Vice President Kamala Harris, in her first major interview since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she rose to the top of the Democratic ticket, pledged Thursday to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet if she wins the election, saying that would reflect her interest in hearing a variety of views.

“I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion,” Harris told CNN in an early excerpt of an interview that was set to air in full later Thursday night. “I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my Cabinet who was a Republican.”

There is a long history of presidents appointing members of the opposite party to their Cabinet, but it is not something Biden or former president Donald Trump did over the past eight years.

Harris, who is Black and Asian American, brushed aside Trump’s false recent assertion that until she “happened to turn Black,” she had not embraced that part of her identity.

“Same old, tired playbook,” Harris said. “Next question, please.”

In the early excerpts, Harris also addressed criticism that her positions have shifted significantly on major issues including climate change and immigration, saying several times, “My values have not changed.”

It was unclear from the excerpts how forcefully Harris intended to repudiate policies she embraced during the 2020 Democratic primaries, including her support for a sweeping “Green New Deal” and for a border policy significantly more lenient than the approach recently adopted by the Biden administration.

“I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real,” Harris said. “That it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines.”

She added: “My value around what we need to do to secure our border — that value has not changed. I spent two terms as the attorney general of California prosecuting transnational criminal organizations.”

The interview, part of a prime-time special called “The First Interview: Harris & Walz A CNN Exclusive,” also marked Harris’s first joint interview with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who sat next to her in the first clips that aired.

Harris and Walz taped the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday afternoon during a campaign swing through the battleground state of Georgia. The interview took place at Kim’s Cafe, a Black-owned restaurant in Savannah.

The interview comes at a crucial moment in Harris’s campaign, marking a new phase as she attempts to build upon the momentum of rallies and an energized convention and works to prove how she deals with less-scripted settings.

She had faced growing pressure to sit for an in-depth interview, after sometimes struggling with such sessions during her tenure as vice president. Harris is likely to face her next major unscripted moment at a debate against Trump scheduled for Sept. 10 in Philadelphia. Trump has struggled to find his footing in a reshaped race, and his allies hoped the interview and the debate would persuade voters that Harris struggles in spontaneous settings.

The CNN interview took on outsize importance because of the compressed campaign schedule, and the fact that Harris has not faced the kind of scrutiny that presidential nominees typically face during a grueling primary campaign.

“She hasn’t done an interview,” Trump said during a news conference earlier this month. “She can’t do an interview. She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview. But I look forward to the debates.”

Harris told reporters nearly three weeks ago that she wanted to “get an interview scheduled before the end of the month,” and this was the first opportunity for her to respond to questions about her new role in the race.

Bash, who conducted the interview, was one of the moderators in the presidential debate between Trump and Biden, who stumbled so badly during the faceoff that he was forced to leave the race. Bash recently interviewed Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, and has also interviewed Harris in the past.

In the interview, Harris suggested that her perspective had broadened in recent years.

“Four years of being vice president — I’ll tell you, one of the aspects, to your point, is traveling the country extensively,” she said. “I believe it is important to build consensus, and it is important to find a common place of understanding of where we can actually solve problems.”

Republicans have noted that Thursday’s interview was conducted jointly with Harris and Walz, saying that showed Harris could not handle it alone and needed Walz for support. But while Harris has not done many one-on-one interviews, it is not unusual for a new presidential ticket to sit for a joint appearance shortly after a party convention. Trump, in fact, did so in 2016 with his then-running mate, Mike Pence, and Harris did one with Biden in 2020.

Still, Harris has had an uneven relationship with the media in her nearly four years as vice president. Her aides say she is a naturally cautious politician, but also that she is acutely aware of the intense spotlight that never leaves her.

She is a history-making figure and was initially viewed as Biden’s natural successor to lead the Democratic Party when he selected her as running mate. Several news organizations assigned reporters to track her tenure, confronting her with a strange level of scrutiny for a vice president wading into a new job.

Harris’s first year was marked by an exchange with NBC’s Lester Holt in which she awkwardly downplayed the urgency of visiting the U.S.-Mexico border, as Republicans and other critics had urged her to do.

