Kamala Harris sparred with Fox News' Bret Baier in a chat meant to sell us on ... the interviewer

In an alternate universe, Vice President Kamala Harris’ first Fox News interview probably would have been conducted by Chris Wallace. A veteran of ABC, NBC and CBS News before his 18 years at Fox, Wallace was among the few debate moderators during the 2020 election to wrangle with former president Donald Trump with any measure of success.

“I think the country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with fewer interruptions,” he told Trump in that long ago time when we expected presidential candidates to show up to multiple debates.

Wallace left Fox in late 2021 after he decided that “when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable,” he told the New York Times.

Not Fox News’ chief political anchor Bret Baier, though. And now that voters aren’t getting any more debates before the November election, we’re left with Baier trying to prove he can take on a coherent presidential candidate like a Real Journalist. Harris agreed to a pre-taped interview conducted by Baier that aired on Wednesday’s edition of “Special Report,” which we were assured aired unedited.

Their chat began politely. Harris even played to Baier's vanity by saying, “I know you investigate, and you are a serious journalist.” Nearly everything that happened after that showed he is not, and she knew it. First came a boneheaded pop quiz: “How many illegal immigrants would you estimate your administration has released in the last three and a half years? Just a number. Do you think it's one million? Three million?” As Harris tried to speak, he eagerly talked over her. "I was beginning to answer you," she said after he promised he'd get to another version of the question he'd already asked.

Then came his demand that Harris confirm whether she will continue “using taxpayer dollars to help prison inmates or detained illegal aliens to transition to another gender” and attempts to goad Harris into 1) apologizing to mothers of women murdered by undocumented migrants and 2) calling Trump voters stupid.

The true high/low point came when Harris brought up Trump’s multiple references to “enemies from within” and his stated intent to turn the military on those who disagree with him.

Baier thought he was ready for her, throwing to a clip from a Fox town hall that aired earlier that conveniently edited out the section showing him saying those very things.

What he might not have expected was Harris calling out that fallacy.

“Bret, I’m sorry and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within’ that he has repeated when he is speaking about the American people. That's not what you just showed,” Harris said.

Baier insisted the clip was Trump’s response to a question about those statements, and Harris rightly countered, “You didn’t show that, and here’s the bottom line: He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people.”

Baier absolutely knows that. Trump used the phrase on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday morning program and at his rally in Aurora, Colo., on Friday. Baier discussed and tried to sane-wash Trump's usage of the phrase on his Oct. 15 show. But he also knows the typical Fox viewer won't fact-check him, especially if that would prove the evil liberals might be on to something.

Harris’ broadly-promoted Fox News interview is the latest must-watch event that has taken the place of additional debates. Most presidential candidates face each other three times, but Trump has refused to square off with Harris again. He's also pulled out of interviews with “60 Minutes” and CNBC, pitching instead to forums where he won't face harsh questions like Tuesday’s all-women Georgia town hall moderated by Harris Faulkner.

Its entirely female audience was overwhelmingly packed with supporters associated with local Republican women’s groups who, according to The Independent, were invited by Fox. CNN reports the network did not disclose that detail.

Meanwhile, Harris is engaging in her own media tour which included her own “60 Minutes” conversation.

Harris' campaign likely viewed a sit-down with Baier as an opportunity to prove she can withstand hostile questioning.

Regardless of her team's intent, Wednesday night’s face-off was never about Harris. It was meant to present Baier as a straight-shooting journalist despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Take the disclosures about Fox’s internal communications laid bare in the Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit filings, which revealed that after Fox became the first network to correctly call Arizona for Biden on Election Night in 2020, Baier suggested retracting the call out of fear of the Trump campaign’s wrath and that of his supporters.

“The sooner we pull it even if it gives us major egg. And put it back in his column. The better we are. In my opinion,” Baier wrote in an email message reported by the New York Times. Fox News did not pull the call, but did fire former political director, Chris Stirewalt and its DC managing editor Bill Sammon, the two figures that made its Decision Desk a formidable force in Election Night coverage.

And it subsequently slow-walked its Nevada call for Biden: “I have pressed them to slow,” Baier said in a text exchange with Tucker Carlson reported by The Daily Beast in 2023. “And I think they will slow walk Nevada. The votes don’t come in until tomorrow.”

Baier has since signed on to Fox News’ right-wing propagandizing, which showed through in his questions and the visuals backing them up.

