In all likelihood, 99 percent of the Fox News faithful who saw Kamala Harris last night came away convinced anew that she’s awful. But her decision to visit the notorious propaganda outlet had very little downside. If she managed to sway a percent or two, that could help her in a close election.
What she did demonstrate – for the small share of Fox viewers with open minds – is that she is the precise opposite of how Trump routinely depicts her. He says she’s dumb, retarded, cognitively impaired, and incapable of stringing sentences together. Perhaps it shocked some viewers to discover that none of those slurs are true. Perhaps some viewers will give her points for sitting in the lion’s den and showing that she’s tough and articulate. Perhaps some female viewers noticed that she refused to abide Bret Baier’s constant interruptions, the first of which came 20 seconds into the interview.
But the most galvanizing moment came late in the half hour, when Harris denounced Trump for railing the other day about unleashing the U.S. military against “the enemy within.” Baier was ready for that – or so he thought. He teed up a video clip that sought to whitewash Trump’s comments; earlier Wednesday, Trump had insisted, “I’m not threatening anybody.” That lie was featured in the clip.
Well. What else could we expect from a fake news network that was compelled to shell out $787 million in a court settlement after it was outed for amplifying Trump’s relentless lies about the 2020 election?
It was no surprise that the clip Baier aired was deftly edited to omit all of Trump’s rants about the so-called enemies within – the “sick” and the “evil” and the “dangerous” and the “Marxists” and the “communists,” and “the Pelosis” (one of which was attacked by a hammer-wielding MAGAt). Harris promptly exposed that classic Fox trickery by slapping Baier silly:
“Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within’ that he has repeated when he’s speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed. Here’s the bottom line, he has repeated that many times. You and I both know that he’s talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.
“This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake, which is why you have someone like the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying what Mark Milley has said, about Donald Trump being a threat to the United States of America.”
Baier was facing the camera, so it was impossible to see the tire tracks on his back.
(Another great moment: When Baier pointed out that roughly half the voters seem likely to support Trump, he asked Harris whether she thought they were “stupid.” That was an obvious Baier trap, inviting her to utter a basket-of-deplorables remark a la Hillary. But she was too smart to take the bait: “I would never say that about the American people!”)
Are at least a small percentage of Fox viewers willing to abide a strong woman who refuses to kowtow? We’ll see about that. But her fervor likely did her no harm – and it’ll arguably play better, in the social media clips, than Trump’s response last night, during a Florida event, to a question about whether he still thinks climate change is a hoax. He answered by boasting about his Doral golf course:
“I get awards, environmental awards for the way I built it for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water, I mean many different, but I’ve had many awards over the years for environmental, the way I’ve built because you know about building that’s what you do…The water is coming up an eighth of an inch over 300 years, the ocean is gonna rise and you know nobody knows if it’s true or not but they’re worried about the ocean rising an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch in 300 years.”
Harris was willing to do Fox News, so perhaps Trump would be just as willing to explain his climate change comment in a sitdown with MSNBC?
Yeah, sure. He’ll do it right after he releases his medical records.