https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/donald-trump-framing-kamala-harris-race-identity-db66ced2?mod=djem10pointWASHINGTON—Donald Trump ignited a firestorm by questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity, an attack that risks harming his larger campaign strategy to define her.
Trump and his team are trying to shape how Americans view Harris, just two weeks into her presidential bid, before she can reintroduce herself to the nation as a candidate in her own right. She will get her biggest opportunity to do that at the Democratic National Convention later this month. Before then, the Trump campaign and other Republicans have worked to cast her as inauthentic in how she presents herself and as too liberal for the country.
“We have to work hard to define her,” Trump said at an Atlanta rally Saturday, before quickly catching himself and adding: “I don’t want to even define her, I just want to say who she is: She’s a horror show.”
But Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks days earlier about her identity, which caused some of his aides to gasp, further injected race and gender into the campaign. The controversy threatens to derail their effort to define her when his campaign, thus far a more disciplined operation than his earlier bids, is eager to blunt the sudden energy for Harris.
At the rally, Trump, whose supporters gathered in the same Atlanta venue where thousands gathered for Harris on Tuesday, hammered Harris as “radical” and a “lunatic” with a “low IQ.” But he steered clear of his earlier allegation that Harris only recently identified as Black. Instead, Trump sought to draw a link between her and President Biden on policy, including Thursday’s historic prisoner swap with Russia, which he characterized as a gift for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
Trump has been frustrated by the positive attention and massive cash haul Harris has attracted, people close to him said. His campaign was hoping to characterize her as being hard to pin down on policy, but instead Trump at a convention for Black journalists took this idea to the extreme and alleged Harris was hard to pin down on race.
The former president avoided going there during the Atlanta rally, but in front of thousands of his supporters, Trump went after Harris’s intellect, speaking abilities and the pronunciation of her first name.
“Ultimately the core of this election is about economic issues. Every time you’re not talking about that, you’re missing an opportunity to engage independent voters,” GOP pollster David Winston said. “Independents always decide who wins elections.”
The former president and 2024 GOP nominee told the audience at a National Association for Black Journalists conference in Chicago that Harris has misled voters by publicly identifying only with her Indian heritage, and he falsely claimed that “she happened to turn black” a few years ago.
Harris’s mother was born in India, and her father was born in Jamaica. Both immigrated to the U.S. Harris’s Indian heritage drew special attention when she became the first Indian-American elected to the Senate in 2016. As a senator, Harris was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. She attended Howard University, a historically Black institution.
Trump’s comments drew immediate backlash, mainly from Democrats, but many Republicans rushed to defend the GOP nominee, describing a strategy to cast Harris as an opportunist.
“Look, all he said is that Kamala Harris is a chameleon,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, told CNN on Thursday. “She is everything to everybody, and she pretends to be somebody different depending on which audience she is in front of. I think it’s totally reasonable for the president to call that out, and that’s all he did.”
Vance, who was once sharply critical of Trump, claimed Harris used a “fake Southern accent” during her campaign event in Atlanta.
Trump, late Friday, sought to play down any criticism or fallout from the event, writing on social media: “The NABJ event that I went to the other day was attended by a lot of really great people. The support that they gave me, and are still giving me, is very special.”
People close to Trump said that before his appearance in Chicago, he had been thinking Harris was being inauthentic in how she presented her race. Several allies said bringing it up in public was ill-advised and a distraction. It harked back to past controversies, including Trump’s falsely alleging former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.
In a sign of how Trump can deviate from his team’s strategy, his campaign didn’t rush to double down on his remarks about her race, instead criticizing Harris for over the years taking opposing stances on issues such as fracking. A $12 million TV ad campaign aimed at battleground states links Harris with problems at the southern border.
Trump also sought to paint the policies of Harris and other Democrats as a danger to democracy, telling rallygoers Saturday that they have been describing him in the same terms for seven years. “I think I got shot because of that,” he added, referring to last month’s assassination attempt against him.
The rest of the world thinks that Trump is a massive danger to democracy and good decision making and governance of the USA
