Before Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ first sit-down interview aired on Thursday evening, Donald Trump was already attacking it.
“She was sitting behind that desk, this massive desk, and she didn’t look like a leader today,” Trump said at an event in La Crosse, Wisconsin, roughly half an hour before the interview aired. “I’ll be honest. I don’t see her negotiating with President Xi [Jinping] of China. I don’t see her with [North Korean dictator] Kim Jong-un, like we did with Kim Jong-un.”
There was no massive desk. Harris and running mate Tim Walz conducted the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash while seated at a small table at a cafe in Savannah, Georgia. But since Trump was providing this bit of unadorned misogyny before the interview ran, his imagination apparently placed Harris behind something more substantial—something like the Resolute desk.
Trump’s attack on Harris’ appearance during the interview was a good signal of where Republicans went in their responses Thursday evening: prepackaged, disconnected from the truth, and weak.
Throughout her interview, Harris did well. She did well even though the media had raised the interview to the level of a do-or-die test. She did well even though Bash seemed to mistake repeating Republican talking points for conducting journalism.
The highlight of the evening was when Harris refused to engage with Trump’s racist claim that she “turn[ed] Black” for political gain.
BASH: What I want to ask you about is what [Trump] said last month. He suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity.
HARRIS: Yeah.
BASH: Any—
HARRIS: Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please. (LAUGH)
BASH: That’s it?
HARRIS: That’s it.
That Harris refused to roll in the mud Trump created seemed to throw Bash off stride, but that was the theme of the evening. Harris was there to give calm, substantive answers. Too bad Bash came so ill-equipped with substantive questions.
As the Associated Press reports, Harris’ first big interview since becoming the Democratic nominee “was notable mostly in how routine it seemed.” Harris’ responses were measured and careful. She didn’t fumble or make noteworthy mistakes. She did not talk about sharks, batteries, or fictional serial killers—Trump’s recent preoccupations.
The fact-checkers could take it easy. And for those who were looking at the interview more interested in heat than light, they will have it much harder.
When The New York Times’ “7 Takeaways From Harris’s First Major Interview” include that Harris “struggles to be punchy off the cuff,” Walz “is good at sitting and smiling,” and that Bash was hampered because the small table made it hard for her to be tough on Harris, you could feel the outlet’s disappointment.
For The New York Times and many other traditional outlets, any interview with Trump is filtered to report the few statements that might be true or at least coherent. When talking about anyone else, those outlets filter for anything that might be seen as a lie or at least an error.
Harris gave them little to talk about.
The same was true of Republicans. Despite his eagerness to get in a cheap shot before airtime, Trump was generally silent during and after it aired. His biggest complaint on social media wasn’t anything Harris said; it was what she didn’t say.
That response lined up with another clearly prepackaged statement from Trump’s campaign, which contained a long list of “what Kamala Harris didn’t talk about with CNN.”
Criticizing Harris for failing to provide answers to questions that weren’t asked may not be the silliest response to an interview in history. But it’s up there.
The one line from the interview that Republicans repeated on Thursday evening and are still spewing across Fox News and other right-wing outlets on Friday was Harris simply saying “my values have not changed.” Republicans are slotting that statement into another prewritten narrative that Trump’s campaign has been selling: Harris as a “flip-flopper.” So they’re taking the “values” line and claiming Harris is saying she still holds every policy position she has ever held—or has ever been claimed to hold—all at once. She’s a radical who wants to stop all fracking! And also a flip-flopper who changed her position on fracking!
However, that’s the opposite of what Harris said. Her full sentence was “I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed.” She clearly used the “values” phrase to explain that while some of her positions on issues like fracking may have shifted as she gathered more information, her underlying beliefs have not. That’s not flip-flopping. It’s called learning.
Regardless of the truth, expect those two contradictory attack lines—Harris is a flip-flopper but also a radical who’s never changed her policy positions—to be the primary Republican talking points coming out of this interview. And of course, media outlets are eager to assist.
What Harris delivered on Thursday night was a solid, ordinary performance. Which is exactly the note she and her campaign wanted to hit. She wasn’t swinging for the moon. She wasn’t trying to reforge her image in half an hour.
She was doing what she did at the Democratic National Convention: showing that she represents normality in the face of over eight years of Trump’s assault on basic norms and human decency.
Because those guys? They’re just weird.
