"Unnerved’ Donald Trump struggles to respond to Kamala Harris candidacy"
"Republican former US president’s campaign misfires in the face of a revitalised Democratic party"
Joshua Chaffin in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania6 HOURS AGO
Donald Trump was seeking to seize back the spotlight that had eluded him since President Joe Biden’s shock decision last month to drop his re-election bid jolted the US election.
But the Republican former president did so this week in a way he might not have intended. Appearing in Chicago on Wednesday at the annual conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, an ill-tempered Trump disparaged his hosts and then questioned whether Biden’s presumed replacement atop the Democratic ticket, vice-president Kamala Harris, was actually Black.“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. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said of Harris, who is of mixed Jamaican and Indian heritage.
He also repeated a warning about immigrants taking “Black jobs” without clarifying what those were.Trump’s remarks — along with the spectacle of an angry former president belittling an accomplished Black female journalist, ABC’s Rachel Scott — prompted disbelief at the conference and beyond.They also deepened the sense that he has been thrown off-balance by Harris’s entrance into the race, which has electrified what had been a demoralised Democratic party."
FT.com
