Morning Joe - Morning Joe 8/13/24

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

The Morning Joe panel discusses the latest in U.S. and world news, politics, sports and culture

She is terrible. She's terrible. But she's getting a free ride. I saw a picture of her on Time magazine today. She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing. And actually, she looked very much like our great first lady, Melania. She didn't look like Camilla. That's right. But of course, she's a beautiful woman. So we'll leave it at that. We will leave it at that part of Donald Trump's conversation last night with Elon Musk on the social media platform, the event delayed by significant technical issues. Does that sound familiar? Which Musk claimed was a hack? No evidence that that is the case. Much more on that conversation in just a moment. Good morning. Welcome to Morning Joe. It is Tuesday, August 13th. With us this morning, the host of Way Too Early, White House Bureau Chief of Politico, Jonathan Lemire, U.S. Special Correspondent for BBC News, Katty Kaye, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and associate editor of The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson and New York Times opinion columnist David French. We'll get to David's

column in just a minute. Joe, it's good to be back with you back in New York City after a Parisian escapade of about three weeks. It is great to have you back. You know the question I'm going to ask. You know the question I'm going to ask. I mean, we were blessed to win gold in Atlanta and synchronized swimming and the St. Lillehammer. Few people remember our Lillehammer silver with synchronized skating, which was the I think was inspiration for Blades of Glory. I don't know. I don't want to take credit for that. But I think that's what like Will Ferrell was channeling you when when he did that. But but compare those events, obviously personal for you, with what happened in Paris, because I will tell you, just sitting in my back lounger watching that, that may have been the coolest Olympics I've seen. And I mean, I've seen some great ones.

You were not alone in that thought. For me, by far, I've covered a bunch of them, by far the best Olympics, not a close second, just as an experience, the way it was run, how Team USA did, how the host country did, how France performed at its own games. And talking to people who've done many, many more around NBC Sports, around NBC News than I have, saying this was the best Olympics that they've ever been a part of. I thought the NBC coverage was incredible. The way they ran it on Peacock, the gold zone is so fun, like the red zone format from the NFL, where they bounce you around to the gold medal events. You got to watch everything you wanted to live. So the coverage back here was great. And as for Paris, always concerns when you drop the Olympics on an old city and boy, did they accommodate them so well using what they had existing, obviously, you know, beach volleyball underneath the Eiffel tower. I went to fencing in the grand Palais with that glass ceiling. You don't know you're a fencing fan until you see it that way.

Incredible energy everywhere. The Metro was flawless, got you to places you wanted to go easily. Um, it was truly a spectacular, spectacular games. And there were a lot of people there from L.A. 2028 walking around, kind of seeing how things were going, going, OK, all right, a new standard has been set for how the Olympics should be run. So it was truly spectacular. Yeah, really has. And I mean, you look at our lower thirds,

Olympics are rating gold for NBC and Peacock. Yay, go team. For people that haven't been around morning, Joe, for a long time. We we aren't company men and women. In fact, I think we were pretty merciless about the Beijing games, especially in the first first week or so with all the pollution and everything else. But no, but it was. But still, I'm still so take that lower third down. That's just. Yeah, yeah. There you go. OK, I can talk about it. We talked yesterday. So a lot of Olympic glory, but also media companies struggling. And what was interesting last week was you probably didn't catch it because you're in the middle of everything over there.

But the same week we heard that Peacock was doing great streaming wise and historic. We also heard that Disney made their first profit in streaming. I mean, this is a long time coming. People see all the reports about media companies having to fire people, lay off people, et cetera, et cetera. Part of that problem is that advertising revenue collapsed from linear and hadn't quite made it back up with those points hadn't sort of reached with streaming and suggests that these Olympics may be remembered for more than just an extraordinary sports story, extraordinary event, but also a pretty big media story as well. Yeah, it was definitely a pivot point for Peacock and maybe for others that now they can launch all

