Fox News host Laura Ingraham took right-wing criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris to a new low on Friday night, dismissing her as “the hugger-in-chief.”
On Fox, where Ingraham’s colleagues have ginned up attacks on Harris’ laugh and—just yesterday—questioned whether she is sober, the opening minutes of The Ingraham Angle were spent trying to depict Harris as unqualified to be president. Instead, Ingraham claimed, the vice president “sounds like a very compelling candidate for, I don’t know, sorority house manager.”
One clip Ingraham showed as purported evidence was Harris’ comments just before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Harris told the press at the time: “I mean, listen guys: We’re talking about the potential for war in Europe. I mean, let’s really take a moment to understand the significance of what we’re talking about.”
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To Ingraham, this apparently didn’t suffice. “Oh, yeah. That was a bad one,” she argued.
“Now, you get it: It’s better for her to stay in her sweet spot as the hugger-in-chief,” the Fox host said, before showing a compilation of Harris carrying out the normal act of hugging people on stage at three events this week—one of them a eulogy.
Harris embraced Morehouse College graduate Tyler Greene at an Atlanta rally on Tuesday, and sorority head Rasheeda S. Liberty at Sigma Gamma Rho’s convention in Houston the following day. In the same city on Thursday, Harris hugged Bill and Hillary Clinton at the eulogy for longtime Democratic lawmaker Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee.
Ingraham’s disparaging nickname for Harris comes as the Republican presidential ticket attempts to shake off how Democrats have been labeling them as “weird.” Both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have insisted that they’re not, with the former declaring repeatedly in a podcast Thursday that it’s actually Democrats who are “the weird ones.”
