Less than two weeks before the 2024 presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris spent time with undecided Pennsylvania voters in a CNN town hall event moderated by Anderson Cooper on Wednesday evening.
When asked about several issues, including border security, the conflict in the Middle East, trust in the Supreme Court, and whether or not her plan on environmental policy was sound, nearly every answer from the Democratic nominee for president centered on her criticism of former President Donald Trump and his policies.
Here are a few takeaways from Harris’ CNN town hall event:
Harris claims Trump will ‘govern like a dictator’
The first question of the night came from Cooper, who brought up Harris’ recent critiques of her Republican rival, by calling him “weak, unhinged,” and even “dangerous” and for repeating comments made by former Gen. and Trump’s chief of staff John F. Kelly.
Kelly told The New York Times in an interview published this week that Trump was unfit for the office of president because he “met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”
Cooper asked Harris what she says to voters who hear negative comments about Trump but still choose to vote for him on election day.
“I do believe that Donald Trump is unstable, increasingly unstable and unfit to serve,” Harris said, adding that she doesn’t think all Americans are aware of the allegations made against Trump by Republicans who served in his previous administration — such as Kelly, insinuating that if they knew, then they would perhaps not be voting for him.
Harris compared Kelly’s recent interview to an emergency “911 call” warning the American people about what a second Trump presidency would look like. When asked if she shares the same opinion as Kelly that Trump is a fascist, Harris said twice in a row, “Yes, I do.”
The conflict in the Middle East
Harris was pressed on the Israel-Hamas war by a few undecided voters Wednesday night. Beth Samberg, a realtor and mother of four, who wore a Star of David necklace, and is a registered Democrat, said she was on the fence on who to vote for due to concerns about rising antisemitism.
Samberg emphasized the recent rise in hate crimes against Jews on college campuses and in city streets, asking Harris how she would combat it and protect younger generations from it. Harris agreed that antisemitism has increased and that “it is something we have to be honest about and we have to deal with.”
The vice president said that when she was California attorney general, she published hate crime reports regularly, and antisemitism was always listed as one of the highest forms of hate, even before the rise following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
“Part of what we’ve got to do is talk with people so that they understand what are the tropes, what are the roots of what we are seeing so that we can actually have people be more understanding,” Harris said. “We need to have laws in place that make those who would commit crimes, on behalf of antisemitism and hate, that they pay a serious consequence.”
The Mexico-U.S. border
An ongoing issue, and one that Harris has been pressed on repeatedly during her campaign due to her current role as vice president under Joe Biden, is the millions of people — including drug dealers, human traffickers and victims — who have crossed over the border into the U.S. under the Biden-Harris administration.
“I have spent a significant part of my career making sure that our border is secure and that we do not allow criminals in and we don’t allow that kind of trafficking (guns, drugs and human) to happen and come into our country,” Harris said.
Though reports of immigration at the southern border have gone down in the last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a reported 8,724,304 Southwest border encounters have occurred since the Biden-Harris administration took office in 2021.
In “2022 (and) 2023 there were record border crossings,” Cooper said. “Your administration took a number, hundreds of executive actions, it didn’t stem the flow. Numbers kept going up.
In June of this year, the Biden-Harris administration took executive action to better secure the border. When asked by Cooper why they hadn’t done that years earlier, Harris responded, “Because we were working with Congress and hoping that actually we could have a long-term fix to the problem instead of a short-term fix.”
Cooper pressed Harris further and asked if she wished she had done those executive orders earlier in 2022 or 2023.
“I think we did the right thing,” Harris responded. “But the best thing that can happen for the American people is that we have bipartisan work happening and I pledge to you that I will work across the aisle to fix this longstanding problem.”
Harris criticized Trump’s stance on the border, accusing him of running on the issue instead of solving it and saying that it needs to be viewed as a bipartisan issue.
“I never intended nor will I ever allow America to have a border that is not secure,” Harris said Wednesday night. “I believe we need to deal with the illegal immigration. There needs to be consequences. ... Part of my plan includes what we need to do to actually do more as it relates to putting resources in including increasing penalties for illegal crossing.”
Harris’ religious beliefs
“One of the first phone calls you made after President Biden announced that he was dropping out was to your pastor,” Cooper said to Harris during the town hall. “I’m wondering, if it wasn’t a confessional, could you say what that conversation was like?”
Harris said she knew immediately just how serious that decision was going to be for her future on getting the news, so she called her Pastor, the Rev.Amos C. Brown of Third Baptist Church, because “I needed that spiritual kind of um connection. I needed that advice. I need a prayer.”
She likened her situation to the biblical story of Esther, a Jew who faced persecution before becoming queen of Persia.
“There’s a part of the scripture that talks about Esther and a times such as this and that’s what we talked about,” Harris said. “And it was very comforting for me.”
Cooper asked if she prayed every day, to which she quickly replied, “I do pray every day, sometimes twice a day.”
“I was raised to believe in a loving God,” she added. “To believe that your faith is a verb, you know. You live your faith. ... The way that one should do that is that your work and your life’s work should be to think about how you can serve in a way that is uplifting other people.”