Democrats lauded it as the perfect pitch; Donald Trump dismissed it as “boring”, while fellow Republicans invoked derogatory terms like “gobbledygook”.
Between the two extremes, Kamala Harris appeared to have achieved what she wanted from Thursday’s groundbreaking CNN interview, given along with her running mate, Tim Walz – her first since become the Democratic presidential nominee.
Under fierce scrutiny after nearly six weeks of interview radio silence, the vice-president earned lavish praise from the Democratic base while denying Republicans a clear line of attack simply by avoiding major missteps of the type that undid Joe Biden’s candidacy in June’s climactic debate.
The performance is also unlikely to shake up a race that has reversed itself since Harris entered it and replaced Biden, flipping a narrow but solid Trump lead into a contest in which she is now firmly ahead.
A commentator with AZCentral.com – a news site in the key swing state of Arizona – called the performance “too sane to be great TV”, an implicit comparison with Trump’s frequently ostentatious media appearances.
Commenting on her championing of Biden’s record in office, the New York Times noted that “it turns out, Ms Harris is a better salesperson for Mr Biden’s accomplishments and defender of his record than he ever was”.
But the highest praise came from Harris’s party supporters.
“This interview with Dana Bash is a moment to recognize that it is absolutely under-appreciated that Vice President Harris is running a perfect campaign,” Bill Burton, a former deputy press secretary in Barack Obama’s presidency, posted on X.
“She took over a campaign that she did not hire. She added pieces to the team who have made it stronger. She ran a convention that was absolutely electric in its energy. And she stepped up to the biggest speech of her life and achieved at the highest level … She is a true inspiration.”
Ed Krassenstein, a pro-Democrat X user with 1m followers, wrote: “Kamala Harris is killing it. She’s showing she is a unifying, non-divisive force … Her poll numbers will go up after this interview.”
Another vocal Democratic supporter, Alex Cole, praised Harris for sidestepping a question from the interviewer, Dana Bash, on Trump’s recent comments denigrating her mixed racial identity, which the vice-president dismissed as “the same tired old playbook”.
“Kamala isn’t playing by Trump’s or the media’s rules. They can’t lay a hand on her,” Cole wrote. “Trump craves the attention.”
Harris’s low-key approach even won the grudging praise of the Republican pollster Frank Luntz when she vowed to enact a bipartisan immigration bill that Trump had pressured his GOP congressional allies into torpedoing.
“Harris reminding voters that Trump sunk a bipartisan immigration solution makes him look pretty bad. Smart approach,” Luntz wrote.
Predictably, the most forceful attacks came from Trump himself, who began went on the offensive even before the interview was broadcast.
On Harris’s response to being pressed on her abandonment of previous leftwing policy positions, Trump wrote: “Her answer rambled incoherently, and declared her ‘values haven’t changed.’ On that I agree, her values haven’t changed.”
A related post conjured up Trump’s frequent and bizarre depiction of Harris as a communist, reading simply: “Comrade Kamala: ‘My values have not changed.’”
after newsletter promotion
Under a Harris presidency, “America will become a WASTELAND,” Trump wrote, reverting to his habit of using block capitals.
He even took issue with the interview’s setting, a Black-owned restaurant in the historic Georgian city of Savannah, suggesting it made Harris look unpresidential.
“She was sitting behind that desk – this massive desk – and she didn’t look like a leader to me,” Trump said at a campaign event in Wisconsin. “I’ll be honest, I don’t see her negotiating with President Xi of China. I don’t see her with Kim Jong-un like we did with Kim Jong-un.”
Jason Miller, a Trump spokesperson and former presidential assistant, asked why the interview lasted only 27 minutes, well short of the hour CNN had slotted for it in its schedule.
“How many minutes of fluff filler did CNN have to run to make up for the ridiculously short interview?” he wrote, asking if the network was forced to “cut some of Kamala’s answers, and that’s why they couldn’t fill the hour?”
The rightwing Fox News channel highlighted the mocking responses of conservative commentators to Harris’s comments on the climate crisis, when she extolled her work on the Green New Deal and said the administration was “holding ourselves to deadlines around time”.
“Gobbledygook,” posted a conservative commentator, Steve Guest, on X. “The definition of a deadline is ‘the latest time or date by which something should be completed’.”
But having promised a presidency that would seek “consensus” and vowed to appoint a Republican to her cabinet, Harris may have noted with quiet satisfaction Trump’s ultimate verdict on her interview: “Boring!”
The judgment could have been a tacit admission that Harris’s performance had denied him a clear target as he prepares for a keynote debate with her in two weeks.
“On issue after issue, Harris signaled moderation and a gauzy centrism that has been the hallmark of every winning Democratic presidential campaign for decades,” Politico said on its Playbook column. “The interview suggested to us how tough Donald Trump’s job is now – and especially at the Sept. 10 debate.”