Former President Trump is facing fierce blowback from his line of attack questioning Vice President Harris’s Black identity, risking his efforts to court more Black voters in November.
The former president drew shock and outrage from members of the Black community after claiming Harris, who is biracial, had “turned Black” after identifying only as Indian for years. Harris has repeatedly referenced her Black and Indian cultural background in her years in the political spotlight.
The fallout online from the interview at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention was swift, with some experts arguing the comments will damage Trump badly with Black voters in the fall.
“I cannot imagine that this did anything but decrease Black voter opinions of Trump,” said Tabitha Bonilla, a professor at Northwestern University. “I think this is what we witnessed in reactions to his NABJ interview on social media, both among Black journalists and in #WhenITurnedBlack,” she added, referring to a hashtag that trended on the social platform X among critics of the former president.
Critics immediately took to social media to express their displeasure, and the Harris campaign issued a scathing rebuke of the former president.
“The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people,” said Michael Tyler, communications director for Harris for President, in a statement.
Project 2025 is an agenda conservative groups have put together for the next conservative president. Trump has sought to distance himself from the agenda, while Democrats, noting connections between the groups and Trump World, have made it a campaign issue.
“Today’s tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump’s MAGA rallies this entire campaign,” Tyler added.
Although minimal data exists on Black voter sentiment around the new 2024 match-up between Trump and Harris, polling between February 2022 and October 2023 from the Black Census Project — which engaged more than 200,000 Black individuals — found Harris had a 71 percent favorability rating. Trump had a 5 percent favorability rating.
Still, said Scott Tranter, director of data science at Decision Desk HQ, Trump was pulling 10 percent to 15 percent of Black voter support when the presidential race looked to be a contest between Trump and President Biden. That would have been a good showing for a Republican presidential candidate.
“A lot of that data was when Joe Biden was at the top of the ticket, and there was a lot of concern about Joe Biden,” Tranter said. “Kamala Harris certainly gets a different angle, and voters take a fresh look. But if Donald Trump were to get 10 [percent] to 15 percent of the African American vote, that’d be a high watermark for any Republican candidate.”
A steady stream of Republicans have criticized Trump’s remarks, arguing they could hurt him in November and that he’d be better off focusing on other issues.
But Trump has doubled down on the arguments.
In a Thursday post on Truth Social, Trump shared a photo of Harris in a sari sitting with her family. He captioned it: “Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated.”
This is far from the first time that Trump, whose political rise was tied to his push of false claims that former President Obama was born in Kenya, has engaged in divisive race-based arguments.
“Donald Trump built his political career on the foundation of racism, and now this is Birtherism 2.0,” said Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright.
Even more concerning, Seawright said, is that “there is a large segment of the population in this country, large segments of his base, who actually feed off of that and are energized by that.”
Trump’s remarks about Harris at the NABJ came in response to a question about comments from other Republicans that she is a “DEI hire,” an insinuation suggesting she is only in her position because of her race.
The rhetoric has appeared to spread. Some Republicans have taken to calling Harris a “DEI hire,” insinuating the only reason she was selected for vice president and subsequently the presidency is because of her race. Democrats and Black leaders have vehemently rejected the idea, while some Republicans have suggested such talk is unhelpful to their side.
Harris, since Biden dropped out of the race against Trump and endorsed her, has unified much of the Democratic Party behind her campaign, sparking excitement among broad swathes of the party — including many Black voters.
Harris’s campaign announced on Friday it had raised $310 million in July. She has received endorsements from the Congressional Black Caucus, the Black Muslim Leadership Council Fund and Obama and first lady Michelle Obama.
Some leaders of organizations representing Black men — one of the most crucial demographics in this year’s election — have begun to throw their support behind her candidacy.
“You can’t hide the excitement surrounding future president Harris’s potential presidential bid,” said Joe Paul, board member of Black Men Vote. “You had 58,000 Americans sign up to volunteer on the same day. That’s not normal. It’s showcasing a robust, grassroots boots on the ground movement.”
Harris crossed the threshold needed to officially become the Democratic presidential nominee in a virtual roll call vote on Friday. But as rhetoric around her racial identity continues, Bonilla said a larger conversation around race is needed.
“Blackness isn’t just one thing, as is no identity,” said Bonilla. “You can be multiple things at one time. But I think most conversations on race and ethnicity tend to fall flat and think about entire groups of people as though they were one thing, and that’s just factually incorrect.
“It also leads to a lot of harm in that it leaves out people who may not fit this modal standard of what we think their racial identity should be. It limits an individual’s ability to be wholly who they are and who they want to be.”