their other products. They have people who come and enjoy the experience on Peacock. And like I said, it was even for me when you can't get out to all the venues, but you got to keep track. I mean, you just call up Peacock, you click on the icon of whatever the sport is. And there it is. It was very, very well done. And one other point that I would have been thinking about a lot since I left Paris a couple of days ago, just kind of a bigger idea is look. Coming back to our politics right where it is, when I left, where it was, is just the spirit of the games. And I know it sounds corny and all that, but you see these athletes from all over the world, from all these different countries, cheering for themselves, cheering for each other, hugging each other, even when they lose, supporting each other, the positivity, the patriotism and all the things that come with the Olympics that we become

accustomed to see in contrast with what we live through every day. And we talk about our politics. People out there in the world are not behaving the way some of our politicians behave. I would put this, this is the best of us, these Olympic athletes, and they work their entire lives for these moments. And when they lose, they walk over and shake their hand and say, I'll be here at the next Olympics.

It's just that vibe. And I know we only get to capture it for two and a half weeks of the Olympics was extraordinarily refreshing in contrast to our politics. Yeah. Well, you know, and again, I'm so glad you said our politics, not even our country. It's a point we try to make here all the time. America is doing great. And by the way, I said this when Donald Trump was president. I said it when Barack Obama was president. I said it when George W. Bush was president, though I had problems, so many problems, obviously, with Donald Trump, but also ideologically

with the other guys I mentioned. I mean, America, I mean, we're stronger than ever economically. We're stronger than ever militarily. We're stronger than ever culturally. Our soft power, our hard power, everything. I mean, we fed and freed more people than any other country on the planet. Americans are good people. Right now, our politics divide us. We need to move past that. We've got to stop this red and blue, sort of a black and white choice. And I think we can do that. But what you're talking about, Willie, it's just like at the beginning of the games, people tried to politicize it.

They tried to politicize it at the end of the games and Americans were like, you know what? I want to see Katie Ledecky swim. That's right. I want to see, you know, keep your politics and your culture wars, like keep that on your little blog in your mom's basement.

I'd like to see Simone Biles. I'd like to see the basketball team on and on. It's just and yeah, it was it was pretty inspiring. And if you doubt the power of the Olympics, watch the professional athletes who have all the fame and the money and the success they could ever want in the world. Watch the way Steph Curry and LeBron James, the two biggest stars in basketball, how they emoted during and after that game and what it meant to them. Watch Scotty Scheffler, the best golfer in the world, in the medal stand as they play the national anthem.

Watch Novak Djokovic, the greatest men's player of all time in tennis, collapse to the ground after he won his gold medal. It really is something different. It really is something powerful, the Olympic Games. Now, it really is. It really is. We have so much to talk about this morning. And I want to talk to David French in one minute. But I've got to say, Gene Robinson, I'm going to start with the Wall Street Journal editorial page. And, you know, I agree with a lot of things they know, I agree with a lot of things they say. I disagree with a lot of things they say. I'm a bit befuddled with with one of their

editorials today. And it actually it hits on a topic that actually drove me to Congress 30 years ago, and that is deficits, debt, federal spending, fiscal irresponsibility. We've got a $35 trillion debt right now. Nobody seems to care about it. But their editorial today suggests that Donald Trump should lecture Kamala Harris on deficits. This Donald Trump and anybody that's watched this show knows Donald Trump has the worst fiscal record of any president in the history of the country. And you can go back and look at documents from Donald Trump's Treasury Department.

They lay it out very clearly. Even before covid, he was exploding the deficit. I tweeted something this morning as I was getting ready for the show after I read this. And it shows a line of the deficit going down like this under Barack Obama, going down from the 2008 collapse and then shooting back up the second Donald Trump becomes president of the United States. So, again, I am all for fiscal responsibility. In fact, that's sort of again, that's what got me into this business in the first place. But to suggest that Donald Trump should lecture anybody on the deficit instead of writing an editorial talking about he was the most fiscally reckless president in U.S. history. He accumulated and amassed more debt in four years than America did. The republic did its first 225 years of existence.

