Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, answered questions in a CNN town hall with anchor Anderson Cooper Wednesday night. She repeatedly condemned her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, in the harshest of terms, even saying that she thinks he is a fascist.
The Daily Signal fact-checked many of her claims.
‘Terminate the Constitution’
Harris touted the fact that former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., endorsed her against Trump. The vice president said Cheney backed her due to “a legitimate fear, based on Donald Trump‘s words and actions, that he will not obey an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
“He himself has said he would terminate the Constitution of the United States,” she added.
The claim traces back to a post Trump wrote on Truth Social on Dec. 3, 2022. In that post, the former president wrote of the 2020 presidential election, “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
He added, “Our great ‘Founder’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
Fellow Republicans criticized his comments, and Trump later clarified that he would not terminate the Constitution.
In a follow-up post, he condemned the legacy media’s interpretation of his post.
“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Dec. 5, 2022.
Hitler’s Generals
Harris said she believed Trump is a fascist and she repeatedly tied him to the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Harris claimed that Trump said to his generals “in essence, why can’t you be more like Hitler’s generals?”
The vice president was referencing an Atlantic article by Jeffrey Goldberg citing anonymous sources, claiming Trump said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
Trump spokesman Alex Pfeiffer said the claim is “absolutely false,” and that “President Trump never said this.”
That article claimed Trump ordered then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows not to pay for the funeral of 20-year-old Army private Vanessa Guillén, calling her a “f—ing Mexican.” Meadows denied the story and Guillén’s sister accused The Atlantic of “exploiting my sister’s death for politics.”
‘Suckers and Losers’
Harris claimed that Trump referred to members of the military as “suckers and losers,” that “he demeans people who have taken an oath to sacrifice their life for our country.”
The claim that Trump called members of the military “suckers” and “losers” originates from a 2020 article published in The Atlantic relying on anonymous sources. Trump has consistently disputed the reports.
‘Price Gouging’
Harris attributed inflation to “price gouging.” When CNN’s Cooper asked her about whether the Trump administration or the Biden administration was responsible for inflation, she suggested that her experience as attorney general in California would help her fight inflation.
“How I come to it is probably a new approach grounded in a lot of my experiences as a former attorney general, where I took on price gouging and part of my plan is to create a new approach that is the first time that we will have a national ban on price gouging, which is companies taking advantage of the desperation and need of the American consumer and jacking up prices without any consequence or accountability,” she said.
Other Democrats, such as President Joe Biden and Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., have attributed inflation to companies’ greed.
As Heritage Foundation Research Fellow EJ Antoni pointed out, there is a far more obvious culprit: government spending.
As Antoni noted, “One of the functions of money is that of a measuring tool. If a yardstick were to shrink from 36 inches down to just 30, it would take 120 of these shortened yardsticks to cover the distance of a football field, instead of 100. As the dollar has lost value, it takes more dollars to measure the value of the things we buy.”
While Americans feel the pain of inflation, so do businesses. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “businesses have gotten the short end of the stick,” Antoni explained. “The producer price index is used to measure inflation on the products and services businesses buy—sometimes called wholesale inflation—and that index has risen 17.5% since Biden took office. Conversely, the consumer price index, the widely cited metric for inflation faced by American families, is up 17.1% over that same time.”
“Businesses have actually been sheltering consumers from some cost increases in an effort to maintain market share and not lose customers,” he wrote. “That also explains why, according to the Biden administration’s Census Bureau, total corporate profits have fallen for the last six quarters after adjusting for inflation.”
“If alleged price gouging were really the cause of inflation, did businessmen magically become greedy when Biden took office?” Antoni asked. “Were corporations never greedy in the 40 years leading up to Biden’s inflationary expansion of government? Businesses haven’t even passed all their higher costs on to consumers; if they’re trying to be greedy, they’re doing it all wrong.”
‘Women Have Died’
When discussing state abortion laws in the wake of the Supreme Court striking down the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade (1973) in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), Harris claimed, “Women have died because of these laws.”
She has repeatedly mentioned the name Amber Nicole Thurman, suggesting that she died due to Georgia’s law restricting abortion.
Yet Thurman died after she took the abortion pill, which caused complications and left parts of her twin unborn babies inside her.
Thurman legally obtained abortion pills in North Carolina to end the lives of her unborn twins, but she could not know without an ultrasound (which the FDA had required only a few years beforehand). Five days later, she began to abort the twins, but both babies’ remains remained in her uterus. She began to develop sepsis and went to the hospital.
Doctors hospitalized her, but she died before they could perform a dilation and curettage to remove the remaining parts of her unborn babies.
Harris blamed Thurman’s death on a law restricting abortion, but the law would not prevent the removal of the babies’ remains when they were already dead. The FDA’s loosened restrictions on the abortion pill, not Georgia’s law, is arguably to blame for this tragic death.
Prefer to Run on the Problem
Harris repeated her claim that Trump killed a bipartisan border bill earlier this year “because he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
Yet critics have warned that the bill would have cemented Biden’s open-border policies into law.
Cooper pressed Harris on why the Biden administration used executive orders to reverse many Trump border policies in January 2021. He noted that illegal aliens crossed the border in large numbers after those orders, and the numbers only decreased when Biden issued other executive orders. He asked her whether she regrets the weaker border policies.
Harris replied that only Congress could solve the ultimate problem. Cooper again pressed her on whether Biden should have issued the 2024 executive orders sooner, and she replied, “I think we did the right thing.”
(For more from the author of “Fact-Checking the Kamala Harris CNN Town Hall” please click HERE)
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr
