The border wall is just the latest example of Kamala Harris moving away from past positions, and her beliefs seem about as deeply held as what polls suggest she should support.
Trump doubts ABC presidential debate
Donald Trump is resisting the agreed presidential debate on ABC because Kamala Harris has a personal friendship with a manager at the station.
I thought I was reading a headline from The Babylon Bee when I read on Tuesday that Vice President Kamala Harris now wants to build the border wall.
But it was not satire.
Rather, the Democratic presidential candidate has decided that she supports one of former President Donald Trump’s central ideas – one that is despised by progressives.
Here’s how the left-leaning news magazine Axios described Harris’ newfound desire to build the wall: “It’s the latest example of Harris moving away from her previous liberal positions, such as supporting Medicare for All and banning fracking – proposals that her advisers say she now opposes.”
We have not received any explanations either, as Harris has not given a single interview or press conference since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race last month.
Finally, the campaign has agreed to an interview with CNN on Thursday, but Harris won’t be the only one there. Her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will be there too. This makes it seem like Harris can’t handle an interview on her own and feels like a cop-out.
No, there, there: We need more than just vibrations to know what Kamala Harris is all about
Just scheduling this one interview has caused a lot of anxiety for Harris’ campaign. I suspect that much of that anxiety has to do with Harris not having a coherent agenda for her presidency. (The rest of the anxiety has to do with Harris’ general incompetence on camera when she doesn’t have a teleprompter.)
From “un-American” to “full steam ahead”
Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane. In 2019, when Harris was running in the Democratic presidential primary, the U.S. Senator from California had some thoughts on the border wall.
Harris called the wall Trump’s “medieval vanity project” and “un-American” in a 2018 social media post. In 2020, she also posted: “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and will not make us safer.”
Seems to be pretty straightforward.
In addition, during her first presidential run, Harris publicly stated that she would decriminalize illegal border crossings and offer health insurance to illegal immigrants under her Medicare-for-all plan. She also said she would not deport illegal immigrants unless they had done something else wrong.
Fast forward to today.
The immigration issue has become one of the most important issues for voters – not least because the Biden-Harris administration has seen chaos at the southern border and a record number of illegal border crossings.
Although Biden appointed Harris border czar in 2021, she failed to prevent illegal immigration across the border.
You can’t say that: This is no laughing matter. Humorless whiners on the left want to silence your “offensive” views.
So she knows she has weaknesses on this issue, and now her campaign team is trying to portray Harris as a tough border guard.
But all this is hard to believe when you look at her record over the last four years and her statements.
Last week, Harris promised at the Democratic National Convention to sign a bipartisan Senate bill that would provide hundreds of millions of dollars for border wall construction, and she released a campaign ad that features the wall several times.
I think that settles the matter.
Harris can’t decide on anything
The border wall is just the latest example of Harris moving away from past positions, and her beliefs seem about as deeply entrenched as what polls suggest she should support.
Her few concrete policy ideas since becoming the Democratic nominee – including price controls on food – are so terrible that Harris’s Democratic colleagues downplay the idea by saying price controls would never pass Congress.
And the wall isn’t the only argument Harris stole from Trump. Earlier this month, she promised not to tax tips. The problem is, Trump had proposed the idea weeks earlier.
Falsification of the facts: From artificial insemination to his military service, Walz is quite the fabulist. Can’t we know the truth?
That means one of Harris’ limited proposals is unlikely to be implemented, and two are copied from Trump, whom Democrats portray as the archenemy of democracy.
The general lack of clarity about what Harris actually believes in and supports has led to confusion during the campaign about how best to bring her running mate Walz into her campaign.
As Politico reports, “the danger of sending him on big solo interviews is that he may not know exactly where Harris stands on every issue.”
Boy, I wonder why.
I have a question for Harris: “Who are you?”
I would honestly like to know.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist for USA TODAY. Reach her at [email protected] or on X, formerly Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques
