White House ramps up talk of Harris’s role in foreign policy as she moves to the top of the Democratic ticket

The White House appears to be making a point of increasing Kamala Harris’s visibility in foreign policy after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and endorsed his vice president for the Democratic nomination.

Administration officials have increasingly stressed Harris’s participation in calls with world leaders and other foreign policy measures since her entry in the presidential race in July, according to Politico’s review of White House statements and briefings from across the administration.

While it is not unusual for the White House to promote the vice president’s involvement, the frequency of the administration’s mentions, and her joining critical calls alongside the president, suggests an attempt to promote her experience and head off Republican attacks as she moves to the top of the ticket.

Donald Trump and his allies, however, have been promoting Harris’s experience for entirely different reasons — by pivoting from attacks on Biden’s alleged foreign policy failures by trying to argue that it was Harris all along who was responsible for them.

Shortly after Biden and Harris had entered office in 2021, Harris was appointed to travel to and work with Mexico and Latin American countries to address the “root causes” of migration to the US-Mexico border.

Those efforts and subsequent foreign travel received relatively little press attention at the time, but Trump’s campaign has now spun Harris as the “border czar” responsible for the “open border” and unleashing a “migrant crime wave.”

Harris, who served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when she was a California senator, touted her foreign policy experience as vice president during her keynote address to the Democratic National Convention.

“We