Bret Baier said he had 75 questions ready for Kamala Harris. He got to ask maybe eight of them.

But that’s what you get when you book a tightly scripted post turtle who shows up 15 minutes late for a five o'clock interview and then proceeds to dodge, delay, and deceive her way through a 26-minute exchange.

What you don’t get, though, is decent answers to good questions. And Baier, to his credit, asked some good, tough, thoughtful questions. In doing so, he disproved the doubters, including yours truly, who’d been prepared for the worst, prepared for a series of cupcakes of the sort she’s been getting all along from the mainstream media.

One of those tough questions was about a Donald Trump campaign ad that shows Harris trumpeting taxpayer-funded sex-change operations for illegal immigrants, even if they’re imprisoned. Baier rolled the tape, and there she was, in a setting she certainly regrets.

“Are you still in support of using taxpayer dollars to help prison inmates or detailed illegal aliens to transition to another gender?”

HARRIS: “I will follow the law.” pic.twitter.com/O9GnJM8aDb

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 16, 2024

How did Harris respond when Baier asked her about it? “I will follow the law,” she said, and then she really reached:

It’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed. Um, you’re probably familiar with, now it’s a public report, that under Donald Trump’s administration, these, uh, surgeries, were available to, on a medical necess- necessity basis, to people in the federal prison system, and I think frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of like, throwing, you know, stones when you’re living in a glass house.

That’s quite a word salad, but I don’t remember Trump promoting any such perversion. Baier brought this up, noting, “The Trump aides say that he never advocated for that prison policy, and no gender transition surgeries happened during his presidency.”

“Well, you know what?” snapped Harris. “You’ve got to take responsible [sic] for what happens in your administration.” (Note to self: Tell Trump to put his best ad team on this ill-advised sentence. Taking responsibility for what’s transpired within the Biden administration seems like a target-rich environment.)

Baier persisted, though, and in what would be a common occurrence during the interview, he circled back to the original question: “Would you still advocate for using taxpayer dollars for gender reassignment surgeries?”

To which Harris replied with — you guessed it — “I will follow the law.”

If you had “I was raised in a middle-class household” on your bingo card, you came away disappointed. Perhaps she and her team noticed that even Saturday Night Live is making fun of that line. Still, if you had “transnational criminal organizations” on your card, bingo.

Baier pressed hard on the border issue, which was good because border security is, next to the economy and abortion, among the issues that most animate the voters. “You’ve said repeatedly that the border was secure,” began Baier. “When in your mind did it start becoming a crisis?”

“I think it dep-, we’ve had a broken immigration system, transcending, by the way, Donald Trump’s administration, even before. Let’s all be honest about that.”

Again, though, no answer to Baier’s question.

Harris said she no longer supports decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and when Baier pointed out that her running mate, Tim Walz, has turned Minnesota into a sanctuary state replete with goodies and giveaways for illegals, she said, “We are very clear, and I am very clear, as is Tim Walz, that we must support and enforce federal law, and that is exactly what we will do.”

When Baier surmised that these were “evolutions” in her positions, Harris got snippy: “Well, let’s be very clear. I’m the only person who’s running for president who has prosecuted [— wait for it! —] transnational criminal organizations, from the Sinaloa cartel to the Guadalajara quotel, er, cartel.”

Harris’s strongest moment came when she unburdened herself from what has been. When Baier pressed her about her inability to say what she’d do differently than Joe Biden, she said: “Let me be very clear: My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency. And like every new president that comes into office, I will bring my life experiences, professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas.”

This was as close to a Sister Souljah moment as Harris is ever likely to come, but she still fell far short.

Indeed, Harris fell short across the board. Baier grilled her on a new Marquette Law School poll indicating that a stunning 79% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. “If it’s on the wrong track,” said Baier, “that track follows three and a half years of you being vice president and President Biden being president. That is what they’re saying, 79% of them. Why are they saying that? If you’re turning the page, you’ve been in office for three and a half years.”

To which Harris stupefyingly responded, “And Donald Trump has been running for office since…”

It was around this point that you could actually see her start to sweat.

Harris then launched into a semi-coherent rant on “unstable” and “dangerous” Trump, but Baier turned the light back on her: “You told many interviewers that Joe Biden was on his game; that he ran circles around his staff. When did you first notice that President Biden’s mental faculties appeared diminished?”

This question elicited the longest pause of the night, after which an uncomfortable Harris responded: “Joe Biden, I have watched in, from the Oval Office to the Situation Room. And he has the judgment and the experiment [sic] experience to do exactly what he has done in making very important decisions on behalf of the American people. Bret, Joe Biden is not on the ballot. And Donald Trump, Donald Trump is.”

Toward the end of the interview, as Harris was fumbling her way through a question about Iran, Baier looked up and to his right and nodded nervously. This was his signal from Harris’s handlers to wrap it up.

Unfortunately for the candidate, the damage had already been done.

POSTSCRIPT: Donald Trump had been critical of Fox News in recent days, but he seems satisfied by yesterday’s act of journalism. “Great job by Bret Baier in his Interview with Lyin’ Kamala Harris,” Trump posted to X with his typical reserve. “She has a massive and irredeemable case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME — So bad, in fact, that she is barely able to talk about any subject other than the man who had the best economy ever, the strongest border in history, and who just got the UNANIMOUS ENDORSEMENT OF THE U.S. Border Patrol, ME!”