Rachel Maddow’s full interview with Kamala Harris I MSNBC EXCLUSIVE

And thanks to you at home for joining us tonight. We do have Vice President Kamala Harris here tonight for her first news interview since leaving office, her first news interview since the election. I'm very excited to speak with her. I'm a little nervous about this interview because it's a big deal, I'll tell you. I do have one thing to tell you though, separate and apart from that, before we get started, MSNBC has just today announced that my new documentary is gonna be airing here on Friday, October 17th. This is a brand new documentary I've made. It's called Andrew Young, The Dirty Work. We're gonna have a special Rachel Maddow show here on MSNBC that night at 8 p.m. Eastern. It's Friday, October 17th, and then the doc is gonna air right after the show. So if you just pop that in your calendar for me, if you don't mind, Friday, October 17th, I will have more to tell you about it in the days ahead, but it was just announced today, so I wanted to let you know. That said, tonight we are gonna be speaking with Vice President Harris. You may remember there was a sort of mantra in her campaign, a call and response that she used in her rallies. She would say, when we fight, we win. She'd say, when we fight, and then everybody would say back with her, we win. And of course, what everybody knows now very much all too well is that she did not win the election, and her new book is about that. The new book is called 107 Days. It comes out tomorrow. It is the story of her 107-day-long campaign for the presidency, the shortest presidential campaign in modern history. She describes in the book on page one how she learned from President Biden that he would end his campaign and hand the reins to her. She learned that news less than half an hour before the whole rest of the world learned it as well. She writes about how everybody in Democratic politics responded when she made all her first phone calls to tell everybody the news, to ask them for their support. She took notes from those calls, and she prints the notes in her book, page 17. Bill Clinton says, oh my God, I'm so relieved. Send me anywhere. Make this your own campaign. Hillary Clinton, we'll do whatever we can. We'll jump on a plane. We'll get on Amtrak. Jim Clyburn says, let's go. I'm all in. Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina says, before you say anything, I'm all in. Pete Buttigieg says, you are gonna be a fantastic president. Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona, Vice President Harris writes, quote, he tweeted his endorsement even before I reached him. So far, so good, right? But not all the calls went like that, and this is the kind of campaign book you might diplomatically call candid, which means it is not all nice, and so we also get Vice President Harris's notes on the other responses she got. Gretchen Whitmer, I believe you will win, but I need to let the dust settle. Talk to my colleagues before I make a public statement. President Obama says, in part, quote, Michelle and I are supportive, but not going to put a finger on the scale right now. Let Joe have his moment. Think through timing. Nancy Pelosi says, in part, it's important that there's a process. We have a great bench. We should have some kind of primary, not an anointment. Bernie Sanders says, in part, quote, please focus on the working class, not just on abortion. J.B. Pritzker says, as governor of Illinois, I'm the convention host. I can't commit, and then Gavin Newsom, she writes, hiking, we'll call back, and then she puts in parentheses, he never did. In 107 days, you get Kamala Harris's thoughts on picking her vice president, interviewing Mark Kelly and Josh Shapiro, and then ultimately choosing Tim Walz and all the great things that were great about Tim Walz, how much, in particular, she loved Tim Walz's wife, Gwen, but she also writes about why Pete Buttigieg was her personal first choice for her running mate. You get her detailed thoughts on how President Biden's age showed when he was tired and her view that the White House basically mismanaged that. She says President Biden was not incapacitated. He was absolutely capable of governing, and he was, in fact, very good at it throughout the entirety of his term, but she also writes that he was not up to the task of campaigning well for another term, and she writes about her regret and her frustrations for how that was handled by the president's senior staff. I will tell you, this book is going to sell a gazillion, bazillion copies, and Vice President Harris's bluntness and clarity on those still very painful matters is gonna be a big part of why. The book, as I said, goes on sale tomorrow. You will read it in one sitting. It is an unputdownable book. You should buy it. But here's the other thing about this book and about Kamala Harris in this moment. When we fight, we win. I mean, this is where we are right now. These were protests on Thursday and on Friday and on Saturday and on Sunday and today, all about ABC taking comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air after threats from the Trump administration effectively directing them to do so. And those protests were in New York and in Los Angeles, yes, but also in places like Central Washington State, Yakima, Wisconsin, oh, Yakima, Washington, and in Mount Kisco, New York. We saw Vice President Harris herself join the calls condemning the Trump administration and ABC for doing that. She put out a statement last week calling it an outright abuse of power. We saw statements of protest from her, from President Obama, from the former president of Disney, ABC's parent company, Michael Eisner. We saw pushback from every other comedian in TV who Trump has pushed to get rid of, including Stephen Colbert, who CBS should maybe uncancel now that everybody can agree what cowards they were too. We saw statements of protest from basically all of Hollywood and the music business and the unions and the ACLU and every celebrity you've ever heard of and people canceling their Disney Plus subscriptions and people who make shows and movies for ABC and Disney saying they would never make shows and movies for that company again as long as this decision stood. And what do you know? When we fight, we win. ABC this afternoon decided, okay, let's throw this in reverse. Jimmy Kimmel will be back on the air tomorrow night and as for Stephen Colbert on CBS, stay tuned. Because of course his firing is just as indefensible if not more so. In this new book, in 107 Days, Vice President Kamala Harris writes about predicting how bad Donald Trump would be in his second term as president. She says, quote, I predicted all that. I warned of it. What I did not predict was the capitulation. About the groveling, scared, rich owners of the LA Times and then the Washington Post pulling their papers endorsements of her just before the election, she says, the pre-capitulation of these powerful billionaires alarmed and dispirited me. As it turned out, they were early adopters. As it turned out, they were early adopters of the feckless posture that would be embraced by a raft of business leaders and institutions once Trump was elected. They had just been the first in line to grovel. And then she says this about what she'll do next. She writes, quote, I wanted a seat at the table. I wanted to make change from inside the system. Today, I'm no longer sure about that because the system is failing us. At every level, executive, judicial, legislative, corporate, institutional, media, every single guardrail that is supposed to protect our democracy is buckling. I thought those guardrails would be stronger. I was wrong. But now, of course, the election is over. And with the election now over, the fight that we're in now is to shore up those guardrails, to rebuild them where they have fallen, to make powerful people less cowardly somehow, to stop people and institutions from capitulating. And if they do capitulate, the job now, the fight now is to get them to see they were wrong to do so and to get them to reverse themselves. That is the fight now. Kamala Harris says, when we fight, we win. Turns out that may be more important than ever after an election that you did not win. Joining us now for her first news interview since the election is former Vice President Kamala Harris. Madam Vice President, thank you. Thank you, Rachel. It's good to see you. I think it's good to be here. It's weird to talk about you with you sitting here and me pretending you're not here. Oh, it was awkward for me too. Okay. How have you been? I am well, all things considered, I am well. How have you been taking care of yourself since the election? You know, I have an incredible family. I've been spending more time with them than I had for quite some time, cooking and writing and reflecting and talking to a lot of people, making a lot of calls, receiving a lot of calls. So I've been busy. Let me talk to you about this capitulation thing. This really landed with me. I feel like we're all in the middle of it, but you articulating it in the way that you do, you've become the patron saint of I told you so. In terms of people understanding the sort of warnings and predictions that you made about what Trump would be like. But you say, I predicted all of that. I warned of it. What I didn't predict was the capitulation, the billionaires lining up to grovel, the big media companies, universities, so many major law firms, I will note, including your husband's. Yeah, and he spoke out about it. He's been very vocal in criticizing it. You said they've all been bending to blackmail and outrageous demands. Yeah. Why did you not predict the capitulation and what do you make of the effort to try to put some steel in the spine of those institutions? So as you know, I am a lifelong public servant, but I've worked closely with the private sector over many years. And I always believed that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy, for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions. And one by one by one, they have been silent. They have been, you know, yes, I use the word feckless. It's not like they're gonna lose their yacht or their house in the Hamptons. And here's the thing, democracy sustains capitalism. Capitalism thrives in a democracy. And right now we are dealing with, as I called him at my speech on the ellipse, a tyrant. We used to compare the strength of our democracy to communist dictators. That's what we're dealing with right now in Donald Trump. And these titans of industry are not speaking up. And perhaps it is because his threats and the way he has used the weight of the federal government to take out vengeance on his critics is something that they fear. And I get that. I understand why they do. We've seen the demonstration of it. Perhaps it is because they wanna please him and nominate him for a Nobel prize. Perhaps it's because they want a merger approved or they wanna avoid an investigation. But at some point they've gotta stand up for the sake of the people who rely on all of these institutions to have integrity and to at some point be the guardrails against a tyrant who is using the federal government to execute his whim and fancy because of a fragile ego. I know that your parents took you to protests in a stroller when you were a little kid before you were literally able to be there to walk and that you've talked about the civil rights movement and its moral legacy being part of your moral core. I feel like a lot of the defenses that we tried to build up in advance of this type of sort of would-be authoritarian takeover were about warning people about how serious the threat was and warning people about what this could mean and what we were in danger of. Now that we're up against it though, I'm not sure that we have great skills to actually not warn about it, but fight it. And if the problem is the system collapsing and the guardrails, as you say, collapsing and people who have power, who ought to be titans, not acting in any sort of titanic way. And standing together because there is safety in numbers as the saying goes. Yes. I wonder if the American people who are repulsed by what Trump is doing and who are, in public opinion polling, very much against what he's doing, as you note in the book, are going to be turning their ire and their protest movement and their organizational capacity, against these institutions that are failing as much as they are against Donald Trump himself and the administration. If that's the way the sort of resistance is headed. So one, back to how you opened the show. I mean, talk about the power being with the people and the people making that clear with their checkbooks as it relates