Donald Trump doubled down on questioning Kamala Harris’ race during Tuesday night’s presidential debate and refused to acknowledge his past comments about her identity.
Trump said “I don’t care what she is” when moderator David Muir asked him why he believed it was appropriate to weigh in on Harris’ heritage.
“Whatever she wants to be is OK with me,” Trump said. When Muir referred to Trump’s comments last month claiming Harris “turned Black” for political gain, Trump said, “I don’t know.”
“All I can say is I read where she was not Black that she put out. I’ll say that. And then I read that she was Black, and that’s OK. Either one was OK with me.”
Trump made the initial comments in an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention.
“She was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said then. “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.”
“Is she Indian or is she Black?” he asked.
She’s both. Harris’ mother was Indian, and her father is Jamaican.
In response, Harris said Tuesday that Trump had a divisive history with race that she described as “tragic.” She highlighted that Trump discriminated against Black people looking to live in one of his father’s buildings. And she chided him for calling for the “Exonerated Five,” previously known as the “Central Park Five,” to face the death penalty.
"I think the American people want better than that, want better than this," Harris said.
In 1989, Trump took out a full-page advertisement in New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty for four Black teenagers and a Latino teen who were falsely accused of having raped a jogger in Central Park. Their convictions were overturned, but Trump has not apologized, and he has consistently refused to walk back his comments, arguing that they had admitted guilt.
He continued the refusal during the debate.
“They admitted, they said, they pled guilty, and I said, ‘Well, if they pled guilty, they badly hurt a person — killed a person ultimately,” he said, adding that “a lot of people” agreed with his actions then.
Ultimately, DNA evidence linked a serial rapist to the crime. But the teenagers spent years behind bars before their convictions were vacated in 2002. New York City later paid them $41 million in a legal settlement. One of the men, Yusef Salaam, now a New York City Council member, condemned Trump’s comments during the recent Democratic National Convention.
“Forty-five wanted us unalived,” he said, referring to Trump as the 45th president. “He wanted us dead. Today, we are exonerated because the actual perpetrator confessed and DNA proved it.
“That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict,” Salaam said, referring to Trump.
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