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You can bet Donald Trump wasn’t prepared for this particular showdown.
On the sidelines of his first and possibly only debate against Kamala Harris in Philadelphia, the former president on Tuesday found himself face-to-face with none other than Yusef Salaam.
Salaam is a member of the “Central Park Five” – a group of Black and Hispanic youths Trump once called to be executed for a crime they were later they later exonerated of.
The confrontation unfolded in the wake of Trump’s debate against Harris on Tuesday night, when the former president made a surprise appearance in the spin room at the Pennsylvania Convention Center – a room where his and Harris’s assembled surrogates were making the case for why their respective candidates were the rightful victor of the debate.
Likely expecting to be fielding another question from a reporter, Trump instead found himself facing Salaam, now an elected member of New York City’s council, who had joined the scrum of reporters surrounding the former president. Salaam, a Democrat, was one of the many Harris campaign allies marked for interviews with press after the debate.
As the former president turned towards Salaam, he was asked by several reporters including NBC’s Peter Alexander whether he would apologize or say anything at all to Salaam.
It wasn’t clear if Trump immediately understood why Salaam was there, but he grinned and pointed at him, quipping: “That’s good, you’re on my side!”
Salaam, obviously taken aback, laughed along with some of the reporters around him.
“No, no, I’m not on your side!” Salaam shot back.
The former president then waved and stepped away to take questions from reporters standing further away.
It was a jarring moment that illuminated the small world of US politics — which, even on the national stage, is often tinier than most appreciate.
The moment was particularly shocking given that Trump had just been called out by his opponent for demanding the execution of Salaam and four others on bogus charges, which Trump only appeared to acknowledge had been recanted in a skeptical-sounding response.
In that response, Trump insinuated that Democrats were digging up old baggage to hit him with, and dismissed Salaam’s relevance to his campaign given that, he claimed, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg “agreed” with his assessment of the case. Bloomberg, a Democrat, blocked a multimillion-dollar settlement over Salaam’s prosecution.
“A lot of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five,” Trump had said during his debate with Harris.
The vice president, meanwhile, argued that it was “a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president, who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people”.
