Meet the “Harlem Hate Pastor” Who Just Met With Donald Trump

If you can believe it, James David Manning is even more inflammatory than the GOP candidate.

<a href=http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Harlem-Drummers/05e0a4f4a74e47b7ac804d1852d8df2b/2/0>Bebeto Matthews</a>/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


On Monday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump met with a group of African American pastors in Manhattan, after some confusion over whether all the participants would be endorsing him. Some black pastors who weren’t there were critical of the meeting—one referred to it as a “get-played moment”—but Trump insisted (of course) that the session went well. He also claimed that some of the participants did agree to endorse him.

Trump, who has made some unsavory statements about the black community, may not be a likely candidate for such endorsements. So who might these Trump-friendly pastors be? Meet Pastor James David Manning of the ATLAH World Missionary Church in Harlem.

Manning, who was at Trump’s summit, has a long record of outlandish, hateful, and nutty statements. His church once accused President Barack Obama of releasing “the homo demons on the black man.” He has vowed to die if that’s what it takes to expose Obama as the devil. He has asserted that Starbucks injects semen from gay men into its coffee. (Yes, really.) He chanted “oh faggots, oh faggots, please come out tonight” during a protest at his church last week.

As a bonus, here’s a video on Manning’s Facebook page of a man who claims that Planned Parenthood, and not Robert Dear (who is accused of killing three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic), practices terrorism every day.

On this Facebook page, Manning (proudly?) posted a news story reporting that “Harlem Hate Pastor James David Manning” was at the Trump meeting. It’s unclear whether Manning was one of the pastors who Trump says has agreed to endorse him. But there is evidence that Manning, who’s no stranger to extreme rhetoric, sure likes the GOP candidate whom Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) recently called “a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate