Trump Doubles Down on “Kamala Isn’t Black” Argument With New Photo

In a Truth Social post Thursday morning, Donald Trump appeared to suggest, again, that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris isn’t really Black, ramping up his identity-based attacks to the horror of those in his party who consider racism a losing electoral strategy.

Earlier in the week, many GOP strategists, including in the Trump camp, worried that attacks on Harris’s race and gender—which seemed all but inevitable considering Trump’s history of racism and misogyny—would pose a serious liability for the campaign. “We hope he doesn’t act like a crazy racist and sexist person, but we can’t control him,” a source close to the campaign told The Washington Post.

These hopes were quickly dashed in the course of Trump’s interview with the National Association of Black Journalists Wednesday afternoon, in which the candidate claimed that, for years, Vice President Kamala Harris “was Indian all the way, and then suddenly she made a turn and she became a Black person.”

Politifact noted this was a “false mischaracterization of Harris’ background and how she has spoken about, and identified with, her race and ethnicity.” Harris, whose mother is Indian and father is Black, has “embraced her Black identity and multicultural background in several ways.”

By Wednesday evening, many Republicans were dismayed. One House Republican told Axios the interview “was not a demonstration on how to win over undecided voters,” and another said it “raised concerns about whether Trump can contain his impulses.”

But Trump dug in his heels again on Truth Social Thursday morning, posting a family photo in which a young Kamala Harris wore a sari, with the snide caption, “Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian heritage are very much appreciated.”

Commenting on Trump’s obstinate commitment to mocking Harris’s biracial background, political analyst and X user ettingermentum wrote, “How does he even theoretically see this helping him,” and commentator Tim Miller sarcastically posted, “Gotta say I am extremely impressed with the strategic discipline that [Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita] has brought to this campaign. I doubted the punditry that indicated Trump could be tamed … but the proof is in the pudding.”

A former Trump aide has accused Donald Trump of falsely identifying as Swedish, following his outlandish claim that Vice President Kamala Harris “happened to turn Black” despite being “always of Indian heritage.”

Omarosa Manigault Newman called out Trump during an appearance on CNN’s Laura Coates Live Wednesday night, saying that she distinctly remembered him identifying as Swedish, “because he didn’t want to acknowledge that his father was German and his mother was Irish, and he thought that that would play better to those who were patronizing his businesses.”

“So can we call the question, his past of self-identifying as first Swedish, then German, and then Irish whenever it’s convenient?”

“Donald doesn’t know the difference between ancestry and race. He doesn’t want to know the differences, nor does he understand the nuances of how people self-identify. And so, I believe that that’s disqualifying for him,” Newman said.

Trump’s grandfather, Frederich, came to New York City from Kallstadt, Germany, according to The Daily Beast. Trump’s father then lied about having Swedish heritage, so that he could more easily sell apartments to Jewish tenants in the aftermath of World War II, according to The Boston Globe.

That lie made its way into Trump’s 1987 bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, where he wrote that his grandfather “came here from Sweden as a child.” It was only when the Trump family received a request from a Swedish organization to put up an exhibit about the family in one of their museums, that it was time to give up the charade. When Trump wrote his next book 13 years later, it correctly identified that his grandfather had come from Germany.

While Newman identified Trump’s mother as Irish, she was Scottish by birth.

As many other Republicans criticized Donald Trump for questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s race on Wednesday, Senator Tom Cotton took a different tack and defended the former president and convicted felon.

On CNN Wednesday, Kaitlan Collins asked the Arkansas senator if Trump’s comments were defensible, and he said yes.

“Kaitlan, of course,” Cotton said. “First off, it’s refreshing to see a presidential candidate who’s willing to go in front of the media, something that Donald Trump knew would be a tough interview. It turned out to be a hostile, adversarial interview, but he’s been doing that for nine years. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has been hiding out for the 10 days that she’s been a president nominee.”

Cotton attacked Harris as a “San Francisco liberal,” saying she had not granted any interviews since President Biden stepped down from the 2024 election and endorsed her for president.

“Yeah, I didn’t hear Donald Trump bring up any of her policy positions today or stances when he was on that stage,” Collins followed up. “But your argument is that just because she hasn’t done an interview since she became the top of the ticket, that it’s OK to question what her race is?”

Cotton denied Collins’s assertion.

“Kaitlan, if you didn’t hear Donald Trump talking about her positions and his record, then you didn’t watch the interview. It went on for 30 minutes,” Cotton said.

“The vast majority of it, Kaitlan, was Donald Trump talking about his record, contrasting it to the Biden-Harris record of higher inflation and wide-open borders and war and chaos around the world,” Cotton added.

Throughout the interview, Collins tried to press Cotton to address Trump’s comments, but the Arkansas senator continued to deflect.

“We have talked about her past positions and the reversals of those,” Collins said. “And we’ve delved into all of that. That’s actually what voters care about. But when your party’s nominee is on stage telling a panel of three Black women that the first Black woman to serve as vice president hasn’t always identified as Black, how does that help your party win elections?”

