Analysis: Kamala Harris clashes with Fox News in interview

Kamala Harris didn’t get her second debate with Donald Trump — so she went on Fox News.

The vice president clashed heatedly with the network’s pro-Trump main anchor, Bret Baier, on Wednesday night in the kind of impromptu, adversarial contest that Republicans have long accused her of avoiding.

Harris and Baier sparred and interrupted each other as he laid out his policy twists and reversals and she hammered home her talking points. The contentious showdown, conducted in the swing state of Pennsylvania, had more in common with the vice president’s only debate showdown with the former president than with formal interviews in which she often stumbled.

“Can I finish, please? You have to let me finish,” Harris said at the start of the interview, using a technique she has employed against male rivals in congressional hearings and debates in the past.

The vice president’s trip to Fox News showed how she is trying to conjure new turning points in a race without a clear leader and with most swing states considered swing states. Trump’s decision to refuse a second debate with his rival meant that the final weeks of the campaign had no major moments scheduled that could change the race.

In the end, on Wednesday, Harris and Fox News probably got what they wanted.

The vice president appeared combative after daring to enter the conservative media’s lair and drew a contrast with Trump, who is avoiding television news interviews in which he will be grilled.

She highlighted his extreme rhetoric and threats to use the military on “internal enemies” — in a way the channel’s viewers rarely see. Her performance reinforced her new campaign tactic of raising new alarms about a second Trump term that she said in a speech the previous Wednesday would see the former president sitting in the Oval Office “plotting revenge, dwelling on his own grievances and thinking only about himself and not about you.”

Harris also did some damage control after saying in an interview last week that there wasn’t much she would have done differently from the unpopular commander in chief over the past four years.

“My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” Harris said. “Like every new president taking office, I will bring my life experiences and my professional experiences and new, fresh ideas.”

Fox, meanwhile, got hours of post-interview content for its commentators. Her post-debate analysis, for example, took advantage of Harris’s non-response to one of Trump’s charges — how many undocumented migrants were let into the country on her watch.

As the network aired highlights from the interview, it ran an ad that read “Kamala continues her tirade against Trump.” Baier pressed Harris on issues important to conservative audiences, including tragedies of young American women murdered by illegal immigrants — with whom the vice president expressed deep sympathy — and her past support for using taxpayer money to fund gender-affirming care for transgender prisoners, including illegal immigrants. (She said she would follow the law on such policies as president).

And in case Harris changed any of her viewers’ minds, Fox followed her appearance with scathing rebuttals from Trump’s eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and his former political adviser Stephen Miller.

The tightrope Harris was walking as she tried to display presidential steel and courage was evident in criticisms of her performance on social media that often played into tropes aimed at strong black women.

But before the interview, Harris’ spokesman Ian Sams explained his thinking. He noted that Fox’s high viewership includes some swing voters and Democrats. And he said Harris wanted those viewers to hear it directly from her.

Another day courting different blocks

The Fox interview capped another day in which Harris tries to attract potentially small numbers of voters who could make a difference in tight battlegrounds less than three weeks before the neck-and-neck election.

After courting black male voters on Tuesday, she traveled to Pennsylvania to try to appeal to Republicans who are unhappy with Trump’s undemocratic behavior. Appearing with former Republican lawmakers and officials ousted from their party by Trump, the vice president noted that finding her in such company would normally be surprising.

But she added: “Not in this election, because at stake in this race are the democratic ideas that our founders and generations of Americans before us fought for. At stake in this election is the Constitution of the United States.”

Democrats believe there could be a significant number of GOP voters, including some who voted for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, who could be persuaded to vote for Harris next month.

If just a few thousand Fox viewers or traditional conservatives switched sides, it could push some swing states in the vice president’s direction. Still, the risk for Harris is that her showing in her first formal Fox interview could alienate some of those voters. And the 100 or so Republicans who showed up with her on Wednesday in Bucks County, a critical suburb of Philadelphia, in many cases represented the Republican Party’s past — left behind in the populist transformation engineered by Trump.

Trump plays on claims that he is unbalanced

At that rally in Pennsylvania, Harris reinforced her new tough tone against Trump, blasting him as “increasingly unstable and unhinged.” She has also raised questions about her age and mental health — turning the tables on the 78-year-old former president who often used the same strategy against Biden when he was in the race.

In many of his recent appearances, Trump has appeared to play on Harris’ allegations. On Wednesday, for example, he doubled down on his false claims that Haitian migrants were eating cats and dogs in Ohio. He told a Univision public meeting with undecided Latino voters that refugees, who are in the country legally, were “eating other things too that they shouldn’t.”

The Republican candidate also proclaimed himself “the father of in vitro fertilization” in his latest attempt to distance himself from the chaos in women’s reproductive health after the conservative Supreme Court majority he built overturned the nation’s constitutional right to abortion. Harris later told reporters that the comment was “bizarre” as she seeks to use subsequent state-level abortion restrictions to widen a gender gap that could help her defeat Trump.

And as Democrats increasingly highlight Trump’s perceived threat to American democracy, Republican vice-presidential nominee Senator JD Vance has insisted that the former president did not lose the last election. “I’ve answered that question directly a million times: No. I think there are serious problems in 2020,” the Ohio Republican said. “So Donald Trump lost the election? Not the words I would use, OK?”

Trump, meanwhile, insisted at a Univision public meeting that January 6, 2021 — one of the most notorious days in American history — was a “day of love” and that there was “nothing wrong.”

Any of Trump’s recent comments would have disqualified a conventional candidate. But it is a mark of how he has transformed American politics that his support base is immune to outrageous or bizarre behavior.

And there is no doubt that Trump, for all his rudeness and ripping apart of restrictions designed to control demagogic leaders, is the authentic voice of tens of millions of Americans.

Harris is also hampered by a frightening political environment. She is a member of an unpopular administration at a time when many Americans are still feeling the aftereffects of the high inflation that the White House has often downplayed and are frustrated by the still-high prices for rent, cars and groceries.

It took her several months to come to the assurance that she would be a stark contrast to the Biden administration, which she revealed in the Fox interview. In itself, this is a reflection of her struggles as a presidential candidate. And his difficulty at the beginning of the Fox interview to effectively deflect some of Baier’s questions about immigration showed that the issue remains a weakness and could be a significant impediment to his efforts to win over GOP defectors.

Still, the fact that she braved the interview could help her with undecided voters. And if nothing else, his appearance served to highlight how the conservative media machine and Trump’s are almost indistinguishable from each other.

This content was originally published in Analysis: Kamala Harris clashes with Fox News in an interview on the CNN Brasil website.

Source: CNN Brasil