When the economy was upright and Americans could go outside without wearing a full-body condom and Trump was just another old white man yelling on his Twitter lawn, “the way too old to be trolling with his trolling ass”-failed businessman was pushing a racist birther theory that then-President Obama was not an actual citizen but a Kenyan immigrant who’d bamboozled America all the way up to the White House.
It was all bullshit fueled by racism. Well, because Trump is nothing if not racist and consistently racist, he’s back at it again refusing to denounce another racist birther theory that is spreading like wildfire among places where racists hang out, like Walmart and Cracker Barrel and wherever they sell Crocs.
The theory looks like this: Senator Kamala Harris, she of a past that includes bamboo earrings and an asymmetric hairstyle, the presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee who was born in California, is not eligible for the vice presidency because she’s going to beat the brakes off sexless robot Mike Pence her parents were immigrants.
On Thursday, instead of debunking this bullshit, or merely calling it bullshit, Trump lent credence to the attack by saying he’d heard “that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” the New York Times reports.
“I have no idea if that’s right,” he added. “I would have thought, I would have assumed, that the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”
Sadly, Newsweek saw fit to publish an op-ed actually lending a credible voice to this bullshit. The piece, published by John C. Eastman, “a conservative lawyer who has long argued that the United States Constitution does not grant birthright citizenship,” thankfully has been widely discredited. Newsweek also conveniently forgot to mention that in 2010, Eastman was seeking to be California’s attorney general, but he couldn’t even make it out of the Republican primary, so no one wants to hear his jealous-ass racist theories.
From the Times:
Ms. Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, was born in 1964 in Oakland, Calif., several years after her parents arrived in the United States.
But Mr. Trump was in effect revisiting an old tactic: spreading a race-based and anti-immigrant crusade he began nearly a decade ago, when he began sowing distrust in the background of Mr. Obama, who was born in Hawaii.
This time, Mr. Trump has legions of followers who have been spreading similar theories about Ms. Harris. In the hours after Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced Ms. Harris as his running mate, a new crop of memes and conspiracy website postings began proliferating online, suggesting that Ms. Harris was an “anchor baby,” a disparaging term for a child born in the United States to immigrants.
As it stands, Kamala Harris has been the presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee for 15 minutes and America’s ridiculous racist slip is showing. If this is how the Trump administration plans to tear Harris down, then they are in for a long fight and an easy one for a Howard grad to win.
The AKAs are going to be insufferable after this.
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