Trump’s appearance onstage at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) on Wednesday was a bust— or worse. On paper it sounds like a good idea but anyone who knows Trump and understands the depths of his lifelong racism had to have been crazy to let him on that stage. As Dan Ladden-Hall noted in Politico yesterday, “If Trump wanted to steal the spotlight away from Harris this week, well, he succeeded in doing that. Just not in a politically advantageous way.”
He said he would pardon the violent J-6 insurrectionists rioters, dodged questions about Vance being prepared or not to assume the presidency, “and— most egregious of all— suggested that Harris isn’t really Black. ‘I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now, she wants to be known as Black,’ Trump said of the VP, who is unquestionably of both Black and South Asian descent. ‘So, I don’t know— is she Indian or is she Black?’… Trump doubled down and even tripled down on baselessly questioning Harris’ biracial background.” On his social media platform he wrote “Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony.”
Republican Members of Congress are privately freaking out over Trump’s latest broadsides. Virtually every Republican Politico contacted “was flat-out distraught by what they perceive as a self-inflicted wound not only for Trump, but for Republicans down the ballot. Maryland GOP Senate candidate Larry Hogan called Trump’s statement “unacceptable and abhorrent,” very much what most Republican electeds are saying off the record.” …The GOP backlash suggests that Trump appears to have botched the “reset” that Republicans were hoping he’d implement this week… The entire line of attack reeks of a desperation that Trump world has been doing a pretty damn good job hiding during Harris’ honeymoon these past few weeks. And yet there are signs that GOP confidence in Trump is now slipping… Republicans are hoping to refocus Trump in the coming days. But they also know that’s not an easy task. On some level, this is who Trump is: He’s always had a penchant for prioritizing schoolyard taunts and divisive rhetoric over substantial policy talk. As longtime Mitch McConnell advisor Scott Jennings put it succinctly on CNN last night: “Trump did crap the bed today. The only question is if he’s going to roll around in it or change the sheets.”
Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH), who has endorsed Trump, went right to the NY Times to blast him and his enablers in an OpEd: My Fellow Republicans, Stop The Trash Talk. “The path to victory in November,” he wrote, “is not through character attacks or personal insults. In fact, those attacks are unlikely to bring a single new voter on board. Catchy one-liners— calling Vice President Kamala Harris a ‘bum,’ ‘not a serious person’ and ‘bottom of the barrel’— might rile up the base, but they do little to connect with independent voters needed to close the deal in November. Independent voters are independent for a reason. They are not driven to the polls by personal attacks. Candidates need to give them a reason to turn out and vote. What solutions are you going to provide that will make life better for them, their families and their communities?... You have to connect with voters on their issues and their concerns. You earn their trust by appreciating that the job is bigger than yourself. You win tough elections by showing real empathy and addressing the anxieties that keep them up at night.”
When independent voters in battleground states— those who will determine the outcome of this election— turn on the TV they see too many members of my party lobbing personal attacks at Harris. It’s the worst kind of politics. It lowers the conversation and it plays into the Democrats’ narrative that this election is about political revenge for Trump. And more important, it reaps no reward.
…With less than 100 days to go until Election Day, any time spent on personal attacks or distracting rhetoric is not just time wasted; it’s time lost. Republicans must hold ourselves to a higher standard. It’s what American people deserve, and it’s good politics, too.
Another Times column critical of Trump’s racism, this one by Lisa Lerer and Maya King noted that at the NABJ event, Trump’s audacity “questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary. And it evoked an ugly history in this country, in which white America has often declared the racial categories that define citizens, and sought to determine who gets to call themselves what… Harris has embraced her dual racial identities. She has long identified as Black and was shaped by several Black institutions. She graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C., and there joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black sorority. She has spoken extensively about growing up in what she described as a Black community in Berkeley, Calif.”
These divisive, disrespectful personal attacks “have circulated among right-wing figures and Trump’s close allies for years. In 2019, Trump Jr. shared a social media post from an alt-right personality that falsely claimed Harris was not Black enough to be discussing the plight of Black Americans during a primary debate. Though Trump later deleted the post, it spread widely across conservative social media, prompting a wave of accounts to question her background, which was exactly the point of the effort, according to some far-right activists.”
