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— NAVIGATING THE INSANITY* –
If Donald Trump doesn’t want to be called “weird,” he has a funny way of showing it.
A day after getting hammered for (ridiculously) suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris misled the public about her race for political purposes, the former president doubled down on his apparent ignorance of the existence of biracial people.
“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,” Trump said at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
“Happened to turn Black”? What in the world was he talking about?
Seeing how Harris has an Indian mother and a Jamaican American father, this isn’t an either/or type of situation.
She is both, and it is therefore correct to refer to her as both the first Indian American US senator and the first Black woman on the presidential ticket of a major party.
Arguing against this simple fact is bizarre… and why would anybody want to?
Of course, assigning motive to the things coming out of Trump’s mouth can be a bit of a challenge.
In any case, neither Trump nor some of his MAGA allies, such as Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), seem to realize that biracial people exist in the real world and, at no point, do they have to choose just one race they want to be.
Harris simply is the offspring of a mixed-race couple and, therefore, likely experienced the cultural heritage of both.
This shouldn’t be complicated… but it apparently is to someone with a well-documented history of racism stretching back decades.
Therefore, in his trademark never-back-down style, Trump insisted on Thursday that the bizarre thing he said the day before was totally normal.
“Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated,” he wrote in a Truth Social post showing a picture of Harris as a young woman in a traditional Indian outfit.
It stands to reason that Trump, who claims to have been “the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln,” is probably not going to score a lot of political points among that demographic with this odd line of attack… and he almost certainly has the hard-core racist bloc already locked up.
At least it seems unlikely that a white dude telling Black people who is or isn’t Black will go over all that well.
Still, that didn’t stop Trump from allowing himself to be consumed by this issue on Thursday morning.
He also retruthed a post from right-wing loon Laura Loomer, which claimed that Harris “is NOT black and never has been.”
As evidence, she presented a birth certificate (remember those?) that showed the “color of race” of the vice president’s father as “Jamaican.”
We’re not sure what that is supposed to prove, but it certainly is not Trump’s “point.”
*In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often funny analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
