“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.

The first thing to understand is that Trump’s professed ignorance is a lie. Harris was identified in news reports as the first Black woman to become a district attorney in California back in 2003, when she won office in San Francisco. Trump funded Harris twice in 2011 and 2014, during her campaign for attorney general of California, around the time she was being touted as “the female Obama” precisely because she is Black. In 2020, a Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to those contributions as proof that Trump was not racist, saying, “I’ll note that Kamala Harris is a Black woman and he (funded) her campaign, so I hope we can squash this racism argument now.” Harris did not recently become Black; Trump recently decided to pretend to be confused about it. (The Atlantic- Adam Swerwer)

Former President Trump’s false new attack against Vice President Harris, questioning whether she can identify with more than one race, arrives at a time when the number of multiracial people in the U.S. is surging, Axios’ Astrid Galván and Russell Contreras write.

  • Why it matters: Trump’s comments illuminate how some Americans consistently misunderstand the complexities of people from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, and how those identities shape their lives.

State of play: People who identify as multiracial, or more than one race, are among the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau.

  • The 2020 census found that those who identify as multiracial grew from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million a decade later — a 276% jump. (Axios)

Harris graduated from Howard University, one of the country’s most esteemed HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), in 1986. She also joined a traditionally Black sorority.

WHY TRUMP CAN’T HELP HIMSELF

Trump made this comment at the National Association of Black Journalists meeting in Chicago in front of a room packed with Black journalists. Why would he do that? There are a lot of theories flying around about why Trump continues to use this attack line against Harris.  Was he intentionally insulting this group of Black professionals and did he plan to do it all along? Did he do it to shore up his MAGA base? Or was he responding the way many old school white guys think about racial purity?

The reason he made this comment is not that hard to get once you understand how a narcissist thinks. And let’s not forget that Trump is also psychopath! Narcissists think about the world through a lens that is all about themselves and their own needs. Everything is about him. He is hardwired to promote himself and his needs above all else. He is also hardwired to feel aggrieved when he is not getting what he wants.

When Trump was running against Joe Biden, the Democrats were losing and Trump was winning. Why? In large part because the Democrats were shedding Black and Hispanic voters in numbers large enough to tip the scale in Trump’s favor. Many younger voters were not excited about Biden. They were not volunteering to help elect him. They were more likely to sit out the election on their couches playing video games and scrolling on their social media feeds. And the Democratic base felt hopeless and powerless.

Trump saw a glide path to re-election thanks to those defections from the Democratic Party and the demoralization of the Democratic base.

HOW TRUMP GOT HIS GLIDE PATH TO VICTORY

Remarkably, Trump had that path to victory in part because of the criminal trials he had faced down.  Trump’s well funded legal team helped him to deflect and beat back accountability he faced in his four criminal trials. The Manhattan (Stormy Daniels) case was the only one that was tried to completion. Trump lost and was convicted by a jury on 34 counts.

After that loss, however, his MAGA pals on the Supreme Court granted him massive criminal immunity from prosecution for anything remotely close to “official acts”. His remaining cases have been challenged on that basis and may now all be dead in the water as a result of that shockingly unconstitutional decision by his Supreme Court fixers.  Then a sniper grazed Trump’s ear with his AR-15 instead of killing him. (The shooter was denied membership in his high school’s shooting club because he was a poor marksman.) Trump seemed to be untouchable, unstoppable, and celestially destined to win re-election.

Many Americans who wanted Trump to face accountability had already been losing hope. Trump’s ascendancy created an air of inevitability about his re-election. With Biden on the ticket, it seemed that Trump would not be beaten. Many people stopped watching the news and went about their lives attempting to ignore the literal elephant in the room. Trump further tightened his grip on the GOP during the Republican Convention. Republicans like Nikki Haley paid homage to Trump after saying she never would.

Trump’s campaign had also been pretty cocky from the start. It did not bother to open up local campaign offices in battleground states. Why bother if you are sure you will win or if the election will be close enough that you could cheat your way to victory.

Donor money flowed into Trump’s legal defense fund to fight his four criminal cases. As it turned out, that was probably the very best way for Trump to campaign. The Georgia election subversion case, the Florida stolen documents case, the January 6th case in DC, and the Manhattan DAs (Stormy Daniels) case; all of them helped to raise Trump’s potential to win re-election. They coalesced Trump’s support among Republicans with Trump doing his rallies in front of cameras in between courtroom breaks. Trump was seen as an embattled hero by his base.

