President Trump on Thursday met with pastors, law enforcement officials and small-business owners at a church in Dallas to discuss plans to "build safety, opportunity and dignity," following recent nationwide protests against police brutality.
The new model calls for: increasing access to capital for small business owners in minority communities; confronting racial disparities in health care; an executive order to encourage police departments to meet professional standards for use of force and de-escalation tactics, as well as a pilot program for social workers to work with police departments; and a push for Congress to enact school choice – a longstanding policy of his administration.
Trump's remarks, a response to recent protests and calls for racial justice sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, did not mention Floyd by name.
Trump held a roundtable with law enforcement officials on Monday at the White House, where he suggested that he was open to ideas for how policing can be done "in a much more gentle fashion," but he has resisted suggestions that systemic racism is a problem in policing.
Responding to a question of whether the president believed there was a problem with institutional racism within the United States, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday took the same approach, declining to address whether Trump believed in systemic racism and instead pointed to what she described as Trump's belief in the fundamental goodness of most police officers.