Bret Baier started off his Wednesday evening interview with Kamala Harris with a barrage of combative questions about immigration, designed less to elicit substantive answers than to prove what a tough guy the Fox host could be.
His aggressive approach was understandable, in a way, since Baier had been under pressure for days from the Donald Trump faithful; they were convinced he was going to go easy on the Democratic nominee for president, and maybe even allow her campaign to edit the interview or see the questions in advance.
So, Baier came out guns blazing, barely allowing the vice-president to finish a sentence before jumping in with objections and arguments.
After 10 minutes of playing immigration “gotcha”, Baier pivoted to the obvious next subject, airing a video clip in which Harris expressed support for transgender people in prisons.
Immigrant hatred. Transphobia. And later, Joe Biden’s age. Baier was running through the Fox News greatest hits playlist.
This was grievance theater, not political journalism.
But Harris got in her licks. She had her moments.
Chiming in afterwards in what some saw as corporate damage control, Baier’s colleagues on Fox News gushed their approval. Martha MacCallum termed Baier’s performance “masterful”, while Dana Perino analyzed the interview as “super good”.
I can’t imagine that too many viewers agreed. If they came to it expecting to learn more about Harris’s policies or get a true sense of her character, they would have been disappointed. That wasn’t the gameplan, and it wasn’t the result.
But Harris accomplished something anyway.
Merely by sitting down with a Fox host, she made a few statements.
First, that she is unafraid and is willing to speak to all voters. It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump, these days, submitting to an interview with, say, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC; just this week, he turned away from a CNBC interview, and earlier canceled a CBS News 60 Minutes agreement.
Second, Harris did manage to introduce a few snippets of reality to dedicated Fox viewers who probably haven’t been exposed to some of the most troubling criticisms of Trump.
“That he’s unfit to serve. That he’s unstable. That’s he’s dangerous,” was how she characterized what millions of Americans are feeling. “And that people are exhausted.”
She even was able to mention, at some length, the harsh view of the former commander-in-chief from Mark Milley, who served in two top military roles – including chair of the joint chiefs of staff – during the Trump administration.
Milley has called Trump “fascist to the core” and has said that no one has ever been as dangerous to the United States.
So maybe this was what one leading expert on Fox News, Brian Stelter, called the Harris campaign’s “Google strategy”. On CNN, Stelter speculated that viewers might hear these comments and go searching online for more, thus piercing the information bubble they’ve been living in.
No doubt, the vast majority of regular Fox viewers have their minds made up – they’re sticking with Trump. No matter his mental decline. No matter his felony convictions. No matter the threats he makes or the threats he poses.
But there may be a small percentage of the millions who tuned in who – despite all the noise and interruptions – managed to hear a reasonable, intelligent and stable alternative to Trump. Maybe some of them live in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, where the interview was recorded, or in Wisconsin or Michigan.
In this coin flip of an election, even that tiny adjustment might make all the difference.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