You know, that's the editorial to write and ask whether he's going to be any different if he gets elected over the next four years. Yeah, of course, it wouldn't be any different. Donald Trump has never cared about the deficit at all. And as you say, he was the biggest spender, certainly one of the biggest spenders in American history, however you look at it in absolute terms, per capita, whatever. He was a huge spender. He cut slash revenue for the government with his big tax cuts. He didn't offset it with any actual budget cuts. In fact, he doesn't like budget cuts. He wants to spend more. So he is absolutely the last person in the world you would ask to come in and fix a deficit. And that actually is true. You look at the cycle over the last 20, 30, 50 years, if you want to cut the deficit,

elect Democrats. They're supposed to be the big spenders, but the deficits go down. And if you want bigger deficits and more debt, elect the Republicans. They just like to spend that money. And Donald Trump is certainly of that ilk. The only time Republicans hear about deficits is when Democrats are in the White House. And then when they're in the White House again, you saw it under George W. Bush. You saw it under Donald Trump.

Deficits explode at record rates. So, Willie, or actually, Willie, if you could, love for you to read this David French piece. I do want to circle back to David really quickly, though. And David, before we read your new piece for The New York Times, I just want to say this is what's so maddening to me. The very things that made you and me conservatives, the very things that moved us to the Republican Party, the very things that made us like believe that we were fighting for right, whether it was, you know, whether it was I'm more boring, but balanced budgets, fiscal responsibility, taking care of taxpayers dollars, giving them like the best bang for their buck, making government as efficient as possible. You know, having the local government do what the local government can do and what they can't let the state governments do, what they can't let the federal governments do. And in all of that, you're worried about individual freedoms, individual liberty, individual rights to go out, work hard, make a living, you know, make a life

where your kids have it better than you do and they have a better opportunity than you even had. Right. That's gone, man. That is gone. And when I hear people talking about, oh, you're not a conservative, it's laughable because what we're seeing now, we're seeing idol worship for not to say a guy. It's a party now. It's a party. They're not conservative. They're not fiscally conservative. They're not conservative on foreign policy. They've got two candidates that want to turn Ukraine over to the Russians, the antithesis of everything that Ronald Reagan fought for, that Republicans have always fought for. There is nothing conservative about this Republican party. And David, I just have to ask if they lose again this year, is that OK? Here we go. If the question I was going to ask is if they lose this year,

is there a chance that they are going to go back to more tried and true Burkean, Reagan-esque conservative principles? By the way, what you're looking at now, direct from Joe's Twitter account. A little chart I made this morning after reading the op-ed. In blue, that is left-wing socialist, communist, whatever you want to call him, Bill Ayers-loving, Reverend Wright-loving, left-wing, like Marxist Barack Obama's deficit record. By the way, it goes down. It goes straight down. So all those things Republicans said about him, obviously not true. Now, if you look right after Barack Obama left office, by the way, four years pre-COVID, look at deficits under Donald Trump. David, they go straight up. That's not conservative.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things that's happening is you have MAGA has seized control of the Republican Party, intentionally transforming it radically, not just, of course, on a policy basis, but on a character basis, calling the old Republican Party the dead consensus. And if you object to it, they say, well, what happened to you? In other words, they're pulling the party away and accusing anyone who objects to it of being a traitor. And this has been the dynamic for nine years now. And here's what's stunning, though, Joe. And, you know, I think some of your viewers just would be amazed by this. There are

still many, many, many Republicans who don't realize how different MAGA is from traditional Republicanism. There's still many Republicans who believe they're voting for at least strong elements of the older party. And Trump benefits immensely from this, even as MAGA just keeps changing it. Yeah, Willie, look at that. Yeah, there it is. It's pretty clear, stark in that graphic there. You've got a new piece out for The New York Times, David, titled To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris. In it, David writes this. While there are voters who are experiencing a degree of Trump nostalgia, remembering American life pre-COVID as a time of full employment and low inflation, there is a different and darker story to tell about Trump's first term. Our social fabric

frayed. It's not just that abortions increased, the murder rates skyrocketed, drug overdose deaths hit new highs, marriage rates fell and birth rates continued their long decline. Americans ended his term more divided than when it began. I'm often asked by Trump voters, David writes, if I'm still conservative, and I respond that I can't vote for Trump precisely because I am conservative. The only real hope for restoring a conservatism that values integrity, demonstrates real compassion, and defends our foundational constitutional principles isn't to try to make the best of Trump, a man who values only himself. If he wins again, it will validate his cruelty and his ideological transformation of the Republican Party. If Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin and conservative Americans will

