President Donald Trump offered clever advice to former Vice President Kamala Harris about her plan to run for California governor.
Learn from your mistakes, Trump warned her.
“Let her run,” Trump told OutKick’s Clay Travis during an interview aboard Air Force One on Saturday. “I don’t want to be [giving] people advice politically, but one thing she’s gotta start doing is she’s gotta start giving interviews.”
During the 2020 election, Trump said former President Joe Biden, “did no interviews, and he got away with it because of COVID. You can’t get away with both of them.”
Harris, 60, is strongly considering a run for California governor in 2026 when current Gov. Gavin Newsom reaches his term limit. Harris has plans to make a formal decision by the end of the summer, insiders said, with a gubernatorial campaign being one of three options she’s considering along with another presidential run in 2028 or remaining on the sidelines as a Democratic Party powerbroker.
Harris has maintained a low profile since being ousted from office in January, making few public appearances and no formal interviews. Her most notable recent appearance was at the 56th annual NAACP Image Awards last month.
But she won’t lay low forever. A former Harris advisor told CBS News that she would be a “great” fit for California’s top job.
“On a national level, what Newsom has been able to do with that job, there is a lot of upside with what she can do as the governor of the fifth-largest economy with her name ID, when our party is looking for national leadership and California looking for good governance,” the former advisor said.
Harris faced significant criticism during her presidential campaign for limiting her media appearances. After Biden was pushed out of his reelection campaign by top Democrats and Harris took over, she went 39 days before sitting down for an interview, which she only did with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on August 29.
Trump, by contrast, embraced independent media platforms during his successful 2024 campaign, appearing on popular podcaster Joe Rogan’s show and others hosted by figures like Theo Von and Andrew Schultz. The president has credited his teenage son Barron with helping him select which podcasts to appear on.
Walz has since complained that the Harris campaign limited his media appearances during the campaign’s final stretch.
“There’s a danger – and I would argue I did it maybe during the campaign – of fighting the last battle instead of the next one,” Walz told CNN.
During his OutKick interview, Trump also reflected on winning non-consecutive terms as president, suggesting it “showed how bad [Democrats] were” at governing during the intervening years.
“What they were doing didn’t work,” Trump said, adding that he now has “much more support” in his second administration, particularly from the tech industry. “If you look at the inauguration — look at the people that were there — it was a who’s who of a world that was totally against me the first time.”