Not Like The Other: MSNBC Scores One Kamala Harris Interview — While Trump Gets Fawning Fox News Chats On The Reg

The news that Vice President Kamala Harris is doing a sit-down with MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle has led — and will lead — to a familiar chorus of criticisms that all ignore a simple fact: These things are not the same.

Harris has been crisscrossing the country with her new VP pick Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), but has taken criticism from the media for not giving a press conference and very few interviews in the opening month-plus of her campaign.

But since giving a CNN interview with Dana Bash , the vice president’s media strategy has begun to widen with increased interactions with the press on the campaign trail, including a Q&A with the NABJ , interviews with local and national radio, and podcast hosts, and others.

On Tuesday night, Harris taped an interview with a popular podcast, and on Wednesday morning MSNBC announced the Ruhle sit-down. Immediately there were criticisms that Harris wouldn’t face “tough” questions in a “friendly” setting — one which is often (wrongly) compared to Trump’s relationship with Fox News. This goes hand-in-hand with the dopey observation that, “Hey, at least Trump puts himself out there!”

Now, this is sort of a complicated subject and there’s a lot that I want to say, so I am going to sort of do The Weave and tie a whole bunch of things together. It’ll be genius.

VP Harris has taken a lot of shit for not doing a bunch of “tough interviews” or press conferences, and while those criticisms sound legitimate, here’s why they’re wrong.

Number one, the pace at which Harris has interacting with the media could be considered normal if there was any way to make that sort of a judgment. This race is is unprecedented in a way that is difficult for people to comprehend.

Jumping into a campaign from a cold stop after President Joe Biden’s bombshell dropout is not something against which any historical comparison can be made. Even if these types of engagements were any sort of a priority, they would be difficult to squeeze into the opening of such a campaign.

After a breakneck campaigning schedule and a hugely successful convention, Harris did do a major interview with CNN and has been ramping up media engagements with a variety of outlets and formats. So from a purely substantive standpoint, there’s not much of a gulf between a fair and realistic expectation, and what has happened. For the record Harris has done at least ten interviews, not counting Ruhle’s, and has taken questions from reporters at least five times since becoming the nominee.

But that CNN interview is a good example of why Harris is favoring engagements like podcasts and that Wired interview and the Oprah special and the National Association of Black Journalists Q&A, which, for some reason doesn’t count because Black journalists interviewing the Black vice president is just presumed to be a friendly encounter.

After weeks and weeks of pressure to sit down with a “tough” journalist, much of the interview consisted of Bash pitching Republican criticisms, including asking the obviously Black Kamala Harris to respond to Trump’s criticism that she isn’t really Black.

This is the same Dana Bash, who with Jake Tapper declined to interject while Trump told 50 lies during a debate that included accusing Biden of literally wanting to kill babies after they have been born, which is what a baby is, by the way. If someone is a baby, then they have by definition been born.

Now I do think a press conference would be politically advantageous to Harris, not because it would quiet any of the criticism — some people would not be satisfied and would simply pivot to saying “well what took so long” or “when can we have another one?” or “why didn’t she tell us if she’s Black?” — but because it would demonstrate to voters some of her best traits: her poise, her expertise, her skill.

But in a time economy like the one Harris is operating under, I can understand why it’s not much of a priority, especially when you see what reporters have done when they have gotten a chance to ask her questions. In one gaggle they literally asked her “when will you take more questions” literally while she was taking questions.

So not only is there a little to be gained politically from such engagements, there is also demonstrably little to be gained substantively. All this talk about giving the American people information is nonsense when you see what they actually ask. I’m pretty sure the American people know that she’s Black.

I would also like to digress for a moment on the subject of so-called friendly spaces.

Critics who invoke this premise do so in a way that positions those spaces not only as equal, but as existing in a vacuum, apart from any outside reality.

There is no reason why the National Association of Black Journalists should be considered a friendly space to one candidate and not the other, unless one of those candidates is an unrepentant racist who demonstrates his unrepentant racism in that exact space, as Trump did when he attacked the vice president over her race.

Even in that supposedly unfriendly space, one of the chairs was occupied by a Fox News Trump booster by the name of Harris Faulkner . I doubt Jessica Tarlov would be invited if Harris decided to go on Hannity .

Here’s another great example of this friendly space nonsense. I don’t know if anybody here remembers this but in 2016, Hillary Clinton went on MSNBC and was literally asked questions about her emails for 13 straight minutes.

