Donald Trump’s ‘neo-birtherism” strategy of attack against Kamala Harris is a return to a tactic that has actually never been tested in an election, a New York Times columnist pointed out Tuesday.
Jamelle Bouie wrote that Trump has adopted similar attacks against his Democratic opponent that he tried against Barack Obama, using race and the base instincts of a section of the American right to attack his opponent as a foreign interloper.
But, wrote Bouie, Trump never actually ran against Obama. And, while baselessly questioning if Obama was born in the U.S. and eligible to be president helped him build create his own fan base, it’s an election tactic that has yet to be tested.
“For years, before he won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Donald Trump was something like the spiritual leader of the Republican Party’s right-wing base,” write Bouie.
“He earned his place in the hearts and minds of conservative voters by doing what most Republican politicians at the time refused to do: He attacked Barack Obama as a foreign interloper and openly questioned his right to serve as president of the United States.”
The strategy, the columnist wrote, put Trump in a position to win his party’s presidential election four years later, but he went on to run against Hillary Clinton. And, four years after that, he took on Joe Biden.
“Birtherism sits at the foundation of Trump’s political career. It is the energy that fueled his ascent to the highest peak of American politics. And as he tries to scale that peak for a third time — and for the first time against a nonwhite opponent — he has returned to birtherism as he makes his case to the public,” he wrote.
This time, his reliance on race is directed right at his opponent, with some variation. Instead of claiming she wasn’t born in America, he’s questioned if Harris is really African American.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” he said at a convention of Black journalists last week.
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“So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
It’s a repeat of Birtherism in that it attacks race, and it is provably false, Bouie wrote.
“The point is that there is no real dispute or even question about Harris’s background. As with its original iteration, the goal of this neo-birtherism is to cast doubts about Harris’s integrity. It is to say that she is inauthentic — that she can’t be trusted,” he wrote.
But, he said, he’s attempting to use a tactic to win an election which he has actually never used before — and it could backfire.
“For as much as Trump defined himself against Obama, he also never ran against Obama,” Bouie wrote.
“ You could even describe Trump’s birtherism as a fantasy of what he would have said to the former president had he been his opponent. If Trump’s attacks on Harris’s identity are part of a strategy, in other words, it’s not one that ever won an election.”
