Trump Spoke With a Group of Black Journalists and It Went Even Worse Than You Think

By Jacob Weindling  |  July 31, 2024 | 3:15pm
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
Media Donald Trump
Trump Spoke With a Group of Black Journalists and It Went Even Worse Than You Think

The National Association of Black Journalists invited Donald Trump to a sit-down interview today, conducted by ABC News Senior Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner and Semafor political reporter Kadia Goba. You can watch the entire 36-minute exchange on C-SPAN here, but the highlights have trickled out into social media, and…well…I’ll let Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah give you the “too-long, didn’t read” summary.

This is such a disaster for Trump that Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post is doing the same thing I’m doing here at Splinter and just sharing Trump’s unedited words knowing their visceral ignorance hits that sweet spot of a newsworthy event and Trump content that helps our bottom lines. Here’s his racist attack on Kamala Harris that is forming the base of everyone’s “how is this worse than I imagined” reactions.

Derrick Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, said “To walk into a room full of Black journalists and attack someone’s “Blackness” is another level of disrespect. To anyone who needs a reminder: we can’t change the color of our skin, and we don’t want to.”

This is…wow. I do not want to make the same mistake these provable weirdos did and assume any conclusive electoral outcomes in July, but this looks like a campaign that got high on its own supply about Black voters supposedly defecting from the Democrats en masse in November, and now when it is confronted with an actual competition against someone ninety percent of the country doesn’t want to leave the race, they’ve got nothing to say other than their abject racism and sexism.

The “weird” charge is clearly making inroads given how much it is obviously getting under the right’s skin, proven by how much they are pathetically flailing around for any cohesive retort to grasp on to, and the best counterpunch Trump has is…no YOU’RE weird.

That Fox News interview is like watching a pitcher who lost their fastball and now has to nibble around the edges of the strike zone. The one thing Trump has been better at than any politician this century is defining his opponent, and he just cannot do it so far with Kamala Harris.

This is because like his Hindenberg-esque appearance in front of the National Association of Black Journalists, the racism coursing through the GOP’s every talking point gets less effective when it comes into direct contact with the people they are discriminating against and everyone is forced to consider it to its dark logical end. It’s one thing when you’re in MAGA city taking shots at the vice president’s diverse background and can spin the clips to harebrained cable news anchors later, but I’m not sure what the Trump camp thought was going to happen when their Fuhrer called Kamala a race traitor in front of an entire room of Black journalists.

The opening question to this interview revealed the gulf between the cloistered weirdo world on the right and the one populated by journalists and other people attempting to situate themselves in some sort of objective reality. There was and continues to be a lot of debate on whether it was a good idea to invite Trump to this event, and right away he provided evidence for why it was a bad idea to do so by attacking Rachel Scott.

That question, like the event itself, is proof of the fundamental tension between these realities. Trump and his team want to portray the world through the lens of their depraved MAGAganda, and the conservative media complex is so powerful, and the mainstream media is so inept, that Trump and his cronies get to define our standards much of the time. But in a more neutral zone where objective truths can be discussed, Trump retreats into being his catty whiny self because that’s the only slice of objective reality that he is mentally capable of inhabiting.

Anyone and everyone can be sacrificed at the altar of his ego, including his entire staff and his new vice-presidential nominee. Remember that “the vice president makes no difference” and that Trump alone can fix it…but also no one told him about JD Vance’s awful childless cat lady stuff and if someone tells you that they’re a fake news liar.

This appearance is pretty universally being panned as a political, optical and substantive disaster by the left, center and non-MAGA right, and this is seemingly confirmed by the far-right initially focusing their ire on Scott’s question that threw Trump’s own words and actions back in his face (that neither Trump nor these schlubs have disputed). It’s early, but so far, I have yet to find a single high-profile right-wing media personality even acknowledging that Kamala quote exists.

If this putrid and gobsmackingly racist attack on Kamala Harris had occurred in primetime during a debate with 50 million people watching, it certainly would not rise to a political firestorm of “holy shit his brain doesn’t work he needs to drop out now” (although where’s the lie?), but it certainly would have more impact than the typical Trump-brained nonsense we’re inundated with every day. Only time will tell if this disaster has any real staying power, but I would bet a healthy sum that Trump will be talking about anything other this shitshow a week from now.

UPDATE: An hour after publishing, the freaks on the far-right started hammering this racist “Kamala isn’t Black” attack, so that silence I observed earlier was just them in the DMs getting all their ducks in a row. These super normal folks having a super normal one really are just gonna do the birtherism thing again because their lizard brains are incapable of containing more than one idea at a time.

 
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