After a disastrous performance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump continued to make false claims about Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity, spreading disinformation that his likely Democratic presidential opponent is not Black and identified only with her Indian heritage until recently.
The attacks on Harris, the daughter of a Black Jamaican immigrant father and an Indian immigrant mother, continued through the evening on Wednesday and into Thursday. The tactics he employed were questioned by high-ranking Republicans, endorsed by others and slammed by Democrats as the former president appeared to mock the concept of being biracial — something around 34 million people, or 10% of the population, in the U.S. identified as during the last census in 2020.
“Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated,” Trump posted on Thursday morning along on his social media network, Truth Social, alongside a photo of Harris in a saree alongside her maternal grandparents and other family members that her cousin once shared with the Los Angeles Times.
He also shared multiple posts from far-right propagandist Laura Loomer, a well-documented bigoted conspiracy theorist, and self-described “proud Islamophobe," including one in which Loomer posted a picture of Harris’ birth certificate which lists her “color or race of father” as “Jamaican.” Trump famously had a long-term obsession with the birth certificate of another prominent Black Democrat: Barack Obama. He played a key role in promoting the “birtherism” conspiracy theory during Obama’s time on the national stage, falsely alleging the man he would end up replacing as president was not actually born in the United States.
“Donald Trump is correct. Kamala Harris is NOT black and never has been,” Loomer writes, before adding that Harris is the descendant of slave owners. Her father, Donald Harris, wrote in 2019 that he was in fact the descendant of a slave owning Irishman who came to Jamaica in the 1800s, which some historians have since also concluded. Being the descendant of a white slave owner who kept Black people in bondage and being a Black person in the modern day United States are not mutually exclusive realities.
In another post of Loomer’s shared by Trump, she writes “CNN even once did a whole video interview about how Kamala is INDIAN. Not black!”
The campaign of trying to argue Harris is not authentically Black, or not Black at all, came after Trump’s performance on Wednesday afternoon in Chicago, where he falsely claimed she only identified with her Indian heritage “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, drawing audible gasps from the room of Black journalists.
He continued to rail against Harris at a Wednesday night rally in Pennsylvania, calling her “fake, fake, fake.” Prior to taking the stage, his campaign displayed screenshots of news coverage of Harris after she was elected to the Senate in 2016 and was identified as the “first Indian-American U.S. senator.” Harris was the first Indian-American U.S. senator, which the short, four paragraph article correctly noted. She was also the 10th Black U.S. senator. Notably, Harris did not write coverage about herself for the Associated Press or Business Insider at the time.
Also notable is the response of the Trump campaign in 2020 to criticisms that he repeatedly described her as “angry” and “a mad woman,” appearing to invoke the trope of the “angry Black woman.” At the time, his spokesperson Katrina Pierson said in his defense that “I’ll note that Kamala Harris is a Black woman and he donated to her campaign” when she was California attorney general.
Harris has long identified both as Black and Indian American, attended the historically Black institution Howard University for her undergraduate degree, joined the Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha and served as the president of her law school’s Black Law Students Association. As she ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2003, she spoke of being Black at Howard and being part of a network of Black lawyers and politicians in California at the time. By all accounts — hers’ and others’ — she was surrounded by Black intellectuals and activists as she grew up in Berkeley, Calif.
But she also has Indian heritage, and periodically visited her mother’s home country and, along with her sister, was “raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture,” she wrote in her 2019 book “The Truths We Hold.”
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women” she wrote.
The White House called Trump’s remarks “repulsive, disrespectful, and insulting.” Harris herself called his hostile appearance at the NABJ convention “the same old show — the divisiveness and the disrespect” as she spoke at the gathering of Sigma Gamma Rho, a historically Black sorority, in Houston on Wednesday night.
“And let me just say: The American people deserve better,” Harris said. “The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength.”
Republicans struggled to rally around Trump’s latest attacks on Harris, who polling suggests is running a much more competitive race than President Joe Biden was before he dropped out last month. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said “I don’t think so” when asked if Trump should have made those comments, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said the comments were a “distraction” and Texas Sen. John Cornyn — a candidate to be Senate Republicans’ next leader — declined to say how he felt about the comments, according to CNN.
North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer echoed Trump’s comments telling a HuffPost reporter, “I don't think he's doubting her Blackness. What he's doing is he's making fun of the fact that she chooses it when it's convenient, and chooses another race when that's convenient.” But he then advised Trump to avoid the subject because “nuance or satire is often confused.”
His staunchest defender was his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants and whose children are biracial.
“All he said is Kamala Harris is a chameleon. She goes to Georgia two days ago, she was raised in Canada, she puts on a fake southern accent. She is everything to everybody,” Vance told CNN in an interview at the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona on Thursday morning. “I think it’s totally reasonable for the president to call that out and that’s all he did.”
After living in Illinois and California, Harris moved to Quebec at age 12 and lived there for six years. On Tuesday, she held a rally in Atlanta alongside mostly Black politicians and entertainers. There she challenged Trump to commit to debating her, which he has so far declined to do, taunting her Republican opponent by saying “as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”