‘This is what happens when I drink!’: Harris calls out ‘loser’ Trump as she cracks a beer with Stephen Colbert

Kamala Harris cracked open a beer and took the opportunity to hit out at election rival Donald Trump on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night, calling the former president a “loser” and joking: “This is what happens when I drink!”

The Democratic presidential nominee walked on stage to rapturous applause from the CBS show’s studio audience and instantly took a jab at Trump as she exclaimed: “They know how to pronounce my name!”

Colbert invited her to have a drink with him, with Harris cheerily accepting a can of Miller High Life, hailing it as “the champagne of beers.”

The host then pitched her a “gotcha question”: “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

She answered: “I’m gonna tell you what some of the people in my rallies – quite a few people are showing up, by the way.

“You know, when you’ve lost, you lost millions of jobs, you lost manufacturing, you lost automotive plants, you lost the election. What does that make you? A loser.”

Chuckling at the remark, she joked: “This is what happens when I drink!”

The beer immediately attracted an angry response from Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, who posted on X: “Kamala drinks a beer to show Americans how relatable she is, but she ends up looking like an out-of-touch elitist trying to gaslight everyone into thinking she’s one of them.”

Harris also used the interview to bring up a line from veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book alleging that Trump secretly sent Vladimir Putin a batch of Covid-19 test kits during the pandemic for his personal use – an accusation the Republican’s campaign has denied.

“You remember how many people did not have tests and were trying to scramble to get them?” she asked.

“You remember how rare it was to have one? You remember people by the hundreds were dying every day?... And this man is giving Covid test kits to Vladimir Putin.

“Think about what this means. On top of him sending love letters to Kim Jong-un. No, think about it. He thinks Vladimir Putin is his friend. What about the American people? They should be your first friend.”

Harris went on to slam Trump’s admiration for “strongmen” world leaders like Viktor Orban, Putin and Xi Jinping.

“He openly admires dictators and authoritarians,” she noted.

“He has said he wants to be a dictator on day one if he were elected again as president. He gets played by these guys. He admires so-called strongmen, and he gets played because they flatter him or offer him favor.

“The commander-in-chief of the United States of America must stand strong on and defend the principles that we hold dear. We should stand with our allies. We should strengthen the alliances that we have, such as Nato, which is the strongest military alliance the world has ever seen. We must stand with our friend Ukraine, where Russia is attempting to change borders by force.”

Harris further slammed Trump for playing “political games” over the response to Hurricane Helene – and now the looming Hurricane Milton.

“There’s a lot of misinformation and I beseech you, I beg you to please not pay attention to it, because there are a whole lot of folks who are there to give you help and aid in terms of the immediate aftermath and what people need to do in terms of getting through the height of this emergency and this crisis,” she said.

After describing her experiences of meeting a traumatized woman in Georgia whose husband was killed by a falling tree, the vice president rebuked Trump for his misleading claims about the federal relief effort: “What upsets me so is the idea that any politician would play political games with these folks, with people who are in the midst of such suffering, loss of life, loss of their homes, loss of normalcy.”

Harris praised the bipartisan cooperation ongoing between the Biden administration, FEMA and local state governors and said of Trump’s attacks: “It’s crude, it’s crude. Have you no empathy, man? You know, for the suffering of other people? Have you no sense of purpose if you purport to be a leader, to understand that being a leader means lifting people up in a time of need and not manipulating them?”

After issuing a severe warning to Floridians about the threat posed by Milton, she was asked about her debate performance against the Republican and what she was thinking during a particular exchange where she posed with her chin resting on her fist while her opponent spoke.

“It’s family TV, right? It starts with a W, there’s a letter between it, then the last letter’s F,” she joked.

Harris has ramped up her media appearances in recent days having previously been criticised for not doing enough press, guesting on the Call Her Daddy podcast, CBS’s 60 Minutes, ABC’s The View and Howard Stern’s Sirius XM radio show.