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‘Lies, dirty tactics’: Kamala Harris slams birther attacks floated by Donald Trump
Harris is the first Black woman and Asian American to compete on a major party’s presidential ticket. Trump in past years indulged in the false conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born abroad.
Kamala Harris, presumptive democratic nominee for vice-president, rejected false and racist theory promoted by President Donald Trump questioning her eligibility, terming them as “lies” and “dirty tactics” to distract attention from the administration’s failures.
“They are going to engage in lies. They are going to engage in deception. They are going to engage in an attempt to distract form the real issue that is impacting the American people,” Harris told TheGrio , a news focussed on covering Black Americans, on Sunday, addressing the issue for the first time.
“I expect they will engage in dirty tactics and this is going to be a knock-down, drag-out and we are ready,” said Oakland, California-born Harris.
President Trump has refused to reject a theory floated on the right, falsely arguing that Harris was not qualified to run for vice-presidential seat, because she was not a natural-born citizen as required constitutionally. As the theory went, her immigrant parents — mother from India and father from Jamaica — were probably not naturalised citizens at the time, 1964. And that she was an “anchor baby”, a term used for children born in the US for the express purpose of facilitating the immigration of the rest of the family.
Harris, 55, was born in Oakland, California. And that makes her a natural-born US citizen and eligible to be president if she needed to step in.
Trump has praised the writer of a Newsweek column, who first put out the falsehood in print, as a “brilliant lawyer”, but said Saturday, “It’s not something that I’m going to be pursuing.” And that it “does not bother me at all”. But he refused to say, when pressed by a reporter, if he believed Harris was eligible to run.
Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, was clearer in an interview on CNN Sunday. “Sure,” he said when asked if he believed Harris was eligible to run, adding that, “And I think the president spoke to this yesterday. This is not something that we’re going to pursue.”
On Thursday, the president had said, when asked about the conspiracy theory for the first time, “I have no idea if that’s right. I would have assumed the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen for vice president.”
Instead of dismissing the starkly false argument, Trump said. “That’s a very serious... they’re saying she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country?” he had asked.
President Trump claimed for years — birthing what came to be called the “birther” theory — that President Barack Obama was not eligible to be president because he was not born in the US. Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was forced to release his birth records to squash this theory. Trump, however, gave up in 2016, when he was running for president.
The same year, however, Trump had launched another “birther” theory. This time about Ted Cruz, the Republican senator who raced Trump to the finish line for the Republican nomination for president before quitting. Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada to a father from Cuba and mother who was American.
The president has reacted viciously to Harris. He has called her “nasty”, and claimed that though she is of Indian heritage, “I have more Indians than she has.”
Harris’s mother Shyamala Gopalan was from Chennai — though she had also lived with her family in Delhi for years. She came to the United States in 1958, became a breast cancer researcher. She met and married Donald J Harris in 1963. Kamala Harris was born to them in 1964. Younger sister Maya Harris, was born in 1967.
Harris has named Sabrina Singh, an Indian American, as her press secretary. “I’m so excited to join the #BidenHarris ticket as Press Secretary for @KamalaHarris! Can’t wait to get to work and win in November!,” Singh wrote in a tweet Sunday. He was formerly the spokeswoman for Michael Bloomberg’s primary campaign and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who is a close friend of Harris.
Harris has also brought on to her team Rohini Kosoglu, her Sri Lankan-born chief of staff from her own presidential campaign that she discontinued last December, as a senior advisor.
