Politics
Column: For many Black women, Kamala Harris' defeat felt like a betrayal. Now what?
The day Joe Biden faced reality, stepped aside and cleared the way for Kamala Harris to replace him atop the Democratic ticket, Teja Smith felt a mix of exhilaration and dread.
Smith, who runs a social media firm in Los Angeles, had been working particularly hard of late, so she treated herself to a daylong stay-cation with family at a Beverly Hills hotel. Word of Biden’s announcement came as they were hanging out by the pool.
The historic nature of that thunderclap moment wasn’t lost on the 34-year-old entrepreneur. But there was another, less-uplifting sensation as well.
“Get ready,” Smith posted on Instagram, “because we’re about to see how much America hates Black women.”
The election result on Nov. 5 — just about 100 days after Harris’ overnight transformation — left Smith feeling sadly, grimly vindicated. The only surprise, she said, was how badly Harris lost.
Her defeat, Donald Trump’s triumph in each and every battleground state and — especially — his winning the popular vote were more than a slap in the face of Black women, long among the most loyal and dedicated of Democrats. It was a fist landed square in the gut.
Raw. Visceral. Shattering.
Views of the 47th president, from the ground up
The feeling has left many like Smith and other Black women she knows ready to pull back from national politics, focusing more on their inner needs and applying their outward energy to local issues and community concerns — places where their investment of heart and soul will be reciprocated in a way that seems beyond much of America.
“It’s draining,” Smith said of seeing the vice president — a former United States senator, California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney — turned aside so emphatically. It also shows, she said, that “no matter how high the ladder” a Black woman manages to climb, “people are still going to doubt you.”
Political activism came naturally to Smith. Her grandmother, who helped raise her, opened the Oakland chapter of the Urban League. Smith’s godmother was chief executive of Planned Parenthood’s Bay Area chapter. Her folks were the kind who took their child with them to their polling place, and they steeped her in the lore of the revolutionary Black Panther Party, which had its roots in Oakland and neighboring Berkeley.
After high school, Smith moved to Southern California. The attraction wasn’t politics but the dreamscape Smith grew up watching on TV. She graduated from Cal State Northridge and used her degree in journalism and communications to open a firm, Get Social, that connects political advocacy and social justice with entertainment and pop culture.
It was through her work, Smith said, that she knew Trump would win the White House in 2016, even as the supposed political experts and many in the news media wrote him off. She could sense Trump’s popularity outside California and other left-leaning climes, as well as the apathy of those who couldn’t imagine the deeply flawed candidate and reality TV star being elevated to the nation’s highest office.
Trump’s administration turned out to be every bit as bad, Smith said, as she had imagined — a mashup of scandals, impeachments, anti-immigrant policies and a botched response to a global pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans; a disproportionate number of them were nonwhite. “That was really a cherry on top with the presidency being bad,” she said.
Smith began working ahead of the 2018 midterm election to educate and register Black and brown voters, contracting with Rock The Vote, among others. Her efforts, both paid and voluntary, continued through the 2020 campaign. She wasn’t exactly wild about Biden — Bernie Sanders was more to Smith’s taste — but her goal was simple: “To make sure Donald Trump never comes near the White House again.”
I recently visited with Smith in the dining room of her South Los Angeles home, a charming 1922 Craftsman that she shares with her husband and their 2½-year-old son. A portion of her bedroom doubles as Smith’s office. A deluxe espresso machine in the kitchen feeds her caffeine habit without busting the family budget.
When Trump became the GOP nominee a third time — “I don’t even understand how he was able to run again,” Smith marveled — she redoubled her political efforts. In September alone, she traveled to six states to gin up enthusiasm for the election, helping register voters and explaining the ins and outs of early balloting and vote by mail. In all, Smith visited more than a dozen states and spent 2½ months on the road.
There were no grandparents or other relatives to help with child care. Just her husband, a mortgage loan officer, holding down hearth and home while running his side business, Hellastalgia, a hip-hop music page.
After all that time and sacrifice, Trump’s victory left Smith depleted and more than a little discouraged. “I was already annoyed going into the election, the fact that it would even be close,” she said over a homemade lavender macchiato. “And to see it play out the way it did. I just. I can’t even…”
Words fail.
A second Trump administration, Smith fears, will be much worse than the first. But there is none of the urgency to rush the barricades or join the political resistance that followed the 2016 election.
“We started nonprofits. … We started all of this stuff to make sure it didn’t happen again,” Smith said. “And now that it’s happened again, it’s one of those things like, well, maybe this is what you guys want.”
Like many of the Black women she’s spoken with, Smith plans to turn her attention away from Trump and national politics and, in her case, work on issues such as Los Angeles’ chronic homelessness problem. “We’re going to need people advocating and talking about things that are impacting their direct communities,” Smith said of her intended focus. “Obviously working at that big level is not working … well for us.”
While she’s no spokesperson for Black women, Smith said, she and others she knows feel overworked, undervalued and taken for granted for too long. There’s no desire, she said, to keep “stepping up for people that haven’t stepped up for us.”
The feeling is: You made your bed, America. Now you lie in it.
