“Kamala is even more radical and incompetent than old Joe Biden,” said Jesse Watters, who labeled her a “California socialist” and declared her “even more unpopular than the most unpopular president in American history.”
Sean Hannity, who has been an on-air ally and off-air adviser to Donald Trump, described her as having a “horrendous” and purportedly “far-left” track record, insisting that voters “seem to detest Kamala Harris.”
Laura Ingraham decried the vice president as a “puppet of the globalists” who replaced “the old puppet of the globalists.”
“No one who truly loves this country, no one who truly wants the best for the American people, would ever subject us to someone like Kamala Harris,” Ingraham said. “They know that Harris is incompetent, just as they knew that Biden is incompetent.”
Watters also described Harris as being something of a pawn for the Democratic establishment. “Kamala is probably easier to manipulate than Joe Biden,” he said.
Several Fox hosts accused Harris of being part of “a coverup,” as Watters put it, complicit in hiding the extent of Biden’s decline. “Right up until the last minute, she’s been lying to the American people,” Ingraham said. On Hannity’s show, former Trump White House official Kellyanne Conway said Harris “led the chorus of liars.” Fox host Mark Levin took an even grander and conspiratorial tone, saying Harris “violated the constitution every day since she’s been vice president of the United States” by not invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president, and therefore “should never be anywhere near the Oval Office.”
Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary who is a regular contributor on Fox, called Harris “a San Francisco liberal who failed” to stop the flow of migrants at the Southern border after Biden tapped her to work on an effort aimed at addressing the root causes that lead people to flee Central America for the United States.
Critics on the right have long danced around the topic of Harris’s race by imputing her rise to affirmative action or “DEI,” the acronym for the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that have drawn fire from conservatives.
Watters — who last month theorized that Democratic insiders planned to have Harris take over during a second Biden term for what he called “a DEI presidency” — predicted that any Democrat who challenges her for the nomination “is going to trigger an identity politics bloodbath.” His guest, investor Jason Calacanis, warned that “the DEI candidate concept just is not going to work.”
There’s a history of Fox-affiliated pundits facing backlash for making inappropriate comments about Harris, particularly about her relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in the 1990s. Pundit Tomi Lahren apologized in 2019 for “a wrong choice of words” after tweeting, “Kamala did you fight for ideals or did you sleep your way to the top with Willie Brown?” Two years later, conservative radio host Jesse Kelly used a crass sexual reference on then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show to describe how Harris launched her career in politics.
Carlson, for his part, repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s first name on air during the 2020 race, drawing a correction from one of his guests, who said it was disrespectful. “For somebody who’s going to be on the national ticket, pronouncing her name right is actually kind of a bare minimum,” Democratic strategist Richard Goodstein said while Carlson laughed.
On Sunday, some Fox commentators preferred to linger in the perceived uncertainty surrounding the race — suggesting that Michelle Obama, who has repeatedly shut down any speculation that she would run, or some other candidate may yet seize the nomination.
“I don’t even know if it’s going to be her,” Hannity said of Harris. “I think other leaders in the Democratic Party have different plans.”
