One on One With Trump’s Black MAGA Pastor – Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting

Reveal
from The Center for Investigative Reporting
Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell is one of the most prominent Black conservatives in President Donald Trump’s orbit. It all started last summer when the president visited Sewell’s 180 Church while campaigning in Detroit. A month later, Sewell spoke at the Republican National Convention. And in January, he prayed for the new president during his inauguration inside the US Capitol. As Sewell’s voice echoed around the domed rotunda, the prayer sounded familiar to many. That’s because Sewell adapted Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
As Trump dismantles DEI policies around the country and pushes efforts to erase Black history from schools and museums, Sewell remains one of the president’s most prominent Black defenders and argues that the Trump presidency is actually improving Black Americans’ lives.
“I believe that racism is when you close the door of opportunity to people because of their skin color, intentionally or unintentionally,” Sewell says. “And I believe President Trump is a anti-racist because he opened the door of opportunity to somebody like me, in a context where nobody would vote for him.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Sewell sits down with host Al Letson to talk about his upbringing as a drug dealer in Detroit, his conversion to Christianity, and his inauguration prayer. Letson challenges Sewell’s ideas about racism, his support of Charlie Kirk, and his defense of the Trump administration’s rollback of DEI policies.
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Watch: I Spent a Week With Black Republicans (Mother Jones)
Listen: Red, Black, and Blue (Reveal)
Read: Trump Shuts Down Diversity Programs Across Government (Mother Jones)
Listen: The Bible Says So…or Does It? (More To The Story)
Watch: Rev. Lorenzo Sewell Delivers Benediction (PBS NewsHour via YouTube)
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Josh Sanburn is a producer for Reveal. He previously worked as a national correspondent for Time magazine, where he covered policing, criminal justice, and societal and demographic trends across the United States. After Time, he worked as a producer for Gimlet Media, where he helped develop and produce special series for the Wall Street Journal’s daily podcast. He’s also produced documentary series for ABC News and National Geographic and has written features for Vanity Fair. Reach him at jsanburn@revealnews.org or follow him on X @joshsanburn.
Kara McGuirk-Allison is a senior radio editor for the Center for Investigative Reporting, where she works on podcast strategy and audio production. In her three decades of audio work, she has produced for a number of NPR news programs, including the award-winning Justice Talking, and was the founding producer of NPR’s Hidden Brain. Before joining CIR, Kara was a podcast producer for Marvel/Disney.
Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.
In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.) When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.
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