Politics
Federal judge blocks Trump from cutting childcare funds to Democratic states over fraud concerns
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A federal judge Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from stopping subsidies on childcare programs in five states, including Minnesota, amid allegations of fraud.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, a Biden appointee, didn’t rule on the legality of the funding freeze, but said the states had met the legal threshold to maintain the “status quo” on funding for at least two weeks while arguments continue.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns.
The programs include the Child Care and Development Fund, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, and the Social Services Block Grant, all of which help needy families.
USDA IMMEDIATELY SUSPENDS ALL FEDERAL FUNDING TO MINNESOTA AMID FRAUD INVESTIGATION
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it would withhold funds for programs in five Democratic states over fraud concerns. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
“Families who rely on childcare and family assistance programs deserve confidence that these resources are used lawfully and for their intended purpose,” HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said in a statement on Tuesday.
The states, which include California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, argued in court filings that the federal government didn’t have the legal right to end the funds and that the new policy is creating “operational chaos” in the states.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian at his nomination hearing in 2022. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
In total, the states said they receive more than $10 billion in federal funding for the programs.
HHS said it had “reason to believe” that the programs were offering funds to people in the country illegally.
‘TIP OF THE ICEBERG’: SENATE REPUBLICANS PRESS GOV WALZ OVER MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
The table above shows the five states and their social safety net funding for various programs which are being withheld by the Trump administration over allegations of fraud. (AP Digital Embed)
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, called the ruling a “critical victory for families whose lives have been upended by this administration’s cruelty.” (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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Fox News Digital has reached out to HHS for comment.
In what might be the most decisive critique yet of President Trump’s remake of the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera’s board approved a resolution on Friday to leave the venue it has occupied since 1971.
“Today, the Washington National Opera announced its decision to seek an amicable early termination of its affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center and resume operations as a fully independent nonprofit entity,” the company said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Roma Daravi, Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, described the relationship with Washington National Opera as “financially challenging.”
“After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with the WNO due to a financially challenging relationship,” Daravi said in a statement. “We believe this represents the best path forward for both organizations and enables us to make responsible choices that support the financial stability and long-term future of the Trump Kennedy Center.”
Kennedy Center President Ambassador Richard Grenell tweeted that the call was made by the Kennedy Center, writing that its leadership had “approached the Opera leadership last year with this idea and they began to be open to it.”
“Having an exclusive relationship has been extremely expensive and limiting in choice and variety,” Grenell wrote. “We have spent millions of dollars to support the Washington Opera’s exclusivity and yet they were still millions of dollars in the hole – and getting worse.”
WNO’s decision to vacate the Kennedy Center’s 2,364-seat Opera House comes amid a wave of artist cancellations that came after the venue’s board voted to rename the center the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. New signage featuring Trump’s name went up on the building’s exterior just days after the vote while debate raged over whether an official name change could be made without congressional approval.
That same day, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) — an ex officio member of the board — wrote on social media that the vote was not unanimous and that she and others who might have voiced their dissent were muted on the call.
Grenell countered that ex officio members don’t get a vote.
Cancellations soon began to mount — as did Kennedy Center‘s rebukes against the artists who chose not to appear. Jazz drummer Chuck Redd pulled out of his annual Christmas Eve concert; jazz supergroup the Cookers nixed New Year’s Eve shows; New York-based Doug Varone and Dancers dropped out of April performances; and Grammy Award-winning banjo player Béla Fleck wrote on social media that he would no longer play at the venue in February.
WNO’s departure, however, represents a new level of artist defection. The company’s name is synonymous with the Kennedy Center and it has served as an artistic center of gravity for the complex since the building first opened.
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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leveling a stunning accusation at Vice President JD Vance amid the national furor over this week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota involving an ICE agent.
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” the four-term federal lawmaker from New York and progressive champion argued as she answered questions on Friday on Capitol Hill from Fox News and other news organizations.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good after she confronted ICE agents from inside her car in Minneapolis.
RENEE NICOLE GOOD PART OF ‘ICE WATCH’ GROUP, DHS SOURCES SAY
Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Video of the incident instantly went viral, and while Democrats have heavily criticized the shooting, the Trump administration is vocally defending the actions of the ICE agent.
HEAD HERE FOR LIVE FOX NEWS UPDATES ON THE ICE SHOOTING IN MINNESOTA
Vance, at a White House briefing on Thursday, charged that “this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order.”
“That woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation,” the vice president added. “The president stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers.”
And Vance claimed Good was “brainwashed” and suggested she was connected to a “broader, left-wing network.”
Federal sources told Fox News on Friday that Good, who was a mother of three, worked as a Minneapolis-based immigration activist serving as a member of “ICE Watch.”
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Ocasio-Cortez, in responding to Vance’s comments, said, “That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
But a spokesperson for the vice president, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation, told Fox News Digital, “On National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, AOC made it clear she thinks that radical leftists should be able to mow down ICE officials in broad daylight. She should be ashamed of herself. The Vice President stands with ICE and the brave men and women of law enforcement, and so do the American people.”
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