Vice President Kamala Harris snapped at President Joe Biden over appointing her as the "border czar" and has felt "disrespected" by his mostly "white inner circle," a new book alleges.
The book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, was penned by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.
"Some of Harris's advisers believed the president's almost entirely white inner circle did not show the vice president the respect she deserved," they wrote, according to excerpts obtained by Politico. "Harris worried that Biden's staff looked down on her; she fixated on real and perceived snubs in ways the West Wing found tedious."
Harris also reportedly snapped at Biden ring an April meeting with Congressional Black Caucus leaders after he praised her by saying she will do "a hell of a job" on immigration issues.
"The vice president corrected him at once," the book says. ''Excuse me,' she said, 'it's the Northern Triangle — not immigration.''
Harris' team had reportedly rejected the term "border czar" and wanted it to be clear that she was only looking into the causes of migration in the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
The VP was extremely dismayed at being assigned to the border as it is a difficult and controversial undertaking."Staff floated the possibility of the vice president overseeing relations with the Nordic countries — a low-risk diplomatic assignment that might have helped Harris get adjusted to the international stage in welcoming venues like Oslo and Copenhagen," the book claims.
They added that her desire to work with the Nordic region was "rejected" and "privately mocked" by White House aides.
"More irritating to Biden aides was when they learned the vice president wanted to plan a major speech to outline her view of foreign policy," the book says. "Biden aides vetoed the idea."
According to the authors, Harris did not want to choose a few "signature issues" to be pigeonholed into.
Harris reportedly told White House aides “in frank terms that she did not want to be restricted to a few subjects mainly associated with women and Black Americans.”
“One senator close to her, describing Harris’s frustration level as ‘up in the stratosphere,’ lamented that Harris’s political decline was a ‘slow-rolling Greek tragedy,’” Martin and Burns write. “Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if Biden declined to run.”
Troubles, the book says, began before the inauguration — with outrage over a photo of her chosen by Vogue for their cover. They selected the most casual of the shoot and featured her wearing black skinny jeans and Converse sneakers. Vogue reporters wrote that the photo portrayed "an approachable but less than grand depiction of the incoming vice president." "Harris had been expecting a more stately-looking photo to make the cover, where she wore a powder blue suit with her arms crossed in front of her," the Daily Mail reports. "Harris was wounded. She felt belittled by the magazine, asking aides: Would Vogue depict another world leader this way?" the book says.
Harris' team contacted the Biden team about the photo, but it was brushed off as a "first world problem."
"[T]he Biden adviser told Flournoy that this was not the time to be going to war with over a comparatively trivial aesthetic issue. Tina, the adviser said, these are first-world problems," the book explained.
Harris also sent her chief of staff to scold Biden staffers for not standing when she enters a room, as they do for the president. She found it to be another sign of "disrespect."
