The Chaser Report - Donald Trump (Re)Plays The Race Card | David Smith

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Donald Trump has questioned if Kamala Harris is actually a black woman. To explain exactly how wrong he is, and why Trump has attempted this line of thinking, Dr David Smith joins Dom Knight to tackle the story. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. Dom here, Charles is still off filming optics, but we have once again, Associate Professor David Smith of the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney. So much to talk about yet again. David, welcome back. Thanks for having me.

Now, I was going to ask about how Kamala Harris is doing, and in particular I wanted to know whether the massive amounts of excitement that I'm seeing actually reflects any reality in terms of the polling and her chances, or if it's just that I watch a lot of comedians like Stephen Colbert and John Stewart who are incredibly excited by this change. And then Donald Trump went and made some comments at a gathering of black journalists and let's just say it's yet another dramatic intervention, it seems like, in the race. Let's get into all of it after this.

So, David, let's start with this news. I'll play a little clip of it here. And she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. 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. So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black? She has always identified as a black woman. I respect either one.

I respect either one, but she obviously doesn't because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went, she became a black person. Be clear, sir. Do you believe that she is? I think somebody should look into that too when you ask a continue in a very hostile, nasty town. It's worth confirming that Carmel Harris has always identified as black as well as Indian. And indeed, as anyone who has mixed heritage knows I don't personally, but my family members do.

It's not like you pick one other than the other. You're both things. It's just the way these things work. Yeah, race is a complicated thing in the United States. And there are plenty of people who identify as. black in the United States who don't all come from the same heritage of being ancestors of enslaved people who were brought across the Atlantic to the United States. There are plenty of people from the Caribbean. There are plenty of people of mixed race heritage who identify

as black. Barack Obama was one of them. Kamala Harris has stressed that she really grew up as black, that her Indian mother raised her and her sister as black, because that is a is how they would be seen by the world. She went to a historically black college, one of the most famous ones, which is Howard University. And certainly in the eyes of most African Americans, there's no indicator that they see her as anything other than black. So for a white man to present himself as the arbiter of who's black and who's not with this bizarrely false claim that she never identified as black before. She was always completely Indian. before and now she's black, we can only call this a return of classic Trump.

And personally, it's a relief to see that he is recovered completely from the assassination attempt, because this is exactly what we would expect. It does take us all the way back to birth rhythm, doesn't it? The first time that Donald Trump really seriously entered national politics in the US when he was casting aspersions over Barack Obama's heritage, bearing in mind that you've got to have been born in the US to run for president, one of the reasons we have haven't yet had President Schwarzenegger, incidentally. Yeah, it's almost unspeakably ugly. I'm just trying to imagine how my family members would feel if they were told that they were one thing and not the

other. It just seems not only not to know anything about her personal circumstances and her history, but not to understand how race works for people. And given that his vice president, can we recall, is married to a South Asian woman and has children who have, you know, half South Asian dissent, it is a stunningly ignorant thing to say, and of course, stunningly indifferent to the complexities of all the years. Yeah, and it really shows the way that Trump has not changed since his first, not only his first proper election campaign, but his first failed attempt to get into politics when he tried to launch it on the back of this birtherist, where is Barack Obama's birth certificate clay? There was a similar birth acclaim about Kamala Harris four years ago.

that was promoted by none other than John Eastman, Trump's attorney and now co-defendant in the state of Georgia. So this is all mixed up with the idea that neither Obama nor Kamala Harris are entirely American. Trump seems to have this quite misguided belief that there's leverage in trying to pick African Americans against immigrants. And I think that that was partly what he was trying to. to do here to say, oh, she's not really black, she's pretending to be black.

I think he has picked the wrong audience for that argument. I think that his mega audience and his rallies are going to love that, because it also feeds into their distorted idea that black people in America get all kinds of unfair advantages. And the same arguments were made about Barack Obama back in 2008. There were people saying, look, he's biracial, he has chosen to identify as black in order to increase his electability. It did not, to the point of mildly,

that line of attack did not work very well against Obama. Trump's racial insensitivity was most successful, electorally, back in 2016, when he was facing a white opponent, and when the media ultimately got very scared of openly labelling Trump a racist because they thought it would alienate his supporters. But in 2020, the racial politics of the United States, had shifted completely.

The defining feature of 2020, apart from the pandemic, was the Black Lives Matter protests, the biggest protests in America since the civil rights movement, which generally had the support of about two-thirds of Americans. And one of the reasons why Trump got the boot in 2020 was because so many Americans didn't like the way that he responded to Black Lives Matter, which was to go back to his 2016 campaign of screaming about law and order all the time. Whatever worked for Trump in 2016 isn't necessarily going to work for him now.

