George Stephanopoulos squared off against Republican Rep. Byron Donalds on Sunday morning in a heated exchange about Kamala Harris’ racial identity and Donald Trump’s treatment of Jan. 6 criminals. Trump surrogate Donalds was quick to defend the former president for questioning the vice president’s racial identity while giving an interview in front of the National Association for Black Journalists conference on Wednesday.
“This is really a phony controversy. I don’t really care. Most people don’t,” Donalds insisted. The organization actually responsible for the questions about Harris’ racial identity is the Associated Press, he asserted.
“But if we’re going to be accurate, when Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was AP that said she was the first Indian American United States senator,” Donalds added. “It was actually played up a lot when she came into the Senate. Now she’s running nationally. Obviously, the campaign has shifted. They’re talking much more about her father’s heritage and her Black identity.”
If Harris’ racial identity is unimportant, Stephanopoulos continued, why are Trump and his surrogates pushing the conversation around it so hard?
“This is something that’s actually a conversation throughout social media right now,” Donalds answered in an apparent bid to deflect blame for the conversation to the internet at large. “There were a lot of people who were trying to figure this out. But again, that’s a side issue, not the main issue.”
Trump only spoke about Harris’ racial identity for “what, two minutes?” Donalds continued. “He spent more than 35, 40 minutes going after her record, talking about how radical of a senator that she was. She was the most liberal senator in the United States Senate. That is a fact,” the Republican representative asserted
“So, questioning somebody’s racial identity for a couple of minutes is OK?” Stephanopoulos responded, incredulous.
Donalds again pointed to the press, adding, “George, I’m going to tell you again, he brought it up. AP is the one that wrote the headline when she first came into the United States Senate. Didn’t talk about her being black. Talked about her being the first Indian American senator. AP brought that up.”
Stephanopoulos took offense at Donalds’ insistence on describing Harris as “Indian American” throughout the interview and seemingly questioning her identity as a biracial woman, something he said the congressman did “every single time” he was asked about Trump’s comments.
“And every single time you repeat the slur … You simply can’t say that it’s wrong,” a clearly frustrated Stephanopoulos told Donalds.
In 2020, the AP denied claims that Harris was sworn into Congress as “Indian American” and insisted “Kamala Harris for years has identified herself as both Black and Indian American. In interviews, she has regularly talked about how her mother, who was from India, raised her as Black.”
When Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016, the AP reported, “Harris will enter the chamber as the first Indian woman elected to a Senate seat and the second Black woman, following Carol Moseley Braun, who served a single term after being elected in 1992.”
Stephanopoulos also disputed Donalds’ claim. He said, “AP did not say that Kamala Harris is not Black. She is biracial. She is Indian. She is Black. You continue to repeat the fact, that you continue to repeat the slur. I don’t understand why you and the president do it.”
Later in the conversation, the pair also traded words about Trump’s treatment of Jan. 6 insurrectionists who were accused of assaulting police officers and authorities. At the NABJ conference Wednesday, Trump said he would “absolutely” pardon those convicted for such crimes, a sound bite Stephanopoulos played back to Donalds — who rejected it outright.
“Hold on, George, you just changed the sound bite. You just changed it. Now you added, ‘if they’re innocent, then I will pardon them,’” Donalds claimed.
“I didn’t change the sound bite. That’s exactly what he said. They’ve been convicted,” Stephanopoulos fired back. As Donalds insisted on his denials of the words Trump said on video in front of a room of Black journalists, the anchor brought the interview to a close, clearly fed up with Donalds resistance to facts and accusations of media conspiracy.
Fellow journalist Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC opined that Stephanopoulos is a great interviewer, but wasn’t sure that bringing on guests who deny reality is ultimately helpful.
You can watch the full interview with Rep. Byron Donalds in the video at the top of this story.
