UPDATED: Kamala Harris, in her first post-2024 election interview, said that what has most surprised her about Donald Trump‘s term is the level of capitulation.
“I didn’t predict that; I did not see that coming,” Harris told Stephen Colbert on CBS’s The Late Show.
Colbert had asked Harris whether she would like to say “I told you so,” given that she predicted a number of things that Trump is now doing, including alienating allies and giving tax cuts to the rich.
“I believed that on some level, there should be many who consider themselves to be guardians of our system and our democracy, who just capitulated.”
Harris was not specific, but suggested that congressional Republicans have failed to stand to Trump as he amasses power.
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“I think there are a lot of people who think they are riding out the storm as an excuse to be feckless,” she said. “… We designed our democracy with three, independent co-equal branches of government. I mean, you see that the president of the United States is trying to get rid of the Department of Education, and Congress has the role and responsibility to stand in the way of that, and they’re just sitting on their hands, and then they go on recess because they don’t want to deal with transparency.”
Harris was referring to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to go on recess last week, earlier than planned, staving off Democrats’ efforts to bring legislation to the floor to require that Jeffrey Epstein records be made public.
Harris was greeted by a sustained ovation from the Late Show audience, while Colbert generally asked a friendly list of questions.
Her appearance was tied to the release of her upcoming book, 107 Days, which she described as a behind-the-scenes account of her short presidential campaign.
Harris also explained her announcement on Wednesday that she would forgo a run for governor of California and, for the time being, elective politics altogether.
“I just, for now, I don’t want to go back into the system,” Harris said. “I think it’s broken.”
While she said that there’s “so many good people who are public servants, who do such good work, teachers and firefighters and police officers and nurses and scientists,” Harris said, “I always believed that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles. And I think right now that they’re not as strong as they need to be, and I just don’t want to for now. I don’t want to go back in the system. I want to travel the country. I want to listen to people, and I don’t want it to be transactional, where I’m asking for their vote.”
Harris announced on Wednesday that she would not run, saying that she would not enter elective politics for now. Her statement did not rule out a 2028 presidential run.
Colbert asked, “To hear you say that it’s broken, to hear you say that our systems aren’t strong enough, is harrowing.”
Harris responded, “But it’s also evident, isn’t it? And it is.”
“It doesn’t mean we give up. No Absolutely not. I am always going to be part of the fight.”
Harris gave a glimpse of some passages of the book, including when Biden told her that he was dropping out of the race, and how she navigated staying loyal to him while also trying to distance herself at points during the campaign. Some pundits say that Biden’s unpopularity ultimately dragged her down.
“it’s an instinct of mine to be someone who does not participate in piling on, and I was not going to pile on, and I just wasn’t going to do that,” she said. “There was a lot of piling on at that time, and I wasn’t going to participate in that.”
Colbert did press Harris on whether, after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, 2024, she was told that she better start preparing for a presidential run.
“I have an incredible amount of respect for him, and I think that the way that we should be thinking about where we are right now is to remember that we had a president of the United States who believed in the rule of law, who believed in the importance of aspiring to have integrity and to do the work on the behalf of the people, and that’s where I will leave that,” she said.
Pressed further, Harris said that “there were some who did” tell her to prepare, but “it was Joe’s decision and he made that decision.”
Harris said that her book would “help people see from the inside” what it is like to run for president on such a compressed time frame, something she said was an “intense experience.” She said that during the campaign, she would pray that “I hope I have done everything I can do today.”
The book also will get into what happened on October 20, her 60th birthday, coming just weeks before the election. Her husband Doug Emhoff also was out on the campaign trail and, in the scramble, “kind of dropped the ball on my big birthday, Harris said.
