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On Wednesday, Kamala Harris sat down with Fox News personality Bret Baier for an interview. When it comes to watching the appearance, one of us lives in the wrong time zone and part of the world and the other was occupied with professional obligations. But one of us has definitely watched it now, and here come some thoughts.
To start, let's note that the Harris interview was the star attraction of the evening, but it actually has two Trump counterpoints. The first is a Fox News-broadcast, Harris Faulkner-hosted town hall with the former president. That aired a few hours before the interview with the Vice President. The second is a Univision-broadcast, Enrique Acevedo-hosted town hall with Trump. That one aired at the same time as the Harris interview. So, you've got one on the same network, and one at the same time.
We're actually going to start with the Trump event on Fox News. Not only did it come first, chronologically, but it also sets the stage for the Harris event in a couple of important ways. We would provide you a link to watch, if you wished to do so, but Fox News did not make one available. They want to sell memberships to their premium service, and so it's locked behind a paywall.
The truth of the matter—and surely you knew this—is that you aren't missing anything by not seeing it. This is Fox News, which is not a serious journalistic entity. The event, which featured not only a female host, but also an all-female audience, was just a campaign commercial that allowed Trump to deliver his spin and/or his non-answers on "women's issues." Not only did Faulkner toss him an endless supply of softballs, but for the audience, the network recruited Trump supporters. Not only did Fox News "forget" to mention this, but they even edited out portions that might have tipped their hand. For example, one woman prefaced her question with "I proudly cast my vote for you today. I hope they count it." That was cut. At another point, the crowd broke into a chant of "Trump, Trump!" That was cut, too. We do not believe that this kind of political theater, performed for an adoring audience (both in the room, and watching at home), can possibly have any impact.
Moving on to the Kamala Harris interview, we were very interested when we heard that Bret Baier drew the assignment. Some commenters described him as a "journalist," and Harris did the same, as a courtesy, during the interview. Please be clear, he is no journalist. He is a partisan, and one who works for a partisan outlet, and knows well what side his bread is buttered on. Speaking in terms of big names, Fox News lost its last journalist when Chris Wallace left. Baier only looks like a journalist (sorta) when he stands next to the aforementioned Faulkner, or Sean Hannity, or Laura Ingraham.
That said, Baier knew full well that this interview was going to get a lot of attention, and was going to be watched by a lot of people who are not Fox News regulars. So, it was at least possible he was going to be on his best behavior, and was going to play it somewhat down the middle. If you wish to watch for yourself, before we tell you which Bret Baier showed up, here it is:
And now the answer. From the start, it was clear that Baier's intent was to act as a surrogate for the Trump campaign, and that Fox News was going to do everything possible to help him. Did he ask a few reasonable questions? Sure. But most of them were gotchas meant to get the Trump campaign's messaging out there.
Heck, even before the actual interview aired, Baier made clear where he was coming from. Keep in mind that the segment was pre-taped (by about an hour), and then included as part of Baier's show. By way of introduction, he carped about Harris showing up 15 minutes late, and suggested that she was "icing the kicker." For those unfamiliar, that's a football strategy wherein the defensive team calls a time out, or otherwise delays the kicking of a field goal/extra point, in hopes of messing with the other team's kicker's mental state. In other words, Baier very clearly sees himself as being on "one team" while Harris is on "the other team."
That Baier had no interest in being "fair and balanced" was also evident from the very moment the interview began. Consider his first question: "How many illegal immigrants would you estimate your administration has released into the country over the last 3½ years?" Not only is that phrasing incredibly leading, it is also presented without context. It's reminiscent of the old no-good-answer Doonesbury question: "Have you stopped beating your wife?" If you say "yes," you concede you were once an abuser. If you say "no," presumably because you never started, you seem to be an ongoing abuser.
