Maddow And Kamala Harris Erupt In Laughter At Quip In Response To Trump’s Racial Attack
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and former Vice President Kamala Harris cracked up over a quip in response to President Donald Trump’s racial attack, which was revealed in Harris’s new book.
VP Harris stunned the political media world with surprisingly candid excerpts from the forthcoming campaign tome 107 Days, and has embarked on a media tour in support of the book. The title is a reference to the time elapsed between her ascension to the top of the ticket and her Election Day loss to now-President Donald Trump.
The ex-Veep was a guest on Monday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show for a wide-ranging interview that hit a lot of topics that are covered in the book, and some that aren’t.
In one exchange, an embarrassed Maddow had trouble reading a gynecologically-oriented retort to Trump’s infamous attack that Harris “turned Black,” and both of them had a laugh as Harris explained her thinking about not taking Trump’s “bait”:
MADDOW: Speaking of a sense of humor, your book is very funny, which I think helps a lot, given that there’s a lot of difficult material.
HARRIS: It has to have a sense of humor.
(CROSSTALK)
HARRIS: Yes.
MADDOW: I’m going to read something where I have to bleep myself in the middle of reading it out loud, sort of.
This is the part when Trump told an audience, National Association of Black Journalists, told them that you happened to turn black…
HARRIS: Right.
MADDOW: … and that you now wanted to be known as black.
You say: “On the plane that day when I first heard about Trump’s remark, we patched in Brian Fallon,” your senior adviser, communications adviser, “on a call to strategize a response. Brian wanted me to punch back with a big speech about my racial identity, like the one Obama had given. I was so” — I will just say it — “I was so pissed that I didn’t hold back. Are you effing kidding me? I was not about to take Trump’s bait.”
“He lies all the time,” I told Brian. He throws out outrageous statements to distract from the real issues. Today, he wants me to prove my race. What next? He will say I’m not a woman and I need to show my vagina?”
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: I don’t even know if I can say that.
“Brian, on the other end of the phone, fell silent. I imagined the deep crimson of his blush.”
All right, so first of all, you made me say it.
HARRIS: That really happened.
MADDOW: Yes, but…
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: So, how do you decide, I mean, in the moment, particularly when it’s so ridiculous? It’s funny. How do you decide when to not take the bait and stay off the terms that he’s trying to set for the debate and when to punch back? What did you learn about that in the process of going up against him?
HARRIS: So, I also talk about the first two weeks that I was at the top of the ticket, we had no polling, because no polling had been done on me. So it was my gut.
MADDOW: Yes.
HARRIS: And so I came up with this speech that actually was about, I was a prosecutor. I dealt with people who had engaged in sexual abuse. I was attorney general. I took on people who engaged in fraud, on and on and on. And so I know his type.
MADDOW: I remember this line, yes.
HARRIS: And because there is — there’s something about, in the English language, that phrase, “I know his type,” that does a lot of work for you, because it’s something we all relate to, whether it was that boss, it was that person, whatever.
I know his type. And so the character that I knew I was running against is someone, because he has shown it also — I mean, he did it with President Obama. He did it with Secretary Clinton. He throws this stuff out that he thinks will be an individual’s weakness or Achilles’ heel with the intent to distract from the fact that, as it was in this campaign, he had no plan for actually bringing down costs and prices for the American people.
He had very few plans for what he would actually do that was about the American people and not about an execution of his vengeance on his enemies. And I wasn’t about to fall for that bait. And the stakes were too high. The stakes were too high. You can’t get in the gutter with that guy, because that is the way that he distracts from the fact that, for example, right now, he promised the people who voted for him that, on day one, he’d bring down prices.
And I do believe, Rachel, that’s one of the main reasons that the people who voted for him elected him, because they believed he would do it. He lied. We’re now in a position where unemployment is up, inflation is up, the cost of groceries is up.
So, as the folks used to say, don’t fall for the okeydoke.
(LAUGHTER)
HARRIS: Just don’t.
Watch above via MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.