“Donald Trump said that what matters is that she identifies as a dangerous San Francisco liberal. It’s not what race she identifies as,” Cotton replied.

It’s not surprising that Cotton would be one of the few senators to publicly jump to Trump’s defense, considering his own record on race. In 2020, he called for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops to crush Black Lives Matter demonstrations. That same year, he claimed that America’s Founding Fathers saw slavery as a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.”

But Cotton is out of step with many of his Republican colleagues, and if he and the rest of the GOP who are defending Trump’s remarks think that the former president will emerge unscathed, they are in for a reckoning, especially considering Trump already has minuscule Black support.

As reports emerge suggesting some Trump allies regret Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance, who has made an abysmal first impression in the public eye, many in the campaign suspect former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway of maligning Vance to the media.

The Bulwark reports that over a dozen “​​Trump campaign staffers, allies, confidants, and advisers” said, without being prompted, that they thought Conway “was undermining him through leaks to the press expressing doubts about his readiness and the campaign’s vetting.”

“He’s pissed off about it. He knows it’s her,” a source close to Donald Trump Jr. told the center-right news site.

Conway was rumored to be a “serial leaker” during Trump’s presidency, and, as his “veepstakes” were underway, she opposed Vance. The New York Times reports that, as the Ohio senator emerged as the favorite, Conway “argued privately” for “other options,” like Marco Rubio.

Maintaining her loyalty and close relationship to the former president, Conway called her accusers “gossip girls” and “ankle biters,” telling The Bulwark that she did favor Rubio but is “not anti-Vance.” A member of the Trump family reportedly said, “The family in general thinks very highly” of her.

When the Republican “veepstakes” were still underway, Conway told CNN that Trump should choose somebody who would not be “a distraction or subtraction,” saying he “should not be made to explain other people’s scandals or statements.” Whatever their thoughts of Conway, such advice is surely ringing in the ears of Trump and his allies as they are having to do just that.

J.D. Vance got slammed by X users after accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of being fake.

“Kamala Harris is a phony who caters to whatever audience is in front of her,” Vance said, during a rally speech in Glendale, Arizona, Wednesday night.

“She went down to Georgia and started with a fake Southern accent. I’m serious, now, what the hell was all that about? Kamala Harris grew up in Canada! They don’t talk like that in Vancouver or Quebec or wherever she came from,” Vance said.

The line of argument seemed like a weak chaser for Donald Trump’s shot at Harris earlier that day, questioning his opponent’s Blackness in a room full of Black journalists.

Of course, from someone like Vance, with his history of stretching the truth and making flip-flopping statements, no one on the internet was buying it.

There were the easy hits, about Vance’s ever-changing name and where he grew up.

Vance has seemingly changed his name a few times, from James Donald Bowman, to James David Hamel, and finally to Vance around 2013, according to Vanity Fair.

As for the Ohio senator’s supposed Appalachian roots—which he capitalized on in his bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy—where he grew up in Middletown, Ohio, is not within the Appalachian region defined by Congress.

But then, there’s the more pressing stuff, like what Vance purports to actually believe. Vance went from being a self-proclaimed “never-Trump guy,” to being Trump’s running mate, in just a few years.

In an attempt to appeal to Trump voters, it seems that Vance is already capturing the very essence of Trump, who rarely casts an accusation that’s not also an admission.

Republicans are freaking out after Donald Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s race on Wednesday.

At the National Association of Black Journalists convention, Trump claimed that Harris chose to suddenly “turn” Black.

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said, responding to a question on the right calling her a “DEI hire.” “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black.

“I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump asked, and then said, “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn and she went—she became a Black person.”

According to Axios, several Republicans think Trump’s words were crazy.

“It was awful,” one House Republican told the publication. They said it called into question if Trump can control his words against the first woman, Black, and Asian American vice president.

“Maybe they don’t know how to handle the campaign, and so you default to issues that just should simply not be an issue,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski. She pointed out that it’s only the latest misstep by the Trump campaign.

“Childless cat women, DEI candidates; now, ‘Is she Black? Is she Indian?’” Murkowski said.

Another House Republican said, “That was not a demonstration on how to win over undecided voters.”

Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan called out Trump’s comments on X (formerly Twitter) without mentioning him by name.

Several Republicans, including one senator who usually doesn’t shy from such discussions, thought the focus should be on Harris’s policies.

“I ain’t getting involved in that,” said Tommy Tuberville. “Let him talk about what he wants to talk about. I’m talking about how bad our country is in shape right now because of her.”

“I think the better approach is to focus on [the] policies of Kamala Harris.… That’s what I’ve been talking about,” said Senator Steve Daines, the Senate GOP’s campaign chief.

Trump made a number of unwise comments at the NABJ convention Wednesday, including his comments on Harris’s race and cognitive health, his use of the term “Black jobs,” or his vow to pardon January 6 rioters. Strangely, he thinks he nailed his appearance there, perhaps further evidence of his own cognitive decline.

