In what was rightly billed as the most adversarial interview Harris has taken since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, she seemed loaded for bear from the moment she sat down with Fox anchor Bret Baier.
It was a sharp contrast with the image she has projected on the campaign trail and in softer interviews and even the moment she strode across the debate stage to introduce herself to her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Harris, at times, appeared to be debating Baier, demanding that he let her finish and not interrupt her answers. Baier, consistently addressing Harris as either “Madam Vice President” or “ma’am,” at one point apologized for the crosstalk.
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But it wasn’t quite Harris the prosecutor or the senator who grilled Trump administration officials in hearings on Capitol Hill, though she referenced her experiences in those areas.
“Let me be very clear: My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden‘s presidency,” Harris said, a clearer line of demarcation than she drew for Stephen Colbert or on The View. She emphasized generational change and differences in experience from Biden.
At the same time, Harris didn’t really mention significant policy disagreements with the current president and defended Biden’s mental acuity despite the obvious fact that she had to replace him atop the Democratic ticket. She has also returned to Biden’s “democracy” theme as the race enters the homestretch, having previously emphasized this less than her boss did.
“You gotta take [responsibility] for what happened in your administration,” Harris said in a line aimed at Trump but that seems likely to circulate against her in Republican circles.
The normally composed Harris lost her temper at times and frequently gave thin answers when pressed to go beyond her anti-Trump talking points, raising the concerns that kept her off the interview circuit in the first place. Her biggest smile came when her night with Baier came to a close.
Harris will score points with her supporters for flashing righteous anger at Trump and Fox News, but that did not appear to be the reason she accepted the interview.
The vice president came armed with frequent references to her Republican supporters, with whom she had appeared in the battleground state of Pennsylvania before the interview. She surely went on Fox to attract more.
Since ascending to the top spot on the Democratic ticket, Harris had come under scrutiny for a paucity of unscripted events and a general lack of press access. Past interviews as vice president haven’t always gone well, such as when she responded to a question about when she would visit the border by saying she hadn’t been to Europe yet either, and off-the-cuff speaking worked against her at times during her failed campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
“Listen, that was five years ago,” Harris responded to one of Baier’s questions about that previous race.
Harris has been trying to flip the script on Trump by doing more interviews, including a sitdown with 60 Minutes that the former president skipped. She mocked his town hall, which devolved into an impromptu “YMCA” dance-off with Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), and she told Howard Stern that Trump was showing weakness by avoiding legacy media institutions. She received generally positive reviews for her debate with Trump and has tried to bait him into another one before the election.
But Trump, who is no Baier fan, demonstrated he enjoys combative exchanges with the media once again this week when he sat down with a top Bloomberg editor to discuss his economic plans, saying his interviewer had been wrong about tariffs for 25 years as the live audience laughed. Trump’s spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, described the Harris interview as a “TRAIN WRECK” (emphasis in the original) in a statement blasted out soon afterward.
Conservatives on social media had peppered Baier beforehand with queries about whether the interview would be edited or Harris would know the questions in advance. The answer both times was no, but Trump supporters were skeptical.
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Harris and Trump are locked in a tight race as Election Day approaches, and early voting is already taking place in some parts of the country. Harris leads Trump by 1.7 points in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, but Trump is ahead of her by a smaller margin in the top battleground states that will decide the presidency.
There have been reports that Harris might venture into Trump-friendly territory by doing an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. Rogan is a softer interviewer than Baier, but the format requires more talking, and his heavily male audience could find the Democratic nominee a tough sell.