Former president Donald Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris of using her race as a political tool during a hostile interview at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference in Chicago on Wednesday.
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said when asked about Republicans who have referred to Harris, who has an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, as a “DEI hire.” “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she turned black, and now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know — is she Indian or is she black?”
A handful of GOP lawmakers have described Harris in those terms since her elevation to the top of the Democratic Party’s 2024 ticket, with Representative Harriet Hageman (R., Wyo.) using the phrase “DEI hire” and Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) characterizing her as a “DEI vice president.”
While President Joe Biden did say before tapping Harris as his running mate in 2020 that he was considering only women for the role, some in the Republican Party warned their colleagues against that line of attack. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) said recently that Harris’s “ethnicity or gender has nothing to do with this whatsoever,” while Representative Byron Donalds (R., Fla.) told CBS News last week that such rhetoric had been “nipped in the bud” after Donalds told fellow Republicans “that’s not where we want to go.”
The interview between Trump and ABC News’s Rachel Scott was tense from the start. Scott opened her first question with a monologue in which she all but called Trump racist before asking him why he thinks black voters should trust him.
“You have told four congresswomen of color who were American citizens to go back to where they came from,” Scott said. “You have used words like ‘animal’ and ‘rabid’ to describe black district attorneys. You’ve attacked black journalists, calling them a ‘loser,’ saying the questions that they ask are — quote — ‘stupid and racist.’ You’ve had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort.”
Trump responded to the question of why black voters should trust him — the first question of the event without any introductory chatter — and went back at Scott.
“Well, first of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, first question,” he said. “You don’t even say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network. And I think it’s disgraceful. I came here in good spirit, I love the black population of this country; I’ve done so much for the black population of this country, including employment, including Opportunity Zones with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, which is one of the greatest programs ever for black workers and black entrepreneurs. I’ve done so much, and you know when I say this, historically black colleges and universities were out of money — they were stone-cold broke — and I saved them and I gave them long-term financing, and nobody else was doing it. I think it’s a very rude introduction. I don’t know exactly why you would do something like that.”
Trump then turned his attention to Harris, conspicuously absent from the convention after saying her campaign schedule made it impossible for her to attend.
“I was invited here and I was told my opponent — whether it was Biden or Kamala — I was told my opponent was going to be here,” Trump said. “It turned out my opponent isn’t here. You invited me under false pretense and then you said you can’t do it with Zoom.”
The former president noted that Harris plans to address the NABJ via Zoom, and he chided organizers for a half-hour delay that he said had been caused by technical difficulties.
Trump’s appearance at the conference caused a rift in the NABJ leadership. While one convention co-chair, Tia Mitchell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, defended the decision to invite Trump on the grounds that NABJ invites both parties’ presidential candidates to address its audience every four years, another co-chair left her position, seemingly as a result of Trump’s appearance.
“I have decided to step down as co-chair from this year’s #NABJ24 convention in Chicago,” Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah wrote on X. “To the journalists interviewing Trump, I wish them the best of luck.”