Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday called former President Trump’s false claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are stealing and eating pets “disgraceful” and slammed his opponent for “telling lies based on very old tropes.”
Harris, speaking in Philadelphia on a panel hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists, said Trump had a long history of using racist tropes and discriminating against black people in particular.
She cited several examples of Trump’s controversial actions regarding race, including his lies about former President Obama’s birthplace, alleged racial discrimination against black families at Trump housing projects and his support for the death penalty for defendants in the 1989 Central Park Five case, the five black and Latino teenagers wrongfully convicted — and later exonerated — of beating and raping a white female jogger.
“This is not new,” Harris said. “It’s not new in terms of these tropes. It’s not new in terms of where it comes from.”
Harris spoke on a panel moderated by three Black journalists before a live audience that included NABJ members and journalism students who attend historically Black colleges and universities.
In July, Trump spoke at the annual NABJ convention in Chicago, engaging in a controversial interview with three black journalists in which he questioned the black identity of Harris, who is the biracial daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants.
Trump falsely accused Harris of changing her racial and ethnic identity over time, claiming that for years, Harris “was always of Indian descent and only promoted Indian descent. I didn’t know she was black until a few years ago when she became black and now she wants to be known as black. So I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she black?”
“I respect both of them, but she obviously doesn't,” said Trump, whose comments on that subject and others drew boos and cheers.
Harris's office said at the time that she did not attend the NABJ convention because she had a scheduling conflict.
On Tuesday, Harris’s harshest criticism of her opponent came after a question from Eugene Daniels, Politico’s White House correspondent, about verbal attacks by Trump, his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, and their allies against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Schools and government buildings in the small town have been evacuated amid a series of bomb threats, many from abroad, as Trump and Vance continue to repeat their false claims that Haitian immigrants have been eating dogs and cats. Trump has referred to those immigrants as people who are in the country illegally, but they are predominantly legal U.S. residents.
“It’s a disgrace, literally, what’s happening to those families, to those children in that community,” Harris said.
Harris said it “breaks her heart” to think of the Haitians in Springfield.
“There were kids, elementary school kids who — it was picture day, remember what it was like to go to school on picture day? — who were dressed up in their best clothes, they got ready, they knew what they were going to wear the night before, and they had to be evacuated. Kids. Kids! An entire community in fear,” she said.
Harris said she believes the American people want to move past Trump’s “hateful rhetoric” and wants to say: “This is exhausting, this is damaging, this is hateful and it’s based on very old things that we should not tolerate.”
On his Truth Social account, Trump has in recent days shared memes with images of himself rescuing animals and one with a group of kittens holding a sign that says: “Don’t let them eat us. Vote for Trump.”
His son Donald Trump Jr., in an interview with right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week, made a racist claim that Haitians were less intelligent than people in other countries, saying: “If you look at Haiti, if you look at the demographic makeup, if you look at the average IQ, if you import the Third World into your country, you will become the Third World.”
In the interview, Harris defended the current administration’s economic policies, saying she and President Biden took office at a time of economic turmoil, with high unemployment amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The country’s economic woes, she said, were largely due to “mismanagement by the former president.”
“Are food prices still too high? Yes,” he said. “Do we have more work to do? Yes. And I will tell you that I believe I offer a new generation of leadership for our country.”
In a statement Tuesday, Janiyah Thomas, the Trump campaign’s Black media director, said Harris “today admitted that she has failed Black Americans,” adding that because of “her failed policies, food prices are too high and the American dream is unattainable for young Americans.”
Harris also told interviewers she called Trump after Sunday's apparent assassination attempt at his Florida golf club.
“I checked on him to see if he was OK,” he said, “and I told him what I have said publicly: There is no place for political violence in our country.”
