WATCH: President Trump SLAMS Harris For Taking The Easy Way Out In Upcoming Joint Interview With CNN - 'Why Isn't It Live?'

During an interview with The Daily Mail released on Thursday, 45th President Donald Trump explained that the upcoming joint interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) is being pre-recorded because of Harris' abysmal history with live interviews. He also posited that Walz is joining his running mate to bail out Harris if she has difficulty answering a question. The interview, which takes place on CNN at 9 PM EST on Thursday, comes after weeks of the Trump campaign pressuring the vice president to speak to the press and confront the various policy reversals she's made since launching her campaign.

"Why isn't it live? It's an interview that's going to be taped, edited, and then put out. That's not even an interview. And then she's doing it with her vice president sitting there. So she's not very smart. When they ask her a question she can't answer, she's just going to look at him," Trump said. "I can't imagine. Everyone's waiting for her to do an interview because she's been a big failure in interviews, as you know."

Trump wasn't the only Republican slamming the Harris-Walz ticket for the decision to hold a joint, pre-recorded interview. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) criticized the Democrat candidates for not allowing Harris to sit down for a one-on-one interview, instead needing her male running mate to join her. "It is absolutely unacceptable that the first and ONLY interview from Kamala Harris - the anointed Democrat nominee for President of the United States - is done jointly with Tim Walz. It is offensive to ALL women that Kamala has refused to sit for a solo interview when she is running to be Commander-in-chief," Stefanik wrote. "And the Democrats’ stenographers in the mainstream media just blindly regurgitate the talking points provided to them directly by the Kamala Harris campaign. Kamala Harris and her entire campaign is an affront to the American people."
 

The interview with Harris and Walz is expected to be taped during the day Thursday in Georgia, where the vice president will be participating in a bus tour to try to win the Peach State, according to The Hill. As previously reported by the DC Enquirer, Harris's campaign advisors asked journalists in recent days about who she should be interviewed by as several networks lobby the campaign to be the first to get the exclusive interview with Harris after her unprecedented rise to become the party's nominee. While Harris set a strict deadline to get an interview "scheduled" before the end of the month, her campaign aides were debating the best path forward for a vice president who is prone to awkward moments in unscripted environments. The announcement on Tuesday solidified that the campaign thought CNN would be the most receptive outlet to shield Harris from an embarrassing moment.

Harris has largely stayed clear of interviews in recent years following an embarrassing encounter with NBC News host Lester Holt in 2021 when she infamously said that she'd "never been to Europe" when asked about whether she'd been to the border. Given this history, the campaign reportedly considered that Gov. Walz should do solo interviews but feared that he didn't know the specifics of his running mate's policy stances. The joint interview, however, would allow Walz and Harris to check one another throughout the interview to ensure they stay on message and avoid awkward moments.

WATCH:
 

President Trump on Kamala's CNN "interview" tonight: "Why isn't it live? It's an interview that's going to be taped, edited, and then put out. That's not even an interview. And then she's doing it with her Vice President sitting there. So she's not very smart. When they ask her a… pic.twitter.com/7KuEZG3eHS

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 29, 2024

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