Donald Trump’s comments on Wednesday questioning whether Vice President Kamala Harris is Black were not an off-the-cuff expression of racism, but part of a broader campaign strategy that Trump and many of his key lieutenants plan to make a heavy focus of their final three-month sprint to retake the White House.
Asked on Wednesday about Republicans accusing Harris of being a “DEI hire” or “DEI candidate,” Trump responded by questioning Harris’ racial identity. “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” he said, adding: “She made a turn, and she became a Black person, and I think somebody should look into that.”
As unhinged as this sounds — and is — Team Trump believes this is a politically smart message, according to three people on and close to the 2024 Trump-Vance campaign. In their private conversations, Trump and some of his closest advisers appear to believe that leveling this attack as loudly as they could help sell the idea that Harris is a “phony” in the minds of independent voters. Trump believes he wins battles when he gets to define the messaging terrain and have Democrats and his media nemeses fight him on his terms (hence, Trump’s deep annoyance at Harris and Democrats’ relentless drive to call him, J.D. Vance, and other conservative leaders “weird”). So, Trump and his allies have been reveling in this line of racial-identity sniping, hoping to bait Democratic leaders into a mud fight.
Some Trump advisers have even argued — including long before Trump began this Harris-isn’t-Black crusade — that painting Harris as inauthentically Black could potentially resonate with certain Black voters, particularly disaffected, young men — who are already skeptical of Harris and President Joe Biden.
The sources stressed that Trump’s comments were not — as has been the case numerous times in his campaigns and during his administration — a situation in which the former president has gone rogue on the stump and indulged his own lack of political impulse control. (These sources in the past have generally had no trouble privately admitting it when that has been the case.) Rather, this is a case of Trump and an array of his aides and influential allies settling on a race-baiting strategy that they are, for the time being at least, convinced will work out well for them in this presidential election.
“It’s not by accident; it’s intentional. We’re behind the [former] president, 100 percent,” a person close to Trump tells Rolling Stone.
In that sense, it is similar to the relatively new, extreme Republican Party-wide policy aim of bombing or invading Mexico. What sounds like an unhinged, errant Trump thought is a mainstream conservative view and plan of action.
The line of attack, of course, has its share of critics among the conservative elite. As Politico reported last month, House Republican leadership practically begged their own rank and file during a private meeting to avoid talking about Harris’ race. Those entreaties clearly aren’t sticking.
On Thursday, Vance — the Ohio senator who Trump tapped for his 2024 vice-presidential slot — swooped in to further buttress the Team Trump tactic. “She is everything to everybody, and she pretends to be somebody different depending on which audience she is in front of,” Vance told CNN. “I think it’s totally reasonable for the president to call that out, and that’s all he did,” Vance said.”
The latest round of Trumpian gutter politics appears to be motivated by a sudden sense of urgency within the upper echelons of MAGAworld — a sense that did not exist just weeks ago, when Republicans thought Trump was cruising to a landslide against Biden, before he bowed out of the 2024 race and endorsed Harris. According to two sources familiar with the matter, behind closed doors, Trump has expressed bewilderment — or genuine surprise even — at Harris’ uptick in the polls, her latest fundraising hauls, and the ease with which her party rallied to her, as opposed to devolving into a disastrous intra-party power struggle ahead of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (Indeed, almost immediately after Biden dropped out, close allies and trusted associates to Trump started directly warning him not to underestimate Harris as a general election rival.)
Harris responded to racist Trump’s comments Wednesday evening at an event in Houston. “It was the same old show: the divisiveness, and the disrespect,” she said. “And let me just say the American people deserve better.”
Trump delivered his broadside against Harris, questioning her racial identity, during a remarkably hostile Q&A before the National Association of Black Journalists convention. It soon became apparent that this was not just Trump being himself, but a coordinated campaign message.
The former president posted a video on Truth Social of Harris cooking with the actress Mindy Kaling, and talking about her South Asian heritage. He wrote: “Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity!”
Before Trump arrived at a campaign rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a Business Insider headline was projected on screen at the event that read: “California’s Kamala Harris becomes first Indian-American U.S. senator.”
Trump did not specifically repeat his attack on Harris at the rally, though his legal spokeswoman and lawyer Alina Habba certainly tried. “Unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are,” she said, stumbling over her words. “I know where I come from.”
In a throwback to Trump’s incessant demand to see President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, far-right activist Laura Loomer posted an apparent copy of Harris’ birth certificate online, writing that the document “proves she is NOT BLACK.”
The attack on Harris has been bubbling up in pro-Trump circles for years. Ali Alexander, the far-right Trump supporter who organized the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, tweeted in 2019: “Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves. She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”
