CAMPAIGN 2020 Donald Trump Jr. tweet draws fire from Harris rivals
Days after Donald Trump Jr. shared, and then deleted, a tweet questioning Sen. Kamala Harris’ race, several of her rival Democratic presidential candidates lent her their support.
Trump, President Trump’s eldest son, shared a tweet Thursday from Ali Alexander, a rightwing personality, that falsely claimed Harris’ racial identity did not qualify her to speak about the anguish that black Americans face.
“Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves,” Alexander wrote during the second night of the Democratic debates. “She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”
Trump shared the message, asking his more than 3 million followers, “Is this true? Wow.”
Democratic candidates showed their support of Harris, a Californian who is the biracial child of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted that Harris does not have anything to prove, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote: “Donald Trump Jr. is a racist too. Shocker.”
Other candidates also responded to the inflammatory tweet.
“The presidential competitive field is stronger because Kamala Harris has been powerfully voicing her Black American experience,” Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., wrote on Twitter. He said Harris’ firstgeneration story embodies the American dream and that it is time to end “birtherstyle attacks.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota tweeted that the attacks on Harris are “unacceptable.”
“We are better than this (Russia is not) and stand united against this type of vile behavior,” Klobuchar wrote.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, whom Harris had challenged during the debate, said the same forces that used “birtherism” to question President Barack Obama’s American citizenship and race are now being used against Harris. “It’s disgusting, and we have to call it out when we see it,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “Racism has no place in America.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who labeled the attacks “racist and ugly,” challenged technology companies to stop “these vile lies dead in their tracks.”
After Trump deleted the tweet he had shared, his spokesman said it was a misunderstanding.
“Don’s tweet was simply him asking if it was true that Kamala Harris was half-Indian because it’s not something he had ever heard before,” the spokesman, Andy Surabian, said at the time. He added that the tweet was deleted after it was recognized that followers were “misconstruing” its intent.