And it actually gets worse. Because Baier viewed himself as more an adversary who was debating Harris, rather than a reporter who was interviewing her, he constantly interrupted her. Over the course of 26 minutes, he must have interrupted at least a dozen times, and probably more like 20. Even if you don't want to watch the whole thing, we highly recommend you click on the link or the embedded video above, and just watch the first 90 seconds. That will give you a very full sense of how the entire interview went. You can judge for yourself if you agree with our take on the tone and tenor.
We know, of course, that "Fox News is very biased" is basically dog-bites-man-type news. But even if you know that, it's really remarkable how shameless they are, even when they know that people who are not Fox News cultists are watching. Not only did Baier ask mostly loaded questions, but the choice of topics might as well have been the work of the Trump campaign (and, for all we know, WAS the work of the Trump campaign). Something close to half of the appearance was spent on immigration and the border. Another big chunk was spent on Harris' support/tolerance for gender-reassignment surgery for prisoners. There was also time for questions about Joe Biden's mental acuity. By contrast, zero time was spent on abortion, the environment, or healthcare. Are those issues not important to voters? Or maybe are they the issues on which Harris is pretty strong, and Trump is pretty weak? We report, you decide.
Whoever was doing the production for Fox News also got in on the "fun." The chyrons that ran underneath the interview often contained editorializing. Here's an example, from about halfway through:
If you actually listen to that part, that's not a fair characterization of what she said (when she wasn't being interrupted by Baier).
The moment that really crystallizes everything we've been saying here came just over halfway through. Baier decided to travel down an odd and disingenuous logical path, arguing that if nearly 50% of the country supports Trump, he must be pretty good. Harris pushed back at that, talking about how his "enemy within" rhetoric is exhausting and divisive. Baier quickly pounced, and played a clip of Trump, from the Fox News town hall earlier in the day, that ostensibly addressed that criticism. You can see that segment here:
What you don't know, unless you happened to watch the earlier event, is that Baier/the producers carefully edited the clip. Just moments before the portion shown during the Harris interview, Trump had been repeating, verbatim, the "enemy within" stuff. The cherry-picking was so egregious that yesterday (that is, about 12 hours after the interview aired), Baier conceded that the "wrong clip" had been played. That is some very pleasant spin, we suppose, but Baier gave no indication during the interview itself that the wrong clip had been played, nor did he say anything during his broadcast an hour later. That means he either didn't know it was the wrong clip (which is bad) or he knew full well and somehow didn't expect to get caught (which is worse). For our part, we favor the second explanation, since it is a very convenient "error" to edit the clip to omit, by mere seconds, the moment that makes Trump look bad and Harris look correct.
Remarkably—given that Harris had been on the campaign trail all day, and that the town hall aired just hours before her sit-down with Baier—she was somehow ready for the bait-and-switch. She said, correctly, that the clip was not the relevant one, and that Trump HAD repeated the "enemy within" remarks during his Fox News appearance. She also took Baier to task—in a professional manner, but it was a spanking nonetheless.
That leads us to the actual takeaway from the interview (besides "Once again, Fox News proves they are not journalists"). Harris dealt with a little over 25 minutes of outright hostility, and she remained calm and collected and handled everything very well. While she certainly pushed back at Baier, she did not lose her temper, she did not struggle to answer the gotchas (even if she sometimes dodged the question), and in general she commanded the room. It is odd to think that an interview would have a winner and a loser, but—and we will die on this hill—Harris was the winner, and Baier was the loser, and it wasn't close.
During the interview—and, again, this speaks to Baier not doing the job he claimed to be doing—we did not learn one thing, policy-wise, that we did not already know. What we did see, however, was that when and if Harris is staring across the table at a Vladimir Putin or a Xi Jingping, she's up to the challenge. We could also see the appearance engendering (no pun intended) some sympathy from women viewers who are on the fence. If there is a woman above the age of 15 that has not had, too many times to count, the experience of a man presuming to interrupt and talk over her, we have not met them.
