On the menu today: Former Vice President Kamala Harris decided to give the New York Times an exclusive interview, but apparently, she wasn’t interested in saying much of anything beyond how well her book is selling. Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, President Trump revealed that his message on affordability for the midterms is that you don’t need to buy so many dolls for your daughter. And a new report suggests that the Russian government contemplated bombing cargo planes flying from Europe to the United States. Read on.
The New York Times on Kamala Harris: ‘The Question Is What She Wants to Say’
Harris sat down for an interview with the New York Times, and the result is one of the odder profiles of a once and potentially future presidential candidate you’ll ever read. Clearly, Harris agreed to do the interview, but she seemed to have put little or no thought into what she wanted to say. And we’re talking about basic open-ended questions, like, “Where should the Democratic Party go from here?”
She has mostly been a bystander in the Democratic Party’s raging debate over its direction. Should Democrats veer to the left or center? More populism? More progressivism? Both? Neither? What exactly should the party stand for?
“This sounds really corny,” she said in the wide-ranging interview with The New York Times in Nashville. “But we have to stand for the people. And I know that that sounds corny. I know that. But I mean it. I mean it.”
“Stand for the people.” Thank goodness she’s here to give the Democrats such groundbreaking, insightful, specific ideas!
You can almost sense the frustration of Times national political correspondent Shane Goldmacher, as Harris apparently agreed to the interview, but didn’t want to say much of anything:
Lawyerly language remains her safe space, and she still defaults to acting as if every question is part of a deposition where answers can and will be used against her. . . .
Yet people aren’t just showing up for her. They’re paying to see her.
“Thousands of people are coming to hear my voice. Thousands and thousands,” she said. “Every place we’ve gone has been sold out.”
The question is what she wants to say. . . .
If Ms. Harris were to run again, it is almost anyone’s guess what the campaign would be about.
The profile begins by emphasizing that Harris doesn’t want to talk about the next presidential election:
The one thing that Kamala Harris absolutely, definitely, most certainly does not want to talk about is whether she is thinking about running for president again.
“It’s three years from nooooow,” the former vice president pleaded in an interview last month, sitting in a leather chair backstage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville before one of the final stops on her nationwide book tour.
The next presidential general election is three years from now, but based on the history of recent cycles, you’ll probably see candidates announcing their campaigns in January 2027 or so. The primary calendar has yet to be hammered out, but you’re probably going to see the first contests in January 2028. So, whether we like it or not, the 2028 presidential race really begins about a year from now. Yes, Harris doesn’t need to build up her name recognition, and she’ll probably have a pre-established large network of donors, but. . . she’s also got unique challenges to overcome.
The Democrats have moved on from the defeat of 2024, and few in the party have spent much time worrying about what Harris thinks about any given topic in any given day. She’s an afterthought, a bad memory, the answer to a question no one is asking anymore.
Harris says at one point in the interview, “There will be a marble bust of me in Congress. I am a historic figure like any vice president of the United States ever was.” Yes. There’s also a bust for Hubert Humphrey, another former senator and Democratic vice president who was nominated without winning any primaries, after the sitting president, beset by controversy, chose to not run for another term, and who lost badly to a controversial Republican nominee making a big comeback bid. (History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.)
She is one of two people on the planet who have been put forth as a candidate against Donald Trump and lost. Maybe the 2028 Republican nominee will be easier to defeat, but if you’re a Democrat, you may well have more than a dozen options again, including possibly as many as nine senators. Why would Democrats roll the dice on her in a second straight cycle and hope for a different outcome?
Trump Doesn’t Believe His Own Message on Affordability
Then again, at this rate, Democrats may waltz to easy midterm victories in 2026.
When this year began, Zohran Mamdani was, at best, in the low single digits in the polls of the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. (The first Emerson poll in February put Mamdani at 1 percent.) While the city’s Democrats have fans of Communism and the intifada in their ranks, what really drove Mamdani to the primary victory, and then on to a general election victory, was a relentless social-media campaign focusing on “affordability.” Even Vice President JD Vance has said Mamdani was smart to center his campaign on affordability.
Last night, the White House kicked off its affordability-focused campaign-style tour.
