In the less than 72 hours since Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, Fox News has unloaded on the California senator. From insisting she was chosen because “she’s a Black, she’s a female”; to lobbing sexist attacks about her lack of “personal charm” and “warmth”; to attributing her success to “powerful alliances with powerful men”; to suggesting that Biden is a puppet candidate while Harris is the Democratic Party’s real choice for 2020, it’s becoming clear there is no line of attack too low for the conservative network.
Shortly after the Biden campaign’s Tuesday announcement, Sean Hannity invited Donald Trump onto his prime-time Fox show as a cohost of sorts for a half hour phone interview on the president’s immediate reaction to Biden’s running mate. “A lot of people think it’s a dangerous choice,” said Trump. Between his usual bizarre rants about windmills killing “all the birds” and his whining about suffering through investigations that no “president should have to go through,” Trump concluded that Harris is “the most liberal” senator who will help “destroy the country” should Biden win in November. (Trump later called Harris a “mad woman” when phoning into Fox Business on Thursday).
“This pick solidifies what’s the most extreme, radical, far-left, out-of-the-mainstream ticket of any major political party in American history,” Hannity said Tuesday night. Also on his show, Jeanine Pirro questioned if “Biden himself” had in fact chosen Harris. “Who really picked this woman to be the vice presidential candidate?” she asked, an argument she continued on Wednesday night by floating a conspiracy theory about how Biden, somehow, “isn’t going to be on the ticket.”
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Laura Ingraham used her Tuesday show to make a similar claim, while suggesting that Harris was a “cynical” pick, made only because her race and gender fulfill a “box-checking exercise for the woke crowd.” After citing a Biden campaign email that referred to Harris as “the best person to help me…lead this nation starting in January 2021,” the Fox News host replied, “Wasn’t that you supposed to be on the top of the ticket doing all that leading for us, Joe? You know, that whole presidency thing? Come on, man.” Ingraham then concluded that “Even Joe is witted enough to understand that he’s not really going to be running the show if he wins in November.”
Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative filmmaker who brought the “Dems are the real racists” narrative into the mainstream, argued on Tuesday that Harris cannot be considered “African American” because she is “descended less from the legacy of, let’s say, Frederick Douglass” and more “from the legacy of the plantation itself.” D’Souza, who was pardoned by Trump in 2018 for making illegal campaign contributions, also remarked that the choice of Harris as vice-presidential nominee is part of “this effort in the Democratic Party and on the left to eradicate all connections to the slave plantation”—an absurd claim made more outrageous coming from D’Souza, the same pundit who wrote that chattel slave owners in America actually “treated” their African slaves “pretty well.”
Elsewhere on the network, others argued the opposite: that Harris was only chosen because she is a Black woman. On Tuesday night, conservative talk-radio host Larry Elder described Harris by saying, “She’s attractive. She’s a Black. She’s a female. She checks all the boxes for the left, so I think she’s going to be a net plus for him.” Another Fox News guest, Leo Terrell, deployed the same line. “Kamala Harris was selected for two reasons: because she’s a woman and because of her race,” he said.