I'm also remembering the very ugly comments he made about Elizabeth Warren's ancestry back in the day. And yeah, I mean, this has been massive news. It's just broken a couple of hours ago. I mean, the social media response, I mean, people have been tweeting pictures or exing, what I refuse to say, axing, have been tweeting pictures of the Hindenburg in flames, particularly given the audience response was so negative there. And yes, his base may like this, but it gave Kamala Harris the opportunity for a very dignified response.

She said that he was being divisive and disrespectful. And really, it's just another situation where she seems to have played her hand very, very well. And really, it's such an ugly moment for so many people you would think that this might move the needle, do you think? It might. I think that certainly Trump was trying to make inroads into the black community, especially with young black men. That's going to get a lot harder after this. And if it moves the needle anywhere, I think it is going to be there, as well as just

reminding people of who Trump actually is. I think over the last couple of months, people might have been able to make peace with him to get everything that he had been about. The great unifier. Yeah, but I. I think it's going to be a lot harder for people to forget this now. And I think we're probably going to see a lot more of this kind of stuff over the next few weeks. I think it's worth pointing out as well.

This is analogous to the way that he talks about Jewish voters in America. So he says that Jewish voters who vote against him, who vote for Democrats, need to have their heads examined because the Democrats don't support Israel. Now, Democrats are actually quite supportive of Israel, especially Joe Biden. But the point is that he's effectively saying Jewish voters who vote for Democrats are disloyal to Judaism because Democrats supposedly aren't as supportive of Israel. And that reveals a lot about Trump's worldview, which is essentially that Jews are Israelis and that Jewish voters should vote purely on the basis of Israel policy. Once again, setting yourself up when you're not.

from an ethnic group as the arbiter of who properly belongs in an ethnic group is never a good idea. It's a blunder that Joe Biden made four years ago. I don't know if you remember this. He was talking to Charlemagne the God, the African-American radio host, and he said something like, if you haven't decided whether you're voting for Trump or voting for me yet, you ain't black. And, you know, the widespread reaction to that was a very justifiable. God, what the fuck? Yes. I say, David, as someone who occasionally works in radio, I wish I could call myself something like, Charlemagne the God. It's just so good. He's wonderful. Yeah, but also, David, you've reminded me, the other thing that he's been in trouble for this

week is saying that Kamala Harris doesn't like Jewish people. It's entirely possible that he was blissfully unaware that the second gentleman of the United States of America, Douglas Amhoff, is Jewish. A bit of a tough claim to make when her husband is literally Jewish. Yeah, look, I don't know whether he'd been briefed on that or whether he just saw that as irrelevant information. Certainly, I don't think that he's making that many inroads with Jewish voters this year either, based on how it's going so far.

Yeah, based on how it's going so far. All right, so that's the controversy of the day, really quite a shocking one. This may go down as the time when Donald Trump words and avert racism actually had consequences. Then again, we've said this before many times, and it hasn't. So we will see what happens. It is worth remembering, and I think people have forgotten this, just how many elections he's lost since 2016,

because you have to count 2018 midterms, 2020 presidential, 2022 midterms, really, as Maga being on the ballot. And so it's a fascinating moment. Let's talk in a second, David, about Kamala Harris. Now she's doing, though. The Chaser Report. More news. Less often. So, David, there's been so much excitement.

We've seen white dudes. Fork for Harris, with more than 100,000 people on a Zoom this week. Curious as that is, with Jeff Bridges, the dude coming out? Or have I got my Jeff's confused? Is it Jeff Daniels? No, no, that's, you're correct. That is Jeff Bridges. Along with many other celebrities who are white dudes, and every other group seems to have a massive

Zoom for Harris as well. So it does seem, I've seen the impact described as kind of a cardiac defibrillator to Democrats. But is this just people who are already voting Democratic getting excited? or is there actually a change, do you think, David, in what's going on? And indeed, in the prospect of success for Kamala Harris. I think there is a wider change. The fact that Democrats are getting excited, that's no small thing in itself because Joe Biden had so much trouble doing it.

