NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump has had tremendous success in stoking racism from the moment he stepped onto the presidential stage.
Democrats again expressed outrage this week over the former president’s mocking and false accusation that Vice President Kamala Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, had recently “turned black” for political reasons. Some Republicans – even on Trump’s own campaign team – appeared to distance themselves from the remark.
But Trump’s rhetoric this week and his record on race since entering politics nearly a decade ago suggest that divisive attacks on race could become a central argument for Republicans in the three-month run-up to Election Day – whether his allies want it or not.
A Trump adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity Thursday to discuss internal strategy, said the campaign need not focus on “identity politics” because the accusation against Harris is that she is “so liberal it’s dangerous.” The adviser pointed to Harris’ record on the southern border, crime, the economy and foreign policy.
In a sign that Trump may not be coordinating his message with his own team, the Republican presidential candidate doubled down the same day by again attacking Harris’ ethnic identity, posting on his social media page a picture of Harris in customary Indian dress in a family photo.
Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming who supports Trump, was one of several lawmakers on Capitol Hill who said Thursday that the rhetoric around race and identity is “not helpful to anyone” in this election cycle.
“The color of people’s skin doesn’t matter at all,” Lummis said in an interview.
Trump resorted to an elderly tactic against Harris
It’s been less than two weeks since President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and endorsed Harris, leaving Trump to pivot from campaigning against an 81-year-old white man showing signs of decline to battling a 59-year-old black woman who is drawing much larger crowds and up-to-date enthusiasm from Democratic donors.
Trump attended the National Association of Black Journalists convention on Wednesday, and in an appearance that was broadcast live on cable television and widely shared online, he falsely claimed that Harris had misled voters about her race.
“I didn’t know she was black until she accidentally became black a few years ago and now wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?” Trump said Wednesday.
At a rally in Pennsylvania a few hours later, Trump’s team showed years of headlines describing Harris as the “first Indian-American senator” on the arena’s massive screen. And Ohio Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, told reporters traveling with him that Harris was a “chameleon” who changed his identity when it suited him.
Harris attended Howard University, a traditionally black institution, and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha fraternity. Throughout her career, she often spoke about being both black and of Indian descent.
Some Republicans argue that Trump’s message on race is part of a broader approach that could appeal to some black voters.
“We’re focused on policy and how we can actually make waves and change things in the black community. Economics, education, inflation, cost-cutting. That’s the message,” said Diante Johnson, president of the Black Conservative Federation, which supports Trump’s efforts to win over more black voters and hosted him at a gala in February.
Veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz said he examined the issue on Wednesday during a focus group with swing voters almost immediately after Trump’s interview. He found that Harris may be vulnerable to criticism because of her gender, but racist attacks could hurt Trump in the fall with the voters who count most.
Much has changed, says Luntz, since Trump rose to prominence by questioning the citizenship of Barack Obama, the United States’ first black president.
“Trump seems to think he can criticize her for the way she handled her race. But no one listens to that criticism. It just doesn’t matter,” Luntz said. “If it’s racially motivated, it will backfire.”
Eugene Craig, former vice chairman of the Maryland Republican Party, said Trump “got what he wanted” at the NABJ convention but that his argument was more offensive than appealing.
“The one thing black people will never tolerate is disrespect for blackness, and that includes black Republicans,” said Craig, who is black himself and worked as a staffer for conservative commentator Dan Bongino’s Senate campaign in 2012. He now supports Harris.
Trump has a long history of racist attacks
Trump has frequently used racial issues to attack his opponents since entering presidential politics nearly a decade ago.
Trump was perhaps the most famed member of the so-called “birther” movement that questioned Obama’s birthplace. He began his first campaign by portraying Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and drug traffickers and later questioned whether a U.S. federal judge of Mexican descent could be fair to him.
During his time in the White House, Trump defended a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and suggested the U.S. should stop accepting immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti and parts of Africa. In August 2020, he suggested that California-born Harris may not meet the constitutional qualifications to be vice president.
And just two weeks after officially entering the 2024 campaign, he dined with notorious white supremacist Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
Trump won in 2016 but narrowly lost re-election to Biden in several swing states in 2020. He won the 2024 Republican primaries despite facing a number of criminal charges.
Some Trump critics feared that his racist strategy would appeal to a significant portion of voters anyway. In November, voters will decide whether to send a black woman to the Oval Office for the first time in the country’s nearly 250-year history.
“I hope Trump’s attacks on Harris are just ineffective flailing. But when you add together Trump’s shamelessness, his willingness to lie, his talent for demagoguery, and the issue of race — and a certain amount of liberal complacency that Trump is just stupid — I’m worried,” Bill Kristol, a leading conservative anti-Trump voice, posted on social media on Thursday.
Harris campaign believes Trump has little chance
A Harris adviser described the moment as an opportunity to remind voters of the chaos and division Trump is creating. But the adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said it would be a mistake for Democrats to latch onto Trump’s attacks on race while neglecting the campaign’s broader focus on key policy issues.
As long as it doesn’t distract the campaign, Harris’ team doesn’t believe there would be little political benefit for Trump to continue attacking Harris’ ethnic identity, the adviser said.
Harris said Wednesday at a gathering of a traditionally black fraternity that Trump’s attack was “the same old show: the division and the disrespect.”
On the ground, however, there were signs in at least one swing state that Trump’s approach might resonate – at least among the former president’s white male electorate.
Jim Abel, a 65-year-old retiree who attended a rally for Vance in Arizona on Wednesday, said he agreed with Trump’s focus on Harris’ ethnic identity.
“She’s not black,” Abel said. “I’ve seen her parents. I have pictures of her and her family and she’s not black. She wants the black vote.”
But several high-ranking Republicans disagreed.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro posted on X an image of a street sign with two directions. One read “Attack Kamala’s past, her lies and her radicalism,” the other “Is she really black?”
“I don’t know, folks, I just think that maybe winning the 2024 election is more important than having this silly and meaningless conversation,” Shapiro wrote.
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Brown reported from Chicago. AP writers Stephen Groves, Mary Clare Jalonick and Farnoush Amiri in Washington and Gabriel Sandoval in Glendale, Arizona, contributed to this report.
