Trump's Interview with the NABJ Goes Off the Rails Amid His Claim that Kamala Harris 'Turned Black'

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | July 31, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | July 31, 2024 |

Things are not going well in Chicago, where former President Donald Trump took questions from Black journalists at the NABJ Convention today. Trump is not used to taking questions from outlets that are not friendly, so the interview got off to a terrible start after Rachel Scott of ABC News rattled off a list of racist comments that Trump has made and asked him why Black people should trust him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible way,” he said, calling ABC “fake news.” He fumed that the interview was 35 minutes late because of audio issues and continued to insist — again, in front of a crowd of Black journalists — that he’s been the best President for Black people since Abraham Lincoln.

It quickly went from bad to weird when he didn’t seem to understand what the definition of DEI is, and then insisted that he always knew Harris as someone from “Indian heritage” who only recently turned Black. “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.”

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Among other notable moments:

— Referring to comments he made at the debate, he was also asked, “What is a Black job”?

“A Black job is anybody who has a job,” he said, later adding that immigrants were going to cross the border and steal the jobs of the people in the room.

— He mispronounced Kamala. Once. The audience did not take kindly to it. He didn’t mispronounce it again.

— Instead of defending J.D. Vance’s statements, Trump said that the Vice Presidential candidate on the ticket doesn’t matter that much, refusing to express any support for Vance.

— He repeatedly returned to the complaint about the “nasty” question he received from Rachel Scott at the beginning of the interview, unable to move past it.

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— He insisted that he would pardon the January 6th rioters who were “innocent” (courts of law convicted them). He also insisted, wrongly, that no one died that day.

— He dismissed a line of questions about Sonya Massey, much to the audience’s displeasure.

The interview ended abruptly, under the direction of the Trump campaign, while Harris Faulkner, a Fox News journalist, was asking him about Project 2025. He was supposed to answer questions for an hour. He only made it 35 minutes.

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