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from https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/08/28/harris-border-wall-trump-illegal-immigration/74964956007/

Kamala Harris steals another idea from Trump. Now she wants to build the
wall – no joke.

The border wall is just the latest example of Kamala Harris'
backtracking on former stances. Her convictions seem about as deep as
what the polls tell her to support.
Portrait of Ingrid JacquesIngrid Jacques
USA TODAY

I thought I was reading a headline from The Babylon Bee when I saw on
Tuesday that Vice President Kamala Harris now wants to build the border
wall.

But it wasn’t satire.

Rather, the Democratic presidential nominee has decided she supports one
of former President Donald Trump’s signature ideas − and one despised by progressives.

Here's how left-leaning Axios described Harris' newfound desire to build
the wall: "It's the latest example of Harris flip-flopping on her past
liberal positions such as supporting Medicare for All and banning
fracking – proposals that aides say she now is against."

We haven’t gotten any explanations, either, as Harris hasn’t done a
single interview or press conference since President Joe Biden dropped
out of the race last month.

Finally, the campaign has agreed to an interview with CNN on Thursday,
but it won't just be Harris. Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz,
will be there, too. That makes it seem like Harris can't handle an
interview on her own and feels like a cop-out.

No there there:We need more than vibes to know what Kamala Harris is all
about

Just scheduling this one interview has caused a lot of consternation for Harris' campaign. I’m guessing a lot of that turmoil has to do with the
fact that Harris doesn’t have a coherent agenda for what her presidency
would look like. (The rest of the angst is tied to Harris’ general incompetence on camera when off teleprompter).

Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, second gentleman Doug
Emhoff, celebrate after she accepted the Democratic presidential
nomination on Aug. 22, 2024, in Chicago.
From 'un-American' to full steam ahead
Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane. In 2019, when Harris was
running in the Democratic presidential primary, the U.S. senator of
California had some thoughts on the border wall.

Harris called it Trump’s “medieval vanity project” then and “un-American” in a 2018 social media post. She also posted in 2020 that “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t
make us any safer.”

Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden at the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 19, 2024.
Seems pretty straightforward.

In addition, Harris is on the record during her first presidential run
vowing to decriminalize illegal border crossings and offering
undocumented immigrants health care under her Medicare-for-all plan. She
also said she wouldn’t deport immigrants here illegally, if they hadn’t done anything else wrong.

Fast-forward to now.

Immigration has rocketed to one of the most important issues for voters
– in no small part because the Biden-Harris administration oversaw chaos
at the southern border amid record numbers of illegal crossings.

Even though Biden appointed Harris as border czar in 2021, she
accomplished nothing to deter illegal migration across the border.

You can't say that:It's no laughing matter. Humorless scolds on the left
want to silence your 'offensive' views.

So she knows she’s weak on this issue, and now her campaign is trying to
make Harris look like a tough border enforcer.

But that’s all hard to believe when one looks at her record the past
four years and at what she has said.


Last week at the Democratic National Convention, Harris pledged to sign
a bipartisan Senate bill that would spend hundreds of millions of
dollars to continue building the border wall. And she has released a
campaign ad that features the wall several times.

I guess that settles that.

Harris can't make up her mind on anything
The border wall is just the latest example of Harris backtracking on
former stances. Her convictions seem about as deep as what the polls
tell her to support.

Her few actual policy ideas since becoming the Democratic nominee,
including price controls on groceries, are so terrible that Harris’
fellow Democrats are downplaying the idea by saying that price controls
would never pass through Congress.

And the wall isn’t the only talking point Harris has stolen from Trump. Earlier this month, she pledged no taxes on tipped wages. Problem is,
Trump already had proposed that idea weeks earlier.

Fudging the facts:From IVF to his military service, Walz is a bit of a fabulist. Can't we get the truth?

That means, of Harris’ limited proposals, one isn’t likely to go
anywhere and two are copied from Trump, whom Democrats portray as the
archenemy of democracy.

The general vagueness over what Harris actually believes and supports
has led to confusion in the campaign over how to best leverage her
running mate, Walz.

As Politico reports, the “danger in sending him out to do big solo
interviews is that he might not have a full command of where Harris is
on every issue.”

Boy, I wonder why.

I have one question for Harris: “Who are you?”

I’d honestly like to know.

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X, formerly Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques

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