Kamala Harris expressed outrage Tuesday over revelations that Donald Trump secretly mailed covid tests to the “murderous dictator” of Russia in 2020 even as he was telling Americans at home to inject “bleach in their blood.”
“I believe Donald Trump has this desire to be a dictator,” Harris told Howard Stern on his SiriusXM show.
“He admires strongmen, and he gets played by them because he thinks that they’re his friends,” she said. “And they are manipulating him full time and manipulating him by flattery.”
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"Vladimir Putin and President Trump at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan June 28, 2019. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS."
REUTERSThe vice president joined Stern on his show, where the former bawdy shock jock asked her about Bob Woodward’s new book, War. According to Woodward, when Putin accepted the tests, he told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
Harris sounded disgusted. “And this guy who’s president of the United States is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator for his personal use,” Harris said, noting that “people were dying” and “scrambling to get the Covid test kits.”
“You only wish Putin would have gotten COVID and dropped dead,” Stern, now a grandfather who has evolved into a serious and empathetic interviewer, interrupted, emphasizing, “I wish that.”
“When he was talking about Americans should be putting bleach in their blood,” Harris said, referring to Trump’s infamous advice on how to rid the body of coronavirus.
Harris told Stern, the country faces a stark choice: “Do we want a president who's going to abide by the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States or someone who is full-time engaged in flattery from Vladimir Putin of Russia and sending covid testing kits over to him when Americans are dying every day.”
At one point, Stern, an avowed Harris supporter, encouraged all his listeners to vote in the 2024 presidential election—but not if they plan to vote for Trump. "God bless you," Stern told Harris at the conclusion of their talk. "You should be president.”
Stern had once been a friend of Trump and the then-businessman was a serial guest on The Howard Stern Show. His appearances on it led to some of his most infamous moments, including volunteering that he would date his daughter Ivanka if he was not her parent and said, “You know who’s a great beauty? My daughter Ivanka. Now she’s a 10.”
Stern, 70, has been on a political and personal journey in recent years, regularly attacking Trump and moving away from his previous Libertarian-Republican politics.
But his show’s audience remains heavily white and overwhelmingly male. Despite his age, Stern’s audience is 74% between 25-54. Young and middle-aged white men are a demographic where Harris is significantly behind Trump.
Her campaign boasted about the Stern endorsement on X, with aide Victor Shi posting, “This is a pretty big deal.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Kamala Harris called Vladimir Putin a “murderous dictator,” not Donald Trump.
