CHICAGO — A House Republican serving as a surrogate for the Trump campaign slammed Vice President Kamala Harris’ new economic platform in a Tuesday press conference, accusing the presumptive Democratic nominee of blithely ignoring Americans’ concerns about skyrocketing prices with her talk of “joy and vibes.”
“Joy and vibes isn’t going to put food on the table,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) told reporters at the Trump Hotel Chicago at a presser with campaign adviser Brian Hughes. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
Presumptive vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had thanked Harris “for bringing back the joy” after she replaced President Biden in the 2024 race.
The Harris-Walz campaign have since blasted out many press releases touting their ecstatic Democratic ticket, with fawning left-wing lawmakers and credulous media alike repeating the “joy” messaging.
“You could be happy and you could be hungry all at the same time,” Donalds countered, hitting Harris over her plans to federally set prices for grocery stores to avoid “price gouging,” hand out $25,000 to first-time homebuyers and grant up to $6,000 in onetime tax breaks for lower and middle-income families of newborns.
The mounting costs of the proposals — some of which were reminiscent of “Soviet-style” central planning — could add as much as $1.7 trillion to the nation’s deficit and would likely lead to widespread shortages with little to no effect on inflation, economists previously told The Post.
Even with a 28% corporate income tax hike, which the Harris campaign rolled out on Monday, the ballooning $34 trillion national deficit would only be reduced by between $1 trillion and $1.2 trillion, according to non-partisan estimates by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Tax Foundation and the Penn Wharton Budget Model.
“Joy does not provide security,” Donalds said at the press conference in the background of the 2024 Democratic National Convention. “Joy does not provide an economic vision. Joy does not provide peace on the Middle East.”
“Go, take your joy to the mullahs in Iran and see what happens to you,” he dared. “It doesn’t work. What is required in this moment is true leadership. We have that opportunity with Donald Trump.”
Donalds accused the joyous campaign of faking the good fellow feeling since Harris lacked raw political talent.
“Now you have a situation where they’re trying to rebrand Kamala Harris because she’s been one of the more unmarketable figures in national politics,” he said. “This whole joy thing … is the cover up for the fact that their policies are a disaster for the American people.”
The two-term Florida Republican also criticized Harris’ record on crime as both vice president and a former state and local prosecutor, needling the Democratic candidate for supporting “cashless bail” and refusing to back law enforcement over fears of alienating the “defund the police” activist wing of her party.
“In 2017, when she was in the United States Senate, she introduced a bill to incentivize states to move toward cashless bail,” Donalds noted. “Cities in our country that have used cashless bail, like New York City, my former home city, have realized that all it creates is a turnstile for criminals to be arrested and go right back out on the streets. It decreases morale amongst law enforcement.”
Police departments have lost nearly 4.8% of their officers since January 2020, according to data from the Police Executive Research Form, which Donalds also cited.
The Trump surrogate later went after Walz for sitting on his hands while Minneapolis was torched and looted by rioters following the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and refused to call in the National Guard for days — something for which the city’s former Democratic mayor blamed the governor as well.
“He watched the city of Minneapolis burn,” Donalds thundered. “It wasn’t the upper class neighborhoods of Minneapolis, wasn’t the suburbs of Minneapolis that was burning — it was poor areas of Minneapolis, which mostly are inhabited by black people and Hispanic people.”
Harris at the time urged Americans to donate to bail funds that set loose both the vandals and violent criminals — and still supports it — while having distanced herself from other radical proposals to defund law enforcement.
“This is not leadership. This is putting your finger in the air and in figuring out which way the wind is blowing,” Donalds charged. “Joe Biden has done that as President. Kamala Harris has done that as vice president. Tim Walz did that as governor of Minnesota.”
