NABJ: The First Six Minutes

A little fact checking

Via Threads. I don't think Trump precisely means to praise the fictional criminal; I think his idea is that Lecter is a typical example of a border-crossing asylum seeker, which is equally nuts (I’m pretty sure he believes an “asylum seeker” is a mental patient looking for a new home, when he denounces the imaginary border policy ”letting millions of people from jails, from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions, drug dealers pour in”). But he can't help showing the appreciation for Lecter's comic stylings.

TRUMP:

First of all, I don't think I have ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, first question. You don't even say "Hello, how are you."

In fact, Rachel Scott began the Trump interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention by thanking the former president for showing up.

SCOTT:

Mr. President, we so appreciate you giving us an hour of your time.

Only then did she ask her question (given his long history of racially insensitive remarks—such as telling congresswomen of color to "go back to where you came from", calling Black district attorneys "animal" and "rabbit" and Black journalists "losers" whose questions are "stupid and racist"—"why should Black voters trust you?") That's the first lie in the first six minutes of the transcript. More, big and little, follow.

***

TRUMP:

I love the Black population of this country. I have 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 have done so much, 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.

The Black-white gap in unemployment continued its gradual Obama-era improvement in Trump's first three years, before the COVID catastrophe; under Biden, it has quickly narrowed to near-parity and has remained there, at historically narrow levels, along with the Black unemployment rate itself.

---

Scott, Cory Booker (D-NJ), Reps, Pat Tiberi (R-OH), and Ron Kind (D-WI) introduced the Opportunity Zone legislation in 2016, when Obama was president, but the idea, of funding economic development in the Black community through tax incentives to encourage entrepreneur investors instead of direct investment, goes back to Richard Nixon, who referred to it hopefully as "Black capitalism". So far, in the 2017 legislation (folded into the Tax Cut and Jobs Act), the capitalists encouraged by the program don't seem to be Black, its success seems to be limited to neighborhoods that are already doing comfortably, and Trump's boasts about it during the 2020 presidential campaign were debunked at the time; if they are doing better four years later, it's probably more to do with the Biden administration's use of the thing Nixon wanted to avoid, grant money.

Trump had little personally to do with the 2019 FUTURE Act providing $85 million in funding for HBCUs—

The president did sign the bill when it hit his desk, but it’s not clear that he did other legwork to get it there.

"The only words the president contributed were his signature, ‘Donald J. Trump,’" Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C., an original sponsor of the bill, told Inside Higher Ed in August.

The bill did relieve the colleges of the need to reapply for aid every year, which was a good thing, but it didn't "save" them. They weren't broke, and it didn't give them more money than the Obama administration had done.

Also, he wasn't answering the question. It wasn't about his dubious actions but his demeaning language. 

***

TRUMP:

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. It turns out my opponent is not here. You invited me under false pretenses, and then you said you can't do it with Zoom. Where is Zoom? She is going to do it with Zoom and she is not coming. And then you are half an hour late, just so we understand. They could not get their equipment working or something was wrong with the video feed. A very nasty question.

Obviously the NABJ couldn't have known when they issued the invitation that Biden wasn't going to be the Democratic candidate. The "false pretenses" accusation is an absurd lie. I don't know why or when NABJ rejected Harris's offer to join the show remotely from Houston, where she was helping the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority celebrate its 60th anniversary, but it's reliably reported that they did.  

In fact the program began not 30 but 70 minutes late, which was pretty awkward, with no explanation, just mildly funky hold music as the attendees milled around the auditorium for the cameras. A report came out on Bluesky, just before it finally started, that Trump's people and the organizers were quarreling over the plan to have Politifact do live fact checking of the event:

When ABC's Rachel Scott at last called Trump onstage, she announced the Politifact fact checking and gave us a hashtag (#nabjfactcheck) so we could follow it. But it didn't in fact happen at all, on Xitter or at Politifact's website.

Which convinces me that the rumor was correct, Trump had won his battle to stop Politifact, nobody had told Scott, and everything Trump said in that passage was a lie. I'm inclined to suspect he's responsible for NABJ's rejection of Harris's Zoom offer, too. NABJ management, which has really not covered itself with glory in this sorry episode, is helping him cover it up with their silence. 

***

TRUMP:

I have answered the question. I have been the best president for Black people since Abraham Lincoln. That is my answer.

SCOTT:

Better than President Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act? 

TRUMP:

You are 35 minutes late because you could not get your equipment to work. In such a hostile manner. I think it is a disgrace.

He had not answered the question but evaded it. The idea that he was a "president for Black people" at all is ridiculous—he was a president against Black people, as he showed when he attempted to mobilize Washington against the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of June 2020. He doesn't know enough about Lyndon Johnson to confront that last question and doubles down instead on lying about his involvement in making the show over an hour late.

***

On the amply covered question of whether Kamala Harris "suddenly became Black" after a lifetime of being "Indian" I'll just note that the panelists understated how false that is when they mentioned that she "went to a Black college": her identification with the Black community goes back to the beginning of her life:

As her mother had no relatives in the country, the Black community in Oakland became her family, even after she had divorced from Ms. Harris’s father, a Jamaican who came to the United States to study economics. Ms. Harris and her younger sister sang in the children’s choir at a Black church and studied the arts at Rainbow Sign, a pioneering Black cultural center. After school, they spent time at a child-care center run by a neighbor in the basement of their apartment building, learning about Black leaders such as Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver and Sojourner Truth.

As a first grader, Ms. Harris joined the second elementary school class in Berkeley to be desegregated by busing, making her an early test subject for a contentious liberal policy. It was a part of her history that exploded into controversy during a Democratic primary debate, when she challenged Mr. Biden’s past stance on busing and his warm remembrances of working with segregationist senators.

Trump is too stupid to understand that people can have complex identities, and he also expects everybody to be as dishonest as he is. 

I would also like to look at how Trump brought this up, a new bit of crazy, in the interview context, because that's not getting any attention.

SCOTT:

Let me ask a follow-up and we will move on to other questions. Some of your own supporters, including Republicans on Capitol Hill, have labeled Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black and Asian American woman to serve on a major party ticket, as a DEI hire. Would you tell those supporters to stop it?

TRUMP:

How do you define DEI?

SCOTT:

Diversity, equity, and inclusion.

TRUMP:

Is that your definition? Could you give me a definition?

SCOTT:

I'm asking you a question, a very direct question.

TRUMP:

Define it for me.

SCOTT:

I just defined it for you. Do you think that Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a Black woman?

TRUMP:

Now it is a little bit different. I've known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage....

As I was watching, I felt certain Trump was being cagy, in that way he has, of trying to hide some specific ignorance from the person he's talking to. He doesn't know what DEI is, or he knows it's a swear word you use against Black people that got a job but he doesn't know what "equity" and "inclusion" are.

In retrospect, I think it was that but more than that. He was determined to work his Big Lie about Harris not being Black into his presentation, but he wasn't sure if this was the place. So he badgered Scott until she put it in words he understood, and then refused to answer and came up with his offensive, but idiotic,  bombshell.

What he hoped to accomplish with it I don't know, but he clearly thinks it's a genius move. It may possibly go back to his father, who began to claim during World War II that the Trump family was of Swedish rather than German origin, so as not to spook their many Jewish tenants (his actually being a Nazi, or at least a Klansman veteran of the 1924 anti–Al Smith demonstrations, may have influenced his perceptions on this). Donald followed, and kept it up for decades. He's too stupid, I'm sure, to grasp the reality of complex identities, and of course he assumes that everybody else is as dishonest and as unable to cope without dishonesty as he is (recall his pushing of the claim that Senator Elizabeth Warren had claimed Cherokee identity in order to snooker the Harvard faculty into giving her a job). I, for one, don't think this tactic is going anywhere with voters who aren't already members of the cult.

SCOTT:

Do you believe Kamala Harris is a DEI hire?

TRUMP:

Could be. There are some. [Points at Fox News's Harris Faulkner at the other end of the row of chairs.] I know this lady right over there, a fantastic person, just introduced me, and we had a great interview, and I heard you got very good ratings. 

Should I keep going?