Kamala Harris just admitted the one thing about President Donald Trump’s second term that caught her off guard.

The former vice president said in a podcast released Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026, that she never expected so many powerful people to cave to him.

Harris, speaking on Keke Palmer’s podcast, “Baby, This Is Keke Palmer,” said her warnings about the second term have come true. She said the one development she “had not anticipated was the capitulation” of people in positions of influence.

“The number of powerful people who have stood quietly by in the face of what they know to be corruption and behavior and approaches that are contrary to the best interest of our country, the powerful people who you know bend the knee at the foot of a tyrant. I hadn’t anticipated that that was going to happen, to the degree it has,” Harris told Palmer.

The Billionaire Still in Trump’s Corner

Harris spoke as the president’s popularity slides with voters, a slide driven by the administration’s handling of the economy and the war in Iran.

The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research ran an AP-NORC poll from Sept. 24-28. In it, about six in 10 Americans say they believe Trump has done something illegal or unethical to profit from the presidency.

Billionaire Elon Musk, who once led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is back in Trump’s corner. He has become the biggest known donor to Republicans this midterm season, giving hundreds of millions of dollars, even as Trump’s numbers with everyday voters have sagged.

Why Harris Wants You to Vote Like a Dealmaker

Harris described a slice of the country’s most powerful people operating on pure self-interest. They act not on principle and not on morality, she said, but on what they can extract from a relationship, and they are prepared to walk away the moment it stops delivering. She did not see it unfolding to the extent it has.

Harris says that same realization partly explains her new message. She wants Americans to vote as transactional voters. She rejects the alternative of opting out of elections over broken-down parts of the system. She told Palmer that plenty has worked and plenty has not.

Disappointment is no reason to remove oneself from the process, Harris said, and declining to vote means being silenced. “And this is not a moment where we can afford to be passive,” she said on the podcast.

In other words, she wants people to use their vote as leverage, not as an act of faith. Harris suggested it as a response to the transactional behavior she described among the country’s powerful, asking voters to use their ballots to demand something in return rather than wait for the political system to earn their trust.

Her Bold Plan for the Supreme Court

Her plan would enlarge the Supreme Court, add new states and reform the Electoral College. Harris is calling for those steps if Democrats win control of Congress. The package would require majorities her party does not currently hold.

A Marquette Law School poll in September found 53 percent of adults favored increasing the number of justices and 47 percent opposed. Support came from 68 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of independents and 35 percent of Republicans.

Y. David Scharf, chairman of Morrison Cohen LLP, pushed back on the proposals. “Kamala Harris says she wants to defend democracy, but her solution is to rewrite its rules when Democrats don’t like the results. That’s a dangerous precedent,” he told Fox News Digital.

Still Undecided on 2028

Harris told Palmer she has not yet decided whether to run for president in 2028. “I haven’t decided yet. I will, I promise,” she said, adding that “’28 don’t matter if we don’t do ’26 right.”

She leads early Democratic 2028 primary polling with 26.4 percent, against 14.4 percent for California Governor Gavin Newsom, in the RealClearPolling average through Oct. 6. A Financial Times/Focaldata poll conducted Oct. 3–6 put Harris at 30 percent and Newsom at 15 percent.

On Wednesday, Oct. 14, Harris added Mississippi, New Hampshire and Wisconsin to her midterm campaign tour, the Associated Press reported. On Oct. 22, she will campaign in Mississippi for U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom, who faces Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. Mississippi’s election day is Nov. 3.

She will wrap up with a three-day swing through Georgia, Oct. 28–30, including stops with Sen. Jon Ossoff. Trump held his own Georgia rally on Friday, Oct. 16, at Dalton Municipal Airport with Senate nominee Mike Collins and gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson.

Some in her own party are unhappy. In a Politico report, nearly 20 California-based Democratic donors and strategists questioned whether Harris has reinvented herself. Former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges was also skeptical: “I don’t see anything different myself. It seems like more of the same to me.”