Lindsey Graham has warned Donald Trump against devolving into birtherism-like attacks against Kamala Harris during the 2024 race for the White House.
The South Carolina senator appeared on Fox News Sunday on August as the Trump campaign continues to search for an effective message to run against Harris after she became the formal Democratic nominee .
Graham made the remarks after Trump broached the issue of Harris’s racial background during an interview at a conference hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists this week. In front of the largely Black audience, Trump insisted that Harris had only recently decided to identify as Black — drawing groans from the crowd.
“[H]ere’s what I would say to President Trump. The problem I have with Kamala Harris is not her heritage; it is her judgment,” Graham said on Sunday. “Every day we’re talking about her heritage and not her terrible, dangerous liberal record throughout her entire political life is a good day for her and a bad day for us. So I would encourage President Trump to prosecute the case against Kamala Harris’s bad judgment.”
Graham added, addressing Trump: “This is your election to lose. It’s important to win.”
But Trump’s campaign has doubled-down on that message since his interview at the journalist event went viral. Last week, images were shown at his rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania of news headlines noting Harris’s Indian-American ancestry (through her mother; her father is Jamaican).
A speaker at Trump’s rally in Atlanta, Georgia on Saturday repeated those claims onstage.
“A few days ago President Trump said he didn’t know Vice President Harris was a Black woman. I’m trying to figure out what all the outrage is about because she’s only Black when she’s trying to get elected,” Michaelah Montgomery, a Trump supporter, said at the event.
She then referenced a baseless claim that Harris had slept with former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown to obtain his endorsement in a past run for office. “The first step in destroying the black community is to dismantle the black family. So aside from her record as a prosecutor, why don’t we ask Mrs. Willie Brown if Kamala Harris cares about Black families,” Montgomery said.
Trump’s embrace of a racist line of attack in questioning the validity of Harris’s Black Jamaican heritage is perhaps no surprise given his prominent role in cultivating the “birther” movement around Barack Obama ’s ancestry. Questions about Obama’s birth certificate centered around a racist assumption held by conservatives that he was lying about having been born in Hawaii, and was actually born abroad.
“I want [Obama] to show his birth certificate. There is something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like,” Trump told hosts of The View during a 2011 appearance.
Trump has faced renewed criticism about his rhetoric concerning Black Americans and members of other races in recent weeks, thanks to a comment he made during his debate with Joe Biden in late June. At that event, he claimed that migrants were “invading” the country and stealing “Black jobs”.
That comment has taken on a life of its own over the past month and was even referenced by Olympian Simone Biles after her gold medal win on Friday.
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