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      ABC host reportedly received death threats after Trump interview

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      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.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBlack 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. More

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      Jackson isn’t just Mississippi’s capital. It’s America’s murder capital

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      Jackson, Mississippi, knows the blues.There’s the old men at sunset carting old amps through a full parking lot to the back of an otherwise nondescript bar, to deliver a fearless late-night symposium in the oldest school of blues.And then there’s the Jackson that wakes up in the morning wondering how many young men got killed somewhere else that night. Jackson isn’t just Mississippi’s capital. It’s America’s murder capital, two years running.Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba is perfectly, painfully aware that his city has a murder problem. And he wants to do something about it.“Our residents aren’t against police,” he said. “Our residents are supportive of having more law enforcement to cover gaps and show presence. But they want a police force that is accountable to them.”But who do those police officers answer to? In a city where 83% of residents are Black and 90% of its voters are Democrats, the only person who lives there with the power to hire or fire the capitol police chief is the white Republican living south of Smith Park in the governor’s mansion. This is a democracy problem. .The response of Mississippi’s predominantly white conservative state legislators and Republican governor, Tate Reeves, to violent crime in the state capital last year was to expand the jurisdiction of the Mississippi capitol police department, a state-controlled agency. House Bill 1020 expanded the footprint of the Capitol Complex Improvement District to much of north-east Jackson, while creating a parallel court system to handle cases brought by the capitol police, bypassing the district attorney and locally elected judges.Jackson’s murder problem is real. The national homicide rate per 100,000 people in the United States was about 5.5 in 2023. Jackson’s high-water mark in 2021 was a staggering 99.5. Last year Jackson’s rate was 78.8..Though violent crime has been falling across the country, Mississippi overall had a homicide rate of 19.4 per 100,000, the highest of any state. Jackson is a fraction of that: only about one out of 20 of Mississippi’s roughly 3 million residents live in Jackson. Take Jackson’s 138 murders out of the state’s 2022 calculation, and Mississippi still has a murder rate of 14.6, about three times the national average.Poverty incubates violence. Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the country and most of Jackson’s murders are in its poorest neighborhoods.But the section of Jackson covered by the capitol police is not where you find most of Jackson’s murder problem. It is where most of Jackson’s white people live.“If it’s a notion about how we make it safer, then please justify why they are in the areas with the lowest crime?” Lumumba asks rhetorically. He surmises that it is one more extension of white conservative contempt of the state’s largest city, a Black-majority city viewed as unable to act in its own interest on how to operate a police department.“Someone from north Mississippi certainly doesn’t have a greater interest or desire for safety within our communities than we have for ourselves,” Lumumba said. “And so, it’s paternalistic. I think it is underpinned in partisanship. Also quite frankly, and honestly, it reeks of racism.”Over a chicken biscuit and coffee in middle-class north Jackson, Dr Anita DeRouen, a high school English teacher and former college professor, recounted a drive-by shooting at an empty house last year, up the street from her own in midtown.“I was outside packing up my car and I hear what sounds like three pow pow pow,” she said. The city cops responded, eventually, she said. Little came of it; no one had been hurt.Her house is just inside the footprint of the Capitol Complex Improvement District now. She has a doctorate in English and still does a thing that’s characteristic of Black people talking about race in Mississippi. Rather than refer to it directly, she points to the brown skin on the back of her hand when she means Black people.If she has to call the police now, the capitol police respond first. “What I’ve noticed is, I do see more police in my neighborhood when there’s a reason to call the police. Right? Do people feel more confident calling the police? I don’t know. I just see them around.”DeRouen’s concern about the capitol police district is about who they will police, and to whom they will be accountable.“As a person living in Jackson, I was more concerned about the court situation that came along with that. Because we elect our judges, and they weren’t going to be elected judges,” she said. “The thing that struck me about the district as a whole was that it was so carved out to protect as many white people as they can.”The police chiefs of each agency talk to each other regularly, and talk in public about trying to coordinate their efforts. A police officer responding to a call in the CCID in Jackson’s north is one fewer to answer a call in the south, after all.But Joseph Wade, chief of the Jackson police department, has found himself telling the public that his cops haven’t been replaced. “I tell the citizens all the time; we’re still going to maintain a footprint within the CCID,” he said to the Jackson city council in May. “We’re not vacating … but it gives us an opportunity to deploy our resources to higher-crime areas in Jackson.”Wade came to the job less than a year ago with a community-oriented policing strategy to address the city’s violence. He holds regular