It is said that Rachel Scott, a senior congressional reporter for ABC News, has been threatened with death after her sharp interview with Donald Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists convention made the former president angry.
Eric Deggans of National Public Radio wrote in an X post published Saturday that 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.
ABC’s Rachel Scott has received death threats following her interview with Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. pic.twitter.com/I5i2e4FrCN
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) August 4, 2024
The Guardian has asked the NABJ, ABC, and Scott for their thoughts on what Deggans said.
With all of the bad things said about Black people in the past, Scott asked Trump on Wednesday, “Why should Black voters trust you?” She asked him, among other things, if he thought Vice-President Kamala Harris had become the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president in November “just because she is a Black woman.”
Trump replied to Scott by calling her “rude” and saying she asked a “nasty question.” He said this about Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent: “I didn’t know she was Black until she turned Black a few years ago.” She now wants to be called Black.
“Okay, I don’t know.” “Is she Black or Indian?”
Trump’s comments about Harris drew widespread ridicule at a time when polls, including one Sunday from CBS News, show the pair tied in key battleground states. On Sunday, US Senator Lindsey Graham – one of Trump’s fellow prominent Republicans – urged him to focus on condemning her policies rather than her background.
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“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 meeting 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 company of an irate mob of fans.
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 star Stormy Daniels.
United Nations experts have previously warned that such vitriol from Trump and his followers – 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 were upset that Trump was booked to speak at the NABJ conference in Chicago because he has anti-Black, anti-journalist, and anti-democratic views.
Ken Lemon, president of the NABJ, said that inviting Trump to speak was in line with a long history of questioning national politicians. But Karen Attiah of the Washington Post quit her job as co-chairperson of the convention’s organizing group because she didn’t want Trump to speak at the event.
Scott led Trump’s session at the NABJ meeting on Wednesday, along with Harris Faulkner of Fox News and Kadia Goba of Semafor.
