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The Hill
07-08-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Kamala Harris stumbles right out of the gate
It might be the only thing Team Biden got right politically — the slow-motion trainwreck that is Kamala Harris and her political operation. The Harris disaster is history in the making. Never before has a putative presidential campaign failed so badly in getting anything right. Harris should be dominant in the Democratic Party. She entered the post-Biden world with strong approval among Democrats, sky-high name recognition and the benefit of 95 percent of Democrats having voted for her in 2024. Plus, she had a built-in excuse for losing — the colossal unpopularity of Joe Biden was clearly a drag for her and rocket fuel for President Trump. But Harris and her team have squandered these advantages in record time. They have demonstrated no coherent plan and no political sense. They don't appear to have any allies in the media or the punditry. Her brief flirtation with running for governor of California is emblematic of her incoherence. Running for major office is not like buying a used car. You either want it or you don't. If Harris truly wanted to plant herself in California and be governor, her pause to 'consider' running would have been a delaying tactic to plan her announcement and her campaign. Instead, it appears that dropping out of sight was her way of preparing to announce basically nothing. She isn't going to run for governor and she is going to release a book about her campaign — not now, but later. On top of that, her 'media tour' has consisted of going on the soon-to-be-out-of-work Stephen Colbert, where she was at her word salad worst. Not only did she have no message, but she whiffed on a series of softball questions so badly that it can only encourage every other Democratic hopeful. The very fact that Colbert had to ask her who is leading the Democrats was insulting — as the immediate previous nominee, it's supposed to be her. But her non-answer made things worse. Any decent politician would have found a way to maneuver Colbert to declare Harris the leader. Compounding matters, she expressed her disappointment that there has not been enough opposition to Trump. Does Harris realize she just called herself out for being weak and absent? Trump's disapproval rating among Democrats is 93 percent. Yet Harris just declared herself AWOL. The big problem for Harris is the same problem Joe Biden faced after his disastrous debate in June 2024: It's not so much the current moment that is the problem — it's the future. With Biden, there was no chance he could have made it through the campaign — debates, public appearances, speeches. With Harris it is the same thing. She has shown no improvement despite ample experience. She remains unprepared, terrible off-the-cuff, and utterly without original ideas. What could possibly change? And clearly, the people who saw Harris up close when she was Vice President figured this out. In my view, one of the great unreported stories from the Biden Administration is the tryout Team Biden gave Pete Buttigieg during the 2022 midterms to replace Kamala Harris — not necessarily as Vice President, but as the heir-apparent to lead the Democratic Party. Never before had a Secretary of Transportation been so visible and a vice president so invisible during the midterms. Too bad for Buttigieg that he mostly flopped or at least failed to catch fire. But what really showed that Harris is not ready for prime time was her presidential campaign. With the nomination dropped in her lap, she completely choked on the two most critical decisions. First, she chose as her running mate perhaps the only Democratic politician more inept than herself. Tim Walz brought nothing to the ticket — not even Minnesota, which was closer in 2024 than it had been in 2020. Harris could have picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a much better vote-getter than Walz, but the howls from the most leftist parts of the party were too loud. Second, she failed to break with Biden. All the polling in the summer was terrible for the president. His favorables were way underwater and his rating on inflation (the top issue) was disastrous. In an environment very hostile to the incumbent, Harris needed to make a break and present herself as something new. But again, she choked. And this is what will sink any chance she ever had of becoming the nominee for a second time. Harris is just not a risk-taker. She is petrified of angering any part of the squabbling Democratic Party, even the much-discredited Biden and his hangers-on. She crumbles in the face of any loud faction and tries to please everyone while saying nothing. Harris has missed the moment. By not breaking with Biden, she threw away her chance to win in 2024. As she stumbles around trying to figure out what to do, other Democrats are charging forward, making their own plans. Nobody is intimidated by her. Even the Biden inner circle — who should be cast out of Democratic politics permanently — have threatened to sink her if she dares criticize them. The nerve of Team Biden is pretty incredible. Even after an avalanche of books ripping Biden's White House staff to shreds, they have no qualms about threatening Harris. And, of course, Harris dutifully defended Biden in her Colbert interview. Pathetic. The true test for any politician is to work without a net. Kamala Harris has proven not only that she cannot work without a net, but also that she can barely crawl forward.
Fox News
06-08-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Harris ran a terrible campaign and was an uninspiring candidate: Dana Perino
'The Five' co-hosts discuss how Democrats want to bench former Vice President Kamala Harris for the midterms, while Team Biden has 'Palinesque' stories about her.
Wall Street Journal
19-06-2025
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
What Would We Do Without Experts?
