Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) on Sunday repeatedly questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity during an interview on ABC News, leading host George Stephanopoulos to chastise him for repeating Donald Trump’s “slur.”
Appearing on Sunday interview show ‘ABC This Week,’ Donalds continued to run interference for the former president, who has so far refused to back down after his controversial remarks at the National Association of Black Journalists conference last week.
Donalds told Stephanopoulos that Trump was only “responding to a question” and called the scandal a “phony controversy.”
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“If we’re going to be accurate, when Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was AP that said she was the first Indian-American United States senator. It was actually played up a lot when she came into the Senate. Now she’s running nationally, obviously the campaign has shifted—they’re talking much more about her father’s heritage and her Black identity. It doesn’t really matter,” Donalds said, before trying to shift the conversation to the Trump campaign’s typical lines of attack against the vice president—her role as the “border czar,” the Biden administration’s foreign policy, and rising inflation.
But Stephanopoulos repeatedly dogged the Florida congressman about repeating Trump’s questioning over her racial identity.
“You just repeated the slur again. If it doesn’t matter, why do you all keep questioning her identity? She’s always identified as a Black woman, she’s biracial. She has a Jamaican father and Indian mother, she’s always identified as both. Why are you questioning that?”
In response, Donalds claimed that Harris’ racial identity was “a conversation throughout social media right now” and told Stephanopoulos “lots of people are trying to figure this out. But that’s a side issue, not the main issue.
Stephanopoulos cut the Florida congressman off before he could redirect the conversation. “You just did it again! Why do you insist on questioning her racial identity?”
Donalds then claimed that Trump only “brought it up” at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia on Saturday, while the original Associated Press story questioned her racial identity.
“AP is the one that wrote the headline when she first came in to the United States Senate. It didn’t talk about her being black, it talked about her being the first Indian-American senator.”
AP published a short news brief immediately after Harris won the election in 2016. The news agency quickly followed the brief up with a longer story, which refers to her biracial identity in the second sentence.
“Now you’re saying that AP is the one that slurred Kamala Harris? Cause those are the facts. You can go to the internet and look at the clips George if you want to,” Donalds told the ABC host.
“AP did not say that Kamala Harris is not Black,” Stephanopoulos said before moving on. “She is biracial. She is Indian, she is Black. You continue to repeat the slur, I don’t understand why you and the president do it, but it’s clear that you’re not going to say that it’s wrong. You’ve now established that for our audience.”
