When former President Donald J. Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity on Wednesday, he lifted a longstanding and false line of attack from the fringes of political discourse to the very center of a presidential campaign.
For years, rivals and critics have lodged accusations that Ms. Harris shifts her personal identity to her political advantage, and that she is, in fact, not who she claims to be.
Those attacks, based on falsehoods, misinformation and conspiratorial notions, have increased dramatically in the week and a half since she emerged as the Democrats’ all-but-certain standard-bearer.
Just hours after President Biden announced that he would not seek a second term, the right-wing agitator Laura Loomer posted on the social media site X that Ms. Harris “pretends to be black” as part of what she called a “delusional, Democrat DEI quota.”The next day, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who spoke at the Republican National Convention last month, said on his popular interview show that the vice president was “sort of Black, sort of Indian.” The rapper Lil Pump, a Trump supporter who has some 20 million followers across Instagram, TikTok and X, said on Sunday that “Kamala Harris isn’t even black…she’s Indian.”
Persons:
Donald J, Trump, Kamala Harris’s, Harris, ’, Biden, Laura Loomer, Harris “, Tucker Carlson, “ Kamala Harris isn’t, ”
Organizations:
Fox News, Republican, Convention, Trump
Locations:
Instagram