The Patriot Post® · Harris's Flip-Flops Have Been Shameless. So Have Trump's.

The speed and thoroughness with which Kamala Harris has been ditching her former political positions are impressive. Rarely has a candidate for president so unabashedly jettisoned policies that until recently were at the heart of her political identity. As a US senator from California, Harris was routinely ranked among the chamber’s most liberal members¹. And as a Democratic presidential hopeful in 2020, she went all-out to cloak herself in San Francisco progressivism, “dart[ing] to the left,” in The New York Times’s formulation², “as she fought for attention from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing.”

Republicans and conservatives have not been shy about calling out Harris’s policy reversals.

“Flip-flopping Kamala Harris” was the headline on an Aug. 2 statement from the Republican National Committee³ that documented a slew of hard-left political stances the vice president formerly embraced but now claims she no longer supports. Among those overturned stances: a ban on fracking⁴, the abolition of private health insurance⁵, defunding the police⁶, enacting the Green New Deal⁷, and mandatory gun confiscation⁸.

“You would think we were covering the Olympic gymnastics today, as Kamala Harris flip-flops, spins, and twists,” National Review’s Jim Geraghty⁹ wrote on Aug. 1. In a broadcast on Fox News, commentator Stuart Varney¹⁰ went through the litany of Harris’s latest U-turns. “This will not go unnoticed,” he told his viewers. “The complete reversal of everything she stood for will not fly.” At Townhall, a major conservative website, editor Katie Pavlich observed that “Harris is trying to rebrand and strike out on her own by scrubbing her far left record” before the Democratic National Convention gets underway in Chicago. The New York Post, in fine tabloid style, zinged Harris with a two-word front page headline: “Kama Kameleon¹¹.”

Now Donald Trump has jumped on the issue¹² with his customary tone of aggrieved hyperbole.

“Kamala Harris has flip-flopped on virtually every policy she has supported and lived by for her entire career, from the Border to Tips, and the Fake News Media isn’t reporting it,” the former president fumed¹³ on his Truth Social platform. “She sounds more like Trump than Trump, copying almost everything. She is conning the American public, and will flip right back. I will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! There will be no flipping!!!”

Trump’s complaint notwithstanding, liberal news outlets haven’t ignored Harris’s makeover. Besides the Times story quoted above, CNN reported¹⁴ more than two weeks ago that the Democratic candidate was “recalibrat[ing]” her policy stances and that “several cornerstones of her 2020 presidential run” are “at odds” with her current positions. The Washington Post ran a lengthy story¹⁵ on the subject on Wednesday and asked in an editorial¹⁶: “Why has she changed so many positions since 2020?”

If the critics who blast Harris for renouncing her past views mean to argue that she shouldn’t be relied on, they’ll get no argument from me. But if their claim is that Harris is unique or exceptional in this regard, they could hardly be more wrong.

Harris is far from the first presidential candidate to turn her back on the views she used to be closely associated with. Mitt Romney¹⁷ entered politics in Massachusetts as a strong supporter of abortion rights, gay rights, gun control, and health insurance mandates; as a candidate for president, he reversed his stand on all of them. John Kerry performed so many policy about-faces when he ran for president — on the war in Iraq, on same-sex marriage, on the Patriot Act, on affirmative action, on free trade — that Slate commented mordantly¹⁸: “If you don’t like the Democratic nominee’s views, just wait a week.”

And then there’s Trump.

As a candidate for the White House in 2016, as president from 2017 to 2021, and now in his third run as the GOP standard-bearer, Trump has proved himself no less willing than Harris to reverse himself on seeming matters of principle.

During his first presidential campaign, for example, Trump vowed again and again that Mexico would pay for the border wall¹⁹ he intended to build. But none of the construction was ever underwritten by Mexico and Trump later insisted that his words shouldn’t have been taken at face value²⁰. “Obviously, I never said this, and I never meant they’re going to write out a check,” he said in 2019.

Same-sex marriage? Trump opposed it²¹ as a candidate for president and suggested the decision legalizing it ought to be overruled by the Supreme Court. Once the election was behind him, he changed tack²². In an NBC interview he pronounced the issue “settled in the Supreme Court. I mean it’s done … and I’m fine with that.”

Early voting by mail? Trump used to condemn the practice without reservation²³. “Mail-in voting is totally corrupt. Get that through your head,” he told his supporters. Now? “Absentee voting, early voting, and election day voting are all good options,” he posted on social media this year²⁴.

Abortion²⁵? Trump went from proclaiming himself “strongly pro-choice” to arguing that “there has to be some form of punishment for the woman.” Last year Trump boasted²⁶ that he had been “able to kill Roe v. Wade” through his Supreme Court nominations, and in February he reportedly told his allies that he would like to see abortion after 16 weeks²⁷ prohibited nationwide. Yet in April he pledged to veto any nationwide ban²⁸ on the procedure.

The Electoral College²⁹? It is “a disaster for democracy,” Trump declared in 2012, when he thought Romney might win the popular presidential vote yet lose to Barack Obama in the electoral tally. Four years later, when he himself had lost the popular vote, he reversed himself. “The Electoral College is actually genius³⁰,” he tweeted.

Of course, all sensible people change their minds occasionally. I wouldn’t think much of a political candidate who refused to alter a position even when the facts on the ground made it untenable or proved it wrong. But I think much less of candidates whose only true fixed principle is to win and who have no qualms about dumping a politically difficult stand for one that is more convenient or popular.

In my judgment, neither Trump nor Harris is trustworthy. Neither has much respect for the voters. Yes, Kamala is a chameleon — and Donald is too. Vote for either at your peril.