Though Heilemann was talking in part about the personalized, particularly denigrating tone of some of what Trump is saying about Harris, Trump also already explicitly brought up Harris’ racial identity. He infamously claimed in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists that Harris “happened to turn Black,” insinuating she is being deceptive and/or conniving in identifying as such. Her father was born in Jamaica.
“They are just extraordinarily racist. And they’re racist top to bottom,” Heilemann said of Trump’s recent outbursts.
“He says Joe Biden turned mentally impaired, but Kamala Harris was mentally impaired from birth,” added the journalist. “She also was — she had the racial make-up that she had since birth, and if you go through — that’s kind of the difference between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. One of them happens to be white; one of them happens to be Black. And if you go through his comments about where the corruption is, every single place he names where terrible things are happening […] just by happenstance, they happen to be places like Philadelphia and Milwaukee and Cleveland.”
Cities such as these tend to have numerically substantial non-white populations.
Heilemann also noted that Trump keeps singling out a community of legal immigrants from Haiti living in Springfield, Ohio — who Trump claimed on a debate stage earlier this month were taking local pets for food. There is zero evidence of that community — of legal residents — doing that, and there has never been any real-world proof of such a thing.
Heilemann also predicted that Trump would lean more heavily into racism as Election Day nears.