in Featured World News Harris Faulkner dishes on what really happened behind scenes during viral Trump black journalist event
By Harold Hutchison, Daily Caller News Foundation
‘I thought, OK, you know what? I’m probably wrong. We get on that stage. I wasn’t wrong. What I saw was real’
Fox News host Harris Faulkner said she knew something was askew before President Donald Trump’s July 31, 2024, interview with a panel during the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference when asked about it during an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Trump was interviewed by Faulkner, ABC News reporter Rachel Scott and Semafor reporter Kadia Goba, during which he clashed with Scott over her first question about Trump’s criticism of left-wing members of Congress and former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, and also commented on Vice President Kamala Harris, saying that he “didn’t know she was black” until a few years ago. Faulkner told the DCNF that she saw executives and others debating how to handle the event before Trump took the stage.
“I was backstage when the delay happened for 40 minutes, ‘Oh, we’re having audio problems.’ What I saw backstage were executives from, from some of the, and former executives, from some of the networks and they were working on what they were going to do with Trump, and it did not look positive. And I got to see that firsthand,” Faulkner told the DCNF about the NABJ event.
“If those people wanted to keep it under wraps, they couldn’t, and they were shouting. And I remember Rachel Scott was part of that whole, you know, melee of people around, I don’t know, it felt like the inner workings of going after Trump,” Faulkner continued. “I thought, ‘OK, you know what? I’m probably wrong.’ We get on that stage. I wasn’t wrong. What I saw was real, and suddenly a script that, you know, appeared in a prompter in front of the stage that I did not remember anybody talking about.”
Faulkner was modest when the DCNF asked her about her decision to speak out about the way the panel was conducted. “All I did in that moment was call out the truth,” Faulkner told the DCNF about her Aug. 1, 2024, appearance to discuss the forum on “Fox and Friends,” during which she expressed her frustration with the “gotcha moments” during the panel.
“So much of what America is focused on and so much of what it started with all that emotion and the gotcha moments from the interviewer who was seated directly to his left, has really overtaken the fact that we had an opportunity to talk with the president who walked into a racial storm yesterday,” Faulkner told “Fox and Friends” co-hosts Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade about Scott’s initial question to Trump. “There were journalists, activists, whatever you want to call people who let their politics show who wanted the NABJ to rescind their offer to have the 45th president of the United States come and sit.”