October 12, 2025
The crowd erupted in applause as Harris made her frustrations known to the protestors in the crowd.
As former Vice President Kamala Harris continues her book tour of her recent memoir detailing her loss to Donald Trump, “107 Days,” protestors are not shy about letting her know how they feel about the Biden-Harris administration’s failure to act decisively regarding the genocide in Gaza. However, for at least one moment, Harris let her frustration with being protested show, according to a report from Mediaite.
As she was being interviewed in Washington, D.C., Harris responded to someone in the crowd who was yelling, among other things, that the former vice president’s legacy regarding Gaza would always be genocide.
Harris responded, noting that essentially she can’t really do anything now since she’s not the president of the United States.
“You know what, I am not president of the United States! You want to go to the White House? And talk to him? Then go on and do that,” Harris quipped.
The exchange shows that while her book acknowledges her awareness that not taking a clearer stance on Israel’s actions in Gaza may have affected her election outcome, she has expressed frustration with protesters interrupting her book tour to voice their views, a dynamic she has faced before.
The crowd was solidly pro-Harris, and erupted in applause as Harris made her frustrations known to the protestor or protestors who were in the crowd.
The protests, as Newsweek notes, are not occurring in a vacuum. Similar protests popped up as Harris was campaigning for president over what is perceived as the refusal of the Biden administration to impose an arms embargo on Israel, as well as Palestinian groups withholding support of Harris because she continued to express support for Israel while its military continued to bomb Palestinian children, among other vulnerable populations.
On the first night of her book tour in New York City, Harris did express compassion for the Palestinian people and condemned Trump for giving the Israeli government and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check.
“What’s happening to the Palestinian people is outrageous and it breaks my heart,” she told a packed New York City performance center on Sept. 25 after she was interrupted by the first of four pro-Palestinian protesters. “Donald Trump has given (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu a blank check to do whatever he wants.”
She told the third protester, “I understand your concern and how you feel — I think I do. And the reality of it is, where we are right now didn’t have to be this way — in terms of the blank check that this president has given.”
Nearly no political issue has been more contentious than the outsized response of the Israeli government to the deaths of 1,200 of its citizens on Oct. 7 2023, which has been blamed on Hamas. A tragedy to be sure, but the starvation of Gazans, and the deaths of at least 60,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, has been sharply condemned by the international community, save, of course, the United States.
In her book, despite noting that “The war in Gaza is not a binary issue, but too often the conversation about it is. I wanted to acknowledge the complexity, nuance and history of the region, but it seemed very few people had the appetite for that or the willingness to hold two tragic narratives in their mind at the same time, to grieve for human suffering both Israeli and Palestinian,” Harris questioned why protests followed her and not Donald Trump on the campaign trail, and the answer, as Jeet Heer writes in a review for The Nation, might lie in the subtext of her positions on Gaza she expresses in the book, even though she privately tried to sway Biden.
“Private pleas for Biden to show some heart were simply an inadequate response to the killing fields of Gaza, which anyone with eyes could recognize as a genocide,” Heer writes.
As it concerns Harris’ quip to protest Trump, the same group responsible for protesting her, CodePink, did the same right to his face when he showed up to a dinner inside Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak and Stone Crab restaurant in Washington, D.C., with Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and members of his security detail.
According to Time Magazine, protestors can be heard on videos of the protest saying “Trump, you are not welcome here,” which was followed by “free D.C., free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time.”
“He is terrorizing communities all over the world, from Puerto Rico… from Palestine… to Venezuela, he is terrorizing communities. He is not welcome to D.C., he is not welcome to Palestine. Palestine is not for sale,” one protester shouted while they were being escorted out by Trump’s security detail. “Shame on you all!”
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