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.”
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.