Trump is Making His 2024 Campaign about Harris' Race, Whether Republicans Want Him to or Not

Donald Trump has found tremendous success from the very first moment he stepped onto the presidential stage by stoking racial animus.
Democrats expressed new outrage this week at the former president's derisive and false charge that Vice President Kamala Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian heritage, only recently “turned Black” for political gain. Some Republicans — even from within Trump's own campaign — seemed to distance themselves from the comment, The Associated Press said.
But Trump’s rhetoric this week, and his record on race since he entered politics nearly a decade ago, indicate that divisive attacks on race may emerge as a core GOP argument in the three-month sprint to Election Day — whether his allies want them to or not.
A Trump adviser, granted anonymity Thursday to discuss internal strategy, said the campaign doesn’t need to focus on “identity politics” because the case against Harris is that she is “so liberal it’s dangerous.” The adviser pointed to Harris’ record on the Southern border, crime, the economy and foreign policy.
In a sign that Trump may not be coordinating his message with his own team, the Republican presidential nominee doubled down on the same day with a new attack on Harris’ racial identity. He posted on his social media site a picture of Harris donning traditional Indian attire in a family photo.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican who has endorsed Trump, was among a number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill who said Thursday that the rhetoric around race and identity is not “helpful to anyone” this election cycle.
“People’s skin color doesn’t matter one iota,” Lummis said in an interview.
Trump turned to an old tactic against Harris It's been less than two weeks after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed Harris. Trump has had to pivot from campaigning against an 81-year-old white man showing signs of decline to facing a 59-year-old Black woman who is drawing much larger crowds and new enthusiasm from Democratic donors.
Trump went to the National Association of Black Journalists convention on Wednesday. In an appearance carried live on cable news and shared widely online, he falsely suggested Harris misled voters about her race.
“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?” Trump said Wednesday.
At a Pennsylvania rally hours later, Trump’s team displayed years-old news headlines describing Harris as the “first Indian-American senator” on the big screen in the arena. And Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump's running mate, told reporters traveling with him that Harris was a “chameleon” who changed her identity when convenient.
Harris attended Howard University, the historically Black institution where she pledged the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and has often talked throughout her career about being both Black and Indian American.
Some Republicans argued that Trump’s message on race is part of a broader pitch that may appeal to some Black voters.
“We’re focused on policy and how we can actually make waves and changes in the Black community. Economics, education, inflation, lowering costs. That’s what the message is,” said Diante Johnson, president of the Black Conservative Federation, which supports Trump's efforts to win over more Black voters and hosted him at a gala in February.
Veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz said he explored the issue during a Wednesday focus group with swing voters almost immediately after Trump’s interview. He found that Harris may be vulnerable to criticism based on her gender, but race-based attacks could hurt Trump among the voters that matter most this fall.
Much has changed, Luntz said, since Trump rose to prominence by questioning the citizenship of Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president.
“Trump seems to think that he can criticize her for how she’s dealt with her race. Well, no one’s listening to that criticism. It simply doesn’t matter,” Luntz said. “If it’s racially driven, it will backfire.”
Eugene Craig, the former vice chair of the Maryland Republican Party, said that Trump “got what he wanted” at the NABJ convention but that the substance of his argument risked being more offensive than appealing.
“The one thing that Black folks will never tolerate is disrespecting Blackness, and that goes for Black Republicans too,” said Craig, who is Black and worked as a staffer for conservative pundit Dan Bongino’s 2012 Senate campaign. He is now supporting Harris.
Trump has a long history of racist attacks. Trump has frequently used race to go after his opponents since he stepped into presidential politics nearly a decade ago.
Trump was perhaps the most famous member of the so-called “birther” movement questioning where Obama was born. He kicked off his first campaign by casting Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and drug traffickers and later questioned whether a US federal judge of Mexican heritage could be fair to him.
While in the White House, Trump defended a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and suggested that the US stop accepting immigrants from “shithole” countries including Haiti and parts of Africa. In August 2020, he suggested Harris, who was born in California, might not meet the Constitution's eligibility requirements to be vice president.
And just two weeks after formally entering the 2024 campaign, he dined with notorious white supremacist Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
Trump won in 2016 but lost reelection in 2020 to Biden by close margins in several swing states. He swept the 2024 Republican primary even while facing a raft of criminal charges.
Some Trump critics worried that his racial strategy might resonate with a significant portion of the electorate anyway. Voters will decide in November whether to send a Black woman to the Oval Office for the first time in the nation's nearly 250-year history.
“I hope Trump’s attacks on Harris are just him flailing about ineffectively. But put together Trump’s shamelessness, his willingness to lie, his demagogic talent, and the issue of race — and a certain amount of liberal complacency that Trump is just foolish — and I’m concerned,” Bill Kristol, a leading conservative anti-Trump voice, posted on social media Thursday.
The Harris campaign thinks there's little upside for Trump. A Harris adviser described the moment as an opportunity to remind voters of the chaos and division that Trump breeds. But the adviser, granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said it would be a mistake for Democrats to engage with Trump's attacks on race at the expense of the campaign's broader focus on key policies.
So long as the campaign does not get distracted, the adviser said, Harris' team believes there is little political upside for Trump to continue attacking Harris' racial identity.
Harris told a gathering of a historically Black sorority on Wednesday that Trump's attack was “the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect.”
On the ground in at least one swing state, however, there were signs that Trump’s approach may be resonating — at least among the former president’s white male base.
Jim Abel, a 65-year-old retiree who attended a rally for Vance in Arizona on Wednesday, said he agreed with Trump’s focus on Harris’ racial identity.
“She’s not Black,” Abel said. “I’ve seen her parents. I’ve pictures of her and her family and she’s not Black. She’s looking for the Black vote.”
But several high-profile Republican voices disagreed.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro posted on X a picture of a road sign with two directions. One led to, “Attack Kamala's record, lies and radicalism," while the other, “Is she really Black?”

