Vice President Kamala Harris had a bad night on Wednesday.
But more interesting than anything she said to Fox News anchor Bret Baier was what wasn’t said — namely, that reporters hadn’t bothered until this interview to ask her the most glaringly obvious question of 2024.
This is why she seemed so completely blindsided when Baier asked about the role she played in the sweeping, years-long conspiracy to hide President Biden’s declining mental fitness from the public.
The media’s failure to press her on this question until now goes beyond mere incuriosity or sloppiness. It’s outright malpractice.
Harris fumbled through her roughly 26-minute conversation with Baier before slinking away on complaints that her host had been too aggressive in his questioning.
By any reasonable measure, the interview was a disaster. Don’t take my word for it. The Democratic nominee and her team began the week hoping her appearance would help them make inroads with Fox’s male and on-the-fence viewers. By the time the cameras had stopped rolling, however, her team had adopted a new line: The interview, they insisted, would go a long way toward rallying left-wingers and Democratic loyalists. Nothing says “that didn’t go as planned” quite like a complete narrative switch-up.
To reasonable minds, Harris’s gamble backfired. She came across as unprepared, tedious and poorly informed. She drew little contrast between herself and her GOP opponent — who, in fairness, likewise tends to be unprepared, tedious and poorly informed.
Though there were many head-scratchers and uncomfortable fumbles in the Baier interview, the critical moment came when Harris rope-a-doped herself with the claim that former President Donald Trump is “unfit” and too “unstable” to be president. This led to obvious follow-up questions regarding the White House’s and her own earlier efforts to dismiss concerns surrounding Biden’s mental and physical fitness.
“You told many interviewers that Joe Biden was on his game,” Baier said, “that he ran around circles on his staff. When did you first notice that President Biden’s mental faculties appeared diminished?”
Harris blanked. Then, after she had had a moment to recollect herself, she simply dodged the question.
“Joe Biden — I have watched 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 said in her trademark word salad format.
Baier pressed, “There were no concerns raised?”
“Bret, Joe Biden is not on the ballot,” said Harris, “and Donald Trump is.”
Yes, but why isn’t Biden on the ballot? This is the question, is it not? As it turns out, Harris knows something about it, even though she went along and played the fool until Biden was forced from his own ticket.
Recall that, following Biden’s career-ending debate performance on June 27, Harris was one of the very first administration officials to go on television and reassure voters that all was well with the president.
“The Joe Biden that I worked with every day is someone who, as I have said, has performed in a way that has been about bringing people into the Oval Office, Republicans and Democrats, to compromise in a way that is extraordinary these days,” she promised CNN viewers.
In February, she had said of her boss, “We have a very bold and vibrant president in Joe Biden.” She also said that same month: “Our president is in good shape, in good health, and is ready to lead in our second term.”
Even before then, she alleged, “Age is more than a chronological fact….Not only is [Biden] absolutely authoritative in rooms around the globe, but in the Oval Office.”
When special counsel Robert Hur described Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Harris rushed to defend Biden’s honor, all but accusing Hur of lying.
“So, the way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous,” she said.
Yet now, the mere fact of Harris’s presidential candidacy explicitly refutes all of those earlier assurances and promises she offered.
A cleverer or better-prepared politician might have expected such an obvious question in response to playing the “fitness” and “instability” cards against Trump. But Harris is not cleverer or better-prepared. She invited the natural response regarding her own attempt to push an unfit presidential candidate on the nation — and she was utterly unprepared for the moment.
For this, she can blame her own all-too-chummy relationship with what should be a much more aggressive and adversarial media.
“You met with [Biden] at least once a week for three-and-a-half years,” Baier pressed on Wednesday evening. “You didn’t have any concerns?”
“I think the American people have a concern about Donald Trump,” the vice president deflected, “which is why the people who know him best, including leaders of our national security community have all spoken out, even people who worked for him in the Oval Office, worked with him in the Situation Room and have said he is unfit and dangerous and should never be President of the United States again, including his former vice president, which is why the job was open for him to choose another running mate. So that is a fact. That is a fact.”
This was the moment that stood above all others Wednesday for its implications. It is newsworthy that Harris froze. It is newsworthy that she declined to address his point directly. But the most newsworthy fact is that she had no good answers to the Biden question because, until Wednesday, nobody had ever made her answer it.
It was the only question that needed asking, yet for her, it was uncharted territory.
How is it possible that Baier is one of the only people in this business who has bothered to ask the Democratic nominee about her role in a plot that ended with the current commander in chief being jettisoned from his own re-election campaign, making way for her own unlikely accession?
For an industry addicted to the word “unprecedented,” and as we’re currently living through times where the word really does apply, it is baffling that journalists aren’t more curious about what Harris knew regarding Biden’s declining mental acuity when she promised repeatedly that he was fit as a fiddle.
Is the U.S. president quitting in the middle of a race and the nomination of his vice president —who didn’t even make it to the Iowa caucuses when she ran for president in 2020 — not “unprecedented” enough for our media?
If the vice president’s involvement in a White House-wide conspiracy doesn’t clear the bar for “public interest,” nothing does.
It was a lousy night for Harris, sure. It was also a bad night for the all-too-friendly political press, whose kid-glove treatment of the Democratic vice president has left her unprepared to answer even the most basic question about policy or the events that secured her own nomination.
Becket Adams is program director of the National Journalism Center.