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Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post White House Counsel spokesman Ian Sams speaks during a news briefing at the White House on Feb. 9.
The Washington Post / Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey
18:01 JST, October 31, 2024
In the final three weeks of the presidential race, former president Donald Trump and his advisers have attacked one particular foe more than three dozen times: a little-known Kamala Harris aide named Ian Sams.
The feud with Sams, a bespectacled 35-year-old longtime foot soldier in Democratic politics, started when Sams did what few Democrats are willing to do: He went on Fox News.
And Trump – as he often is – was watching.
“We’re not seeing Donald Trump do very many interviews,” Sams told Fox News host Neil Cavuto in an eight-minute segment in mid-October, during which he touched on Trump’s refusal to release his medical records, the deadly Jan. 6. 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the former president’s handling of the pandemic, all while smiling affably as Cavuto, at times, talked over him and tried to cut him off.
“It’s been about a month now since he did a mainstream media interview,” continued Sams, a senior Harris adviser and spokesman. “We have got to wonder why.”
Sams left the studio and was greeted with cheers from his colleagues inside the campaign’s office in Wilmington, Delaware – and a social media post from Trump that had landed while Sams was still on air talking.
“How much time does Ian Sams, Senior Advisor to Lyin’ Kamala Harris, spend on FoxNews?” Trump asked in the post – which also dismissed Sams as “just a below average guy, with memorized FAKE NEWS sound bites, almost all of which are WRONG” and decried Fox News as having “totally lost its way!” Trump cited a number of other Democrats by name in the post.
Several days later, Trump wrote that Sams “virtually owns” the network.
Since Trump’s first post, Trump adviser Stephen Miller has tweeted about Sams on at least 15 occasions; Trump adviser Jason Miller has posted nine times; the Trump War Room campaign account has posted six times; and Trump spokesman Tim Murtaugh has posted four times.
Appearing on “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning, Trump bemoaned what he said was a decline in Fox News, arguing the network should no longer play negative ads about him or book Democrats critical of him.
“In the old days, you never had Ian Sams,” Trump told the show’s hosts.
Later that day, he raised the issue of Democratic guests with Rupert Murdoch during a private meeting, according to a person familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Fox News declined to comment on any interactions between Trump and Murdoch.
The Harris campaign declined to comment on Sams’s recent emergence as an obsession for Trump.
“It seems like the only person who watches more of Ian’s hits on TV than Trump are his blood relatives,” said Lily Adams, a friend of Sams who has worked with him on multiple campaigns, including Harris’s unsuccessful 2020 presidential bid.
Before joining the Harris campaign, Sams served in the Biden White House, where he was tasked with fighting against all of the Republican congressional inquiries into President Joe Biden – including the touchy issue of the president’s son Hunter.
What Sams is doing – refusing to cede Fox News to Republicans – is part of the Harris campaign’s strategy this cycle. The vice president and her team believe she must win over some of Fox News’s viewers – namely soft Republican and independent voters who voted for Nikki Haley – if she is going to win the presidency. She has a large polling gap with White men and has begun appearing frequently with Republican critics of Trump.
She was weighing offering to participate in a second presidential debate on Fox News, but then Trump shot down the idea. Harris also participated in a recent interview with Fox anchor Bret Baier, where she was grilled on her policy shifts and polls that show Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. Harris aides also note that Fox gets higher ratings than other cable news networks.
Trump has long been obsessed with Fox News, tracking the channel’s coverage of him for hours upon hours. While he occasionally flips to other networks, and often criticizes Fox publicly, he watches that channel more than others, people close to him said, speaking anonymously to share candid details.
And Sams – who often appears on daytime Fox News shows, when Trump is almost always watching – proved the perfect foil. Sams, an avid golfer and country music fan who grew up in eastern Tennessee and went to the University of Alabama, is accustomed to being a rare Democrat in the room.
He often tries to bait Trump, raising questions about the former president’s health and his energy levels.
On Oct. 15, after Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum repeatedly pressed Sams about Harris’s struggle to win over male voters, he returned to the topic in a way sure to enrage Trump – and press the Harris campaign’s message that Trump is not fit to serve again as president.
“I think that if you’re a man, you’re not afraid to put out your medical records,” Sams said. “If Donald Trump was a real man, he would put out his medical records. And so I think he shouldn’t be afraid to show the country his health and mental and physical fitness before this election.”
Sams has studied Trump for more than a decade and at times found himself on the losing end. He moved to Brooklyn and worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, when he was responsible for rolling out her domestic policy agenda, he told a reporter in a profile for his alma mater.
He took the loss hard, along with many of his friends who now work for Harris.
After Clinton lost, he toiled away in Democratic politics for several years before joining Harris’s 2020 presidential effort, which ended before a single vote was cast. At the time, Sams told others it was a disappointing campaign.
He later took a job as a spokesman for the Biden administration’s coronavirus response before working as a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, where he was responsible for crafting the response to special counsel Robert K. Hur’s damning report on Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Once Biden dropped out, Sams moved to Wilmington and began working for Harris again, trying to avenge the defeats of the past two presidential cycles. One of his strategies has been to push for the campaign to appear on Fox News. Other than Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Biden does not have a cadre of regular surrogates on the network.
Trump’s aides have sometimes inflated Sams’s role – and sometimes deflated his role – but since his Fox News star turn, they have begun attacking him far more often than any other Harris aide and have become fixated on him, following the lead of their boss.
“One month ago, Kamala Harris was riding high in the public polling, but then Ian Sams took over the campaign and initiated a series of mind-boggling stupid decisions, including sending Liz Cheney to campaign for Harris in Michigan and thinking that a smart play to win back African American men centered on drug legalization,” Trump spokesman Jason Miller said.
Appearing on Jen Psaki’s MSNBC show Sunday evening, Sams addressed his unexpected star turn in Mar-a-Lago circles with the sort of aw-shucks sincerity that seemed to belie his true intention: to bait Trump yet again.
“I don’t really know why Donald Trump seems to be spending his time TiVo-ing Fox News appearances and lashing out against spokespeople,” Sams said. “That’s not something that the vice president does.”
