Two things can be true at once. Here are two things that are true about this year’s presidential race:

One, Donald Trump is the most fundamentally unfit presidential candidate ever nominated by a major party. He’s a congenital liar, a dangerous demagogue, a convicted felon who has long shown contempt for the Constitution and has increasingly shown symptoms of psychological instability. Worse even than all that, he was the only sitting president in U.S. history to attempt to illegally, violently retain power after losing an election. For the good of the country — and virtually regardless of the electoral alternative — America must not return Trump to office.

But — two — Trump’s unprecedented, incontrovertible unfitness is not justification for even a “normal” candidate like Kamala Harris to sidestep the rigorous public vetting process normally required of prospective presidents. Nor is it justification for America’s mainstream media to abdicate its own crucial role in that process.

The caricature of Harris as an intellectual lightweight who is lost without a teleprompter is and always has been at odds with reality. Formerly California’s widely lauded top cop, and later a brutally capable cross-examiner on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Harris has long demonstrated a depth of substance and intelligence that isn’t (or shouldn’t be) negated by this or that stray rhetorical gaffe.

Further, in her brief time as a presidential nominee, Harris has shown that, unlike her opponent, she is capable of course-correction and growth. The woman who stumbled her way out of the 2020 Democratic primaries was unrecognizable in the Harris who perfectly stuck the landing with her August nomination acceptance speech and then kicked Trump’s proverbial behind all over the debate stage in September. She has since largely diffused early criticism for policy vagueness, and now routinely showcases specific proposals regarding the economy, foreign policy and the border.

All of which begs the frustrating question: Why is she still hiding from substantive media interviews, and dodging hard questions during the few she has sat for? And why is so much of the media meekly acquiescing?

The Republican complaint that Trump was vigorously fact-checked by the ABC News debate moderators last month while Harris was allowed to slip out of answering questions is, at one level, almost comical. Harris was indeed playing the old political game of answering the question she wanted instead of the one she was asked. But Trump babbled semi-coherent fantasies about house-pet-eating immigrants, “post-birth executions” and economic data made up out of whole cloth. Those who lie more should be fact-checked more.

But, again, Trump’s well-established abnormality doesn’t justify throwing out normal vetting standards for everyone else. In the same debate, Harris was allowed, with zero pushback, to give unrelated talking points instead of answers to questions about Biden administration tariffs, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, her reversed policy positions and more.

As of this writing, nominee Harris hasn’t conducted a single formal press conference and has sat for just two interviews with national media outlets.

In one, CNN’s Dana Bash pressed her (too gingerly) on whether she has “any regrets about what you told the American people” regarding President Joe Biden’s cognitive state. It’s a relevant question, given the all-too-apparent fact that Biden’s handlers clearly hid his decline from the public. Harris non-answered by lauding Biden’s loyalty and judgment. Bash moved on.

Harris also non-answered the question about her shifting positions on fracking and immigration, with the lofty-sounding but meaningless declaration that her “values” haven’t changed. If there was ever a Wait, what? moment in an interview, that was it. But Bash again moved on.

In a subsequent interview on MSNBC, Harris was asked about the fact that, for all her (fully justified) criticism of Trump’s tariff plans, the Biden administration has kept Trump’s previous tariffs in place and has even considered expanding them. Harris quickly steered the issue to the friendlier territory of her own plan for a $6,000 child tax credit. Instead of nudging her back to the original question, interviewer Stephanie Ruhle declared her tax proposal “a real plan.”

Even those kid gloves look like anvils compared to what Harris faces in her more frequently chosen interview forums: friendly podcasts, star-struck local-news outlets, Oprah Winfrey.

Yes, Trump limits most of his own interviews to the fawning sycophants at Fox News, who smile obediently as he blathers and lies. But the subterranean bar set by Trump cannot be allowed to become the new standard of media scrutiny.

Major media outlets should be demanding in unison, loudly and publicly, that Harris — who, after all, has positioned herself as the “normal” candidate here — do what nominees normally do in the final stretch and engage in frequent, substantive press conferences and national interviews. There is, instead, only the occasional grumble from the press about Harris’ inaccessibility.

It’s clear that Harris and her handlers consider this aloofness the safe play. Harris is smarter and more capable than much of the country gives her credit for, and more frequent and forthright interviews could confirm that to many fence-sitters. But why risk confirming the caricature instead with an irrelevant slip of the tongue that would be amplified by her critics?

Here’s why: Because those few fence-sitters, in a few states, will decide this election. They need a reason to reject the Trumpian devil they know for someone they still don’t know well enough.

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