White House Defends Kamala Harris Trip as ‘Success’ Despite ‘Out of Context’ Lester Holt Moment: ‘She Did What She Came to Do’
Hector Vivas/Getty Images
White House officials pushed back on criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris’ first foreign trip, calling the foray a “success” despite the Lester Holt interview that has drawn sharp attacks from Republicans and has come to dominate media coverage of the trip.
Politico Playbook published an item entitled “Former Harris aides: Foreign trip exposed her political weakness,” a premise that they backed up by paraphrasing “a few people who worked for Harris in the past,” writing “After the trip wrapped up, we spoke with a few people who worked for Harris in the past and want her to be president in the future. They said more performances like this could complicate her path.”
But the balance of the piece contains reporting that casts the trip in a much more positive light, at least on the substance, such as the revelation that the VP “called an audible” and pulled Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador aside for a half-hour private conversation.
And of the Lester Holt moment that went viral on the right before being embraced by the mainstream media as well, a former Senate aide told Playbook “It sometimes takes her a while to land on the right message, and sometimes she can be a little undisciplined in her message. But she eventually gets there.”
White House officials also defended the trip, and dismissed the Holt interview:
“The trip was a success. Was there one moment in one interview that is taken out of context and being used? Yes, but she did what she came to do,” a White House official told us Wednesday night.
One aide who has been briefing Harris on the Northern Triangle countries put it this way: “The narrative and the substance of the work are not always the same thing. We may or may not be able to control the narrative, but we can control what we focus on.”
On Wednesday, CNN reported that unnamed White House officials were “perplexed” by some of the vice president’s statements, but none of Playbook’s sources echoed that sentiment.
