Vice President Kamala Harris was asked how she reacted to — and how she would explain to her pioneering immigrant mother — comments by former President Donald Trump indicating that the surge in immigration to the United States was “poisoning the blood” of our country.
(Born in Chennai, India, Harris’s late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a biomedical scientist and PhD at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, arriving in California from India for university at age 19. Her father, Donald Harris, is a Jamaican-born economist.)
Knowing Harris’s family’s immigration history, interviewer Lawrence O’Donnell colored his question by asserting Trump was “talking about your blood.”
In response, Harris mentioned how people heard “correctly” echoes from the rhetoric of Hitler in Trump’s words, and then said she was raised by parents active in the civil rights movement and that she had learned at a young age that there “are some people who will use their voice in a way that is meant to dehumanize.”
Vice President Harris on Trump saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America: It is language meant to divide us. It is language people have rightly found similar to the language of Hitler. Strength does not look like a bully, a leader is someone who has empathy pic.twitter.com/09FNSCQ81n
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) December 20, 2023
Calling Trump’s blood comment “language that is meant to divide us,” Harris went on to lament the current state of division in the country, and bemoan the increasingly prevalent notion that leadership and bullying have become, for some, synonymous.
Harris believes otherwise, and offered a definition of a leader that measures power with different criteria.
“I think it’s just critically important that we remind each other,” Harris said, “including our children, that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based not on who they beat down but who they lift up.”
In this the Vice President echoes such disparate political figures as John Quincy Adams (“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader”) and Ralph Nader (“I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers”).
Harris’s comments may sound abstract and idealist, but they are offered in counterpoint to a political opposition that is loudly denouncing heterogeneity and new ideas and people as a danger to the country. Below is Trump adviser Stephen Miller railing against the “resettlement of America in real time” by immigrants.
Stephen Miller doubles down on Trump parroting Hitler’s “poisoning the blood” rhetoric, calling for rounding up Latinos in mass detention camps: People are coming in from different cultures. A generation from now, people will not know the country they’re living in pic.twitter.com/XxVTuhyAKa
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) December 20, 2023
