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Former President Donald Trump used his turn before the nation’s largest professional association of Black journalists to question the racial identity of his rival for the White House this fall, telling a shocked National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago that Vice President Kamala Harris “happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”
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It took Trump all of 10 days running in a head-to-head against the first woman and first incumbent of Black and Indian-American heritage to openly question her background.
“I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said, raising questions that echoed the ex-President’s persistent and discredited questions about former President Barack Obama’s place of birth. “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of the sudden she made a turn and she went, she became a Black person.”
Harris has always identified as a product of a multicultural family, being born of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. Her single mother, a Hindu adherent, embraced Black culture. Harris went on to study at Howard University, a historically Black university, where she joined Alpha Kappa Alpha Inc., one of the nation’s preeminent historically Black greek-letter organizations. She is slated to address a Black greek-letter organization later Wednesday in Houston.
Trump’s trolling was as ugly as ever, but it was hardly surprising. This sort of red-meat attack is what has powered his campaigns dating to early days of 2015, when he leaned on racially charged rhetoric to fire up his white nationalist base. It propelled him back into headlines after a solid week that saw Harris’ replacement of Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket give her daily dividends of good headlines and better fundraising. And despite Trump’s insistence that his third White House campaign would be an appeal to all Americans, he couldn’t help but hint that Harris only got her current position because she checked diversity and inclusion boxes.
At the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about the comment. “What you just read out to me is repulsive. It’s insulting. No one has any right to tell someone who they are, how they identify,” she said from the briefing room’s podium.
Trump, who has never shied from picking at racial scabs, was also asked what he meant by once again referring to employment opportunities as “Black jobs.” He said many in the room had lost their gigs as the cost of immigrants coming into the United States to steal their jobs. He said a second Trump term would “stop people from invading our country.” He then noted that “a lot of journalists in this room are Black,” apparently misunderstanding the audience and its membership.
The comments came a day after Trump suggested that Harris should never win the White House. “She’ll be like a play toy,” Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “They look at her and they say, ‘We can’t believe we got so lucky.’ They’re going to walk all over her.”
Trump then looked right at the camera with a coda: “And I don’t want to say as to why. But a lot of people understand it.”
(Trump’s campaign denied any sexist or racist reasons.)
Trump’s advisers have tried to cast his efforts to win over Black voters as sincere. While Democrats have enjoyed a consistent and perhaps absolute advantage with Black voters since the Civil Rights Movement, Trump-supporting Republicans have seen cracks in that coalition that they hoped to exploit. Even so, Trump’s rhetoric combined with the denigration of Harris’ elevation as little more than a “DEI pick” are doing little to make those realignments reality.
The questioning Wednesday afternoon got off to a rocky start. Rachel Scott of ABC News confronted Trump with his history of questionable decisions including spreading doubt about the birthplaces of Obama and former Nikki Haley, telling four American congresswomen to return to where they came from, dining with white supremacists, and describing Black prosecutors as animals. “Why should Black voters trust you after you’ve used langage like that?” Scott said, sitting feet from the President. Trump immediately attacked Scott’s integrity and professionalism. “Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.”
It was precisely the antagonism that Trump sought. Even before he got going on a diatribe of his greatest hits of white grievance and racial resentment, Trump set the tone by complaining that neither Biden nor Harris were not on stage. “You invited me on false pretense,” Trump complained, suggesting Harris was going to participate by Zoom. “I think it’s a disgrace.”
Trump’s showing in Chicago and his efforts to turn the afternoon hostile fit his general M.O. But it signals just how rough the next three months could be if it stays on this same trajectory and tone.
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“She became a Black person.”