to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. We saw the power of the people over the last few days and it spoke volumes and it moved a decision in the right direction. I think that part of where we are now in terms of thinking about what the fight is, it requires us, yes, to understand that we've got this administration and this president in front of us abusing the power that the people vested him with. But we also need to understand that this is bigger than Donald Trump. You know, part of what I write about, this stuff is decades in the making, Rachel. It didn't just happen overnight. You know, so much of what has indeed overwhelmed people, not to mention just scared the stuff out of people, is what we are witnessing is a high velocity event. We are witnessing something that has been happening so rapidly and it feels chaotic. But what I would offer you is what we are witnessing is the swift implementation of a plan that was decades in the making, decades in the making. Project 2025 didn't just drop out of thin air. That's a product of decades of work. Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation. Understand that the implementation of a plan that's about trying to get rid of the Department of Education, deregulate industries, weaken the rule of law by over a period of time, creating a system and through gerrymandering states so that we would now have the Supreme Court that we have. This stuff didn't happen overnight. And it did not happen just because of an election in 2024 or even 2016. So when we talk about where the fight must go, there is the aspect of it that is about the immediate moment such as the weight of the federal government being used to silence critics, citizens, and it must be about understanding that this did not just happen overnight and we have to pay attention to an agenda that is not gonna necessarily go away when this guy is finally termed out of office. Well, let me ask you on that gerrymandering front. The White House has been very aggressive pushing Republican-led states to gerrymander their maps to effectively give Republicans a major edge heading into the midterms next year. That has led to responsive Democratic efforts including in your home state of California. Do you support Democrats' effort to kind of fight fire with fire there? Will you be involved in that California measure, for example? Absolutely support it. You mentioned Gavin earlier. By the way, Gavin has a great sense of humor. So, you know, he's gonna be fine. But- Did you warn him about the hiking thing was gonna, you did, okay. I've known Gavin forever. He literally has a great sense of humor. But let me say about what he is doing with redistricting. It is absolutely the right way to go. Part of what we've got to, I think, challenge ourselves to accept is that we tend to play by the rules. But I think this is a moment where you've got to fight fire with fire. And so what Gavin is doing, what the California legislature is doing, what those who are supporting it are doing to say, you know what? You want to play? Then let's get in the field. Let's get in the arena and let's do this. And I support that. Speaking of a sense of humor, your book is very funny, which I think helps a lot given that there's a lot of difficult material. I'm gonna read something where I have to bleep myself in the middle of reading it out loud, sort of. This is the part when Trump told an audience, National Association of Black Journalists told him that you happened to turn black and that you now wanted to be known as black. You say, on the plane that day when I first heard about Trump's remark, we patched in Brian Falun, your senior advisor, communications advisor, on a call to strategize a response. Brian wanted me to punch back with a big speech about my racial identity, like the one Obama had given. I was so, I'll just say, I was so pissed that I didn't hold back. Are you effing kidding me? I was not about to take Trump's bait. He lies all the time, I told Brian. He throws out outrageous statements to distract from the real issues. Quote, today he wants me to prove my race. What next? He'll say I'm not a woman and I need to show my vagina? I don't even know if I can say that. Brian, on the other end of the phone, fell silent. I imagined the deep crimson of his blush. All right, so first of all, you made me say it. I really happened. Yes, but how do you decide, I mean, in the moment, particularly when it's so ridiculous, it's funny, how do you decide when to not take the bait and stay off the terms that he's trying to set for the debate and when to punch back? What did you learn about that in the process of going up against him? So, you know, Earl, I also talk about, you know, the first two weeks that I was the top of the ticket, we had no polling because no polling had been done on me. So it was my gut. Yeah. And so I came up with this speech that actually was about, you know, I was a prosecutor. I dealt with people who engaged in sexual abuse. I was attorney general. I took on people who engaged in fraud, on and on and on. And so I know his type. I remember this line, yeah. And because there is, you know, there's something about in the English language, that phrase, I know his type, that does a lot of work for you because it's something we all relate to, whether it was that boss, it was that person, whatever. I know his type. And so the character that I knew I was running against is someone, because he has shown it also. I mean, he did it with President Obama. He did it with Secretary Clinton. He throws this stuff out that he thinks will be an individual's weakness or Achilles heel, with the intent to distract from the fact that as it was in this campaign, he had no plan for actually bringing down costs and prices for the American people. He had very few plans for what he would actually do that was about the American people and not about an execution of his vengeance on his enemies. And I wasn't about to fall for that bait. And the stakes were too high. The stakes were too high. You can't get in the gutter with that guy because that is the way that he distracts from the fact that, for example, right now, he promised the people who voted for him that on day one he'd bring down prices. And I do believe, Rachel, that's one of the main reasons that the people who voted for him elected him because they believed he would do it. He