EXCLUSIVE — When former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard was a Democrat, she made political waves by criticizing then-California Sen. Kamala Harris for her prosecutorial record during one of their 2020 presidential primary campaign debates.
Now Gabbard has this advice for former President Donald Trump before his debate against Harris next month: Make your case against the vice president based on her character.
“It’s about her character,” Gabbard told the Washington Examiner. “That was really what I exposed in that debate in 2019 when we were both candidates running for president, was her hypocrisy and how she would say one thing and do another. She would hold people, the people, to one standard and hold herself to a different standard. I challenged her on the record that she claimed to be proud of, and she had nothing to say to defend that record. Not much has changed between then and now.”
Gabbard’s advice is somewhat at odds with other Trump supporters who are imploring the former president to criticize Harris’s policies rather than her personality. But, on the sidelines of the Moms for Liberty National Summit in Washington, the Army Reserve officer contended he could do both.
“If I can be helpful to him in any way, it really is just sharing the experience that I’ve had with her on the debate stage and how she will try to hide, deflect away from, distract away from the truth, the truth about who she is and her record, and the fact that the policies, at least so far that she has talked about just a little bit, stand diametrically opposed to her record,” she said. “She is a fake person who cannot be trusted and who cares only about herself and her political ambition and not about the American people.”
During an interview, Gabbard provided scant details on Trump’s debate preparation, with which she is helping him before his Sept. 10 matchup with Harris on ABC. The former president told reporters this week that he is “not spending a lot of time on it.”
“I think my whole life, I’ve been preparing for a debate,” Trump said. “Basically, you have to be real. You can’t cram 30 years of knowledge in your head in one week. There’s a little debate prep, but I’ve always done it more or less the same way.”
In 2019, Gabbard accused Harris of prosecuting more than 1,500 people for marijuana offenses when she was San Francisco‘s district attorney and California’s attorney general and then laughing when she was asked by The Breakfast Club radio program that year “if she ever smoked marijuana.” Gabbard then alleged Harris “blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so” when she was the state’s attorney general.
Gabbard was referring to the 1983 quadruple murder case of Kevin Cooper afterHarris’s office declined to order advanced DNA testing. Former California Gov. Jerry Brown and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA)’s decision to do so has not overturned Cooper’s conviction so far. However, the courts never demanded that Harris conduct the tests,according to the Washington Post.
But, five years later, Gabbard is more focused on Harris’s vice presidency and is encouraging Trump to do the same on the debate stage.
“She’s been the vice president of the United States for the last 3 1/2 years, a breath away from the presidency, someone who she says is the last person in the room with President [Joe] Biden when he’s making a decision,” Gabbard said. “She has cast more tiebreaking votes in the United States Senate than any other vice president in history. She has not been some passive person sitting in the corner. She is responsible for every policy that the Biden-Harris administration has pushed forward in these last 3 1/2 years, policies that she has said time and time again she is proud of, touting their success.
“It’s not about tying her to Biden, it’s tying her to her own record,” she added. “She has very intentionally tied herself as vice president to Joe Biden, pointing out, both of them, that there is no space between them when it comes to policy, that they were a team, that they did everything together. This is about holding her to account for her record and sharing the truth with the American people that Kamala Harris is trying to hide with her lies.”
Gabbard argued that Harris’s Democratic Party is not the party that she and another former Democrat-turned-Trump-endorser, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., were part of for so long. In addition to embroiling the U.S. in “multiple wars,” Gabbard cited what she called “tyrannical” aspects of the Biden-Harris administration regarding censorship “through proxies like Facebook and Meta” and increasing economic hardship across the country.
“President Trump is showing that he has the ability to bring people together who may not agree on every issue, may have strong disagreements on a few or many issues, but who are coming together around the most fundamental, important issues to us as Americans in peace and freedom,” she said.
Gabbard predicted the 2024 election could have echoes of 2016 in that some supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted for Trump over Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton that cycle, particularly because of the economy. Gabbard, herself, resigned as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee to endorse Sanders that year but cast a ballot for Clinton in the fall.
“Why is that? Because they saw what many people are seeing now,” Gabbard said. “You saw some of the populist policies of Bernie Sanders or some of the populist policies that President Trump had then and continues to have now, fighting for the working man and woman in our country. He’s talking about no taxes on tips, no taxes on Social Security. He’s talking about the people who are struggling to survive right now in this tough economic environment that’s been created by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.”
Besides the debate, Gabbard is also helping Trump appeal to independents, including by hosting a town hall with him in La Crosse, Wisconsin, the night before she sat down with the Washington Examiner, as Harris makes her own pitch. Gabbard approved, too, of the former president’s recent appearances on podcasts.
“It’s reaching people however and wherever we can,” she said. “People are consuming information, media, in a lot of different ways right now.”
Shortly after Gabbard endorsed Trump, the former president announced she and Kennedy would be members of his transition team. Although the team has not yet met, Gabbard hoped Trump’s Day One priorities would include undermining the “national security state” and cutting to “the heart of the swamp of Washington.”
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“That includes elected politicians and a whole lot of unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state who unfortunately have gotten to a point where they believe that they are more important and more powerful than the voices of the people and that they will do what is in their best interest at the cost of our liberty,” she said.
Similar to Kennedy, Gabbard indicated she would serve in a second Trump administration to lead “that change” if the former president asked her.
