President Joe Biden announced four years ago that then-Sen. Kamala Harris was put on the ticket because she’s a black woman. So naturally, the first female vice president now running to accomplish what Hillary Clinton couldn’t in 2016 is eager to capitalize on the stardom that comes with being a “first.”
While Democrats court minority voters with segregated outreach sessions at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago this week, former President Donald Trump is on a swing-state tour campaigning through the most competitive battleground regions of the Midwest. On Tuesday, the Republican nominee made a stop in the Detroit suburb of Howell, Michigan, a city in a reliably red county surrounded by blue votes that Republicans obviously hope to flip in November.
Trump’s event on “crime and safety,” however, according to the Harris campaign, isn’t just a “dog whistle” from the Republican, but a “bullhorn.”
Alyssa Bradley, the Harris campaign’s Michigan communications director, condemned Trump for “choosing to rally in a town that was historically known as ‘the KKK capital of Michigan.’” Trump was asked about the charge of white supremacy related to the presence of area extremists at the tail end of Tuesday’s event. The former president responded by asking the reporter a question of his own.
“Who was here in 2021?” Trump said.
“Joe Biden,” she answered.
“Thank you,” Trump responded before walking off.
The slanderous attack from the Harris campaign was characteristic of the California Democrat exploiting an obsession with identity politics to depict opponents as virulently racist. In 2021 she was quick to pile on against border agents wrongly accused of whipping Haitian migrants in Texas and never apologized. Trump, meanwhile, is a consistent target of Harris’ frequent allegations of racism. Harris told The Root in 2019 that as a leader, “You call racism what it is.” When asked if she thought Trump was a racist, she responded, “I do. Yes. Yes.” But what about her boss?
Even President Biden was on the receiving end of Harris’ racism charges on the 2019 debate stage when she trashed him over his previous opposition to bussing to integrate schools. “I do not believe you are a racist,” Harris told him, but she didn’t have to. She made her point by calling him a segregationist in prime time.
Trump doubled his share of the black vote from 6 percent to 12 percent in the last election. Before Biden dropped out, polls suggested the former Republican president was on track to do the same this November. One poll showed Trump on track to claim as much as 30 percent, representing a political earthquake for the Democrats’ coalition. Of course, Republicans are also wondering when black voters will wake up to the racist messaging from leftists that Democrats are entitled to their support because they put a black Beyoncé fan on the ticket.
In July, Republicans featured model and television personality Amber Rose at their nominating convention. Rose described her evolution from someone who believed whatever the Democrats and the media told her about Trump to someone who actually met his supporters and realized everything portrayed about the former president was just slander.
“I believed the left-wing propaganda that Donald Trump was a racist,” she said, before embarking on her own “research” to discover Trump and his supporters “don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, or straight.”
“It’s all love,” she said. “And that’s when it hit me: These are my people. This is where I belong. … I never felt more free and more love for my country than I do now.”
Rose’s speech presented an optimistic message of race in America that stands in stark contrast to the Democrats who exploit racial grievance politics to claim irredeemable racism still saturates the country and requires political patronage from far-left politicians for minorities to climb the socioeconomic ladder. CNN’s Van Jones characterized Rose’s speech as “the most dangerous speech for the Democratic coalition.”
“That is a young woman of color. She is describing the experience a lot of people have, feeling that maybe, if you’re around too many liberals, you might get criticized too much or you might not be able to speak your mind, and she spoke to it really well,” Jones said. “And she’s way more famous than any of us up here — I’m going to tell you that — way more famous. And so, to the extent that these guys are trying to bust up our coalition, that was a bunker buster right there.”
Trump’s inroads with black voters also explain why Democrats have been so offended by the former president highlighting the reality of immigration taking black and Hispanic jobs in the June debate with President Joe Biden.
“They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs,” Trump said, obviously referencing the 10 million migrants who’ve crossed the border under Biden’s tenure and are now threatening the jobs of incumbent workers in low-wage employment, a disproportionate number of whom are black and Hispanics, which leftists are often the first to point out.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama mocked the remark in her address to the DNC Tuesday night.
“I want to know — who’s going to tell him, who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” Obama said.
Trump has also received flak throughout the summer for comments he made at a conference for the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Chicago, when, in typical Trump fashion, he suggested Harris was not actually black.
“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. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?”
The vice president’s father is Jamaican, and her mother is Indian. Both are immigrants, and neither are from Africa. To most Americans, the heritage of her parents offers distinction without a difference. But to some African Americans and activists in the Democrat Party, her biracial identity does matter. The Washington Post reported in 2019 on left-wing influencers who explained her lineage as the reason why Harris never picked up momentum with black voters in the presidential primary.
“You don’t voluntarily immigrate into a community that is supposedly segregated, and then claim the struggles of people who have been here chained to chattel slavery for multiple generations,” one activist named Antonio Moore said on his radio show. “Kamala Harris does not have a black agenda.”
“Moore is a leader of a tiny but outspoken movement called American Descendants of Slavery, or ADOS, which has been rattling Democratic strategists and enraging some liberal black leaders by calling for a reimagining of black identity that replaces skin color with historical lineage as the defining characteristic,” the Post reported. “Descendants of American slaves, they say, should not be seen as part of broader groups like ‘people of color’ or ‘minorities,’ because their historical situation is completely different.”
Trump’s remarks at the NABJ were a mere comment on Harris’ authenticity while she capitalizes on her identity to secure black voters as part of the Democrats’ primary coalition in November. While woke leftists already pledged to Harris will be the most vocal with their outrage over Trump’s references to Harris’ race, the viral moment also cast a light on the exploitation of her affiliation with a constituency that might otherwise question her authenticity, particularly in Detroit, a city which is 77 percent black.