Trump threatened to back out of Black journalists interview over live fact-checking

Donald Trump reportedly didn't want to be live fact-checked during his disastrous visit to the National Association of Black Journalists' annual convention in Chicago, according to the group's president.

NABJ president Ken Lemon confirmed to Axios that Trump initially refused to take the stage if the journalists fact-checked him live. The disastrous Q&A with the former president was ultimately delayed by more than an hour — though that is not unusual for a Trump event — but he did eventually sit for the talk.

Trump blamed the delay on problems with the venue's audio. Lemon confirmed that there had been audio issues, but they were solved quickly, and that Trump's reluctance to be fact-checked was holding up the event.

Lemon told Axios that the «bigger problem was his threat not to take the stage.»

“He did not want to be fact-checked, but we could not let him on the stage without fact-checking,” he said.

Lemon said that he was preparing himself to go out to the crowd and explain why Trump wouldn't be appearing when the former president decided to walk out and do the Q&A.

The Trump campaign disputed Lemon's account to Axios, saying Trump had to wait for «close to» 40 minutes for an audio issue to be resolved.

Trump then had a contentious discussion with the panel journalists, and make the especially bizarre comment that Vice President Kamala Harris «turned» Black after previously describing herself as Indian.

“I didn’t know she was Black,” he said on Wednesday. “She happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?… I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way and all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black