Former President Donald J. Trump, in a combative appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, repeatedly disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris and the Black women interviewing him as he made the case on Wednesday that Black voters should vote for him in November.
In a 30-minute appearance, Mr. Trump made false and exaggerated claims about Ms. Harris, overstated his role in securing funding for historically Black colleges and universities and repeated his false assertion that he did more for Black Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln. He also rehashed several other inaccurate claims about inflation, immigration and other topics that have become staples of his public appearances.
Here’s a fact check.
What Was Said
“I’ve known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much. And 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.”
False. Ms. Harris, the daughter of an Indian American mother and Jamaican father, has consistently identified as Black in public life and long before she entered the national stage.
Ms. Harris told The Washington Post in 2019 that she had long been comfortable with her racial identity. The Post reported that during her 2010 race for attorney general of California, some members of the Indian American community in San Francisco had not known about Ms. Harris’s Indian heritage, and that in public office, Ms. Harris had “tended to stress issues over her personal biography.”
But Ms. Harris never hid her biracial background during various campaigns. In her 2019 autobiography, “The Truths We Hold,” Ms. Harris wrote that her family instilled “pride in our South Asian roots” in her and her sister, Maya, but that “my mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters.”
“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women,” Ms. Harris wrote in the book.
Ms. Harris joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, a sorority for Black women, at Howard University, a historically Black university. She was also the president of the Black Law Students Association at the University of California Hasting College of Law.
A 1999 Los Angeles Times article mentioning Ms. Harris, then an assistant district attorney in San Francisco, referred to her as a “liberal African American” prosecutor, and a 2000 San Francisco Examiner article called Ms. Harris a leader in the city’s Black community. She first ran for public office in 2002 for San Francisco district attorney and, when she won her race, became the state’s first Black district attorney.
She appeared on a panel as an emerging leader in the Black community in a 2006 conference. And in a 2009 speech to a Los Angeles-area high school about Black history, Ms. Harris spoke of her personal history as intertwined with that of the civil rights movement, alluding to how her parents “organized” in the streets during the 1960s.
When she ran for California attorney general in 2010, news outlets called Ms. Harris the “female Obama” and her campaign website emphasized that she was the “first African American woman and first South Asian woman in California to hold the office.”
Mr. Trump donated to Ms. Harris’s campaign after she became attorney general in 2011.
What Was Said
“She did not pass her bar exam. And she didn’t think she would pass it, and she didn’t think she was ever going to pass it. And I don’t know what happened. Maybe she did pass it.”
This needs context. Ms. Harris failed California’s bar exam on her first attempt in July 1989, according to her autobiography, and received a letter in November that she had failed, “to my utter devastation.” While she did not address her subsequent exams in the book, Ms. Harris was admitted to the bar in June 1990.
The California bar exam is among the hardest in the country. The July 1989 exam had a pass rate of 59.5 percent, while the February 1990 exam — presumably the one Ms. Harris took — had a pass rate of 45.9 percent.
What Was Said
“Historically Black colleges and universities were out of money. They were stone-cold broke. And I saved them. And I gave them long-term financing.”
This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump is taking outsize credit. Historically Black colleges and universities were not “broke,” but federal funding for H.B.C.U.s did run out in September 2019, a casualty of a broader fight in the Senate about education policy. That December, Republicans and Democrats reached a compromise to restore that funding and made it permanent for a decade. Mr. Trump signed the legislation into law.
Democratic lawmakers and one H.B.C.U. president told Inside Higher Ed that Mr. Trump did little to secure the funding besides bestowing his signature, though Republicans said his support was instrumental.
It is also worth noting that Mr. Trump did not request the increased funding that the schools received. He requested $643 million in funding for H.B.C.U.s in the 2019 fiscal year and $626 million in the 2020 fiscal year, but congressional appropriations topped $700 million in both years.
What Was Said
“I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”
False. Historians would beg to differ. Among modern presidents, the most significant legislative achievements arguably belong to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who shepherded the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act.
Mr. Trump tends to count among his accomplishments the First Step Act, a bipartisan bill that made changes to federal prison sentencing; the inclusion in the 2017 tax overhaul of the Opportunity Zones program, which offer a tax break for investing in low-income communities and communities of color; funding for H.B.C.U.s; and low unemployment rates for Black Americans.
The First Step Act was the “the culmination of several years” of efforts and debate, according to the Congressional Research Service, and it fell short of goals set by a more expansive overhaul proposed in 2015.
The Opportunity Zones tax break has “fueled a wave of developments financed by and built for the wealthiest Americans,” The New York Times reported in 2019. A 2020 study found the tax break did little to spur job creation in the “zones,” many of which were in predominantly Black communities.
The unemployment rate for Black Americans did reach 5.3 percent in September 2019, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records in 1972. But it fell even lower under President Biden, to 5.1 percent in March 2023.
Other Claims
Mr. Trump also repeated many talking points that The New York Times has previously fact-checked:
He claimed that the real inflation was “more than” the Consumer Price Index as it did not include interest rates. (The C.P.I. does not include interest rates for many reasons.)
He claimed that many unauthorized immigrants were coming from prisons and mental institutions. (There is no evidence for this claim.)
He misleadingly claimed that Mr. Biden’s classified documents case was “much worse” than his own. (The volume found in Mr. Biden’s case was much smaller. Also, Mr. Biden’s aides alerted officials when documents were discovered and cooperated, while Mr. Trump repeatedly defied requests.)
He falsely claimed that Democrats were allowing abortion “after the baby is born.” (Infanticide is illegal in every state.)
He misleadingly compared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, asserting that “nothing happened” to protesters. (Thousands of those protesters were, in fact, arrested.)
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