have a chance to build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life. David, let you expand a little bit on that. This is something Joe talks about all the time. I'm still conservative. You guys were just talking about this standing right here. It's the party, the Trumpists that have changed. Yeah, absolutely. It's not just that the party's changed, but events, things have changed. So in 2016 and 2020, I voted third party. I wrote in. I could not vote for the Democrat. I definitely was not going to vote for Donald Trump. But there are some things that have changed since 2020. One of them was January 6th, which illustrated the links that Donald Trump would go, the destructive

links to our own constitutional order that Donald Trump would go. And then the next year when Russia invades Ukraine, you see the incredible stakes for the international order, for American national security. And on both of those just paramount issues, Trump is not just on the wrong side in many ways, especially here domestically. He's the instigator of the crisis itself. And so if you're dealing with changed events, I feel like it's incumbent on me to be open to changing my mind on at least one element of my stand. And that is, in this case, to vote for the party that at the very least is going to stand against Russian aggression. And Joe, you know, saying that out loud that I'm voting against a Republican to make sure that the United States resists Russian aggression

is, again, one of those moments where you can't believe how much things have changed. No, it's just it's a surreal moment. And, you know, I have explained to people before I explained to Katie when Donald Trump was president that that I've always had great faith in America. And many people say and they do. Many people say that I'm too optimistic. And I'm it's too glass half full. But my feeling has always been that Madisonian democracy rounds off the sharp edges. That's why I said when Donald Trump was president and people come up to me, go, oh, you just you're you know, this is all about, you know, ideology. I said, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. I said it's about respecting constitutional boundaries.

I'm I'm fairly confident that everybody from Mike Pence to Bernie Sanders would would would respect constitutional boundaries. And if Mike Pence were president or Bernie Sanders were president, I'd worry much less than if Donald Trump were president, because, again, Madisonian democracy checks and balances a separation of powers that rounds off the sharp edges. We could survive four years of somebody who's very conservative, are very liberal. Our problem here is someone who just doesn't respect constitutional boundaries and brags about being authoritarian to his supporters. And, you know, the truth is, I agree with David. There are a lot of people who who think that this is like Clinton versus Dole in 1996. But there are quite a few Republicans I've talked to that like the authoritarian streak in Donald Trump. They like the strongman approach.

Yeah, I mean, Mike Pence put his own life in danger. He put his family's life in danger in order to protect and defend the bounds of constitutional democracy. It was night and day from the former president, who is now running again, telling Christian conservatives, don't worry, you won't have to vote again in four years time because I'll have it all fixed. And who knows? You know, Donald Trump says stuff that is random and makes no sense. And maybe it was just another thing he says that's random and makes no sense. But it's pretty striking when you have a candidate running for president of the United States who is telling

his supporters, who is telling American voters, you will not have to vote again in four years' time. The implication being that there will not be an election in four years' time. Now, I'm one of those people who thinks that the American guardrails hold and that the courts are strong and the press is strong and that there will be an election in 2028. And there are an awful lot of Democrats who believe that there will be an election in 2028 because they want to run in 2028. But it is very different, and it's really all about Donald Trump. David, when you look at Kamala Harris's record as a conservative, and I know you've got probably fellow conservatives who are voting for her.

And I know people in the conservative wing of the Republican Party who have endorsed her. And you look at her record on things like immigration or as a prosecutor in San Francisco or what she has said about a single-payer health system or what she has said about ending fracking in Pennsylvania. And I know she's reversed some of that, but they seem to be reflections of her liberalism. Is it hard for you to say that you're going to vote for her? Yeah, it is, actually. I'm a little bit encouraged that in many ways she's moving closer to me, you know, disclaiming the defund the police stuff and the fracking bans, endorsing the border bill, for example. So in some concrete ways, she is moving more to the middle. And that is somewhat reassuring. But, yeah, at the end of the day, if she wins the presidency, there are a lot of policy issues that we would disagree on.