community meetings where he shares crime data and solicits feedback from the public. The city established an office of violence prevention and trauma recovery last year, which works to intercept people who are likely to commit an act of violence – or to be a victim of violence – before they add to Jackson’s statistics.The Jackson city police department fields about 275 officers. The capitol police have about 200 and are staffing up to get to 225, chief Bo Luckey said in public comments in May.Neither agency is unblemished. Even as the legislature was considering a plan to expand the authority of the capitol police, the department was under scrutiny for a series of questionable shootings. In one case, an officer fired into an apartment building while chasing a suspected car thief, shooting a woman asleep in her bed. In another, police appear to have shot through the windshield of a car, killing 25-year-old Jaylen Lewis.People around Jackson are touchy about policing right now after the revelations of the Goon Squad torture case in neighboring Rankin county. The federal investigation resulted in convictions for six white Rankin county deputies who sexually humiliated and abused two Black men, shooting one in the mouth. The trial surfaced a pattern of misconduct that still has the community reeling.Local law enforcement in Jackson bristles at any comparison between their policing and that of the Rankin sheriff’s office.Jackson police are still digging out from criticism for failing to notify Bettersten Wade that her son Dexter Wade, had been killed by an off-duty police officer and – despite having ID and her phone calls to the coroner’s office – was buried in an anonymous pauper’s grave behind the county jail. The city and county remain at odds over who should take blame; meanwhile Jackson reformed its notification processes in the wake of public scrutiny.View image in fullscreenIn comparison, two years after the Lewis shooting, Mississippi public safety officials have remained unwilling to reveal basic details about the event to Lewis’s family, citing a continuing “investigation”.State officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.The mayor noted that the city’s clearance rate for homicide investigation’s is above 70%, an indication that the public is willing to work with city police to solve crime. The national average is around 50%.Lumumba insists that the violence in Jackson is not a product of poor policing, drawing a contrast in approach with the capitol police. “But the fact that new problems surface, new interpersonal conflicts take place means that there’s a gap that we’re not filling,” he said. “And I only say that to say that this is absent in the consideration of the state, as they try to approach a safer environment for Jackson from a paternalistic standpoint. They don’t engage community.”Downtown Jackson has been losing population for a generation. You can drive long vacant stretches between buildings before finding signs of life inside. Depopulation isn’t just a Jackson problem – when you look at the list of shrinking communities in America, Mississippi towns like Greenville, Clarksdale and Vicksburg top the list, all expectations of Sun belt growth be damned. People are fleeing poverty.The emptiness creates problems for those who remain: squatters and unobserved spaces nurturing crime. Loss begets a vicious cycle.But people live in this town. Many are thriving.An hour before blues time at Hal and Mal’s, Jackson’s resident drag queen Penny Nickels was finishing up trivia night at the other end of the bar. It’s a monthly event held by Mississippi Capital City Pride. They’re worried about how the police will handle anti-queer harassment.“I’ve had protesters outside protesting, just me. I’m just one queen,” Nickels said. “I’ll be getting out of the car in the parking lot, and they will be coming out. Like they will be yelling directly after me.”The city’s Pride festival is a major event in Jackson, and has long had administrative support from the city government, said Chris Ellis, chair-elect of Mississippi Capital City Pride.“The governor vacates the premises while we’re around,” Ellis said. “I’m sure if he was there, he would ignore us, pretend we don’t exist, or outright claim that we’re, you know, degenerates, and all that good stuff.”Jackson’s LGBTQ+ activists fought for protections from bullhorn-wielding protesters during Pride, and the city responded with an ordinance limiting how amplified sound can be used in public.Alas, the capitol police do not enforce Jackson city ordinances.That complicates the coordination Jackson’s police department hopes to achieve with the capitol police. For the moment, a single 911 system handles all calls for the city, regardless of type. “When a citizen dials 911, they don’t know if it’s a city ordinance or a state law,” Wade said.The legislature anticipated this problem. Reeves vetoed a bill extending local ordinance enforcement authority to the department, because he doesn’t like the city’s politics.In a Facebook message explaining his veto, Reeves said capitol police should not be obligated to uphold local laws restricting police from pursuing immigration violations, describing Jackson as a so-called sanctuary city.“I believe, if this bill were to become law, the capitol police could not assist ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in deporting illegal aliens that live in this community,” Reeves said. “Any time or attention – from an already under-resourced police force – on dealing with city ordinances [of which there are hundreds and none of which have been contemplated, much less approved, by the state] and code enforcement is an unnecessary diversion of personnel from their mission of finding and arresting the criminals.”Reeves did sign legislation requiring any protest next to state property in Jackson to obtain the written permission of the Mississippi public safety director or the capitol police chief. That legislation has been blocked in federal court.Jackson’s annual Pride march – which is held in an area that is now covered by the CCID – is nonetheless caught between the governor and his politics, Ellis said.