The question in today's headline has often been asked by this column with a sarcastic chuckle, though sometimes it's been hard to find the humor in an age afflicted by the abuse of academic credentials for political ends. It certainly wasn't funny during the Covid panic when medical authority was used by government officials to silence dissent, restrict human liberty and impose enormous and unnecessary burdens on America's children. But today one has to be feeling a little better about the ability of a free people to make democratic choices without having to bow before an ideological agenda dressed up as scientific consensus. Last December, while it remained unclear who was running the U.S. Government, the nominal Biden administration attempted one last effort to use the court system to take power over a controversial question away from voters. Specifically the government attempted to persuade the Supreme Court to block states from deciding whether sex-transition treatments can be administered to minor children. Team Biden defended such practices with a dubious appeal to expert authority, as if it was settled science that such treatments are appropriate and necessary. Thank goodness the Supreme Court didn't buy this last heaping helping of Biden-era malarkey.
Fox News
05-02-2025
- Business
- Fox News
MIKE POMPEO: Trump's renewed maximum pressure on Iran will reshape the Middle East
President Donald Trump achieved a vision of peace and prosperity in the Middle East none thought possible in his first term. Now, he has an incredible opportunity to reshape the future of the Middle East for years to come. This week, he took the first step toward realizing this vision by doubling down on his maximum pressure campaign against Iran. His team can complement this sanctions approach by continuing the work of the first Trump administration and expanding the Abraham Accords. As the past four years have shown, enriching and enabling the malign Iranian regime only leads to war and terror. As Trump demonstrated, the best way to avoid these outcomes is through massive and effective sanctions on Iranian oil exports, which allow the regime to prop up its dysfunctional economy, fund terrorist proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, and inflict pain and suffering on the Iranian people. This is why we in the first Trump administration, at the president's direction, successfully targeted Iran's oil exports with historic sanctions. At the end of our tenure, Iran's oil exports had fallen to just about 400,000 barrels a day. Like an animal caught in a trap, the regime thrashed and tried to break free by escalating tensions and instigating conflict. President Trump met this escalation with steel resolve in the form of contained, lethal strikes – like that which claimed the life of Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani – that maintained deterrence while not putting American soldiers in harm's way. By bankrupting the Iranian regime and building a coalition of partners and allies willing to contain Iran through the Abraham Accords, the first Trump administration laid the groundwork for a genuinely peaceful and prosperous Middle East. I was proud to have contributed to this historic effort as secretary of state. Unfortunately, the Biden administration favored appeasement rather than deterrence. It failed to continue our sanctions program, made obscene ransom payments to the ayatollah, and revived the Obama-era falsehood that the regime would moderate – if only the right deal could be struck. Led astray by fantasy, Obama's successors in Team Biden went right back to enriching the regime at the expense of America's security and that of our allies. At one point in the administration, Iran was exporting roughly 2 million barrels of oil per day – five times more than it had been just a few years prior – and Iran sold $144 billion worth of oil over Team Biden's first three years. This infusion of wealth yielded predictable results. Iran resumed funding its proxies, Hamas perpetrated its grotesque attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and the Houthis initiated a blockade of the Red Sea that lasted more than a year. Iranian-backed militias killed six American service members over the administration's last two years in office. Iran built and sold thousands of drones to Russia that bolstered Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and it sold more oil than ever to the People's Republic of China. Abandoning our maximum pressure campaign was a disaster for America's foreign policy and national security. President Trump's decision to reverse Biden's appeasement and bring back our maximum pressure campaign was necessary, and its timing is perfect: Israel's incapacitation of Hezbollah helped lead to the downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Israel's campaign in Gaza to destroy Hamas is nearing victory. These realities have left the regime in Tehran at its weakest point in years. Now is the time not only for maximum pressure to return with support for the organized opposition within Iran, but also for the White House to fully support our ally Israel in its mission to ensure Iran never reaches its goal of creating a nuclear weapon. This will set the stage for the Iranian people to decide their own future instead of the tyrannical despots in Tehran, and it will give our partners and allies in the region the space and security they need to deepen their economic and security ties. Whether within Iran, across the Middle East, or elsewhere, the return of President Trump's maximum pressure campaign is tremendous news for lovers of liberty – but his team should not stop there. Iran is not our only vulnerable adversary: Putin's wartime economy is on life support, and the Chinese Communist Party's centrally-planned economy is under serious strain. Now is not the time to back off, relieve pressure or seek deals – now is the time to secure a better future for the United States and the world. President Trump's maximum pressure campaign worked once against Iran, and it will work again; he should expand this strategy beyond the regime in Tehran.
