Republican officials and right-wing media stars have lobbed withering and unrelenting criticism at Vice President Kamala Harris for not visiting the southern U.S. border after President Joe Biden tapped her to lead up the administration’s response to the migrant crisis.

However, now that she announced that she plans to go to the border on Friday, many of those same conservatives are angry over her visit, calling it a “complete mistake” and complaining that she is not going to where they believe the “height of the problem” exists.

[...]

Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy, meanwhile, changed course from his months-long grilling of White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki over the vice president’s non-presence at the border, wondering on Wednesday why Harris felt the need to go now.

“Why is the vice president visiting the border this week when earlier this month she dismissed a trip like that, saying it would be a grand gesture?” Doocy asked, prompting Psaki to note that Harris also said at the time she’d be open to a border trip at an appropriate time.

Some Republican lawmakers, however, were even more blatant in playing “heads I win, tails you lose” over the announced trip.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who earlier this month fumed that his constituents were upset that “Kamala Harris hasn't even visited the border,” took to Twitter to slam the veep for her planned visit. “Complete mistake—Kamala Harris will find some way to make the crisis worse,” he wrote.

And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has repeatedly demanded Harris make a border trip, complained in a lengthy Fox News interview about Harris choosing to go to the border city El Paso, asserting that this was the wrong part of the border and away from the “epicenter” of the crisis.

“El Paso is a lovely city. Beautiful place in Texas. It is also not—does not happen to be the locus of the crisis... So she is going where the height of the problem isn’t,” Cruz exclaimed, adding that Harris wants to avoid cameras seeing “kids in cages.”