Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign reportedly “declined requests for comment” about when Harris will stop declining the media’s requests for comment.
“The Harris campaign has declined requests for comment about when Harris plans to stop shunning media availability,” the Daily Beast reported on Thursday.
The outlet pointed out that reporters “have not been given a chance” to ask the vice president “questions in an unscripted setting,” noting that Harris has “largely avoided the press since her damaging interview” on NBC’s Nightly News in June 2021, when she gave a bizarre answer to a question about her failure to visit the U.S. southern border.
“Do you have any plans to visit the border?” NBC’s Lester Holt asked, to which an apparently struggling Harris replied, “At some point, you know, we are going to the border, we’ve been to the border. So, this whole, this whole, this whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.”
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After that, Holt said to Harris, point-blank, “You haven’t been to the border,” to which the vice president bizarrely replied, “And I haven’t been to Europe.”
Since then, Harris’s media appearances seem to have been mostly pre-recorded — something her opponent’s campaign has noticed.
During a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on Thursday, former President Donald Trump said Harris is “not doing any news conferences, you know why? Because she can’t do a news conference.”
“She doesn’t know how to do a news conference,” Trump said. “She’s not smart enough to do a news conference. And I’m sorry, we need smart people to lead this country.”
On Wednesday, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), approached reporters standing outside Harris’s Air Force Two aircraft on a Wisconsin runway, saying, “I figured I’d come by” because the media “might get lonely” standing by themselves with nobody to talk to.
“I thought you guys might get lonely, because the vice president doesn’t answer questions from reporters, and hasn’t for seventeen days,” Vance told reporters.
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According to Daily Beast, journalists “had been willing to give Harris a pass for ignoring their requests for interviews,” as they assumed her experience on the campaign trail was probably “hectic” in the wake of President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.
Others, however, might argue these “hectic” events Harris is allegedly experiencing on the campaign trail cannot possibly be as chaotic as President Trump’s campaign experience, which has included facing unprecedented amounts of lawfare, being threatened with Secret Service removal, and surviving an assassination attempt.
Nonetheless, political reporters are now “starting to agree that the Trump campaign has a point” about Harris’s avoidance of the media, Daily Beast acknowledged.
“Starting right now, every day she’s not talking to the media is political malpractice — it’s not good for democracy,” Ron Fournier, veteran ex-White House correspondent for Associated Press, said.
New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen, meanwhile, said on Wednesday that Harris’s failure to “sit for big interviews and routinely answer on the record questions from reporters on the [campaign] trail” is “disappointing.”
While it may be unheard of for a soon-to-be nominee of one of the two major U.S. political parties to avoid giving unscripted interviews or press conferences, several unprecedented events have transpired so far this election year.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.