Even the White House thinks it's bad! Biden administration was 'perplexed' at Kamala's snippy Mexican press conference answers over whether she will visit the border
Even the Biden administration appears to be baffled by Kamala Harris' trip to Guatemala and Mexico to address the border crisis.
White House insiders were 'perplexed' by her answers to her questions over whether she would visit the Rio Grande and 'hoped her first foreign trip would be a success', CNN reported.
Officials also fear that any progress she made during her meetings with the Guatemalan and Mexican presidents may be undone by her mixed messages and terse encounters with reporters.
Harris' trip was meant to focus on the 'root causes' of migration that have led to families and unaccompanied children heading north to the border.
But she made a series of seemingly conflicting statements about her decision not to visit the border and enraged progressives by telling migrants: 'Do not come'.
By the end of her trip, at a press conference in Mexico City with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Harris insisted the trip was a success.
'Listen, I've been to the border before and I'll go again,' she said.
She also hinted that a border trip would be 'short-sighted', but did promise to visit without giving a date.
Administration officials are 'perplexed' at some of the conflicting statements made by Vice President Kamala Harris on her first foreign trip in office
CNN reported that officials were concerned within the administration that whatever progress Harris had made on the leader-to-leader level might have been undermined by her conflicting answers and PR missteps.
'It’s left some of the administration officials perplexed, and the vice president’s team frustrated,' the network Wednesday.
'There was hope the trip would be a success, and in the end, they feel it may have been overshadowed by some of her answers to these questions,' the network reported.
She also snapped at reporters a few times when questioned about a border visit. Among those asking about it was a CNN correspondent. Fox News correspondents have been hounding the White House on the topic for weeks, so it was unlikely to have surprised her team.
At the same news conference where she said she would go to the border, Harris also shrugged off the idea.
Harris visited Mexico and Guatemala in her first trip outside the country as VP
She said at a Mexico City press conference she would visit the border, after earlier commenting about 'grand gestures'
Vice President Kamala Harris (R) participates in a roundtable with Guatemalan community and civil society leaders to continue conversations about how best to address the root causes of migration at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala in Guatemala City on June 7, 2021
Vice President Kamala Harris is greeted by Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard as she steps off the plane upon arrival at Benito Juarez International airport in Mexico City, for her first international trip as Vice President to Guatemala and Mexico, in Mexico June 7, 2021
'I think it's short-sighted, for any of us who are in the business of problem solving to suggest we're only going to respond to the reaction as opposed to addressing the cause,' she said.
It echoed her earlier comments in Guatemala, where she characterized such a visit as being for show.
'I came here to be here on the ground, to speak with the leader of this nation around what we can do in a way that is significant, is tangible and has real results,' she said.
'And I will continue to be focused on that kind of work as opposed to grand gestures.'
There is an element of showmanship in any foreign trip – and Harris was not shy about calling her own first foreign foray a victory.
'Do I declare this trip a success? Yes I do,' she said.
She also took heat on the trip when she shot back at NBC anchor Lester Holt when he asked her about visiting the border.
'At some point, you know, we are going to the border,' she said. 'We've been to the border. So this whole thing about the border. We've been to the border. We've been to the border,' she repeated.
'You haven't been to the border,' Holt pushed back.
'And I haven't been to Europe,' Harris snapped, then quickly turned it into her signature laugh.
'And I mean, I don't understand the point that you're making,' she said to Holt 'I'm not discounting the importance of the border.'
She also kicked off her trip with a blunt message to migrants: 'Do not come,' an admonition that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called 'disappointing.'
In another odd moment, a case of mistaken identity at Harris' press conference in Mexico City on Tuesday allowed a woman wrongly identified as a Univision reporter with a similar name to ask the vice president a fawning question.
The woman, introduced by Harris' press secretary Symone Sanders as 'Maria Fernanda from Univision', was one of only five people called on for questions at the Mexico City event.
She asked a soft question, which Harris called 'great.' Late on Tuesday, Fox News revealed that the woman was in fact a San Francisco Bay-area entrepreneur named Maria Fernanda Reyes. Univision put out a statement saying the woman was not their reporter.
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