And finally, there is Trump's Univision town hall. If you want to watch, here it is:
At the very start, they used a picture of UCLA to represent "education." Undoubtedly, Bruins around the world are thrilled to be associated with Trump's policies in that area.
The advantage that town halls have over debates is that the questions are ostensibly being asked by actual voters, and so aren't necessarily the usual debate-host palaver. And indeed, the folks who asked questions during the event asked some really good ones. The disadvantage to town halls is that they suffer from a particularly acute version of the "no pushback" problem. The candidate on stage can say anything they want, and if the question did not get answered, then... oh, well.
Here is an example of both of these things. The questioners all posed their inquiries in Spanish, and were all clearly native speakers of the language. That means that at least some of them are immigrants of recent vintage, perhaps even undocumented immigrants. These would be the same people that Trump villainizes on a daily basis, and promises to expel from the country if he becomes president again. The second question of the evening came from a farmer named Jorge Velasquez, and he asked one of the (several) obvious questions:
Good evening, President Trump. For many years, I have worked with these hands, hunched over picking strawberries and cutting broccoli. This tough job is mainly done by undocumented people. If you deport to [sic] these people, who would do that job and what price would we pay for food?
Here was Trump's rambling answer:
So the problem we have is we had people coming in under my administration, and they were coming in legally. They were coming in through a system that we had, which was great, because I'm the best thing that ever happened to farmers, you know that. I was great.
Farmers are doing very badly right now, very, very badly, under this administration. Under my administration, farmers did very well. We have to have a lot of people come into our country. We just want them to come in legally through a system, because they've released hundreds of thousands of people that are murderers, drug dealers, terrorists. They're coming in totally... Nobody knows who they are, where they come from, and the people that are most against it are the Hispanic people. They are totally against it, what's happened.
The other thing I can say is that a lot of the jobs that you have and that other people have are being taken by these people that are coming in, and the African American population and the Hispanic population in particular are losing jobs now because millions of people are coming in.
So they're coming in, but they're also coming in largely, and tremendous numbers coming in out of mental institutions. They're emptying out mental institutions. They're emptying out insane asylums. That's a step above a mental institution. Worse, bigger, bigger problems, bigger problem people. They're emptying out jails. The jails are being led into our country from Venezuela. But not just South America, from all over the world they're being led in, from jails, from... Nobody's ever seen anything like it. The jail population throughout the world has come way down, and it's all coming into the United States of America.
So we want workers and we want them to come in, but they have to come in legally. They have to love our country. They have to love you, love our people. The problem with this administration is they've totally lost control. It's the worst president and the worst vice president that we've ever had in this country, what they have done to our country in terms of hurting it.
We will make four observations: (1) It's a semi-word salad, (2) it's full of lies, (3) it misrepresents Trump's actual position, and (4) he doesn't come close to answering the question. All of this is par for the course.
In other words, like the Fox News event earlier in the day, the Univision town hall was pretty much useless. Trump was able to deliver his talking points, and that was pretty much that. And if you don't believe us, well, the former president of Univision, Joaquin Blaya, said the same thing, describing the event as a "propaganda project" and an "infomercial."
We will note that Trump seemed more mentally sharp, and generally more coherent, than during his Bloomberg interview or during the Donald Trump Autumn Dance Party earlier this week. Maybe he does better when he doesn't feel defensive. Maybe it has to do with sleep, or medication, or something else. Maybe it just depends on the day. In any event, while his answers were unsubstantive, he did work the crowd very effectively, and even managed to deliver a couple of lines that were joke-adjacent, and got a decent laugh from the audience.
That said, Trump's usual braggadocio was on display, and his very first remark was about how great his numbers are, and how he always sets records. That definitely was not true on Wednesday. Harris' appearance on Fox News drew 8.5 million viewers, which is a lot for cable news, and more than tripled the usual 2.5 million who tune in to see Baier. Meanwhile, Trump's Fox News hit drew 3 million, while his Univision appearance drew less than a million. So, in the only metric he really cares about, he lost bigly. (Z)