That Cringe Gas Station Visit by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Just Got Much Worse

Sunday was a banner day for the Harris campaign. After weeks of carefully curated events, the vice president turned presidential nominee went off-script multiple times, reminding Americans why they once ranked her the most unpopular major politician in the country.

After delivering a word salad on the "duality of democracy," a line she's used many times before, she then explained to a high school football team that they can be "undefeated" even if they don't win a game. It was vintage Kamala Harris, punctuated by a visit to a gas station that left people wincing.

Kamala Harris stops at Sheetz, immediately goes full cringe pic.twitter.com/B1VolywQEK
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 18, 2024

I don't know about you, but I was going to vote for no price controls, lower mortgage rates, and a secure border until I saw Kamala Harris get a bag of Doritos. What a life-changing moment.

As off-script as the word salads I mentioned above were, this was a moment that was clearly on-script, and painfully so. Just as the vice president starts to walk away from him, you can see Doug Emhoff rush to bend down and grab a bag of pre-staged chips. Harris then pretends to wander down one of the aisles before he suddenly reappears, Doritos in hand so she can deliver her line.

What if I told you that wasn't where the cringe stopped, though? Believe it or not, they filmed that interaction multiple times, and with multiple people giving her the chips. In another video, Tim Walz is the one "finding" and giving her the Doritos.

Is there anything they won't lie about? Here they pull the same gimmick twice in the space of a couple minutes -- gassing us up to show how great a wing-man Tim is, when Doug had already found her the Doritos. #StagedValor https://t.co/CJUXw5MrJX pic.twitter.com/R6wtua2wZ3
— Matt Beebe (@TheMattBeebe) August 19, 2024

If you watch the first video where Emhoff gives Harris the Doritos, you can see Tim Walz in the background, staring right at them. Yet, a few minutes later, he pretends to be the subservient simp getting her the bag of chips. It looks like the two sides of the campaign didn't communicate well, leading to each putting out separate versions of the gimmick.

This is what happens when a nominee is running the most inauthentic, astroturfed presidential campaign in history. Everything about Harris and Walz is meticulously staged and focus-grouped, from the "white guy tacos" nonsense to the constant highlighting of her "Chuck Taylors." I wouldn't be surprised if Harris doesn't even like Doritos.

What's worse is that it seems to be working, at least for the moment. There's time for that to change, though. The DNC is already a disaster, with massive protests forming, and the more Harris is in the public, the more she's going to screw up the scripted moments. By November, Americans will have seen through the facade. The question is whether they'll vote accordingly or convince themselves irrelevancy is more important than policy.