That moment vexed White House officials, and for months after the Holt interview, Harris looked at such engagements warily.

Harris increased her media engagement in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the national right to an abortion. Bash was the first to interview Harris after that decision, as the vice president said the administration would do everything in its power to protect medication abortion.

Harris also was Biden’s chief defender in the hours after the rocky June 27 presidential debate.

“What we saw tonight is the president making a very clear contrast with Donald Trump on all the issues that matter to the American people,” Harris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper at the time. “Yes, there was a slow start, but it was a strong finish. And what became very clear through the course of the night is that Joe Biden is fighting on behalf of the American people.”

During her presidential campaign, Harris has spoken with reporters under the wing of Air Force Two after the release of American captives from Russia, and she routinely talks to journalists in off-the-record sessions at the back of her vice-presidential plane.

Still, those engagements typically last a handful of minutes and provide few opportunities for follow-ups.

SAVANNAH, Ga. — In dueling speeches in battleground states, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump painted competing pictures of the stakes of the 2024 election, with Trump warning of dire economic consequences if Democrats win, and the vice president stoking fears of a second Trump presidency, which she said would mean a national abortion ban and a country where Trump has “no guardrails.”

Harris and her vice-presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have been on a two-day bus tour through Southern Georgia, favoring small gatherings with students and volunteers as well as stops at local businesses. She taped an interview with CNN where she promised to put a Republican in her Cabinet. Her trip culminated with a rally at a packed arena in Savannah where Harris spent most of her speech warning that Trump would be even more dangerous in a second term.

“The stakes in 2024 are even higher because consider that the United States Supreme Court recently just basically told the former president that, going forward, he will be immune no matter what he does in the White House,” she said. “Understand Donald Trump with no guardrails — consider what that means when he has openly vowed that when reelected on day one he would openly be a dictator.”

She also said Trump handpicked Supreme Court justices “with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe versus Wade, and they did.”

In a sign of how worried Trump is about Harris’s appeal among women, he sought to blunt Democratic attacks on his record on reproductive rights by promising that either the government or insurance companies “will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment.”

“Because we want more babies, to put it very nicely,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan, adding that he would allow new parents to “deduct major newborn expenses from their taxes.”

“So we’re pro-family,” Trump added. “The IVF treatments are expensive. It’s very hard for many people to do it and to get it, but I’ve been in favor of IVF right from the beginning.”

In spelling out his proposal Trump offered no details of how it would be implemented, and the prospects of such a policy change remain a long shot. In June, Senate Republicans, including Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance of Ohio, blocked a Democratic bill that would have guaranteed access to in vitro fertilization nationwide.

In many ways, while the candidates are pinballing around the same swing states, they are far apart in tone and timbre. Harris has been running a conventional campaign following a dramatic start to her second bid for the White House. Trump has spent the week steeped in controversy, much of it stoked by him and his campaign surrogates.

On Wednesday, Harris and Walz met with the marching band of a Savannah-area high school, then stopped for barbecue. On Thursday, after taping her first media interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris continued her tour of the Peach State, culminating in an evening rally.

Enmarket Arena in Savannah was nearly filled two hours before Harris was scheduled to speak, with attendees doing the wave and dancing to Beyoncé, Cardi B and Tems.

Trump, for his part, amplified a crude joke about Harris performing a sex act, accused her of staging a coup against President Joe Biden to become the Democratic nominee and faulted her, without evidence, for a security lapse during his attempted assassination. In between, he has starred in an online infomercial where he tried to sell pieces of the “knockout suit” he was wearing when he debated Biden.

His Monday visit to Arlington National Cemetery — and an incident involving his campaign aides and a cemetery employee — drew an unusual rebuke on Thursday from the Army, which said the campaign was told about federal laws regarding political activity at the cemetery and “abruptly pushed aside” the employee.

