Haberman: Trump ‘trying pretty hard’ to bait Harris into fight about race

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said former President Trump is trying to bait Vice President Harris into a fight about race, noting he struggles with female opponents.

Haberman told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday that one of the reasons Trump is rattled by Harris’s campaign is because she is a Black woman. She said Trump was “comfortable” with President Biden as his opponent but suggested he struggles to find a line of attack with “women opponents, women critics, and particularly Black women who are critics.” 

“You can see his campaign if you look at the Trump War Room account on Twitter. They are trying pretty hard to bait her and to bait Democrats into a fight about race, and that has been something so far that the Harris campaign has not taken the bait on, but this is something that we have seen him do before. It is something that comes up — has come up in other races,” she said Tuesday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”

In the early days of Harris’s campaign, some Republicans took heat for labeling Harris as a “DEI hire,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion polices. Trump has also mocked Harris’s heritage in an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, saying she “happened to turn Black” in recent years.

Harris is of both Black and South Asian descent.

Haberman also noted the attacks Trump has levied against Harris are similar to the ones he used against former President Obama.

“Trump is a man of few moves, and so we have seen him make the same ones over and over,” she said.

“You are correct that he is trying to run against Kamala Harris the same way that he attacked President Obama, when Obama was in office and Trump was flirting with the idea of running for president in 2011 and was promoting the birther lie suggesting that the first Black president was not legitimate to serve,” she added.