MSNBC host Rachel Maddow interviews former Vice President Kamala Harris about her new memoir, 107 Days, which reflects on her campaign as the 2024 Democratic nominee for president. Maddow deemed Harris “the patron saint of I told you so.”

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC: Let me talk to you about this capitulation thing. It’s really landed with me. I feel like we’re all in the middle of it. But you articulating it in the way that you do, you’ve become the patron saint of I told you so, in terms of people understanding the court sort of warnings and predictions that you made about what Trump would be like. But you say, I predicted all of that. I warned of it. What I didn’t predict was the capitulation, the billionaires lining up to grovel, the big media companies, universities, so many major law firms, I will note, including your husband’s. FORMER VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Yeah, and he spoke out about it. MADDOW: He’s been very vocal in criticizing it. He said, they’ve all been bending to blackmail and outrageous demands. Why did you not predict the capitulation? And what do you make of the effort to try to put some steel in the spine of those institutions? HARRIS: So as you know, I am a lifelong public servant. But I’ve worked closely with the private sector over many years. And I always believed that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy, for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions. And one by one by one, they have been silent. They have been, you know, yes, I use the word feckless. It’s not like they’re gonna lose their yacht or their house in the Hamptons. And here’s the thing, democracy sustains capitalism. Capitalism thrives in a democracy. And right now we are dealing with, as I called him at my speech on the Ellipse, a tyrant. We used to compare the strength of our democracy to communist dictators. That’s what we’re dealing with right now, Donald Trump. And these titans of industry are not speaking up. And perhaps it is because his threats and the way he has used the weight of the federal government to take out vengeance on his critics is something that they fear, and I get that. I understand why they do. We’ve seen the demonstration of it. Perhaps it is because they want to please him and nominate him for a Nobel Prize. Perhaps it’s because they want a merger approved or they want to avoid an investigation. But at some point they’ve got to stand up for the sake of the people who rely on all of these institutions to have integrity and to, at some point, be the guardrails against a tyrant who is using the federal government to execute his whim and fancy because of a fragile ego.

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