Vice President Harris’s campaign bashed former President Trump over his Wednesday interview at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention, saying he showed hostility and chaos on stage.
The campaign’s statement didn’t focus on the personal attacks against Harris, which included Trump saying that the vice president “happened to turn Black,” but instead on his general interview in Chicago and his treatment toward Black journalists.
“The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people,” Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler said.
During his NABJ interview, Trump clashed with ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott, who cited the birther conspiracy about former President Obama, Trump’s call for certain Democratic lawmakers to “go back” to countries they came from, and his meeting with a white supremacist at Mar-a-Lago.
The former president said she asked the question in “a horrible manner” and called ABC “a fake news network,” adding that he has done “so much for the Black population.”
“Trump lobbed personal attacks and insults at Black journalists the same way he did throughout his presidency — while he failed Black families and left the entire country digging out of the ditch he left us in,” Tyler said in his statement. “Today’s tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump’s MAGA rallies this entire campaign.”
Tyler added that Trump needs to “show up” to the previously scheduled debate on Sept. 10, hosted by ABC, after the former president has increasingly hedged over the prospect of debating Harris in recent days after his former opponent, President Biden, bowed out of the race.
White House officials, meanwhile, have focused their criticism over Trump’s NABJ interview on his statements on Harris’s race and heritage.
Communications director Ben LaBolt said the former president went “full circle” after he “started his national political career by saying Barack Obama wasn’t American.” And press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the comments “repulsive” and “insulting.”
Ahead of the interview, Harris’s campaign urged journalists to call out Trump’s “lies.”