Top Senate Republican says Trump should focus on issues, not race in campaign against Harris

Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2-ranking Senate GOP leader, said Wednesday that former President Trump should focus on policy issues and not race in his campaign against Vice President Harris.

“The campaign is, needs to be, must be about the issues, and there’s plenty to talk about. I just think that’s where the focus needs to be. That’s how we’re going to win in November,” Thune told reporters.

Thune, who is running to succeed Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) as Senate GOP leader, was responding to the former president’s claims that he doesn’t know whether Harris, who is of Indian and Jamaican heritage, is Indian or Black. Trump made the remarks during a combative interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago.

“I’ve known her a long time indirectly. Not directly very much,” Trump said. “She was always of Indian heritage. And she was only promoting Indian heritage. I 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.”

“So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?” he said. 

Trump’s remarks come as Republican leaders in Congress, including Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), are warning their colleagues to back off using diversity, equity and inclusion politics to attack Harris.

The comments immediately drew condemnation from Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Black Democrat from Georgia.

“I’ll tell you what it’s not: It’s not surprising. This is who Donald Trump is. This is the politics of insult, of revenge and resentment and retribution, and I suspect we’ll hear that all the way until November,” he said.

“I think at the end of the day the people of America are going to reject that. They know what Kamala Harris represents,” Warnock said.

“Here’s a woman who is the daughter of a Jamaican man and an East-Asian immigrant mother. She went to Howard University. She’s married to a Jewish man,” he said. “She embodies in her life story the American covenant, E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. Donald Trump doesn’t understand that.”