Former Vice President Kamala Harris said the warnings she delivered about President Donald Trump’s second term have come true — with one exception she says caught her off guard: how quickly powerful people would fold.
Speaking with Keke Palmer on the host’s show Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026, Harris said the development she “had not anticipated was the capitulation” of those in positions of influence.
“The number of powerful people who have stood quietly by in the face of what they know to be corruption and behavior and approaches that are contrary to the best interest of our country, the powerful people who you know bend the knee at the foot of a tyrant. I hadn’t anticipated that that was going to happen, to the degree it has,” Harris told Palmer.
Trump’s Standing With Voters
The former vice president’s comments arrive as the president’s popularity slides with voters, driven by his administration’s handling of the economy and the war in Iran. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe Trump has engaged in illegal or unethical conduct in order to profit from the presidency, according to polling by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Even so, a roster of influential figures has kept the president in its corner. Billionaire Elon Musk, who spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Meta head Mark Zuckerberg and other technology executives have each continued to extend Trump a measure of support as his numbers with everyday voters have sagged.
That dynamic is the one Harris zeroed in on. She said she has come to understand that a slice of the country’s most powerful people operate on pure self-interest — not on principle, not on morality, but on what they can extract from a relationship, and that they are prepared to walk away the moment it stops delivering. She added that she has to admit she did not see it unfolding to the extent it has.
Her Pitch to Transactional Voters
Harris said that same realization is part of the reason she now urges Americans to approach the ballot box as “transactional voters” rather than opt out of elections over the parts of the system that have broken down.
Plenty has worked and plenty has not, she told Palmer, but disappointment is no reason to remove oneself from the process — because declining to vote, in her framing, means being silenced.
“And this is not a moment where we can afford to be passive,” she said.
It is a pitch that reframes voting as leverage rather than as an act of faith — a response, she suggested, to the very transactional behavior she described among the country’s powerful. Rather than waiting for a political system to earn their trust, she argued, voters should use their ballots to demand something in return.
Calls for Structural Change
Harris has paired that message with a push for structural overhauls to American government. She has called for expanding the Supreme Court, adding new states and reforming the Electoral College if Democrats win control of Congress — a package of changes that would require majorities her party does not currently hold.
Taken together, the remarks sketch out how Harris is positioning herself in the political conversation: as a critic less focused on the president himself than on the institutions and individuals she says have declined to check him. Her warnings about a second Trump term, she maintains, were accurate. What she says she got wrong was the willingness of so many people with power to say nothing at all.