Former President Donald Trump Thursday continued to troll Vice President Kamala Harris about her racial heritage, posting a photo of her as a younger woman with her Indian grandparents and other family members while wearing a sari.
"Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago!" Trump said in his Truth Social post. "Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated."
The post comes amid blowback over comments he made Wednesday at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago when he claimed Harris, whose father was Jamaican-American and mother was from India, "happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black."
The photograph Trump posted appeared in coverage during the 2020 election, when Harris was running as President Joe Biden's running mate.
It was included in a Los Angeles Times story in which Indian-Americans were celebrating her becoming the first Indian woman to become a vice presidential candidate.
Harris is pictured with her Indian grandparents, her sister Maya, and two children.
Her father, Donald Harris, was born in Jamaica and was an economist who taught at Stanford University. Her mother, breast cancer researcher Shyamala Gopalan, moved from India to California in the late 1950s, where she studied at UC Berkeley.
In June 2020, Harris told a podcast, Asian Enough, that her mother had been "conscious of race" while raising her and her sister in Berkeley in the 1960s and 70s, and pointed out that she grew up in the Black community.
"She knew that in America, her daughters would be treated, for better or worse, as Black women and Black children, and she raised us with a sense of pride about who we were," Harris said at the time. "But it was never to the exclusion of always being very proud and very active in terms of our Indian culture as well."
Harris' first name means "lotus" in Sanskrit.
Harris, responding to Trump's claims, said Wednesday night during an event for the historically Black sorority Sigma Gamma Rho, that Trump's comments are coming from "the same old show — the divisiveness and the disrespect. Let me just say the American people deserve better. The American people deserve better."