Former Vice President Kamala Harris was labeled as “sick” by the Trump administration after she likened Donald Trump to “Communist dictators” and called him a “tyrant” with a “fragile ego.”
Harris, who’s currently promoting her new book 107 Days, appeared on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show on Monday (Sept. 22), where she shared her candid thoughts on the Trump administration and MAGA.
In a snippet shared on X from the “Official White House Rapid Response account,” Harris stated, “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 dictators. That’s what we’re dealing with right now in Donald Trump and these titans of industry are not speaking up and 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 and I get that. I understand why they do. 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.”
The White House responded by tweeting, “SICK: 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 tweeted from this own account, “I cannot overstate the pleasure it brings everyday to walk into the office this woman will never occupy.”
Throughout the 40-minute interview, Harris continued to call out those who didn’t “speak up” against Trump. With her being “a lifelong public servant,” she believed “that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy, for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions.”
Harris added, “They have been silent […] It’s not like they’re gonna lose their yacht or their house in the Hamptons.”
She spoke on the attacks on the First Amendment and noted, “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.”
Harris also spoke on MAGA, saying the agenda has been “decades in the making” and is bigger than Donald Trump.
“Project 2025 didn’t just drop out of thin air,” she stated. “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.”
Watch the full sit-down above.