DEUS EX MACHINA

But then… the Democrats went and disrupted everything. They dislodged Joe Biden, removing his drag on the campaign, and Kamala Harris rose up as the logical Democratic candidate for president. She took over the campaign and changed the vibe. She was willing to be sassy. She was a strong, engaging new voice. Her team is willing to fact check Trump’s lies. Finally! Harris at the top of the ticket instantly reawakened and revitalized many of the sub groups in the electorate that had gone relatively dormant for the Dems. She juiced the Black vote, the Hispanic vote, and the youth vote. The base coalesced around her. The battleground states were suddenly in play again. Women recognized her as a national leader on the crucial issue of reproductive rights. People rose up for her in a spectacular way as if a bottle of champagne had been uncorked. A groundswell of donations and volunteers flooded into her campaign.

The Harris campaign raised 310 million in July alone. 66% was from first time donors. 170,000 volunteers signed up to canvass for her. She brought in the A team from Obama’s campaign: David Plouffe, Stephanie Cutter, Jennifer Palmieri and others who had led that successful campaign. She changed the messaging from “we must save our democracy” to “we must save ourselves- Freedom!”

TRUMP’S REACTION

To Trump, the self-centered narcissist, that switcheroo felt like a deeply personal attack on him, a totally unfair play. Harris has been likened to Barack Obama, Trump’s detested antagonist and rival, who made fun of him at the Correspondent’s Dinner. Obama’s mockery was said to be the real reason Trump ran for president in 2016. And now, here we are in 2024, with Trump facing the female version of the thing that could knock him off his glide path to safety and victory- a revitalization of the energy of the Obama coalition updated with newly energized younger voters, because they could make Harris the first Black/Asian/woman president. A trifecta of newness! Hope! And progress towards a multiracial country.

SHIFT IN THE ZEITGEIST

There is a reason that so many recent Disney movies have featured fearless, often multiracial female heroines: Moana, Mulan, Brave, Pocohantas, Rava, Princess and the Frog, Tangeled, Inside Out, and Frozen, to name some. They are part of a rising zeitgeist (spirit or mood) in America that people of all backgrounds deserve to be seen as equal, being multiracial is normal. Kamala Harris, is part of a related rising cultural norm that women, including multiracial women of color, can be successful fighters who are admirable, likeable and better leaders than many men have been or could be, in part because they are women. They come at the role of leader with a greater sensibility, compassion, caring, and understanding about the value of community, a more ethical world view, hard scrabble energy, authenticity, and empathy. Just think about who in the Republican Party stood up to Trump. A number of young women were the ones who broke the silence barrier by testifying before the House select committee about Trump’s transgressions.

Just as Barack Obama made politics joyful, hopeful and more fun when he was in the political world, Harris is exciting and delighting the electorate with her laugh, her strong voice, her sass and because she is a woman. She embodies the promise of something new in a country that is looking for change. She stands for a new political approach that will work for fairness for all instead of the defunct and shamelessly corrupt old boy system that Trump and Vance and the Supreme Court cronies represent. Hence, the retort to Trump’s Make America Great Again, (shorthand for empowering good ole boys, frat boys, and incels) is Harris’ call to action: “We won’t go back!”.

Social media is alight with Harris memes and video clips. In one clip we see three cats (a reference to childless cat ladies, trolling JD Vance) prowling across the carpet in the Oval Office on their way to take back the White House.

SO WHY DID TRUMP ATTACK HARRIS’ BLACKNESS?

When Trump questioned Harris’ Blackness he was trying to disrupt and beat back her threat to him, the rising energy and power she brought because she is becoming a cultural icon as evidenced on TikTok and social media. He was trying to torpedo the idea of the strongly positive, energetic Black woman who will lead us into the future. It was his attempt to defeat a cultural movement that’s too big to be defeated. What Trump is saying in his usual coded way is this: “She’s not really Black, you guys. You shouldn’t trust her to lead you because she is not really a member of your tribe.”

When Trump is before his rally audiences, Trump can decree something and it shapes the reality of his followers. Fox News listeners and all of the MAGA acolytes who take up his version of reality and repeat it. It works in rallies. His reality is their reality.

But when Trump is faced with people outside of the MAGA reality bubble, his decrees do not work. This attack on Harris got him a huge amount of well deserved blow back.

Trump understands that this rush of excitement and energy for Harris is a huge threat to him and what he emphatically and petulantly wants for himself: a return to power, greater wealth through even more massive corruption than he got away with in his first term, and the protected hidey hole of the presidency which would instantly make him the only man in America who is above the law.