A lot of policy issues. There are some we'd agree on, such as support for Ukraine. But we can have, as Joe was just saying, we can have that conversation. And there are other elections I can vote in, like for Senate or for House, that can blunt the effect of her more left-wing policies. But we're doing it within the norms of American democracy, within the rules of American democracy. And then in the next election, if she's gone too far, I'll vote a different direction. But we can't treat this. This is a core element of my piece. We cannot treat this like a regular election where

some of the regular policy issues dictate our vote. There are other front line, top tier issues like respect for American democracy, defense and maintaining, defending and maintaining American allies that are just at this very high level. And we can't pretend they're not there. As David lays out in the piece, the Republican Party now unrecognizable from what it was just a few decades ago in terms of both foreign policy and some matters here at home. But Willie, the great question, the unanswerable question is, what happens next? Even if Donald Trump were to be defeated this fall, does that mean Trumpism? Does that mean the MAGA movement goes away? There are certainly some of the

Republican Party who say, yes, we finally rid of him. Let's move on. We'll rebirth this party into something new for 2028. I don't know there's a guarantee of that. His he is still going to be the loudest voice in the party, most likely. Certainly he you know, his running mate is set up to be a loud voice in his party going forward. The MAGA movement has captured so many state local officials, state houses, Congress, the House of Republicans, House of Representatives in particular. I don't know that even if Trump were to be defeated in November, that this would be said that the party would be able to rid itself of this movement. This is the party right now, the MAGA movement. And it just it might look a little different. It might have a different name

on top of it in 2028. But I don't know that we could just take as faith that it'll go back to what it was. Yeah, with tens of millions of regular supporters as well on board. As long as we're inside the editorial pages, the Wall Street Journal, Jerry Baker writing this morning, Trump is looking like a loser again, talking about the press conference last week that he calls false, obtuse and lunatic. We're going to get into more of that from the Wall Street Journal in just a moment. Still ahead, we'll hear more from Donald Trump's two hour glitch filled interview with billionaire Elon Musk, including what the former president had to say about a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Morning Joe's back in just 90 seconds. Beautiful live picture of the White House sun up at 627 in Washington here in New York. Former President Donald Trump and ex-owner Elon Musk engaged in a conversation last night on the platform with 1.3 million people listening on X Spaces at its peak.

The event delayed for about 40 minutes by technical problems, Musk blamed a cyber attack, a claim that could not be verified, called into doubt by a number of experts. Once things finally did get underway, the pair spoke for more than two hours with Trump doing most of the talking. Here's a little of what he had to say. I hate to say this. The reason the numbers are much bigger than you would think is they're also taking the nonproductive people. Now, these aren't people that will kill you. We have enough of them. But these are people that are nonproductive.

They are just not productive. I mean, for whatever reason, they're not workers or they don't want to work or whatever. And these countries are getting rid of nonproductive people in the caravans in many cases. And they're also getting rid of their murderers and their drug dealers and the people that are really brutal people. And they're coming into our country at levels that have never been seen before. I know Putin very well. I got along with him very well. He respected me. And it's just one of those things. And he would we would talk a lot about Ukraine. It was the apple of his eye.

But I said, don't ever do it. Don't ever do it. You can't do it, Vladimir. You do it. It's going to be a bad day. You cannot do it. And I told him things that what I do. And he said, no way. And I said, way. The highest level of diplomacy there. Come on. A little Valley girl. No way. Wow. Who is that? It was Zappa. Which Zappa moon unit Zappa was Valley girl. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Channeling moon unit there. That's pretty awesome. No, no way. And he's so proud of his relationship with Vladimir Putin just won't come off that position. He loves the guy. So, John, I hope you didn't listen to all two hours, but we did listen to a bunch of it, mostly rambling, mostly Donald Trump talking once they did get it up and running. And again, just painting this American carnage, dark, dark picture of America contrasted with the enthusiasm and crowds

we've seen from the Harris campaign. Yeah. And shades of Yalta there with the diplomacy way and no way between Trump and Putin. Yeah. I mean, first of all, Trump was not challenged once during this interview. Elon Musk has remade Twitter access Twitter X as to a sort of a very Trump-friendly platform. He has endorsed him. And he said ahead of time, I'll be up basking softballs. I want to have a conversation. It's about vibes. And that's what we got last night, a vibe established there by Donald Trump standing in front of a portrait of himself in tennis gear as he did this two-hour Twitter space interview. But I think you hit on something important. Vibes do matter right now. I mean, and that might not be enough to carry one side or the other until Election Day. But right now, it is a stark difference, Gene Robinson, where we're seeing

