She is not one of us.
When former President Donald J. Trump challenged Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity at a public forum on Wednesday — and again on social media the next day — that was the message at the core of his remarks.
It is a tactic that has long been part of the underside of American politics: presenting an opponent as somehow “other” or “not one of us” — someone who cannot be trusted or truly known.
But while this has been a recurrent theme in American campaigns for at least a century, Mr. Trump has taken it to a new level, historians and analysts said. What has often been a subtext or a whisper campaign driven by surrogates is, in Mr. Trump’s hands, a central message of his campaign — projected on screens at a rally, promoted on social media and reinforced by his running mate.
Mr. Trump has personally led the effort, explicitly falsifying the biography of his opponent and invoking race and gender in ways no modern major-party leader has done before. Even as a noncandidate in the 2008 election, he deployed such tactics against Barack Obama, demanding to see Mr. Obama’s birth certificate and claiming that Mr. Obama — who went on to be the nation’s first Black president and was born in Hawaii — was not born in this country.
“Whenever the United States is poised to break a political glass ceiling, we see an intensification of othering in our politics,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. “What makes Trump a singularly poisonous political player is that the top of the ticket is overtly engaging in othering against his political opponent.”
Over decades, the tactic of othering has been wielded against candidates with various backgrounds, characteristics and traits, among them race, ethnicity, gender, economic class and religion — all in the service of making them seem alien to voters. And it has often been effective. In 1928, Republican opponents seized on the fact that Al Smith, the Democratic candidate for president, was a Roman Catholic, suggesting that he would therefore be beholden to the Pope.