Fox News’ Bret Baier Defends Combative Kamala Harris Interview, Would “Love” to Have Her on Again

Bret Baier wants a second go-around. After Vice President Kamala Harris’s first formal sit-down on Fox News last week, the anchor, who was unusually aggressive in his questioning, is hoping she returns to the network soon. “I’d love to try again,” Baier tells Vanity Fair in an interview. “The more candidates face tough but fair questions, the better it is for viewers and voters, and actually the better it is for candidates.”

Harris entered the lion’s den for an interview last week that served as a political Rorschach test, with Republicans mocking her performance and Democrats praising it, as the Fox News anchor faced scrutiny of his own. (“This was grievance theater, not political journalism,” wrote one critic.) Baier kicked off the interview with a question about the number of illegal immigrants allowed into the country under the Biden administration, which immediately devolved into a heated back-and-forth. Within seconds of providing her answer, Harris was interrupted by the anchor, who repeatedly pressed for a specific number as she tried to answer.

The combative sit-down was even parodied on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, with Alec Baldwin mocking Baier’s approach in the show’s cold open. In one exchange, Maya Rudolph as Harris tells Baldwin as Baier that he has to “listen” to hear her answer to his questions, to which he quips, “Well, I can’t because I’m talking.”

Some argued that, as expected, the Fox News anchor challenged Harris more than former president Donald Trump, whose first question from Baier was, “What do you think is the most important issue facing the country right now?” Baier defended his line of questioning to VF, saying, “It comes up in polls time and time again about immigration being one of the top two issues, along with the economy.”

The Fox News chief political anchor says that while there were multiple instances in which he allowed Harris to provide her “talking points” to the audience, his interruptions were in an effort to “redirect,” adding that if he didn’t, her “long answers” would “eat up all the time of this interview that was live-to-tape.” Baier continued that Harris “even acknowledged, ‘You know what I’m going to say,’ and I was trying to get in and say, ‘Yes, but this is what I’m asking specifically.’”

He also pushed back on criticism that he challenged Harris more than her opponent, saying, “If you look back at the Donald Trump interview, I had the same kind of interruptions when there was clearly an effort to go down a talking-points road.” Baier says that his interview with Trump was “much the same tenor, to try to get them back on the topic that you’re asking about.” The Republican candidate clearly stumbled in that June 2023 interview; “Trump’s Fox News disaster” is how Axios summed it up.

Still, throughout last week’s interview, Baier interrupted Harris at least 38 times in 27 minutes, which was about twice as often as he interjected in Trump’s interview, according to CNN. “I get the criticism,” Baier says. “I get the wondering whether that was different. But if you look back on that one-on-one with former president Trump, he didn’t like it at the time.”

While Fox News tried to get both Harris and Trump to agree to debate, Baier says he’d also been requesting an interview with the Democratic candidate. Earlier this month, the Harris campaign asked if he’d be interested in a sit-down in a battleground state, he recalls. “I said, ‘Absolutely, whatever you guys give us, we’ll make it happen,’” Baier says. “So that began the logistics talk, and we ended up in Pennsylvania.”

Beyond the on-camera fireworks, there was also some drama behind the scenes. As the interview was set to be taped, Baier says the Harris campaign pushed very close to the 5:18 p.m. cutoff for the network to be able to turn it around for Baier’s 6 p.m. show, Special Report. It ended up being a “time crunch,” he says. According to Baier, Harris “was in the building” ahead of time but didn’t come into the interview room until 5:17 p.m., “so we were sweating whether we were going to be able to turn the tape around.” Even still, he says Harris was “very cordial,” and “the staff was very helpful setting it all up.”

“We welcome them back because I think those exchanges illuminate things for voters and viewers,” he added.

Baier also addressed his “mistake” in airing an incomplete clip package that referenced Trump’s concerning rhetoric, specifically his “enemy from within” comment. “The context of that was not fully everything we wanted in that sound bite,” he says. “But the reason I did pull the sound bite was I was assuming [Harris] was going to say, ‘We, Fox, don’t cover this enough.’”

“I wanted to point out, that same day Harris Faulkner had a town hall with the former president in which she asked specifically about that question and what he meant,” Baier says, but “in the chaos of getting it on the air I didn’t realize how we could have made that much more clear to both the viewer and to the vice president listening to it.” The anchor added that he wanted to address it on his show the following day “once I saw some reaction to that moment, and I agreed with it.”

Regardless of any background rushing or clip-pulling errors, the sit-down was a ratings boon for the already dominant cable network, according to Nielsen data released by Fox News, with 7.8 million total viewers and 1.13 million viewers in the key 25–54 demographic, outperforming Harris’s recent 60 Minutes interview, her appearance on ABC’s The View, and her visit to CBS’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

Baier, too, can see the added benefit in Harris agreeing to join him for a sit-down—even if the reaction has been “mixed”—noting that as the campaign narrows its electoral focus in the final days, Fox News offers a broad viewership that he says includes “Republicans, Democrats, and independents, and there’s a lot of suburban folks who tune in.” This echoes the sentiment Harris campaign spokesman Ian Sams provided to Vanity Fair’s Inside the Hive host Brian Stelter prior to the interview. Sams’s two-pronged explanation for Harris’s appearance on Fox News—which he said is an “important piece of the puzzle” in the campaign’s strategy—included the consistently high ratings that the network provides as well as the “undecided voters who watch.”

“The campaign came in with a plan, and they wanted a strong viral moment. She clearly had a couple of those and she used a lot of her time talking about former president Trump,” Baier says. “I wish we could have just had this conversation, but because of time constraints and how she was answering, I figured if we didn’t do what we did, it would have been about four questions in [those] 20-plus minutes.”