“We’ve always done a march around Jackson as part of our festivities every year,” Ellis said. “And we’re talking about not doing that because it’s in the purview of the capitol police.”“The reason he even stopped me was because I had my white girlfriend in the car.” Just after leaving an arraignment hearing at the Hinds county courthouse in Jackson, a Black man in his 30s nervously, described the reasons he ran from a traffic stop from a capitol police officer in an unmarked car earlier this year. As the Jacksonian talks jackrabbit fast, he’s reliving the event. He requested anonymity to help prevent reprisals.“So he profiled me. I was driving her car,” the young man said, explaining how the officer pulled him over because his girlfriend was with him.“He gets out. I just see him waving the gun.“I instantly take off, police or no police. This is supposed to be a traffic stop. I’m not wanted for anything. And I haven’t did anything. But I’ve been assaulted by the police. I’ve been beat for nothing. They were supposed to be taking me to jail, instead they put gloves on, beat me and they just dropped me off in a neighboring neighborhood.”In his recollection, Jackson city police tuned him up in an alley some years ago. But it was capitol police that went after him recently.Jackson is depressing, he said.“Corrupt politicians, corrupt government system, corrupted … everything is fucked up. The streets have potholes. There are great people, but living under these circumstances, it creates chaos. The poverty contributes to crime, There’s no resources for our kids for anything to do. You can even have a degree, but you still have to know someone. Yeah, and this is being real.“If you can make it here, you can make anywhere. But if you didn’t make it out of here, then really, it was all against you anyway.”An afternoon in a courtroom at the Hinds county courthouse will break your heart. On a random Monday in July, two dozen men and women – mostly men, almost exclusively Black men shackled together – passed before the bench.The state’s initial legislative plan called for the establishment of a parallel court system for cases brought by the capitol police, bypassing Hinds county superior court. Chief justice Michael K Randolph, a white conservative Republican, would have appointed the judge for this court. Its prosecutors would be appointed by the attorney general, Lynn Fitch, also a white conservative Republican.A fifth circuit federal court approved the basic concept in affirming the law last year. But Mississippi’s state supreme court also ruled last year that the court’s judges could not be appointed and hear felonies under the Mississippi constitution.So now the plan is for the court to be restricted to misdemeanor cases, said Hinds county superior court judge Johnnie McDaniels.“The idea was that court was created to alleviate the backlog of cases in Hinds county. But I’m not sure we have a backlog of cases in terms of misdemeanor cases,” he said. “My position has always been that the state legislature should simply fund two other circuit court judges for Hinds county, so that we can address the real backlog of the number of cases we have. We have a a number of murder cases, a number of all types of cases. And our judges work extremely hard.”Almost all of the defendants had court-appointed attorneys because they were too poor to afford private counsel. Most stood accused of relatively minor crimes. Probation violations, because they didn’t want to show up in front of a probation officer without money to pay their fines. Drug possession. Running from the cops.But four faced murder charges.Senior judge Winston Kidd said what came through court that day was fairly normal. The murder problem is real.“And I acknowledged that when [SB] 1020 came out,” he said, referring to the bill that expanded the capitol police department’s power. “I acknowledged this problem. But no one could tell us why do we need this bill? The only thing I could go back to was the fact that all four circuit judges are African American, and in no other jurisdiction in this state had they tried something of that nature.”In 2017, the Mississippi legislature created the Capitol Complex Improvement District as a vehicle to fund infrastructure issues in Jackson. The state and the city have been feuding over control of its ageing water system. Bit by bit, the state’s eye has wandered over other Jackson assets – a baseball field here, the airport over there.Jackson needs the means to alleviate long-term problems of poverty. Instead, the state looks at taking what the city has left.“I’m more than just looking over my shoulder,” Mayor Lumumba says. “I’m anticipating and expecting it … In Mississippi, we’re also dealing with not what they don’t give us right. But an effort to take what we do have away from us.” More

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      ‘It was the same old show’: Kamala Harris responds to Trump’s attacks on her racial identity

