Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) went after former President Trump Saturday for his comments Vice President Harris’ racial identity earlier this week during a panel at the National Association of Black Journalist’s (NABJ) convention in Chicago.
“The disrespect that you saw on that stage to those journalists and the way that he talked to them, and the way that he talks about our vice president, if he will talk about the most powerful Black woman in the world this way, just imagine what he says behind closed doors about the rest of us,” Crockett said to MSNBC’s Alex Witt.
During the contentious NABJ interview, ABC News’s Rachel Scott pressed the GOP nominee on comments from other Republicans that Harris was a “DEI hire,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion, and was only elevated to the top of the Democratic ticket because of her race and gender.
In his response, Trump questioned Harris’s race and ethnicity.
“I’ve known her a long time indirectly, Trump began. “Not directly very much.”
“She was always of Indian heritage. And she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he continued. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black.”
He added, “So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?”
Crockett cringed at the comments, saying the rhetoric at the event is representative of the “same old Donald that we’ve seen.”
“For those Black folk that think that Donald Trump really understands Black culture or that he is fighting for us in any way, I’m here to tell you that he’s not,” she said during the interview.
The former president also received blowback from the White House over his attacks on Harris, who became the presumptive Democratic nominee Friday.
“As a person of color, as a Black woman … what he just said, what you just read out to me, is repulsive, it’s insulting and no one has any right to tell someone who they are, how they identify,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the first Black person to hold the position, said in response.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded to Crockett’s comments in a statement to The Hill Saturday.
“Big talk from a Kamala Harris surrogate whose candidate of choice was too much of a coward and chicken s— to even show up at the event,” he wrote in the statement.
NABJ received scrutiny after announcing that Trump would be attending the annual convention. While some said the event would offer Black journalists the opportunity to grill the former president on how he plans to address the most pressing issues facing Black voters, others expressed concerns over his previous rhetoric both toward and around Black Americans.