It’s not whether she’s Black, it’s why does he question it?

At the time of these keystrokes, Vice President Kamala Harris is officially the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States in the 2024 election.

That means it is all but a metaphysical certitude she will face former president Donald Trump, the MAG-er...Republican nominee, at the polls Nov. 6.

And that means Trump, a noted demagogue and projectionist, has to pivot to some other form of cheap slander in order to try to win.

With President Joe Biden, it was easy. He’s too old, he’s senile, he’s frail; he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing. He’s a marble-mouthed gaffe machine who, if elected, won’t even make it to the end of his second term.

Never could figure out how the president was also “Crooked Joe,” the mastermind behind the “Biden Crime Family,” but I guess that doesn’t matter now.

The above attacks on Biden, while unconfirmed by any doctor — except for the stutter Biden has battled all his life — are, of course, all detriments one could attach to Trump, who is 78, preoccupied with fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, garbles words on the stump regularly and, when he was president, famously couldn’t descend a stage ramp without help.

At least Biden was riding the bike before he fell off it.

With the president withdrawing from the 2024 campaign, Trump — now the only Old Guy in the race — can’t do his usual 4K Ultra Hi-Def projection job on Harris, who is 20 years his junior and, to put it mildly, effervescent.

So, without his usual slings and arrows, Trump will turn to the other tried-and-true MAGA methodology, attacking Harris for being a Black woman.

But only if he has to.

Last week, at a forum hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump questioned Harris’ ethnic makeup, saying she “turned Black.”

“I did not know she was Black until a couple of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” Trump told the three Black women moderating the forum. “And now she wants to be known as Black. Is she Indian, or is she Black?” 

First, for the record, Vice President Harris’ mother is Indian and her father is Jamaican. But the implied ignorance of Trump’s statement — People can be more than one ethnicity? — obscures something much more insidious.

To Trump — and the 35 to 40 percent of the country that, unfortunately, thinks like him — Harris must be denied her Blackness because, if she has it, she’s unassailable without incurring accusations of racism. 

And while there are also left-wing interests who will try to make sure that’s true, it isn’t. Harris has been a prosecutor, a city attorney, a state attorney general, a U.S. senator and vice president of the United States. She has a record subject to scrutiny from anyone on the right, and, in some cases, the left.

But Trump needs the perception he can’t attack Harris on substance to be out there because he never attacks on substance. It’s always on things like looks, appearance, race, gender and whatever cutesy nickname he can hang on someone for his supporters to chant and buy on a T-shirt.

Trump needs to question Harris’ Blackness because he knows, or thinks, it’ll be an effective smokescreen for why he’s hamstrung from attacking her record, or anything she might want to do as president.

Plus, he’s not interested in talking about that stuff anyway. Too much effort.

And so, Trump must claim Harris falsely identifies as Black. That way, he can both suggest she’s a liar and say, to whomever he needs to, she’s hiding behind cynical political correctness to keep him from being able to campaign against her fairly.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton thought the American electorate would see through Trump’s superficial, blunt-force buffoonery. It did not.

Kamala Harris has already shown she’s not going to make that mistake, so Trump has already resorted to an inverted attack on her race. Her gender will be next. And then, as he grows more desperate, the attacks will become direct.

But it won’t be enough, because it feels, more and more every day, like the rest of us have finally had enough of Donald Trump’s fascist medicine show to usher him out of our Chautauqua tent of national politics for good.

The author is the editor of The Riverdale Press.