But if we have a look at the polls, there's still a lot of uncertainty around it. But we can be really sure that Harris is doing a lot better than Biden was in the polls. Just about every poll out there shows a significant improvement. for Harris. There are some national polls now that show Harris slightly ahead. There have even been some swing state polls that show Harris slightly ahead. There's not enough post-Harris polling out there yet to really draw any conclusions about who is ahead in this race. Certainly according to the bookmakers, Donald Trump is still the favourite, though not by anywhere near as much as he was. But there is no doubt that she is doing a lot better than Biden. It's quite telling

to look at her approval polls, which were down at about Biden's level, which is also fairly close to where Trump has been for the last three years or so. But in the last couple of weeks, they have notably shot up, like, shot up a lot beyond what the margin of error would be on opinion polls. It's still negative, but it's only, you know, 7% negative as opposed to 20% negative. Now, I think that is very real. And I think it's because Previously, when people have been asked about Kamala Harris, they haven't known very much about her, because as we've discussed, she was quite a low-profile vice president. So people were thinking of her, what they were really thinking of was Joe Biden and Joe Biden's presidency. Now that she's effectively become the candidate in her own right, people seem to be seeing her as herself, or at least as they want to see her.

And that's something that they see a lot more favorably than Joe Biden. So I think everything that we are seeing, it's not just Democratic buzz. She genuinely does seem to be generating a lot more excitement in the wider American population, which is not surprising, given that at the tender age of 60, she's so much younger than everyone. By the way, Dom, I've got a very interesting piece of trivia about this. Great. The oldest Australian to become prime minister was Malcolm Turnbull at age 61. Really?

Yeah, there were other prime minister. who were older when they stepped down, Howard and Menzies were both older when they stepped down. But in terms of age when first elected, it's Turnbull at age 61. That just gives you an idea of how much younger, on average, Australian prime ministers are than American presidents, at least in the last few years. Because Kamala Harris just looks incredibly young and vibrant as a 60-year-old in this race. It's quite extraordinary. Yeah, she's sort of dancing around and, uh,

electrifyingly not stooping and not shuffling around. But it's true. She's near retirement age. I mean, by the time she finishes what would be a first term, she'll be, what, 64? So nearly at the retirement age in Australia. The other thing to ask about, David, is the way that her campaign's going, look, I did see a CNN analyst looking at how she might be changing the electoral map in the US and opening up, Sunbelt states and opening up the North East and the industrial

northeast and so on. And look, too early to say, as you say, but certainly this analyst was quite. quite excited as kind of a CNN version of Antony Green. But the sass and the wit is what I find refreshing from the Harris campaign. When they wished happy, what was it, IVF day to everyone except J.D. Vance, given his past comments on that. And this whole line they've adopted, I think, from Governor Waltz, that they're just weird. There's just been a lot of humor coming in. And they issued a statement, I don't have it in front of me, but it's something like comments on a statement by a 78-year-old convicted felon rather than using Trump's name.

So someone in the social media team or in the campaign team at least has a sense of humor. So if they're going to have the candidate who laughs, as Donald Trump's tried to describe her, then yeah, give them something to laugh about. Yeah, one of the things that's been so effective about the whole weird attack, and Governor Tim Walts of Minnesota really articulated this well, he said, we're not afraid of fashion, you know, we're afraid of fashion. But we're not afraid of weird people. And that was very important because in many ways, it's taking the fear out of the campaign for

Democrats when everything is about the last chance to save democracy, you know, defending against the authoritarian threat. It does get very heavy. It gets very fearful. And when things aren't going well, it leads to despair. That was what happened in the last few weeks of the Biden campaign. Fear is a demobilizing political emotion. There have been experimental studies that have shown this.

People are more likely to take political action when they're angry, but actually less likely to take political action when they're fearful. So having a campaign that was essentially based on fear, like we have to vote for Joe Biden because otherwise we're going to get someone who's going to overturn democracy, regardless of whether or not that's true, it was really losing any kind of effectiveness it had. So this has taken the fear out of the campaign. And this has really, yeah, lightened things up a lot in a way that is helping to,

in a way that's helping to mobilize people far more effectively. All right. So we'll see if this actually translates into polling. But it's certainly refreshing and getting to talk about people other than Biden and Trump certainly has been enjoyable, even though Kamala Harris is still a bit of an enigma. I follow U.S. politics probably closer than some, more closely than some. And I couldn't tell you a great deal about what her policy stances are likely to be. I remember a few of them from last time, but I don't really know what her vision is for America.