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      Kamala Harris has shrugged off Donald Trump’s questioning of her racial identity, saying that it was “the same old show” and that “America deserves better”, at a rally in Texas.On Wednesday, in an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), Trump antagonised senior Black journalists and questioned Harris’s race, saying, “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black.”His interview, which was meant to last an hour, according to Axios, was cut short after 34 minutes.In Houston, Harris appeared unruffled and kept her remarks on Trump’s comments brief.“This afternoon,” she said, pausing for boos from the crowd. “Donald Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists.”“And it was the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth. A leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us – they are an essential source of our strength.”The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was speaking at the Sigma Gamma Rho’s 60th International Biennial Boulé, the Black sorority’s gathering of its entire membership in Houston, Texas. Harris said she was there “as a proud member of the Divine Nine” – a group of the most historically powerful Black fraternities and sororities in the US. Harris is an alumna of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.The Harris campaign said in a statement: “The Donald Trump America saw at NABJ is the one Black voters have known for years.”On Wednesday evening, Trump spoke at a rally in Pennsylvania, his first in the state since the assassination attempt against him last month.Trump said of Harris, “Don’t forget. Four weeks ago she was considered, like, the worst,” and that she had had a “personality makeover … All of a sudden she’s considered the new Margaret Thatcher”.View image in fullscreenAs supporters waited for Trump at the rally, which started an hour late, giant screens displayed a 2016 Business Insider headline referring to Harris as the first “Indian-American US senator”.On Wednesday evening in Maine, Harris’s husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff – who was himself subjected to attacks from Trump this week – said Trump’s remarks in Chicago reflected “a worse version of an already horrible person”, the Washington Post reported. “He should never be near the White House again.”“The insults, the BS – it’s horrible, it’s terrible, it shows a lack of character,” Emhoff said.White House Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was speaking to journalists as Trump made his remarks on the NABJ panel. Asked about the comments, which a journalist read out to her, she at first said she would be “super careful”, then changed her mind. “Wait. No, no, no,” she said.“As a person of colour, as a Black woman who is in this position,” she said, referring to her role, “What he just said, what you just read out to me is repulsive. It’s insulting.”Harris was the only person qualified to say what her identity was, she continued.“And I think it’s insulting for anybody – it doesn’t matter if it’s a former leader, a former president – it is insulting.” More

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      Trump repeats lies and attacks Kamala Harris’s racial identity at panel of Black journalists

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      During a contentious and chaotic panel hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) on Wednesday, Donald Trump parroted disinformation about immigration and abortion, questioned Kamala Harris’s race and accused a panel moderator, Rachel Scott – the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News – of being “rude” and presenting a “nasty question” when she asked him: “Why should Black voters trust you?”The appearance – which received backlash earlier this week from Black journalists citing the former president’s anti-Black, anti-journalist and anti-democracy history – received a mix of jeers, laughter and interruptions from attendees as Trump evaded several questions asked by moderators.On multiple occasions, audience members at the annual convention in Chicago attempted to fact-check Trump in real time, including when he falsely claimed that Harris did not pass her bar exam to be a lawyer, and when he defended pardoning people who were convicted for their actions on January 6.Trump arrived more than an hour late to the panel, which was moderated by Scott; Harris Faulkner, the Fox News television host; and Kadia Goba, the Semafor politics reporter. According to HuffPost, Trump demanded that NABJ organizers not go through with live fact-checking during the discussion, and was in a “standoff” with organizers before the event took place. A live fact-check of Trump’s comments was still featured as planned.The conversation opened with Scott asking why Black voters should trust Trump given his repeated, inflammatory comments about Black people.“Well, first of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” Trump said, before asking whether Scott was with “fake news network” ABC News. (When he levied a later attack on Scott, one audience member shouted back in her defense.)Trump added: “I think it’s disgraceful that I came here in good spirit. I love the Black population of this country. I’ve done so much for the Black population of this country … I think it’s a very rude introduction.“He continued: “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln,” which received a mix of boos and applause.Despite promoting his attendance at NABJ on Wednesday morning, by the afternoon panel Trump was claiming to have been invited under false pretenses. The former president said he had been told that Harris would be present at the convention and was instructed to attend in-person. (A source close to the Harris campaign said on Tuesday that she was unable to attend due to the ongoing search for her running mate and the funeral of the representative Sheila Lee Jackson. )Throughout the panel conversation, Trump relied on many of his previous talking points with Black voters.He repeated the unsubstantiated claim that undocumented immigrants were planning on taking “Black jobs”, an assertion that many have condemned as racist.When asked by Scott to clarify what Black jobs were, Trump replied: “Anybody that has a job – that’s what it is. They’re taking the employment away from Black people.”Scott then asked Trump about Republicans claiming that Harris is a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) replacement for Joe Biden.In response, Trump claimed that Harris suddenly “became a Black woman” and had previously only been identifying with her Indian heritage. “Is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said, as the audience audibly