Part of Donald Trump’s strategy for November is to win over Black voters, which is why he was recently a guest at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago. I will leave it to you to judge how well he did.
Of Kamala Harris he said: “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.” He claimed – without foundation – that originally Harris would only speak of her south Asian roots (she has an Indian mother and a Jamaican father) – but that now she wanted to be known as Black. The audience seesawed between laughter and derision; groans and gasps.
He picked a fight with one of the hosts, the respected ABC television reporter Rachel Scott, accusing her of being mean and nasty after she had quoted back to Trump some of what he had said before about people of colour.
And then during the course of his remarks, he spoke about the problems of illegal immigration – because those who were “streaming across the border” were taking “Black jobs”.
Hang on. What’s a “Black” job as opposed to a white one? Did he mean that those coming from central America were taking the jobs of Black journalists in the room who’d gathered for their convention? No. Of course not. When he speaks about “Black jobs” he means unskilled, manual labour. That hasn’t stopped Black people from reclaiming the phrase, though – in response to somebody telling her that her Black job was “being the GOAT, winning Gold medals and dominating gymnastics” on Twitter/X, Olympic gymnast Simone Biles replied “I love my Black job”, accompanied by a black heart emoji.
But of course, Trump has been here before. He was the leading proponent of the “birther” conspiracy about Barack Obama. He repeatedly sought to undermine the credentials and legitimacy of America’s first African American president by insisting that he had been born in Kenya, and was therefore ineligible to be the US head of state. And it’s not just Democrats that he does this to.
When Nikki Haley was running against him for the Republican nomination, he argued that her Indian heritage meant she couldn’t run for president. It was nonsense. In speeches he would repeatedly call her by her birth name Nimarata. Now why would you do that? Or why would he repeatedly use Obama’s middle name (Hussein) in speeches? With Harris, his favourite laughter line is to swill her first name “Kamala” around his mouth and pronounce it in myriad different ways as if to draw attention to the foreignness of it.
The easy answer is to say that he is quite simply a racist and that he’s pandering to his “redneck” base. And there may be something to that. Now I know two weeks is an eternity in US politics, but it was only a fortnight ago when Trump went to his convention, having survived the assassination attempt, and was telling delegates he was a different, kinder person now, and was the man to unite the country.
But that was before an ailing and failing Biden Zimmer-framed off the stage. Harris has upended Republican political calculations and Trump’s delicate equilibrium. The hastily decided upon reboot strategy was to portray the Democrat as a hopeless liberal from San Francisco who had presided over a catastrophe at the southern border; that her economic policies would impoverish US voters. It has a merit to it. So why is he going on about her racial origins?
There aren’t a whole lot of Republicans who can answer that question. Indeed, many are tearing tufts of hair out. The Trump base – who are already locked in – may love it, but the Maga mob doesn’t get Trump over the line. He needs to broaden the base of his support.
If you were being charitable you’d say there is a strategy there, even if it has been cack-handedly done. The aim is to depict Harris as a chameleon. A woman who will say or do whatever is needed to win an audience. That she doesn’t believe in anything. Trump’s running mate is making a more rational fist of this argument.
It feels these attacks on Harris are based on Trump’s instincts, not worked through strategy. But it doesn’t seem to be working. The polls suggest things are moving in the wrong direction. A poll of the key swing states this week found Harris ahead in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and neck and neck in Michigan.
This is a big turnaround on a few weeks ago when it was looking like the Biden/Trump rematch. Yes: early days, still a long way to go until the election – one set of polls does not a summer make.
But momentum and morale is – remarkably, given recent events – with the Democrats. And there is a bit of joy that there hasn’t been for a long time. It wasn’t just the Black journalists in Chicago who were laughing at Trump – Harris is too. And the laughter is becoming infectious.
One of the people under consideration to be her VP pick is the Minnesota governor Tim Walz. In a recent speech he had a whole riff where he described Trump as “weird”. And it’s become a thing. It has struck a chord. People are mocking his predilection for talking about shower heads and water pressure, Hannibal Lecter and electrocuting sharks – and the question has been put: has anyone ever actually heard Trump properly laugh?
The race is not the one that Trump thought he would be running, and it feels as though he is struggling to recalibrate – to reset his sights on a new, much younger target. In my judgement, this is still Trump’s election to lose. But it’s not impossible now that he will.
Jon Sopel is the former BBC North America editor and now presents Global’s ‘The News Agents’ podcast