Now We Know Why That Disastrous Trump Event Started So Late - Edith Olmsted (2024)

Donald Trump almost didn’t take the stage at the National Association of Black Journalists conference earlier this week because he was terrified of being fact-checked.

The former president appeared on stage Wednesday more than an hour late to take part in a conversation moderated by ABC News’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner, and Semafor’s political reporter Kadia Goba.

Trump quickly complained about the delayed start, saying it had taken half an hour for the NABJ to get their sound equipment to work. Apparently, he was trying to get ahead of something else.

While there were some audio problems, “the bigger problem was his threat not to take the stage when he had agreed to go on. He did not want to be fact-checked, but we could not let him on the stage without fact-checking,” NABJ president Ken Lemon told Axios in a story published Friday.

The NABJ had arranged for Trump’s interview to be simultaneously fact-checked online in collaboration with Politifact. At one point, Trump’s team requested that the NABJ not post fact-checking to its social media accounts, or allow the moderator to discuss the fact-checking on stage, according to Lemon.

“Our whole team stood our ground,” Lemon told Axios.

At one point, things got desperate. “I was prepared to go on stage to craft a statement, saying he decided not to go on stage because of fact-checking... we couldn’t compromise on that,” Lemon said.

But as Lemon drafted his statement, Trump finally walked on stage, Lemon said.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told Axios a different story. He said that Trump’s team waited “for close to 40 minutes while audio/technical issues were fixed by NABJ.”

Trump used his contentious appearance to launch racist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, including questioning her race as the crowd booed him.

Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, gushed to NOTUS Thursday, lauding Trump for being so brave about the whole event. “He actually goes into hostile audiences, he answers tough questions, he pushes back against them, but he actually answers them, and how nice it is to have an American leader who’s not afraid to go into hostile places and actually answer some tough questions,” Vance said.

However, it’s clear Trump is distinctly unwilling to go into hostile audiences, and was left scrambling for a way to back out when he knew his words would be held to account. His team ended up cutting off the event, which was scheduled to last an hour, after just 34 minutes. If his seething response to ABC’s Scott is any indication, Trump can’t take a tough question at all.

Vice President Kamala Harris has shattered campaign fundraising expectations, bringing in a whopping $310 million in July, more than double Donald Trump’s $137 million.

Harris took over President Biden’s campaign operation after he decided to withdraw from the 2024 presidential election less than two weeks ago, spurring the floodgates to open. The Democratic campaign has $377 million in cash on hand, $50 million more than the Trump campaign, Politico reports.

The Biden-Harris campaign has also cracked the $1 billion mark with four months left until the election, the quickest campaign to do that in history, they said on Friday.

Trump had successful fundraising months after his hush-money felony convictions in May, causing him to catch up to Biden. After Biden’s poor showing in June’s presidential debate, the president’s fundraising started to dry up from both small donors and major ones. Some even stopped their donations to pressure Biden to withdraw from the race.

But after Harris entered the race, small donors rushed to donate, with two-thirds of July’s donations coming from first-time donors. Several Zoom calls, such as White Dudes for Harris and Black Women for Harris, raised more than $20 million.

Harris’s rise has caught the Trump campaign off guard, and they have no idea how to deal with her. She has erased his polling advantage in several swing states. And Trump, who usually has insults and nicknames at the ready, is struggling to respond to Harris calling him and his running mate “weird.”

But will these positive numbers, along with the good vibes, be enough? Harris will announce her own running mate soon, and her pick can’t be one that alienates Democrats and stunts her momentum. If she chooses well, Democrats will be looking to November with optimism.

On Thursday evening, at-large Houston City councilwoman Letitia Plummer announced that she’s seeking the nomination for the late Sheila Jackson Lee’s congressional seat. If elected, Plummer would become the first Muslim woman to represent Texas in Congress.

Jackson Lee held Texas’s gerrymandered-to-hell 18th district—contorted into the shape of a partially eaten donut to encompass Houston’s mostly Black and brown north—for the better part of 30 years, and was arguably one of Texas’s more progressive legislators. When she died of pancreatic cancer in mid-July, it didn’t take long for those waiting in the wings to announce intentions to replace her. In a statement, Plummer wrote that she plans on “continuing [Jackson Lee’s] tradition of robust and unapologetic advocacy.”

Plummer, a dentist by trade, touted her support from labor and her City Hall record focusing on “quality of life issues” for underserved communities—a common touchstone for Houston politicians, given the repeated and intensifying environmental crises plaguing the city. When asked, she also said she would support a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and oppose all military funding to Israel, a major departure from her predecessor. “I do believe I would be the only one [in this race] that would take that level of hard stance,” she told The New Republic. “I obviously am against any level of terrorism, but we cannot continue to kill innocent people.” Two hours after this article was published, she backtracked, saying she didn’t hear the full question, and clarified that she believed Israel needed military support for defense and “release of the hostages and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire are both necessary.” *

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has yet to call for a special election for Jackson Lee’s seat, so instead, per Texas law, the race will be decided in a few weeks by just 88 Democratic Party precinct chairs representing parts of the 18th congressional district, a truncated process meant to fill the seat in a crunch. In seeking the party’s nomination, Plummer has chosen her words carefully so as not to jeopardize her current city hall position; local precedent says officeholders can technically “seek” the nomination to become the party’s candidate but can’t “announce his or her........

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