Republicans scrambled as they tried to defend former president Donald Trump’s racist lies about Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president.
Trump, at an appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists last week, launched a racist attack against Harris by falsely accusing her of misrepresenting her racial background. “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black… So I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a Black person.”
Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance, who has three mixed-race children, applauded and doubled down on the attack: “I thought it was hysterical. I think he pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris,” Vance said Wednesday.
GOP Rep. Byron Donalds, who himself is the father of mixed-race children, called Trump’s comments a “phony controversy,” saying on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, “I don’t really care, most people don’t.” But Donalds then went on to repeat Trump’s slur against Harris’ racial identity and lie about an Associated Press (AP) story from when Harris was first elected to the Senate.
“When Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was AP that said she was the first Indian American United States senator,” Donalds said. “It was actually played up a lot when she came into the Senate. Now she’s running nationally, obviously the campaign has shifted. They’re talking much more about her father’s heritage and her Black identity. It doesn’t really matter. The [former] president barely mentioned it.”
What the AP actually wrote is this: “Harris will enter the chamber as the first Indian woman elected to a Senate seat and the second Black woman, following Carol Moseley Braun, who served a single term after being elected in 1992.” (Emphasis added.)
Donalds went on to obfuscate and blame Harris for “massive inflation” and “her failure as border czar” even though Republican claims that Harris was Biden’s “border czar” have been labeled misleading by fact checkers.
But George Stephanopoulos did not let Donalds get away with lying about Harris’ racial background. “You just repeated the slur again. If it doesn’t matter, why do you all keep questioning her identity? She’s always identified as a Black woman. She is biracial. She has a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. She’s always identified as both. Why are you questioning that?”
“This is something that’s actually a conversation throughout social media right now,” Donalds dodged. “A lot of people are trying to figure this out.”
“Sir, one second, you just did it again! Why do you insist on questioning her racial identity?” Stephanopoulos asked indignantly.
This racist talking point was debunked long ago. In 2020, the AP ran a fact check that ruled these claims are false. “Kamala Harris for years has identified herself as both Black and Indian American,” the AP’s Amanda Seitz wrote. “In interviews, she has regularly talked about how her mother, who was from India, raised her as Black.”
“George, now that you’re done yelling at me, let me answer,” Donalds testily fired back at Stephanopoulos. The MAGA congressman again pivoted away from the question to say that Trump spent time attacking Harris’ record at his Saturday rally (during which the former president also perpetuated lies about election fraud and cheered the appointment of MAGA loyalists to the Georgia State Election Board.)
“I know you guys like to glom onto this that he talks about in jest or in a serious manner for about a minute or so, but what you do not cover is the litany of failures of Kamala Harris,” Donalds said.
“So questioning someone’s racial identity for two minutes is OK?” Stephanopoulos responded.
Donalds again falsely claimed the AP “brought… up” the claims that Harris is the first Indian senator to be elected in the Senate, repeatedly neglecting that they also in the very same sentence called her the “second Black woman” elected to a Senate seat. “None of this matters to the American people,” Donalds added.
“If it doesn’t matter,” Stephanopolous replied, “I don’t understand why you keep on repeating it, why the [former] president keeps on repeating it, why those introducing the [former] president yesterday keep on repeating it.”
“George, actually, I’m not the one who keeps repeating it. George, you’re the one that’s bringing it up now,” Donalds replied.
“Sir, you’ve done it three times. Every single answer you gave me — now let me finish, sir — every single answer you gave, you repeated the slur,” Stephanopoulos said.
Donalds then tried to get Stephanopoulos to change the subject, but the anchor continued: “AP did not say that Kamala Harris is not Black. She is biracial. She is Indian. She is Black. You continue to repeat the… slur. I don’t understand why you and the [former] president do it, but it’s clear you’re not gonna say that it’s wrong, and you’ve now established that for our audience.”
“Let’s move on,” Donalds pleaded after five minutes of back-and-forth.
Over on on CBS’s Face the Nation, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton got off comparatively easy when he was asked about these attacks on Harris by Ed O’Keefe.
“Are you personally OK with him questioning whether she’s Black?” O’Keefe asked Cotton.
“Ed, he wasn’t saying what matters is how she identifies as her race,” Cotton said. “He explicitly said he didn’t care. One was fine. The other was fine. Both was fine. She identifies as a dangerous San Francisco liberal. That’s the danger to the American people.”
“Let’s move on to other things,” O’Keefe said, allowing Cotton to get away with his lie.
But Republicans should have to face up to the harmful, vile racist falsehoods being spewed by their party’s candidate, especially because they are part of the Trump campaign’s broader strategy. Sources told Rolling Stone that Trump and his aides have planned these race-baiting attacks, despite House Republican leadership begging its members to avoid the topic of Harris’ race, according to Politico.
“It’s not by accident; it’s intentional,” a person close to Trump told Rolling Stone of the attacks. “We’re behind the [former] president, 100 percent.”
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”