After getting booed, laughed at, and fact-checked, Donald Trump decided he had had enough of his Wednesday interview and left early. 

At a National Association of Black Journalists event in Chicago, the former president was slated to speak for an hour. Despite starting more than an hour late, allegedly due to technical difficulties, moderators began the discussion with Trump by thanking him for agreeing to still speak for the full hour. 

Their thanks were premature, however, as Trump only spoke for 34 minutes. Moderator Rachel Scott indicated that Trump’s team cut things off. 

The awkward affair was riddled with tense moments and shouts from the audience. Throughout the interview, Scott and fellow moderator Kadia Goba displayed  incredible professionalism—and Trump, of course, showed none. 

The Republican presidential candidate spent his time interrupting people, questioning Kamala Harris’s Blackness, trying and failing to explain what “Black jobs” are, and promising to pardon January 6 rioters. 

Immediately following the event, Trump took to TruthSocial to gloat about his performance and complain about the event overall. “The questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement,” he wrote. 

Despite his poor performance and early exit, Trump said he “CRUSHED IT!” 

Donald Trump’s social media venture is losing users every month, hurting his bottom line and possibly showing that his rhetoric is losing appeal even among his own base.

The Guardian spoke to a right-wing media analyst, Howard Polskin, who said that Truth Social had only 2.11 million unique users in June, a decline of 38 percent from one year ago.

“The diminishing audience levels for Truth Social suggest a rejection of the harsh rhetoric expressed by the ex-president and his political allies that is one of the hallmarks of the two-year-old platform,” Ploskin said.

Trump Media & Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, had experienced a jump in its stock price of $46 per share after a gunman tried to kill Trump earlier this month. But those gains appear to have been short-lived, as the stock dropped to about $29 per share Wednesday. Both numbers are nowhere near the peak price this year, which was close to $72 per share in March after its initial public offering.

The venture was supposed to be Trump’s cash cow, as the former president and convicted felon owns 60 percent of the company. But a series of setbacks since launching have ruined Trump’s financial fail-safe. The company had a net loss of $58.2 million in 2023, numbers that had to be reaudited after its accounting firm was charged with “massive fraud” and subsequently barred from ever serving as accountants again. The company lost an astonishing $327.6 million last quarter, only bringing in $770,500 in revenue.

Trump can’t brag his way out of Trump Media’s declining stock value, as pumping up the stock is illegal. He can’t try to dump the stock until September without board approval, either, and while he’s been given a reprieve from his legal cases by the Supreme Court, he still has legal bills to pay. But all he can do is watch Trump Media’s stock price continue to go nowhere, or come up with another grift with which he can fleece his supporters.

Donald Trump doubled down on a frightening campaign promise Wednesday.

While at the National Association of Black Journalists’ conference in Chicago, Trump was asked if he would pardon rioters who assaulted police officers during the January 6 insurrection.

“Oh, absolutely I would,” Trump replied while interrupting the moderators. “If they are innocent, I would pardon them.”

“They’ve been convicted,” Rachel Scott, senior congressional correspondent for ABC News, quickly clarified, to which the crowd interrupted in laughter.

Trump previously has called the violent insurrectionists “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” He has promised several times over to “free” the rioters, despite saying on the day after the Capitol attack that “those who broke the law” would “pay.”

But he changed tune just a year later. “We’ll be looking very, very seriously at full pardons,” Trump said in 2022. “I mean full pardons with an apology to many.”

At Wednesday’s event, Trump tried to redirect the conversation to left-wing rioters in Minneapolis and Seattle while justifying the violence of January 6. When pressed by Scott about the acts of individuals pummeling police officers in what was likely the largest single-day assault on law enforcement, Trump justified the insurrectionists’ actions by simply saying the officers “shot a young lady in the face.”

Donald Trump made an outlandish claim Wednesday that Vice President Kamala Harris had failed the bar exam, while challenging her to take a cognitive test.

During an interview at the convention for the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump responded to a question from Semafor’s political reporter Kadia Goba, who asked if he would be willing to take a cognitive exam.

“I would love to do it,” Trump said, brushing past Goba’s follow-up about releasing the results. Instead, Trump said he had pushed to take a cognitive test with Joe Biden, and said the same offer applied to his new, far younger opponent.

“I would do it with her also. You know what? She failed her law exam, she didn’t pass her law exam, so maybe she wouldn’t pass the cognitive test,” Trump said shrugging.

The audience instantly burst into noisy chatter. “Oh—” someone said into the microphone, cringing at the outrageous claim. Another person went “pfft” into the microphone.

“Are you saying she wouldn’t pass?” asked ABC News’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott, whom Trump repeatedly scolded throughout the interview.

“I’m just giving you the facts,” Trump insisted. “She didn’t pass her bar exam. And she didn’t think she would pass it, and she didn’t think she was gonna ever pass it. And I don’t know what happened, maybe she passed it.”

Scott asserted, as the president spoke over her, that Harris had, of course, passed the bar. That much can be assumed from someone who served as the Los Angeles County district attorney and attorney general of California.