The Daily - Harris Baits Trump: Inside Their Fiery Debate

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

In their first and possibly only presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris dominated and enraged former President Donald J. Trump.Jonathan Swan, who covers politics and the Trump campaign for The Times, explains how a night that could have been about Ms. Harris’s record instead became about Mr. Trump’s temperament.Guest: Jonathan Swan, a political correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Read The Times’s live coverage of the debate as it happened.Who won? Here’s a sampling of the reaction.And here’s a fact-check on Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Today, in their first and possibly only presidential debate, Kamala Harris dominated and enraged Donald Trump and made a night that could have been about her record instead into a night about his temperament. My colleague, political correspondent, Jonathan Swan, walks us through how it unfolded. It's Wednesday, September 11th.

Jonathan, good evening. Michael, how are you? I'm okay. I mean, it's late. It's very late. It is damn near midnight, and we appreciate you being willing to stay up with us. Always happy to be here. So Jonathan, this debate was described beforehand by you in the paper of record and the Times

as the most important 90 minutes in American politics in generations. So I just want to ask you why even before it began, in your estimation, it merited that string of superlatives? Well, now you say it. I think we might have gone a bit overboard on that because the Biden debate knocked him out and he dropped out. So probably that one goes down the system. I'm being a little facetious. Look, the reason it was so unusually important is that so rarely these days do you have a candidate that there are so many voters who are still

curious about them and haven't made up their minds about them and are hungry for more information about them, that they're still very malleable in terms of voter opinion as Kamala Harris is right now. That you cannot find a voter in America who doesn't have an opinion about Donald Trump. It's very, very hard to anyway. But somewhere in the realm of 30% of voters want to know more about Kamala Harris, are curious about her, want to see if she presents as plausible as a commander in chief, want to see what her ideas are for dealing with inflation and the economy, and are generally

up for grabs. So both sides, both the Trump campaign and the Harris campaign, viewed this debate in almost exactly the same way, which was it is an opportunity to define Kamala Harris for that slice of undecided voters in the seven key battleground states that are going to decide this election. And how in your mind were each of these candidates hoping to do that very specific task, define Vice President Harris here? Well, the Trump team had a very clear goal. He spent quite a lot of time preparing for this debate.

Their goal was to force Kamala Harris to own her partnership with Joe Biden, a very unpopular president, and force her to own the most unpopular aspects of his record, of their record in office, in particular high prices, the situation at the southern border, chaos around the world. What they were trying to avoid is for her to present herself as the change candidate. They want her to be seen as the incumbent, as someone who is a fixture of the current leadership in this country that undecided voters are very, very frustrated with.

On her side, their job was to present the exact opposite, was to present herself without throwing Joe Biden under the bus completely, but a break, something new, the future, an optimistic breath of fresh air, Trump is the past, a changed candidate in a change election, and also to present herself as someone that people could see as being a president or a commander in chief, someone who passes what Trump has thought of as the plausibility test. So that's how each side saw the debate going into it.

And I wonder who you think accomplished those objectives best. She did. That's about as short an answer as I've ever received on the show. And we're gonna make you explain that. So let's talk about what actually happened during these 90 minutes of this debate and how those two strategies, in her case,

it seems, did play out and his perhaps didn't. Take us into the debate room. So let's now welcome the candidates to the stage. Vice President Kamala Harris and President Donald Trump. Well the first moment that struck me was right at the beginning when she walked over to Donald Trump. Kamala Harris, how's it going? Nice to see you, have fun. Thank you. And shook his hand.

Welcome to you both. It's wonderful to have you. It's an honor to have you both here tonight. Which might seem unremarkable, but in the context of Trump and debates, it was sort of a power move. There was all of this discussion behind the scenes before Trump's debate with Biden, where Trump was discussing with his advisors, should I shake his hand? Shouldn't I shake his hand? I mean, Trump is someone who thinks a lot about visuals, about optics, about domination, things like that. So it's definitely something that he

would have thought about. I don't know what his thinking was going into this particular debate, but that was a move that I thought, oh, interesting. She's come here to play and perhaps also come here to try to get under his skin a little bit. Right. From the get-go, literally before a word is uttered. Yeah. And then we get the first question. I want to begin tonight with the issue that voters repeatedly say is their number one issue, and that is the economy and the cost of living in this country. The ABC moderator, David Muir, asks Kamala Harris, the question that Donald Trump really

wants, or his team going into this wanted it to be the question that Donald Trump really wants, or his team going into this, wanted it to be the question that defined the whole night, which is... And your opponent on the stage here tonight often asks his supporters, are you better off than you were four years ago? Would you say that voters are better off now than they were four years ago? When it comes to the economy,

do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago? So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. Kamala Harris, she starts out, her voice is sort of a little jittery, she sounds nervous. We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing. And the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people. And she basically avoids the question. My passion, one of them, is small businesses.

