Vice President Kamala Harris gave her first solo interview Wednesday on cable news as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, and failed to answer questions even in a friendly interview by MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle.
Ruhle — who faced criticism for comments Friday in which she had defended Ruhle from having to face questions about her policies — asked Harris pointed questions and even fact-checked some of her repeated talking points.
When Harris tried to claim, falsely — as she has in the past — that “Donald Trump left us with the worst economy since the Great Depression” (it was, in fact, growing when he left office), Ruhle noted: “It was during COVID and employment was so high because we shut down the government, we shut down the country.” Harris then said Trump lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs before the pandemic, which is also false: manufacturing jobs rose by 450,000.
Ruhle also fact-checked Harris’s claim — also a staple of Joe Biden’s economic speeches — that Trump’s 2017 tax cuts only benefited the rich and corporations. “He didn’t just cut corporate taxes, he cut individual taxes,” Ruhle observed.