Fox interview goes all gotcha, all the time
You saw it. I saw it. We all saw it. Vice President Kamala Harris did an interview Wednesday with Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier and, as The New York Times framed it, got a debate instead.
Ahead of a third presidential election with Donald Trump — now a convicted felon indicted for inciting an insurrection — as their candidate, MAGA Republicans routinely dodge answering, 1) Did Donald Trump lose in 2020? and 2) Will he/you accept the results? For voters not wanting a replay of Jan. 6, those are pertinent election issues.
No, no, no, those are “gotcha” questions, Republicans object, as Speaker Mike Johnson did. (Will no reporter demand they explain what they expect to “get” if they answer?)
Inside Fox’s Earth 2 bubble, Baier was all “gotcha” all the time. Baier asked Harris questions to which he really did not want her answers. He was not interested in revealing for his viewers her vision for America’s future. He was litigating the past. Baier interrupted. He talked over. He badgered. He baited. He oh-so-obviously tried to make Harris say Trump voters are stupid. Baier tried to reframe the election as a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden, asking when she first noticed Biden’s diminished mental faculties.
Watch it again for yourselves here:
But Harris the prosecutor was having none of it. The Democrat now endorsed by over 100 Republicans parried and turned questions on immigration policy into accusations on Donald Trump’s and Republicans’ records on preserving a broken immigration system as a campaign issue rather than a problem to fix.
“Brett, Joe Biden is not on the ballot,” Harris snapped. “Donald Trump is on the ballot,” she replied citing former Trump administration officials and national security experts who insist Trump is unfit to be president.
Harris made sure to end with a rapid summary of her goals to address affordable housing, strengthening the economy, and ensuring a strong military. If Fox viewers expected a woman easy to “get,” they were disappointed, and certainly not enlightened. Baier was both.
“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” William F. Buckley famously wrote in the 1950s. Trump’s fascist-adjacent MAGA movement stands athwart it, yelling Fox.
John Harwood wrote at Zeteo on Wednesday that Trump’s MAGA movement is rooted in the Confederacy’s legacy of slavery, America’s original sin. A Red America stands against moving on from race-based politics and resentments while Blue America looks forward.
Charles Blow sees among some Black men the draw of patriarchy, an older and deeper tradition. That tradition is even older than the yearning of the world’s oligarchs for a return to feudalism, as I’ve argued.
As is, one American party stands for public service. The other led by Trump, for preserving the Ancien Régime through overturning democracy for autocracy, if not outright fascism.
Anand Giridharadas addressed that this morning on MSNBC. The Fox interview was interruption as a metaphor for a minority Old Guard objecting to and trying to silence a more pluralistic America and the future Harris represents as vanguard of a new generation. MAGA is future-shocked, Giridharadas tweeted. That itself is a fine metaphor, but not one that new generation will get any more than Bret Baier.
Update: Couldn’t locate this clip at post time. It was a key moment in the Harris interview.