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Donald Trump said he would “fire” the ABC News journalist who grilled him about his past comments during a panel at the National Association of Black Journalists convention on July 31.
During his appearance on Adin Ross’s livestream on Kick on Monday, Trump was asked for his reaction to the event, which his campaign appeared to cut short by 30 minutes when it was clear that he led the session off the rails.
“This woman starts talking … about racism, and I said, ‘You didn’t even say hello to me,’ and I’m doing them a favor by doing this,” Trump told Ross on Monday. “I’m doing this out of respect to the Black community.”
Last week, ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott asked Trump about his history of false claims about his rivals and his inflammatory remarks to officials and reporters of color.
“Why would Black voters trust you when you have used language like that?” she asked.
“I don’t think I’ve been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” Trump replied. “You don’t even say hello, how are you.”
Trump told Ross that he didn’t “know who she was.”
“She was nasty. Terrible person,” he said. “She is horrible. She was very nasty.”
He later said that “if I owned that network I would fire her so fast.”
During his appearance at the NABJ conference in Chicago, Trump also baselessly questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity and falsely claimed that she only recently “made a turn” and “became a Black person.”
Scott has since reportedly faced threats to her life following the interview, while Trump’s remarks revived racist “birther” conspiracy theories and false characterizations about Harris’s biracial identity.
The NABJ executive director reportedly 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.”
Ross — a 23-year-old streamer with a mostly young male audience of more than 1.4 million Kick followers and 4.4 million YouTube subscribers — fawned over the former president during a 90-minute stream and gave him a Rolex and a Tesla Cybertruck wrapped in images of the former president.
In mostly rambling answers to a handful of questions, Trump repeated his familiar grievances and complaints about immigration, crime, San Francisco, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
