Kamala Harris’ interview with the National Association of Black Journalists may not have been as bombastic as Donald Trump’s interview with the group seven weeks ago, but Harris still found ways to make major news on Tuesday — and take plenty of shots at her opponent.
In a live interview with three NABJ reporters from different outlets, the vice president spent more than five minutes calling out Trump for his false comments about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.
“It’s a crying shame,” she said, noting there have been at least 33 bomb scares in Springfield since the debate last week when Trump baselessly claimed that migrants were abducting and eating pets.
She reiterated her support for a two-state solution and a cease-fire deal in Gaza — against the wishes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and said she supported pausing the transfer of certain bombs to Israel.
“One of the things that we have done that I am entirely supportive of is the pause that we put on the 2,000-pound bombs,” Harris said. “And so there is some leverage that we have had and used, but ultimately, the thing that is going to unlock everything else in that region is getting this deal done.”
She even used the Springfield situation to needle the former president while discussing the apparent assassination attempt against Trump over the weekend and whether she felt safe with her Secret Service protection.
“I do,” she said. “But you can go back to Ohio; not everybody has Secret Service.”
She continued that there were far too many people in America who are not feeling safe right now because of Trump’s comments vilifying immigrants in Springfield.
Above all else, however, Harris tried to contrast herself with Trump. She talked about needing to speak the truth on the generational impact of slavery. She talked about the need for an assault weapons ban. And she talked about how she would sign Roe v. Wade protections into law.
But she didn’t take for granted that Black Americans would vote for her.
“I’m working to earn their vote,” Harris said. “Not assuming I’m going to have it because I’m Black.”
As Harris fights for the presidency, her support among Black Americans has become a critical point. While Black voters — as they usually do — are overwhelmingly supporting the Democratic candidate, there are plenty of Black men this cycle who are warming to Trump. Harris, who has mostly avoided sit-down interviews with the press, agreed to the NABJ panel partially because she needs to court these voters.
But it also was an important opportunity to attack Trump.
Her Springfield comments were particularly pointed, especially her decision to connect another assassination attempt to Trump’s own rhetoric. The former president told Fox News on Monday that Harris’ “rhetoric” was causing him to be shot at, though Trump couldn’t help but say Joe Biden and Harris were trying to “destroy our country.”
“It is called the enemy from within,” Trump said. “They are the real threat.”
Harris, however, didn’t back down from casting Trump’s own words as reckless, suggesting he was to blame for a school of young children — on picture day — having to evacuate because of threats associated with Trump’s claims about Haitian migrants.
“When you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand, at a very deep level, how much your words have meaning,” Harris said.
She contrasted Trump’s statements about law enforcement with the reality that law enforcement resources are being wasted on addressing threats to the Springfield community. And she said he was “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old.”
She then connected Trump’s words with his past actions — like not renting to Black people as a landlord and taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times to call for the death penalty against five Black and Latino teenagers who turned out to be innocent — and she argued that Americans see through what Trump is doing.
“I know that people are deeply troubled by what is happening to that community in Springfield, Ohio. And it’s gotta stop,” Harris said. “And we’ve gotta say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the President of the United States of America, engaging with that hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country.”
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Ryan Hernández is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.