PALM BEACH, Florida — Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president in 2024, said presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’s ongoing efforts to flip-flop her positions on several major issues, such as energy, immigration, crime, health care, and more via press aides rather than explaining things herself, will not work for her long term.
“I don’t think that’s going to fly,” Trump said. “She can’t do a press conference.”
Trump’s comments came during an hourlong exclusive interview with Breitbart News here at Mar-a-Lago, his luxurious seaside resort and club, on Thursday evening. Specifically, Harris has in recent weeks had press staffers, oftentimes anonymously, issue statements across the media changing her long-held positions on everything from her support for banning fracking to her support for the radical “Medicare-for-All” healthcare vision that would destruct American healthcare plans to her positions on immigration and crime policy and more. Harris herself, though, has not explained whether she actually changed on these issues and if so why and how she changed. American voters are left to trust these many times nameless and faceless aides to Harris on her supposedly new positions since Harris continues to refuse to hold a press conference or sit for a press interview explaining herself.
The most egregious of Harris’s many recent flip-flops—which led to the New York Post cover on Monday morning calling her “Kama Kameleon”—was on fracking.
KAMA KAMELEON pic.twitter.com/XLJ3fGBIi0
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 12, 2024
During her 2020 Democrat presidential campaign, Harris specifically said quite clearly she would ban fracking if elected president. Then, a few weeks ago after having left that as her public position for many years, an anonymous campaign aide issued a statement to The Hill newspaper saying that never mind she no longer supported banning fracking. The candidate herself has made no such pronouncement, and has certainly not explained herself on this critically important issue to both American energy and economic policy that also has major political implications in battleground states including most notably Pennsylvania, but nonetheless many in media just assume she actually changed based on this anonymous aide’s commentary.
Trump, in his interview with Breitbart News, made clear that Harris’s views on energy are extreme and radical and would cripple the U.S. economy.
“On energy, she wants everything to be run by the wind,” Trump said. “It’s crazy. She will destroy our country. Germany went that path for two years under Merkel. One of the reasons that Merkel is not there anymore is that the opposing party said ‘we’re ruining our economy.’ Wind is very expensive energy. It frankly doesn’t work. It’s intermittent if the wind is blowing. The whole thing is crazy. In Germany, they took out the coal plants and everything else and now they’re building a plant a week under the new government. They know it doesn’t work and yet they consistently want to do it. They know electric trucks don’t work—they have to stop six times from New York to California. Diesel stops not once.”
Trump said that his debate preparation will be straightforward as it is simply “common sense” that Harris is a mess on the issues.
“She wants open borders. She wants to defund the police. She’s always wanted that. She’s never changed. Now, she wants to change,” Trump said. “She wants to say things she doesn’t believe in. She actually believes in defunding the police. She actually and absolutely believes in open borders. She was the Border Czar for three and a half years and she was the worst Border Czar in history. She never even went to the border. They said she went once, she went to a section of the border that has nothing to do with the problems. She was a terrible border czar. Millions of people have come in. I think 20 million people have come into our country. It could be even more than that especially with the got-aways. The got-aways are brutal. They’ve come in from all over the world not just South America. Many, many terrorists have come in to our country. Look, she wants to defund the police and she always had. She has helped people that wanted to destroy our country like in Minnesota, she helped them get out of jail. People died in Minnesota. They went after the federal courthouse. They went after everything.”
Trump told Breitbart News that Harris’s history of failing as a candidate—he pointed to her poor performance in the 2020 Democrat presidential primaries—does not bode well for her chances this year. He also said he was shocked outgoing President Joe Biden, who Harris and other Democrats pushed aside this year despite the fact he won the nomination, surprised him by picking Harris as his vice president that year because of how “nasty” she was to him.
“I watched her—look, there were 14 candidates running and she was the first one to get wiped out,” Trump said. “I didn’t think she was good in debates at all. I thought she was terrible. She was nasty to him but other than that—she was very nasty to him. I was shocked when he picked her because she was the nastiest. The people didn’t like what she was doing. The people didn’t like her. She never made it to Iowa. She quit almost immediately.”
Trump said that Harris is going to have to explain herself publicly on these major issues and soon. Trump said that career politicians like Harris usually are telling the truth when they take their first position on something, the radical one, and it’s not honest when they try to walk it back.
“She’s going to have to explain,” Trump said. “Why did she want open borders and now she wants a wall? Always, when that happens, I’ve seen it for years in politics, you have politics and you have a politician. He says something early on like ‘I want a wall, I want this,’ that’s always the position. ‘I want to defund the police,’ she wants to defund the police. Now, all of a sudden, she’s saying ‘no, I didn’t really mean that, I didn’t really mean that.’ All of these policies add up to the way that that is what she really wants to do. She actually thinks defunding the police is good.”
Trump also said Harris’s running mate Minnesota’s Democrat Gov. Tim Walz wants to defund police as well. Trump said Walz refused to send in National Guard troops to protect Minneapolis when rioters in 2020 were burning the city down to the point where one police precinct was abandoned by the cops.
“So does the governor of Minnesota—he thinks defunding the police is good. He’s actually said it,” Trump said. “He gave the police very little protection. When they chased the police out of the precinct, do you remember that? He wouldn’t send in the troops. I was responsible for sending in the National Guard. If I didn’t send in the National Guard, I’ll tell you Minneapolis wouldn’t even exist today. He wouldn’t do it. We were calling him saying ‘send in the Guard, send in the Guard.’ He wouldn’t do it.”
More from Trump’s latest exclusive interview with Breitbart News is forthcoming.
