On Thursday, Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance defended Trump’s false comments about Kamala Harris’s biracial identity, saying the former president was merely pointing out “the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris.”
“All he said is that Kamala Harris is a chameleon,” Vance — who has three biracial children — told reporters from the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona. He also said that Harris “presents to be somebody different, depending on which audience she’s in front of. I think it’s totally reasonable for the president to call that out.”
On Wednesday, during an interview with a panel of journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, Trump incorrectly claimed that Harris, who has a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, identified as Indian until “all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a Black person.” He added, “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black.”
The following day, Harris brushed off the vile comments, telling a crowd at a campaign stop that when he talked about her heritage, Trump was displaying “the same old show — the divisiveness and the disrespect.”
