Following an introduction by the former president, Georgia activist Michaelah Montgomery stole the stage at Republican contender Donald Trump’s Atlanta rally on Saturday.
At the conclusion of his address at the Georgia State University Convocation Center, Trump summoned Montgomery to the stage and said he had met her at a restaurant earlier in the year, according to Fox News.
Montgomery, a Clark Atlanta University alumnus, recognized Trump in public and complimented him on his advocacy for historically black colleges and universities, according to Trump.
“She looks at me, says, ‘It’s President Trump. You saved my college.’ And I said, ‘How the hell do you know that?’… This one is so smart, so sharp,” Trump recalled.
“She grabbed me. She gave me a kiss,” he added. “I said, ‘I think I’m never going back home to the first lady.’”
“You were supposed to keep that quiet,” Montgomery responded with a laugh.
Before giving the podium to Montgomery, Trump praised her, calling her “incredible” and having a “tremendous future.” He also promised to do “whatever I can to help you.”
“I do want to add on to some of the remarks that were made by others,” the conservative activist began. “And we do need to do our best to get the message out there. The fight is nothing if all we do is talk about it amongst ourselves.”
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The purpose of Conserve the Culture, Montgomery continued, is to “mobilize the HBCU students so that they may get this [conservative] message.” Montgomery is the founder of this organization.
“Nobody needs this message more than my folks, so do y’all care for real?” Montgomery said to the cheering audience. “Are y’all with us for real? Ima give it back to Big T.”
Days prior to the gathering, the White House had denounced Trump for remarks he had made about Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identification at the National Association of Black Journalists convention.
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when 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?”
Harris Faulkner of Fox News commended Trump for stepping up in the face of hostility and taking a few “nasty” questions.
In an interview on “Fox & Friends” the following day, Faulkner, who co-moderated a panel discussion with Trump on Wednesday, stated: “I’m watching that back and I’m seeing that we were able to, at some points, the former president and I, have a conversation. So much of what America is focused on today and so much of what that started with, 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 a president who walked into a racial storm yesterday.”
“There were journalists, activists, whatever you want to call people who let their politics show, who wanted the NABJ to rescind its offer to have the 45th president of the United States come and sit,” added Faulkner.
“They had also invited Joe Biden, and he had said yes, but he’s not on the ticket anymore. They’ve also invited Kamala Harris. Finally yesterday, after some reported back and forth about her schedule, so on and so forth, she’ll do something via satellite. And I know she’s attending Representative Sheila Jackson Lee’s funeral today, but NABJ is several days; it’s five days, Wednesday through Sunday. So, that has been worked out,” she noted further.
