For more than half a century, candidates from both major parties have sat down with 60 Minutes in the weeks before the presidential election. On Monday, CBS aired an interview with only one candidate — an interview that was repeatedly evasive and largely vague.
Ultimately, only Vice President Kamala Harris sat for the 60 Minutes interview. After agreeing to sit down, Donald Trump apparently backed out over concerns that CBS would fact-check him. (CBS thoroughly called out Trump and his campaign for their “shifting explanations” about why he couldn’t participate.)
But Harris wasn’t exactly an open book. Instead, she frequently answered the question she wished she were asked rather than the one CBS journalist Bill Whitaker did ask.
When Whitaker asked if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was acting as a close ally, Harris reframed the question. “With all due respect,” she said, “the better question is ‘Do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people?’”
“And the answer to that question is yes,” she said.
When Whitaker asked Harris how she would pay for an economic plan that nonpartisan analysts predict would add $3 trillion to the national debt, Harris noted that other economists had reviewed her plan and determined that hers would strengthen the economy. “His would weaken it,” she said.
And when Whitaker interjected to press Harris that she wasn’t answering his question — “pardon me, Madame Vice President, the question was, ‘How are you going to pay for it?’” — Harris was light on details.
She said she was going to make sure that “the richest among us, who can afford it, pay their fair share in taxes.”
Whitaker tried to get more details. He insisted on living in “the real world,” where there’s a Congress resistant to raising taxes on any individual. But Harris contested that, “when you talk quietly with a lot of folks in Congress,” there are lawmakers who understand that the Trump tax cuts “blew up our federal deficit.”
“None of us, and certainly I cannot, afford to be myopic in terms of how I think about strengthening America’s economy,” Harris said.
Time and again, Harris was careful not to say much during her CBS interview. But she did manage to make news on a few topics.
Perhaps her most decisive answer was on the war in Ukraine, where she said she wouldn’t meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin without Ukraine’s cooperation. (She was less definitive about Ukraine joining NATO. Harris said that was an issue “if and when it arrives at that point.”)
Harris also navigated a question about negative views on the economy, noting low unemployment and an economy that is “thriving by all macroeconomic measures.” But she also noted that part of the negative views were due to high prices and that part of her economic plan is to bring down costs on groceries.
After recently disclosing that she owns a gun, Harris specified that she has a Glock and “of course” had fired it. At a shooting range, apparently.
Another notable moment came during Whitaker’s conversation with vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. Whitaker asked about disagreements between Harris and Walz since the Minnesota governor had joined the ticket. Walz admitted — with a laugh — that the vice president had encouraged him to “be a little more careful on how you say things.”
It may have been prescient advice, as Walz continues to face criticism for potentially misrepresenting details about his own life, such as his military record and his presence in Tiananmen Square during the 1989 protests and ensuing massacre.
(Walz continued to dismiss the concerns, saying he was sometimes “a knucklehead.” And when Whitaker pressed him that some of these misrepresentations were “more than just being a knucklehead,” Walz said he thought people know who he is and could tell the difference between him getting a date wrong and “a pathological liar like Donald Trump.”)
But even as Harris and Walz tried to dodge a number of questions, they both managed to say infinitely more to CBS than Trump.
Trump backed out of the 60 Minutes interview a week ago, according to CBS. Even though CBS cited a number of interactions with Trump’s chief spokesperson, Steven Cheung, as they sought to schedule the interview, Cheung called the report “fake news,” claiming that the Trump campaign had never “scheduled or locked in” any interview.
Whitaker asked Harris to comment on Trump’s renege. Harris, in a move she pulled most recently at the debate, pointed to his campaign events.
“If he is not gonna give your viewers the ability to have a meaningful, thoughtful conversation, question and answer with you, then watch his rallies,” she said. “You’re gonna hear conversations that are about himself and all of his personal grievances. And what you will not hear is anything about you, the listener.”
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Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.