gasped. “I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of sudden she became a Black woman.”Scott replied that Trump’s assertion was untrue, that Harris has always identified as Black, and that she attended Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington DC.Reaction to the panel was mixed among journalists in the room.At least two Black attendees sporting Trump hats frequently cheered for the former president, especially as he reiterated that he faced “political persecution” after being convicted of 34 felonies.Others were critical. “Ultimately, the conversation was a non-starter,” said Michael Liptrot, South Side weekly reporter. “The moderators did their best to lead a productive conversation and dive deeper and, ultimately, attempts to flip the question led to a stalemate in many ways.”Laura Washington, a political analyst at ABC 7 in Chicago, said Trump “came out very hostile” from the very beginning of the panel: “That was a very difficult thing for the [moderators] to manage because he didn’t answer the questions and was sort of trying to turn their questions back on them and make them the bad women in the room.”Still, Liptrot and Washington agreed that the panel should have taken place, noting the NABJ tradition of inviting Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and the need to hold Trump accountable.Jasmine Harris, the Black media director for Kamala Harris’s campaign, hit back at Trump’s NABJ remarks in a statement, emphasizing the former president’s lies and attacks on members of the press.“Not only does Donald Trump have a history of demeaning NABJ members and honorees who remain pillars of the Black press, he also has a history of attacking the media and working against the vital role the press play in our democracy,” Harris said.“We know that Donald Trump is going to lie about his record and the real harm he’s caused Black communities at NABJ – and he must be called out,” she added.Members of the Biden administration were also critical of Trump’s attack on Harris’s racial identity. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, called Trump’s remarks “repulsive” and “insulting” during a Wednesday White House briefing.“I think it’s insulting for anybody. It doesn’t matter if it’s a former leader, a former president, it is insulting,” she said. “She is the vice-president of the United States. Kamala Harris. We have to put some respect on her name. Period.” More

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      ‘It puts everyone in a really bad position’: Black journalists react to Trump joining NABJ panel

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      On Monday night, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) announced that Donald Trump will participate in a panel discussion at the organization’s annual convention in Chicago, which starts on Wednesday.The announcement, which said that the Q&A would “concentrate on the most pressing issues facing the Black community”, was met with swift online backlash from some Black journalists. They decried the decision to invite a presidential candidate who has lambasted Black journalists, led a movement to squash diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and who is responsible for increased anti-journalistic sentiment, including the popularization of the term “fake news” to describe factual, but potentially unflattering, reporting.Tiffany Walden, a co-founder and editor-in-chief of The TRiiBE, a digital platform that focuses on Black Chicago, told the Guardian that NABJ’s decision was “irresponsible”.“We’ve watched Trump threaten to send the feds here when he was in office,” Walden said. “We’ve watched him use Chicago as a dog whistle in all of his campaign’s materials during his first run for office. He talked about Chicago having top gang thugs. So this puts the city of Chicago and its residents in a very vulnerable position. It also puts Black journalists in a very vulnerable position at a convention that’s supposed to be a safe space for them.”Ameshia Cross, a political analyst, echoed this sentiment on X: “The same Trump that attacked Black journalists from the stump. The same Trump who is attacking DEI, can’t get ahead of his own racism and sexism. And the guy who wants to dissolve journalism as we know it, that’s who is speaking at #NABJ24 w/ record attendance. C’mon yall.”Another journalist, Carron J Phillips, called the move “the single dumbest and worst decision in NABJ history”.The outcry led to the NABJ president, Ken Lemon, and others defending the decision, saying that Black reporters should have the opportunity to question a political candidate.“Every year, every presidential election cycle, we invite the presidential candidates to come,” Lemon said to NABJ student journalists on Tuesday. “We extend that to anyone who is a nominee and in this case we have two presumptive nominees. We invited both of them … This is an important hour. We have people whose lives are depending on what happens in November … This is a great opportunity for us to vet the candidate right here on our ground.”Kamala Harris is scheduled to speak elsewhere on Wednesday, when Trump will be at NABJ, but her confirmation to attend this year’s convention, which lasts through Sunday, is “pending”, according to NABJ.Tia Mitchell, the chair of NABJ’s political journalism taskforce and a Washington correspondent at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote on X: “I helped make this call. And it’s in line with invitations NABJ has sent to every presidential candidate for decades. But continue to go off on your feed. I’ll continue to work to create opportunities for journalists to interview the potential next President.” (Mitchell, NABJ and NABJ’s Chicago chapter did not respond to requests for comment.)Wednesday’s panel will be moderated by Rachel Scott, a senior congressional correspondent for ABC News; Harris Faulkner, who anchors The Faulkner Focus and Outnumbered for Fox News; and Kadia Goba, a politics reporter for Semafor.“As journalists, we can never be afraid to tackle someone like Trump,” Jemele Hill, a contributing reporter for the Atlantic, wrote on X. “The reality is that he is running for president and needs to be treated as such. Being questioned by journalists is part of the job, and especially important in the company of Black journalists. Mainstream media keeps trying to convince us that he actually is gaining support among Black people. Let’s see if it’s true.”But the journalist Matthew Wright pushed back on the notion that there was anything productive in questioning Trump.“What does that serve?” Wright said to the Guardian. “We literally just watched him talk to Laura Ingraham [who] was trying to get him to answer different questions, but he practically played evasive of action even then. If a super conservative white woman can’t get straight answers out of him, what makes you think that three black women are going to get them?”In a statement about the NABJ appearance, Trump’s campaign wrote: “President Trump accomplished more for Black Americans than any other president in recent history.” Some journalists used this statement as evidence that NABJ’s decision to platform the former president was harmful, and would lead to further perpetuation of falsehoods.“This is the way 45 is touting his appearance before @nabj this week. Was this what you wanted [Tia Mitchell]? He is already lying and he isn’t even in Chicago yet. This is your legacy,” April Reign, a media strategist, wrote on X.The timing of the panel announcement – less than 48 hours before the convention’s start – also drew concern from NABJ members.Shamira Ibrahim, a culture writer, told the Guardian that she was shocked by the decision.“It puts everyone in a really bad position,” Ibrahim said. “You already paid your convention fees, you already paid for a hotel that’s likely not refundable at this point, flights are likely difficult to get replaced. Even if you have a moral opposition to it or an ethical opposition to it, you’re kind of already stuck in whatever plan you made.”NABJ’s annual convention has allowed Black journalists a space to fellowship and gather safely since the organization’s founding in 1975, with some reporters likening it to a family reunion. Inviting Trump, Ibrahim said, undermined that sense of community.“NABJ is primarily not just a place for journalists to get opportunities to interview politicians, but also a place for Black journalists to network, to have open conversations about things that are happening in the industry, to attend panels, and really get a sense of how to shift in a very, very volatile, fragile space,” she continued.“Inviting someone who, one, has made targeted attacks on Black journalists, two, has actively been responsible in defunding programs that help build Black journalists, and three, has publicly attacked the Black press flies in the face of any sort of fidelity convention.”On Tuesday afternoon, a coalition of organizations, including Chicago Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression and Anti-War Committee Chicago, announced plans to rally outside the convention to “tell Trump he’s not welcome in Chicago”. More

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      ‘I’m rocking with Kamala’: Black men defy faulty polling by showing up for Harris campaign

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      On Monday night, more than 53,000 Black men joined a virtual conference, Win With Black Men, to rally behind the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. During the four-hour call, organizers said the group raised more than $1.3m for the Harris campaign and grassroots voter organizations focused on Black men.The success of the call, which was inspired by the Win With Black Women call the night before, runs counter to the narrative shaped by recent election polling indicating that 30% of Black men are planning on voting for Donald Trump. “Don’t let anybody slow us down asking the question: ‘Can a Black woman be elected president of the United States?’” Raphael Warnock, who represents Georgia in the US Senate, said on the call. “Kamala Harris can win. We just have to show up. History is watching us, and the future is waiting on us.”Black voters have consistently been a key voting bloc for Democrats, but experts say inaccurate polling about Black men in particular could be creating false narratives about their leanings this election cycle, mainly the idea that there is a mass shift of Black voters to the Republican party. Win With Black Men, which was hosted by the journalist Roland Martin, said it’s working to dispel stereotypical notions about changes in Black male voting habits, their refusal to support a woman candidate and their unwillingness to mobilize politically.“People are making a lot of conjectures without actually talking to a large enough sample of Black people to be able to say things with the precision that they’re making it,” Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University, said. “You’re not going to be able to detect what is likely to be no more [than] a one- to three-point swing in favor of Donald Trump based on changes in surveys where you’re talking to 200 Black people at a time. I can’t say with any statistical certainty that that three-point shift is real or not.”Unrepresentative polls can also have an adverse effect on voter habits. People tend to vote if they perceive that an election is close, Gillespie said. So polls that suggest that Trump is going to win easily and that even Black people will vote in droves for him may distort people’s understanding of reality. Ensuring that the public is aware of potential polling inaccuracies is key.