lied. We're now in a position where unemployment is up. Inflation is up. The cost of groceries is up. So, you know, as the folks used to say, don't fall for the okey-doke. Just don't. All right. Lots more to ask you. We'll be right back with Vice President Kamala Harris. Her new book is called 107 Days. It comes out tomorrow. It's going to be a massive bestseller. We've got more with Vice President Harris just ahead. Stay with us. We're here live with former Vice President Kamala Harris. Her new book about her 2024 run for the presidency is called 107 Days. It's out tomorrow. Madam Vice President, I have to ask you about the, I think the part of your book that has people most upset thus far, which is some of your writing about the decision around the president abandoning his reelection campaign, the timing there and how it's handled. You say in part, page 46, it's Joe and Jill's decision. We all said that like a mantra as if we'd all been hypnotized. Was it grace or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn't a choice that should have been left to an individual's ego, an individual's ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision. Whose decision should that have been? How should that decision have been made? So when I write this, it's because I realize that I have and had a certain responsibility that I should have followed through on. Which is, and so when I talk about the recklessness, as much as anything I'm talking about myself, there was so much, as we know, at stake. And as I write, where my head was at at the time is that it would be completely, it would come off as being completely self-serving. If you said to President Biden that you did not think he should run again. Yeah, or even that he should question whether it's a good idea. But I think that one of the reasons I wrote this book, Rachel, is there are actually a number of reasons. One is, one, that it is unprecedented, right? To your point of what you said in your opening. We had a president of the United States running for reelection three and a half months from the election, decides not to run. The sitting vice president enters the race against a former president of the United States who's been running for 10 years with 107 days to go. And it ended up being the closest presidential election in the 21st century. And there was so much about those 107 days that for me, and this is really a behind-the-scenes look at those 107 days, was about seeing people who seemingly had nothing in common coming together by the thousands with a level of optimism and dare I say joy about the possibilities for America. And I hope to remind people about that light that people brought to it and to remind people that that light is still there. And we can't let that be extinguished by an election or the individual who's in the office right now. Because to the point of all those folks who got out in protest about the Kimmel suspension. And about everything else that people have protested. Right, in the variety of ways, whether it be going to a protest or being with their pocketbook or getting engaged in local and state and federal elections, they'll make a difference and they've made a difference. And I guess the last point is that we've got to really remember that this person who's in the White House promised a whole lot of people who supported him and voted for him that he would do one thing, which is bring down costs and prices. And he lied to them. And we need to remember that as we move forward with the next series of elections, the midterms are around the corner, that it's not just about him by himself. There were others around him who perpetuated that same promise and have not followed through. They're about to go into negotiations around the continuing resolution, the budget. And I know that that leaders Schumer and Jeffries are going to meet with the president, I think, in the Oval Office. And good for them to go there and ask Donald Trump, the president of the United States, to justify why he is proposing to cut Medicaid, why he is willing to shut down the government for the sake of putting on the backs of working people the tax cut he gave to the richest people in America. Do you think that Democrats should vote to allow the government to shut down in order to try to extract concessions from Trump on these matters? It won't be the Democrats who are shutting it down. It will be the Republicans. The Democrats are doing the job that any elected leader should do, which is to say, we're not going to do the bidding of the president of the United States at the sacrifice of our constituents' healthcare. Negotiate. You describe in the book something that you called a secret project that you ran as vice president, that you called the STARS project, identifying up-and-coming talent in the Democratic Party. You'd meet with them, ask them about their interests. You say that more than one of them said they felt like they were being called to the principal's office when you asked them to come in. But the folks who you met with in this way include some of the people who you see very frequently now on MSNBC, Jasmine Crockett, Angela Also Brooks, Maxwell Frost, Robert Garcia Moore. Arguably the fastest-rising star right now in Democratic politics is Zoran Mamdani, who is going to be elected mayor of New York City, and probably in a landslide if the polls are anything to go by. Lots of mainline Democrats have been very shy about his candidacy. They seem somewhat flummoxed by his success. As a sort of talent spotter in the Democratic Party, what do you think of him and his candidacy, and what do you think of mainline Democratic shyness and agitation about the prospect that he's gonna win? Look, as far as I'm concerned, he's the Democratic nominee, and he should be supported. Do you endorse his candidacy? I support the Democrat in the race, sure. But let me just say this, he's not the only star. I know that he's in New York, and I know New Yorkers think they're the center of the world, and here we are in New York having this interview. It is the biggest city in the country. And I love New York, as the saying goes, I really do. But, I mean, there are people like Barbara Drummond in Mobile, Alabama, Helena Moreno in New Orleans. They're all running for mayor, too, and they are stars. So I hope that we don't so over-index on New York City that we lose sight of the stars throughout our country who are right now running for mayor and many other offices, governor and so on. So that's where I am. We got a big tent, and we got a lot of stars. 