Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) confronted intense grilling on Sunday for refusing to sentence former President Donald Trump’s repeated questioning of Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identification, at instances even echoing the Republican presidential candidate’s racist speaking factors in regards to the proudly biracial presumptive Democratic nominee.
Trump has been outwardly racist for many years now, however made headlines earlier this week after saying at an annual conference for Black journalists that Harris “happened to turn Black,” questioning how she might determine as each Indian American and Black. The previous president has since doubled down on his feedback which have now been adopted by his working mate and the far proper, whereas different Republicans really feel that their candidate ought to focus much less on Harris’ racial identification and extra on her coverage positions.
Donalds, a Trump ally, tried a number of instances to maneuver on from questions relating to the GOP candidate’s feedback with out denouncing them throughout an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” However host George Stephanopoulos continued to press the congressman, who’s Black, over why he couldn’t merely say the previous president’s questioning of Harris’ racial identification is mistaken.
“This is really a phony controversy. I don’t really care, most people don’t,” Donalds stated. “But if we’re going to be accurate, when Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was AP that said she was the first Indian American United States senator. It was actually played up a lot when she came into the Senate.”
“Now she’s running nationally. Obviously, the campaign has shifted. They’re talking much more about her father’s heritage and her Black identity,” he continued earlier than making an attempt to pivot to what the Republican Celebration sees because the vice chairman’s coverage failures.
The Related Press reported on the time of Harris’ Senate win that she was the primary Indian American to develop into a U.S. senator as a result of it’s appropriate, with that particular historic milestone tied to her Indian American identification. The AP by no means implied that Harris’ Indian American identification negates her Black identification, and the vice chairman has at all times recognized as mixed-race and a Black girl.
In response to his reply, Stephanopoulos reminded Donalds that he simply repeated the racist questioning of Harris, referring to it for the rest of the interview as a “slur.”
“If it doesn’t matter, why do you all keep questioning her identity?” the host requested. “She’s always identified as a Black woman. She is biracial. She has a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. She’s always identified as both. Why are you questioning that?”
Donalds questioned her identification once more and claimed that there are a whole lot of social media customers “trying to figure this out,” leading to him and Stephanopoulos arguing with one another. Donalds then acknowledged Trump’s questioning of Harris’ identification throughout a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, making an attempt to attenuate the feedback by claiming the GOP candidate solely spoke about it for a few minutes.
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“So questioning somebody’s racial identity for a couple of minutes is OK?” Stephanopoulos requested, to which the congressman claimed that none of Trump’s racism “matters to the American people.”
“I don’t understand why you and the president do it, but it’s clear you’re not going to say that it’s wrong,” Stephanopoulos stated. “And you’ve now established that for our audience.”
Throughout a roundtable dialogue on “This Week,” Rachel Scott, ABC’s congressional correspondent who interviewed Trump when he made the racist feedback on the conference for Black journalists, stated that the previous president “leaned into a territory that many Republicans were hoping that he would just flat out avoid, especially when it comes to questioning the racial identity, the heritage — especially in front of the National Association of Black Journalists — of Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Harris and her marketing campaign have made it a degree to not give an excessive amount of air to the racist feedback by Trump and his allies, calling him divisive and arguing that he’s specializing in her identification as a result of he’s struggling to go after her based mostly on precise coverage points.
“It has been really notable for us reporters who have picked up on the nuance about how she has responded to some of these attacks questioning her racial identity. She is not going there, and Democrats say, look, she knows who she is,” Scott stated. “She identifies as a Black and Asian woman. Why does she have to go out there and respond in that sort of way?
“What she is doing is putting it back on Donald Trump and Republicans, saying they’re dividing, and then pivoting back to the issues,” Scott added.
