First Donald Trump falsely asserted that Kamala Harris had long identified herself primarily as Indian American, and only leaned into the Black part of her mixed-race identity recently to benefit herself politically.
Then the pile-on began.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, portrayed the vice president as “a chameleon” and suggested she affected a Southern accent when talking to Southern voters: “She presents a different posture, depending on which audience that she’s in front of.”
Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is engaged to Trump’s son and has advised the former president, became one of many Republicans who posted a photo of a young Harris in a sari and insisted that Trump “brings up a solid point!”
And former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka said on CNN that Harris was “a disaster whose only qualifications was having a vagina and the right skin color. She’s a DEI hire, right?” He added mockingly: “She’s a woman! She’s colored! Therefore, she’s got to be good.”
The lightning-fast spread of the attack line in the day after Trump’s remarks showcased both his continued willingness to weaponize race and gender fissures to cut down political opponents, and the ready-made echo chamber primed to amplify attacks rooted in identity.
It seemed to herald a new and vitriolic phase of the 2024 campaign even as it reflects a familiar pattern. Trump, suddenly facing a Black woman, is leaning into his ugliest political instincts and finding the conservative ecosphere willing to go along. More than a decade after he began baselessly questioning the birthplace of the country’s first Black president, Trump has helped to normalize such offensive attacks — and a dwindling minority in his party appear willing to publicly challenge his most outrageous statements.
But beneath the base attacks, there is also a political calculus — and political peril — in both Trump’s words and Harris’s responses.
For Trump, denunciations based on race and gender could alienate Black, minority and young voters, as well as key groups of swing voters, including suburban women who see Harris’s sudden entry into the race as a moment of historic progress.
Trump’s campaign is actively courting all of those groups; his controversial comments at the National Association of Black Journalists convention Wednesday were part of a push to highlight what he has delivered for Black Americans. Even outside of those pivotal groups, Trump’s language — and his party’s amplification of it — may send a message to voters that a second Trump term would be riddled with chaos and animus.
Harris became the Democrats’ likely nominee after President Biden on July 21 bowed to pressure to step aside following a rocky performance in a presidential debate against Trump.
Afterward, several GOP lawmakers called Harris a “DEI candidate,” a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion programs that many conservatives have assailed. House Republican leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson, asked members to refrain from such comments, saying the fight should be based on policy, not identity.
Asked about Trump’s comments on Harris’s race this week, some GOP lawmakers suggested Trump should focus on policy but declined to openly criticize him.
Harris’s aides and supporters have thought that the upended race for president could quickly devolve into racist and misogynistic attacks, but they concede Harris faces a delicate balance on how to respond. She is not just a minority woman who has been insulted by a White man, but also a politician whose opponent has successfully used grievance and racial animus to power his own ascent — and to defeat a diverse array of opponents on the way.
“What Trump did today was essentially take a script and a paragraph from a playbook where he’s been perhaps one of the major authors in the last 15 years,” said Donna Brazile, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee who managed Al Gore’s campaign for president in 2000. “Trump wants to bring us backward so that we can respond to the hate and division and fear of yesterday and not the promise and the opportunities that will confront us in the future.”
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this story.
Harris addressed Trump’s statements Wednesday during remarks at the annual gathering of the historically Black Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, calling Trump’s words “the same old show — the divisiveness and the disrespect.” But while she spoke of his attacks on the trio of Black female journalists who moderated the conversation with Trump, she did not directly speak to the attacks on her.
“The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth,” she said. “… We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength.”
Harris’s mother was born in India, and her father is from Jamaica. Harris has embraced both cultures for decades. She attended historically Black Howard University and has been a member of a Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, since the mid-1980s.
It’s unclear what motivated Trump to question Harris’s racial identity at the gathering of Black journalists. Trump has publicly lamented the change at the top of the ticket, calling it a “coup” at a recent event. And while Trump led Biden in national polls and battleground states after the disastrous debate performance by the president, Harris’s entry has put the race at parity. Democrats hope Harris will galvanize minority and younger voters and help the party retain the White House.
Trump made the initial comments Wednesday during a question-and-answer segment moderated by three Black female journalists at the NABJ’s convention in Chicago. Trump’s presence had already sparked controversy within the organization by critics who said the NABJ was amplifying the platform of a candidate who had assailed journalists of color.
“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?” Trump said. He added later that Harris “was Indian all the way” but then “became a Black person.”
Since then he and his campaign have dug in further, insisting that old articles and video clips highlighting Harris’s Indian heritage somehow negate her Black identity. On Wednesday night, screens at Trump’s rally in Harrisburg, Pa., flashed headlines that declared Harris an “Indian American U.S. Senator.”
On Thursday, Trump reposted far-right activist Laura Loomer’s false claims that Harris’s birth certificate shows she is “lying about being Black” — underscoring how the former president has given a spotlight to the most extreme fringes of his party. The document she shared lists Harris’s father as “Jamaican.”
Spokespeople for Trump’s campaign did not respond Thursday to questions about the repost and about whether the former president believes Harris is Black.
Trump’s political ascent began during the term of President Barack Obama, when Trump became perhaps the most prominent face of the birther movement, which falsely claimed that Obama was born in Kenya — rather than his real birthplace of Hawaii — and thus constitutionally unable to be president. He dismissed his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton as “unbalanced” and “unhinged.”
Wednesday’s statements weren’t his first personal attacks against Harris. He has also insulted her intelligence, saying she would be a laughingstock in front of world leaders — all while frequently mispronouncing her name.
“She’ll be like a play toy,” Trump told Fox News. “They look at her and they say, ‘We can’t believe we got so lucky.’ They’re going to walk all over her.”
He added, “And I don’t want to say as to why. But a lot of people understand it.”