At Trump’s afternoon event in Potterville, Mich., his aides hoped he could redirect attention to the fact that Harris has offered limited details about her agenda as a president — beyond outlining several populist policies during an address earlier this month in Raleigh, N.C., focused on “lowering costs for American families.”

On a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose to a record high, the former president said he was in Michigan with a simple message for the American autoworker and other workers: “Your long economic nightmare will very soon be over.” Trump blamed Harris for inflation that soared during Biden’s tenure — even though it has more recently been easing back toward normal levels. He also pointed to the rise in housing costs and credit card debt.

“Kamala’s made middle class life unaffordable and unlivable,” Trump said, touting the tax cuts passed during his administration and calling Harris “comrade Kamala.” “I’m going to make America affordable again. In addition to make it great again, we’re going to make it affordable again.”

Trump also made now-familiar attacks on Harris’s record on immigration as vice president and at one point suggested that he didn’t need to make a speech: “All I have to do is say she was the leader of the defund the police movement and then I say, ‘Ladies and gentleman, thank you very much.’”

Harris’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s defund the police attack.

Trump also noted in Michigan that Harris has changed some of her positions since she ran for president in 2019 on key issues such as fracking and universal health care. “She’s the greatest flip-flopper. … She probably goes back to her room and gets sick to her stomach when she says what she has to say. Because she’s a Marxist; she’s a fascist, and she never believed,” he said.

Trump also called Harris incompetent, suggesting that was why she waited until Thursday to do an interview. He and other Harris critics have said her first month as the Democratic standard-bearer has been largely scripted, and that she has availed herself of few opportunities to take serious questions from people not explicitly in her corner.

Some of that criticism may be blunted by the end of this week. Harris and Walz sat down for an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash Thursday afternoon. The interview is scheduled to be broadcast in prime time Thursday, but her campaign released a statement about a Republican in her potential Cabinet even before she started speaking in Savannah.

“I’ve got 68 days to go with this election, so I’m not putting the cart before the horse,” she said, according to excerpts released by her campaign. “But I would [have a Republican in my Cabinet]. I think it’s really important. I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion. I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my Cabinet who was a Republican.”

Her campaign noted that she received endorsements from 238 alumni of the campaigns of former president George W. Bush, and former GOP presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney, an attempt to blunt Trump’s assertions that she was too liberal.

Trump also tried to blunt some of the heat he has taken about his campaign workers’ confrontation with an Army employee at Arlington Cemetery this week.

On Thursday, the U.S. Army defended an Arlington National Cemetery staff member who confronted two Trump campaign workers on Monday, saying they were prohibited from taking photos as part of a political campaign. The Army said in a statement that its employee “acted with professionalism” during the encounter and that she has been “unfairly attacked” by Trump’s supporters and his campaign.

Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita called the woman a “despicable individual,” and campaign spokesman Steven Cheung alleged without evidence that the woman had suffered a “mental health episode.”

In Michigan on Thursday, alluding to the altercation, Trump said while he was at Arlington, the families had asked him to take pictures over the graves of their sons, sisters and brothers. “I said, absolutely, I did. And then I said farewell. I said goodbye,” Trump recounted. “Last night, I read that I was using the site to politic, that I use it to politic. This all comes out of Washington.”

Trump continues to lead in four of the seven battleground states that will likely decide the election, according to a Washington Post composite of polls, but Harris’s standing continues to improve in swing states, including a solidifying position in the Midwest.

New Jersey state Sen. Nellie Pou on Thursday secured the Democratic nomination to replace the late Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) on the November ballot. She is now likely to become the next House member from New Jersey’s 9th District, which is solidly Democratic.

Pou would be the first Latina to represent New Jersey in Congress.

Pou received a unanimous vote at a convention Thursday evening where local party leaders were tasked with picking the new Democratic nominee, according to the Passaic County Democratic Party. All of Pou’s competitors had withdrawn by Wednesday evening, when New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) endorsed her.

“Senator Nellie Pou is the ideal public servant to succeed Congressman Pascrell and continue his life’s mission of building a stronger, fairer, more equitable, and more inclusive New Jersey for every family,” Murphy said in a statement.