I don't really know what her big ideas are. She hasn't yet won the nomination, and she hasn't given many speeches in the role. So we're all adjusting to this new situation. But, yeah, it does seem as though we're only now seeing just how anemic, really, the Biden campaign. was, and Donald Trump doesn't seem to know how to deal with Kamala Harris, as we've just heard. I mean, he also, in the course of that meeting, claimed he was the best president for black people since Abraham Lincoln, which I think also went down like a lead balloon, really. But yeah, it really seems as though he's not equipped really to deal with a candidate like

Kamala Harris, far more so than we saw with Hillary Clinton. Yeah, I think it's really thrown his campaign off their game. And in some ways, you can imagine it would be very very. very hard for a campaign to adjust to a switch this sudden when they have spent three years preparing for a campaign against one man and when they had all of their attacks against him so well honed and when everything had been going so well for them in the middle of the year even though they were certainly aware of the possibility of a switch there was a memo published from may that was leaked saying we need to be you know ready for the possibility

there's been some reporting that suggests that by the time the Republican Convention happened, they were convinced that it was too late and that Biden would be too stubborn to stand aside. So when he actually did stand aside, it really fought them off guard. And you can imagine for anybody, it would be pretty difficult to recalibrate under those circumstances. So it's not an easy task. But then again, Trump himself just seems to be coping with it in the worst possible way. It really seems to be, let's just reach back as far as possible into the dirty laundry basket, you know, to drag up the garments that we were wearing eight years ago. It's, he's not coping with it well.

Yeah, well, you know, the older you get, David, the harder it is to cope with change. Yes. All right. So, look, there was a speech Kamala Harris gave in Georgia a couple of nights ago. it's worth checking just for the excitement of the stump and we've seen this has all been Trump's way that the big excited audiences of there's a transcript here from Vanity Fair where they've they've transcribed her first um first statements just the enthusiasm she basically says thank you all thank you laughs thank you thank you laughs applause my goodness thank you

thank you thank you thank you laughs thank you everyone thank you thank you laughs thank you everyone thanks very much thank you everybody she couldn't speak david because people were so excited yeah But this is the kind of excitement that she's generated. And you were saying earlier about it's still not quite, you know, we're still not quite clear what she stands for. Certainly my podcast partner, Chaz, says she's got the best chance anyone has ever had to run as a generic Democrat. People can project whatever they want onto her.

It is also important to remember that there was one thing that she stood for very clearly, which was she was the party's strongest champion. of reproductive rights. Yeah. One thing she was really able to do as vice president, and especially as Biden just seemed to be getting weaker and weaker on this, not saying the word abortion during the debate when he was served up an absolute softball on abortion, answering a question about something else instead.

Given that this has been the Democrats' biggest advantage over Republicans, if you're going to be known for one thing, that is a very good thing to be, you know, to be known for. So she starts from a very strong position, yeah, position there. But I mean, you do also have to think that just the fact of her being a really obviously energetic, capable candidate is enough to get people excited no matter what she's for. Yeah, look, but also we have to remember if she is a generic Democrat in the way that Chaz analyzes,

she still is utterly historic, the notion of a woman of color being there. So even if her policies are. completely generic. She's still a momentous person to be running and potentially winning. And it's not surprising this brings back memories of Obama when people really did think that new possibilities were opening up in a way that hadn't been seen before. And it does certainly, I can't remember a time in democratic politics when there was as much excitement as this in my lifetime other than the Obama campaign. Yeah, this is what Democrats I know back in the US are saying that this is, it feels like 2008 again. And And Obama as well also had this very confident, optimistic, sunny personality, which is very similar to what Harris is bringing to the table now.

And very different from the way that we've experienced politics over the last eight years. So that kind of excitement that she's generating, it really does, it resonates with 2008. Now, there are some differences in 2008 by about September, everyone was social. that Obama was going to win the victory party, as far as I can remember it in Michigan, began about two months early, which is not going to be the case here. This looks like it's going to be a very close election. But nonetheless, the excitement is, it feels very similar. Yeah, absolutely.

And look, I guess we also will see what the polls do. If they do jump up, that sense might creep in soon. But there are parallels, the notion of being in the Senate for a short time and then going up. Of course, Obama was never VP. But he was still relatively new. when elected in the same way that Kamala Harris would be having flown under the radar really

for the past few years. Well, the campaign certainly keeps serving up surprises. I don't know with the Donald Trump being massively racist in front of an audience of black journalist is a massive surprise, but I'm sure more twister in store, David. Thank you for talking us through the latest. My pleasure. And he mentioned the podcast with Chaz. That is called PEP

with Chaz and Dr Dave. It is very long, so it is for the passionate fan. I highly recommended. And we'll catch you next time. Our Gears Remote, we're part of the Akron and Class Network. See you.