Donald Trump is facing a fierce backlash for questioning the race of US election rival Kamala Harris. However, for anybody not born yesterday, this kind of anti-Blackness and racism is nothing new.
Of course, Trump’s political career was forged in the cauldron of the 2010s “birther” conspiracy theory that sought to delegitimise then-president Barack Obama by claiming falsely that he was born abroad. Trump has a storied history of racism, from being sued in the 1970s for discrimination against Black tenants to his notorious pandering to white supremacist marchers in 2017. His latest racist act is to claim that Harris “became a Black person” for political convenience.
Like an estimated 34 million Americans in the nation’s fastest-growing demographic, Harris is dual heritage and has often spoken about being Black and South Asian.
A onetime aide to former president George W. Bush, Scott Jennings, told CNN:
He did crap the bed… The only question is whether he’s going to roll around in it or get up and change the sheets.
Trump in the ‘lion’s den’
Trump’s inflammatory comments came amid a barrage of insults and falsehoods as he attacked Harris during a combative interaction with a panel of Black journalists in Chicago.
Trump is desperate to woo Black voters from Harris but Trump fared exactly as you’d expect:
Trump told a room full of Black journalists that they’re always late and that he’s the second coming of Abraham Lincoln… and then it got worse pic.twitter.com/mskg1EaSfq
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) August 1, 2024
Or, if you’d like a more condensed version:
MUST WATCH: This clip shows what was probably Trump’s single most unhinged, outrageous, rude and openly racist exchange with a reporter at the National Association of Black Journalists conference. 👀 pic.twitter.com/H7MSSqfUW7
— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) July 31, 2024
Or, just the gist of it:
Oh my God. I cannot believe this Trump interview with Black journalists is real. This may be one of the worst interviews he’s ever done, and that’s saying something.
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) July 31, 2024
‘No sense of decency’
Bill Kristol, chief of staff from 1989-93 to then vice president Dan Quayle, said Trump’s goal was likely to revive old racist characterisations of Harris as inauthentic after her pivot to the political left during her 2020 primary campaign. Kristol said:
Trump has no sense of decency. It would be nice if this were disqualifying for political success.
But decency doesn’t always prevail in this world of ours. Decency needs to be aggressively defended. Indecency needs to be exposed and denounced.
Donald Nieman, a political analyst and professor at Binghamton University in New York state said:
Birtherism made him an avatar of populist conservatism in 2011 and his attacks on Mexicans and Muslims played a critical role in his victories in 2016.
They stoke the passion of the base and that’s important. But they also turn off a lot of the few swing voters who play a critical role in deciding elections these days — as the results in 2018, 2020, and 2022 suggest.
However, let’s not ascribe too much political strategy to the presidential contender. Political scientist Nicholas Creel, of Georgia College and State University, told Agence France-Presse that the latest controversy lays bare Trump’s lack of self-control and narcissism – “Trump being Trump” – rather than some underlying strategy. He said:
The best way to view this specific scandal is not as some sort of fifth-dimensional chess strategy whereby he was looking to excite his base via dog whistles but simply as an insensitive comment from a latently racist old man who thinks he can do no wrong.
Trump has always been a lying racist, and will always make the choice to continue to be a lying racist. Sometimes, it’s just not that deep.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
Featured image via Unsplash/Jon Tyson
