Former President Donald Trump’s racist comment about Vice President Kamala Harris’ heritage was swiftly debunked by CNN’s fact-checking reporter Daniel Dale on Wednesday.
GOP nominee Trump falsely suggested at the National Association of Black Journalists convention that Harris, his likely Democratic rival in the 2024 election, had historically promoted her Indian heritage and had only recently leaned into her identity as a Black woman for political gain.
But that’s “just not true,” said Dale.
“I quickly, just via Google and with the help of CNN’s ‘KFILE’ team, Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck, found multiple examples of her talking about her Black identity going back decades,” Dale explained.
Harris’ “biography on the official website of the San Francisco district attorney page identified her as an African-American woman,” he continued. “I found an article in Politico that quoted her talking about her Black identity and speaking out against anti-Black racism in 1989 as a law student.”
It’s “not some sort of sudden identity conversion” as Trump claimed, Dale said. “That’s just completely fictional.”
Dale also fact-checked the “laundry list” of other false claims that Trump made elsewhere during his appearance — from abortion rights to immigrants to inflation.
Watch Dale’s full analysis here: