(Daily Signal)—Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, answered questions in a CNN town hall with anchor Anderson Cooper Wednesday night. She repeatedly condemned her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, in the harshest of terms, even saying that she thinks he is a fascist.
The Daily Signal fact-checked many of her claims.
‘Terminate the Constitution’
Harris touted the fact that former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., endorsed her against Trump. The vice president said Cheney backed her due to “a legitimate fear, based on Donald Trump‘s words and actions, that he will not obey an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
“He himself has said he would terminate the Constitution of the United States,” she added.
The claim traces back to a post Trump wrote on Truth Social on Dec. 3, 2022. In that post, the former president wrote of the 2020 presidential election, “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
He added, “Our great ‘Founder’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
Fellow Republicans criticized his comments, and Trump later clarified that he would not terminate the Constitution.
In a follow-up post, he condemned the legacy media’s interpretation of his post.
“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Dec. 5, 2022.
🚨Kamala Harris repeats the claim that Trump would "terminate the Constitution of the United States."
That's an exaggeration. He briefly called for the "termination of rules" in order to reverse what he claimed to have been a fraudulent election, and he later clarified that… pic.twitter.com/8zaFqYZ2eo
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 24, 2024
Hitler’s Generals
Harris said she believed Trump is a fascist and she repeatedly tied him to the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Harris claimed that Trump said to his generals “in essence, why can’t you be more like Hitler’s generals?”
🚨Remember that anonymous-sources Atlantic article claiming Trump didn't want to pay for the funeral of that "f—ing Mexican"? The article that @MarkMeadows denied and @mguilen_ (the sister of the murdered Army private) condemned The Atlantic for? Kamala Harris just referenced… pic.twitter.com/s02qzMfPMD
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 24, 2024
The vice president was referencing an Atlantic article by Jeffrey Goldberg citing anonymous sources, claiming Trump said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
Trump spokesman Alex Pfeiffer said the claim is “absolutely false,” and that “President Trump never said this.”
That article claimed Trump ordered then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows not to pay for the funeral of 20-year-old Army private Vanessa Guillén, calling her a “f—ing Mexican.” Meadows denied the story and Guillén’s sister accused The Atlantic of “exploiting my sister’s death for politics.”
Wow.
I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics- hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members. President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today. https://t.co/o8cDrKOKBV— Mayra Guillen (@mguilen_) October 22, 2024
‘Suckers and Losers’
Harris claimed that Trump referred to members of the military as “suckers and losers,” that “he demeans people who have taken an oath to sacrifice their life for our country.”
The claim that Trump called members of the military “suckers” and “losers” originates from a 2020 article published in The Atlantic relying on anonymous sources. Trump has consistently disputed the reports.
‘Price Gouging’
Harris attributed inflation to “price gouging.” When CNN’s Cooper asked her about whether the Trump administration or the Biden administration was responsible for inflation, she suggested that her experience as attorney general in California would help her fight inflation.
“How I come to it is probably a new approach grounded in a lot of my experiences as a former attorney general, where I took on price gouging and part of my plan is to create a new approach that is the first time that we will have a national ban on price gouging, which is companies taking advantage of the desperation and need of the American consumer and jacking up prices without any consequence or accountability,” she said.
🚨Kamala Harris suggests price gouging is responsible for inflation.
FACT CHECK: Pants on fire👖🔥
The consumer price index has increased less than the producer price index, which means that companies, on a whole, are taking a loss on prices. They are tightening their belts as… pic.twitter.com/B6rISafDOw
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 24, 2024
Other Democrats, such as President Joe Biden and Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., have attributed inflation to companies’ greed.
As Heritage Foundation Research Fellow EJ Antoni pointed out, there is a far more obvious culprit: government spending.
As Antoni noted, “One of the functions of money is that of a measuring tool. If a yardstick were to shrink from 36 inches down to just 30, it would take 120 of these shortened yardsticks to cover the distance of a football field, instead of 100. As the dollar has lost value, it takes more dollars to measure the value of the things we buy.”
While Americans feel the pain of inflation, so do businesses. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “businesses have gotten the short end of the stick,” Antoni explained. “The producer price index is used to measure inflation on the products and services businesses buy—sometimes called wholesale inflation—and that index has risen 17.5% since Biden took office. Conversely, the consumer price index, the widely cited metric for inflation faced by American families, is up 17.1% over that same time.”
“Businesses have actually been sheltering consumers from some cost increases in an effort to maintain market share and not lose customers,” he wrote. “That also explains why, according to the Biden administration’s Census Bureau, total corporate profits have fallen for the last six quarters after adjusting for inflation.”
“If alleged price gouging were really the cause of inflation, did businessmen magically become greedy when Biden took office?” Antoni asked. “Were corporations never greedy in the 40 years leading up to Biden’s inflationary expansion of government? Businesses haven’t even passed all their higher costs on to consumers; if they’re trying to be greedy, they’re doing it all wrong.”
If inflation is caused by corporate "greed" then why are producer and consumer prices both up by 19% since Jan '21 w/ consumer price increases only just recently catching up to price increases faced by businesses? Asking for a friend… pic.twitter.com/EBLwxyEEwR
— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) April 15, 2024
‘Women Have Died’
When discussing state abortion laws in the wake of the Supreme Court striking down the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade (1973) in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), Harris claimed, “Women have died because of these laws.”
She has repeatedly mentioned the name Amber Nicole Thurman, suggesting that she died due to Georgia’s law restricting abortion.
Yet Thurman died after she took the abortion pill, which caused complications and left parts of her twin unborn babies inside her.
Thurman legally obtained abortion pills in North Carolina to end the lives of her unborn twins, but she could not know without an ultrasound (which the FDA had required only a few years beforehand). Five days later, she began to abort the twins, but both babies’ remains remained in her uterus. She began to develop sepsis and went to the hospital.
Doctors hospitalized her, but she died before they could perform a dilation and curettage to remove the remaining parts of her unborn babies.
Harris blamed Thurman’s death on a law restricting abortion, but the law would not prevent the removal of the babies’ remains when they were already dead. The FDA’s loosened restrictions on the abortion pill, not Georgia’s law, is arguably to blame for this tragic death.
🚨'WOMEN HAVE DIED': Kamala Harris claimed that "women have died because of these laws," referencing state laws restricting abortion after Dobbs v. Jackson.
Yet the cases she repeatedly brings up, those of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, actually have more to do with the… pic.twitter.com/sTKIdvYcEp
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 24, 2024
Prefer to Run on the Problem
Harris repeated her claim that Trump killed a bipartisan border bill earlier this year “because he’d prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
Yet critics have warned that the bill would have cemented Biden’s open-border policies into law.
Cooper pressed Harris on why the Biden administration used executive orders to reverse many Trump border policies in January 2021. He noted that illegal aliens crossed the border in large numbers after those orders, and the numbers only decreased when Biden issued other executive orders. He asked her whether she regrets the weaker border policies.
Harris replied that only Congress could solve the ultimate problem. Cooper again pressed her on whether Biden should have issued the 2024 executive orders sooner, and she replied, “I think we did the right thing.”
🚨'I THINK WE DID THE RIGHT THING': Kamala Harris tells Anderson Cooper she does not regret the Biden-Harris administration's executive orders reversing Trump's border policies, even after she acknowledged that later executive actions helped stem the border crisis. pic.twitter.com/UGdXVBIVPv
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 24, 2024
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
