Washington, Aug 29: US Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday will face her first major test after securing the Democratic party’s nomination for president – an interview.
Harris will sit down with her running mate Tim Walz, the Governor of Minnesota, for an interview with CNN anchor Dana Bash.
This will be Harris’s first major media interview as she has faced growing calls from both Republicans – including her rival for the White House Donald Trump and his running mate Senator J.D. Vance – and Democrats to answer questions in an unscripted interaction with reporters.
Apart from a few questions from reporters of the pool travelling with her, she has not addressed a news conference either. The interview will be her first big step. The next will be the September 10 debate with Trump.
Trump and Vance have repeatedly challenged her in interviews and news conferences in the hope of getting a stumble out of her or a misstep that will stop or pause her momentum, which has turned the race from the time President Joe Biden dropped out and Harris was elevated to the top of the Democratic ticket. Harris has done very few media interviews as Vice-President and a disastrous interview in 2021 continues to be used to define her.
The NBC interviewer had asked if she had plans to visit the border after being tasked by Biden to tackle the problem of immigration at its roots.
“At some point… We are going to the border. We’ve been to the border … This whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border,” she said. The interviewer then pushed back: “You haven’t been to the border” and she responded: “And I haven’t been to Europe either.”
“And I mean, I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. I’m not discounting the importance of the border,” she added.
Even after agreeing to the CNN interview, Harris is facing criticism for not doing it solo. “Last night, CNN announced that Kamala has mustered up the courage to sit for a ‘joint’ interview – after 39 days of hiding out from reporters,” the Trump War Room account had written on X after the announcement of the interview. (IANS)
Trump’s battleground campaigning increases
Donald Trump is scheduled to campaign Thursday in Michigan and Wisconsin as the former president ramps up battleground state travel heading into the traditional Labor Day turn toward the fall election.
Trump’s intense focus on recapturing states he won in 2016 but lost narrowly in 2020 continues with stops in the middle of Michigan and western Wisconsin.
Trump’s day starts with an afternoon rally in Potterville, Michigan, near the state capital of Lansing. Trump won Eaton County, where part of Lansing is located, in both 2016 and 2020, but by a smaller margin the second time.
It will be his third visit to the state in the past nine days and second this week after a speech to the National Guard Association in Detroit on Monday.
Later, he will visit La Crosse, Wisconsin, for a town hall moderated by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who endorsed him in Detroit. It will be Trump’s first visit to Wisconsin since the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which ended three days before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and made way for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Along with Pennsylvania, which Trump will visit on Friday, these three Midwestern states make up a northern industrial bloc Democrats carried for two decades before Trump won them in 2016. Biden recaptured them on his way to the White House in 2020. (Agencies)