Pascrell, 87, died on Aug. 21 after being hospitalized for weeks with a fever and respiratory infection. The 14-term congressman had been the second-oldest member of the House.

Democrats were on a tight timeline to replace Pascrell on the ballot, facing a Thursday deadline.

Pou has served in the New Jersey Senate since 2012 and was a member of the General Assembly before that. She was appointed to replace Pascrell in the chamber in 1997 after his election to Congress.

The Republican nominee for the November election is ​​Air Force veteran Billy Prempeh.

NEW YORK — Donald Trump is making a second effort at getting his state court hush money case removed to federal court as his lawyers engage in aggressive efforts to get his sentencing postponed until after the November election.

In a filing Thursday evening, Trump attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove argued that the former president and current GOP nominee is being harmed by actions taken by the state court judge who has overseen the New York case.

Trump was convicted in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment ahead of the 2016 election. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 18.

“The ongoing proceedings will continue to cause direct and irreparable harm to President Trump … and voters located far beyond Manhattan,” Blanche and Bove wrote.

Their filing cited a recent Supreme Court decision giving broad immunity to sitting presidents from actions that relate to official duties. While that ruling stemmed from a different criminal case against Trump, his legal team has since argued that a significant part of the Manhattan district attorney’s hush money case relied on evidence and testimony connected to his first year in the White House.

“The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that these types of violations threaten the structure of the federal government and the ability of future Presidents to carry out their vital duties in the way the Framers intended,” the filing said.

U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected Trump’s initial removal efforts last year, concluding that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s felony case was being properly handled in New York state court and was not connected to the former president’s official duties while in office.

If Hellerstein agrees to hear arguments on the new filing, it could affect the timeline of proceedings in state court.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan is expected to rule soon on a request from Trump’s lawyers to postpone his sentencing until after the Nov. 5 election. Merchan is also scheduled to decide on Sept. 16 if the presidential immunity doctrine should have any bearing on Trump’s conviction.

Vice President Kamala Harris appeared Thursday in her first major interview since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. Harris sat for the CNN interview alongside her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).

It was a much-anticipated conversation, given that Harris has yet to lay out an extensive policy agenda and given the dearth of questions she has answered during her five-plus weeks as the Democratic standard-bearer.

Below are some takeaways.

1. Harris suggested that, while her policies have changed, her values haven’t

One of the big questions was how Harris would address the various changes in her positions from her 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, when she aligned with a number of liberal causes that she has since distanced herself from.

Harris expounded somewhat — emphasizing that her values have stayed constant — but didn’t provide too much clarity on why she has changed the specifics.

Among the positions she has moved away from are banning fracking and establishing single-payer health care, along with her sympathetic comments about both overhauling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the “Defund the Police” movement. (Harris back then stopped shy of calling for abolishing ICE and actually defunding the police, as some on the left advocated.)

“My values have not changed,” Harris said Thursday, repeating a version of that phrase four more times.

CNN host Dana Bash suggested Harris might have come to view those ideas as impractical as she’s understood them better, or embraced them for short-term political gain in a Democratic primary. (Such positions were more in vogue in the Democratic Party back then.)

Harris didn’t grant either premise, but her answer hued closer to the former. She suggested she’s still working with the same set of values in mind, but employing different tools in changing times.

She suggested some of the goals of the Green New Deal, which she advocated in 2020 but no longer does, were addressed by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, including setting goals to deal with climate change.

“We did that with the Inflation Reduction Act,” Harris said. “We have set goals for the United States of America and, by extension, the globe around when we should meet certain standards for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as an example.”

Harris said banning fracking was no longer necessary because of advances in clean energy.

She also spotlighted illegal immigration, an issue where she once pushed decriminalization of unlawful border crossings but where she has of late played up border security.

“My value around what we need to do to secure our border, that value has not changed,” Harris said. “I spent two terms as the attorney general of California prosecuting transnational criminal organizations, violations of American laws regarding the passage — illegal passage of guns, drugs and human beings across our border.”

