When Donald Trump accepted the National Association of Black Journalists’ invitation to speak at its annual convention this week, the group’s leaders maintained that they were upholding a tradition of inviting presidential candidates to speak during an election year and welcomed the chance “to ask the tough questions that will provide the truthful answers Black Americans want and need to know.” Instead, they were rewarded Wednesday with a classic Trump showing of falsehoods and racist attacks, including questioning Vice-President Kamala Harris’s biracial identity.
When ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott asked whether he considered Harris a “DEI hire,” itself a racist dog whistle that conservatives have used against the vice-president to denigrate her achievements, Trump said “no.” But he then went on a tirade that sounded like a throwback to the years he spent promoting racist conspiracy theories about former president Barack Obama’s birthplace.
“I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly, very much. And she was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said of Harris. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
To be clear, Harris is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. She has always identified as a Black and South Asian woman, and has spoken at length about growing up in a multicultural household in Oakland, California. She also attended Howard University, a historically Black university, and is part of the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Many Black journalists received the news this week of Trump’s appearance on the NABJ panel in Chicago with skepticism and anger, given his track record of attacking reporters and his history of racist remarks. One of the convention’s co-chairs, Karen Attiah of the Washington Post, stepped down as result.
While Harris also received an invitation to the convention, her campaign said she was unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts. She was in Texas campaigning Wednesday and was also expected to attend Representative Sheila Lee Jackson’s funeral service.
Predictably, Trump behaved no differently at NABJ than in any of his previous public appearances. He spewed lie after lie after lie: about how Harris “failed” her bar exam, about immigration, about abortion, about inflation, about being “the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln,” about the event’s hourlong delay being due to technical issues rather than his team’s insistence that the panel not be fact-checked live. (Earlier in the day, he also lied in a TruthSocial post about how Harris “disrespectfully refused” to attend the convention.)
The former president was also unable to answer some basic questions about current events relevant to a Black audience. Semafor reporter Kadia Goba asked him whether he believes in immunity for officers involved in fatal police encounters, such as in the case of Sonya Massey, the 36-year-old mother who was fatally shot by a cop in Illinois after she called 911 about a suspected intruder. Trump told Goba he was not really familiar with the case. “I saw something that didn’t look good to me,” he added.
But most jarring was his clear contempt for the Black women interviewing him. He has a history of denigrating Black reporters who challenge him, as he’s done in the past with journalists April Ryan, Abby Phillips, and Yamiche Alcindor. Trump attacked Scott throughout the NABJ event after she began the panel with a question about his long history of inflammatory and racist remarks. He referred to Scott as “this woman,” calling her “nasty” and “rude.”
Though the panel was meant to last an hour, it ended abruptly when Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner asked him a question about Project 2025, the far-right presidential transition plan authored by Trump alumni that is likely to serve as a road map for his second administration if he wins in November. Scott told the room that Trump’s team indicated “we have to leave it there.”
Following the event, Trump took to TruthSocial to celebrate: “The questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!” Shortly afterward, the Harris campaign issued a statement describing Trump’s appearance as “simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump’s MAGA rallies this entire campaign.”
“It’s also exactly what the American people will see from across the debate stage as Vice-President Harris offers a vision of opportunity and freedom for all Americans,” the statement continued. “All Donald Trump needs to do is stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10.”
