‘Whatever she says she is’: Trump can’t seem to stop completely insulting Harris’ identity as a woman of color

During Tuesday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump doubled down on his comments about Kamala Harris’ racial identity. Asked about his July remarks saying Harris “happened to turn Black,” Trump said, “I don’t care what she is. Whatever she wants to be is okay with me.”

However, the public record shows that it has actually not been “okay” with Trump; it has, in fact, been the opposite in business and politics. The broadly crass and cavalier attitude toward Harris’ identity and lifelong identification as both Black and Indian is reflective of more than his long-standing history of racial insensitivity and discrimination—it further details a more profound, often forgotten history of dog whistling in a few different spaces.

Harris pointed out that Trump’s troubling chronology of racial discrimination extends into the 1970s when the Justice Department sued Trump’s real estate company for refusing to rent to Black tenants. More infamously, in 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in New York City’s prominent newspapers, calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in the case of the “Central Park Five,” five Black/Latino teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of assault and rape. Even after exonerations—due in large part to a confession by a serial rapist unrelated to the teenagers—Trump has yet to apologize for his role in recklessness in inflaming public opinion.

Ironically, while questioning Harris’ identity, Trump has also used Black people for popular, and then political, gain. During the run-up to the 2016 election, he attempted to strain out support from the Black vote by courting politically uninformed or disaffected rappers (Kanye West, Ice Cube) and other notable Black figures (Steve Harvey).

Getting into finer historical detail, Trump’s description of Harris as “Marxist” is specifically telling. Used as a seemingly non-racialized slur, it has a dog-whistling legacy that implies Black people are incapable of independent political thought. It derives from the insistence on fairness and equality, specifically following the return of Black soldiers in World War I. Upon return after involvement in a liberation fight, they believed they had earned their own liberation at home, including the same rights as any other American.

Moreover, Blacks had begun to consider Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialist concepts, even some in a notion of Black internationalism. In the course of their demands, including confrontations with the limitations of Marxism in regard to race, white leaders and media meshed the burgeoning Black political thought with Leninist/socialist thought—which was based, in part, on truth. But the propagandized inference was that a Black man was incapable of autonomous consideration of their material condition and needed white men to guide their way forward.

In direct relation, an inarticulate Trump mocked Harris’s economic plan as a copy of President Joe Biden’s: “Look, I went to the Wharton School of Finance and many of those professors, the top professors, think my plan is a brilliant plan. It’s a great plan; it’s a plan that’s going to bring up our worth, our value as a country. It’s going to make people want to be able to go and work and create jobs and create a lot of good, solid money for our country.”

“And just to finish off, she doesn’t have a plan,” he continued. “She copied Biden’s plan. And it’s like four sentences, like ‘Run Spot, Run.’ Four sentences that are just, ‘Oh, we’ll try and lower taxes.’ She doesn’t have a plan. Take a look at her plan. She doesn’t have a plan.”

Though Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris, a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, is indeed known for his critiques of mainstream economic theory from the left, there’s no apparent throughline into her political views. It is as if Trump’s derogative marking of Harris—an aggressively mainstream Democrat and apparent capitalist—as a Marxist, in his mind, was absorbed through weird political osmosis or congenital defect.

Vice President Harris responded to Trump’s inane comments with grace and composure, stating, “I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people.”

Trump’s continued attempts to open questions on and delegitimize Harris’ identity are not just personal attacks; they represent a comprehensively racist playbook of using race to divide the electorate.