Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) came under intense scrutiny Sunday for refusing to condemn former President Donald Trump’s repeated questions about Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity, at times appearing to make racist remarks about the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Trump has been openly racist for decades, but made headlines earlier this week when he told an annual convention for black journalists that Harris “just happened to turn black,” and questioned how she could identify as Indian-American and black. The former president has since doubled down on his comments, which have now been echoed by his running mate and the far-right, with other Republicans arguing that their candidate should focus less on Harris’ racial identity and more on her policy positions.
Donald Trump, a Trump ally, tried several times during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” to move beyond questions about the GOP candidate’s comments without condemning them. But the host George Stephanopoulos continued to press the congressman, who is Black, to explain why he couldn’t simply say the former president’s question about Harris’ racial identity was wrong.
“This is really a fake controversy. I don’t really care, most people don’t,” Donalds said. “But if we’re to be accurate, when Kamala Harris entered the United States Senate, it was the AP that said she was the first Indian-American senator in the United States. It was actually ramped up quite a bit when she entered the Senate.”
“Now she’s running nationally. The campaign has clearly changed. They’re talking a lot more about her father’s heritage and her black identity,” he continued, before attempting to pivot to what the Republican Party sees as the vice president’s policy failures.
The Associated Press reported at the time of Harris’ Senate victory that she was the first Indian American to become a U.S. senator, because it’s true, with that specific historical milestone tied to her Indian American identity. The AP has never suggested that Harris’ Indian American identity negates her black identity, and the vice president has always identified as mixed-race and a black woman.
In response to his answer, Stephanopoulos reminded Donald that he had just repeated Harris’ racist questioning, calling the rest of the interview an “insult.”
“If it doesn’t matter, why do you all keep questioning her identity?” the host asked. “She’s always identified as a black woman. She’s biracial. She has a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. She’s always identified as both. Why do you question that?”
Donalds again questioned her identity, claiming that there are many social media users “trying to figure this out,” which led to him and Stephanopoulos getting into a fight. Donalds subsequently acknowledged that Trump asked questions about Harris’ identity during a rally in Atlanta on Saturday. He tried to downplay the remarks by claiming the GOP candidate had only spoken about it for a few minutes.
“So it’s OK to question someone’s racial identity for a few minutes?” Stephanopoulos asked, to which the congressman argued that Trump’s racism “doesn’t matter to the American people.”
“I don’t understand why you and the president are doing it, but clearly you’re not going to say it’s wrong,” Stephanopoulos said. “And you’ve established that for our audience now.”
During a roundtable on “This Week,” Rachel Scott, the ABC congressional correspondent who interviewed Trump when he made racist comments at the convention for black journalists, said the former president was “treading territory that many Republicans had hoped he would just avoid, particularly when it comes to questioning the racial identity, the legacy — particularly to the National Association of Black Journalists — of Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Harris and her campaign are reluctant to draw too much attention to the racist comments made by Trump and his allies, calling him divisive and arguing that he is only focusing on her identity because he has trouble taking her on current policy issues.
“It’s really remarkable for us as reporters who have seen the nuances of how she’s responded to some of these attacks that have called her racial identity into question. She doesn’t go there, and Democrats say, look, she knows who she is,” Scott said. “She identifies as a Black woman and an Asian woman. Why does she have to go there and respond that way?
“What she does is blame Donald Trump and the Republicans, saying they’re divided, and then she goes back to focusing on the issues,” Scott added.
