Former President Trump has faced strong backlash from his attack lines questioning Harris’ black identity, jeopardizing his efforts to win over more black voters in November’s presidential election.
The former president shocked and angered members of the black community by claiming that the biracial Harris had “become black” after identifying only as Indian for many years. Harris has repeatedly referenced her black and Indian cultural background during her years in the political spotlight.
The interview, at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference, sparked immediate reactions online, with some experts arguing that the comments will significantly damage Trump’s standing with black voters this fall.
“This has undoubtedly lowered black voters’ opinions of Trump,” said Northwestern University professor Tabitha Bonilla. “I think we saw this in the reactions to his NABJ interview on social media, both from black journalists and #WhenITurnedBlack,” she added, referring to a hashtag that trended on social platform X among critics of the former president.
Critics quickly took to social media to air their displeasure, with Harris’ campaign issuing scathing rebukes of the former president.
“The hostility Donald Trump displayed on stage today is the same hostility he has displayed throughout his life, throughout his time in office and throughout his campaign for president as he sought to regain power and impose his harmful Project 2025 policies on the American people,” Harris campaign director Michael Tyler said in a statement.
Project 2025 is a policy agenda put together by conservative groups for the next conservative president, and while Trump has sought to distance himself from it, Democrats have highlighted the group’s ties to TrumpWorld and made it an issue in the campaign.
“Today’s outrage is just a glimpse of the chaos and division that has characterized Trump’s MAGA rallies throughout the campaign,” Tyler added.
There is little data on Black voter sentiment regarding a new Trump-Harris showdown in 2024, but polls from February 2022 to October 2023 show that: Black Census Project In a survey of more than 200,000 black people, Harris had a 71 percent favorability rating, compared with 5 percent for Trump.
Still, Scott Tranter, director of data science at Decision Desk HQ, said that when the election was expected to be a contest between Trump and Biden, Trump was garnering support from 10% to 15% of black voters, which would have been a good showing for the Republican presidential nominee.
“A lot of that data is from when Joe Biden was the front-runner, and there was a lot of concern about Joe Biden,” Tranter said. “Kamala Harris certainly has a different angle, and voters are looking at it in a new way. But Donald Trump was in the top 10 in the presidential race. [percent] Winning 15 percent of African-American voters would be a record for a Republican candidate.”
Republican lawmakers have criticized Trump’s comments, saying they could hurt his chances in the November presidential election and that he would be better off focusing on other issues.
But Trump doubled down on his claims.
In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump shared a photo of a sari-clad Harris sitting with her family, with the caption: “Thank you Kamala for the beautiful photo you sent me all those years ago! I am so grateful for your warmth, friendship and love of our Indian heritage.”
This is not the first time Trump, who rose to political prominence by promoting the false claim that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, has engaged in a divisive race-based debate.
“Donald Trump built his political career on racism, and now this is birtherism 2.0,” said Democratic strategist Antjuan Searight.
What’s even more worrying, Searight said, is that “a large portion of the population of this country, a large portion of his supporters, actually depend on that and are energized by that.”
Trump’s comments about Harris at NABJ came in response to a question about comments made by other Republicans about her being a “DEI hire,” implying that she is in her position solely because of her race.
This rhetoric appears to be widespread. Some Republicans Call Harris Calling it a “DEI hire,” he implies that the only reason she was elected vice president and then president was because of her race.Democrats and black leaders have vehemently rejected the idea, and some in the Republican Party have suggested such talk doesn’t serve them.
Since Biden dropped out of the race against Trump and endorsed Harris, she has rallied many Democrats to her campaign and generated excitement among a broad cross-section of the party, including many Black voters.
Harris’ campaign announced Friday that it had raised $310 million in July. She has received endorsements from the Congressional Black Caucus, the Black Muslim Leadership Council Fund and President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle.
Some leaders of organizations representing black men, one of the most important demographics in this year’s election, have begun to support her candidacy.
“There’s no hiding the excitement surrounding President-elect Harris’ potential run for president,” said Joe Paul, executive director of Black Men Vote. “58,000 Americans signed up to volunteer on the same day. This is not the norm. It shows a powerful, grassroots, hands-on movement.”
Harris passed the threshold needed to officially become the Democratic presidential nominee in a virtual roll call vote on Friday, but as debate continues over her racial identity, Bonilla said a broader discussion about race is needed.
“Being black isn’t one thing, just like you don’t have an identity,” Bonilla said. “You can be many things at once, but most conversations about race and ethnicity tend to be trivial and tend to treat a whole group of people as if they’re one thing, which is factually false.”
“It also does a lot of harm in that it excludes people who don’t fit into the standard criteria of what we think racial identity should be. It limits individuals’ ability to be who they want to be.”
