LAS VEGAS — Vice President Kamala Harris’ repeat gambit of spouting scripted answers demonstrates her contempt for voters, charges former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard — who famously shish-kebabbed the veep in a 2019 debate.
“Kamala Harris today is the same person who ran for president in 2020 in the sense that she is great at delivering well-rehearsed lines on a debate stage,” Gabbard told The Post.
“What’s most insulting,” she continued, “is that she thinks the American people are so stupid as to believe her well-rehearsed lines and ignore the reality of our lives and the struggles that so many have been facing directly because of her and her time in this administration.”
Gabbard represented a Hawaii district in the House of Representatives for four terms before entering the 2020 Democratic contest, eventually leaving that race and ultimately the party.
She now backs Donald Trump. The Post caught up with her at a weekend event promoting the former president’s bid for a second term.
Harris has plenty of other weaknesses besides her inability to offer much more than word salads when forced to go off script. The ex-rep gave a bleak assessment of Harris’ record.
“People can’t afford as much as they used to be able to afford, and they’re struggling just to make basic ends meet,” she told The Post, and “directly, because of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s foreign policy decisions, we sit on the brink of World War III and nuclear Armageddon and are embroiled in multiple wars around the world.”
Her Sin City mission — where alleged “sexting” target Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined her onstage at the Restore America event moderated by race car driver Danica Patrick — was to “shine a light on the truth and remind the American people about Kamala Harris’ record and remind them as well about President Trump’s record and the kind of success that he had in every way that Kamala Harris has failed,” Gabbard said.
The first Samoan American to serve as a voting member of Congress, Gabbard is widely regarded as having cleaned Harris’ clock during that 2019 Democratic presidential candidate debate in Detroit.
Gabbard ripped Harris’ record as California attorney general, decrying her jailing of more than 1,500 people for marijuana violations, blocking evidence allegedly exonerating a death row inmate and reportedly keeping inmates in state prisons “beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor,” per Politico, which said Harris “stumbled through an answer.”
The exchange wounded Harris’ campaign, and she dropped out before the Iowa caucuses, failing to get a single delegate.
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Gabbard said that while Harris can spout scripted sentences on a stage — as she did in the Sept. 10 debate with Trump — there’s not much beyond the surface.
The veep is AWOL, Gabbard said, “when it comes down to the issues that actually matter to the American people, taking responsibility for her role over these last three and a half-plus years, almost four years of her being in the White House, for everything that’s gone wrong, so terribly wrong in our country, from our open borders to historic levels of inflation to drastically increased cost of living.”
Harris, Gabbard said, “does not want the American people to know who she really is, and so she is trying to put forward a version of herself with the help of the propaganda media and Big Tech that was created by her pollsters that she believes will help her win this election.”
The Army Reserve officer, who published her book “For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind” this year, said she’s seen voters share a common frustration in her travels in swing states such as Nevada.
“There are a lot of people who are dissatisfied with politics as usual, people who are frustrated that leaders in Washington have forgotten them,” Gabbard said. “You look at what has happened in East Palestine, Ohio. You look at what’s happened with the destruction in my home state of Hawaii, with the wildfires on Maui. You look at communities in Louisiana who are still struggling in the aftermath of multiple hurricanes that have hit them. There are so many people who, for many reasons, feel like they’ve been left behind.”
The Trump campaign is laser-focused on those voters, she said. “There’s no way that Kamala Harris, as hard as she tries, can run away from her responsibility in that, and that’s really where both our challenge and our opportunity here is over these next days.”
