Now that Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee, stories that never bubbled to the surface are popping up, and there will be more to come. 

Axios wrote an unflattering story on Monday, highlighting that Biden thought she was a terrible candidate who would likely lose to Donald Trump. Now, POLITICO has a similar story about how European leaders think she is a lightweight who can never become president. 

Speaking candidly, centrist European politicians and officials have suggested Kamala Harris has yet to convince them she can beat Donald Trump.https://t.co/EWntYJ1bl3

— POLITICO (@politico) July 23, 2024

The core of the story is that behind closed doors European leaders view Harris with, shall we say, skepticism. And they can back that up with a hot microphone conversation in which a Board Member of the European Central Bank trashes Kamala without being aware that his comments were being streamed to the world. 

BRUSSELS — Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the U.S. presidential election gave European politicians an urgent new question: What would Kamala Harris be like? 

Vice President Harris is now the favorite to become the Democratic nominee to take on Donald Trump in November’s election. Speaking candidly, centrist European politicians and officials suggested Harris has yet to convince them she can beat him.

Isabel Schnabel, an executive board member of the European Central Bank, was caught on a hot mic earlier this year criticizing the vice president as “invisible”, and predicting that she would never win. The Democratic Party selection process “is a failure,” Schnabel said in comments reported here for the first time. 

“They should have built up another candidate to Kamala Harris from the beginning,” Schnabel said in a private conversation ahead of a panel event in February, apparently unaware her remarks were being live-streamed. “She would never win an election, I mean that's hopeless." Schnabel's next comment was particularly cutting: "I don't even know her because she has been so invisible.”

Ouch. 

The Democratic Party selection process is a failure. Harris is invisible. I don't even know her.

Ouch. 

Joe Biden has, of course, been horrible on foreign policy, but he rests much of his reputation on his links to political figures around the world. He views his foreign policy chops as his greatest skill.

Harris? She is literally a nobody to foreign leaders. 

Speaking privately — though not on a hot mic — other people familiar with Harris’s style of diplomacy criticized her speeches, recalling that she tended to read from a prepared text in a stilted manner.

Two officials who met with Harris at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year told POLITICO she displayed a split-screen persona at the gathering.

On the one hand, her public interventions were highly-scripted — speeches delivered via teleprompter, with little spontaneity, with her 2023 speech at the same conference particularly ill-received as applause-lines bombed and she failed to connect with the audience. 

Another example of this is her feather-ruffling appearance at a U.K. artificial intelligence conference in 2023. Harris came on stage late and gave a speech — described to POLITICO as "banal" by one attendee — which poked holes in the flagship conference's theme.

The British actually complained to the White House about her. Can you imagine?

Of course, none of these people LIKE Donald Trump, but he is anything but invisible and the opposite of a pushover. 

They dislike him because he upends the current status quo, and that status quo is leading us to failure. Europeans seem fine with that, although they are preparing for a Trump presidency by doing the right thing: building up their military. That has been his ask, and they are now going to deliver because Trump is likely to be the next president. 

Harris is leaning into her incompetence by refusing to preside over Bibi Netanyahu's speech and refusing to meet with him, proving that she, like Biden, hates our friends and intends to help our enemies, like Iran. 

So what is Netanyahu doing? He'll be meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.