In an interview on Tuesday before the National Association of Black Journalists, Vice President Kamala Harris condemned Donald Trump for promoting “hateful” lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
Recently, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have repeatedly promoted false claims that the migrant community has abducted domestic pets and are “eating” the animals. The claims have prompted bomb threats against schools and government facilities and led to the cancellation of a local cultural festival.
In her interview, Harris was asked to give her assessment of the situation.
Describing the fallout of the rhetoric as a “crying shame,” Harris said a “whole community” had been “put in fear” because of the Republican ticket’s rhetoric. She noted that during her time in public office, she had learned that leaders had a responsibility to understand the impact of their speech.
“When you have these positions—when you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand at a very deep level how much your words have meaning,” Harris said.
The vice president said figures like Trump have a “profound responsibility” to understand how their statements can affect people’s lives and the public trust.
She said that responsibility had even more weight “especially when you have been—and then seek to be again—president of the United States of America.”
Harris also noted that Trump’s frequent claim that he supports law enforcement should also be called into question since law enforcement resources have been required to respond to threats against the Haitian community.
Harris connected Trump’s attacks to “age-old” tropes that have been used against Black people. She also said Trump’s comments were part of a pattern of behavior, noting his promotion of the racist birther smear against former President Barack Obama, as well as Trump’s history of denying to rent housing to Black families and his call for the innocent teenagers in the Central Park Five to be executed.
“We’ve got to say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States of America, engaging in that hateful rhetoric that—as usual—is designed to divide us as a country,” she added.
“I think most people in our country, regardless of their race, are starting to see through this nonsense and to say, ‘You know what? Let’s turn the page on this.’ This is exhausting, and it’s harmful, and it’s hateful and grounded in some age-old stuff that we should not have the tolerance for. So let’s turn the page and chart a new way forward and say you can’t have that microphone again.”
Despite statements from local law enforcement officials that the claims promoted by Trump and Vance are false, Vance defended the campaign’s rhetoric in a Sunday appearance on CNN.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told host Dana Bash.
