Pastor Dr. Maurice Watson delivered a powerful rebuttal to Donald Trump’s racist comments about immigrants on Sunday to his congregation at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Maryland.
Sitting in the pews was a very special guest: Vice President Mike Pence.
“There are members of this church who are from Africa, who are from Haiti. They call me pastor,” Watson began, receiving a standing ovation from his congregation. He described Trump’s description of these nations as “hurtful, dehumanizing, visceral, guttural, ugly.” (He said he could not repeat the actual language, allegedly “shithole,” in church.)
“I stand here today as your pastor to vehemently denounce and reject such characterizations of the nations of African and of our brothers and sisters in Haiti” Watson continued to another standing ovation. “Whoever made such a statement and whoever made such a visceral, disrespectful, dehumanizing adjective to characterize the nations of Africa… is wrong. And they ought to be held accountable.”
“My friends and members from Haiti and Africa: You are owed an apology but you probably won’t get one,” Watson said as Pence looked on.
Watch the whole thing:
Pence attended the historically black church just before Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Pence once called King Jr. “one of the heroes of my childhood.”
According to WUSA, “The Vice President reportedly became visibly red-faced at times throughout the speech.”
In an email to the Associated Press, a spokesperson for Pence denied that his face turned red.