Returning Saturday from a five-day trip to Paris, Vice President Kamala Harris faced staff defections, rivals blanketing cable news networks, and an onslaught on media leaks.
Aides worked overtime to prevent off-the-cuff foibles while abroad. But awaiting Harris in Washington was a near 5,000-word report detailing a slew of frustrations between the vice president, President Joe Biden, and assorted White House staff.
While Biden and Harris both face sinking poll numbers, Harris’s typically fall lower, calling into question their ability to rally Democrats ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
In Harris’s vice presidential office, turnover has sparked other repeated questions about the vice president’s longevity in the role and her prospects for future office.
On Thursday, the White House confirmed that Harris’s communications director, Ashley Etienne, was leaving the administration.
Etienne, a former top aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama, was locked in an impossible position.
“If she isn’t able to generate one positive or productive story on our historic VP, then that’s probably not an Ashley deficiency,” a senior House leadership aide told the Washington Examiner, adding that she “probably felt tied from a professional standpoint.”
The aide said Etienne had only to weigh her responsibilities inside the administration with the opportunities outside.
Sunday’s report said Harris’s chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, has struggled to recruit new staff.
Flournoy has been turned down by several people unwilling to join the office, “and several people currently on staff have started to reach out to contacts to say they’re looking to leave,” sources told CNN.
Some Democratic Party officials told the Washington Examiner that Harris had failed to guard against slip-ups, such as when she did not counter a student who accused Israel of “ethnic genocide” before Harris was set to speak at a university about voting rights.
Other Democrats blamed the White House, wondering how a notoriously tight-lipped administration continued to spew unflattering stories about the vice president.
For Harris, the scrutiny is acute.
During a visit to Guatemala earlier this year, the vice president was pressed repeatedly by NBC News’s Lester Holt over her intention to visit the U.S.-Mexico border as illegal immigration surged and she took on the role of stemming the number of attempted crossing from countries in Central America.
Appearing frustrated, Harris retorted, “And I haven’t been to Europe.” The response set off a firestorm over what some viewed as her flippant response to a significant domestic concern.
Soon after, Harris angered far-left Democrats when she said people in the region should not attempt to immigrate illegally to the United States and would be returned, telling them, “Do not come.”
“If you come to our border, you will be turned back,” Harris said during a press conference with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei in Guatemala City.
The interview, taped at the start of her trip, set a combative tone.
In Paris, Harris kept a distance from the traveling press pool, ignored shouted questions on fraught issues, and avoided local media interviews. While a video of Harris speaking at the Pasteur Institute drew attention in Washington under the premise that she was speaking in a French accent, among locals, her first few days essentially went unnoticed.
Notably, a bilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron garnered no Elysee Palace statement. Harris’s media availability throughout was tightly vetted, with the vice president keeping to an unerring script.
Asked on her final day about what she had learned that would prepare her for the presidency, Harris responded to the Washington Examiner only to the state of the two nations’ relationship.
But with the trip still underway, former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, a member of the Biden campaign’s vice presidential search committee and a presidential confidant, stirred questions about who might succeed Biden should he choose not to run.
“I’m hoping the president runs for reelection,” Dodd told the New York Times. “But for whatever reason that might not be the case, it’s hard to believe there would be a short list without Kamala’s name on it. She’s the vice president of the United States.”
Biden has said he plans to run for reelection, but he will turn 79 this weekend, his advanced age leaving open the possibility that this could change.
