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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Harris defends ‘scripted’ style and agrees Trump is ‘about
fascism’ in wide-ranging interview with Charlamagne tha God
By Gregory Krieg and Ebony Davis, CNN
Updated:
7:50 AM EDT, Wed October 16, 2024
Source: CNN
Vice President brushed off criticism that she comes across as “very
scripted” – wearing her cautious style as a badge of honor –
during a wide-ranging interview Tuesday in Detroit with radio host
Charlamagne Tha God.
“That would be called discipline,” Harris said, arguing that
“there are certain things that must be repeated to ensure that I have
everyone know what I stand for.”
On a , where she is critical to her coalition, Harris pushed back
repeatedly against suggestions she was disconnected from the Black
community and made a vigorous case against her rival, former , saying
his campaign feeds on fear and agreeing with the radio host that it is
“about fascism.”
“By voting in this election, you have two choices, or you don’t
vote, but you have two choices if you do and it’s two very different
visions for our nation,” Harris said, warning as she often does that
another Trump presidency would “take us backward.”
But Charlamagne Tha God, co-host of “The Breakfast Club” radio
show, pushed the vice president to go further.
“The other is about fascism,” he said. “Why can’t we just say
it?”
“Yes, we can say that,” Harris said.
In the hourlong, town hall-style interview, Harris called the coming
election a “a margin-of-error race” and outlined her new
proposals aimed at appealing to Black men, while also discussing her
economic agenda, health care proposals and plans to continue pushing
the , an anti-police brutality bill that has failed in Congress.
Harris defended her record as San Francisco district attorney,
describing herself as “one of the most progressive prosecutors” on
marijuana cases. If elected, Harris said, she would push for federal
decriminalization.
Asked about how she would engage with the Black community, and the
Black church specifically, Harris said that she had “grown up” in
the church and that any suggestion otherwise was slander by the
“Trump team.”
“They are full of mis- and disinformation, because they are trying to
disconnect me from the people I have worked with and that I am from,”
said Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India.
“Because otherwise they have nothing to run on.”
Harris also slammed Trump over his vow at a rally last week in Aurora,
Colorado, to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expedite the
removal of undocumented gang members.
“He is running fulltime on a campaign that is about instilling fear,
not about hope, not about optimism, not about the future, but about
fear,” Harris said.
A night earlier, on the trail in Pennsylvania, she took the unusual
step of playing for the audience a collection of clips showing Trump
calling his political opponents the “enemy within” – describing
the video as evidence that the former president is “increasingly
unstable and unhinged.”
In her interview Tuesday, Harris pointed to Trump’s lies about the
Haitian immigrant population in Springfield, Ohio, which set off a
furor that caused local officials to cancel a cultural diversity
celebration and led the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, to call in
state police to protect school students.
“Look what he did in saying that those legal immigrants in
Springfield, Ohio were eating their pets,” Harris said.
Trump and running mate JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, made the
false assertion repeatedly despite being confronted with multiple
fact-checks and a public rebuke from DeWine and local officials.
Harris called it a feint to distract from Trump’s successful efforts
to scuttle a bipartisan border deal on Capitol Hill earlier this year.
“The hypocrisy of it abounds because on the issue of immigration,
let’s be clear, some of the most conservative members of the United
States Congress, working with others, came up with a border security
bill, which was the strongest, toughest border security bill in a long,
long time,” she said.
“He prefers to run on a problem instead of fix a problem. And we got
to call it out and see it for what it is,” Harris added.
After the interview, Harris stopped by a watch party at CRED Café, a
coffee shop and event space owned by former NBA players Joe and Jordan
Crawford. She thanked attendees and pushed them to the polls.
“Early voting, everybody knows it starts in four days here in
Michigan, and Detroit is going to help deliver Michigan,” Harris
said. “Michigan is going to help us win.”
Earlier in the day, she visited the Black-owned Norwest Art Gallery,
where she was joined by actors Don Cheadle, Delroy Lindo and Detroit
native Cornelius Smith Jr. for a conversation with Black men focused
on entrepreneurship.
This headline and story have been updated.
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