Donald Trump is leaning on former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for some debate prep after her viral takedown of Kamala Harris just five years ago.
Gabbard hammered Harris on her criminal justice record in a televised debate when both ran unsuccessfully for the 2020 Democrat nomination.
The Hawaii Congresswoman, who has since left the Democrats and become more friendly to conservatives, is set to offer the president a few pointers ahead of the first presidential debate between Trump and Harris.
Gabbard and Trump have already held a practice session for the September 10 showdown in Philadelphia, where she’ll no doubt remind him of how she eviscerated her in the 2019 debate.
The Congresswoman claimed that Harris locked up more than 1,500 minor drug offenders ‘and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana’ on a radio program.
She accused her of keeping innocent people in jail and extending sentences to take advantage of their free labor, in a sharp attack on the former U.S. Senator and attorney general of the Golden State.
‘There is no excuse for that, and the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology,’ Gabbard insisted.
A lawmaker who’d propelled herself to the top field with an attack on Joe Biden in the last debate, Harris got a taste of her own medicine in Detroit, where she was on stage with Biden again.
Gabbard said she was ‘deeply concerned’ about Harris’ record as her state’s top prosecutor. ‘There are too many examples to cite.’
‘She fought to keep cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way,’ Gabbard charged to applause.
Enraged, Harris said she’d done the work of ‘significantly reforming the criminal justice’ for a state of 40 million people and would decriminalize
‘The bottom line is, Senator Harris, when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives, you did not and worse yet, in the case of those who are on death row, innocent people, you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to do so,’ she charged.
‘There is no excuse for that, and the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology.’
Harris did not dispute that charge directly in her rebuttal. She focused on her personal opposition to the death penalty and ‘very difficult’ decisions she made to not seek the death penalty in widely-publicized cases.
But after the debate, she was asked by Anderson Cooper on CNN to respond.
Instead she dismissed Gabbard as an also-ran and an apologist for Bashar Al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, whom Gabbard met after the start of his brutal civil war.
In a statement, Trump campaign National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wouldn’t characterize it as your usual debate practice for the ABC News event.
‘President Trump has proven to be one of the best debaters in political history as evidenced by his knockout blow to Joe Biden,’ she said.
‘He does not need traditional debate prep but will continue to meet with respected policy advisors and effective communicators like Tulsi Gabbard, who successfully dominated Kamala Harris on the debate stage in 2020.’
One person who tried to clap back on the other side was Lis Smith, who was running Pete Buttigieg’s competing campaign.
She cited a moment where the now-Transportation Secretary made the audience derisively laugh at Gabbard over her comments on national security and talks with Al-Assad.
In October 2022, Gabbard announced she would leave the Democrat party because it was ‘under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.’
It’s made her a favorite with conservatives, to the point that some have floated her as a left-field choice for Trump’s VP in 2024.
Gabbard spoke to a CPAC ballroom full of Trump supporters who cheered her on in February as she praised the former president for continuing to fight the establishment elite in Washington, D.C.
‘I’ve met a lot of strong tough people in my life, I can’t think of a single one who could not only withstand all that is coming at Donald Trump without crumbling, but someone who would actually choose to keep fighting against the entire Washington establishment,’ Gabbard said.