Harris Condemns Trump’s ‘Hateful’ Claims About Springfield, Ohio

Harris Condemns Trump’s ‘Hateful’ Claims About Springfield, Ohio

“This is exhausting, and it’s harmful,” Kamala Harris said during an interview. “And it’s hateful, and grounded in some age-old stuff that we should not have the tolerance for.”

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By Erica L. Green and Nicholas Nehamas

Erica L. Green reported from Philadelphia, and Nicholas Nehamas from Washington.

Vice President Kamala Harris said on Tuesday that former President Donald J. Trump’s unfounded claims about Black migrants in an Ohio city were “hateful rhetoric” and “tropes” that had been “designed to divide us as a country.”

“This is exhausting, and it’s harmful,” she said during an interview with Black journalists in Philadelphia. “And it’s hateful, and grounded in some age-old stuff that we should not have the tolerance for.”

She added, “It’s got to stop.”

Ms. Harris’s remarks on Tuesday at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists were her most forceful yet about the Trump campaign’s escalating attacks on migrants and communities of color, and her first time directly addressing the situation in Springfield, Ohio.

Bomb threats have shut down schools and government buildings in the city, after Mr. Trump said at the presidential debate last week that Haitian immigrants there were stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs — an accusation for which there is no evidence and which many Black Americans and Democrats condemned as racist.

Mr. Trump has continued to amplify the claims as he seeks to put immigration at the center of his White House bid. Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, has also spread the debunked theories, saying on Sunday that he was willing “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”

In her interview, Ms. Harris laid out the city’s distress, pointing to children who could not attend school and law enforcement officers who had been stretched thin. She said residents had enjoyed “productive” lives before people began “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old.”

“It’s a crying shame,” she said. “My heart breaks for this community.”

Ms. Harris linked the growing tensions in the city to other racist political attacks by Mr. Trump, including the lie that he spread for years that Barack Obama was not a United States citizen.

Speaking two days after the second assassination attempt against Mr. Trump, the vice president mentioned her Republican rival by name just once during the roughly 45-minute interview.

On Sunday, as Mr. Trump played golf at his club in West Palm Beach, Fla., Secret Service agents opened fire on a man with a rifle who was hiding in bushes around the course, the authorities say. The man fled without firing a shot and was eventually arrested.

Since then, Mr. Trump has blamed Democrats like Ms. Harris and President Biden for the attempted violence, accusing them of “inflammatory language” in their warnings of the threat he poses to democracy. But at the same time, Mr. Trump, who has a long history of stoking political violence, has continued to use menacing language. He called the Democrats the “enemy from within” and “the real threat.”

Ms. Harris used her Tuesday interview — one of the few she has held with mainstream journalists since becoming the Democratic nominee — to continue hammering home the contrast between her and Mr. Trump and presenting herself as shepherding in a new chapter for American politics.

As she spoke about Springfield, she explained that throughout her career as a prosecutor, she had understood that her words could “move markets.” Holding an office like the presidency, she said, “means that you have been invested with trust to be responsible.”

“We’ve got to say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States of America engaging in that hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country, is designed to have people pointing fingers at each other,” she said.

Ms. Harris added, “It’s designed to do that, and I think most people in our country, regardless of their race, are starting to see through this nonsense and to say, ‘You know what, let’s turn the page on this.’”

She said she had spoken with Mr. Trump earlier on Tuesday, checking in to make sure that he was OK and reiterating her sentiment that “there’s no place for political violence in our country.”

As the Secret Service faces heightened scrutiny, she told the interviewers that she felt safe under the agency’s protection but that many vulnerable Americans did not feel safe generally.

“You can go back to Ohio,” she said. “Not everybody has Secret Service, and there are far too many people in our country right now who are not feeling safe.”

Ms. Harris fielded a series of policy questions with answers that often echoed her stump speech. In response to a question about whether Americans were better off economically than they were four years ago, she pointed to the Biden administration’s successes in reducing childhood poverty and lowering unemployment and prescription costs. She also elaborated on her proposed “opportunity economy,” which she said would bolster the middle class with benefits like child-care tax credits.

She acknowledged, however, that Americans were still feeling the pain of inflation, citing high grocery costs.

The Trump campaign sought to jump on her remarks.

“Kamala Harris admitted today that she has failed Black Americans,” Janiyah Thomas, the campaign’s Black media director, posted on social media. “She told the NABJ that after three and half years of her failed policies, grocery prices are too high and the American Dream is unattainable for young Americans. We can’t afford four more years of Kamala Harris. It’s time to put President Trump back in the White House and restore economic prosperity.”

Ms. Harris also sidestepped thornier direct questions about her stances on civil and human rights issues, like reparations for the descendants of enslaved people and the war in Gaza, that are particularly salient for Black, young and progressive voters.

Asked whether she would take executive action to create a commission to pay reparations, Ms. Harris said she believed the issue should be taken up by Congress.

“I’m not discounting the importance of any executive action, but ultimately Congress, because if you’re going to talk about it in any substantial way, there will be hearings, there will be a level of public education and dialogue,” she said.

Pressed on whether she would change the United States’ policy toward Israel because of the Gaza conflict, Ms. Harris dodged the question three times, repeatedly pointing to a deal the Biden administration has struggled to broker between Israel and Hamas to institute a cease-fire in exchange for hostages held in Gaza.

“We need to get it done immediately,” she said. “And that is my position. It is my policy. We need to get this deal done.”

Ms. Harris’s appearance at N.A.B.J. was highly anticipated. Mr. Trump had appeared before hundreds of the group’s members in July, as part of its election-year tradition to invite presidential candidates to address its annual convention, and just weeks after he survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa.

He used the venue to question Ms. Harris’s racial identity, telling the room full of journalists that the vice president — whose mother was Indian American, whose father is Black and who has always identified as a Black woman — had “all of a sudden” become “a Black person.”

During the interview, Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized a Black, female interviewer because she had opened the event with a question that included details about his past racist statements.

And he told the group of journalists that immigrants would come and take their jobs, while proclaiming that he had been “the best president for the Black population” since Abraham Lincoln.

Katie Rogers and Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.