Trump on Harris: Is She Indian or She Happens to Turn Black?

Presidential candidate Donald Trump questioned in an interview Wednesday whether his Democratic rival Kamala Harris is truly black or if she is using race as a political tool.

Harris “has always been of Indian heritage and she’s just promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a few years ago when she happened to be black,” Trump told a group of interviewers at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago.

“And now she wants to be identified as black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?” he added of Harris, the first black woman of South Asian descent to become vice president in U.S. history.

“I respect both categories but obviously she doesn’t, because she’s been Indian all along and then all of a sudden she turns around and she’s a black person.”

The provocative comments by the Republican presidential candidate are the latest in a series of increasingly personal attacks on Harris, who he also accused this week — who is married to a Jewish American — of anti-Semitism.

The White House quickly responded to Trump's comments, calling them "insulting."

"Nobody has the right to tell someone who they are and how they identify themselves," White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre, the first black woman to hold the position, told reporters.