Since being made “border crisis manager” 81 days ago, Kamala Harris has infamously refused to visit the border. Meanwhile, the border crisis has intensified, with record-breaking surges of illegal migrants overwhelming our border patrol agents, thousands of unaccompanied minors abandoned in the desert and drug cartels profiting off the humanitarian disaster. Now, with voices on the right and left subjecting Harris to legitimate scrutiny on her avoidance of the crisis, the vice president is laughing off their questions — literally — in a stunning show of dismissiveness from someone who claims to be a leader.
In March, when the true scale of the humanitarian crisis was becoming horrifyingly clear, a reporter asked Harris if she planned to visit the border. “Not today,” she responded, bursting into laughter. She did the same thing earlier this week during an interview with NBC when journalist Lester Holt asked the same question. The cringeworthy exchange went as follows:
Lester Holt: Do you have any plans to visit the border?
Kamala Harris: At some point, we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border…
Lester Holt: You haven’t been to the border.
Kamala Harris: And I haven’t been to Europe! (bursts into laughter)
It is no laughing matter when toddlers are filmed being dropped over walls or heartbreakingly crying out as smugglers abandon them. It is no laughing matter when evil drug cartels turn a massive profit from this crisis, or when men on the FBI terror watch list waltz into our country. It is no laughing matter when migrants, drawn by the promise of the Biden-Harris open borders agenda, drown in the Rio Grande.
Americans understand the necessity for secure borders and the pressing need to address this humanitarian crisis. Why doesn’t Kamala Harris? Why does she keep failing to answer simple, good-faith questions about her pronounced absence in a time of abject crisis? On one level, she’s just not a great vice president. Remember, this is the former senator who desperately painted her now-boss Joe Biden as a racist before performing so badly in Iowa that she immediately dropped out of the 2020 presidential race. But on another level, her laughter — dismissive and offensive as it might be — signals a fundamental discomfort with the impact of her and Biden’s disastrous policies.
Harris has seen the numbers. She should know how bad this crisis is. Right now, Customs and Border Protection agents are arresting nearly 6,000 illegal immigrants a day, the highest number in over two decades. Seizures of the deadly smuggled drug Fentanyl are spiking, with more fentanyl seized so far in 2021 than throughout all of 2020. The flood of migrants includes thousands of children with nowhere to go, preyed on by vicious cartels. Human rights groups estimate that a significant percentage of women who make the dangerous journey to our border are raped along the way. With a situation that disastrous, it makes sense that Harris is uncomfortably laughing and trying to change the subject. Approaching this crisis with appropriate solemnity would force Biden and Harris to grapple with the humanitarian devastation their failed policies have created.
In other words, owning up to the crisis and visiting the border would require accountability and leadership. Through peals of camera-ready laughter, Kamala Harris has steadily refused to provide anything of the sort.
Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) has served as chair of the Republican National Committee since 2017.