footage night after night of the vice president and her running mate having these raucous, joyful rallies. People are laughing. People are smiling. They're dancing to Beyonce before she takes the stage. Trump, on the other hand, is this. It was a two hours. I mean, he was a little more controlled in his rhetoric last night than he has been on the rally stage. At times, he seemed to sort of slur his words a little bit. But he, you know, you can see here there with the portrait behind him. But he painted a very dark, dystopic picture of America, that the threats and danger lurking around every corner. And at least

at this moment, it appears that that's not a message that's resonating with the actual voters who are going to sign this election. Yeah. How can you imagine that people wouldn't resonate to that picture of that dark room with Trump's hair and that weird portrait in the tennis outfit in the background, which is just talk about dystopic. Boy, I don't see how that's not really just just turning voters on. It's it's incredible, the contrast right now. And and it's driving Trump crazy. You know, he's he's searching and searching and trying to find a way into the conversation because he's just sort of babbling into the void in a lot of instances.

And, you know, we've seen the recent times when he goes out in public and just says foolish and nonsensical and ridiculous and worrisome things, worrisome about his own mental health. I guess if you want to look at it in political terms, maybe he was trying to get back the white dude vote or to shore it up by doing this thing with Elon Musk, figuring that that was the demographic he was going to reach, you know, kind of fans of Elon Musk and his political transformation or metamorphosis, whatever it was. But I just, boy, you know, if you sort of babble for two hours into the void, you know, does it actually make a sound? I'm not convinced that it did. I was going to listen to the thing. I just gave up after 40 minutes when they couldn't make it work. So that kind of tells you a bit about the Elon Musk, Donald Trump show. And Willie, it's impossible to set aside the nonsense, including at one point

where Trump saw the Time magazine cover of Vice President Harris and said that she looked like Melania Trump. But Gene makes a good point, though. There was a strategy behind this. It wasn't just to have an Elon Musk love fest. His campaign in a briefing to reporters last week, they basically said, we feel like we can win this election by turning out new voters. And they believe those new voters are young men, some white, but also young men of color, who perhaps would be more influenced by an Elon Musk character, who we saw Trump do some TikTok videos last week with a twitchy streamer who drew like a half million views.

They feel like that is one area of this infertile ground. They think those voters might be more inclined to support him than Harris. He's trying to woo them. Unclear if last night was successful, but there at least is a game plan behind this. Clearly surrendering some of the women voters that he's going to need trying to make up ground with the men. So I mentioned the new column this morning from Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker. It's titled Trump is looking like a loser again. In it, Jerry writes, quote, We need to be clear about the problem. It isn't, as some have suggested, that Mr. Trump has been wrong footed by the Democrats switch for Mr. Biden and Miss Harris, nor is it a reflection of accelerated degeneration. The Trump of the past

few weeks has looked and sounded more or less exactly like the Trump of nine years ago. This is the problem. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the presidency in 2020. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the House in 2018 and the Senate in the Georgia runoff election in January 2021. Instead of telling voters consistently and repeatedly what they are actually getting if they vote Democrat, he's merely reminding them what they will get again if they vote Republican. Joe, obviously, Gerard Baker makes clear he's no fan of Vice President Harris and her agenda. But he is saying if this is the Donald Trump we see through Election Day, according to Jerry Baker, he's going to lose. And this is a concern that Republicans across the board are expressing right now, some behind closed doors, some some outwardly.

I mean, we have clips of people who have been big supporters of Donald Trump through the years, sort of Trump media, far right wing media, and basically encouraging Donald Trump to change tact. But Donald Trump famously said to those donors, I am who I am. But I will say, David French, we always say it's early. You know, January of last year, it's early. March, it's early. I was saying the same in June and July. Still early.

