Vice President Kamala Harris said the decisions by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times not to endorse a presidential candidate are “disappointing,” but she drew a line from the billionaire owners of both papers directly to Donald Trump.
“It’s disappointing, no doubt,” the Democractic nominee for President told Charlamagne tha God on Tuesday’s episode of “The Breakfast Club” radio show. “But the other piece of it is, it gets back to my point of who is Donald Trump because he is the one who is up for election with me. I think that some of your listeners, they know, and others may not, which is it’s billionaires in Donald Trump’s club. That’s who’s in his club. That’s who he hangs out with, that’s who he cares about.”
Endorsements for Harris were planned by both the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, but the billionaire owners of both papers — the Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong and WaPo’s Jeff Bezos — quashed both and did not allow them to run.
Harris continued, “That’s why, when he was last president, he put in place a massive tax cut for billionaires and the biggest corporations. And that is exactly what he will do again. His policies are not about middle class folks. He’s not sitting around thinking about what he can do to take care of your grandmother and your grandfather. He’s thinking about people like himself or himself and all of his grievances and all that makes him angry about how he has personally been treated, as opposed to worrying about how you have been treated and what his responsibility is to lift you up.”
Both papers received significant blowback from staff and readers after their owners canceled the endorsements, with the Washington Post suffering 200,000 subscription cancelations.
In an editorial published Monday evening, Bezos insisted business interests had nothing to do with his decision to scrap the Post’s endorsement. “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” he said, arguing instead that they “create a perception of bias.”
Over at the LA Times, Soon-Shiong said on Friday he has “no regrets whatsoever” about scrapping their endorsement and, as TheWrap exclusively reported, a series called “The Case Against Donald Trump.” “In fact, I think it was exactly the right decision.”
