{"id":31646,"date":"2024-08-03T19:20:28","date_gmt":"2024-08-03T19:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/?p=31646"},"modified":"2024-08-03T19:20:28","modified_gmt":"2024-08-03T19:20:28","slug":"trump-revives-birtherism-as-harris-gains-in-polls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/2024\/08\/03\/trump-revives-birtherism-as-harris-gains-in-polls\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump revives birtherism as Harris gains in polls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Desk Report:\u00a0 <\/strong>Donald Trump is facing a fierce backlash for questioning the race of US election rival Kamala Harris, but to those acquainted with the Republican\u2019s long history of inflammatory language and behavior around the issue, the smear was nothing new.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s political career was forged in the cauldron of the 2010s \u2018birther\u2019 conspiracy theory that sought to delegitimize then-president Barack Obama \u2014 who had a Kenyan father \u2014 by claiming falsely that he was born abroad.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Those who say Trump is\u00a0 racist point to dozens of other controversies the property tycoon has stoked, from being sued in the 1970s for discrimination against Black tenants to his notorious pandering to white supremacist marchers in 2017.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s worst impulses resurfaced Wednesday with his outlandish claim that Harris \u2014 the first female and non-white vice president \u2014 recently \u2018became a Black person\u2019 for political convenience.<\/p>\n

Like an estimated 34 million Americans in the nation\u2019s fastest-growing demographic, Harris is mixed race and has been consistent in celebrating her Black and South Asian identity.<\/p>\n

The attack handed Trump back a media spotlight that had evaded him since Harris\u2019s game-changing entry into the White House race, but it also honed attention on his extensive record of racial transgressions.<\/p>\n

\u2018He did crap the bed\u2026 The only question is whether he\u2019s going to roll around in it or get up and change the sheets,\u2019 veteran strategist Scott Jennings, a onetime aide to former President George W. Bush, told CNN.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s inflammatory comments came amid a barrage of insults and falsehoods as he attacked Harris during a combative interaction with African American journalists in Chicago.<\/p>\n

The 78-year-old is desperate to woo Black voters from Harris\u2014who has erased his polling leads since jumping into the race\u2014but the invitation was already controversial, given his well-documented history of denigrating Black female reporters.<\/p>\n

Jennings suggested that Trump should move on from the scandal, but the former president has been doubling down, sharing images of Harris celebrating her Indian origins as some kind of ill-conceived \u2018gotcha.\u2019<\/p>\n

Riding high after surviving an assassination bid in July, Trump saw his campaign thrown into chaos when the 59-year-old vice president replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket for the November 5 election.<\/p>\n

Keith Gaddie, a politics professor at Texas Christian University, said Trump\u2019s motivation for his latest remarks was likely a compulsion to grab back the limelight, as \u2018no one is talking about assassination attempts anymore.\u2019<\/p>\n

But he also sees significance in the context\u2014a conversation with three African American interviewers in front of an audience of fellow Black journalists\u2014and believes the ex-president was playing \u2018the gladiator in the lion\u2019s den\u2019 for his white base.<\/p>\n

\u2018He essentially decided to battle his opponent by proxy, by battling with Black female journalists,\u2019 Gaddie said.<\/p>\n

Bill Kristol, chief of staff from 1989-93 to then vice president Dan Quayle, said Trump\u2019s goal was likely to revive old characterizations of Harris as inauthentic after her pivot to the political left during her 2020 primary campaign.<\/p>\n

\u2018Trump has no sense of decency. It would be nice if this were disqualifying for political success,\u2019 Kristol wrote in a newsletter Thursday for center-right publication The Bulwark.<\/p>\n

\u2018But decency doesn\u2019t always prevail in this world of ours. Decency needs to be aggressively defended. Indecency needs to be exposed and denounced.\u2019<\/p>\n

While some observers see Trump\u2019s racial remarks as part of some clever political strategy rather than the intemperate outbursts of a bigot, analysts are mixed on whether they are helpful.<\/p>\n

\u2018Birtherism made him an avatar of populist conservatism in 2011 and his attacks on Mexicans and Muslims played a critical role in his victories in 2016,\u2019 said Donald Nieman, a political analyst and professor at Binghamton University in New York state.<\/p>\n

\u2018They stoke the passion of the base and that\u2019s important. But they also turn off a lot of the few swing voters who play a critical role in deciding elections these days\u2014as the results in 2018, 2020, and 2022 suggest.\u2019<\/p>\n

Political scientist Nicholas Creel, of Georgia College and State University, told AFP the latest controversy lays bare Trump\u2019s lack of self-control and narcissism\u2014\u2019Trump being Trump\u2019\u2014rather than some underlying strategy.<\/p>\n

\u2018The best way to view this specific scandal is not as some sort of fifth-dimensional chess strategy whereby he was looking to excite his base via dog whistles,\u2019 he said, \u2018but simply as an insensitive comment from a latently racist old man who thinks he can do no wrong.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Desk Report:  Donald Trump is facing a fierce backlash for questioning the race of US election rival Kamala Harris, but to those acquainted with the Republican’s long history of inflammatory language and behavior around the issue, the smear was nothing new. Trump’s political career was forged in the cauldron of the 2010s ‘birther’ conspiracy theory that sought to delegitimize then-president Barack Obama — who had a Kenyan father — by claiming falsely that he was born abroad.   Those who say Trump is  racist point to dozens of other controversies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31647,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31646"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31648,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31646\/revisions\/31648"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}