Former Vice President Kamala Harris has been branded “sick” by the Trump administration after she labeled Donald Trump a “tyrant” who has a “fragile ego”.
She laid waste to Trump and his efforts to curtail free speech, to use merger rules as political leverage, his attacks on government, and the MAGA mutiny he is leading.
In a passionate, 40-minute interview, Harris called out the “titans of industry” in the business and corporate world for not “speaking up” about Trump and instead capitulating to his demands.
She noted that as “a lifelong public servant” who has worked with the private sector, she always believed “that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy, for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions.”
“They have been silent,” Harris said, calling them “feckless” for bending to Trump’s “outrageous demands.”
“It’s not like they’re gonna lose their yacht or their house in the Hamptons,” she added, before stating, “Right now we are dealing with, as I called him at my speech on the Ellipse, a tyrant.”
“We used to compare the strength of our democracy to communist significantors,” she noted. “That’s what we’re dealing with right now in Donald Trump. And these titans of industry are not speaking up.”
Harris mentioned the Jimmy Kimmel incident, where ABC bowed to conservative pressure to take the late-night talk show host off the air briefly last week. She also referenced several billion-dollar corporate mergers that have required approval by the Trump-steered Federal Communications Commission.
“Perhaps it is because his threats and the way he has used the weight of the federal government to take out vengeance on his critics is something that they fear,” Harris said. “And I get that. We’ve seen the demonstration of it. Perhaps it is because they want to please him and nominate him for a Nobel prize.”
“Perhaps it’s because they want a merger approved, or they want to avoid an investigation,” she continued.
“But at some point, they’ve got to stand up for the sake of the people who rely on all of these institutions to have integrity and to, at some point, be the guardrails against a tyrant who is using the federal government to execute his whim and fancy because of a fragile ego.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
The bold statements from Harris riled up some key MAGA voices.
The White House’s Rapid Response 47 X account called Harris “SICK,” posting a clip of the MSNBC interview, stating, “Failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris is inciting violence on MSDNC, calling the duly elected President of the United States—who escaped two assassination attempts—a ”tyrant.””
White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair also shared some of Harris’ interview with the caption on X, “I cannot overstate the pleasure it brings everyday to walk into the office this woman will never occupy.”
Podcast host Katie Miller also joined in, posting on her X account. “This lame rhetoric didn’t work on Americans in the last election, and it won’t work now. She’s just so bad at this.”
Miller’s podcast has just over 5,000 subscribers on YouTube, with only one of her interviews getting over 10,000 views.
During her Monday interview, Harris said the MAGA agenda has been “decades in the making” and is bigger than Donald Trump.
“Project 2025 didn’t just drop out of thin air,” Harris said. “That’s a product of decades of work. The implementation of a plan that’s about trying to get rid of the Department of Education, deregulate industries, weaken the rule of law… creating a system and through gerrymandering states, so that we would now have the Supreme Court that we have.”
“So when we talk about where the fight must go,” she added, “there is the aspect of it that is about the immediate moment, such as the weight of the federal government being used to silence critics, citizens, and it must be about understanding that this did not just happen overnight. And we have to pay attention to an agenda that is not going to necessarily go away when this guy is finally termed out of office.”