2026 is shaping up to be an election that is gonna be filled with Democratic primaries, though. And a lot of mainline Democrats in their 70s and 80s are gonna be facing challengers in their 30s. Do you think Democrats are at all justified in their frustration with there being so many older Democrats in elected office? Do you think it is time for the oldest Democrats in elected office to be thinking kind of wholesale as a category about the need to retire and move on from office? You know, I wouldn't over-generalize on that, meaning that there are some Democrats who are, you know, older in age, but very young in terms of how they are thinking and very bold in terms of how they're thinking. I think that every one of the candidates is going to be judged based on whether they actually have a plan, whether they see the people, whether they're listening to them, whether they offer something that feels dynamic and bold, especially at this moment, whether they have the fight in them to fight what we know to be wrong, but also the fight to fight for something. I think that's how they're gonna be judged. I don't know that the voters are gonna judge strictly on somebody's age. I have much more to ask you. Okay, I'm here. Madam Vice President, the book is called 107 Days. It comes out at midnight. More with Vice President Harris right after the break. We're back with former Vice President Kamala Harris, her new book about her 107-day presidential campaign, the shortest presidential campaign in modern history for all the obvious reasons. That book comes out tonight at midnight. Vice President Harris, I wanna ask you about something that's going on right now in the news. We've had, in the last few days, two developments from the president that are the sorts of things that you were warning about, but now we've got them and we have to decide how to contend with them. One is the president directly ordering the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against people he perceives to be his political enemies, including firing prosecutors who told the administration there was not an evidentiary predicate to bring those charges. We've also now, in an executive order today, we've got the president describing Antifa, the anti-fascist, it's not even really a movement, the anti-fascist tactics of a portion of the protest movement, as a domestic terrorist organization. What is your reaction to those things? What do you think the appropriate response is to things like that? Well, in normal times, we should and could expect that our courts would step in when asked to declare the legality or illegality of what the president is doing, because Civics 101, we all know, we designed our democracy through three co-equal branches of government, the executive, legislative, and the courts, the judicial. And I would like to believe that that is still something that is standing. Certainly at the local level, you can see where the various courts have actually provided the guardrails against his abuse of power, against President Trump's abuse of power. The lower courts have been more inclined to step up, but my fear is that as some of those cases reach the United States Supreme Court, that we can't necessarily count on precedent to dictate how they will rule on the president's power. And again, Rachel, we talked about this during those 107 days, because remember the court before the election basically said that the president of the United States would be immune from whatever he did in office. So he walked in to the White House with what he thinks is a blank check. And- Specifically in the Justice Department, that immunity ruling effectively told him he can direct the Justice Department to do whatever he wants, which he is now doing online, telling them to bring baseless prosecutions. But there are a couple of things that have happened this week, and every week we should take note when they do. But one, again, we've talked about the response to the Kimmel suspension, but the other is that U.S. attorney who was appointed by the president is a Republican and said, I'm not doing it. And as a former prosecutor, one of the things I know whether people like it or not is prosecutors, for the most part, especially if they've been doing it for a while, are apolitical and take seriously their oath to do justice without fear or favor and to do what they believe is the right thing to do based on the facts and the law. And we have seen this week evidence of someone who I'm sure didn't vote for me, and we may disagree on a whole lot of other stuff, but he had the courage to stand up and say he's gonna follow his oath and do what is ethically right. So let's take heart and hope that others within the Department of Justice will see that that is, you know, have something that steers their conscience. But, you know, I mean, let's not also be distracted by the fact that there are gonna be the career people who understand that, but then Trump is appointing people to these positions who have no experience as a prosecutor. And the closest they have to it is their experience defending him against crimes and are now sitting behind the desk making decisions about who should be charged with what. So it is a scary time. I don't mean to suggest otherwise, but there are these moments that we should also take note of. Yes, and there have been, to that point, there have been multiple Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys who have resigned or left office under these circumstances. Yes, they have, yes, they have, yes, they have. Let me ask you a politics question. I mentioned in the intro tonight that you say in the book really bluntly that your personal first choice for your running mate would have been Pete Buttigieg, and you praise him effusively. You say he would have been an ideal partner if I were a straight man. And you say effectively that demographically it was too much to ask of the American people to ask them to elect you with him as your running mate. I wonder if his reaction to that since this part of the book has come out, if you've had any reflection on that, or I guess I'd ask you to just elaborate on that a little bit. It's hard to hear with you running as, you