HOUSTON — Addressing a cavernous auditorium filled with thousands of Black women decked out in royal blue and gold — the colors of Sigma Gamma Rho, a historically Black sorority holding its biennial celebration in Houston on Wednesday — Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged the ugly, unhinged rant that former President Donald Trump delivered hours earlier at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention in Chicago.
During a panel discussion moderated by a trio of female reporters, Trump had questioned Harris’ race, suggesting she “turned” Black as a matter of political convenience.
Rachel Scott, a correspondent with ABC News, asked the former president about Republicans’ efforts to brand Harris, pejoratively, as a “DEI hire” — a smear intended to paint the vice president and former U.S. senator as someone who was picked for a job not for her skills or accomplishments, but because she ticks a specific demographic box.
Instead of distancing himself from the caricature, Trump launched an uglier attack, questioning whether Harris was Black at all. “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. 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,” he said. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Harris responded to Trump’s remarks about her race — one of a series of stunning exchanges he made during the controversial 34-minute interview — at Sigma Gamma Rho’s 60th International Biennial Boule.
“This afternoon, Donald Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists. And it was the same old show: the divisiveness, and the disrespect. And let me just say the American people deserve better.”
Harris went on: “The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth. A leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us — they are an essential source of our strength.”
Already, Trump’s campaign seems determined to capitalize on, rather than back away from, Trump’s remarks — a signal that the campaign thinks his racist, bad-faith attack on Harris will have a political benefit.
Just hours after his interview — before the former president arrived at a campaign rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania — a Business Insider headline was projected on a screen at the rally that read: “California’s Kamala Harris becomes first Indian-American U.S. senator.” By then, Trump had already posted a video on Truth Social of Harris cooking with the actress Mindy Kaling, and talking about her South Asian heritage. He captioned it: “Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity!” Trump did not revisit the comments onstage at the rally, but his lawyer Alina Habba tried, declaring awkwardly at one point: “Unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are, I know where I come from.”
Trump has a history with this type of attack: He milked bad-faith “doubts” about Barack Obama’s birth certificate for years — a campaign that eventually laid the path for his 2016 presidential bid. On Wednesday, far-right Trump supporter Laura Loomer posted that she was sharing a copy of Harris’ birth certificate, writing that it “proves she is NOT BLACK.” She added: “Donald Trump is correct. Kamala Harris is NOT black and never has been.”
The attack on Harris originated years ago, promoted by the right-wing provocateur Ali Alexander, who organized the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Alexander tweeted in 2019: “Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves. She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.” Donald Trump Jr. retweeted it at the time.
At a fundraiser in Maine, Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff — the target of recent faith-based attacks from Trump — dismissed the former president’s comments, calling them “a distraction.”
“We can’t get distracted by Hannibal Lecter,” Emhoff said, referring to Trump’s bizarre proclivity for the fictional cannibal. “Even the insults hurled at myself and my wife … that’s to distract us and get us talking about that.”
The Trump campaign is in desperate need of a distraction: After weeks of withering criticism of J.D. Vance, his running mate, the Trump campaign must be grateful for any earned media opportunity that doesn’t involve questions about whether or not his pick for vice president had sex with a couch, or revolve around his declaring “war” on broad swaths of the American electorate.
Vance, himself the father of three mixed-race children, laughed off Trump’s comments about Harris’ race at a rally in Arizona on Wednesday. “I thought it was hysterical,” Vance said. “I think he pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris.”
Harris is the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer researcher who was born in India, and Donald Harris, an economist who was born in Jamaica. The couple met in Berkeley, California, and where they were both active in a legendary Black intellectual study group at U.C. Berkeley. Harris herself was born in Oakland, and she went on to study at Howard University, a historically Black college, where she became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha — one of the “Divine Nine” historically Black sororities and fraternities.
She has spoken often about her Black heritage, including to the popular radio show The Breakfast Club in 2019. “I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black,” she said. “I was born Black. I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.