CNN’s Kaitlan Collins was not happy with Fox News’ handling of the Kamala Harris interview.
The host specifically called out Fox’s Bret Baier for not playing Donald Trump’s original “enemy inside” comments when he asked the vice president to respond to her response to her criticism of his comments.
Baier’s less than 30-minute interview with Harris on Wednesday was extremely contentious.
He complained that the VP showed up 15 minutes late for their pre-recorded sit-down in Pennsylvania and her team tried to interrupt it.
Collins was particularly critical of the way her news colleague presented Trump’s claims that the “enemy within” the US is more dangerous to him than external and foreign threats.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins disagreed with Fox News’ questioning of Vice President Kamala Harris over Donald Trump’s ‘enemy from within’ comments
“For the past eight years, those who want to keep us from achieving this future have slandered me, denounced me, sued me and tried to remove me from the ballot. And who knows? He may even have tried to kill me,” Trump said in his speech earlier this month.
“You know, I always say there’s an enemy within and there’s an enemy without,” Trump continued. ‘And if you are smart, the enemy from outside will not be a problem. Russia, China and North Korea, we won’t have a problem if you have a smart president. But we have an enemy from within who, I think, is much more dangerous than the enemy from without.”
Harris denounced Trump’s comments as evidence that he has become “more unhinged.”
But Trump responded to her criticism earlier on Wednesday during a town hall with Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, saying, “I’ve heard about that.” They said I was threatening. I don’t threaten anyone. They are the ones who threaten. They do false research. More research has been done on me than on Alphonse Capone. He was the biggest gangster.”
Baier asked Harris to respond to Trump’s answer, but the vice president took more issue with Baier’s failure to play up Trump’s original comments about the “enemy within” — and Collins seemed to agree with that assessment.
“With 20 days to go until the election, Vice President Kamala Harris has gone where she’s never gone before, and frankly, where no Democratic candidate has gone in quite some time. About Fox,” Collins said on her Wednesday evening program on The Source.
Baier’s Fox News interview with Harris, recorded in Pennsylvania Wednesday, was tense and combative at times
“The vice president campaigned for those few persuasive conservative voters in an interview that was controversial from the start,” she continued.
“Fox’s Bret Baier questioned the vice president about everything from immigration to trans rights to how she would be different from President Biden,” the CNN anchor continued. “She was interrupted several times while answering those questions. And there were tense conversations throughout the interview.”
“But it was perhaps this moment, when she was asked about Trump supporters, that things got incredibly heated,” she said before playing down the “enemy within” discussion.