NC Gov. Roy Cooper compares Trump comments on Harris' race to 'birtherism' attacks on Obama

DURHAM, N.C. — North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Thursday that former President Donald Trump is “showing us who he is” by questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity.

Responding to Trump’s comments after speaking at a Harris campaign event about abortion rights, Cooper compared them to Trump falsely claiming for several years that former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

“He’s showing us who he is, he’s trying to divide us,” Cooper told reporters following the event, in Durham. “It reminds me of exactly what he did with President Obama and birtherism. This is what MAGA is about.”

Trump’s comments came during a conversation with political journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention in Chicago on Wednesday.

Trump was asked if he believed Harris was a “DEI hire,” as a few Republicans in Congress have said, and if she was only on the Democratic ticket because of her race and gender. Trump said he had known her “a long time indirectly, not directly,” and claimed that Harris 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,” Trump said. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?”

He went on to add: “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, she became a Black person.”

Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, is multiracial. She attended a historically Black university, joined a historically Black sorority, and joined the Congressional Black Caucus, noted PolitiFact, which labeled Trump’s claim “Pants on Fire!”

Her campaign, responding to Trump’s comments on Wednesday, said “the hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president.”

Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, said in a statement following his comments that he has “continually said that unlike Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, he’s running to be President for ALL Americans, and if you’re running to unite the entire Country, you have to back it up with action like President Trump did today at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago.”

During the Harris campaign event in Durham on Thursday, Cooper said that Trump doesn’t tell the truth that much, but he’s right when he brags about the fact that he is responsible for the destruction of Roe v. Wade.”

Cooper said that voters who don’t support the new 12-week abortion ban North Carolina Republicans enacted last year over his veto can help change things by helping Democrats break the GOP’s legislative supermajority in November. He also said that Trump is claiming to have moderated his position on abortion, and said he doesn’t believe it.

“They will say anything to get elected, and Donald Trump, or JD Vance, would sign a federal abortion ban in a New York minute,” Cooper said.

In April, Trump said he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban if one was passed by Congress, reversing his previous stance on the issue as a candidate in 2016 and during his first term in office, CNN reported.

And ahead of the Republican National Convention last month, GOP delegates approved a new party platform that adopted Trump’s current position that abortion policy should be left to each state to decide, abandoning the “party’s long-standing explicit support for national restrictions,” The Washington Post reported.

Cooper said that Harris, if elected president, would veto a potential national abortion ban, and instead push for legislation restoring Roe as the “law of the land.”

Cooper and other speakers also said Trump would implement the policies laid out in Project 2025, a proposed overhaul of the federal government published by the Heritage Foundation.

Asked by The News & Observer about the Trump campaign saying this week that reports of the project’s “demise would be greatly welcomed,” Cooper said voters shouldn’t be “fooled,” and said that the plan was put together by Trump’s own former aides and allies.

Matt Mercer, spokesman for the North Carolina Republican Party, referred The N&O to a statement from the Trump campaign in which it said that the campaign has “made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term.”

Mercer also referred The N&O to a statement regarding abortion policy in which Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s national press secretary, said that Trump “has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion.”

Kate Cox, a mother of two from Dallas who had to travel outside of Texas last year to obtain an abortion to terminate her nonviable pregnancy, also spoke during Thursday’s Harris campaign event.

Cox said she and her husband always wanted a big family, and were “overjoyed” when they learned she was pregnant with their third child last August. Cox later found out that her baby was developing with full trisomy 18, a genetic disorder that her doctor said meant that if her child, a girl, survived the pregnancy, “she would live for, at most, hours or days.”

The health complications also threatened her ability to safely have more children in the future.

“Amidst all my grief, at the loss of my pregnancy, I had to kiss my children goodbye and flee my state to get an abortion,” Cox said. “It was unspeakably hard.”

Cox said her experience “has intensely reminded me that abortion is health care.” She also said she “didn’t always pay attention to politics” and “didn’t always vote,” but said to cheers from gathered campaign volunteers that “after what happened to me, I promise you I will never again miss an opportunity to vote.”

“Wanted, prayed-for pregnancies sometimes end in abortion,” Cox said. “And mothers and parents are the right people to make compassionate, difficult decisions for themselves and their families, with doctors, not politicians.”