Donald Trump is known for hurling insults at his political opponents.
He’s made schoolyard digs like calling Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe” and Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” and gone even further to imply Ted Cruz’s father helped John F. Kennedy’s assassin and question Kamala Harris’ racial identity.
But now that Harris is Trump’s official 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 Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on Monday that Trump needs to stop getting caught up with insults against Harris.
“The winning formula for President Trump is very plain to see,” Conway told Kudlow on Fox Business. “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.”
And Trump has been leading the charge insulting Harris, just as he did with his former opponents Biden and Clinton. But unlike those adversaries, there’s a new element of Harris’ identity Trump has gone after: 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 has 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.
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance recently echoed Trump’s attacks.
“I believe that Kamala Harris is whatever she says she is,” Vance said on CNN on Sunday. “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,” adding that Harris is a “fundamentally fake person.”
Conway is just the latest Republican to call for Trump — and Vance, by association — to stop questioning Harris’ heritage.
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 chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Richard Hudson — 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.
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