Meet Mark Burns, Trump’s most prominent surrogate to black voters, who’s tweeted a cartoon of Clinton in blackface and says she would kill Christianity.
The last time Pastor Mark Burns advised Donald Trump, they talked about compassion.
The pastor was aboard the real-estate mogul’s private jet last week, flying from Mississippi to New York, where the two spoke about Trump’s upcoming appearance at another black pastor’s congregation in Detroit on Saturday.
“It is the first time he’s speaking in Detroit, to the African-American community, and the key word is ‘compassion,’” Burns told The Daily Beast in a brief phone interview. “I want them to get to know the same guy I’ve grown to know and love.”
Burns said one of the things that originally drew him to Trump during the Republican primary was Trump’s stand against the supposed “War on Christmas.”
“We’ve become so politically correct that Christianity has taken a back seat,” Burns observed.
For the past year, Burns has been Trump’s go-to campaign-trail pastor. And he has denounced Hillary Clinton, liberals, and political correctness in much the same provocative manner as the Republican presidential nominee.
So when Burns, a conservative black pastor, tweeted a cartoon of Hillary Clinton in blackface—“Black Americans, THANK YOU FOR YOUR VOTES and letting me use you again..See you again in 4 years,” he posted—it wasn’t out of character.
The pastor, a smaller-time televangelist who co-founded the South Carolina-based Christian TV network NOW, assumed the role of an official Trump surrogate shortly after meeting Trump at a closed-door gathering with various black pastors in New York City late last year.
Since then, Burns—or “Pastor Mark,” as friends call him—has gone on to become a key and very public fixture in Trump’s campaign. And it’s boosted Burns’s national profile more than he ever anticipated.
Over the past nine months, he has introduced Trump at multiple rallies and victory speeches, boosted him nonstop on social media, declared on-stage at the Republican National Convention that “all lives matter” (the popular, condescending retort to Black Lives Matter), and regularly made the cable-news rounds to deliver his full-throated defenses of his candidate.
According to Burns, he has advised Trump personally on a number of other occasions, on and off of Trump Force One.
“We talk in person, he’s a very open person—he is so accessible when we’re together,” Burns said. “Most of the time, our conversation is… heavily focused on the needs of people in our country, and what am I hearing as a pastor.”
As Trump’s trusted surrogate and happy culture-warrior, the pastor hasn’t been afraid to walk through fire for Trump—and he certainly hasn’t been concerned about bowing to any strains of “political correctness.”
In March, for example, Burns said Clinton wants a “genocide” against black Americans.
“It vexes me greatly how [African Americans] will stand behind [Hillary Clinton, who] is OK with the murders of babies,” Burns said on (of all places) The Alex Jones Show. “That’s really one of my major platforms behind Donald Trump. He loves babies. Donald Trump is a pro-baby candidate, and it saddens me how we as African Americans are rallying behind… a [Democratic] Party that is OK with the genocide of black people through abortion.”
(During that interview, Burns condemned Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit that candidate Trump had previously praised as doing “wonderful things having to do with women’s health.”)
Burns has pushed the unsubstantiated theory (as has Trump) that Clinton’s emails “DID GET PEOPLE KILLED.”
And while stumping for Trump early this year, Burns also alleged that “Bernie Sanders… doesn’t believe in God” and that “Bernie gotta get saved. He gotta meet Jesus. He gotta have a come-to-Jesus meeting.”
(Sanders, Clinton’s former rival in the Democratic primary, is Jewish.)
Above all else, Burns wants Trump to help “#BringGODbackToThisNation,” a country where marriage is “between one man & one woman..!” In his eyes, the very idea of Christianity in America is “UNDER ATTACK” by Clinton and her fellow progressives.
Click here to read more.
SOURCE: The Daily Beast – Asawin Suebsaeng
BCNN1 WP 