To tee up his queries about the Biden administration's border policy failures, Baier played a clip of Alexis Nungaray, the mother of murder victim Jocelyn Nungaray, tearfully testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in a September hearing. Democrats on that committee characterized the hearing as an election season attack, citing the lack of related legislative proposals.

It's a highly strategic framing: no candidate can ever look good by calling the testimony of legitimately grieving mothers a political stunt.

But to ask Harris, “So do you owe them an apology, is what I’m saying?” is disingenuous posturing by a so-called newsman. To follow Harris’ expression of sorrow for her loss with “...But do you want to answer her?” is needless grandstanding, not fact-finding pressure.

Not long after that, Baier asked Harris why she thought 50% of the population supported Trump. “So are they misguided, the 50%? Are they stupid?”

Inside the Fox News bubble, Baier’s chaotic swinging impressed the guys in the dugout. After the interview, he consulted his colleagues Dana Perino, Martha MacCallum, and “The Five” co-host Harold Ford Jr. on how he did. Each gave him a nice “Attaboy.”

“I think it is great that she did the interview with Fox, and I think that it was amazing that you were the interviewer. I think that was an incredible 30 minutes well-spent by both of you,” Perino said, before calling Harris’ answers, such as they could be with someone prattling over her, “thin.”

From the outside, the industry reviews aside from the usual right-wing amplifiers were not uniformly glowing.

Few were expecting the showdown to do much for Harris, although Fox’s rivals were shocked to amusement by Fox’s selectively edited Trump clip.

“Brett Baier just used a soundbite to try to clear Donald Trump of saying a thing in which he cut out the part where he says it!” said an animated Chris Hayes, before playing the full clip of Trump telling the town hall assemblage, “It is the enemy from within, and they're very dangerous. They're Marxists and communists and fascists and they’re sick.”

Then he name-checks California Democratic congressional representatives Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi as “dangerous for our country, “so sick” and “so evil. “

“If you have a smart president, they can all be handled,” Trump says, before segueing into the relatively harmless section Baier played for Harris.

“You see what they did there? On their own network?” Hayes continued before snarkily pointing out the obvious: “We also have recording equipment here at 30 Rock, like a lot of other places, where you can just, you know, grab that.”

This matters, as Hayes cites, because Faulkner broached the question to give Trump a chance to retreat from his fascist rhetoric and he refused to take that hint.

Hayes and other MSNBC anchors aren’t taking shots at Baier and Fox News to defend journalistic sanctity, mind you. “Donald Trump has no choice but to come on MSNBC for an interview," Hayes declares at the end of the segment . . . which is hilarious to seriously insist and even more hysterical to imagine.

But that is what we’re left with now at this point in the race – special fan service appearances disguised as journalistic exercises.

Baier pleased Trump and his base while fumbling the opportunity to venture beyond culture war claptrap to press Harris on issues with a real and direct bearing on the average American’s life.

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There were no inquiries about her plans to ease the housing shortage, remedy the rising cost of living or expand healthcare coverage. The only question about the economy was feelings-based and asked Harris to be either a psychic or a psychoanalyst: “Why do you think more people say they trust [Trump] on the economy than they trust you?

His foreign policy segment consisted of a trick question asking her opinion on who America’s greatest enemy is. (She answered Iran, when to the MAGA viewership, the correct answer is China . . . depending on what day it is.) Then – for fun, I guess? – Baier tried to get Harris to weigh in on whether, and when, she thought that President Joe Biden’s “mental faculties appeared diminished.”

It is telling that Baier played back clips from “The View” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” to demand she address the question of what she would have done differently from Biden, as opposed to the same segment on “60 Minutes.”  Maybe the intended effect was to make his questions look harder-hitting than those posed by jovial entertainers. I shouldn’t have to point this out, but that’s a given for a network news anchor.

There’s also a difference between probing a candidate’s statements for weak points and showboating to please the man Baier was afraid to anger on election night 2020.

"I would like that we would have a conversation that is grounded in a full assessment of the facts,” Harris said at the conversation’s close. “…I think this interview is supposed to be about the choices that your viewers should be presented about this election and the contrast is important.”

Harris fulfilled her side of the bargain by showing up. Baier failed by neglecting to do anything rigorous or useful with that opportunity. And somewhere Wallace, who now has a CNN show, must be relieved to know his previous election season work set a journalistic bar that his old network's successors have yet to clear.