But the Republican nominee’s remarks on Wednesday were perhaps the most
overt attack on her identity yet and seemed to be an effort to inject the fringe idea into the mainstream conversation about her bid.
“We’re saying this is shocking. He’ll probably put this in an ad saying how he went to talk to ‘the Blacks’ and how courageous that was,” said Cliff Albright, a liberal organizer and a co-founder of Black Voters Matter. “They’ll eat it up. He gets more out of this than we get out of it.”
Like many of Mr. Trump’s more provocative statements, the comments conveyed several unsettling ideas at once, all of them somewhat open to interpretation: He implied Ms. Harris was deceiving voters and selecting an identity for political gain. He suggested to the predominantly Black audience that she was not one of them— and to Indian Americans listening that she abandoned them, an assertion echoed by the onetime Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday.
“Kamala leaned into her Indian heritage when it was convenient in California,” Ramaswamy wrote on Twitter. “She’s now casting that aside & leaning into black identity when it’s convenient nationally.”
And by calling attention to her background, Trump seemed to be relying on an old political tactic of exoticizing nonwhite candidates.
Former President Barack Obama— the biracial son of a white mother and Black father— faced similar attacks.
For years, Trump and other Republicans spread conspiracy theories about Obama’s racial heritage with innuendo and lies about the authenticity of his birth certificate.
“Was it a birth certificate? You tell me,” Trump said in 2012, years before running to replace Obama in the White House. “Some people say that was not his birth certificate. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows.”
Obama’s citizenship was never in any doubt, as he had proved by releasing his entire birth certificate a year earlier. But Trump’s accusations were aimed at stoking suspicions and fears among white supporters who were all too eager to believe that Obama was born in Africa.
Throughout 2011, when he was first considering a foray into presidential politics, he repeated the lie about Obama over and over again, in tweets, speeches and interviews. He hinted at a conspiracy to cover up the truth and he repeatedly brushed aside evidence to the contrary, including the actual birth certificate. And it was effective, to a degree that stunned even Trump’s political advisers: His popularity among hard-core Republican voters soared.
On Wednesday, Trump seemed to see similar political opportunities in the moment. In the hours after he questioned Harris’s identity, he repeated the claim in a Truth Social post. A headline noting Harris was California’s “first Indian American U.S. Senator” was projected on a large screen above the stage at his Pennsylvania rally on Wednesday evening.
And across social media platforms, Trump supporters circulated questions about whether her race was mentioned on her birth certificate— a throwback to the attacks they once leveled against Obama.
Charlie Sykes wondered aloud if Wednesday was Trump’s worst day, a ghastly episode of “Fat Elvis Does Birtherism... a pathetic old racist trying to replay his greatest hits… [H]e thinks that playing the race cards will work again. Even his post-debacle campaign statement made it clear that he wants to relitigate some of most incendiary comments from 2015. But back then, his comments were shocking; now they just feel… weird.”
Even Fox News host Jessica Tarlov slammed Trump for his NABJ performance. “My reaction is that it was a complete, absolute dumpster fire for the former president. I don’t feel the need to give him any credit for showing up there because he came with a terrible attitude. He hit all of his regular hits, lying about his record for Black Americans, the comparison saying he’s done the most for the Black community since Abraham Lincoln is obviously ridiculous. Unemployment is lower for Black Americans under Joe Biden than Donald Trump. Everybody knows that. Even Donald Trump knows that. People have told him he just won’t stop. I thought that he was rude and offensive to the questioners. I don’t think in response to what Joe was saying, that asking him, for instance, about calling Kamala Harris a DEI hire is going into debate mode. This is who his opponent is. And then his response that she used to be Indian and is now somehow black was offensive, no matter the color.”
Trump may be trying to see if an actually honest campaign can win in a shithole.
IOW, are there more pure evil racist white voters than there are non-nazis who are still stupid enough to fall for the democraps' bullshit.
Or maybe they've queued up the fake electors and/or the bigger, better-armed brown-shirts, know that democraps are congenital pussies and won't do shit, and the nazis don't much care either way.
Actually, in a way, their honesty is quite refreshing. Ominous... but still... something we've not seen in at least 60 years.