Jon Stewart struggles to hide shock at Kamala Harris’s bold claim that Biden was ‘fully competent’ to serve another term
Jon Stewart was visibly stunned after former Vice President Kamala Harris said she believed Joe Biden was ‘fully qualified’ to serve another term in the White House.
On his podcast, The Weekly Show, the host criticized Harris during her time in office and asked why she believes she lost to Donald Trump in last November’s election.
Harris said she regretted not being able to draw a clearer distinction between herself and Biden during her failed presidential bid, but insisted she was not ‘talking about competence’.
‘I’m not talking about competence at all. “No, I believe he is fully qualified to serve,” he said.
‘Are you really like that?’ Stewart responded.
‘I do,’ said Harris, to which Stewart replied: ‘It actually surprised me.’
Before ending her re-election race, Harris argued that Biden’s repeated gaffes were due to the pressures of the campaign and said he still had the “stamina to govern” behind the scenes.
‘Running for president of the United States means running a marathon at the speed of a sprinter, having tomatoes thrown at you with every step you take,’ he said.
‘And being the sitting president while doing this is too much to be the sitting president. Too much.”
Jon Stewart was visibly shocked after former Vice President Kamala Harris said she believed Joe Biden was ‘fully qualified’ to serve another term in the White House.
Harris insisted Biden “has the stamina to govern” and said she stood by him when he faced pressure to distance himself because she “cares deeply about him.”
Stewart appeared unimpressed with Harris’ stance on Biden’s competence, questioning whether a person who struggled to campaign had the skills to lead a nation.
‘I think it’s hard for people to accept that he doesn’t have the stamina to run, but he has the stamina to manage,’ he said.
Stewart asked Harris why she stood behind Biden throughout his campaign and supported many of his policies; Harris said she “cared deeply for him.”
‘I didn’t want to pile on the criticism he faced. “I didn’t think it was necessary,” Harris said.
‘I also realized that I didn’t fully understand how big of an issue it was for some people to separate myself from it. ‘I felt the distinction between him and me was quite clear.’
‘If I had known what I know now, I probably would have approached it a little differently,’ he added.
Harris appeared on the podcast as part of a promotional tour for her new book, 107 Days, which details her perspective on her four-month campaign for the White House.
Harris said she regretted not being able to draw a clearer distinction between herself and Biden during her unsuccessful presidential bid, but insisted she was “not talking about competence.”
The former Vice President has come under scrutiny for some of the references in his book, including his open admission that he regrets not dropping Biden from the 2024 campaign sooner.
In an excerpt from the book, Harris admitted: ‘During all these months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Maybe.
‘Of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to argue that he should leave. I knew it would be incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run away.’
‘He might have seen it as naked ambition, perhaps poisonous infidelity,’ he wrote.
Harris also explained that going into the 2024 campaign, she automatically follows the “mantra” set by the White House that if Biden wants to win re-election, that is the decision he will make with his family.
‘Was this a blessing or indifference?’ Harris asked. ‘Looking back I think it was reckless. The stakes were very high. This was not a choice to be left to the individual’s ego or ambition. This had to be more than a personal decision.’
Harris’ remarks about Biden’s position in her book led to attacks from the president’s former aides shortly after she began her promotional tour.
A former Biden White House official said: axios He said in September that Harris was ‘not good at work at all.’
“He had essentially zero role in any of the key workflows in the administration and was instead dropping bombs for stilted photo ops that revealed just how out of depth he was,” the official said.
Another former official said Harris can’t blame Biden for losing the 2024 campaign, despite his claim that ‘107 days’, as she calls her book, are not enough to run a successful campaign.
“The independent variable there is not Biden or his aides, but the vice president,” the aide said.
