Donald Trump hasn’t let up on insisting that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently became Black.
During a bumbling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee deflected a direct question probing his reasoning for claiming that the biracial Democrat had “turned Black.”
“Kamala Harris’s father is Jamaican American, and she went to a historically Black college,” prompted a reporter, referring to Harris’s attendance at Howard University. “How is she only recently deciding to be Black?”
“You’ll have to ask her that question because she’s the one that said it. I didn’t say it,” Trump said. “But I’ve known her a long time, I actually contributed to her campaign a long time ago, because I was a developer—I contributed to lots of campaigns, to Democrats, Republicans; some were liberal, some were conservative, but you’ll have to ask her about that.
“To me it doesn’t matter,” he continued. “But to her, from her standpoint, I think it’s very disrespectful to both, really. Whether it’s Indian or Black, I think it’s very disrespectful to both. To me it doesn’t matter.”
Reporter: How is Kamala Harris recently deciding to be Black?
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 8, 2024
Trump: You have to ask her because she said it I didn't say it.. I think it’s very disrespectful to both whether it’s Indian or Black pic.twitter.com/GLb4MEOaNS
Trump’s outrageous claim sprang up at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, when the 78-year-old white candidate tried and failed to curry favor with the crowd by trash-talking Harris’s racial identity.
“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,” Trump said at the convention, seemingly unable to grasp how a person could have two parents from different cultures but still manage to appreciate both. (More than 10 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2020 census, is multiracial.)
