Fox News star Greg Gutfeld took aim former Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday’s broadcast of “The Five,” slamming her reported decision to bypass former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as a running mate in the 2024 election.
Harris, according to excerpts from her forthcoming memoir “107 Days,” viewed a ticket pairing a black woman with a gay man as “too big of a risk.”
The revelations, highlighted in a report from The Atlantic, showed Harris admitting that Buttigieg was initially her first choice.
She admitted Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man.”
Gutfeld Roasts Kamala Harris Again pic.twitter.com/rMePOwpLSg
— GSJ Media Group (@gsjmediagroup1) August 3, 2025
Gutfeld mocked the reasoning. “I love this story,” he said. “I’m so confused. She said she wanted a gay man. Isn’t that why she picked [Minnesota Gov. Tim] Walz?”
“I can’t stand people who say they almost did something, but they didn’t because it was hard. And they still expect some credit for almost doing it. It doesn’t count.”
He added that real respect comes from “doing the thing that is hard or doing the thing that carries risk.”
We talked about the Media's love for Kamala Harris and more. Love being a writer an panelist on Gutfeld! #AdamHunter #Gutfeld #Kamala #Trump pic.twitter.com/9WgN3PQugu
— Adam Hunter (@AdamComedian) August 7, 2025
The Fox host continued, “We almost did it too. I almost picked Mayor Pete, but I didn’t. Anyway, it’s funny how DEI hires refuse to pay it forward. Imagine if Joe Biden felt the same way about Kamala, that Kamala felt about Mayor Pete.”
“He wouldn’t have picked her. She wouldn’t have been the VP. She wouldn’t have run for president,” Gutfeld pointed out.
“Then finally she’s running for president. And she’s like, ‘Oh, a gay man? Hell no, I wanna win.’ I’m gonna rely on that old meritocracy thing.”
In her book, Harris claimed that pairing with Buttigieg might have been a step too far for voters in the 2024 Election.
“We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” she reportedly wrote.
I don’t think we are talking enough about how the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, is openly admitting to discriminating against someone because he was gay (Mayor Pete).
Wow. pic.twitter.com/c8odbXjfzJ
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) September 19, 2025
“Part of me wanted to say, ‘Screw it, let’s just do it.’ But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk,” she wrote. Harris added that Buttigieg “also knew that – to our mutual sadness.”
She described Buttigieg as a sincere public servant who had a rare ability to frame progressive arguments in ways conservatives could hear.
“I love Pete. I love working with Pete. He and his husband, Chasten, are friends,” Harris wrote. Despite her admiration, she ultimately pivoted to Walz, after speculation swirled around names like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly.
Buttigieg responded on Thursday, telling Politico he was “surprised” to hear Harris’s reasoning. He argued that Americans “would have judged the campaign on the issues, not his identity.”
“My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories,” he said.
He added that Harris’s concerns were “not something that we ever talked about.” Buttigieg pointed to Barack Obama’s 2008 win in Indiana and his own terms as mayor of South Bend as proof that voters could look past identity politics.
“You just have to go to voters with what you think you can do for them,” the former Transportation Secretary remarked. “Politics is about the results we can get for people and not about these other things.”
Another section of Harris’s book turned critical of Joe Biden. She described his original reelection bid as “reckless” and admitted she might have done more to push him to step aside earlier.
Harris reflected that she was in “the worst position to make the case that he should drop out” because it could have been perceived as disloyal and self-serving.
One former Biden official responded harshly, telling Axios that Harris “was simply not good at the job” and had little substantive role in the administration, preferring photo ops that revealed she was out of her depth.
Harris also recounted her interaction with Shapiro during the vetting process, claiming he asked about the number of bedrooms in the vice-presidential residence and whether Smithsonian artwork could be borrowed.
She wrote that she suspected he wanted to be involved in every decision, which she deemed unrealistic. “A vice-president is not a co-president,” she reminded him.
Shapiro later said Harris will “have to answer” for not speaking out about Biden’s declining capacity while she served in the White House.
“She’s going to have to answer to how she was in the room and yet never said anything publicly,” Shapiro said.
He noted that while he wasn’t in those meetings, his perspective came from leading Pennsylvania, a state Biden lost in 2024.
He insisted he was vocal about Biden’s fitness with the president’s team. “I told them my concerns,” Shapiro said.