Trump Elevates His Falsehoods, Lies on Harris and Brings it Up Center

 

By Ken Bensinger

The New York Times 

When former President Donald J. Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity on Wednesday, he lifted a longstanding and false line of attack from the fringes of political discourse to the very center of a presidential campaign.

For years, rivals and critics have lodged accusations that Ms. Harris shifts her personal identity to her political advantage, and that she is, in fact, not who she claims to be. Those attacks, based on falsehoods, misinformation, and conspiratorial notions, have increased dramatically in the week and a half since she emerged as the Democrats’ all-but-certain standard-bearer.

Just hours after President Biden announced that he would not seek a second term, the right-wing agitator Laura Loomer posted on the social media site X that Ms. Harris “pretends to be black” as part of what she called a “delusional, Democrat DEI quota.”

The next day, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who spoke at the Republican National Convention last month, said on his popular interview show that the vice president was “sort of Black, sort of Indian.” The rapper Lil Pump, a Trump supporter who has some 20 million followers across Instagram, TikTok and X, said on Sunday that “Kamala Harris isn’t even black…she’s Indian.” 

Their comments, seemingly aimed at suggesting to Black voters that the Democratic candidate does not represent them and, more broadly, planting the idea that Ms. Harris is inauthentic, helped turn what had been a trickle of such content into a gusher. Overnight, conservative corners of the internet, long fixated on Mr. Biden’s age, swung to what looked to be their newest target. Years-old video clips of Ms. Harris acknowledging her South Asian heritage found fresh currency, along with memes mocking her speaking style and even a Billy Joel song modified to say that “she’s not Black or white, Indian, Jamaican.”

In fact, the vice president is the daughter of a Black Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both of whom immigrated to the United States before Ms. Harris was born in Oakland, Calif. She has long identified as both Black and Indian.

“This is something she’s dealt with her entire career,” said Neil Makhija, the president of the advocacy group Indian American Impact. He pointed out that Ms. Harris attended Howard University, a historically Black university, and belongs to a prominent Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. “Trump questioning her identity and heritage is nothing new, and it’s part of a long-running strategy of employing racial division and animus.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump embraced the discourse wholeheartedly while sitting for a question-and-answer session at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago. “I didn’t know she was Black,” Mr. Trump said, “until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black.”

He later followed that statement, which drew gasps from the room, with a post on his social network, Truth Social, that Ms. Harris was “stating she’s Indian, not Black” and that she was a “stone cold phony.”

Editors

Defenders of Ms. Harris compared the remarks to birtherism — the debunked idea that Barack Obama should not have served as president because he was not a natural-born citizen. Mr. Trump is widely credited as an originator of the birther conspiracy.

Senator Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat who is on the shortlist to be Ms. Harris’s running mate, called the former president’s comments on Wednesday “overtly racist.”

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The campaign against Ms. Harris similarly began with questions about whether she was legally able to serve.

As far back as January 2019, Chris Cuomo, then a CNN anchor, responded to a claim by Jacob Wohl, a right-wing activist and Trump supporter, that she was “not eligible to be president” by suggesting that Ms. Harris, then a senator, could settle the matter by producing “proof.”

Ms. Harris responded weeks later, saying, “This is the same thing they did to Barack” in an interview on “The Breakfast Club” podcast, which has three Black hosts. “This is not new to us. And so, I think we know what they are trying to do.” 

By August 2020, when she was selected to be Mr. Biden’s running mate, copies of Ms. Harris’s California birth certificate began circulating on social media, often amplified by conservative voices looking to discredit her. They wrongly pointed to a line on the document noting that her father’s “color or race” was “Jamaican” as evidence that she was not in fact Black.

While more than 92 percent of Jamaicans have Black ancestry, some people have falsely asserted that because her father, Donald J. Harris, was descended from a man who had owned slaves in the early 19th century, he could not be Black. But it was quite common for slaveholders to father children with women held as slaves.

Mr. Harris is credited as the first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford’s economics department.

Lavern Spicer, a prominent Trump supporter who is running for Congress in Florida, referred to Ms. Harris as Black in late 2020 but soon began claiming that the opposite was true, stating on social media in January 2021 that Ms. Harris “can play the Black card because the media covers for her, but that girl is not Black.” Since then, Ms. Spicer has hammered on that point in scores of posts, including one last week asserting that Ms. Harris was not Black but an “Indian woman married to a Jewish man.”

 

“Show me a picture of Kamala in a sari,” said Vish Burra, the executive secretary of the New York Young Republican Club, while discussing Asian American identity on a panel hosted by Vice in late 2022. Mr. Burra, who is of South Asian descent, quipped, “I’ve seen Justin Trudeau wear Indian clothes before her.”

(Mr. Trump, continuing his false line of attack on Ms. Harris on Thursday, posted a photo that has been widely circulated among right-wing influencers in recent weeks of Ms. Harris wearing a sari.)

So far, Ms. Harris and her campaign have largely tried to avoid debates about her background, focusing instead on the divisive nature of such rhetoric.

Speaking at an event for a Black sorority in Houston on Wednesday evening, Ms. Harris avoided any rebuttals to Mr. Trump’s statements, saying simply that “the American people deserve better.” But later in the evening, her campaign’s rapid response team took on the matter more directly, posting on X that “Kamala is both Black and Indian” and that “you can be two things at once.”

Regardless, some of Mr. Trump’s most avid supporters have dug in. On Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Loomer resurfaced Ms. Harris’s birth certificate, writing on X that it “proves she is NOT BLACK.”

Ken Bensinger covers right-wing media and national political campaigns for The Times. More about Ken Bensinger