President-elect Donald Trump called out Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign strategy during an interview with Time Magazine, after he was named their "Person of the Year."
When asked by the magazine what Harris' worst mistakes were, Trump pointed to Harris' media strategy.
"I think that when she wouldn't talk to anybody, it shone a light on her. In other words, if she would have gone out and just did interviews," Trump began. "She didn't do anything. And people said, Is there something wrong with her? Why would they? I mean, I'm doing this interview with you. I did interviews with, if I had the time, anybody that would ask, I'd do interviews. I think the Joe Rogan interview, you know, that went on for almost three and a half hours."
Prior to the election, the Trump campaign denied that it had ever formally accepted an invitation for Trump to sit for a "60 Minutes" interview, after CBS News claimed he had backed out.
TRUMP-VANCE TICKET HAS DONE COMIBINED 105 INTERVIEWS SINCE AUGUST COMPARED TO 103 FOR HARRIS-WALZ
Harris didn't sit for an interview for over a month after President Biden announced he was dropping out, and she became his replacement on top of the Democratic ticket. Toward the end of August, she ramped up her traditional media appearances, as well as podcast interviews, following her first joint sit down with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz.
"But it's an interesting question when you ask about her. I think they made a big tactical mistake by literally not talking to the press, even if a really friendly, I mean, and they had almost all friendly, somebody would come up with a really friendly—like you guys, maybe—but a friendly interview, and they turned everybody down. They wouldn't do the basic. And people, including me, would start to say, is there something wrong with her? What's wrong? Why wouldn't you do some basic interviews?" the president-elect said.
Trump told Time Magazine that Harris's interviews that didn't go as well for her wouldn't have gotten as much attention if she had done other ones.
"In other words, if she did those same interviews, but she did another 15 interviews, you know, you wouldn't have really noticed it that much," he said.
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"She put so much emphasis on interviews. Somebody thought there was something wrong, and I don’t think she ever recovered from that," he added.
Trump and Harris both turned to podcasts and nontraditional media sources throughout their campaigns. Harris notably sat for an interview with the "Call her Daddy" podcast, hosted by Alex Cooper.
Harris' top campaign aides were frustrated by what they described as a "narrative" about Harris not doing interviews.
"I do think a narrative, 107 days… two weeks talking about how she didn't do interviews, which you know she was doing plenty, but we were doing in our own way, we had to be the nominee, we had to find a running mate, and do a roll-out, I mean there was all these things that you kind of want to factor in. But real people heard, in some way, that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump, that I think that was a problem," Dillon told "Pod Save America" host Dan Pfeiffer in the weeks following the election.
