Vice President Kamala Harris blatantly plagiarized her April 2007 testimony before Congress as California attorney general. In 2012, she cited a plagiarized story about a fictional sex trafficking victim in a taxpayer-funded report. These egregious instances of plagiarism, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, should not come as a surprise to those who have followed Harris's upward-failing career in politics. Media reports, including comments from her (many) former staffers, suggest that, in addition to being an abusive, self-absorbed boss, Harris is also profoundly lazy.
"You can’t run the country if you can’t run your campaign," former Harris aide Gil Duran told the New York Times in 2019, several days before Harris ended her disastrous primary campaign. The Times report portrayed Harris as unable to "make difficult personnel choices," a candidate prone to "hazy talk" who "struggles to carry a message beyond the initial script" and whose "personal political convictions can be unclear." It would appear that little has changed.
More reports of dysfunction surfaced shortly after Harris was sworn in as vice president. Current and former staffers complained to Politico in June 2021 that "decisions were dragged out," and that Harris "refuse[d] to take responsibility for delicate issues and blame[d] staffers for the negative results that ensue." The report came several weeks after Harris's infamous interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, during which she struggled to explain why she hadn't visited the southern border. "This whole thing about the border, we've been to the border," she said. When Holt correctly pointed out she had not been to the border, Harris lost her composure. "And I haven't been to Europe," she huffed. "And, I mean, I don't, I don't understand the point that you're making."
The White House was shocked by Harris's childish response to such an obvious question. "To Biden's staff it was a strange and disappointing turn for the vice president," reporters Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin wrote in This Will Not Pass. "Holt's question had been entirely foreseeable, and yet Harris had seemed totally thrown. Had her staff failed to prepare her, or was the vice president just a very uneven performer?" Biden's communications director at the time, Kate Bedingfield, grew "weary" of defending Harris and privately complained that Harris had repeatedly "fallen short of sky-high expectations" throughout her career, which included a "messy" Senate office and "fiasco" of a primary campaign. "Perhaps, [Bedingfield] suggested, the problem was not the vice president's staff."
In December 2021, the Washington Post published yet another article about how Harris's dysfunctional office was struggling to retain staff, which suggested the vice president's laziness was at least partly to blame. "Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared," the Post reported. One former staffer complained that Harris was not "somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work," which meant aides were subjected to "a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism."
Burns and Martin's book, published in 2022, contained a number of revelations about Harris's unwillingness to prepare and do any actual work as vice president. For example, the authors reported that Biden aides "privately mocked" Harris's suggestion that she be put in charge of "overseeing relations with the Nordic countries." Democratic lawmakers were reportedly flummoxed by Harris's lack of involvement in the Biden administration's effort to push their legislative agenda through Congress. "Visitors from the Hill saw scant evidence that the vice president was actually shaping the administration's thinking," the authors wrote. "Her contact with lawmakers was mostly a matter of formalities ... heavy on small talk, with Harris asking about family but speaking little about policy or political strategy."
Harris was eventually tasked with leading the administration's efforts to advance so-called voting rights legislation, but that went about as well as her stewardship of the border crisis. "[Harris] had never become a leading actor in the Democratic effort to pass a voting bill on the Hill," Burns and Martin wrote. "Months after taking on the assignment, Harris had never spoken directly about the issue with [Senator Joe] Manchin, the most important Democratic, or with [Senator Lisa] Murkowski, the lone Republican who had backed any version of voting rights legislation in 2021."
Over the course of her media blitz in the closing weeks of the campaign, Harris has validated critics of her work ethic by failing to produce coherent answers to predictable questions. For example, during a friendly chat with the female co-hosts of The View, she managed to flub a relatively easy question about what she would do differently as president compared to Joe Biden. "There is not a thing that comes to mind," Harris said. That was her second attempt at answering the question. Her first was a rambling word salad about how much she loved small businesses.
"Everything about Kamala Harris, from whispers about her ignoring reports, berating staff for not preparing her properly, word salad non-answers to questions she knows will be coming, to this latest round of plagiarism examples point to one common thread: She is unimaginably lazy," wrote media observer John Ekdahl.
Former president Donald Trump, among others, agreed with that assessment, noting that Harris took the day off from the campaign on Tuesday, ostensibly to prepare for an NBC News interview that didn't go particularly well. "I can't get over it," Trump said. "Who the hell takes off? We have 14 days left, and she'll take a couple of more days off, too. You know why? She's lazy as hell, and she's got that reputation."