The NABJ wasn’t the audience Trump was aiming at

As offensive as all that was to the Black men and women staring in his direction, Trump knew it was getting a belly laugh with his crowd, who can’t get enough of that stuff.

In a Trump charade, facts don’t matter.

Most of the NABJ audience knows the truth. That Harris is a daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. That both of her parents immigrated to this country.

Harris has said her mother raised her sister and her as Black because that’s how the world would see them.

Harris has been dealing with that trope for years. “I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black,” said the then-senator in a 2019 radio interview. “I was born Black. I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”

Harris embraced her identity. She elected to attend my alma mater, Howard University. She pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority. She and my wife, Gwen, are sorority sisters — a relationship they discovered four years ago when Harris brought her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to Washington. As an undergraduate, Harris became a Sweetheart of my fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi.

Trump doesn’t know and probably doesn’t care that Sen. Kamala Harris was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Lest anyone forget, Trump led the false, racist “birther” movement against President Barack Obama. And he tried the same thing against Harris when she was named Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020. President Trump said at a news conference, “I just heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements and by the way the lawyer that wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.” The piece was a pile of junk, as were Trump’s grotesque hits on Harris’s heritage, then and now.

And from the jeering audience in the room on Wednesday, he got the scornful reception he deserved.