Harris did not directly respond when asked whether she still supports decriminalization, saying instead, “I believe there should be consequence.”

They weren’t the most edifying or enlightening explanations, in that they didn’t really address how much she still might believe in these past policies. Supporting border security, for example, doesn’t explain why you don’t still talk about reforming ICE or decriminalizing illegal immigration.

But politically, you can’t really say that you abandoned a position for expediency or because you realized you were wrong. The former would call into question your sincerity, while the latter would call into question your wisdom.

2. She walked a very fine line on ‘change’

Harris has walked a very fine line in this campaign. She has sought to run as something of a “change” candidate despite her high-ranking role for the past three and a half years as vice president to Joe Biden, who is not a popular or well-reviewed president.

And she certainly massaged that distinction Thursday. She pitched the Biden administration as a successful one that would come to be viewed more positively over time. But she also sought to play up how her presidency could be different and even better.

Perhaps most strikingly, she repeatedly used the kinds of catchphrases you usually hear from a challenger. She twice referred to a “new way forward,” and she twice held up “the last decade” as something to be moved beyond.

“One, I am so proud to have served as vice president to Joe Biden,” Harris said. “And two, I’m so proud to be running with Tim Walz for president of the United States, and to bring America what I believe the American people deserve, which is a new way forward and to turn the page on the last decade of what I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies.”

When Bash noted that the last decade included three and a half years under Biden and Harris’s vice presidency, Harris suggested she was talking more about the ethos that began with Donald Trump’s election.

When Bash pressed her on why she hasn’t already done the things she’s pitching using her current perch, Harris suggested that the Biden administration has been limited because of what it needed to do to emerge from Trump and the covid pandemic.

“Well, first of all, we had to recover as an economy, and we have done that,” Harris said.

She pointed to the difficulties coming out of the pandemic and pitched that recovery, however uneven and however high inflation was, as unmatched among wealthy nations. (Many wealthy nations also dealt with high inflation, for example.)

At other points, she more tightly hugged Biden’s legacy.

“I think history is going to show that in so many ways, it was transformative, beyond what we have accomplished around finally investing in America’s infrastructure, investing in new economies, in new industries, what we have done to bring our allies back together,” Harris said, adding that the current administration has achieved “extraordinary successes.”

But she mostly pitched it as something of a first step, suggesting that emerging from the economic recovery would free her up to do bigger and better things.

“I’ll say that that’s good work,” Harris said. “There’s more to do, but that’s good work.”

Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos polling recently showed that most Americans don’t regard Harris as having played a particularly central role in the Biden administration’s economic and immigration policies.

3. They sought to do no harm, and probably didn’t

In some ways, this was about just getting the first big interview out of the way. Harris has been under pressure for not taking more media questions for weeks — creating plenty of anticipation for this sit-down — and as noted above, there were a number of lingering issues that just haven’t been addressed in speeches and other campaign appearances.

Harris has also seen a sudden surge in popularity after years of being an unpopular vice president, which fueled questions about whether that would hold up amid more direct scrutiny.

Harris was cautious and sometimes circuitous in her answers — the latter being something Republicans often attack her for — but she didn’t really stumble or seem to do anything that might hamper her momentum. She and Walz also dealt with some lingering questions in ways they must hope will allow them to move forward now.

In particular, Walz seemed to concede that some of the things he and his campaigns have said about his biography haven’t been accurate — including about his 1990s drunken driving arrest, about his family’s use of fertility treatments and indicating that he carried weapons into war while serving in the National Guard, even though he was never in combat while overseas in support of the Afghanistan war. He downplayed these remarks in the interview.

Of his weapons claim, he said his wife told him his “grammar is not always correct.” Of a false account of his DUI arrest and statements that indicated his family used IVF rather than a less-contentious fertility treatment, Walz said, “I certainly own my mistakes when I make them.”

Walz didn’t directly address how grammar explains his weapons claim or go into detail about the IVF claim. But the name of the game seemed to be to take these questions, get past them, and hope to move on.