(This story was updated to correct a typo.)
WASHINGTON ‒ In their first and likely only presidential debate, Republican Donald Trump doubled down on his impertinent suggestion that his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, had only recently “turned Black.”
“All I can say is I read where she was not Black that she put out,” Trump told the moderators during the Philadelphia debate this month. “Then I read she was Black, and that’s OK.”
The Democratic nominee appeared rattled for a moment, but she rebounded by casting the former president’s entire career as someone who has “attempted to use race to divide.”
That’s what experts and activists say Trump is doing with just seven weeks left until Election Day.
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These experts and advocates point to comments he has often made in recent weeks ‒ whether it be questioning Harris’ racial identity, spreading false rumors about immigrants eating Americans’ pets or migrants taking “Black jobs.” They told USA TODAY these are evidence Trump and his allies are intentionally trying to pit racial and ethnic groups against each other.
“They’re looking for wedges between groups and inside of groups,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, a progressive political party known for cross-endorsing candidates.
Such racially charged expressions aren’t new to American politics, but what’s evolved in this cycle is how they’re being used.
Instead of the tropes being fed exclusively to white voters in rural or suburban areas, these experts say racial anxieties about jobs, resources and crime are also being deployed to more diverse communities as part of a broader strategy.
The Republican campaign is trying, for example, to exploit historical tensions over who can trace their roots to chattel slavery in the U.S.
“For (Trump) a small strain is better than nothing,” Mitchell said.
Trump campaign officials tell USA TODAY they don’t care how Harris identifies herself, but in the same breath they describe the VP as a “racial opportunist” who appeals to Black voters when it’s convenient for her to hide behind what they describe as the Biden administration’s failed record.
Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who is supporting Trump in this year’s election, said concerns with the influx of migrants “sits right at the lap” of Harris. He said a debate has been bubbling in “barbershop talk” spaces among Black working class voters about the stress migrants have put on limited resources.
“Not in terms of the African American people who are in law firms and physician offices,” Kilpatrick told USA TODAY. “But on the street level, the everyday family person who is an entrepreneur in the neighborhood that they live in or they go to work every day expecting to get an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, it is an issue. And it’s a wedge issue.”
Attacks on Harris’ authenticity a dog whistle to Black nativists, some say
Poll after poll forecasts the 2024 contest as a razor-thin election and Harris allies understand that Trump doesn’t have to win the Black vote overall, as much as he has to shave off tiny margins President Joe Biden won in 2020.
Democrat Bakari Sellers, a CNN political analyst and longtime Harris friend, said most surveys now have the VP raking in above 80% of the Black vote.
But she needs to get closer to 90% to win the presidency, he said.
Trump hopes to peel away a portion of Black voters in urban centers who agree with the GOP worldview about the southern border, Sellers said.
“It’s primal nativism within the Black community that is about one-tenth of your barbershop,” Sellers said. “She’s gonna have to work hard, and we’re gonna have to work hard to churn out each one of those percentiles.”
The votes are there for Trump because some Blacks think Democrats have ignored them for too long, said Janiyah Thomas, who serves as Black media director for the Trump campaign.
“The issue isn’t about Black people having differences with immigrants,” Thomas said. “It’s about Democrats neglecting Black people while providing extensive resources for illegal immigrants.”
Kilpatrick called attention to a measure in California – ultimately vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom – that would have made some undocumented immigrants eligible for up to $150,000 in state-backed home loans. In Chicago, the city has doled out more than $460 million for eligible migrants, who receive up to six months of rental assistance and public transportation cards.
Those sort of headlines aggravate Black voters living in cities hit hardest by the economy, who are having trouble finding a job or buying a home, he said.
“You see that happen over and over again, and the community is up in arms,” Kilpatrick said.
Trump campaign officials have pounced on those reports, spending heavily in messaging aimed at urban radio stations. They say Black voters in major metropolitan areas across the country have taken notice of the resources going toward migrant communities, and are increasingly frustrated with Democrats and by extension Harris.
Mitchell said an extensive survey released by the Working Families Party this month does show there is a “sliver of working class people who are very vulnerable to some of these appeals.”
The poll, provided to USA TODAY, asked respondents if most immigrants make America stronger “through hard work, taxes and other contributions.” It found a net 53% of all voters agreed with that statement, including 65% of upper and 58% of middle class respondents.
Among working class voters just a net of 49% agreed, leaving space for Trump to gain a few votes.
Still, working class voters favor offering undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship at a higher rate than others, the poll found.
Defining Harris: ‘Racial opportunist’ versus ‘Black pedigree’
At its core, experts and activists say Trump’s false allegations that Harris belatedly “turned Black” is meant to undermine her authenticity.
“This is probably something she’s heard all her life,” said Bishop Dwayne Royster, executive director of Faith in Action Network, the largest progressive faith-based group in the country.
Royster said by extension the allegation looks to cut into her ability to connect with the Black community and understand concerns around immigration or any other subject by trying to remind voters of how Harris’ origins are different from their own.
Her mother was Indian and her father is Jamaican. She attended Howard University, a historically Black college and joined its oldest sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, while there.
