Given the relentless pace of political news these days, you may have already forgotten the furor over Donald Trump’s comments at the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago last week. So here’s a quick reminder. “She was Indian all the way,” he said of Kamala Harris, “and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she became a black person.”
The audience greeted Trump, who obviously knew he was kicking a hornet’s nest, with “gasps and jeers.” A little later at the White House, Biden administration press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the comments “repulsive” and “insulting.” The New York Times went with “shocking.” On the MSNBC website, two professors huffed that Trump was demonstrating his “ignorance,” since race, as every college grad knows, is “socially constructed.” The verdict, from Democrats as well as many Republicans, was that the encounter was a disaster for the Trump campaign.
That’s possible. Many sober-minded people, including some who will be voting for him, are exhausted by Trumpian hyperbole and provocations. This latest entry, though not quite the racist outrage critics said it was, nevertheless could portend worse offenses to come.
Or maybe, just maybe, Trump was engaging in an epic troll that will work to his advantage. There’s a good chance that the swing voters whom both candidates need to court were not especially “repulsed” or “shocked” by Trump’s statement. Many of them likely have biracial friends, acquaintances, or even family members who aren’t bothered by violations of check-the-box thinking. What they will dislike is a repeat performance of a Democratic Party fulminating over identity politics and policing any hint of racial insensitivity. That’s exactly the briar patch Trump has led them to jump into.
Remember where the campaigns stood just before the fateful conference in Chicago. From the time President Biden left the presidential race on July 21, until last Wednesday’s interview, everything seemed to be going Harris’s way. She projected the image of a happy warrior princess; her attractive appearance and pop culture fluency provided a vibrant contrast to the wrinkled senior citizens who had depressed the national mood up until then. Celebrities lined up to spread fairy dust on her campaign. TikTok morphed into a Kamala-stan club. In a cover story, New York Magazine celebrated the thrilling arrival of “Kamalot.” Even the candidate’s nervous quasi-hysterical laughter, a tic that might actually deserve Democrats’ new favorite insult “weird,” was being resurrected as sign of a misunderstood quirky, lighthearted charm. Trump lobbed some of his usual schoolyard taunts, lame zingers like “crazy,” “dumb,” “nuts,” and “weak,” but they weren’t landing. Harris seemed to be having too much fun to be bothering herself with a name-calling old crank. So were her ecstatic followers. Trump and his MAGA crowd, riding high after a thwarted assassination attempt and a much-lauded convention, were suddenly cast into the role of forlorn outsiders trying to sneak a glimpse from behind the velvet rope at a cool national party they weren’t invited to.
That all changed when the media and Harris supporters grasped at the poison apple Trump proffered in Chicago. The media went into a frenzy of fact checking. They cited numerous examples of how Harris had aligned herself with black institutions and groups, all of them true: she had attended Howard University, a historically black institution; she had joined a historically black sorority; she served as president of the association of black law students at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law; as senator, she took a strong interest in race issues; she dated high-profile black men. But the facts were not the point for Trump. Reconquering his place in the headlines was crucial, of course, but he was also hoping to remind more skeptical voters how crazy Democrats get over race matters. If it was a troll, it was a doozy. Though Harris herself has remained somewhat aloof from the controversy, other Democrats were taking the bait.
Agnostic outsiders may have noticed something, well, weird, about the indignation roused by Trump’s Chicago provocations. Harris is biracial, with a black father and an Indian mother. She has company in the one in ten Americans who check off two or more boxes on their Census form. In fact, multiracial is now the fastest-growing demographic category. Harris has not shied from her mixed parentage in the past. In fact, she has often resisted the identity game, at least in relation to herself. If she has sometimes emphasized the black side and at others, the Indian, well, that’s the nature of politics in a huge, polyglot nation where personal biography looms large. “You are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created,” she has said of electoral politics. She concludes: “I describe myself as a proud American.”
Her followers evidently didn’t get the memo, and she herself failed to remind the voting public of her commonsense embrace of her own background. Her campaign and her grassroots followers have both made gender and race central to their organizing efforts. In the short time she was actively running, identitarian Zoom groups and fundraising proliferated like late summer ragweed. “Win with Black Women” started the trend, attracting over 40,000 supporters. White women responded with a Zoom extravaganza called “White Women: Answer the Call,” in what was reportedly the largest Zoom meeting ever. Hispanic women, South Asian women, white men, black gay men, and WinWithBlackMen (a demographic that had previously shown some unexpected affection for Trump) all joined the identity convention. Arriving in a few days is a Zoom called “AAHNPI Men Assemble”; AANHPI is what people in the know have deemed the latest demographic box; it includes, weirdly, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders who, some might notice, have little in common.
Harris enthusiasts appear to believe these collective identity groups, far from being divisive, are a benign display of the party’s inclusivity. Somehow, I doubt the voters in swing states she desperately needs to add to her coalition would see it that way. A few days ago, the New York Times ran a piece based on interviews of voters in seven states, asking them what role race could play in their decision to vote in the presidential election. All the participants were on the same page: “I’m tired of hearing it,” one said; “That’s not an issue,” a middle-aged black health-care worker from Chicago put it. It’s a warning to Democrats not to overplay their hands; Trump should take heed, too.
If the polls are right, Harris’s popular vote numbers are now running close to even with the former president’s; her Electoral College standing is another matter. Democrats have been losing working-class voters for decades, including the black and Hispanic working class that was supposed to be in the bag for them. As American Enterprise Institute political demographer Ruy Teixeira observes, “working-class voters constitute a disproportionately large share of the electorate in three must-win swing states”—the very states Harris has not coincidentally been scouring for an advantageous vice presidential nominee. If those voters saw clips of the White Women for Kamala Zoom, they would have experienced a cringey sense of déjà vu: here was an echo of the peak woke of 2020, with all its jargony, exaggerated virtue and faux humility. “If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and other people of color] individuals or, God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat and instead we can put our listening ears on,” Arielle Fodor, aka @mrs.frazzled, a one-time teacher-turned-influencer whose brand is “gentle parenting” for adults, told the White Women for Kamala crowd. “As white people, we have a lot to learn and unlearn. So do check your blind spots.”
If they happened to see clips like this one, the semi drivers jawing at Kwik Trip truck stops and the waitresses serving them had to be thinking: Do we really want to make America woke again?
Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images