Kamala Harris defended her economic plans, avoided saying whether Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasa “close ally” and said she would not meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin for peace talks if Ukraine was not also represented, during a wide-ranging sit-down interview that aired on Monday.
With the presidential race between Harris and Donald Trump effectively dead-locked, Harris has launched an unusually robust media blitz, which includes popular podcasts, talk radio, a battleground state town hall, daytime television, late night shows and Monday’s network sit-down with CBS for its 60 Minutes prime-time election special.
Before the interview with Harris aired on Monday night, CBS correspondent Scott Pelley detailed his attempts to produce a similar 60 Minutes sit-down with Trump.
“Unfortunately last week, Trump cancelled,” Pelley told the audience. He said the Trump campaign provided “shifting explanations” for why the Republican nominee declined to participate, including that he did not want to be factchecked.
Instead, the network broadcast an interview with Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who Pelley said was “paying the price for Trump’s claims of a stolen 2020 election”. The county’s top election official lost his July primary to a Republican opponent who called Maricopa county’s elections a “laughing stock”.
In the interview with Harris, CBS’s Bill Whitaker pressed her on how she would pay for her economic proposals, which include plans to build millions of new housing units, tax breaks for new parents and $25,000 down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers. The vice-president vowed to make the country’s billionaires and biggest corporations pay their “fair share”, a solution Whitaker found dubious.
“We’re dealing with the real world here,” he said, asking how she would persuade Congress to raise taxes on the country’s highest earners. Harris insisted there were lawmakers who would listen to her pitch if she were president.
An analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that seeks lower deficits, released a report on Monday that found Harris’s economic proposals could see the federal debt climb by as much as $8.1tn through 2035, or have no impact at all. Trump’s plans on the other hand could add as much as $15.15tn to the nation’s debt over the same period.
“I cannot afford to be myopic in terms of how I think about strengthening America’s economy,” Harris said in the interview. “Let me tell you something. I am a devout public servant. You know that I’m also a capitalist, and I know the limitations of government.”
Harris navigated around the thorny question of whether Netanyahu was “a real close ally”, saying: “The better question is: Do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that question is yes.”
The excerpt of that exchange was released on Sunday, ahead of the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s deadly cross-border attack on Israel. In a sign Harris intends to hew closely to Biden’s approach to foreign policy, the vice-president said that Israel had a right to defend itself, while adding that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed”. Israel’s war has levelled Gaza and killed almost 42,000 Palestinians.
In a line of questioning about the future of Ukraine, Harris categorically ruled out a bilateral meeting with Putin to discuss ending the grinding war without involving the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “Without Ukraine? No,” Harris said.
She also again warned of what could happen if Trump were in office: “Donald Trump, if he were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now. He talks about, ‘oh, he can end it on Day 1.’ You know what that is. It’s about surrender.”
During the interview, which was pre-taped and aired in full on Monday, Harris defended her ideological shift to the political center, insisting as she has in the past that her “values have not changed”.
She said that travelling the country as vice-president, and working to pass bipartisan legislation in Congress had emphasized the need to find “common ground”.
“I believe in building consensus,” she said.
Harris was also asked about the gun she talked about owning during an event held with Oprah Winfrey last month, in which she declared: “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot,” drawing laughs from the host and the audience. On 60 Minutes, Harris said she owns a Glock, citing her background as California’s top law enforcement official. Asked if she has ever fired it, Harris laughed: “Of course I have,” she said. “At a shooting range. Yes.”
Part of the 60 Minutes special included a segment with her running mate, Tim Walz, who was asked where he and Harris disagree.
With a bashful smile, Walz said Harris probably wished he was a “little more careful” with his public comments. Since becoming the vice-presidential nominee, Walz has had to clarify several past remarks, including his description of his military service and whether he was in Hong Kong “when Tiananmen happened”, a reference to the pro-democracy protests that culminated in the massacre of hundreds of people in June 1989.
Walz brushed off the remark during the vice-presidential debate last week, saying he had “misspoke” and could be a “knucklehead at times”. But Whitaker pressed him, asking if it was a misrepresentation and whether the American people could trust him if the Democrats win in November.
Walz drew a sharp line between himself and Trump, who he called a “pathological liar”, and said voters could have confidence in him to be their vice-president.
“I will own up to being a knucklehead at times, but the folks closest to me know that I keep my word,” he said.
The 60 Minutes interview was part of a week-long media push by the Democratic ticket that began with Harris’s appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast, which aired on Sunday. She is also scheduled to participate in a Univision town hall in Nevada on Thursday as well as an interview with Howard Stern on Sirius XM and appearances on The View and Late Night with Stephen Colbert. From Los Angeles, Walz made his late-night TV debut with an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live. He also taped a conversation with the SmartLess podcast and last weekend made his first Sunday show appearance, in which he fielded tough questions about his views on abortion, immigration, the economy and his own past misstatements in an interview with Fox News Sunday.
Taken together, it represents a sharp change of pace for the vice-president after two-and-a-half months in which she mostly resisted such exchanges.
Before boarding Air Force Two, en route to New York on Monday afternoon, Harris fielded a handful of questions from reporters.
Asked about a report that the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, ignored the vice-president’s call to discuss recovery efforts as the state braces for Hurricane Milton to make landfall, Harris accused the Republican of “playing political games”.
“These are the height of emergency situations, it is utterly irresponsible and it is selfish,” she said.
She also assailed Trump as “incredibly irresponsible” for spreading falsehoods about the administration’s response to Hurricane Helene, which ripped across the southern Appalachians, killing more than 220 people in six states.
“There’s a lot of mis- and disinformation being pushed out there by the former president about what is available, particularly to the survivors of Helene,” she said. “It’s extraordinarily irresponsible. It’s about him. It’s not about you.”
