Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic 2024 presidential nominee, ridiculed former Republican President Donald Trump’s wall on the southern border during her time in the U.S. Senate and the Biden White House.
She’s called the wall anti-immigrant, medieval, wasteful, a vanity project, and a complete waste of taxpayer money.
But with the presidential election 70 days away, the 59-year-old California politician has suddenly decided that Trump’s wall on the southern border is such a good idea that she’s adopted it as part of her official immigration policy platform.
“If she’s elected president, Kamala Harris pledges to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the wall along the southern border,” according to a new report from Axios, which cited unnamed Harris campaign officials.
Harris’ about-face on the border wall is a stunning reversal in a campaign that has been characterized by the candidate’s staff claiming, usually anonymously, that she doesn’t support the very policies she’s supported throughout her entire time in public office.
Harris stridently supported abolishing private health insurance in favor of “Medicare for All” — but has just recently disavowed that position, according to aides.
Harris once vociferously supported a ban on fracking, but now that she’s looking for votes in states like Pennsylvania, where fracking for natural gas supplies thousands of jobs, Harris campaign staffers insist she no longer supports such a policy.
But the immigration flip-flop is far and away the most spectacular policy reversal from the Democratic candidate.
As a Senator, Harris vowed in 2017 to vote against any funding for the construction of a southern border wall.
“On the subject of transnational gangs, let’s be perfectly clear, the President’s medieval vanity project is not going to stop them,” said Harris on the campaign trail in 2019.
Harris’ long-standing opposition to building a security wall on the southern border continued even after President Biden appointed her as “Border Czar” and tasked her with handling the illegal immigration crisis on behalf of the Biden Administration.
The dramatic shift in Harris border security policy comes after polling has shown that stronger border security is a winning issue for Republicans, and that the majority of Americans support mass deportations.
Even Axios appears to have grown tired of Harris campaign staffers insisting that Harris no longer supports policy positions she has consistently supported throughout her political career.
ABC News has also seemingly grown weary of Harris’s immigration inconsistencies, highlighting the hypocrisy of her new pro-border security political ad, which uses footage of the border wall — including sections that were constructed during the Trump Administration.
In addition to reversing herself of key policy items, Harris has also demonstrated a knack for copying policy ideas first embraced by the Trump campaign.
After Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), announced a plan to work towards a $5,000 tax credit per child.
“I’d love to see a child tax credit that’s $5,000 per child. But you, of course, have to work with Congress to see how possible and viable that is,” said Sen. Vance. “President Trump has been on the record for a long time supporting a bigger child tax credit, and I think you want it to apply to all American families.”
After Vance faced mockery from left-wing outlets for his plan to have “childless cat-ladies” subsidize the tax credits, Harris adopted a similar policy as her own, one-upping Vance by proposing a $6,000 tax credit.
She did the same thing after Trump proposed a policy to remove income tax from tips.
Harris, who supported a 2023 policy intended to help the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to better tax tips, changed her tune on that issue as well and mimicked Trump’s proposal.
It is unclear if Harris’ adoption of some of Trump’s policy will do more to draw voters away from him, or alienate her own base.
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