump campaign claimed, but it’s safe to say the majority of the crowd came from outside Detroit. If I were to guess, given the history before Trump, the crowd was organized and came from the white suburbs outside of Detroit.
Some “MAGA” propagandists such as Kellyanne Conway claimed that Trump’s speech had 8,000 people. Judging from the video posted above, there were not 8,000 people at Trump’s speech.
Here’s another crowd photo:
Trump is trying to fool voters into thinking he’s more popular than he actually is, which is why it’s important for reporters covering Trump events to ask where the crowds are coming from.
