The National Association of Black Journalists has a long history of inviting presidential candidates to speak, ABC News’ Rachel Scott reminded those present on Wednesday to witness Donald Trump wreak havoc at its annual conference in Chicago. Former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have attended past conventions, she said, and the organization is also in talks to host an event with Trump's opponent Vice President Kamala Harris in September.
“As journalists, we use opportunities like these both to inform our reporting, but also to help voters understand the choices that they face in a consequential and historic election year,” Scott explained. All that sounds reasonable, if this were a normal election and Trump was a normal candidate.
But once Trump joined Scott and her fellow moderators Harris Faulkner of Fox News and Semafor’s Kadia Goba onstage he proved yet again, as if we needed reminding, that he is not.
“I want to start by addressing the elephant in the room, sir,” Scott began after thanking Trump for being there and giving what was supposed to be an hour of his time, but turned out to be around 37 minutes, after starting more than an hour late.
“A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today,” she continued, citing Trump’s birther smears against Nikki Haley and former President Barack Obama; his telling four American Democratic Congresswomen of color “to go back to where they came from,” and his describing Black district attorneys as animals and calling them rabid. She brought up his dinner with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, at Mar-a-Lago.
“So my question, sir, now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you, is why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?” Scott asked.
Predictably, Trump answered in a way that made it obvious he wasn't there to win over Black voters. “Well, first of all, I don't think I've ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, a 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.”
Since this is about journalists and their obligation to the public; since this specific scenario places Black journalists in a physical gathering devoted to “sensitizing all media to the importance of fairness in the workplace for Black journalists,” as TheGrio’s Michael Harriot, an NABJ member, points out in his column about the mess; let me clarify what I mean by “normal.”
A normal candidate would endeavor to answer a reporter's questions about things they're on record as saying. This also assumes they’ll pivot from a question’s wording to discuss their platform, along with massaging the truth to suit their agenda and even making mistakes.
A normal candidate would not attack a mainstream news organization as “fake news” or call a reporter “rude” for asking a reasonable question about inflammatory statements he’s made about Black people — specifically Black journalists.
To that point, a normal candidate would expect questions about his record of calling Black journalists “losers” and their questions “stupid” and “racist” when appearing before a room of their peers, and maybe endeavor to explain himself.
There is no excuse for those statements, but that’s not what I mean. As I said, Trump's answers ultimately didn’t matter because none of them were for the Black audience, either in that room, or watching PBS' livestream. Trump is not a normal candidate trying to sell himself to the American people. Everything he did on that NABJ stage was bloody meat for his base.
Trump lied and prevaricated from start to finish, banging out his old hits with a special spice for his audience. He was the "best president for the Black population" since Abraham Lincoln, he said. The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were treated unfairly. Immigrants are "invading" us from the southern border and taking Black jobs. "What is a Black job, sir?" asked Goba.
"A Black job is anybody that has a job. That's what it is," Trump babbled.
“. . . I respect either one, but she obviously doesn't,” Trump continued, “because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn and she went . . . she became a Black person.”
Harris’ mother was a biologist who emigrated from India. Her father is a Black emeritus professor of economics who came to the United States from Jamaica. She's also an alumnus of Howard University, one of the top HBCUs Trump is keen on taking sole credit for supporting. Do you even need to ask if there were fact-checkers in the room? No. There were not.
NABJ instead directed the audience to PolitiFact’s live blog which could neither keep up with the lies nor refute Trump’s assertion that the event was late because NABJ couldn’t get its audio setup together. That wasn’t what organizers told a few media reporters, who said Trump’s people kept them in a stand-off by demanding that NABJ not do live fact-checking. No matter, since Trump's falsehoods are already circulating.
Scott and Goba did a fine job of pushing back at the most ridiculous lies, generally comporting themselves and the profession well. Colleagues on X and other social media outlets said as much within their echo chambers.
Faulkner, teasing her one-on-one with Trump conducted aside from this appearance, set him up for a few tee-ball base hits with, “What is your message today?” and “What's your plan for the Black community when it comes to money?” and “Why did you choose JD Vance?”
