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Donald Trump is getting pressure from Republicans to stop insulting Kamala Harris’ identity.
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Trump’s former advisor Kellyanne Conway joined the chorus of Republicans urging him to cool it.
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On Fox Business, Conway called for “fewer insults, more insights, and that policy contrast.”
Former President Donald Trump is known for hurling insults at his political opponents.
He’s made schoolyard digs like calling President Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe” and Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, a “nasty woman.” He’s gone even further, implying Sen. Ted Cruz’s father helped President John F. Kennedy’s assassin and questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity.
But now that Harris is Trump’s 2024 opponent, more and more Republicans are urging the former president to back off the name-calling — including his former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.
Conway, a regular Fox News contributor, told the Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on Monday that Trump needed to stop focusing on insults against Harris.
“The winning formula for President Trump is very plain to see,” Conway told Kudlow. “It’s fewer insults, more insights, and that policy contrast.”
Kudlow added: “I think personal insults of her, not a good idea. Really not a good idea. It’s a distraction. It’s unnecessary. It’s off message.”
It didn’t take long after Harris was placed at the top of the Democratic ticket for Republicans to launch a barrage of sexist and racist attacks against her, including suggesting that she slept her way to the top, that she’s a mediocre “DEI hire,” and that she’s not a “natural-born citizen.”
Trump has been leading the charge in insulting Harris, just as he did with his former opponents Biden and Clinton. But Trump has gone after an element of Harris’ identity that he didn’t focus on with those adversaries: her race.
At the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago last month, Trump told the crowd of reporters that he “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,” suggesting that Harris had changed her racial identity to suit her political agenda.
Harris is of Jamaican and Indian descent and has regularly discussed both parts of her racial identity throughout her career.
The Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, recently echoed Trump’s attacks.
“I believe that Kamala Harris is whatever she says she is,” Vance said Sunday on CNN. “But I believe, importantly, that President Trump is right that she’s a chameleon. She pretends to be one thing in front of one audience. She pretends to be something different in front of another audience.” He added that Harris was a “fundamentally fake person.”
Conway is just the latest Republican to call for Trump — and Vance, by association — to stop questioning Harris’ identity.
In an interview on “Fox News Sunday” earlier this month, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a longtime ally of Trump, also urged the former president to cool it on the race-based attacks of Harris, saying that the problem “with Kamala Harris is not her heritage, it’s her judgment.”
For weeks now, Republican leaders — including House Speaker Mike Johnson and the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina — have been pushing for an end to the attacks on Harris’ identity.
Trump’s posts on Truth Social over the past few days have been heavily focused on criticizing Harris’ record and policies, as Republicans have urged him to do. But, considering Trump’s history, it is hard to imagine a world in which his identity-based attacks on Harris stop completely.
Read the original article on Business Insider
