Gutfeld And Trump Mock Kamala Harris ‘Word Salads’ — But The Clips Are Actually Easily Digested If You’re Not A Kamala-Hater

Former President Donald Trump and Fox News host Greg Gutfeld mocked Vice President Kamala Harris over what the show’s producers called “Word Salads” — but were actually just clips of the VP making easily-understood statements.

Trump and his allies and supporters have been attacking the vice president for months over her race, and have frequently crossed the line with obscene and misogynist smears. But another frequent attack from Trump and his supporters is the notion that the vice president speaks in “Word Salads.”

On Wednesday night’s edition of Fox News Channel’s Gutfeld!, the show’s host welcomed Trump to his late-night panel, and played a montage he introduced by saying “Kamala says some more nonsense!”:

GREG GUTFELD: Kamala says some more nonsense! Roll it.

VP KAMALA HARRIS: Hello to all my — to my Divine Nine brothers and sisters! (LAUGHS) And my sorors!

It was school photo day. You remember what that’s like?

You really ought to understand, at a very deep level, how much your words have meaning.

A future where we can see what is possible. Unburdened by what has been.

We can see what is possible. Unburdened by what has been.

Unburdened by what has been.

GREG GUTFELD: Do you? (JEERS, LAUGHTER) There’s an objective crowd.

All right. It’s hard to kind of figure out what she’s saying. Why does anybody ever ask a follow up question? Like, what do you mean?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, that should have happened in the debate. Yeah. And the interesting thing is, she doesn’t do interviews. You would not see her come onto the show. I can tell you right now.

GREG GUTFELD: We ask her now! Come on this show, Kamala, we’ll have a box of wine!

DONALD TRUMP: She doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like doing interviews.

GREG GUTFELD: Yeah.

DONALD TRUMP: And she’s not knowledgeable about economy and various things, and I think it would be a problem.

But you know what? He was pretty much gone. They said, Joe, it’s over, you getting out. And he said, I’m not getting out. You’re getting out. And they were very nasty. 25th Amendment and everything else.

He got out and they put her in.

And she’s somehow — a woman — somehow she’s doing better than he did.

GREG GUTFELD: Yeah.

DONALD TRUMP: But I can’t imagine it can last.

But none of what Gutfeld played there qualifies as a “word salad” — far from it. Let’s review.

The first quote is from the 2024 Phoenix Awards Dinner, during which Harris began by thanking her sorority sisters, as well as fellow members of the Divine Nine:

Hello to all my Divine Nine brothers and sisters — (laughs) — and my sorors — (applause) — and to all my HBCU brothers and sisters. (Applause.)

Rather than try to determine a motive, let’s just grant the most charitable interpretation of this citation: cultural ignorance. Specifically ignorance of Black culture.

It is entirely possible that neither Trump nor Gutfeld knows what the Divine Nine is. And Trump himself has repeatedly denigrated the vice president by claiming that she was at a “sorority party” when the Prime Minister of Israel was addressing Congress, when in reality Harris was headlining the Delta Sigma Theta National Convention.

These organizations are not comparable to White fraternities and sororities — they occupy outsize significance in Black culture for their importance in organizing to combat racism and its effects.

The next two quotes are from the same event:

It was school photo day. You remember what that’s like?

You really ought to understand, at a very deep level, how much your words have meaning.

They’re snipped from a panel Q&A hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Philadelphia, during which the VP got emotional talking about the campaign of Trump lies that has incited threats against schoolchildren and others.

The last clips are of the much-memed signature phrase that critics have bashed, but which caught fire with supporters. Harris has used the phrase throughout her career, and dozens of times during her vice presidency. Here’s how she used the phrase at a 2019 presidential debate:

And when I look around the town halls that we do in this race for president of the United States, and I look at the — the meetings that we do and the community meetings, and I see these little girls and boys, sometimes even brought by their fathers, and they bring them to me and I talk to them during these events, and they smile and they’re full of joy, and their fathers tell them, see, don’t you ever listen and let anybody ever tell you what you can or cannot be. You have to believe in what can be, unburdened by what has been.

In or out of context, the meaning is clear and has special meaning for people trying to break through historic barriers. It’s not a difficult phrase to understand — but it just might sound alien to someone who was born on third base.

There are times when the vice president speaks cautiously. Sometimes very cautiously. When she was asked at an NABJ forum whether she would use executive action to form a commission on slavery reparations, Harris gave a lengthy response that guided the subject toward a critique of Republicans for trying to deny history and even to extol the “benefits” of slavery, and when pressed said that congressional action is preferable. It was a careful answer, but it was 100% on-topic.

Gutfeld and Trump aren’t the only ones who take sensible things that Harris says and put a thematic laugh track over them to entertain howling MAGA fans — Trump’s team has several Twitter accounts devoted to the practice.

But what is particularly stunning about this example is that Gutfeld is sitting there riffing about word salads with the absolute king of verbal vegetation.

Just last week, Trump stumbled his way through an answer about funding childcare at the New York Economic Club that left so many croutons lying around it attracted pigeons.

And just a day before his appearance on Fox News, Trump rambled for almost nine minutes straight when he was asked how he would lower the cost of food, bashing immigrants and riffing about Elon Musk and stranded astronauts.

The common thread between these two rants is that when Trump did manage to drop in something resembling an answer to the question that was actually asked, they were both disasters. He told the economic club that he wouldn’t have to do anything about the cost of childcare because his tariffs would I guess make everyone rich?

And he told the woman who asked him about lowering the cost of groceries that he would do so by choking off the supply of imported foods, which, not only would not lower food prices, but would also entail billions of dollars in taxpayer money being paid to farmers for not selling food overseas.

Now Trump was rightly derided for his answer about childcare, but his rant about astronauts and groceries got little attention until I reported on it, and in both cases, the focus was on Trump‘s bizarre style, and not his disastrous policy ideas and obvious inability to maintain a train of thought.

The “word salad” rap on Harris is part of a larger pattern of Trump and his allies in politics and the media denigrating the vice president’s intellect, as well as a widely-observed problem that Trump has with women — especially Black women. The media should not portray these “word salad” accusations as competing claims, but as what they are: the rank projections of a racism-and-misogyny-prone candidate who is unfit to serve.

Watch above via Fox News Channel’s Gutfeld!.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.