know, you're the first woman elected vice president, you're a black woman and a South Asian woman elected to that high office, very nearly elected president, to say that he couldn't be on the ticket effectively because he was gay, it's hard to hear. No, no, no, that's not what I said, that he couldn't be on the ticket because he is gay. My point, as I write in the book, is that I was clear that in 107 days in one of the most hotly contested elections for president of the United States against someone like Donald Trump, who knows no flaw to be a black woman running for president of the United States and as a vice presidential running mate, a gay man, with the stakes being so high, it made me very sad, but I also realized it would be a real risk, no matter how, you know, I've been an advocate and an ally of the LGBT community my entire life, so it wasn't about, yeah, right, so it wasn't about any prejudice on my part, but we had such a short period of time and the stakes were so high. I think Pete is a phenomenal, phenomenal public servant. And I think America is and would be ready for that, but when I had to make that decision with two weeks to go, you know, and maybe I was being too cautious, you know, I'll let our friends, we should all talk about that. Maybe I was, but that's the decision I made and I, as with everything else in the book, I'm being very candid about that. With a great deal of sadness about also the fact that it might've been a risk. Will you consider running in 2028? That's not my focus right now. I know it's not your focus. That's not my focus at all. I know it's- It really isn't. You know I'm just gonna- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let me, I know you're not considering it now, but are you saying, when you decided you're not gonna run for governor of California. Correct. Were you saying you are never gonna run for anything ever again or were you just saying, I'm not gonna run for that office right now? That was the decision before me and I made the decision not to run for governor of California. By the way, there are a lot of great candidates running and I love my state and we want somebody to definitely follow in the footsteps of Gavin in terms of standing up and understanding the power that California has to stand up to what we're saying in DC. As politic as you are being in those remarks, you are beautifully impolitic in this book in a way that makes it honest and as I said, candid, fun to read and I think really important. I think it is blunt and true and I commend you for writing it and for being willing to go out there and defend it and talk about it in these blunt terms at a time we need some real straight talk. Thank you. Thank you for being here today. Thank you, I appreciate that. Thank you, thank you. The book is called 107 Days. It is compelling and funny and a little dishy and it comes out tomorrow. Former Vice President Kamala Harris is going to be doing 15 city book tour. If you don't have tickets yet already, you should make sure to get tickets to go see her on this journey. All right, we'll be right back after this. Stay with us. All right, that's gonna do it for me for now. Now it's time for the last word with the great Lawrence O'Donnell. Good evening, Lawrence. Good evening, Rachel. And that's not gonna do it for you right now. You just had the biggest interview of the year so far on MSNBC. So, okay, tell us everything that you discussed during the commercial breaks. I will say, I am an awkward person who doesn't get along with people very well writ large, just as a general thing about me. I'm a hermit, I'm a pineapple who lives under the sea. But I get along really well with Vice President Harris in the sense that I find her easy to talk to. And what that means is that when we're off camera, like when we were in the commercial breaks, the conversation kind of just kept going the way that it was on camera. We were talking about what she was saying about Trump not bringing down prices and the issue about health premiums about to go up and Republicans not having any plans to go along with Trump not having any plans and Democrats needing to be able to articulate that and build up their stars more than they do and that there's so much good talent in the Democratic Party. So it wasn't anything juicier than what you got on the air, but she's really fired up and ready to go, I will say that. So I haven't read the book. And so that passage that you mentioned that has gotten a lot of controversial coverage where she talks about Joe Biden making the decision to run for a second term and then it being up to him in the end to decide not to. And she uses the word recklessness in that passage. And tonight in discussions with you, she includes herself in that recklessness that she's describing. Does that track with the text of the book? Yes, it does. I mean, what she says is she expresses regret for not having done more, I think, to help the White House arrive at the right decision about President Biden's reelection campaign. But she also explains why in the moment and in situ she didn't feel like she could. She kind of makes the case like me of all people, I'm the one person who couldn't say, step aside old guy, I need to be the one running instead of you. But she's definitely frustrated with the ways decisions were made around the president. She doesn't really criticize President Biden himself. She definitely criticizes the team around him. But Lawrence, now that I know that you have not read the book, have you read the part that's about you? No, I have not. Do you know this one part? Can I read it to you? Go ahead. Okay, it's at page 22. The mythology of America says anyone can grow up to be president, but most people don't think that's really possible for them. Did I grow up as a kid with a dream to be president? No, my mother told me I could be anything and I believed her, but president wasn't on my list. I was in my first year as a senator before it crossed my mind. Oddly, as a result of a throwaway remark, Doug and I were home in Los Angeles for the weekend having breakfast at a popular hangout in our neighborhood when Lawrence O'Donnell walked in. He wandered up to our table to talk about the dire consequences of a second Trump term. Quote, you should run for president, he said. I honestly had not thought about it until that moment. The idea took root in my