“She definitely has a Black pedigree because of Howard, because of being an AKA, but for somebody not clued in to the experience of African Americans in this country, many of us are (racially and ethnically) mixed with a whole lot of other things,” he said.
Thomas, the Black media director for Trump, said the Republican nominee wants the focus to be on the vice president’s record rather than her identity. But Thomas, who is Black, also ripped into Harris as a “racial opportunist” and a “desperate code-switcher,” who is guilty of using “pandering accents” in front of different audiences.
Thomas also called out the vice president’s ancestry, saying Jamaicans do not identify as descendants of American chattel slavery, “hence the reason why Black Americans did not connect with her during her failed Democrat primary and we don’t connect with her now.”
(Blacks arrived in Jamaica as enslaved people but because the island nation was then part of the British Empire, slaves there were emancipated in the early 19th century, decades earlier than in the U.S.)
Those sharp attacks underscore how Trump and his allies are seeking to exploit a rift among a segment of outspoken Black activists, particularly those in the reparations movement, who emphasize that their African American roots to slavery give them a distinct political agenda compared to Black leaders and communities with other backgrounds.
Harris’ surrogates in Congress say they intend to draw voters’ attention to similarities between Trump’s recent comments about Blacks and his slurs about immigrants that date back to his first run for the presidency in 2015.
Trump and some of his supporters have questioned Harris’ qualifications to be president, saying the vice president ‒ a former district attorney, California attorney general and U.S. senator ‒ got her job solely because of her race.
Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nevada, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, dismissed that allegation out of hand last week, speaking with reporters at the group’s legislative conference in Washington, D.C.
“It’s not lost on me, and I think many Americans ‒ Black Americans in particular ‒ understand the racial rhetoric that has been used by the previous president,” Horsford said.
“Beyond his rhetoric, racial rhetoric, it’s his actual policies and actions that have harmed Black Americans,” he added about Trump. “But to be clear, we have a responsibility to make sure that every voter understands the choice, understands the two competing visions for America.”
Some racist tropes harken back to slavery
The use of racist stereotypes in U.S. politics isn’t new, and harken back to when people of color were considered “savages.”
Jason Williams, professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey, said the trope of immigrants eating pets, for instance, has long been associated with darker skinned people, namely from Africa or Caribbean islands, as well as Asians.
“It just made it easy for them to scapegoat … It’s really a way to dehumanize them,” Williams said.
With roots going back to Reconstruction, a period soon after the end of slavery, the rhetoric continued through the Jim Crow era, which extended from the late 1800s to the mid-1960s, largely, but not exclusively in the South.
There are more recent examples, experts said, such as in 1988 when Republican nominee George H.W. Bush, the sitting vice president, released an ad against then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis featuring Willie Horton, a Black man, who while temporarily released from prison, raped a white woman. Critics said it played on racial stereotypes and fears.
Elsie Scott, director of the Ronald W. Walters Leadership and Public Policy Center at Howard University said racist rhetoric rose again after Barack Obama’s candidacy to become the nation’s first Black president.
Trump, then known as a real estate mogul and TV star, repeatedly ‒ and without evidence ‒ questioned whether Obama had been born in the United States.
“The country has not changed. It’s really gone backwards in the last few years,” said Scott. “We’re seeing some ratcheting up since Kamala Harris became the top of the ticket, but even before then when she became vice president.”
Republicans regularly push back against such claims, and have defended some of the remarks saying they aren’t about race, but about calling out Democrat’s lack of action on immigration and “failed” economic policies.
“This is why nobody trusts the mainstream media. All you do is take President Trump out of context to divide Americans,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in an email to USA Today.
“President Trump is running to make America safe, prosperous, and strong again for all Americans.”
Trump himself has bristled at claims that he is prejudiced and previously defended his record.
“I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed,” Trump said in 2018 after he was criticized for allegedly making a disparaging remark about Haiti, El Salvador and several African countries.
Did deeper:Immigrants-eat-pets trope is a century-old stereotype and ‘very old racism’
But that’s not how he came across to some who watched last week’s debate.
Rep. Troy Carter, D-Louisiana, co-chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation conference, called Trump’s comments racist, reckless and an act of desperation.
“It’s part of the history of trying to silence the voices of minorities, to suggest that we don’t have anything to say or to talk over us because you don’t want to hear facts,” Carter told USA TODAY.
At a conference panel on Haiti, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Democrat from Florida, called Trump’s comments offensive and irresponsible. She said Haitians work hard to succeed in the United States and there’s a mutual benefit to their presence here.
“We’re actually dedicated to serving this country. We’re dedicated to working,’’ said Cherfilus-MCormick, who hosted the panel. “There are dark people and divisive people who are spreading something else on the news.”
Although Trump’s efforts to create division and anger may work with some voters, Sellers, a friend of Harris’, said he believes it won’t be enough to win Trump the White House again. He said the VP called it for what it was in front of 60 million people who watched the debate.
“She basically said that the country’s better than him,” Sellers said. “We’re not going to sit here and allow Donald Trump to use racism as political currency.”
Follow Deborah Berry on X (formerly Twitter), @dberrygannett and Phillip M. Bailey, @phillipmbailey
