On Wednesday, Newsweek ran a legally unsupportable and thoroughly racist editorial insisting that Sen. Kamala Harris is not a valid candidate for vice president because of her immigrant parents. That attack, which Newsweek went on to defend with the editorial equivalent of “many people are saying,” served its two-fold purpose well: It provided that site with trollish clickbait, and it provided a new round of birthers with a link they could use to push at people who don’t understand that this Newsweek is a long, long way from the magazine they remember.
Newsweek’s use of arguments against birthright citizenship as an attack on Harris are racist because arguments against birthright citizenship are intrinsically racist when used against anyone. That they’re now being applied to a Oakland-born senator whose parents happened to be born in Jamaica and India is just the latest use of arguments entirely born of the effort to redefine who is a “real” American in a way that excludes not just immigrants, but the children of immigrants. Claiming that arguments against birthright citizenship are being applied to Harris in a way that’s not racist is ridiculous, because these are arguments that were created to defend racism. So it should be no surprise that Donald Trump has now joined in this new birtherism, or that the media is giving it far too much credence.
Donald Trump wasn’t a causal participant in the birther conspiracy theory against President Barack Obama. Republicans began generating conspiracy theories around Obama’s birth well before the 2008 election. Despite Daily Kos being the first to publish a copy of Obama’s certificate of live birth, provided to this site by the Obama campaign six months before the election, Trump only increased his use of those conspiracy theories after the election. That included claiming that Obama’s birth certificate was a fake, to claim that Hawaii issued back-dated birth certificates to noncitizens, and to accuse Obama of murdering an official who knew the “truth” about his certificate.
In addition to dozens of tweets on the topic, Trump was a constant fixture on television where he reliably spouted birtherism conspiracies—and not just on Fox News. In an April 2011 appearance on Today, he claimed that he had “sent investigators” to Hawaii. At various points over the next five years, Trump insisted that these investigators had found evidence to support his racist claims, including this statement: "I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding. ... You are not allowed to be a president if you're not born in this country. Right now, I have real doubts." In 2016, as he was dealing with a stack of other scandals in the runup to the election, Trump made a “major statement” on his birther claims—which consisted of blaming it on Hillary Clinton. Trump’s Hawaii investigators apparently never checked in. In fact, there are good reasons to believe these investigators never existed in the first place.
Trump wasn’t a follower in the Obama birther movement—he was a leader. The leader. So naturally he has latched onto the new round of birtherism aimed at Harris. Referring to the Newsweek article, Trump told reporters on Thursday that “I just heard it today that she doesn't meet the requirements and by the way the lawyer that wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.”
The lawyer in question being a Federalist society chairman and member of the extensive Republican “think tank” network that exists only to churn out conspiracy theories that Republicans can then use to claim to have the support of lawyers/researchers/academics. The author of the Harris hit piece, John Eastman, is the moral equivalent of a tobacco company doctor: He only exists to generate lies dressed up as legal theory.
On Thursday evening, the Biden campaign provided an email response to Trump’s statements: "Donald Trump was the national leader of the grotesque, racist birther movement with respect to President Obama and has sought to fuel racism and tear our nation apart on every single day of his presidency. So it's unsurprising, but no less abhorrent, that as Trump makes a fool of himself straining to distract the American people from the horrific toll of his failed coronavirus response that his campaign and their allies would resort to wretched, demonstrably false lies in their pathetic desperation."
The whole birther movement was never seriously about removing Barack Obama from office. It was about delegitimizing his actions as president. About reminding people that he was “other.” About reminding people that he was the Black son of an immigrant father. The new birtherism is about the very same thing.
No one really doubts that Harris is qualified to be vice president. Those qualifications are blazingly clear, simple, and she meets all of them. Trump isn’t trying to get Harris off the ticket. He just wants her delegitimized and othered.
