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Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and current campaign adviser, accused Vice President Kamala Harris of not knowing her “roots” shortly after the GOP nominee questioned whether Harris was Indian or Black.
Habba opened for Trump at his campaign event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Wednesday evening. She mispronounced “Kamala” before stating: “I’m so excited because when I spoke at the RNC, I didn’t know she was the one we were going after. But now I do.”
“I’m going to speak to you, Miss Harris! I am a strong woman, a mom, a lawyer, and an American!” Habba told the crowd.
“And unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are! I know where I come from! And I don’t play around with the Constitution,” said Habba, whose parents are Iraqi immigrants.
Habba served as Trump’s lawyer during his civil fraud trial earlier this year, in which a judge ordered him to pay $454 million. She announced during his criminal hush-money trial that she had taken a new role as his “legal adviser.” Now, she works as an adviser on his campaign.
Mere hours before the rally, Trump participated in a heated question-and-answer session with the National Association of Black Journalists.
“I didn’t know she was Black,” he said about Harris. “She happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? ... I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way and all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.”
The interview has been decried by strategists and political commentators as a “dumpster fire.”
Trump’s running mate JD Vance, the father of three biracial children, on Wednesday told The Hill that he thought Trump’s comments were “hysterical” and accused the media of “overreacting to it.” The Ohio Senator added: “I think he pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris,”
Harris herself responded to the former president’s comments while speaking to Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority sisters at a Houston gathering, calling Trump’s remarks “the same old show” of “divisiveness and disrespect.”