I don’t know what the Harris equivalent of that would be, because it would be weird for someone to sit there for 13 minutes and ask her why she isn’t doing interviews during an interview, or maybe just sit there for 13 minutes are you sure you’re Black?

But knowing full well that this is what she would face, now try to understand that Trump literally just told Jewish people that they were putting themselves in danger by not voting for him, and like nobody’s asked him about that. Nobody hardly talks about it.

What would 13 minutes of somebody asking Trump why he is threatening Jewish people with danger even look like? Because there is no space, friendly, or unfriendly, where that is going to happen. And there are 1 million things almost as bad as that that just get swept under the rug because these things are not the same!

Which brings me to this notion that MSNBC and Stephanie Ruhle are a friendly space for Harris, and also that they are somehow similar to Fox News and Trump in that respect.

Of all of the MSNBC hosts that could have been chosen to interview Harris, Ruhle is the least ideological — she has a long history and expertise as a financial journalist, not exactly a seething cauldron of liberalism. Yes, her contempt for Trump is obvious as she demonstrated on last week’s episode of Real Time . But again that contempt doesn’t exist in a vacuum. She is not alone in noticing the fact that the things Trump says out loud would objectively be disastrous to the US economy. And that his capture by far right misogynists has already resulted in women dying as a result of the abortion laws he enabled.

But that doesn’t mean she will necessarily be friendly to Harris. It doesn’t mean she won’t ask tough questions. They might not be the same tough questions that Dana Bash would ask, but she has on the economy and will press for specifics. She will be carrying the load for colleagues who have questions about the Biden-Harris approach to Israel. Ditto immigration, where she is just as likely to be asked about her promise to dreamers as she would be on Fox, albeit with far fewer references to “illegals” and “invasions.”

But the most ridiculous thing about this comparison is best illustrated by Trump running mate JD Vance’s whining complaint upon hearing the news.

Vance rushed to X/Twitter to bleat , “This is legitimately pathetic for a person who wants to be president. Ruhle has explicitly endorsed Harris. She won’t ask hard Qs.”

Vance and Trump have been afforded literally hours and hours of truckling sycophantic airtime on Fox News for months and months and months. Remember when Republicans were whining about the vice president doing an interview with her running mate? Vance and Trump literally did joint interviews that were rolled out over the course of days and days and days with tough questions like so just how great are you going to make America again? And what will you do about the invasion of illegals? I’m paraphrasing, of course. They were probably much worse.

The list of Fox News and Trump-friendly media appearances is truly staggering. Since his fawning joint interview with Vance and Jesse Watters, Trump has had at least 22 interviews with Fox News, Fox Business Network, and Fox News Radio hosts. That doesn’t include the pathetic time he called Greg Gutfeld after he got dumped by the previous show when he rambled into a hard break.

That also doesn’t include the double-digit appearances Vance has made since becoming Trump’s running mate.

There’s also the obvious fact that MSNBC hasn’t been ordered to pay out 3/4 of $1 billion (that’s more than 200 Squid Game prizes) for promoting a lie that incited a riot of Harris supporters after months of damaging revelations about just how beholden MSNBC is to Harris and her supporters. These things are not the same!

Which is not to say that Harris should not go on Fox News. Somebody around here wrote a column to that effect not long ago. What she should do is agree to a Fox News Q&A that includes two Fox personalities of their choosing, two CNN personalities, and two MSNBC personalities. And I’d suggest Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy for Fox — those two sometimes blurt out uncomfortable truths despite their surroundings.

The last thing I will say is that there’s no doubt the MSNBC interview will be less strenuous than any interview. Trump would experience away from his safe spaces on Fox News and the rest of the right-wing news ecology. But there’s a reason for that.

There’s a reason why hurricanes and sun showers aren’t covered the same way — you’d sound stupid warning about a “Category 5 Rainbow.”

It’s just the fact that reality and facts are more friendly to Harris than Trump. Stephanie Ruhle would look silly sitting there asking Harris why she keeps attacking the woman who a judge says was raped by her or keeps making racist attacks on her opponent and Haitian people and anybody else or why she has a dipshit plan to bring down grocery prices by blocking the supply of imported food, etc. etc. etc. — because none of those things are true of Harris.

These. Things. Are. Not. The. Same.