What does Kamala Harris really stand for?

Someone recently posted on X: “Trump’s Agenda is whatever the last adviser or billionaire told him to do…”  

Like so many attacks launched against the former president, it is not accurate. There are at least 10 core beliefs that have inspired candidate and President Donald Trump since he first considered running for the Oval Office, and which continue to headline his campaign.

Specifically, Trump has consistently fought to secure our border; reduce taxes; beef up law enforcement and make our streets safe; lighten regulation, allowing businesses to thrive; oppose unfair trade policies that send jobs overseas; strengthen our military; exit globalist treaties, such as the Paris climate accord, that disadvantage the U.S.; promote school choice; support Israel; and yes, make America great again.

Trump has steadfastly championed these policies, both on the campaign trail and when he was president. Because most of them make sense and are popular with most Americans, even Democrats have embraced some of these positions — for example, demanding fairer trade terms.

Recall how, during the 2016 campaign, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton suddenly reversed her stance on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade deal involving 11 Pacific Rim countries. Signaling her flip-flop, left-leaning Politico ran a piece titled: “Clinton raved about Trans-Pacific Partnership before she rejected it.”

We know what Trump stands for, and what he would do as president. But what about Kamala Harris? What does she believe in? Voters must wonder. When she ran for president in 2019, she backed a ban on fracking; mandatory gun buybacks, i.e. gun confiscation; taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries for prison inmates; racial reparations; decriminalizing illegal immigration; defunding the police; eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement; “Medicare for All”; the Green New Deal; and allowing felons to vote.

Now Harris is denying that everything she ever did was the real her. For instance, her campaign says she no longer favors outlawing fracking. Her shift no doubt reflects the unpopularity of that stance in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state.

Her campaign has also said she didn’t really mean she supported defunding the police. When she said to defund the police, she really just meant that the police should be smarter and tougher.

But Harris is sticking to some of her extreme positions, such as reparations, at least for now. Let’s see whether she flip-flops on that as well, when her backers do some polling and discover that less than one third of Americans endorse paying Black people to make amends for slavery.

Democrats, aided by their allies in the liberal media, are reinventing the vice president. They are eager to hide all traces of her progressive positions and policies. They know that far-left candidates are unelectable nationally, which is why Democrat bosses conspired to sideline Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2020 even though the self-described Democratic socialist had won the popular vote in the party’s first three primary contests. 

Hence the frantic re-positioning of Harris on numerous controversial issues. Democrat pooh-bahs are thrilled that Harris was once a prosecutor and served as California’s attorney general, allowing them to present her as a law-and-order candidate. Unfortunately, her policy record during that phase of her career is just as confused as her campaign today.

For example, critics charge her with having supported Proposition 47, which reduced penalties on numerous crimes and arguably ushered in San Francisco’s current lawlessness. Others argue she cleverly refused to take a stance on important criminal justice issues during her tenure so as to avoid making unpopular choices.

Eventually, Harris will have to sit for a real interview. She will have to explain where she stands on a host of issues. It’s easy to escape scrutiny and avoid revealing your beliefs when you’re appearing before friendly groups like Black sororities and RuPaul’s Drag Race. But Harris will be exposed as a politician who swims with the polls and has no real core when she tries to explain her shifting views of fracking and “Medicare for All.”

So far, her campaign has successfully protected her from that kind of examination, redeploying tactics that similarly shielded Joe Biden during the 2020 race. Biden campaigned mainly from his basement, using COVID-19 as an excuse for not making more public appearances, Voters now know why: Even then, Biden was showing signs of mental impairment, which ultimately forced him out of this year’s race.

Americans will demand more from Harris. In recent weeks, the U.S. media has gone all out to whitewash and rewrite her past, hoping voters will forget that she was one of the most unpopular vice presidents in history. They have done a remarkable job bashing Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), taking the spotlight off a vulnerable Harris.

Democrats’ approach so far has been working. According to a recent Bloomberg-Morning Consult poll, the VP is running neck-and-neck with the former president in key swing states.

But it won’t last. Voters who are most concerned about the economy and immigration, the top two issues by a wide margin, heavily favor Trump.

The most telling question asked by this poll was this: “Have you seen, read, or heard anything about each of the following in the past week?” Concerning Harris, 49 percent of respondents answered, “Yes, and it was mostly positive” while 42 percent said it was mostly negative. About Trump, 37 percent said what they had heard was positive, while 54 percent said it was negative.

That is the liberal media putting its thumb on the scales. On the issues important to voters, as opposed to the valiant whitewashing efforts of the New York Times, MSNBC et al, Trump wins.  

The Trump campaign was wrong-footed by Joe Biden’s exit from the race. Now it is readying a tidal wave of negative advertising about Harris’s extremely unpopular and shifting positions. They will brand her as a lightweight and as inauthentic. The latter charge was also leveled against Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was true, it stuck and she lost. Kamala will suffer the same fate.

Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim and Company.