Former Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with Rachel Maddow on Monday evening for her first news interview since she left office — and lost the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump. The exclusive sit-down comes amid a flurry of recent headlines surrounding Harris’ new memoir, “107 Days,” which is set to be released Tuesday.
In the book, Harris pulls back the curtain on her chaotic and truncated campaign for president. In one anecdote, she recalled how her team urged her to deliver a speech punching back at Trump over his attacks on her racial identity. “I was not about to take Trump’s bait,” she wrote. “Today he wants me to prove my race. What’s next? He’ll say I’m not a woman and I’ll need to show my vagina?”
Harris told Maddow she knew “the character” she was running against. “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,” Harris said. “And I wasn’t about to fall for that bait.”
Maddow called Harris “the patron saint of ‘I told you so,’” noting that she frequently warned about Trump’s planned executive overreach on the campaign trail. However, according to Harris, she did not predict just how easily America’s most powerful people and institutions would go along with those plans.
“I am a lifelong public servant,” but “I’ve worked closely with the private sector over many years,” Harris said. “And I always believed that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy, for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions. And one by one by one, they have been silent.
“Perhaps it’s because they want a merger approved or they want to avoid an investigation,” she continued. “But at some point they’ve got to stand up for the sake of the people who rely on all of these institutions — to have integrity and to, at some point, be the guardrails against a tyrant [who] was using the federal government to execute his whim and fancy because of a fragile ego.”
In the face of this corporate capitulation, Harris spoke about the important role the American people can play, citing ABC’s ending of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension as an example: “We saw the power of the people over the last few days, and it spoke volumes, and it moved a decision in the right direction.”
But Harris stressed that to build a proper resistance to the administration, people should “understand that this is bigger than Donald Trump.”
“So when we talk about where the fight must go,” she continued, ‘there is the aspect of it that is about the immediate moment, such as the weight of the federal government being used to silence critics, citizens, and it must be about understanding that this did not just happen overnight, and we have to pay attention to an agenda that is not going to necessarily go away when this guy is finally turned out of office.”
Maddow also asked Harris about her relationship with former President Joe Biden. In the book, Harris criticized Biden’s decision to run for re-election. “In retrospect, I think it was recklessness,” she wrote. “The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.” Harris told Maddow she took responsibility for contributing to that “recklessness.” “So when I write this, it’s because I realize that I have and had a certain responsibility that I should have followed through on — and so when I talk about the recklessness, as much as anything, I’m talking about myself,” she said. Harris’ reintroduction to the national stage comes as rumors over her political future continue to swirl. Earlier this year, she closed the door on a run for governor of California. “For now, my leadership — and public service — will not be in elected office,” Harris wrote in a July statement. When Maddow questioned Harris about the possibility of a 2028 presidential run, Harris declined to completely rule it out but said it was not her “focus right now.”
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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