Those Uppity Black Journalists
Someone complained that every time she thought of voting for Harris, the Democrats do something that bothers her so much it sends her back to Trump. That particular time it was the National Association of Black Journalists’ (NABJ) treatment of Trump. She considered it a hostile ambush showing that the left was obsessed with attacking the president.
This is such a good example of poor reasoning that I thought it was worth a post. It reverses the guilty and the innocent in a way that I repeatedly see with people who think voting for Trump might make sense.
No doubt, the interviewer, ABC’s Rachel Scott came out with a very pointed question. But was it an unfair question? Was it an ambush? Here is the entire quote [note 1]:
Mr. President, we so appreciate you giving us an hour of your time.
I want to start by addressing the elephant in the room, sir.
A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today.
You have
pushed false claims about some of your rivals,
from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama
saying that they were not born in the United States,
which is not true.
You have told four Congresswoman women of color who were American citizens
to go back to where they came from.
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.
So my question, sir, now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you,
why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?
It would certainly be rude to start with such questions if you invited a coworker to your house for dinner, but this was not a social call. The purpose of the NABJ event was to get the candidate’s views on important topics.
Was Scott’s litany of supposed Trump offenses true? Yes, I remember when he said them [note 2], and when he dined with white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes.
Do these Trump episodes suggest a valid reason to vote against Trump? Of course, they represent just a sample of a long history of prejudiced statements and actions by the former President.
Was it unfair to bring them up? Actually it was an opportunity for Trump to explain himself. If Trump had innocent reasons for making prejudiced-sounding statements about people of color, that would have been a good time to explain them.
Was it an ambush? Of course it had to occur to Mr. Trump that an organization of “Black Journalists” would ask him about his long history of increasing tribal antagonism.
For anyone who thinks this was an unfair question, I have to ask: do you have a problem with a candidate who repeatedly says things designed to drum up hatred based on people’s ethnicity, race, religion, etc? If not, why not?
The other moment in the interview that got the most news coverage was this exchange:
Scott: Sir, do you believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a Black woman?
Trump: Well, I can say no, I think it’s maybe a little bit different. So 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. 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?
This claim was rated pants on fire false. Not only was it untrue, it takes a lot of nerve to tell someone that they are not really the race that they are.
All this raises a question for people who think Trump was treated unfairly:
Why are you less upset about Trump telling racist lies than you are about him being asked about telling racist lies?
Note 1 All NABJ quotes taken from a transcript of the event.
Note 2 Scott should have said that Trump accused Obama and Haley of not being “natural-born citizens,” which would make them ineligible to be president. He spread false claims that Obama was not born in the US. For Haley, he shared a post falsely claiming that she was ineligible because her parents were not citizens when Haley was born in the US.