CNN host Don Lemon condemned President Trump for lending credence to the false claim that Sen. Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic candidate for vice president, is not a natural-born U.S. citizen.
He expressed disbelief during the opening of his show on Thursday night, hours after the president responded to a Newsweek op-ed that questioned whether Harris is eligible to run for vice president as Joe Biden’s running mate because her parents, immigrants from Jamaica and India, respectively, were not citizens at the time of her birth in Oakland, California, or before she turned 16.
“He is starting with birtherism. Can you believe it? Is it 2011 all over again? What is going on? Birtherism, now, against Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s vice presidential nominee, who is a black woman. Does that ring a bell to you?” he said.
The show then aired a clip from a press conference earlier in the day in which Trump said, “I heard it today, that she doesn’t meet the requirements.” He then heaped praise on Dr. John Eastman, a law professor and former dean who wrote the op-ed. The president deemed Eastman a “highly qualified, very talented lawyer.”
During the press conference, under questioning by reporters, Trump also made clear that he was not fully up to speed on the argument being made against Harris, asking at one point, “They’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country?” A reporter corrected him, explaining the argument is about her parent’s residency, after which Trump said, “I don’t know about it. I just heard about it. I’ll take a look.”
Lemon called the questioning of Harris’s citizenship a “dumb, stupid conspiracy theory” and directed his ire at the president.
“This man is so full of it, y’all. Come on. He knows better than that,” Lemon said. “He’s the president of the United States. Shouldn’t he have a modicum of decency and class? And just say to that, ‘Look, come on. Let’s talk about something real. A lot of people have died from the coronavirus. That’s serious. Kamala Harris is on the vice presidential ticket. Move along.’ No. He’s got to go for these racist dog whistles. Not even a dog whistle. Birtherism. Again?”
Numerous legal scholars agree that Harris is a natural-born citizen, and some have called the contradicting narrative “racist nonsense” and “idiotic.” The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” and the 1898 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark found that children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents who are lawful permanent residents are citizens.
However, Eastman argues that there’s the possibility of Harris not being fully “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and thus not a “natural-born citizen.”
The questions about Harris’s eligibility echo the baseless “birther” conspiracy theory, which Trump himself had promoted, that former President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that President Trump told reporters on Thursday he “heard” Sen. Kamala Harris is not eligible to be vice president. He did not claim that she wasn’t eligible.