imagination and as a result of running against Joe for the nomination in 2019, I wound up as his VP. You did it. You were the one who first put the thought in her mind to run for president. So, she reminded me of this in the middle of her presidential campaign, her first campaign when she was running against that Democratic primary field and she's reminded me of it a couple of times since then. So here's, now that it's public information, it was really, really, really early. Really early. Because, remember. She was first elected in 2016, so this would have been in 2017. So Trump just having been sworn in. Yeah, well, so remember. So, Kamala Harris is elected to the United States Senate on the same night that Donald Trump was elected president. So, all Democrats going into that election day who might think about running for president, all thought that was eight years away because Hillary Clinton's gonna be president for the next four years. She's gonna run for election. No Democrat has a decision to make for another six, seven years. At least, that's the way it was before they started counting votes on election day. So, I actually saw her very, very soon after election day on a Saturday morning at that restaurant that she's talking about and I didn't just barge in to her breakfast. She waved me over, Rachel. I wouldn't, you know me. She didn't make you sound like a creep. She didn't make it sound like, you know, Lawrence of O'Connor slinked over to us. Here's the really cool thing in that room, okay? And this is Los Angeles and she's just been elected to the Senate. She has sunglasses on and she's at the community table because she couldn't get a table for two the way like I could, right? Because they know me. And I really had the feeling, by the way, that in that room, even though she's just been elected senator and everybody in that room voted for her, very few people in that room had any idea who she was. Like, maybe nobody. And it might have been the sunglasses, but it's also California and their kind of distant relationship to politics even though they vote for people. And so what I knew was she was gonna be under very, very intense pressure very quickly about are you a candidate for president? And she's in a really weird position. And so what I said to her was, you have to run and you have to run because the Obama lesson is it's never too early. And the Biden lesson is there is a second place. You have to run. And I left it at that and left them to their breakfast. Joe Biden became vice president by running against Barack Obama for president. That is how people have, the Democrats especially, had been picking their running mates was someone who ran against them. And so there is a second place in presidential campaigns and that is the vice presidency. And so that I think was based on the calendar when that happened. I'm pretty sure that was the very first time anyone had said anything to her about that. That's the way that she describes it is you being the first person to actually articulate it to her. So, I mean, she was a two-term attorney general at that point. The campaign that she ran to become the elected DA in San Francisco was the most cinematic freaking thing you could possibly imagine. I mean, she'd been through some really interesting California political wars, but the idea of not just joining the Senate, but then you telling her immediately, no, now you're on the national stage, keep going, don't stop rising, turned out to be a formative thing for her. Well, listen, if I didn't say it, other people were gonna say it down the line. I mean, I knew that. It wasn't something that, oh, I only heard it in one place. And it's just because of the calendar that I was literally the first person to say it to her, I'm sure. And what I was struck by in all those campaigns that you mentioned, Rachel, is here's somebody who won every campaign that she ran in right up to the United States Senate, and her first setback was in that primary running for president. And so she was a winner in California politics as you know. She was on this program for the first time when she was San Francisco District Attorney, again, when she was Attorney General. And I remember someone telling me, before I ever knew anything about her, someone in Hollywood telling me about her and talking about her, this was basically black political Hollywood already knew about her. And they were talking about her as the term they were using was the female Obama, meaning a black woman who could go all the way, who could go as far as Barack Obama. And then the first time someone brought me to see her speak somewhere, I saw that and I thought, well, yeah, she could absolutely go all the way. Lawrence, what did you make of, I don't know if you saw it as you were sitting down, but I asked her at the very end, are you gonna run for president in 2028? What did you make of her response? Well, that was the standard, a computer could have done that response. That's somebody who has not. But she's not a computer. She has body language and you know. Oh no, but that's the answer you give when you might and you might not. She absolutely might. That's the answer that says, in effect, I guess the translation for that is I might. That would be the fair translation of that in American politics. And I'm so glad you asked it. It was one of the things as I was sitting there, and it's the only thing by the way, because I never, in your interviews, I'm always just living in the interview. And as I was noticing the minutes though, and I thought, is Rachel gonna ask her if she's gonna run? And you did. And so thanks for that. And I'm sure that's gonna be one of the headlines that you create by that. But Rachel, and by the way, this was, I don't know if it felt this way to you, but certainly for me watching it, this was Vice President Harris at her best. You brought out the best about her, I think, in the way that she took on every one of these questions that you asked, the way she gave each one of your questions a fair response. She wasn't avoiding anything except possibly that last one about are you gonna run for president? It seems very unlikely that at this point her mind would be made up about that. I mean, how do you make your mind up about that without having some infrastructure to base it on? And we know she doesn't have any campaign infrastructure right now. It