Trump uses inflammatory racial rhetoric about Harris. How that plays in 2024.

Former President Donald Trump was confronted with a laundry list of his past racially incendiary remarks on Wednesday – and immediately added another one.

In a contentious interview at the National Association of Black Journalists, Mr. Trump was asked if he believed Vice President Kamala Harris was “only on the ticket because she is a Black woman,” and he responded by questioning her heritage.

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. 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. So I don’t know – is she Indian, or is she Black?” Mr. Trump said, to astonished gasps and scattered boos from the crowd of Black journalists. “She was Indian all the way. And then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went [and] she became a Black person.” 

Mr. Trump’s comments caused an immediate firestorm. Ms. Harris has always identified as biracial – her mother was an immigrant from India, and her father is a Black immigrant from Jamaica. She attended Howard University, a Historically Black University, and remains an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a prominent Black sorority.

It’s just the latest example of the former president attacking his political foes with incendiary rhetoric about their race, cultural background, or gender. Mr. Trump has questioned the racial backgrounds of former GOP 2024 rival Nikki Haley and former President Barack Obama. His entry into politics in many ways began with his championing the false “birther” conspiracy theory that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in the United States. He suggested that four congresswomen of color, all American citizens, should “go back where [they] came from.” He’s used words like “animal” and “rabid” to describe the Black district attorneys who led criminal investigations against him. And those are just the examples that ABC News’ Rachel Scott laid out to begin the interview, before Mr. Trump called her question “very nasty.”

His recent comments suggest that the message discipline Mr. Trump had shown for much of the past year may have been a reflection of his lead in the polls over President Joe Biden, who seemed headed for a disastrous loss. Now that he’s in a close fight, that discipline may be slipping. Vice President Harris would be the first woman, the first Indian-American, and the first Black woman to win the presidency. Her candidacy has galvanized Democrats, and erased Mr. Trump’s surprising polling strength with young and Black voters in many recent surveys.

Mr. Trump’s habit for inflammatory rhetoric hasn’t changed. The bigger question is how such rhetoric may play in the America of 2024.

Trump’s history of divisive remarks 

Mr. Trump ran from the start on a bevy of racially charged issues and divisive rhetoric about women. In his 2016 campaign launch, he said most Mexican immigrants coming to the U.S. were “rapists” bringing drugs and crime. He proposed banning all Muslims from entering the country. He insinuated that then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly had asked him tough questions because she was on her period. He insulted the appearance of another rival, former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, saying: “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”

Facing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the first woman to lead a major-party presidential ticket in U.S. history, he attacked her as “unhinged” and “unbalanced,” and repeatedly questioned her “strength.”

Mr. Trump won that election, in spite of a historically large gender gap in the vote. And his victory set off a wave of social protest movements that roiled the country.

His inauguration was immediately followed by the Women’s March. An estimated 4 million people turned out to protest the new president in cities across the nation, the largest protest in U.S. history. The #MeToo movement, where women openly discussed their own experiences with sexual harassment and assault, came soon after. The 2018 midterms swept a crowd of female Democrats into office. 

Ms. Harris launched her first presidential campaign on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2019, and leaned into the history-making potential of her candidacy. Her campaign’s red, purple, and yellow color scheme and logo were an homage to the 1972 presidential campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to serve in Congress and to win delegates as a major-party presidential candidate. The high moment of Ms. Harris’ campaign came when she blasted then-candidate Joe Biden for his efforts to end busing programs aimed at desegregating public schools. But she quickly faded in the race, dropping out before a single vote was cast. Mr. Biden won the nomination, and picked her as his running mate.

The 2020 election between two older, white men didn’t set up the kind of contrast in race or gender embodied in former President Obama’s and Secretary Clinton’s earlier campaigns. But the murder that summer of George Floyd at the hands of police set off a wave of Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and racism. Most were peaceful, but some turned violent, and became a core argument for Mr. Trump’s campaign. Some Democrats’ support for calls to “defund the police” also undercut Mr. Biden, even as he rejected them.

Mr. Trump also dipped back into birtherism conspiracy theories – this time directed at Mr. Biden’s running mate. “I heard today that she doesn’t meet the requirements” to be president, he said, referencing an op-ed debunked by legal experts that questioned whether Ms. Harris, who was born in the U.S. and is therefore a natural-born U.S. citizen eligible to serve as president, was actually allowed to do so.

Focusing on the future – or identity politics?

On Wednesday night, Ms. Harris responded to Mr. Trump’s newest attack by calling it “the same old show – the dismissiveness, the disrespect.” But she was quick to pivot back to her core message.

“The American people deserve better,” she said. “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength.”

Ms. Harris is trying to frame the race as a broad contrast rather than a personal battle with Mr. Trump. “This campaign is about two different visions for our nation. Ours is focused on the future. Donald Trump’s is focused on the past. We’re not going back,” she posted on the social media site X on Thursday.

But that doesn’t mean she isn’t engaging in what her critics deride as identity politics. Ms. Harris has raised a huge amount of cash from identity group-based fundraisers like “White Dudes for Kamala Harris.” Her campaign merchandise includes sticker packs showing her in different-colored pantsuits arranged to represent the pride flag. A hip hop fan, Ms. Harris has heavily featured work from Black women artists in her campaign. Her Tuesday rally in Atlanta included a performance from hip hop star Megan Thee Stallion, and her rally theme song is Beyonce’s “Freedom.”

California Sen. Laphonza Butler is the only Black woman currently in the Senate, and only the third in the history of the U.S. She’s also a close ally of Vice President Harris who worked on her 2020 presidential campaign. In an interview last week, before Mr. Trump’s most recent comments, she said that Mrs. Clinton’s experience had taught Democrats that they can’t get “distracted” by Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and must stay focused on their own message.

“The bullying tactics that former President Trump has used consistently since he was winning in 2016 – the name calling, the leering – we’ve seen it,” she says. “Let’s move on.”

“The more time you spend trying to counteract crazy, the less time you spend talking with the American people” about issues they actually care about, Senator Butler adds.

But other Harris allies see a necessity in pushing back. Bakari Sellers, who served as Ms. Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign national co-chairman, says Mr. Trump’s latest remarks made it clear who he was. “Everyone who votes for Donald Trump is not a racist – but Donald Trump is a racist,” he says. “He is the one who’s injecting the race card. It’s funny that they always accuse Democrats of playing identity politics and injecting race. He’s the one who literally is. He questioned her identity as a Black woman.”

Mr. Sellers was a surrogate for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign, when first lady Michelle Obama famously coined the line, “When they go low, we go high.” It quickly became a mantra for Mrs. Clinton and her campaign. But Mr. Sellers says things have changed since then. 

“Democrats have gotten a lot more savvy. So when they go low, we just go to hell with them,” Mr. Sellers says. “Kamala’s going to stay above the fray. That doesn’t mean the rest of us are.”

Patrick Gaspard, who now heads the Center for American Progress Action Fund, was Mr. Obama’s political director in 2008 and helped him navigate the choppy waters of being the first Black major-party nominee for president before taking on senior roles in the Obama White House and Democratic National Committee. He says in some ways, it’s become harder for Democrats and Republicans to have a common conversation.

“We’re having a more difficult time talking across differences because of social media than we ever have before,” he says. “There’s a sense that we don’t have a common language.”

But he also thinks that the attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies that resonated so well in the past with some voters aren’t going to work as well this time around.

“In 2016, Donald Trump’s whole message had the vulgarity, had the racial animus, had the misogyny, but there was this core reassurance that ‘something had been lost to you, I’m going to help get that thing back for you,’” Mr. Gaspard says. “It is a different moment. And Donald Trump has not evolved in a way to respond.”

The “DEI hire” attack

Even before his remarks on Wednesday, Mr. Trump had begun honing his attacks against his new opponent. He has consistently mispronounced her name, while mocking her as “Crazy Kamala.” He’s asserted on multiple occasions that Ms. Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people,” despite the fact that her husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish.

And Mr. Trump now appears to be doubling down on questioning Ms. Harris’ biracial heritage.

“Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity!” he posted on his social media page Wednesday evening. 

This line of attack has been building for weeks. Soon after Ms. Harris emerged as the Democratic nominee, multiple House Republicans accused her of being a “DEI hire” – short for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” though they seemed to be swapping in the trendy term for a more traditional accusation that she was an “affirmative action” hire.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, warned his caucus against using that DEI attack. And some seemed to take the memo. Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, one of the first Republicans to call Ms. Harris a “DEI hire,” refused to answer multiple questions on whether she stood behind her previous comments. “I think we need to focus on her record, which has been a failure from top to bottom,” she said last week.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, a close Trump ally, also disputed in a conversation last week that Republicans were the ones focused on race and gender. “Democrats are playing racial politics, not us. We’re not the ones that are into critical race theory and identity politics,” he said. But he warned that Republicans should focus on the issues, not character attacks on Ms. Harris: “It’s their policy that’s destroying this country. Don’t make it personal.”

During his 2012 presidential campaign against President Obama, Mitt Romney, now a senator from Utah, assiduously avoided any personal attacks on Mr. Obama’s heritage. He said last week that he thought calling Vice President Harris a “DEI hire” was a “huge mistake.”

“It denigrates the person who levels a charge like that, and frankly elevates the person at whom it’s leveled,” Senator Romney said. “It backfires enormously, to call out people’s physical differences in a campaign. There are differences on policy and experience and vision for the future. That’s what a campaign ought to be about.”

Many Democrats believe Mr. Trump’s political ascendence was a reaction to the Obama era. And recent right-wing politics has been fueled by backlashes against the Black Lives Matter movement, fury over DEI requirements in schools and corporate America, a broader societal acceptance of transgender people, and further shifting in gender roles in society.

Senator Butler, Ms. Harris’ former staffer, laughs when asked if she sees the current political environment as the last gasp of counter-reaction against a changing culture.

“We’ll have to have this conversation again in November,” she says. “I think the election will let us know. Are we as aspirational and as racially tolerant and as colorblind as we say that we are? I’ll meet you back here at the [Senate] elevators Nov. 6, and we can figure it out.”