President Trump did not stick to the script:
You know, you can give up certain products. You can give up pencils, because under the China policy, you know, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two, you know, they don’t need that many. But you always need — you always need steel. You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice, but you don’t need 37 dolls.
This is not the first time Trump has rolled out the argument that the problem in the American economy is that the nation’s parents are buying their daughters too many dolls. It was a bad, dumb, Bernie-Sanders-style, tone-deaf argument back in May, and it is still one now.
Trump also said:
Prices are coming down very substantially. But they have a new word. You know, they always have a hoax. The new word is “affordability.” So they look at the camera and they say, “This election is all about affordability.”
And later:
We’re dealing with bad people, and the word “affordability” is the exact same thing. And I can’t say “affordability hoax” because I agree the prices were too high, so I can’t go to “hoax,” because they’ll misconstrue that. But they use the word “affordability” and that’s their only word. They say “affordability” and everyone says, “Oh, that must mean Trump has high prices.” No, our prices are coming down tremendously from the highest prices in the history of our country.
The rate of inflation has remained around 3 percent since June 2023. The year-over-year rate of inflation has come down considerably from its peak of 9.1 percent in June 2022, although that mostly occurred in late 2022 and early 2023. This is not the same thing as prices coming down, and yet Trump repeatedly insists, “Prices are coming down very substantially” and “Our prices are coming down tremendously.”
Then there was the president’s assessment of the economy in an interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns on December 8:
Burns: But. . . but I do want to talk about the economy, sir, here at home. And. . . and I wonder what grade you would give your economy.
Trump: A-plus.
Burns: A-plus?
Trump: Yeah, A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.
A large majority of Americans do not believe that the U.S. economy is performing anywhere near an “A-plus” level, never mind all the extra pluses Trump gives himself. In the latest Gallup poll, just 21 percent of Americans described current economic conditions as excellent or good, while 40 percent now rate current conditions as poor. Just 27 percent said the economy is getting better — the lowest since July 2024 — while 68 percent said the economy is getting worse. Economic confidence is the lowest it has been in 17 months.
From his comments, it is clear Trump is not actually convinced America has an affordability problem.
In 2026, every Democratic is going to run on the message, “Elect me, and I will make life more affordable.” The Democratic agenda of higher taxes, higher spending, and more regulations will only make the cost of living more expensive, but that may not matter that much to many voters. All they will hear is someone talking about the problems they face.
Meanwhile, the president will insist the economy is the greatest ever, and that you don’t need to buy your kids as many toys as you used to buy them.
We Are in a Form of War with Russia, We Just Don’t Want to Acknowledge It
A story in the Financial Times that I would like to know a great deal more about:
In July 2024, DHL parcels exploded in logistics centers in the UK, Poland and Germany. Each of them was powerful enough to have brought down a cargo plane had they detonated onboard.
Security services would eventually trace the plot back to a group of Russian-directed saboteurs who had a further 6kg of explosive material in their possession. That was enough to give them the capability for what security officials told the Financial Times was the next stage of the plan: to attack flights to the U.S., and cause more disruption to the airline industry than any act of terror since the World Trade Center attacks. (Emphasis added.)
Over the past year, Andrew Stuttaford, Noah Rothman, David Satter, and I have written about the Russian incendiary devices at DHL facilities and flights in Europe. But the notion that Russia was ready to target flights to the United States is new, and it is a vivid demonstration that the Russian government feels entitled to kill innocent people as a form of leverage.
Those are the guys we’ve got Steve Witkoff negotiating with right now.
ADDENDUM: Last night, the city of Miami, Florida elected its first openly Democratic mayor since 1997. (Independent Manny Diaz, who served from 2001 to 2009, was not-so-secretly a Democrat.)
Third, every week local media runs a story on immigrants who were working through the legal system to adjust their status and ended up detained or deported. This is bad for many reasons, and it’s terrible for the GOP brand. A lot of us have been pointing out for months that “illegal” is being applied far too broadly, encompassing people who entered via lawful means. You cannot put a Cuban migrant who arrived on a flight through a program established by the federal government — and who has a legal right to adjust status pursuant to the Cuban Adjustment Act — in the same bucket as gang members and cartel operatives who crossed the border undetected. Hispanics understand this nuance, even if others don’t.