Morning Glory: Kamala Harris lacks the minimum skills set to be president

Vice President Kamala Harris lacks the minimum skills necessary to serve as president. That conclusion also means she lacks the skills to be Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s military. The absolute whiff that was her sit-down with CNN’s Dana Bash demonstrated Harris’s skills deficit. The upcoming debate—unless the moderators wholly avoid asking her even a moderately difficult question—will confirm this conclusion. 

The Constitution’s requirements are simple: the president must be at least 35, be a natural born citizen, and must have lived in the United States for at least 14 years. Harris checks all three boxes. (The Qualifications Clause is set forth in Article II, Section 1, Clause 5.)

But what are the skills that are actually required to get most decisions right and to avoid catastrophically wrong decisions?

First, a president must be able to identify, hire and retain qualified senior staff to help him or her. Every president makes personnel mistakes but they must master this skill or at least hire people who can do so as Chief of Staff and Cabinet secretaries. 

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Next, the president must be able to absorb an enormous amount of incoming information and to make sense of it. He or she must be able to prioritize the crucial data provided them and understand the choices they confront as a result of that information. Then they have to be at least an average decision-maker. Again, every president makes mistakes. We cannot expect, because we will never get, a "perfect" president. But between the choices we are given, who makes the better decisions more often than the other candidate?

A president must also be able to communicate to his or her subordinates in the Executive Branch, which includes the military, what their decisions are and in what order they are to be implemented. They also need to be able to recall their decisions, follow-up on them, and change course when the results do not match the expectations. 

HARRIS' FOREIGN POLICY RECORD GIVES INSIGHT TO GOALS

Finally, a president must be willing and able to communicate that which needs to be communicated to a free people via a free press. He or she has to be ready, willing and able to explain and persuade what they and the country are about. 

The record before us about Donald Trump and his ability to do the job is there. Controversial or not, Trump makes choices and explains them. He is never not available to the media. He can also assemble key appointees. When it came to picking nominees for the Supreme Court, for example, he selected three superb jurists. He had some big misses in his first year as president when it came to staff but he will be far better prepared this go 'round than after his election in 2016. 

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event in Detroit, Michigan, US, on Monday, Sept. 2, 2024. (Emily Elconin/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Trump also made some mistakes during the unprecedented crisis that was COVID but, critically, he got the most important thing done: Operation Warp Speed was a Trump initiative and the vaccines it produced have saved millions of lives. The mistakes of the COVID era, such as the shut down of schools, are, at most, only partially his responsibility. I think Trump did as well as most presidents could have done. Had Operation Warp Speed not been launched and successfully completed, the catastrophe that was COVID would have been far, far worse. 

Trump also did not begin any new wars but was prepared to use and did use military force when necessary, as with the elimination of ISIS terrorists generally and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi specifically, and the killing of Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani when he landed in Iraq with the intention of killing even more American troops stationed there. The Quds Force is the expeditionary arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and Soleimani was assassinated by the American military at the order of Trump on January 3, 2020.  (An excellent question to pose of Harris on debate night: "Did President Trump make the correct decision when he ordered the military to eliminate Soleimani in January of 2020?") Trump had also begun a process to withdraw from Afghanistan, but his agreement with the Taliban had red lines which he would have enforced and which President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris did not. The catastrophic collapse of the American mission in Afghanistan was the result. 

There is no evidence from her time as Vice President or as a United States Senator to lead an objective observer to conclude she is at all prepared to be president and quite a lot to show she isn’t, including her single interview since being swapped in as nominee given President Biden’s manifest and very alarming incapacity. Harris’s one high profile job as Vice President was to stem the flow of migrants across our southern border, and she failed miserably at doing so. She is trying to redefine her job description on immigration now, but Biden was explicit at the time he put her in charge of the border: Stem the flow. She did not do that. In fact, there is no evidence she successfully completed any task at the border. 

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Kamala Harris is afraid of the media—even the extremely friendly media. She will not sit down for interviews because every interview she has given has been a disaster for her. She can’t communicate and her rate of staff turnover is deeply worrisome. 

Those in the legacy media telling you otherwise about Harris’s skills are the same people who told you Biden was just fine up until he displayed in unmistakable fashion that he isn’t. Harris is not ready to be president, and there is zero indication that she can grow into the job or even has confidence in her own ability to do so. 

Hugh Hewitt is host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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