‘You have changed’: Harris faces brutal grilling on flip-flops, border crisis in 60 Minutes interview

(Daily Caller News Foundation) – Vice President Kamala Harris faced a tough grilling during an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” as she continues her media blitz.

The vice president joined Bill Whitaker for a pre-recorded sit-down, the second of her media tour that includes Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy,” “The View,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Howard Stern Show.” Whitaker conducted what can be expected to be the hardest interview of the tour, pressing Harris on her repeated policy flip-flops, her vague economic plan and the border.

Whitaker first tongue-tied Harris about her economic plan, asking her to defend the estimated $3 trillion it would add to the federal deficit and explain how she would pay for it.

“Okay, so the other economists who have reviewed my plan versus my opponent’s, determined that my economic plan would strengthen America’s economy, his would weaken it. My plan, Bill, if you don’t mind, my plan is about saying that when you invest in small businesses, you invest in the middle class and you strengthen America’s economy. Small businesses are part of the backbone of America’s economy,” Harris began to respond.

“But pardon me, Madam Vice President. The question was, how are you going to pay for it?” Whitaker interjected.

“Well, one of the things I’m going to make sure that the richest among us who can afford it pay their fair share in taxes. It is not right that teachers and nurses and firefighters are paying a higher tax rate than billionaires and the biggest corporations. And I plan on making that fair.”

Whitaker interjected again, reminding Harris that they were “dealing with the real world,” asking her how she expected to get such a plan through Congress.

“You know, when you talk quietly with a lot of folks in Congress, they know exactly what I’m talking about, because their constituents know exactly what I’m talking about. Their constituents are those firefighters and teachers and nurses. Their constituents are middle class, hardworking folks,” Harris answered before Whitaker told the vice president that Congress had made no indication it planned to back her plan.

Before hitting the vice president on the border, Whitaker attempted to get answers from Harris on her frequently changing policy positions – something other journalists have tried, and failed, to do. (RELATED: Harris Fails To Explain Flip-Flops, Says She Has No Regrets About Biden In First Interview)

“Let me tell you what your critics and the columnist say,” Whitaker began. “They say that the reason so many voters don’t know you is that you have changed your position on so many things. You were against fracking; now you’re for it. You supported looser immigration policies. Now you’re tightening them up. You were for Medicare for all. Now you’re not. So many people don’t truly know what you believe or what you stand for, and I know you’ve heard that.”

“In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States, and I have been traveling our country, and I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus,” Harris said in response to her series of flip-flops.

“We are diverse people, geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds, and what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus, where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values to find common sense solutions, and that has been my approach,” she continued.

Whitaker then moved to ask Harris about her plan for the migration crisis, a point of weakness for the vice president who oversaw addressing root causes of the issue during the Biden administration. It’s a job that caused Republicans to brand her as the “border czar.”

The “60 Minutes” host asked Harris why she and President Joe Biden just now embraced a recent crackdown on asylum seekers, rather than taking those steps in 2021.

“The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system, knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up. Fast forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, got together, came up with a border security bill,” Harris said, repeating her administration’s frequent talking points about Trump asking members of Congress to kill the bill.

“I’ve been covering the border for years, and so I know this is not a problem that started with your administration. But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?” Whitaker pressed.

The vice president began to answer, telling Whitaker that the border crisis was a “long-standing” problem that her administration has offered solutions to before he interjected and repeated the question.

“What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?” The “60 Minutes” host followed up as Harris once again calling on Congress to act.

Harris’ sit-down with “60 Minutes” was her second solo national interview, her first being with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle. The vice president first sat down with Dana Bash of CNN, though Walz accompanied her, after facing scrutiny for avoiding the press in her first month of her campaign. After doing the occasional interview with local media, MSNBC announced Harris would sit down with Ruhle, who later defended Harris’s lack of “clear” and “direct” answers.

The vice president is also set to appear on “The View,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Howard Stern Show.” Colbert has previously hosted fundraisers for Biden in both 2020 and 2024, according to The New York Times. Stern previously endorsed Biden for president in 2020.

Walz, who himself has also been avoiding the media, also sat down with “60 Minutes.” He revealed to Whitaker that some of the disagreements he and Harris have had are over things he has said that have garnered criticism — such as claiming he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square unrest.

“Waltz has been criticized for embellishing or telling outright falsehoods about his military record and about his travels to Asia in the 1980s,” Whitaker’s voiceover began.

“In your debate with JD Vance, you said, ‘I’m a knucklehead at times,’ and I think you were referring to the time that you said that you were in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square unrest when you were not. Is that kind of misrepresentation. Isn’t that more than just being a knucklehead?” the host followed up.

“I think folks know who I am, and I think they know the difference between someone expressing emotion, telling a story, getting a date wrong by rather than a pathological liar like Donald Trump,” Walz responded.