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Kamala Harris trolled for posing before Ho Chi Minh bust amid Kabul-Saigon comparison

Kamala Harris also laid flowers at the site where the North Vietnamese shot down Senator John McCain's plane in 1967

Kamala Harris has been criticized after she reached Vietnam on Tuesday night, August 24. The vice president has reportedly visited Vietnam in a show of support against China's “intimidation” in the South China Sea, but her critics have slammed it as a tone-deaf approach as they compared Kabul evacuation by the US to Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

On Wednesday, August 25, Harris met Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Vice President Vo Thi Ahn Xuan and posed smiling under a bust of the country's former President Ho Chi Minh. A bilateral meeting took place between Harris and the Communist country's president in the mirror room of Hanoi's presidential palace, where she told Phuc that “our relationship has come a long way in a quarter of a century.” At the beginning of the meeting she also said, “We need to find ways to pressure and raise the pressure, frankly, on Beijing to abide by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and to challenge its bullying and excessive maritime claims,” before adding America would “maintain a strong presence in the South China Sea”.

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You can see pictures here.

Later, the 56-year-old visited the site where the North Vietnamese shot down Senator John McCain's plane in 1967. McCain, who had spent several years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, died in 2018 after battling brain cancer. Harris paid tribute to McCain by laying flowers there as it was his third death anniversary. This comes as the US continues to evacuate thousands of Afghans from Kabul after the Taliban took over the country earlier this month. The horrific scenes from the South Asian nation are reportedly very similar to the scenes from the fall of Saigon in 1975 after the US defeat in Vietnam.American helicopters had to evacuate people from the embassy roof in the last days of the Vietnam War.

However, Harris is not there to discuss Saigon — now called Ho Chi Minh City — as she promised Vietnam of giving an additional one million coronavirus vaccine doses. Earlier, USA had donated five million doses to Vietnam. Besides, the US will also help Vietnam by giving $23 million for American Rescue Plan and emergency funding through the Centers for Disease Control and the United States Agency for International Development so that it can expand its vaccination reach and defeat the coronavirus pandemic.

But Senator Bill Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican and a former US ambassador to Japan, said: “She's going to have a challenge from a domestic public relations standpoint, because everyone in America right now is associating the images that they're seeing on TV with the collapse of Kabul, with the images of Americans being lifted from the rooftop of our embassy in Saigon.” Political commentator tweeted, “The Biden White House has made some awful choices in the past eight months, but whoever made the decision to send Kamala Harris to Vietnam while a modern day Saigon on steroids is playing out in Afghanistan should be fired on the spot. Next level stupidity.”

A user asked, “Why was this trip necessary now?” Another one wrote, “That's good. @VP can heckle at a statue in the rain rather than actually performing her duties. What a totally unqualified & inept woman who slept her way to the top, then rode the coattails of racism, wokism, sexism, & misogyny to the @WhiteHouse.”