Vice President Kamala Harris got grilled in a tense “60 Minutes” interview Monday night for alienating “millions and millions” of US voters by calling former President Donald Trump a “racist.”
CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker took Harris to task for portraying Trump as “racist and divisive.”
“You have accused Donald Trump of using racist tropes when it comes to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, when it comes to birtherism, when it comes to Charlottesville. In fact, you have called him a racist and divisive,” Whitaker said.
“Yet Donald Trump has the support of millions and millions of Americans. How do you explain that?”
“I am glad you’re pointing these comments out that he has made, that have resulted in a response by most reasonable people to say, ‘It’s just wrong. It’s just wrong,’” Harris, 59, began.
But Whitaker pressed, “With so many people supporting Donald Trump — a man you have called a racist — how do you bridge that seemingly unbridgeable gap?”
Instead of answering, Harris dodged.
“I believe that the people of America want a leader who’s not tryin’ to divide us and demean,” she said. “I believe that the American people recognize that the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you beat down, it’s based on who you lift up.”
As recently as Sept. 10, when Trump and Harris duked it out at the ABC News-hosted debate, the Democratic candidate mischaracterized Trump’s comments, saying it was “a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people.”
“Let’s remember Charlottesville, where there was a mob of people carrying tiki torches, spewing antisemitic hate, and what did the president then at the time say? There were fine people on each side,” she added.
The erroneous claim that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville has been fact-checked numerous times since the 2017 event. The 45th president was referring to both protesters and counter-protesters in a disagreement over the decision to preserve a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Trump stated in a press conference afterward that neo-Nazis and white supremacists should be “condemned totally.”
In terms of his support, Trump, 78, clinched the GOP nomination in 2024 after winning the votes of 2,243 delegates. He received roughly 74 million votes in the popular vote during the 2020 election, although he lost the electoral college vote. In 2016, he won the electoral college, while coming up short in the popular vote with nearly 63 million in 2016.
Public polling ahead of Nov. 5 also shows him making historic inroads as a Republican candidate with Hispanics, black men and Jewish voters — coalitions that could deliver him needed victories in key battleground states by chipping away at Harris’ lead.
On Tuesday, Trump visited Ohel Chabad Lubavitch, which is the final resting place of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson in Queens, to place a rock on a tombstone and to mark the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre in Israel.
Critics have pointed to other racist or racially insensitive comments he has made about illegal immigrants, whom he accused this year of “poisoning the blood of our country” and taking “black jobs.”
Trump also promoted the “birther” conspiracy about former President Barack Obama, claiming wrongly that the 44th president was born in Kenya and not Hawaii, and recently said Harris “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.”
The ABC moderators drew attention to the latter remark during the debate, which Trump admitted he was wrong about in 2016 without apologizing, whereas Harris mentioned the former.
“All I can say is I read where she was not black, that she put out,” Trump responded. “And then I read that she was black. And that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her.”
Harris’ father, Donald Harris, was born in Jamaica, and mother, Shyamala Harris, was born in India.
Both emigrated to the US to pursue doctorates at the University of California, Berkeley, where they met in the 1960s.
