Black pastor praises Trump for event at Detroit church: 'President Biden never came to the hood'

President Donald Trump held a roundtable event on Saturday at a church in Detroit with city community leaders where a black pastor praised the 45th president and lamented that Joe Biden and Barrack Obama "never came to the hood." 

"President Trump, I'm so humbled that you would be here," Rev. Lorenzo Sewell said during the campaign event with Trump.  

"President Obama never came to the hood, so to speak, right? President Joe Biden—he went to the big NAACP dinner, but he never came to the hood. So, thank you," Sewell added.  

Trump said it was his honor to go and join them at the church event. Trump met with community leaders at the church for the round table discussion event on Saturday afternoon.  

According to the Detroit Free Press, when Sewell got the call to host the event last week, he couldn't believe it. "I thought I was being punked," Sewell, senior pastor of 180 Church, told the outlet. "I literally thought it was a joke." 

"For him to have a community conversation, I thought it was an opportunity to be able to really give the least of these, the disenfranchised and marginalized, an opportunity to have a voice at the table because typically we're on the menu," Sewell added. "If you come to Grand River, if you walk through our community, you will see, quite frankly, that it's desolate. ... (Trump campaign officials) didn't want to talk to people that had high prestige and high power positions. They wanted to talk to the least of these." 

Last year, Sewell had written an op-ed for the outlet where he had praised the work of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on infrastructure. Sewell also told the outlet leading up to Saturday that the event had to do more with faith than politics.  

"The spiritual component ... is the part that I'm concerned the most about," he told reporters. "The Bible says that we should be praying, interceding and we should be supplicating for all of our leaders specifically for those that are in authority... Our church prays for all of our leaders and in the Bible, you see that political leaders always worked with spiritual leaders. There was Jesus and Pontius Pilate, King Agrippa and Paul, Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar, Pharaoh and Moses." 

Trump was the keynote speaker at the event where he also spoke about his achievements in office for the black community. He was joined by Representative Byron Donalds as well as other allies for the event.  

"We achieved the lowest African American unemployment rate and the lowest African American poverty rate ever recorded during my 4 years," Trump told the audience during the event.  

One community leader from Detroit commented during the meeting, "I look at how Joe Biden became the president and allowed Afghanistan to collapse and allowed our soldiers to die—it angers me." 

"We had a president who loved our soldiers, and we need to put our president back in office!" 

Trump's visit to the city is part of a pattern that he has established in reaching out to communities not traditionally thought of as conservative. Earlier this year, Trump held rallies in New Jersey as well as the Bronx with many minorities in attendance.