Vice President Kamala Harris criticized the former president Donald Trump as he repeatedly claims he is appealing to black voters over his felony conviction, saying the Republican candidate’s racist efforts to reach black Americans are “offensive.”
Harris, the first Black American, South Asian American and woman to become vice president, made the comments in an interview with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski that aired Monday. During the interview, Brzezinski asked the Democrat for her thoughts on the indicted ex-president’s attempt to connect with black voters through his legal battle, as well as his oft-repeated claim that he can’t be a racist because he has black friends.
“Well, on the first point, in conjunction with the second point, it’s insulting,” Harris replied. “It’s offensive for a number of reasons, including [that] he has reduced the entire population of people to a sum of what, in his mind, is who they are. And he’s wrong, and he’s wrong.’
Trump was convicted last month of 34 crimes related to his hush-money trial, one of several cases for which the former president has been charged, including charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election that he lost.
“I have been charged for nothing – for something that is nothing. …I was indicted a second time, a third time and a fourth time,” Trump said at the Black Conservative Federation Gala in South Carolina in February.
“And a lot of people said that’s why black people like me, because they’ve been hurt so badly and discriminated against. And they actually viewed me as a person who was being discriminated against,” he continued. “It was pretty amazing. Possibly – maybe there is something there.”
The Republican candidate repeated this claim in an interview with Semafor published earlier this month, in which he claimed that black voters have told him “very clearly and very clearly” that they “feel like similar things have happened to them.”
At the time of Trump’s comments in February, the Biden campaign said Republicans were “enacting racist tropes” that mocked Black voters.
“This may come as news to Trump, but pushing tired tropes, wannabe Jordans and mugshot t-shirts will not sway Black voters who have suffered record high unemployment and skyrocketing uninsured rates under his leadership,” says Biden spokesperson Sarafina Chitika. said in a statement. “Trump is showing black voters exactly what he thinks of them — and his ideas for winning them over are as corny and racist as he is.”
Trump has a long history of racism, having famously called for the death penalty for the acquitted five – the black and brown teenage boys falsely accused of rape in New York in New York – in the 1980s. He also led the right-wing conspiracy that falsely accused former President Barack Obama of being born in Kenya and not the US, and called the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, “very fine people.” Just last month, a producer on Trump’s former reality TV show “The Apprentice” claimed there is a recording of the then-businessman using the N-word in reference to a black contestant.
“I have so many black friends that if I were a racist, they wouldn’t be friends, they would know it better than anyone, and fast. They wouldn’t spend even two minutes with me if they thought I was racist – and I’m not!” Trump told Semafor this month a claim he has often repeated, despite the reality that having black friends does not eliminate racism.
Despite repeatedly denouncing the hush-money trial, which made him the first US president ever convicted of a crime, Trump is now proudly promoting his guilty verdict with his 2024 campaign, saying it has since has received a huge influx of contributions.
“Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists denounce me, I consider it a great, great badge of honor,” Trump told the crowd in South Carolina in February. “Because I’m being sued on behalf of you, the American people. I’m being sued for you, the black people. I get sued by sick people for many different groups.”
In a Pew Research Center poll released last month, 18% of Black respondents said they would vote for Trump — double what it was during the 2020 election. About 77% said they would vote for Biden , and 65% said they believe Trump broke the law by trying to overturn the 2020 election.
Days away from the first presidential debate of the 2024 election, Trump announced he had chosen his choice for vice president, although he would not reveal who it was. Among the list of potential contenders are two black Republicans, Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) and Rep. Byron Donalds (Fla.) — the latter who recently suggested that black Americans were better off in America’s racist Jim Crow era.
‘I don’t know who he’s going to choose. I try not to spend too much time thinking about how he thinks,” Harris said Monday. “But listen, I think it’s clear that there is a litmus test. And he’s going to pick someone who’s more loyal to him than to his country… and he’s more likely to bring in someone who’s going to be a rubber stamp.”
