Rev. Al Sharpton said Donald Trump accomplished what he set out to do by appearing at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday.
The former president’s goal, according to Sharpton, was not to reach a new audience—but to show his majority-white base that he’s still on their side.
“He went in there and stood up to those Black journalists, stood up and called the vice president someone that is not proud of who she is,” Sharpton told MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace shortly after Trump’s widely panned interview. “Played to those few Black men that he’s trying to get off.”
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The longtime civil rights leader and Democratic activist said the former president used the audience of Black journalists primarily as a “backboard” to score points with his own fan base.
“I will go to their own conference and do everything but call them the n-word,” Sharpton said, describing what he said was Trump’s thought process. “And I will try to act like their candidate, their hero, their strong black woman they’re rallying around—she didn’t even say she was black until a little while ago.”
At the conference, Trump raised eyebrows when he said Vice President Kamala Harris “happened to turn Black” after previously identifying with her mother’s Indian heritage.
“I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t,” Trump told ABC News’ Rachel Scott. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.”
Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an immigrant from India. Her father, Stanford University economics professor emeritus Donald J. Harris, is a Black immigrant originally from Jamaica. Harris attended Howard University, a prominent HBCU in Washington, D.C.
Sharpton had harsh words for Trump’s critique, asking the Republican candidate, “when did we not know she was Black? When she was elected the first Black district attorney of San Francisco? Or maybe when she was elected the first Black attorney general of the state of California? Or maybe we missed it when she was the only Black woman in the U.S. Senate? Or the only Black woman to run for vice president?”
Trump, for his part, doubled down on the criticism of Harris after the interview—reposting a video on Truth Social where Harris cooks Indian food with actor Mindy Kaling.
Sharpton also accused the former president of having “a serious problem with Blacks, period. Particularly Black women,” later adding that he “saw the NABJ as a useful platform for him to show that he will stand up to Blacks, and call us whatever he wants to call us, and attack our people in our face. And they aren’t gonna do anything about it.”
