July 31, 2024
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday took his first big swing Wednesday at the revamped Democratic ticket — and it did not go well for him.
Trump participated in a controversial live interview at a convention of Black journalists in Chicago and quickly stumbled into racially insensitive remarks about Vice President Kamala Harris as he questioned her identity and qualifications.
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“She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said, prompting audible gasps and murmurs, according to reporters in the room. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago until she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”
Trump continued to make the same point about Harris’ ancestry even as one of the moderators, ABC News’ Rachel Scott, interjected that Harris attended an historically Black college and has always identified as Black.
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His remarks, one of many tense exchanges in a Q&A session at the National Association of Black Journalists, underscored the Trump campaign’s floundering efforts to blunt the momentum of Harris since President Joe Biden agreed to drop his reelection bid.
The interview marked Trump’s first major attempt to pivot a campaign designed to defeat Biden toward a younger and more challenging opponent, and laid bare the difficulties the Republican nominee and his movement more broadly may have in taking on a woman of color without veering into misogynistic, racist invective. While many in Trump’s base may agree with his blunt assessment of Harris as a political token, it may reinforce the former president’s vulnerabilities with swing voters heading into the final stretch of what looks to be a very close election.
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Bugs Marlowe