The Endless Campaign

Susan Estrich on Oct 19, 2024

"Cat Eats Fox" was Matt Drudge's headline after Kamala Harris' much touted "interview" with Fox News anchor Bret Baier. It wasn't really an interview. He whined about her coming in 15 minutes late for a pretaped interview and then barely let her answer a question before interrupting her, talking over her and generally just playing to his Fox News choir, including President Donald Trump, who roundly cheered his performance afterward. Poor Bret; he used to be a real journalist back in the days when Roger Ailes, my friend and former client, ran the ship. Now real journalists, like real journalism, are a hard-to-find commodity at Fox, the official news outlet of the Trump campaign.

But the vice president accomplished what she set out to do. Criticized for avoiding interviews, she has been doing them non-stop, from late-night TV to "60 Minutes," from Stephen Colbert to Fox News. At Fox, in particular, she showed she was tough enough to take on the most hostile debater, even when he insisted on talking over her, even when a parade of chyrons (the subheadings that are supposed to summarize what she is saying) distorted her clear answers. She got in all the key points that she has been using, and putting on the airwaves, in key states: that Trump has attacked Americans who disagree with him as "the enemy from within," that he would use the American military against the American people, that his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has called him "the most dangerous person to this country." In campaign parlance, Trump is no longer just "weird," a relic of the joyful days of the campaign, he is "unstable" and "unhinged." Even his senior campaign officials and supposed allies, who are paid like princes and leak like sieves, are complaining to reporters that the former president is incapable of sticking to his scripts and delivering his talking points about immigration and the economy.

Meanwhile, Trump has been busy dancing at a rally, attacking Biden and Harris in missives in the middle of the night, telling off-color "jokes" and avoiding the mainstream media. "President Trump has never backed down from any interview," Karoline Leavitt, his national press secretary, told reporters.

Not exactly. He backed out of interviews with CBS News' "60 Minutes," with NBC News in Philadelphia, and with CNBC's "Squawk Box," while of course finding time for a "Fox and Friends" love fest. At a Univision town hall, he reportedly stunned his audience by claiming that "we" were peaceful on Jan. 6. "Some of those people went down to the Capitol. I said, 'peacefully and patriotically,' nothing done wrong. At all. Nothing done wrong. And action was taken, strong action. Ashli Babbitt was killed, nobody was killed, there were no guns down there, we didn't have guns. The others had guns, but we didn't have guns, and when I say 'we,' these are people that walked down, this was a tiny percentage of the overall." In fact, one Capitol police officer had a stroke at the riot and died the next day; more than 100 police officers were injured on Jan. 6; and four more died by suicide in the following seven months. There was nothing peaceful about it.

On Truth Social, Trump continued to rant about Kamala Harris' CBS interview -- after he backed out from doing one of his own. "60 MINUTES SHOULD BE IMMEDIATELY TAKEN OFF THE AIR - ELECTION INTERFERENCE. CBS SHOULD LOSE ITS LICENSE. THIS IS THE BIGGEST SCANDAL IN BROADCAST HISTORY. Kamala should be investigated and forced off the Campaign, and Joe Biden allowed to take back his rightful place (He got 14 Million Primary Votes, she got none!). THIS WHOLE SORDID AND FRAUDULENT EVENT IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!"

The threat to democracy is Donald Trump. If he loses narrowly on Nov. 5, he will not go quietly into the night. If he wins, he will seek retribution against a legion of "enemies." The voting comes soon, but the truly scary part is that this is far from over.

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