But even his nonsensible marshmallow responses to her didn’t matter. Wednesday’s bleak comedy served only Trump, doing a disservice to the NABJ, and to Harris, the first Black and South Asian woman to top a major party's presidential ticket. Amplifying the organization’s self-injury was its announcement on Tuesday that it denied Harris’ offer to appear virtually this week since her campaign schedule wouldn’t allow her to be there in person.
Trump used this to his advantage, claiming he was lured to the conference under false pretenses: “I was told my opponent, whether it was Biden or Kamala, I was told my opponent was going to be here,” he alleged. What he’s describing sounds like a debate, which, to my knowledge, NABJ does not do during election years.
So what is to be gained by the NABJ bringing him onto its turf to make a live show of disparaging two more?
Trump is the latest in a series of controversial political figures that NABJ has platformed over the years. His announcement stirred up social media reminders of the time the organization hosted his surrogate Omarosa Manigault Newman in 2017, who was mainly just disagreeable.
My memory rewound much farther to one of the first conventions I attended in 1996. That year’s political firebrand was remembered afterward for calling the assembled reporters “slave writers, slave media people." Most of those in the room were right to feel insulted. But Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was not running for office. He was fresh off organizing the Million Man March in 1995 and stood accused of making some truly bigoted and antisemitic statements.
He still is. The Southern Policy Law Center lists a collection of sourced antisemitic statements on its page designating him as an extremist. He also has a complicated legacy and reputation among Black folks, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes in his reported essay in The New Yorker: “This is a man whose political identity is constituted by antagonism to the self-image of America. To moderate his stance of unyielding opposition would be to destroy the edifice he has spent his life constructing.”
The NABJ had a sense of what it was getting into with him too. Now, contemplate what it welcomed into its midst Wednesday as you take in what else Farrakhan said to its members in Nashville 28 years ago.
When you have the right and the privilege to feed the human mind, then to feed the human mind lies mixed with truth, skewing the truth, hiding the truth, manipulating the truth for this one's benefit and to that one's degradation, is not my idea of protecting democracy and the fundamentals of a democracy.
Which is pretty much what NABJ allowed enabled Trump to do this week.
On Wednesday Ryan spoke for many when she lamented on X, “Trump came into our home, a Black Press advocacy convention, and insulted us in our face. What is worse, he was invited to do this by NABJ leadership.”
The offense didn't stop once Trump left the stage well short of his promised hour. Soon after he posted on Truth Social: “The questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!”
His campaign’s senior adviser Lynne Patton released a statement that says in part, “You would think that the media would have learned something from their repeat episodes of fake outrage ever since President Trump first came down the escalator in 2015, but some just refuse to ‘get it.’”
Patton’s right, but not for the reasons she thinks. Harris’ entry into the presidential race was guaranteed to generate racism and misogyny from Trump and his minions, but the easiest way to spread that poison is to legitimize him in mainstream forums.
Headlines describing what he said about Harris amplified those slurs and other lies he dropped on Wednesday, which only energizes his base and its worst actors. These are the same mistakes media watchdogs warned fellow journalists to refrain from making after handing Trump billions in free promotion in 2016 and flirting with a repeat performance of that in 2020.
I don't think this is going to work for Trump. But if it does it will likely be with a big assist from the new york times pic.twitter.com/LiX1jjwyhH
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 1, 2024
To see it recur via an organization dedicated to supporting Black journalists and journalism is infuriating. Still, I never would have guessed I would be invoking another politically consequential and controversial guest's three-decades old warning in response to this organization's terrible judgment.
At least Farrakhan said something worth remembering, and true — a call to refuse framing damaging acts as business as usual, by saying, "This is what we've always done." That means NABJ and the Fourth Estate; that means anybody interested in defending democracy. Disbelieve those observations at your peril. They will stand up to a fact-check.
Check out the full "PBS News Hour" stream of the conversation. (Fast-forward to 1:10 if you want to skip the hold music and blank stage):
