Harris clashes with host in contentious interview on Fox
"WASHINGTON CROSSING, Pa. — Vice President Kamala Harris, under pressure to broaden her appeal to Republicans and conservatives with Election Day fast approaching, sat for a contentious interview with Fox News where she said more bluntly than before that her presidency would not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s.
The interview with Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier, which also featured a testy back-and-forth on immigration, represented a calculated gamble for Harris, given Fox’s role as a conservative-leaning network that is one of the top news sources for Republicans. It offered her a chance to refashion a recent comment on ABC’s “The View” that she could not think of anything she would do differently from Biden, a remark that even many Democrats strategists viewed as a misstep.
“Let me be very clear — my presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency, and like every new president that comes in to office, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas,” Harris said. “I represent a new generation of leadership.”
From the first few minutes of the interview, Baier sought to put Harris on the defensive with aggressive questions about the Biden administration’s record on immigration, a top issue for many Republican voters. Baier repeatedly asked if she would apologize to the families of women who were killed by undocumented immigrants after the Biden administration eased President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. Baier played a clip of one of the mothers blaming the Biden administration for her daughter’s death.
Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with Fox News for an interview on Oct. 16. Here’s what she said. (Video: HyoJung Kim/The Washington Post)
Harris called the crimes “tragic cases” and said she could not imagine the pain those families felt “for a loss that shouldn’t have occurred.” But she sought to shift the focus to Trump’s move to torpedo a tough bipartisan border security bill that would have funded 1,500 additional agents and allowed the president to essentially shut down the border if illegal crossings reached a certain point.
Had Trump allowed that bill to pass nine months ago, Harris said, “It would be nine months that we would have had more border agents at the border, more support for the folks who are working around-the-clock trying to hold it all together to ensure that no future harm would occur.”
Harris said she does not support decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings in the United States: “I do not believe in decriminalizing border crossings. I’ve not done that as vice president. I will not do that as president.”
And asked about the criticism that she has received from the Border Patrol officers union, which is supporting Trump, Harris said she understood their concerns about the current state of the immigration system.
“They’re frustrated, and I get it,” the vice president said. “They want support, and that’s what that border security bill would have done.”
The interview represented an extraordinary moment in an already turbulent campaign, as a Democratic nominee who has been criticized for avoiding unscripted moments sat down with a network that has made its name with sometimes-fiery hosts who often attack Democrats and embrace conservative causes.
Harris is not the first Democrat to try to flip the script by agreeing to an interview with Fox in hopes of reaching voters who might otherwise be unlikely to hear their perspective. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has repeatedly sparred with the network’s hosts, earning him plaudits from fellow Democrats. And Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has appeared on “Fox News Sunday” two weekends in a row.
The Harris campaign believes the vice president has an opportunity to win over at least some Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who are alarmed by Trump’s rejection of the 2020 election results, his threats to unleash government powers against his political opponents, and his unusual behavior in some of his recent appearances.
Earlier on Wednesday, Harris appeared with more than 100 Republicans who have endorsed her campaign at an event in Bucks County, Pa., where she argued that Trump is not worthy of the support of Republicans who care about democracy. Noting that the former president at one point suggested terminating the Constitution as he falsely insisted he was the winner of the 2020 election, Harris argued that a person who makes that threat should never stand behind the presidential seal.
“If you share that view, no matter your party, no matter who you voted for last time, there is a place for you in this campaign,” Harris said. “The coalition we have built has room for everyone who is ready to turn the page on the chaos and instability of Donald Trump. And I pledge to you to be a president for all Americans.”
At the afternoon rally, Harris repeated new lines that she has tried out this week that Trump is “increasingly unstable” and “seeking unchecked power.” Harris argued that the hallmarks of her leadership as president would be an effort to build consensus among people of different political persuasions and a focus on making Americans’ lives better. Trump, she said, “will sit in the Oval Office plotting retribution, stewing in his own grievances, and think only about himself and not you.”
She was joined onstage at the “Country Over Party” event by an array of Republican leaders including former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan and former members of Congress such as Barbara Comstock of Virginia, James C. Greenwood of Pennsylvania, Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Denver Riggleman of Virginia, Christopher Shays of Connecticut and Dave Trott of Michigan.
Looking at the Republicans with her onstage and in the audience, she laughed and noted that in any normal election, it would be strange for them to be with her at a campaign event, “but not in this election.”
Over the past few months, the Harris campaign has been reaching out to voters who supported former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. In an effort to signal that Harris merits Republicans’ votes, her aides have also highlighted her support from prominent Republicans including former congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who urged Americans during a recent appearance with Harris to reject the “depraved cruelty” of Trump.
Kinzinger, who like Cheney was a member of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, spoke before Harris at the Bucks County event Wednesday.
He called Trump a “whiny, weak, small, tiny man who is scared to death.”
Trump, as the GOP presidential nominee, is expected to win Republican voters by large margins in every state. But if Harris can improve her standing among these voters even slightly in hard-fought battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania, it could make the difference between winning and losing, according to analysts on both sides.
In the Fox interview, Baier pressed Harris on when she first noticed that Biden’s “mental faculties appeared diminished” and why she had said he was capable of continuing to do the job of president before he dropped out of the race.
She did not directly answer the question. “I have watched in from the Oval Office to the Situation Room, and he has the judgment and the experience to do exactly what he has done in making very important decisions on behalf of the American people,” Harris replied. “Joe Biden is not on the ballot, and Donald Trump is.”
Harris sidestepped questions about a position that she took earlier in her career supporting the use of taxpayer dollars for gender-affirming surgeries for prison inmates. Trump has prominently featured those remarks in some of his ads, which Harris described as a scare tactic.
“I will follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed,” Harris said when asked whether she still supports using public funds for those surgeries. “Under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available on a medical-necessity basis to people in the federal prison system. And I think, frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of like throwing, you know, stones when you’re living in a glass house.”
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