is interesting she's doing this very big book tour. She's doing this 15-city book tour. She's doing, she says she's structuring it basically to do a lot of listening. Like I think she's eager to get back out into the country and start talking to people and listening to people again to figure out if it's the right thing to do, in part, and to figure out if it's the right thing to do. Yeah, and yeah, this is the way to do it. I think we can remember the Colin Powell book tour, which literally in the 1990s had people wind up around corners and everyone thought, this is the biggest book tour we've ever seen, and it was by far. Everyone thought he is going to run for president and he didn't in the end. And so I think we'll know when and if she announces. I think it might be hard to tell at any point before that. But Rachel, what else besides page, what is it, 22 about me? What else did you discover in the book that I haven't read that you didn't have time for in the hour? Oh, there's a lot in it. I mean, the stuff that I'm really focused on, as you know, I'm not the world's greatest authority on Democratic Party politics. There's definitely a lot on how things work inside the Democratic Party, different Democratic Party sort of capabilities and incapacities, I would say. Certainly she is bordering on caustic when it comes to describing the political operation around President Biden. When President Biden was still running for re-election, she says that the political briefings that were run for the campaign, I think the actual phrase she uses is made no sense to me. She quotes one of her own staffers describing them as a dog and pony show. She's just caustic in terms of whether or not the political operation around President Biden was serving him well. And so that's interesting stuff. And I think it's important in terms of reckoning with what went wrong and the timing on everything. But I'm really also very interested. I mean, she's, like you said, she was very successful in California politics, brought a really interesting and accomplished resume and history in politics and as a public servant to being a United States Senator, which is what she brought to being a vice president. And therefore, I'm kind of interested not just in what she did before, but what her leadership prescription is now. And the other thing about which she is utterly caustic is the way institutions and powerful people have failed the country. Not just, she says Trump's doing what we knew he was gonna do and what she told us he was gonna do, and she's right about that. What has failed and what has been a surprise are the institutions in our country that we expected more from. And that diagnosis, I think, is really important. And it's important not just as like a caption for what's going on, it's the prescription for what needs to be done to get us out of this mess. We need better institutions. We need better elites. We need better powerful people. And even if the Trump administration reacts to protests by sending in the Marines, Disney doesn't. And the other institutions that we've got that are failing, the law firms don't, the universities don't, the other institutions that we've got that are failing are susceptible to public pressure and political pressure and they ought to be being subjected to more of it because we need them. You can't just do it without them. We need our institutions and our elites to be not capitulating. And so that's the project of the American people who are trying to stand up for our country right now. And her articulating it that way is, to me, just really helpful and clarifying and sort of cuts through a lot of the dross that we're otherwise talking about too much. Hey, Rachel, you know how we have those digital cameras, the digital clocks right under our camera? I normally look down and it says four minutes after the hour when we've had a long chat. It now says 14. So that's a record, but before you go, before you go, because I know you have to go, I want to go back to the very first thing you mentioned in your hour, which is your new documentary about Andrew Young. I didn't know you were working on that. I'm fascinated by Andrew Young. He's one of the real political pioneers and he had a pretty big career before he ever got into politics. When will we see, it's on this network on a Friday night, I think you said. It is, it's gonna be, thank you for asking. It's Friday, October 17th. So I have this production company, which is called Surprise Inside. Our first documentary was the one about Lev Parnas from Russia with Love that premiered to a huge audience here on MSNBC, got nominated for an Emmy. It was something I'm really proud of. This is our second documentary project. And it's the first of a couple projects I'm gonna be rolling up before the end of the year, which are both, I think of them as like my homework for what I need to get smarter about and what I want to learn more about, what I want to understand more deeply about what we need to do next as a country. And one of the things that we've got as a country in this time of need is we've got an inheritance from morally upstanding and successful movements like the civil rights movement. And we need to learn from them, not just as inspirations, we need to learn from them in terms of how they actually did the work to get done what they got done. We need to know what it means, not just to be impressed by their accomplishments, but to actually be in the middle of it, doing it for all of its difficulties. And the story of Andrew Young, the reason it's called Andrew Young, the dirty work, is it's about the fricking day-to-day dirty work and how hard it is to make these things work. And so it's the nuts and bolts, the nitty gritty side of the civil rights movement. As I said, it's the first of a couple of projects along these lines that I'm gonna have coming out this year. But the first one is this documentary that comes out Friday, October 17th here on MSNBC. The only way to get a sneak preview of it is to go to the MSNBC live event on Saturday, October 11th. We'll be showing some scenes for it. But then the premiere is here on October 17th. Rachel, I love that shot of the young Andrew Young that we just had up on the screen there. Rachel, thank you very much for chatting with me longer than usual tonight. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Lance.