Dr. West has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump, referring to him in a June interview as the “neo-fascist gangster in the White House.” Describing himself as a democratic socialist, Dr. West has lamabsted politicians from both the Republican and Democratic parties. While Trump has attempted to paint Harris as a member of the radical left, West said that wasn’t the case.
“I want Trump people to know, I’m a radical,” West said in a Wednesday interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN. “My dear sister [Kamala] Harris is not a radical—she’s a centrist and a moderate. I love the sister, she’s my AKA sister and everything, but at the same time, I recognize that when it comes to serious class struggles that are going on, the class war of the bosses against workers, she’s not always been on the side of the workers. Neither has Biden.”
“We have to tell the truth about even those we vote for,” West added. “That’s why I don’t endorse them, I vote for them.”
West warned that if presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Harris still retain their ties with “neo-liberal elites, then we’re just going to have another slow disaster rather than a quick catastrophe.”
Newsweek reached out to the Biden campaign for comment.
Regardless of his views about Harris and Biden, West told Cooper that Americans “have got to make sure Trump leaves the White House one way or another. Either by election or if he loses and he won’t leave, then some of us will have to go and escort the brother. It’s time to go. You’ve done your damage.”
As the first Black woman to run for vice president, some observers believe Harris could draw both progressives and Black voters to Biden’s side in November. Widely regarded as a safe choice, Harris could complement Biden’s own political platform without pushing away voters with moderate viewpoints.
The Trump administration reacted quickly to the announcement of Harris as Biden’s running mate. Minutes after news of Biden’s choice was made public, Trump’s campaign released a video calling Harris a “phony.”
“Biden calls himself a transition candidate,” the ad said. “He is handing over the reins to Kamala while they jointly embrace the radical left.”
During a Tuesday press briefing, Trump said Harris was “a big tax raiser, she’s a big slasher of funds for our military, and she’s got a lot of difficult things that she’s going to have to explain.”
“Plus, she was very, very nasty to—one of the reasons it surprised me, she was very—she was probably nastier than even Pocahontas [Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren] to Joe Biden,” Trump added. “She was very disrespectful to Joe Biden. And it’s hard to pick somebody that’s that disrespectful. When she said things during the debates—during the Democrat primary debates—that were horrible about Sleepy Joe.”
Vice President Mike Pence told a crowd in Arizona on Tuesday that he was not surprised by the news that Harris had been chosen as Biden’s running mate. “As you all know, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have been overtaken by the radical left,” Pence said. “So given their promises of higher taxes, open borders, socialized medicine and abortion on demand, it’s no surprise that he chose Senator Harris.”
Harris criticized Trump on Wednesday during a campaign event in Delaware, saying that he had “inherited the longest economic expansion in history from Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Then, like everything else he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground.”
