Don’t confuse anything that happened with the kind of scrutiny candidates undergo when they hold town halls under real campaign conditions. There was no cranky guy to get up and ask a question out of left field or a local activist determined to nail the candidate down on his or her obsession. No, in this case, Winfrey’s first question was “Can you feel the joy rising here?” (Harris said she could.) After that, Winfrey said, “It seems to us that something happened to you the moment Joe Biden stepped aside and withdrew his candidacy, that a veil or something dropped and you just stepped into your power.”

And so on. The event was part lovefest, part pep rally. Actually, it was all lovefest. Harris said almost nothing of consequence because 1. her entire approach to the campaign is to avoid saying anything of consequence and 2. it wasn’t that kind of event. (She did serve up a little bit of her famous word salad.) So rather than go through Harris’s various statements, it might be a good idea to take another look at her way of avoiding any substantive discussion of her record on what is one of the top three issues in the campaign — the border.

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About 40 minutes into the event, a man named Justin rose and said to Harris, “When you become president, what would be your specific steps to strengthening the border?” It was one of the few real questions of the day.

“So it’s a wonderful and important question,” Harris said. “You know my background was as a prosecutor, and I was also the elected attorney general for two terms of a border state, so this is not a theoretical issue for me. This is something I’ve actually worked on. I have prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings. I take very seriously the importance of having a secure border and ensuring the safety of the American people.”

The credentials Harris claims to have on the border predate her time in the Senate and in the vice presidency. She does not cite anything she has done in the White House as proof that she could secure the border as president. She continued, “Sadly, where we are now can be traced most recently back to the fact that when the United States Congress, members of the Congress, including some of the most conservative Republicans, came up with a border security bill, and here’s what the border security bill would have done: It would have put 1,500 more border agents at the border. Let me tell you, those border agents are working around the clock. It would have just been about giving them some support and relief, which is probably why the border agents actually endorsed the bill. It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl. And I’m looking at people from all over the country here, so I don’t need to tell the folks who are watching this what fentanyl has done to families, to kids in our country, and the need to take seriously stemming the flow coming into our country and addressing that extraordinary and tragic issue in terms of its effect.”

Harris continued, “The bill would have allowed us to have more resources to prosecute transnational criminal organizations, and it would have been part of the solution. And Donald Trump called up those folks and said, ‘Don’t put that bill on the floor for a vote.’ He blocked the bill, and you know why — because he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.” The room erupted into applause. “And he has put his personal political security before border security. Because understand, even in the intervening months, what that bill would have done to give support to folks who care about this issue — and this again gets to the point about what does leadership really look like, and is it about you or is it about the people? Is it about running on problems or fixing problems? My career has always been about saying, ‘Let’s fix problems; let’s address the needs’ because we know it’s within our capacity to do that.”

At that point in Harris’s soliloquy, Winfrey stepped in and said, “So to answer Justin’s question, now that that bill has gone and hasn’t passed, will you reintroduce that?”

“Absolutely,” Harris answered. “And when I am elected president of the United States, I will make sure that bill gets to my desk, and I will sign it into law.”

It was an absolutely surreal moment, as is every moment Harris addresses the border issue. The bill she has made the centerpiece of her case on the border was introduced in the Senate on Feb. 4, 2024. Yes, this year. It died in the Senate in May. It was never introduced, and would never have passed, in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, Republicans opposed the bill in part because, even though it would have done some good things, it would also have regularized massive, daily flows of illegal crossers into the United States, which is specifically the problem Congress needed to stop, not normalize.

Here’s the thing: President Joe Biden and Harris took office on Jan. 20, 2021. They opened the door to illegal border crossers, and millions came into the U.S. It went on through 2021, through 2022, through 2023. Only when an election year came around did they make any noise about “securing” the border. And then, instead of relying on the president’s executive authority, they waited around for a doomed bill to fail in the Senate.

Now the entirety of Harris’s border security agenda is to somehow revive the bill and somehow get it passed in both Senate and House. And then she will bring about border security by signing it into law. 

That is simply not a serious position. It’s a dodge, a deflection, and a totally transparent one at that. Harris claims signing a bill would show what leadership really looks like. But she has been in a position of leadership for nearly four years, and for all that time, her administration has sought to accommodate, not stem, the flow of millions of illegal border crossers into the U.S. The influx has put enormous burdens on states and municipalities around the country. It has created security problems as the Biden-Harris open-door policy attracted people, including some criminals and some who are on terrorist watchlists, from around the world. And it has made a mockery of the idea of American law and sovereignty at its borders.

And yet that is the only case Harris makes for what she claims would be her “leadership” on the border. Yes, it’s unreasonable to expect serious policy discussion during an Oprah cheerleading party. But Harris has not offered any more substance anywhere else either. At this point, it seems obvious that she doesn’t plan to say anything more before Election Day.