Still saying it's only August. But I will say in August, it is getting awfully late for somebody like Jerry Baker to write a column like that, because unlike you, he is not going to vote for Kamala Harris. And he probably won't vote for any Democrats. At the same time, he says what everybody's whispering, and that is Donald Trump. What did he say? Like one third of what Donald Trump said in the press conference was delusional, outright false, et cetera, et cetera. So this is this is sort of I don't know if it's a canary in a coal mine or what it is. But when you've lost Jerry Baker in mid-August as a Republican nominee, you know, there's there's trouble brewing. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, a lot of Republicans right now are in kind of in a state of shock that the Trump campaign that even if Trump himself was undisciplined, then he at least could take on somebody like Kamala. He at least could take on,

of course, Joe Biden. And a lot of people are gobsmacked that there hasn't really been an intentional strategy rolled out against Kamala Harris other than this sort of berserker Trump dot going from thing to thing to thing and even emphasizing her race. And so there's just this growing sense that, oh, wait, maybe there was not a plan B here. And they're making this up on the fly. And you're beginning to see a lot of that coming out in commentary. Yeah, the words Jerry Baker using in his piece, false, obtuse or lunatic in describing that press conference, the remarks that he made at the press conference at Mar-a-Lago the other day. New York Times columnist David French will be reading your new piece at NYTimes.com. David, thanks so much. Up next, more on Elon Musk. Our next guest says

the Tesla CEO is a danger to democracy. Ed Luce joins us with a look at his latest piece for the Financial Times when Morning Joe comes right back. Welcome back to the Morning Show. Just an absolutely beautiful look at New York City with the sun rising 642. Getting about halfway into August. It's great to have you here this morning. Crazy times. I mean, it's the last two, three months have just been breathtaking. Everything that's happened and it is moving so quickly. We quoted Lennon, not John Lennon, but Vladimir Lennon yesterday talking about how sometimes decades go by where nothing happened and sometimes week goes by where decades happen.

It certainly is where we are right now. Drudge is linking to a story this morning, a Time magazine story talking about one of the biggest vibe shifts in American history. You look at polling, it's it's moving very quickly again. Let me say again, it's only August. Voters don't go to the polls. Early voting, I think, starts in earnest in about three, four weeks. So still early. But it's it's it's the end of the beginning. It's not the beginning of the end. It's the end of the beginning, as Winston Churchill would say. And so we're moving now into the days and weeks that really count the most. And every day that there's an additional, quote, vibe shift or a shift as again, drudge links up to time is is a day that people supporting Donald Trump or the campaign

have more to worry about. I saw something in the Financial Times that really underlined how much the political world is shifting underneath all of us right now. And that was a question about who Americans trust more on the economy. To talk about that, let's bring a national editor for the Financial Times, Ed Luce. Ed, Financial Times, University ofuce. Ed, Financial Times, University of Michigan, ask, who do you trust more to handle the economy? Joe Biden, always behind on that number to Donald Trump, sometimes double digits. I hear, I know you were surprised as I was and as surprised as so many other Americans were. But that number for the first time in this long campaign between Donald Trump and either Biden or Harris has shifted with the Democrats ahead by one point.

It's a statistical tie. But again, even that is a massive shift. Yeah, it is. And it's not as if there's been a dramatic change in people's economic fortunes in the last three, four weeks. It's roughly the same economy as when they were last asked the question. So I think this is all down to the sort of sense of energy. And dare I use that overused word joy that we're getting from the Harris-Waltz campaign that has just given people more confidence in Kamala Harris as somebody who can improve their prosperity. Because I say, as I say, nothing has actually changed objectively in terms of the economic numbers or people's personal finances in the last three weeks. What has changed is the mood. And I think, you know, we had, I guess, a vibe session while Biden was president. People just were not prepared to look at their

circumstances in an upbeat light. And now they are all of a sudden. And that's that's, I guess, in a nutshell, what's happened across the board politically in the last three or four weeks. And we've been talking a little bit this morning about Elon Musk and that conversation he had for more than two hours on X last night. And your new piece in The Financial Times is titled Elon Musk and the Danger to Democracy. In it, Ed writes this. The key question is what, if anything, democracies can do to address the danger from Musk? It is one thing having a newspaper proprietor or the owner of a television station pushing their biases in their outlets. This has always happened. and it's protected speech.

