Fact-Checking Trump’s Remarks on Race

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.

“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