SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Vice President Kamala Harris joined a Democratic virtual event yesterday to say…

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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I will officially accept your nomination next week once the virtual voting period has closed. But already, I’m happy to know that we have enough delegates to secure the nomination.

SIMON: But who will be her running mate? And former President Donald Trump launches a personal attack. NPR’s Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks for being with us.

RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.

SIMON: Let’s get to that contentious interview Wednesday. National Association of Black Journalists meeting in Chicago – ABC’s Rachel Scott asked Trump if he believes Kamala Harris was only on the ticket because she was a Black woman. This was his answer.

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DONALD TRUMP: She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know. Is she Indian, or is she Black?

RACHEL SCOTT: She has always identified as…

TRUMP: You know what…

SCOTT: …As a Black woman…

TRUMP: …I respect…

SCOTT: …Who went to a historically Black college.

TRUMP: …I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t.

SIMON: Ron, do you think this was a planned line of personal attack on Vice President Harris or something else?

ELVING: There are a couple of schools of thought on this. One holds that Trump just wanted to be outrageous and get attention. And let’s face it, he’s been upstaged for nearly two weeks now since Biden stepped aside and Harris stepped in. Certainly, it’s been harder for him to dominate news cycles at will. He may be frustrated that for all the successes of his convention last month in Milwaukee, he did not get a polling bounce from it as candidates have in the past. So that’s one answer.

But some believe Trump was trying to alter the overall discourse around Harris by highlighting her biracial identity, doubting its authenticity and making it the focal point of the campaign. He may welcome that kind of focus. He sees that as good ground for him and galvanizing for his backers.

SIMON: So far, it seems the vice president has resisted getting drawn into any kind of debate about her own heritage. But how has she been talking about her opponent this week?

ELVING: It’s possible Harris’ response has been disappointing to Trump. She’s been reluctant to take the bait, mindful perhaps of how much he would like to have identity politics supersede everything else. Instead, she’s called it out as divisive and disrespectful and also as being just old. The same racially tinged attacks Trump has used back to before he was a candidate. You may remember him promoting the birther conspiracy way back more than a decade ago, questioning whether Barack Obama was a citizen born in the United States.

SIMON: Kamala Harris will officially accept her party’s nomination for president after the virtual roll call ends 6 p.m. Eastern time Monday. Soon thereafter, she hits the campaign trail with her new running mate. Who will that be?

ELVING: This weekend, she is interviewing six finalists, according to her campaign. Some of that maybe public relations or thank-you notes. She has said she will campaign with her pick on Tuesday, and the first event is going to be in Philadelphia, which is making some people think the leading candidate has to be Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

Now, Pennsylvania is the largest of the six swing states that most people expect will determine this election – the states that voted for Trump in 2016 but for Biden in 2020. Shapiro may not be as popular on the left as, say, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, or Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. But this is an Electoral College election, and neither Walz or Buttigieg brings you a swing state. Neither do the other governors, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Andy Beshear of Kentucky, so the other candidate to still bear in mind is Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, the former astronaut and Navy combat pilot. He could help with Harris’ vulnerability on the border issue and also help Democrats carry Arizona again.

SIMON: Finally, what do you make of the criticism of the Biden administration’s seven-country prisoner exchange – 24 people in all, but Donald Trump didn’t like it?

ELVING: You know, Trump went on to declare that the negotiators here were total failures and to ask whether there had been any cash in the deal. He said he had, himself, gotten lots of hostages out as president, although not former Marine, Paul Whelan, who was just now released. And Trump insisted he always got hostages out without giving up anything at all, and certainly not any cash, and he seemed very interested in whether the deal had included cash.

SIMON: Ron Elving, thanks so much.

ELVING: Thank you, Scott.

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