“These narratives are also used to kind of confuse Black voters themselves, which can in turn depress Black vote and drive down turnout,” said Christopher Towler, founder of the Black Voter Project (BVP), a national polling initiative. “It can be used as a mechanism of voter deterrence, knowing that Black voters will play a key role in this election.”View image in fullscreenThough Gillespie said it will take a few days for new polling that specifically examines how Harris is performing with Black voters, recent mobilization around Harris suggests that narratives about a would-be exodus of this bloc from the Democratic party might have been premature.The problem comes down to sample size. In surveys of 1,000 to 1,500 voters, sub-sample sizes of Black voters may be anywhere from 150 to 300. In some cases, all people of color are amalgamated into one demographic group. Surveys with such a small sample size create large margins of error.“The issue is the level of precision with which we can make certain types of pronouncements when you’re talking to that few people,” Gillespie said. “The number that comes out in the survey is the midpoint of a range of possible numbers that we think is in the real population because of statistical analysis.”If the sub-sample size is less than 100, she said, the margin of error is plus or minus 10. So if a survey says that 20% of Black voters are going for Trump, the real number based on the sub-sample is between 10% and 30%.Towler, of the Black Voter Project, said that he began noticing the issue of unrepresentative polling years ago. He started BVP to “counteract the industry standard of taping on a couple hundred Black responses to a general survey” and using that small sample size as a full picture.“It’s really unscientific,” Towler said. “So I’ve worked for years now to try and create data that is reliable, accurate and actually representative of the Black community.”This year, BVP released a large, multiwave, national public opinion survey focused on collecting representative data of Black Americans. Fielded from 29 March to 18 April, with 2,004 Black Americans interviewed, the survey collected a nationally representative sample of respondents from all 50 states. The BVP study found that 15% of respondents would vote for Trump if the election had been held at the time of the survey, a figure much lower than reported by other polls with smaller sample sizes. A survey on the BVP scale is important to garner an idea of what the Black population and Black voting population of the US actually looks like, Gillespie said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut mainstream beltway polling companies typically lack Black leadership, so accurate polling of Black communities is not a priority, said Towler. What’s more, some pollsters do not see the value in spending more money to survey a population that they estimate will already vote staunchly Democratic.Black and brown communities exist on the margins in American politics, said Emmitt Riley, president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Mainstream political scientists’ biases result in pollsters who are not adequately capturing the political behaviors and views of excluded groups.“Many people who study race aren’t considered to be mainstream political scholars,” he said. “This has profound consequences for the kind of reporting that’s happening, the kind of news stories that are coming out, how you describe what’s happening in these communities.”Towler said that pollsters should create surveys that are culturally competent and that ask questions in ways that don’t manufacture misleading opinions. “It’s important when looking at polling of Black people to, one, not only make sure you have polls designed to accurately measure Black opinion, but to also have pollsters who study and understand the Black community,” he said.While polls continue to try to parse out where Black men will place their political support, groups like Win With Black Men and Black Men for Harris are making their loyalties clear.“Let’s protect Kamala. Let’s be with her like she was there for us,” Bakari Sellers, the former South Carolina representative, said on the call. “We are going to disagree a lot. But let’s put the petty bickering aside. Let’s stand up and be the Black men who change this country. We built this country. I’m rocking with Kamala.” More

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      Conservatives’ racist and sexist attacks on Kamala Harris show exactly who they are | Judith Levine

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      Like a warm compress drawing pus from a wound, the Democratic presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris immediately brought out the misogyny and racism of the Maga Republican party.Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican representative, called Harris, the child of a Black Jamaican father and an Indian mother, a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) hire – picked, that is, because she is Black, not because she’s qualified. Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, insinuated that Harris is a welfare queen. “What the hell have you done other than collect a check?” he asked at a Michigan rally of Harris, a former state attorney general, US senator and now the vice-president. At the same time, social media posts showing Harris with her parents falsely claim she’s not really Black, because her father is light-skinned.Popping up again are rumors circulated in 2020 by Trump lawyer John Eastman that Harris is ineligible to run for office because she might not be a citizen. Like Barack Obama, about whom Trump stirred the same “birther” calumny, Harris was born in the US.Far-right blogger Matt Walsh and former Fox host Megyn Kelly suggested Harris slept her way to the top. Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer went further, alleging that the veep was “once an escort” who started out by “giving blow jobs to successful, rich, Black men”. The founder of Pastors for Trump tweeted: “Both Joe + the Ho gotta go!”While allegedly copulating with all comers, Harris is slammed for failing in her womanly duty to reproduce. In a video that recently turned up, Vance, the father of three, told Tucker Carlson in 2021 that the US was being run by “childless cat ladies” – Harris among them – who don’t “have a direct stake” in the country’s future. Will Chamberlain, a lawyer who worked on Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, proclaimed that “people without kids … are highly susceptible to corruption and perversion. They have no care for the future and live in the present.”Being a step-parent – as Harris is to her husband’s biological children – doesn’t count, Chamberlain added. This criticism has never been leveled against the childless George Washington – although, to be fair, he was the Father of Our Country.And if misogyny and racism are not sufficient, the right keeps searching for plain weirdness to use against the Democratic candidate. All they’ve come up with, though, is one of her more charming characteristics, her laugh, from which Trump derives his lamest-yet political nickname: “Laughing Kamala”.This stuff is vile to watch. But as with drained pus, it’s got to be exposed to the air. Because it’s not just talk. It reveals what a Trump presidency would mean. By exposing what’s festering barely under the skin of Trumpism, the Republican party is telling us to vote against him.While in office, Trump’s ignorance and incompetence prevented him from accomplishing – or, often, knowing – what he wanted to do. In his madder moments, some of his advisers pulled him back from the edge. But this time, he’s got a team of smart, loyal experts and a detailed plan, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to get it done.In 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s murder spread across the country, Trump gunned to gun down the protesters – literally. “Can’t you just shoot them?” he asked Mark Esper, according to the then defense secretary’s memoir. In another memoir, then Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender quotes the apoplectic president calling on police and the military to “crack [protesters’] skulls” and “beat the fuck” out of them. For the most part, this didn’t happen.Should Project 2025 become reality, however, the commander-in-chief would be freer to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which authorizes him to direct the military to put down domestic unrest. The blueprint also advises the administration to revoke all consent decrees imposing federal oversight on police departments with records of brutality and murder of civilians, particularly civilians of color.The 2024 Republican national convention, featuring Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock and another straight white man on the ticket, was practically a parody of the white hypermasculinity animating the party. But the Republican party promises to force its gender ideology on the rest of us. “Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” reads the platform. Project 2025 proposes that “the redefinition of sex to cover gender identity and sexual orientation … be reversed” and the phrase “sexual orientation and gender identity” be eliminated from anti-discrimination policies across federal agencies. In fact, its aim is to eliminate anti-discrimination policies altogether.And, of course, there’s abortion. In 2016, Trump opined that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Then he walked the statement back. This April, he told a reporter that states should be allowed to punish doctors. “Everything we’re doing now is states and states’ rights,” he elaborated, using the historical code words for legislated racial segregation – now updated to gender oppression. And while he’s distanced himself from a federal abortion ban, Project 2025 is riddled with pledges to protect the safety, dignity and humanity of the unborn.Clueless as he was, Trump attained the right’s holy grail: a supreme court majority that will decimate the civil and human rights of people of color, pregnant people, the poor, immigrants and the marginalized long into the future. The Trump court is already punishing people who seek abortions. Even if Congress founders, this court will realize every racist and misogynist dream.It’s hard to say whether this bigotry will sway voters. A month before the 2016 election, after a campaign of one racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic outburst after another, Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” tape was leaked and a dozen women accused the candidate of sexual misconduct. Hillary Clinton surged to a lead of as much as 11 points. Then, FBI director James Comey released a letter equivocating on the extent or importance of those official emails on her private server, and Trump won. It’s still unclear whether the Comey report turned the election. But the pussy-grabbing tape did not.Still, in 2016, Trump was a pig but an untested pig. A lot has happened since then. His presidency was bookended by the Women’s March and the Black Lives Matter protests. In 2017, Tarana Burke’s #MeToo hashtag went viral and rage over sexual harassment exploded. Five years later, Pew Research found that the majority of Americans, including Republicans, felt the #MeToo movement had a positive impact. BLM engaged protesters of every age and race, and antiracist movements continue to. Trump has been convicted of sexual abuse. Now, if anything, Maga is focusing the anger of women and people of color.Republican leaders sense these changes, and they’re worried – worried enough that Richard Hudson, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, called a closed-door meeting to tell the caucus to cut the slime and focus on the issues.Maybe they will. But Trump and his nastier champions will not: hatred will continue to ooze from their mouths. Disgusting as it, pay attention. Because sexism and racism are not just talk. They’re policies – the calamitous policies a Trump presidency augurs.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More