Would you crack a cold one with Kamala Harris? The vice president and Democratic presidential nominee dropped by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night, where she shared a beer with the late-night host.
Harris has been making the media rounds ahead of the election, making appearances on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, ABC’s The View, and The Howard Stern Show in quick succession. Her latest stop was at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City, where she sat for an interview with Stephen Colbert. She was greeted by a chorus of cheers from the audience. “They know how to pronounce my name,” she quipped to Colbert before diving into the interview.
Colbert began on a somber note by asking the vice president about relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and the forthcoming Hurricane Milton. “To all of those folks in North Carolina and Georgia, please know that FEMA and the people on the ground are there are there to help you. You are entitled to help,” Harris said. She continued by relaying an anecdote about a woman in Georgia who lost her husband after a tree fell on their house during the storm, urging people in the path of the next hurricane to evacuate.
“What just upsets me so is the idea that any politician would play political games with these folks—with people who are in the midst of such suffering, loss of life, loss of their homes, loss of normalcy—and then for the sake of political gain, tell these lies in a way that is meant to make people distrust the help that is there for them to receive,” she said, alluding to misinformation about hurricane relief.
Colbert eventually moved on to Harris’s presidential run, remarking that her campaign is one of the shortest in modern American history. “My opponent, the former president, has been running since 2020,” Harris said, getting a big laugh from the audience. She used the relative newness of her campaign to underscore the difference between her fresh perspective and Donald Trump’s “old, tired playbook.” Harris scored more points with the audience when Colbert asked her what was going through her head during the presidential debate. “It’s family TV, right?” she said. “It starts with a w, there’s a letter in between, and then the last letter’s f.”
Harris also used her Late Show interview to touch on weightier subjects, including the war in Gaza. “We must have a ceasefire and hostage deal as immediately as possible,” Harris said. “This war has got to end.” Colbert then brought up Trump’s love of name-dropping foreign autocrats like Viktor Orbán, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Vladimir Putin. “Dictators and authoritarians and people who have been well described as murderers,” replied Harris.
“He gets played by these guys,” she continued. “He admires so-called strongmen, and he gets played because they flatter him or offer him favor…He thinks Vladimir Putin is his friend. What about the American people? They should be your first friend.”
At the end of the interview, Colbert brought up an old canard about politicians: Sometimes they win because people vote for someone they think they’d like to have a beer with. Then he asked Harris perhaps the only question that truly matters: “Do you want to have a beer with me?”
She said yes, of course, and Colbert cracked open two Miller High Lifes—the brand chosen by the VP backstage. “The Champagne of beers!” she exclaimed after taking a sip. She also called Trump “a loser,” pointing out that he lost jobs, manufacturing plants, automotive plants, and, most importantly, the 2020 election. “This is what happens when I drink beer,” Harris added.
While sipping a beer on national TV seems fairly innocuous, Trump’s campaign is having a bit of a meltdown over the stunt. After Harris’s Late Show appearance, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung posted on X, “Kamala drinks a beer to show Americans how relatable she is, but she ends up looking like an out-of-touch elitist trying to gaslight everyone into thinking she’s one of them.” Harris hitting Trump’s campaign where it hurts? We’ll drink to that.
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