Ex-aide accuses Trump of claiming fake ancestry amid Harris race attacks

Donald Trump claimed that Kamala Harris only recently began identifying herself as Black, but one of his former aides claims the ex-president has falsely presented his family's ancestry for years.

Trump told a gathering of Black journalists the vice president had always presented herself as Indian-American and only "happened to turn Black" in recent years, but his former aide and reality TV cast mate Omarosa Manigault Newman told CNN that the former president claimed to be Swedish in his 1987 memoir.

"I recall in his book The Art of the Deal, Laura, when Donald Trump identified himself as Swedish, right?" Newman said. "Because he didn’t want to acknowledge that his father was German and his mother was Irish, and he thought that that would play better to those who were patronizing his businesses. So can we call the question his past of self-identifying as first Swedish, then German, and then Irish whenever it’s convenient?"

Trump's mother was actually born in Scotland and moved to the U.S. in 1930.

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"Donald doesn’t know the difference between ancestry and race," she added. "He doesn’t want to know the differences, nor does he understand the nuances of how people self-identify. And so, I believe that that’s disqualifying for him."

Harris is the American-born daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother who attended Howard University, the historically Black college where she a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, which was the first sorority established by Black college women in the U.S.

"When he mispronounces her name, he does it as a slur," Newman said. "He does it intentionally to harm her, to make people see the otherness of Kamala Harris ... when he says, 'Oh, at some point she identified as this, and at some point she identified it as this, are you going to hold Donald Trump to the fire for identifying himself as Swedish, even though he has no Swedish roots, in his bestselling book, The Art of the Deal?"

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07 31 2024 23 12 29 youtu.be