Several suspects arrested in violent protests that erupted after the fatal stabbing of three children in northwest England were due in court Friday as officials braced for more clashes that Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned and blamed on “far-right hatred.”
Starmer vowed to end the mayhem and said police across the UK would be given more resources to stop “a breakdown in law and order on our streets”, The Associated Press said.
Demonstrations are being promoted online over the coming days in towns and cities including Sunderland, Belfast, Cardiff, Liverpool and Manchester, using phrases including “enough is enough,” “save our kids” and “stop the boats.”
John Woodcock, the British government’s adviser on political violence and disruption, said there was a “concerted and coordinated” attempt to spread the violence.
“Clearly, some of those far-right actors have got a taste for this and are trying to provoke similar in towns and cities across the UK,” he told the BBC.
The attack Monday on children at a Taylor Swift-themed summer holiday dance class shocked a country where knife crime is a long-standing and vexing problem, though mass stabbings are rare.
A 17-year-old, Axel Rudakubana, has been charged with murder over the attack that killed Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6, in the seaside town of Southport in northwest England. He also has been charged with 10 counts of attempted murder for the eight children and two adults who were wounded.
A violent demonstration in Southport on Tuesday was followed by others around the country. Rudakubana was born in Britain to Rwandan parents and lived close to the scene of the attack.
Suspects who are under 18 are usually not named in the UK, but judge Andrew Menary ordered that Rudakubana could be identified, in part to stop the spread of misinformation.
Far-right demonstrators have held several violent protests, ostensibly in response to the attack, clashing with police outside a mosque in Southport on Tuesday and hurling beer cans, bottles and flares near the prime minister’s office in London the next day.
Merseyside Police, which is responsible for Southport, said it had made seven arrests so far and had a team of specialists reviewing hundreds of hours of footage to identify anyone involved.
“If you took part in this disorder, you can expect to receive a knock on your door by our officers,” Detective Chief Inspector Tony Roberts said.
Police officers were pelted with bottles and eggs in the town of Hartlepool in northeast England, where a police car was set ablaze. Seven men aged 28 to 54 were charged with violent disorder and were due in court Friday, the local Cleveland Police force said.
At a news conference Thursday, the prime minister said the street violence was “clearly driven by far-right hatred” as he announced a program enabling police to better share intelligence across agencies and move quickly to make arrests.
“This is coordinated; this is deliberate,” Starmer said. “This is not a protest that has got out of hand. It is a group of individuals who are absolutely bent on violence.”
Starmer said his so-called National Violent Disorder Program would enable police to move between communities — just as the “marauding mobs” do. Officers will harness facial recognition technology to identify culprits and use criminal behavior orders often imposed on soccer hooligans that prevent them from going to certain places or associating with one another.
Starmer put some of the blame on social media companies, though he didn’t announce any measures to address that and said there was a balance to be struck between the value they offer and the threat they can pose.
“Violent disorder, clearly whipped up online, that is also a crime. It’s happening on your premises,” he said.

Trump is Making His 2024 Campaign about Harris' Race, Whether Republicans Want Him to or Not