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.”
The first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention at the American Airlines Center, on Sept. 9, 2026 in Dallas, Texas.
People of all colors listen as Donald Trump speaks on the first day of the Republican midterm convention.
Trump supporters at the Republican midterm convention.
Apple Maps, August 30, 2026
It’s Been 25 Years Since 9/11. Did the Terrorists Win?
I once had a conversation with Barack Obama about the nature of terrorism. This was during his second term, and he’d been going on for a few minutes about how Islamic terrorism wasn’t actually an existential threat to Americans, but rather a chronic and manageable risk. I was all too familiar with this argument, having conducted the interview with John Kerry in 2004, in which he said terrorism could be reduced to the level of a “nuisance” — a quote that blew up on him during the final weeks of the campaign. I found Kerry’s answer problematic then, and I had the same reaction when Obama said it. I asked him pointedly: What would have to happen for him to decide that terrorism was, in fact, existential? How about a suitcase nuke on a subway car? Then would he concede that terrorists were more than criminal gangs?
Obama didn’t hesitate. Terrorism would only reach the level of an existential threat, he told me, if Americans responded by abandoning their own values and turning on one another. There was nothing a bunch of homicidal zealots could do to destroy the most powerful country on Earth, but we could certainly destroy ourselves if we abandoned our constitutional protections in a fit of panic.
At the time, this struck me as something you might expect to hear from a constitutional-law professor, but not necessarily from the president of the United States. There was an intellectual fatalism about Obama I sometimes found disconcerting — a sense that he saw himself as a twig in the river of history, and it was up to the rest of us to change the current. I doubt he would dispute that assessment. But I thought often of that conversation a few years later, as the country careened into the Trump era. And as we pause now to reflect on the 25 years that have passed since the attacks of Sept. 11, I find myself thinking about it again.
Alternative histories are a tricky business, best left to novelists and sci-fi filmmakers. As a friend of mine in politics likes to say, mockingly, whenever such theories get floated: What if Hitler had won the Civil War? And yet, it’s hard not to see a direct line between the events of 2001 and where we are today — and to wonder how different the country might have looked had it never happened. On the eve of the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, George W. Bush’s young presidency seemed to be wobbling. Absent those attacks, he might well have been a one-term president, and he almost certainly would not have invaded Iraq. Nor would Democrats become backed into defending the entrenched war in Afghanistan as the “good war” — a way of differentiating their own response to 9/11 from Bush’s without sounding reflexively pacifist.
Without the economic shock of 2001, it’s unlikely that desperate policymakers would have looked the other way while lenders, underwritten by the government, turned the housing market into a casino, leading to the second massive blow of the decade: the market collapse of 2008. All of these things, in quick succession, destroyed what remained of the public’s faith in its governing establishment, leading directly to Obama’s stunning takeover of the Democratic Party and, later, to the election of Donald Trump.
The Trump I met in the late 1990s, while he was flirting with an independent run for president, held himself out as a centrist reformer, in the mold of Ross Perot. By 2015, when he started running as a Republican, Trump had fully embraced a reactionary, white-nationalist movement — a response to Obama, yes, but also to Bush, whose instinct in the months after 9/11 had been to speak out forcefully in defense of Muslim Americans, and whose support for liberalized immigration infuriated much of his party’s base. Trump’s core appeal then, as it is now, was rooted firmly in the nativist, anti-globalist backlash that emerged in 2001. (According to Pew Research, roughly 42 percent of Americans believe Muslims are having a negative impact on the country.) The animating idea of Trump’s second term is that white, English-speaking Americans are the only authentic Americans. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that he will twist or shred any page of the Constitution to enact this vision, since he really makes no effort to conceal it.
Nor is America’s hard turn away from pluralism and liberal democracy happening in a vacuum — far from it. In the past decade, similarly reactionary, anti-immigrant movements have rocked Britain and taken over Italy, and they now seem poised to wrest power in France and Germany. Maybe some of this would have happened without 9/11; the hollowing-out forces of globalization and automation were already fueling plenty of economic fury here and in Europe by the turn of the century, and the revolution in social media wasn’t far off. But there’s little doubt that the “War on Terror,” which became the first real foreign policy framework since the end of the Cold War, focused all of that anxiety toward an identifiable enemy, fracturing societies that had been held together by a 50-year consensus around personal liberties. If Obama were being honest, he’d probably say he told me so, and he’d be right.
IN THE MONTHS after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq, it was hard to get much perspective, and genuine patriotism mixed — as it always does — with a series of mindless gestures and clichés. Flag pins became mandatory even for reporters, peace songs were effectively banned, Republicans brought “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” into the lexicon to protest French misgivings about war. It became rote for politicians to say that the terrorists hated our way of life and we would never let them win. (To this day, when my dog snarls at some terrified Shiba Inu for no reason, I ask her why she hates freedom.)
Twenty-five years on, though, with the benefit of distance and experience, we can ask some questions we couldn’t ask then. And one of them is what the violent extremists who sent those suicide planes into our buildings really hoped to achieve. Did Osama bin Laden think he could win a holy war with America? Did we ultimately frustrate his script for the downfall of the West, or did we simply play our part?
Terrorism is, by its nature, asymmetrical. Whether it’s the Viet Minh under the French, or the IRA in Britain, or Al Qaeda, there’s an inherent understanding that the terrorist can’t win a conventional war against an obviously superior military force. What the terrorist seeks is destabilization of the status quo. His desperate act is an igniter in search of fuses; the goal is to set off a chain reaction inside the fortress that can’t be controlled, to disrupt order with chaos and see what shakes out. The terrorist knows this will likely cause his own people suffering in the short run, but that’s part of the point. He believes the occupier to be a soulless monster, and by reducing it to its basest instincts, he hopes to bare its nature to the world.
We’re seeing this play out, in real time, in Israel. The leaders of Hamas, their military options exhausted and their political goals slipping away, could not have been under any illusion that they would drive out the Israeli occupiers by savagely killing and mutilating more than a thousand innocent people. They must have hoped that Israel would react with blind fury and cruelty, resorting to the instinct for all-out annihilation that its leaders had long managed to suppress. Nearly three years later, Israel has tumbled from legitimatized power to international pariah, its politics riven by disunity, its moral authority in shambles. Do we think Hamas really cares that more than 70,000 of its own people have died in the carnage? Its repugnant leaders almost certainly consider that a cost worth paying in the broader context of history. What they have achieved, in political terms, has exceeded their most feverish dreams.
The Israelis should have looked across the Atlantic and learned something from our own experience. America on Sept. 10, 2001, was an unchallenged superpower at peace — vexed by social and economic divisions, yes, but still stable enough to survive a disputed election with its political consensus intact. A quarter century later, we find ourselves fighting a third unsuccessful war in the Middle East, our society more divided and our politics more poisoned than any time since the 1800s, a foundation of laws imperiled after 250 years of durability, immigrants hunted down like animals by masked agents, violence and extremism on the rise from both right and left, truth and intellectualism in retreat. This is not solely the fallout from Sept. 11, 2001, but it is the result of a series of events that, were you able to hit a rewind button and live it all again in reverse, would lead you directly back to that day. If bin Laden meant for his attack to be the first in a series of similarly epic crimes, then he was soundly defeated — no small achievement for American soldiers and spies. But if his goal was to destabilize America and bring out the worst of our nature, then he may have pulled off the most successful terrorist attack in history.
Over and over we told ourselves, in that agonizing moment, that the terrorists would never win. A quarter century later, it’s getting hard to argue they didn’t.