Rachel Scott’s piercing interview at National Association of Black Journalists event left former president fuming
ABC News’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott has reportedly faced threats to her life after her piercing interview of Donald Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists convention left the former president fuming.
The NABJ’s executive director told members at a meeting on Saturday that “Scott had received death threats following her work asking incisive questions of … Trump at the group’s national convention” three days earlier, Eric Deggans of National Public Radio wrote in an X post published Saturday.
Deggans didn’t elaborate, and the Guardian has asked the NABJ, ABC and Scott for comment.
Scott asked Trump on Wednesday, “Why should Black voters trust you?” given his history of inflammatory comments about Black people. Among other questions, she also quizzed him about whether he believed Vice-President Kamala Harris had risen to the top of the Democratic ticket for November’s White House election solely “because she is a Black woman”.
Trump replied to Scott by accusing her of being “rude” and having presented a “nasty question”. In reference to Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, he said: “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.
“So, I don’t know. Is she Indian, or is she Black?”
Trump’s comments about Harris drew widespread derision at a time when polls, including one Sunday from CBS News, show the pair essentially tied in key battleground states. Notably, on Sunday, US senator Lindsey Graham – one of Trump’s fellow prominent Republicans – urged him to focus on condemning her policies rather than her heritage.
“Every day we’re talking about her heritage and not her … record … is a good day for her and a bad day for us,” Graham said on Fox News Sunday.
Scott’s encounter with Trump added to the former president’s long record of hostility toward reporters. Frequently, he excoriates journalists as unpatriotic enemies of the people, uses his lectern as a platform from which to hurl insults at the press and singles out reporters by name as purveyors of “fake news” – often in the presence of an irate mob of supporters.
Some in his circle even blamed the failed 13 July assassination attempt targeting Trump on news coverage that was critical of the former president, who just in May was convicted in criminal court of falsifying business records to hide hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
United Nations experts have previously warned that such vitriol from Trump and his supporters – hundreds of whom attacked the US Capitol after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden – enhances the possibilities of violence against the press.
Black journalists criticized organizers of the NABJ’s convention in Chicago for booking Trump’s appearance, citing his anti-Black, anti-journalist and anti-democracy stances.
The NABJ’s president, Ken Lemon, defended the decision to invite Trump to speak as continuing a tradition of questioning national political figures. But the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah resigned from her position as co-chairperson of the convention’s organizing committee in protest of having Trump address the gathering.
Scott moderated Trump’s session Wednesday at the NABJ convention with co-moderators Harris Faulkner of Fox News and Kadia Goba of Semafor.
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