Opinion | Trump Pulls Out His Birther Bag of Tricks

For years, before he won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Donald Trump was something like the spiritual leader of the Republican Party’s right-wing base. He earned his place in the hearts and minds of conservative voters by doing what most Republican politicians at the time refused to do: He attacked Barack Obama as a foreign interloper and openly questioned his right to serve as president of the United States.

Birtherism made Trump a celebrity on the right. It made him a force to reckon with in the Republican Party. It made him so popular with Republican voters that, while fighting to win the 2012 race for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney ventured out to Las Vegas to receive Trump’s blessing and support. “There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life,” Romney said at the event. “This is one of them. Being in Donald Trump’s magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight. I’m so honored and pleased to have his endorsement.”

It may not have looked like it at the time, but birtherism also put Trump in a position to win the Republican presidential nomination for himself just four years later. Birtherism sits at the foundation of Trump’s political career. It is the energy that fueled his ascent to the highest peak of American politics. And as he tries to scale that peak for a third time — and for the first time against a nonwhite opponent — he has returned to birtherism as he makes his case to the public.

Now this form of birtherism, to be fair to Trump, is a little different from the one he used to try to delegitimize Obama. To attack the former president, Trump liked to insinuate that he wasn’t born in the United States. “He’s spent millions of dollars trying to get away from this issue,” Trump said in 2011. “Millions of dollars in legal fees trying to get away from this issue. And I’ll tell you what, I brought it up, just routinely, and all of a sudden a lot of facts are emerging and I’m starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country.”

Against Kamala Harris, the vice president and standard-bearer for the Democratic Party in November, Trump says that while she may be American, she isn’t African American. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. Now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said last week at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

As with the birther attack on Obama, this charge of racial opportunism is as false as it is offensive. Harris, the child of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, has always identified with both parts of her heritage. While at Howard University, the historically Black college in Washington, D.C., she joined a Black sorority. While a student at what was then called the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, she was president of the Black Law Students Association. She was identified, after winning the 2003 race for San Francisco district attorney, as California’s “first African American district attorney.” And she has spoken to both her Black identity and her South Asian identity in subsequent speeches, writings, interviews and campaign materials.