Trump Escalates Race Attacks on Harris, Worrying Some Republicans

 

Trump Escalates Race Attacks on Harris, Worrying Some Republicans

 

A day after telling Black journalists that Vice President Kamala Harris had recently decided to become “a Black person,” Mr. Trump shared a photo of Ms. Harris in traditional Indian clothing.

 

Shane Goldmacher

By Shane Goldmacher

Aug. 1, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/us/politics/trump-kamala-harris-race.html

 

Donald J. Trump continued to raise false and incendiary questions about Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity for a second day on Thursday, as Republicans watched the former president drive his campaign into a divisive and potentially damaging direction.

 

A day after telling an audience of Black journalists in Chicago that Ms. Harris had “all of a sudden” decided to become “a Black person,” Mr. Trump posted a photo on his social media site of Ms. Harris dressed in a sari with a caption stating: “Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated.”

 

Mr. Trump also amplified posts from Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist, who had posted copies of Ms. Harris’s birth certificate and had spread false accusations that Ms. Harris has lied about her race.

 

Ms. Harris, whose father is from Jamaica, and whose mother was Indian American, has long identified with both her Black and South Asian heritage.

 

An alumna of a historically Black institution, Howard University, she responded to Mr. Trump’s comments during her speech at a convention of Black sororities on Wednesday, saying, “The American people deserve better.”

 

Whether Mr. Trump’s initial remarks on Wednesday were planned or not, the Trump team is clearly intensifying this line of attack.

 

“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,” Mr. Trump told the audience of Black journalists. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

 

For a Republican Party that has acclimatized itself to a decade of combustible comments from Mr. Trump, the reaction to his latest remarks had the feeling of a familiar routine: Republicans mostly rolled their eyes in private and held their tongues in public.

 

David Kochel, a longtime Republican strategist, called the racial identity attack unneeded and risky when, he said, Mr. Trump had a clear case against Ms. Harris on policy grounds.

 

“It’s a pretty simple campaign. Why complicate with questions around race is beyond me,” Mr. Kochel said. “The campaign is to tie her to the unpopular Biden economy and prosecute the case against her on the border.”

 

But Mr. Trump’s campaign instead leaned into his questioning of Ms. Harris’s heritage. At a rally in Harrisburg, Pa. on Wednesday night, his campaign put headlines noting her Indian American background on the big screens above the crowd.

 

“Rally signage is the best signage!” Jason Miller, a top Trump adviser, wrote on X with the laughing emoji.

 

As Mr. Trump’s comments ricocheted around the political world, politicians from both parties seemed to be trying to determine whether such an attack would be effective in 2024, amid a rapidly diversifying electorate. More than 12 percent of Americans identify as multiracial.

 

Democrats denounced him as racist.

 

“We need to fiercely call out this type of bigotry and ignorance,” Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida wrote on X, responding to Mr. Trump’s post on Thursday of Ms. Harris in Indian garb. “During my primary race, some folks said similar things about me. That I wasn’t actually Black cause my mom is Cuban. Or that I’m not actually Latino because I’m Black.”

 

The rare Republican to criticize Mr. Trump was Larry Hogan, the former Maryland governor, who is running for Senate against a Black woman, Angela Alsobrooks, the county executive of Prince George’s County, in a state where Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular. Mr. Hogan denounced Mr. Trump’s comments as “unacceptable and abhorrent.”

 

Others sought to refashion and reframe Mr. Trump’s baseless allegation, seeking safe ground through a more sanitized version.

 

Those included Senator JD Vance, Mr. Trump’s running mate, who said at a rally on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had attended the Black journalists’ conference “because he’s running to be president for all Americans.” He attempted to recast Mr. Trump’s questions about Ms. Harris’s race as questions about her character.

 

“Kamala Harris is a phony who caters to whatever audience is in front of her,” Mr. Vance said.

 

Taylor Budowich, the chief executive of Make America Great Again Inc., the leading pro-Trump super PAC, echoed that view, saying, “Ms. Harris had an authenticity problem, and President Trump was right to expose it.

 

“At every step of her career she has invented or reinvented herself, adopting whatever position, dialect, or story necessary to get what she wants,” Mr. Budowich said.

 

Democrats were dubious that authenticity was the real issue.

 

“To call someone a phony because of their race or ethnicity, that is not getting to the problem, that’s appealing to racism,” James Carville, a Democratic strategist, said. “I’m sorry, that excuse doesn’t fly.”

 

Still, some Democrats privately said that the whole episode reminded them uncomfortably of 2016. Mr. Trump stoked controversy after controversy — dominating repeated news cycles — all summer that year before eventually defeating Hillary Clinton to win the White House.

 

“We must stay vigilant and stay focused on the stakes in this election,” said Rahna Epting, the executive director of MoveOn, the progressive organizing group.

 

Dennis Lennox, a Michigan-based Republican strategist, said that the episode was giving him flashbacks to his party’s struggles in 2008 to land a message against Barack Obama, who was then the Democratic presidential nominee.

 

“Saying the sitting vice president of the United States, who is a Black woman, isn’t Black seems like you’re throwing everything against the wall and hoping something sticks,” he said.

 

But Mr. Lennox was leaving open the possibility that Mr. Trump was injecting himself into what has been a 10-day period of favorable news and developments for Ms. Harris since she entered the race after President Biden bowed out and endorsed her.

 

“Either Trump masterfully did that to stop the narrative that Kamala was building in the media, or he completely walked into the trap he’s walked into multiple times in the past,” Mr. Lennox said. “It’s an open question which one is correct.”

 

For months, Mr. Trump has made claims that he plans to compete for a greater share of Black voters than Republicans have traditionally won. And for months Mr. Biden had struggled to excite Black voters, with polls showing him earning far less support than he had in 2020.

 

Mr. Trump’s campaign has sought symbolic ways to signal his interest in Black voters, with his decision to agree to a question-and-answer session at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention as just the latest example.

 

During the primary, he spoke at the Black Conservative Federation’s gala, where he claimed that “the Black people like me” because of his indictments in four criminal cases. And during his hush-money trial in New York, he held a rally that featured Black rappers.

 

But the dynamics of the 2024 race have shifted since Mr. Biden stepped aside, and Mr. Trump is adjusting to the reality of running against a Black woman.

 

A correction was made on Aug. 2, 2024: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the name of the county where Angela Alsobrooks is the executive. It is Prince George’s, not Georgia’s.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

 

Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent, covering the 2024 campaign and the major developments, trends and forces shaping American politics. He can be reached at shane.goldmacher@nytimes.com. More about Shane Goldmacher