We’ve seen lots of pictures featuring a happy-looking Kamala Harris in recent days as her party tries to position her as a viable presidential candidate, but many people who have worked with her in the past report that there was no joy to be found in their interactions with her.
Although she has long been accused of workplace bullying at different points in her career, the fact that just four out of the 71 staffers she hired during her first year in office are still with her is extremely telling. Everyone else has either quit or been fired, which makes for a staff turnover rate of 92 percent – an appalling figure that would leave any business scrambling to make changes at the top in response.
Accusations of running a toxic workplace have plagued Harris since her days as the California Attorney General in the 2010s. For example, a professor at California State University, Barbara O’Connor, reported that students of hers who interned for Harris would often come to her in tears.
The situation did not change when she became a senator, with an analysis revealing that her office came in ninth place in staff turnover rates among the 114 senators who served in the years from 2017 to 2020.
During that time, sources in Congress report that she was known to berate her subordinates and go on tirades full of expletives.
One notable incident in which she couldn’t control her anger and failed to treat staff respectfully took place during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018. After staging a walkout from the hearings, she blew up at staffers outside the main Judiciary Committee room, cursing and even giving orders to people who didn’t work for her. Those present on this occasion say she yelled, “Anyone who’s staff, get the f--- out of here.”
More evidence of her poor treatment of employees came in the form of a resignation letter that her former State Operations Director, Kelly Mehlenbacher, shared with the New York Times in 2019. She said that she had “never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly” and added that “morale has never been lower.”
Low morale appears to be a common theme when working for Kamala, with a Politico report in June 2021 revealing that dozens of people they spoke to who were familiar with her vice presidential office described “low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials.” One source said that people there did not feel supported and instead felt that they were “treated like s—t,” while another described it as an “abusive environment.”
Another former aide described her as someone who didn’t prepare for public appearances and then pointed fingers at her staff when they inevitably went wrong.
"Soul-destroying criticism"
One source told the Washington Post: “It's clear [with Harris] that you're not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you're constantly sort of propping up a bully and it's not really clear why.”
Reports about her workplace bullying often note that the people in these roles are accustomed to working under pressure with challenging bosses and maintaining demanding hours, so this is not simply a matter of people finding themselves in over their head working for someone with such a high profile. Some Democrat insiders are worried that she won’t have enough senior aides by her side to be successful in her presidential run thanks to the toxic workplace environments she creates.
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