President Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump donated to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) during her 2014 re-election campaign for California attorney general, according to state campaign finance records reviewed by Law&Crime.
Harris accepted those donations from then-private citizen Trump at a time when he was a leading proponent of the birther movement against then-president Barack Obama.
In September 2011, Donald Trump donated $5,000 to Harris. In February 2013, he donated an additional $1,000 to her re-election bid. In June 2014, Ivanka Trump donated $2,000 to Harris.
The Sacramento Bee reported on the mutual respect between the Trump and Harris family in early 2019:
The first donation from Trump, for $5,000 in September 2011, came months after he had begun popping up on cable news promoting a conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not the United States, something that’s been widely condemned as racist.
Harris campaign spokesman Ian Sams told McClatchy that Harris donated the $6,000 Trump had contributed to a non-profit that advocates for civil and human rights for Central Americans. But that donation wasn’t made until 2015, a year after she won her reelection for attorney general and as she was launching her run for the Senate.
On Tuesday, of course, Harris was announced as Democrat Joe Biden‘s running mate for the 2020 presidential election.
Trump immediately responded with a campaign ad that incorrectly cast Harris’s center-left voting record as radically leftist. The ad also took aim at Harris’s decidedly floating and shifting political positions through the years and characterized her as a “phony.”
In a key segment of that likely pre-produced Trump campaign ad, the narrator notes that Harris previously sparred with Biden during the Democratic Party primary over the former vice president and Delaware senator’s longtime support for so-called “racist policies” — the latter being an apparent reference to the viral June 2019 debate moment when Harris criticized Biden for supporting pro-segregationist policies.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Biden was a vocal opponent of busing and used his powerful Senate perch to frequently oppose busing by both the federal government and by the states.
“There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”
Biden, in response, falsely said that he only opposed busing by the U.S. Department of Education. That was not true. Biden actually supported and authored several bills in the Senate which aimed to eliminate busing and successfully passed his own measure which prohibited the U.S. Department of Justice from using busing as an anti-segregation tool. The Democratic nominee also highlighted his working relationships with conservative segregationist senators–another aspect of Biden’s life that Harris said was “very hurtful” during that eventful debate.
Voters should expect more of Trump exploiting the past tension on race between Biden and Harris–and the repeat use of the “phony” nickname as well.
In fact, it’s already become something of a Trump family talking point viz. Harris.
“Might as well switch the hashtag to #HarrisBiden2020 because we all know phony Kamala and her radical leftwing [sic] friends will be calling all of the shots in a ‘Biden Administration,’ not slow Joe!” tweeted Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday–while re-sharing the same video as his father.
The 45th president’s eldest son reiterated that charge on Wednesday morning.
“Kamala Harris isn’t a ‘moderate,’ she’s a phony politician who sold out to the radical left for power,” he said in a statement unsupported by Harris’s voting record.
[image via screengrab/Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.]
