httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsWCqrLDyrA
TV host Steve Harvey was the latest celebrity to drop in for a meeting at Trump Tower on Friday.
“Our president asked that all of us sit down and talk to one another in order to move our country forward,” the host of Family Feud and The Steve Harvey Show noted in a statement posted to Twitter.
“The transition teams on both sides asked me to meet and I’m glad I did.”
Harvey said that Trump “Immediately got Dr. Ben Carson on the phone to begin dialog in looking for programs and housing to help our inner cities.” He added that the president-elect “Seems very open to my mentoring efforts across the country.”
Harvey’s bottom line? “I would sit with him anytime.”
Harvey, who has been weathering a blowback over racial comments about Asian men on his talk show, told reporters after the meeting, “They’re kind of beating me up on the Internet right now for no reason, but that’s life, isn’t it?”.
Like many of Trump’s cabinet picks, he’s been critical of the agency he hopes to lead. “These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse,” Carson wrote in a 2015 Washington Times op-ed.
After Trump won the election, Carson demurred when initially asked about a possible cabinet post, citing his lack of experience in government or running a federal agency.
When Sen. Elizabeth Warren asked if Carson could assure her that Trump’s real-estate businesses would not profit from HUD projects, he argued, “If t happens to be an extraordinarily good program that’s working for millions of people and it turns out that someone that you’re targeting is going to gain $10 from it, am I going to say ‘no,’ the rest of Americans can’t have it?”.