August 01, 2024 10:55 AM UTC

Trump Sets GOP Race Relations Back To Stone Age, Thrilling Lauren Boebert

• 9 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

CNN reports from the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, where Donald Trump appeared yesterday for a sit-down interview with three Black journalists that even on the Trump scale of incendiary shock value is difficult to overstate: a performance that would have ended any other political career, and although it’s not the first time we’ve said something like that about one of Trump’s innumerable self-inflicted rhetorical wounds, it’s perhaps never felt more true.

Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed Wednesday that his 2024 Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, “happened to turn Black” a few years ago, saying that “all of a sudden, she made a turn” in her identity.

Trump’s comments at a gathering of Black journalists in Chicago came when an interviewer asked him whether he agreed with Republicans on Capitol Hill who have characterized Harris as a “DEI hire.” Trump responded by questioning Harris’ heritage.

“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. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” the former president said.

The audience present was ready to jeer Trump, but the audible gasps of shock were authentic as this outrageous racist commentary sank in. It was immediately apparent that Trump’s statements would be headline news by the evening, which proved correct, along with Vice President Kamala Harris’ dignified response:

“The American people deserve better,” Ms. Harris said at a convention of Sigma Gamma Rho, one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities. “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.”

We are not going to waste a lot of time re-explaining in this space the facts about Vice President Kamala Harris’ dual South Asian and Black Jamaican ancestry, because there is absolutely no need to restate facts which have been clearly established simply because another racist blowhard baselessly questioned them. But because the Republican nominee for President went there, we’ll remind everyone that it is possible to be biracial, meaning of two (or even more) racial heritages. Harris attended the historically Black Howard University, but even that doesn’t matter because Harris has nothing to prove to anyone about her heritage. The people who feel the need to keep asking such questions, much like those who baselessly questioned Barack Obama’s birth certificate, are racists. And the biggest commonality between the “birther” attacks on Obama and the racist questioning of Harris’ heritage is Donald Trump.

There’s nothing about this that Trump’s opponents didn’t know. But only Trump could spell it out in terms that even many Republicans couldn’t deny. Newsweek:

“What have we been talking about all week long? Childless cat women. DEI candidates. Now ‘Is she Black? Is she Indian?'” Senator Lisa Murkowski, a rare Trump critic in the GOP, told Punchbowl News on Thursday. “Maybe they don’t know how to handle the campaign, so they default to issues that simply should not be an issue.”

…Former Trump White House press secretary Alyssa Farah Griffin warned that Trump’s comments won’t just hurt him with the Black community since “most Americans (but apparently not Trump!) understand the concept of being biracial and that to talk this way about anyone’s race is offensive.”

We’re inclined to agree that “most Americans” understand what being biracial means, more than previous generations and cutting across most political boundaries. There are just too many people irrespective of their stand on any other issue who will be personally offended by Trump’s racist attacks on Harris’ biracial heritage because it’s also an attack on their family, or one they know.

With all of this in mind, we’re not going to surprise many readers with Colorado’s grope-to-glory carpetbagger and indefatigable Trump cheerleader Rep. Lauren Boebert’s take:

Of course, Harris was not the first Black U.S. Senator, explaining the first headline. But she was the first Black vice president, which explains the second headline. This again is how being biracial works. If it’s not obvious to you, the first thing to understand is that is not the biracial individual’s problem. It is yours. We wondered for a moment if Boebert would be this quick to double down on Trump’s overt racism in her old more competitive district, before realizing that of course she would have. Like Trump, this is who Boebert is. No matter how many votes it costs them, the narrow base they play to is also the loudest.

Just having to explain what is obvious to everyone except the wilfully ignorant makes us want to take a hot shower. The only upshot is the likelihood that millions of voters across the country are having a similar reaction.