Trump, President Donald Trump’s eldest son, on Thursday shared a tweet from Ali Alexander, a right-wing personality, that falsely claimed Harris’ racial identity did not qualify her to speak about the anguish that black Americans face.
“Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves,” Alexander wrote during the second night of the Democratic debates. “She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”
Trump shared the message, asking his more than 3 million followers, “Is this true? Wow.”
By Saturday, several Democratic hopefuls had begun to publicly support Harris, of California, who is the biracial child of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted that Harris does not have anything to prove, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote: “Donald Trump Jr. is a racist too. Shocker.”
Other candidates also responded to the inflammatory tweet.
“The presidential competitive field is stronger because Kamala Harris has been powerfully voicing her Black American experience,” Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, wrote on Twitter. He said that Harris’ first-generation story embodied the American dream and that it was time to end “birther-style attacks.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota tweeted that the attacks on Harris were “unacceptable.”
“We are better than this (Russia is not) and stand united against this type of vile behavior,” Klobuchar wrote.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, whom Harris had challenged during the debate, said the same forces that used “birtherism” to question President Barack Obama’s American citizenship and race were now being used against Harris. “It’s disgusting and we have to call it out when we see it,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “Racism has no place in America.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who labeled the attacks “racist and ugly,” challenged technology companies to stop “these vile lies dead in their tracks.”
After Trump deleted the tweet he had shared, his spokesman claimed it was a misunderstanding.
“Don’s tweet was simply him asking if it was true that Kamala Harris was half-Indian because it’s not something he had ever heard before,” the spokesman, Andy Surabian, said at the time. He added that the tweet was deleted after it was recognized that followers were “misconstruing” its intent.
Harris has faced attacks on her race before and has sometimes pushed back at attempts to label her.
In February, Harris told The Washington Post that she called herself “an American.”
“My point was: I am who I am,” she said. “I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.”