Trump’s Attempt To Remove Kamala’s Blackness Should Be His Waterloo

But the press is already letting it slide

Image by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Donald Trump hit what should be a Waterloo moment in his flailing, racist presidential campaign yesterday at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention when he claimed Kamala Harris isn't Black. It was a very public demonstration that he is incapable of interacting with society.

During his interview with the NABJ, ABC News’ Rachel Scott asked Trump about comments by Republicans, including members of Congress, claiming that Harris was a “DEI hire,” which is a well-known racist dog whistle aimed at women and people of color whenever their career extends past an entry-level position.

Trump responded by saying her line of questioning was nasty, then, when pressed specifically if he “believed Harris was a ‘DEI hire,’” said, “Could be, could be,” even though Harris has won major elections, including to the U.S. Senate, in her home state of California, which would be one of the world’s biggest economies if it was an independent nation.

Trump then directly maligned her Black identity by saying:

“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?”

I shouldn’t need to say that she has always proudly identified as both a Black (her father is a Jamaican-American economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University) and Indian-American. She pledged with the nation’s first Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, when she attended Howard University.

Her fond stories about her Indian-American mother, a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before she passed away in 2009, are legion.

Trump seems to be suffering from a growingly acute case of dementia, but unfortunately, the part of his brain that is still working is the nefariously clever part dedicated to gaslighting in a way that excites his base.

When Joe Biden had an extended senior moment during his debate with Trump, the press quickly went into overdrive on the age question. That relentless pressure eventually led to Kamala Harris’s candidacy. It turns out we are better for it, but that doesn’t mean the press should continue to ignore Trump’s glaring character defects or his debilitation.

Trump’s performance yesterday should have been the same kind of disqualifier that Biden’s debate performance became. Republicans, though, have drifted so far away from any form of human decency that the thought of them replacing him as their nominee doesn’t enter the discussion.

Meanwhile, the press dances around Trump's obvious racism as if they're afraid he'll win the presidency and take away their license to protect him from himself. It's a bizarre circular drain of insanity that threatens the American Experiment more intensely than anything since the Civil War.

The press refuses to stop treating him like a serious candidate. The excuse seems to be that he’s the presidential candidate of a major political party. This ignores the overwhelming evidence that he’s gone far beyond the racist eccentricities that defined him during the 2016 election and is so certifiably crazy that the Kamala Harris campaign has successfully defined his entire movement as weird.

The newsletter from this morning’s Semafor, for example, simply called his display “Vintage Trump,” almost as if it was a good thing as they ignored all his odd behavioral quirks and comments.

The New York Times wrote, “Trump Questions Harris’s Racial Identity, Saying She Only ‘Became a Black Person’ Recently.” Nary a word about how weird he acted in general.

This kind of headline gives credence to his gaslighting. It’s a form of soft credibility. There are much better ways to write the headline, including how I rewrote it for them in a comment I made on BlueSky based on the first paragraph of this article.

This was an opportunity for the mainstream press to call him out on his racism. They declined.

Notes

The crazy during his interview wasn’t limited to the racist gaslighting. The entire interview was one long march into the weirdness that is his campaign.

Aaron Rupar created what he calls a supercut of Trump’s meltdown and posted it on YouTube. It’s impossible to watch this long clip and not come away with the impression that this is a man who is not only not fit to be president, but is unfit to interact with normal humans:

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Programming note: If you are noticing something different about the layout of this newsletter and website, it’s because I’m back on Substack, despite my earlier professed distaste for Substack’s willingness to host racist content. Without going into much detail now, the Ghost platform simply wasn’t working for me.

I’ll go into further detail on this as time allows, but now that I’m back on Substack, expect more frequent newsletters. I’ll also be repopulating this Substack with fiction over the next few days.

The domain name remains the same: Ruminato (ruminato.com).

Thanks for your patience.