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Vice President Kamala Harris 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 campaign swing in Michigan, where she is courting the Black male voters 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 President Donald Trump, 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 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, 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, following her live interview with Charlamagne tha God. 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 has been updated.
