Vice President Kamala Harris will have a “fine” debate performance on Tuesday, Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita told House Republicans on a phone call Friday, Axios reported.
The Trump team does not expect Harris’s debate performance to be disastrous for the Democrat party, like President Joe Biden’s performance this summer, which ultimately caused Democrats to force him to step aside.
Harris has been focusing on debate prep this week, media reports indicate, though some reports suggest it is not going as well as the Harris campaign would hope.
Harris will try to avoid being shellacked again after the 2020 cycle when then-Democrat Rep. Tulsi Gabbard held Harris accountable for her radical-left record. Gabbard’s attack on Harris during the debate was deadly. Harris was the first candidate to drop out of the race.
“We had not done a good job having her prepared to take that punch,” one person who worked with Harris in 2019 told NOTUS this week. “Tulsi’s effectiveness in 2019 was a lack of preparation on our side. … I think there are very few new blind spots now.”
With only 60 days left until the presidential election, time is running out for voters to learn about Harris’s ambiguous plans to fix the nation’s decline under the Biden-Harris administration.
She has only sat for one prerecorded interview since joining the race seven weeks ago on July 21, 2024. In those seven weeks, Harris allegedly changed her view, outright flip-flopped, or has an unknown position in nine areas.
Those topics include:
- Banning plastic straws (Flip-flopped)
- A mandate for only producing electric and hydrogen vehicles by 2035 (Unknown)
- Banning fracking (Flip-flopped)
- Gun confiscation through a buyback program (Allegedly no longer supports via anonymous campaign spokesperson)
- Decriminalizing illegally crossing the southern border (Allegedly no longer supports via anonymous campaign spokesperson)
- Reparations (Unknown)
- Building a border wall (Allegedly no longer supports via anonymous campaign spokesperson)
- A federal jobs guarantee (Allegedly no longer supports via anonymous campaign spokesperson)
- Medicare for All (Flip-flopped)
Trump might be able to exploit Harris’s flip-flops and unknown positions by casting her as an empty political shell with intentions to do or say whatever is needed to get elected.
Harris’s candidacy faces a catch-22. Harris cannot campaign on policies to fix crime, inflation, and border security without undermining the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, but she must tout the administration’s policies to validate her record and candidacy.
CNN’s Dana Bash exposed Harris’s conundrum on the topic of the economy during her first pre-taped interview in August.
Harris owned the Biden-Harris administration’s economic record while she simultaneously blamed Trump for it. The contradiction was stark, producing an outcome that forced Harris to tout her administration’s policies to validate her candidacy all while she undermined her record and her candidacy.
RELATED — Josh Shapiro: Harris Should Not ‘Underestimate’ Trump; ‘He Is a Skilled Debater’
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.