WASHINGTON − Former Vice President Kamala Harris called President Donald Trump a “tyrant” in her first news interview since she lost the 2024 presidential election.

“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,” Harris said in an exclusive MSNBC interview with host Rachel Maddow on Sept. 22. “That's what we're dealing with right now in Donald Trump.”

Harris’ remarks came a day before her memoir “107 Days,” which details her short-lived presidential campaign, was published on Sept. 23.

In the memoir, she writes that she predicted and warned about what Trump would be like, but didn’t predict the billionaires “lining up to grovel” and the big media companies, universities and major law firms bending to the president’s demands.

“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,” Harris told Maddow. “And one by one by one, they have been silent.”

She added, “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.”

Harris also highlights in her memoir that it was “recklessness” that drove so many people around former President Joe Biden to defer to the aging president and his wife about his reelection decision. She wrote that she didn’t tell him to quit the race because she feared it would have come off as “self serving.”

“I realize that I have and had a certain responsibility that I should have followed through on … so when I talk about the recklessness, as much as anything, I’m talking about myself. There was so much at stake,” Harris told Maddow.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Harris knocks Trump as 'tyrant' with 'fragile ego' in MSNBC interview

Reporting by Sudiksha Kochi, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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