Trump Encourages Racist Conspiracy Theory About
Kamala Harris
President Trump said he heard that Ms. Harris, the
presumptive Democratic vice-presidential nominee born in California, was not
eligible for the ticket, repeating a theory that is rampant among his
followers. Constitutional scholars quickly called his words false and
irresponsible.
By Katie Rogers
Aug. 13, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/politics/trump-kamala-harris.html?searchResultPosition=1
WASHINGTON
— President Trump on Thursday encouraged a racist conspiracy theory that is
rampant among some of his followers: that Senator Kamala Harris, the
presumptive Democratic vice-presidential nominee born in California, was not
eligible for the vice presidency or presidency because her parents were
immigrants.
That
assertion is false. Ms. Harris is eligible to serve.
Mr. Trump,
speaking to reporters on Thursday, nevertheless pushed forward with the attack,
reminiscent of the lie he perpetrated for years that President Barack Obama was
born in Kenya.
“I heard it
today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris.
“I have no
idea if that’s right,” he added. “I would have thought, I would have assumed,
that the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run
for vice president.”
Mr. Trump
appeared to be referring to a widely discredited op-ed article published in
Newsweek by John C. Eastman, a conservative lawyer who has long argued that the
United States Constitution does not grant birthright citizenship. Ms. Harris,
the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, was born in 1964 in Oakland,
Calif., several years after her parents arrived in the United States.
But Mr.
Trump was in effect revisiting an old tactic: spreading a race-based and
anti-immigrant crusade he began nearly a decade ago, when he began sowing
distrust in the background of Mr. Obama, who was born in Hawaii.
This time,
Mr. Trump has legions of followers who have been spreading similar theories
about Ms. Harris. In the hours after Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced Ms. Harris
as his running mate, a new crop of memes and conspiracy website postings began
proliferating online, suggesting that Ms. Harris was an “anchor baby,” a
disparaging term for a child born in the United States to immigrants.
Mr.
Eastman’s column tries to raise questions about the citizenship of Ms. Harris’s
parents at the time of her birth, and argues that she may have “owed her
allegiance to a foreign power or powers” if her parents were “temporary
visitors” and not residents. Ms. Harris’s parents received doctorate degrees
from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963 and were working as
academics when Ms. Harris was born in 1964.
But
constitutional law scholars say that the immigration status of Ms. Harris’s
parents at the time of her birth is irrelevant because under the Constitution,
anyone born in the United States automatically acquires citizenship.
The 14th
Amendment makes it clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United
States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United
States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Nonetheless,
Mr. Eastman’s article leapfrogged throughout social media on Thursday. Tom
Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch — a favorite
information source of Mr. Trump’s — shared the article on Twitter. By Thursday
afternoon, it had reached some 14.3 million people on Facebook, Reddit and
Twitter before it was parroted by the president, according to data reviewed by
The New York Times.
Newsweek in
the meantime defended Mr. Eastman’s column, asserting that it had “nothing to
do with racist birtherism.” Experts in constitutional law were still quick to
disparage the article as dangerous.
In an
interview on Thursday, Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at
Harvard Law School, compared Mr. Eastman’s idea to the “flat earth theory” and
called it “total B.S.”
“I hadn’t
wanted to comment on this because it’s such an idiotic theory,” Mr. Tribe said,
“There is nothing to it.”
Mr. Tribe
pointed out that the theory still quickly landed in the hands of a president
who has used his pulpit to spread a number of conspiracies against his
political enemies, particularly those who do not have white or European
backgrounds.
During the
2016 presidential race, Mr. Trump continuously questioned the citizenship of
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, suggesting that his Canadian roots would be a
problem should he win the presidency. Mr. Cruz, who was born in Canada to an
American mother and a Cuban father, is a United States citizen. Mr. Eastman,
for his part, wrote that year that Mr. Cruz was eligible.
But Mr.
Trump was relentless about questioning Mr. Obama’s background. In 2011, he
began appearing on television to question whether Mr. Obama was born in the
United States — spreading the lie he has never fully apologized for.
“Maybe I’m
going to do the tax returns when Obama does his birth certificate,” he said in
an ABC interview in April 2011. “I’d love to give my tax returns. I may tie my
tax returns into Obama’s birth certificate.”
Mr. Obama
eventually released his birth certificate. Mr. Trump has never released his tax
returns.
At the
White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, Mr. Obama acknowledged that he
released his long-form birth certificate, and took aim at Mr. Trump, who was
sitting in the audience.
“He can
finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like, did we fake the
moon landing?” Mr. Obama said as a stone-faced Mr. Trump looked on. He also
displayed a rendering of the White House, styled as a casino, should Mr. Trump
win the presidency.
Mr. Trump,
of course, ended up running and winning. In 2016, he finally, and tersely,
acknowledged that Mr. Obama was an American citizen.
“President
Barack Obama was born in the United States, period,” Mr. Trump said at the
time. “Now, we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”
He then
falsely suggested that Hillary Clinton, his former Democratic opponent, had
started the rumor.
Ben Decker
contributed reporting.
Correction:
Aug. 13, 2020
An earlier
version of this article misspelled the name of the University of California
school from which Kamala Harris’s parents received doctorates. It was the
University of California, Berkeley, not Berkley.
Katie
Rogers is a White House correspondent in the Washington bureau, covering the
cultural impact of the Trump administration on the nation's capital and beyond.
@katierogers
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