Kamala Harris gave her most in-depth response yet to Donald Trump’s outlandish claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are kidnapping and dining on families’ cats and dogs, tying the allegations to the former president’s long history with “age-old” racist tropes, including birther conspiracies about President Barack Obama.
“It's a crying shame,” she said during a discussion with members of the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia on Tuesday. “I mean, my heart breaks for this community.”
Trump fanned the flames of the conspiracy theory at his debate with Harris last week, when he said that new arrivals in Springfield were “eating the pets of the people that live there.”
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On Tuesday, Harris lamented the fact that children in the city have had to live in fear amid bomb threats that have followed the allegations. But she also suggested that the comments didn’t exactly come as a surprise given his previous patterns when talking about race.
She accused him of “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age old.”
“I said it not very far from here the other day at the debate,” Harris said. “This is not new. This is not new in terms of these tropes. This is not new in terms of where it’s coming from. And whether it is refusing to rent to people, rent to Black families, whether it is taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times against five innocent Black and Latino teenagers, the Central Park Five, calling for their execution, whether it is referring to the first Black president of the United States with a lie, birther lies.”
Harris made similar comments on the debate stage last week when asked to respond to Trump’s remarks at the NABJ’s annual conference earlier this summer, when the former president claimed that Harris, who is multiracial, “happened to turn Black.”
His comments sparked widespread criticism, though Harris herself was initially measured in her response.
Asked about Trump’s remarks, she simply labeled them as his “same old tired playbook,” in her first sit-down interview last month, before opting for a more full-fledged response in September.
“I think most people in our country, regardless of their race, are starting to see through this nonsense,” Harris said Tuesday. “And to say, ‘You know what, let’s turn the page on this. This is exhausting. And it’s harmful. And it’s hateful. And grounded in some age-old stuff that we should not have the tolerance for.’”
