US President Donald Trump has stoked false claims that Democratic vice-presidential contender Kamala Harris is ineligible to hold that office because her parents were foreign born.
The claims about Harris — who was born in the United States, making her constitutionally eligible to be both vice president and president — echo a baseless theory that Trump long promoted about his predecessor Barack Obama.
“I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump said at a White House news conference on Thursday, referring to an August 12 opinion piece in Newsweek.
The article by conservative law professor John Eastman says that “before we so cavalierly accept Senator Harris’ eligibility for the office of vice president, we should ask her a few questions about the status of her parents at the time of her birth.”
Trump said that Eastman, of Chapman University “is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer. I have no idea if that’s right.”
Eastman was also an unsuccessful Republican challenger, losing in the primary for the 2010 California attorney general’s election won by Harris, who served in that post before becoming a US senator.
Harris, 55, was born in Oakland, California to a mother from India and a father from Jamaica. She is the first black woman and woman of South Asian heritage to be granted the honor of a place on the ticket of a major US party.
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