Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday that the American people deserve better than former President Donald Trump after he questioned her ethnicity.
Trump dropped to a new low of mudslinging on Wednesday at a convention for Black journalists, accusing Harris of “turn[ing] Black” for political points. Harris was set to deliver remarks at the Black sorority Sigma Gamma Rho’s biennial conference in Houston, Texas, just hours later.
“We all here remember what those four years were like, and today we were given another reminder,” Harris told the crowd. “It was the same old show, the divisiveness and the disrespect.”
“The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts,” she went on. “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us.”
Trump has long questioned his opponents’ racial identities, and was a proponent of the baseless “birther” conspiracy theory that suggested former President Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen.
“I’ve known her a long time — indirectly, not directly, very much — and she was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said in response to a question from moderator Rachel Scott of ABC News. “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?”
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at a Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority gathering in Houston, Wednesday, July 31, 2024, in Houston.
Harris was born in California. She is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants.
In his interview Wednesday, the former president also attacked Scott and her employer for being “nasty” and “rude” after she questioned him on his accusations against Obama and his remarks that immigrants were taking “Black jobs.”
Trump has amped up his criticism of ABC News, which is set to hold another presidential debate on Sept. 10, as he seeks to duck out of his commitment to attend.
Earlier this week, he said that while he would “probably” wind up facing off against Harris on the debate stage, he wasn’t sure it would benefit his own bid.
“Everybody knows who I am,” he told Fox News.
Harris threw down her own challenge in response, urging the former president to appear.
In Houston, the vice president cast her candidacy as a choice between the future and the past, asking those gathered to help get out the vote in the run-up to November.
“When we organize, mountains move,” Harris said. “When we mobilize, nations change. And when we vote, we make history.”
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