Vice President Kamala Harris has avoided sitting for unscripted interviews with media allies, making Friday the 19th straight day she has refused to sit down for an interview since becoming the party’s de facto nominee.
The last time Harris sat for “anything approaching an extended sit-down interview” with a news outlet was on June 24, according to Newsweek.
Harris’s last solo press conference was on December 2, 2023, in Dubai about the Israel/Hamas war, the Daily Mail‘s Charlie Spiering reported Thursday.Harris might not be partial to unscripted events for two reasons. First, she has a habit of delivering silly word salads and gaffes. Second, she appears to be navigating policy debates within her own party. Anonymous campaign aides have flip-flopped on five of her radical-left policies.
Harris’s lack of media access has caught the attention of media elites and spurred mockery from the right. “Excuse me, what are we doing right now?” Former President Donald Trump questioned during a Thursday press conference at Mar-a-Lago. “She’s not doing any news conference.”
“You know why she’s not doing it? Because she can’t do a news conference,” Trump said. “She doesn’t know how to do a news conference. She’s not smart enough to do a news conference.”
Following Trump’s comments, Harris vowed on Thursday to schedule an interview “before the end of the month” after speaking with her team.
It was unclear if the interview itself would take place sometime in the last three weeks of August or whether the interview would only be scheduled in that time frame.
Members of the media are beginning to report on what appears to be Harris’s strategy to run a public relations campaign similar to President Joe Biden’s in 2020.
Elite media companies, which are financially struggling in the new age of digital media, count on newsworthy stories generated by relevant presidential candidates to produce content for monetization. Just this week, Axios, “a far-left propaganda site,” according to Breitbart News’s John Nolte, announced Tuesday it would cut ten percent of its 500-person staff.
“Harris is starting to face more questions about why she isn’t doing more press, which are only bound to grow louder,” Politico Playbook reported Thursday.
“The press has questions for Vice President Kamala Harris,” the New York Times’s Michael M. Grynbaum reported Friday. “She isn’t giving a whole lot of answers.”
“Harris has yet to sit for an interview or take questions from the stump since launching her campaign July 21,” Axios’s Avery Lotz noted.
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Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
