Spoiler alert: he meant it. When Donald Trump claimed, on Wednesday afternoon, in a combative onstage interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, that Kamala Harris had adopted her identity as a Black woman in an effort to gain political advantage, he drew appalled gasps from the audience. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said. This was an inaccurate slur as well as a bizarre one. Harris has always been proudly biracial: she is the daughter of an Indian mother and a Black, Jamaican father, both of whom immigrated to the U.S. She attended Howard, a historically Black college, where she joined one of Black America’s most storied sororities. Nonetheless, Trump doubled down on this particularly Trumpian form of hate speech. In a post on his Truth Social platform, 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!” That evening, in a rally in Pennsylvania, his campaign even projected an old news headline proclaiming Harris the first Indian American U.S. senator. Trump’s embattled Vice-Presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, joined in, too, calling Harris a “total phony who caters to whatever audience is in front of her.”
By Thursday morning, as the liberal commentariat feasted on its horror over his remarks and right-leaning pundits struggled to explain and excuse it, Trump mocked them all, posting an old photo of Harris alongside relatives on the Indian side of her family. He wrote, “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.” In another post, he circulated the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer’s idea that, because Harris’s birth certificate says her father’s “color or race” is “Jamaican,” not Black, she is a “liar” who is “NOT black and never has been.”
How much clearer does it have to get? America, you are being trolled.
The point here is simple: Trump’s efforts, over the past twenty-four hours, to shift the political debate to his own untrue and offensive assertions about the Vice-President’s race may well be a political disaster, but they are not an accident, a flub, or an undisciplined lapse. This, in 2024, is as absurd as subscribing to the credulous spin that Trump’s near-death encounter with a would-be assassin’s bullet had remade him into a unity candidate for the ages. Even Trump couldn’t help mocking this ridiculous line from his advisers. “When I got hit, everybody thought I was going to be a nice guy,” Trump said on Wednesday night, adding, “I really agreed with that for about eight hours or so.”
Trump is Trump is Trump. The Harris attacks represent a textbook example of his approach to politics, combining his belief in the strategic power of race-baiting to mobilize his base and his favorite tactic for disrupting a bad news cycle: changing the subject to something even more outrageous. Every minute spent debating Harris’s race—or his own folly in raising it—is a minute not spent on Trump’s own failings: on his advanced age and manifest unfitness for the Presidency; on his legal liabilities and criminal conviction; on his kooky Vice-Presidential nominee and his party’s extreme right-wing agenda.
We saw this time and again during his Presidency. Brazenness remains Trump’s superpower. It’s hard to think of another politician who might willingly play an unhinged racist on national television as a way of diverting attention, but it’s utterly plausible with this one. Nine years into Trump’s political career, the mystery is not that he keeps doing it but that so many Americans keep falling for it.
Since her unlikely Presidential campaign began, less than two weeks ago, Harris has had a remarkable run, with the enthusiasm of Democrats eager for a new candidate further boosted by the miserable début of Trump’s running mate. Vance’s past utterances have proved to be a literal dream for opposition researchers. Childless cat ladies! America’s Hitler! He even got into an exchange with the governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, over Diet Mountain Dew. Who knew that “weird” might work better against the G.O.P. than “democracy-destroying Christian nationalists”? 2024 has definitely not panned out as anyone planned.
On Tuesday, Harris held her largest rally of the campaign season, filling an arena in Atlanta with some ten thousand dancing, cheering fans. She laughed, she clapped, she brought the fight to Trump in a way that Joe Biden, in all his months on the campaign trail, never could. By the ineluctable logic of Trumpism, of course the ex-President had to do something to change the subject. And since he is who he is, of course it would be about race.
Before Wednesday, Trump’s attacks on Harris just didn’t land. He called her “mean,” “nasty,” “crooked,” and “crazy,” a “radical-left lunatic,” a “Marxist,” a liar. None of it stuck. The nicknames he floated for Harris seemed generic, mere retreads of his greatest hits. The “nasty” woman trope was a pure ripoff of his own 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton; if Trump is America’s ultimate insult comedian, then the lack of new material was telling.
But memories, when it comes to Trump, are perplexingly short. Race-baiting is Trump’s original sin in politics, going back to his embrace of the birther lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; perhaps the surprise is simply that it took more than a week into Trump’s head-to-head match with Harris for him to play it so overtly. There’s another way, however, to look at this depressing twist in the election contest—as a sign of Trump’s incipient fears that a race he thought he had won may now be slipping away.
Back in the 2020 campaign, the conservative lawyer John Eastman, of future January 6th fame, advanced the notion that Harris might not really be a natural-born American, eligible to serve as Vice-President, because neither of her parents was a naturalized citizen when she was born, in California. As my husband, Peter Baker, and I reported in our book, “The Divider,” some of Trump’s White House advisers—including the hard-line anti-immigration aide Stephen Miller, who is still on his team today—urged him to seize on this Harris-birtherism theory in the campaign. After a heated internal debate, Trump, for once, took a pass on pushing a racial conspiracy. How, then, to interpret his decision, four years later, to use an equivalent one? Is this, perhaps, an early indicator of Trump’s level of panic about the threat that Harris poses to him?
In not even two weeks as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Harris has erased the lead Trump had in many national polls, and she looks competitive or ahead in the latest battleground-state surveys, too. Talk about a vibe shift. In this environment of calcified public opinion and hardened partisan lines, such a swing in a week seems like nothing less than a miracle. No wonder Trump has resorted to his favorite trick—in his sad, twisted version of America, he sees the race card as the winning hand. ♦