I have no idea what the best legal remedy would be that was consistent with democratic and free speech values. I do know, however, Ed writes, that whatever he says, Musk is no fan of either. He revels in conflict and is fascinated by the possibility of collapse. He's a disaster capitalist, a vicious troll, and a brilliant engineer rolled into one. And Katie Kay, obviously, this is also a man who has made very clear his intention to support Donald Trump, as he did giving him an open forum last night to millions

of people. Elon Musk is on the side of Donald Trump in this election. Yeah. Whether he's a brilliant engineer after that 40 minutes we all spent kind of listening to clanky music, I'm not quite so sure. Well, maybe he's fired too many brilliant engineers and they couldn't get it working again. I mean, what do you think in terms of the impact on some voters who might have sat through that 40 minute glitch, Ed, last night and actually listened to the content of the interview? What What impact do you think Elon Musk has sort of on voters in particular and on this election? Well, you're right about the engineering. I mean, if you can't get spaces working, you know, you're going to have trouble settling Mars. Look, only about 1.3 million people

listened to this. It took an age to begin. And I was one of those who did wait around for it to begin. And then, of course, it never ended. It just went on and on and on. It wasn't an interview. It was a very softball, quite eccentric conversation between a donor and his candidate. None of the tough questions were asked. I mean, Musk did try and sort of push some of his hobby horses,

like controlling spending, which Trump would hear nothing of. Trump is not into controlling spending. But I think the net effect here is really just to confirm what we saw in Trump's press conference in Mar-a-Lago last week when he addressed the National Association of Black Journalists a couple of days before, which is that he isn't resetting. He's not a new Trump. He's not a disciplined, razor-like focused new candidate who is going to define Kamala Harris. He is, as somebody else made the analogy, he's like Spinal Tap on tour, an aging rock band on tour playing its greatest hits.

I don't think he's going to come up with anything new. So we have X and what he's doing to try to help Trump. And there's that impact that we should worry about, I think. But what I actually worry about is technology, not spaces, but space. SpaceX, the Starlink satellite network, it is extraordinary for one man to have such power, to have power over this unique network of satellites that has been, for example, crucial to the war effort in Ukraine, that he actually has the power to switch on and off. You know, the astronauts who are now up at the International Space Station may not be able to get home until one of Elon Musk's spacecraft, not one of NASA's, but one of Musk's can go pick them up. So I'm concerned about that. What are your thoughts about his his dominion at this point over the space realm?

It's remarkable. Starlink, as you say, he threatened to withdraw and briefly did withdraw Starlink services from the Ukrainian forces who rely almost exclusively on it for on the ground communications life-and-death battlefield situations. And he just applied the pressure on Ukraine. He basically wanted a better contract out of them. And so at a really key stage in the Russian special military operation, as Putin called it, Musk, of course, has also shown a great deal of sympathy for Putin. This kind of reliance on a mega oligarch, I mean, the richest man in the world, is, I think, an extremely dangerous one for democracy. My point about Musk's risk to democracy was also about X, his use of X. And my own country, as you know, has had race riots, has had racist attacks on refugee communities based on false information that a Muslim refugee had killed these three girls a few days ago in the UK. of that misinformation, potentially lethal disinformation. But he retweeted and endorsed far-right people in Britain, far-right racist thugs—let's

not mince our words about this—who he had reinstated on the site, on X, that helped generate riot situations on the ground. This is a proprietor tilting the disinformation playing field towards really bad actors. And so my concern is if he can do that in that kind of situation, and saying things like civil war is inevitable, he wants conflict.

If he can stoke racial conflict in situations like that, well, what can he do when push comes to shove in this U.S. general election now that he's explicitly endorsed Donald Trump? He can he can be an extremely consequential and bad actor. And I think we ought to pay a lot of attention to this. Musk is not well-intentioned when it comes to U.S. liberal democracy. The new piece is a Financial Times website. U.S. national editor at the Financial Times, Ed Luce. Ed, thanks so much as always. Still ahead, Semaphores Ben Smith joins us to talk about his new piece titled, Will Kamala Harris's Short Run Kill the Permanent Campaign?

Plus, The Atlantic's George Packer breaks down what Democrats can learn from the trauma of the 1968 convention in Chicago. Morning Joe's coming right back.