One of the repercussions of President Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance is that Vice President Kamala Harris was brought out to do cleanup media. The vice president sat down for an interview on MSNBC, where she and host Rachel Maddow talked mostly about the abortion portions of the debate.
Watch as Maddow and Harris seethe over Trump’s citation of former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s proposed disposition of newborn survivors of an abortion attempt:
RACHEL MADDOW: You know, the issue of former President Trump lying came to the fore on this issue of choice, on this issue of abortion rights in a very pointed way. He kept asserting over and over again that if you are pro-abortion rights or if you want to codify Roe or if you're a critic of the decision to overturn Roe and have these abortion bans then you are a murderer and you want to kill infants, and that what people who are pro-choice are are people who want to kill babies after they are born. And it’s- it’s- it’s- I sometimes say this is Earth Two. This is not a factually based thing at all. But he repeatedly reiterates that. It’s not the moderator's job, though, to fact check that. It’s essentially the other candidate's job to fact check that. I wonder what your thought, strategically, is in terms of countering a counternarrative and lie about abortion rights that’s so obscene and yet so consistently repeated by their side and by their candidate.
KAMALA HARRIS: Well, the facts are exactly what are on our side to your point, Rachel. First of all this- what they are talking about is they are attempting, as they are wont to do, especially Donald Trump, create fear based on fiction for the sake of getting and hitting political points. What we know and what he is acutely aware of is what he has done and intended to do is not politically popular with a lot of people in both so-called red states and blue states and so now, you see him wavering. Let's not forget when he was President of the United States, he said that if a national abortion ban was sent to his desk, he would sign it. He said that. As Maya Angela told us a long time ago, when people tell you who they are, take them at their word. Believe them. We know when Donald Trump comes in, if he has a Congress that passes a national abortion ban he will sign it into law. One of the most fundamental issues of our time.
As much as Maddow and Harris may choose to seethe over it, Trump was not wrong about late-term abortion. As our colleague Nick Fondacaro noted, this is what Northam actually said:
RALPH NORTHAM: So, in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that is what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue.
Democrats’ historic resistance to born-alive protections for survivors of abortions is a matter of record. A more recent example of such Democrat initiatives is the so-called “Women’s Health Protection Act”, which passed the last Democrat House and eliminates most restrictions on abortions. This stuff can’t be spun or explained away, no matter how hard they try or how many times they yell “disinformation”.
But abortion is the left’s sacred ritual and, after the disastrous debate, Harris had to come in and do cleanup. Given historical norms for vice presidents with regard to presidential debates, it had to have been unsettling for Harris to come on and try to put a spin on Biden’s performance.
