Kamala Harris’s interview with Fox’s Bret Baier was strikingly adversarial and angry

Kamala Harris speaks to Fox host Bret Baier. Picture: Fox News.

Few viewers would have emerged from watching Kamala Harris’s highly combative interview with Fox News having learned anything about her or her policies except her visceral disdain for Donald Trump.

During the 30 minute interview with Bret Baier, she became at times visibly furious with his lines of questioning. But it was Trump’s rhetoric and mental state that she repeatedly attacked throughout, adding that she would “support and enforce federal law” as president.

Baier and Harris talked over each other continually, and most of Harris’s answers tended toward verbiage - grammatically correct, but saying very little concrete.

“I am running on ‘turning the page’ from the last decade in which we have been burdened with the kind of rhetoric coming from Donald Trump,” she said at one stage, using two phrases about pages and burdens for which she’s often mocked.

Baier began predictably with perhaps Democrats’ weakest policy area, illegal immigration, challenging Harris to state the number of illegal immigrants her administration had allowed to enter the US, which official estimates put to be at least six million.

Harris refused to acknowledge the unprecedented surge had anything to do with Biden administration, and wouldn’t apologise to the families who had lost loved ones after they were murdered by illegal immigrants, events even Bill Clinton conceded earlier in the week might not have happened had the border been more secure.

“Of course, to the extent our administration’s policies had anything to do with those tragic murders, we apologise, and my administration will do much better” was what she should have humbly said, rather than blaming Donald Trump whose border policies were immediately reversed by Joe Biden in early 2021.

At least she gave a stronger answer when asked how she would be different from Joe Biden as president, a question she flunked terribly last week in a soft-ball interview on The View, where she said she couldn’t think of anything she’d do differently.

“I will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency; like every new president I will bring my life experience, professional experience, fresh and new ideas, I’m a new generation of leadership,” she said.

“For example I have not spent the majority of my career in DC,” she added, quickly trying to talk about her policies to bring down the cost of housing.

Harris ‘lost it’ when Baier played a clip of Donald Trump, who was asked earlier on Fox what he’d meant by his controversial claim the US had “an enemy within”, claiming the clip played was unfair.

When Baier challenged on why and how she had changed her positions on public funding for sex change operations or decriminalisation of illegal immigration, she gave unclear answers.

For Harris critics, the interview will be rich fodder to claim she’s not up to the task of being president. Her performance was at least as much the result of the very bad hand she’s been dealt: trying to defend the Biden administration of which she’s been a central part, whose track record is so unpopular.

It’s difficult to find many positive let alone effusive comments on Harris’s performance on social media. It’s unlikely she’ll give another Fox interview before November 5, but she deserves credit for at least agreeing to it. And it would be great to see Trump in an interview on MSNBC, but given he believes he’s ahead, that’s unlikely.