I was actually, my mother raised my sister and me, but there was a woman who helped raise us. We call her our second mother. She was a small business owner. I love our small businesses. She starts with what sounds like a really canned remarks about, you know, I was raised as a middle-class kid. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations,

the dreams of the American people. You know, very cliched sort of political rhetoric. And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. And she starts rattling off some of her policies. My plan is to give a $50,000 tax deduction to start up small businesses, knowing they are part of the backbone of America's economy. And you sort of think, okay, where's she going with this? And then she sort of pivots to this attack against Trump at the end.

My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations. As, you know, the guy who's only out for rich people, who wants to cut taxes for billionaires. And that's where her first answer ends. Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle class

people paying for tax cuts for billionaires. I mean, what she's trying to do here is she's trying to present Donald Trump as a guy who's fighting for only himself and his rich friends and contrast herself as someone who grew up middle class, who's fighting for the middle class, and who cares about you, the voter. Mm-hmm. And as you said, this is her objective in this debate, to begin to clearly define herself on her own terms. Exactly. Which in this case also means not wanting to talk about whether the economy is better now than it was four years ago. What she's doing is tap dancing. She's tap dancing around it and trying to find an angle to turn this back on offense.

And what about Trump's answer on this key issue of the economy? What does he have to say? Trump started out fine. It was a rambling answer, but he basically hit her on the things that we've come to expect him to attack her on. We've had a terrible economy because inflation has, which is really known as a country buster, it breaks up countries. He attacked her on inflation, he defended his tariffs, being tough on China. I took in billions and billions of dollars as you know from China.

In fact, they never took the tariff off because there was so much money they can't. And then he pivoted to immigration. On top of that, we have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums. Started attacking her, yes, with hyperbolic claims about criminality and the dangers of undocumented migrants. They are taking over the towns. They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently.

And also hyperbolic claims about his own economic record. I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country. I'll do it again and even better. But it was delivered in a fairly calm manner and exactly the kind of messages that his team has been hoping that he would make. Mm-hmm. And then we get to the issue of abortion. I want to turn to the issue of abortion.

President Trump, you've often touted that you were able to kill Roe v. Wade. This was the first turning point in the debate. Trump gets the first question on abortion. Vice President Harris says that women shouldn't trust you on the issue of abortion because you've changed your position so many times. Therefore, why should they trust you?

Well, the reason I'm doing that vote is because the plan is, as you know, the vote is, they have abortion in the ninth month. And you can see he's very uncomfortable with it. They even have, and you can look at the governor of West Virginia, the previous governor of West Virginia, not the current governor, is doing an excellent job. But the governor before...

It's an issue that he's told people privately he thinks could cost him the election. And he starts pivoting around talking about... He said, the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we'll execute the baby. Baby's being executed after they're born, then he sort of rolls back around into a states' rights argument. Now, Ohio, the vote was somewhat liberal.

Kansas, the vote was somewhat liberal, much more liberal than people would have thought. But each individual state is voting. He's kind of all over the place. And then the follow-up question goes to Kamala Harris. There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born. Madam Vice President, I want to get your response to President Trump. Donald Trump hand-selected three members of the United

States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade and they did exactly as he intended. And now in over 20 states, there are Trump abortion bans, which make it criminal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care. In one state, it provides prison for life. At this point in the debate, I sort of started to think, OK, she's really finding her footing. You could see the confidence come through in her voice.

You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the healthcare providers are afraid they might go to jail and she's bleeding out in a car. And she pretty quickly went to personal stories. She was not talking in an academic way about this issue. A 12 or 13 year old survivor of incest? Being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don't want that?

She was emotional in the way she talked about it, talking about a government that would be monitoring your miscarriages. Understand, in his project 2025, there would be a national abortion monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages. And she reframed the issue as an issue of freedom. I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, in particular the freedom to make decisions about one's own body, should not be made by the government. Which is another

word that the Democrats have been trying to reclaim for themselves from Republicans. Would you veto a national abortion ban if it came to your desk? Well, I won't have to because again, two things. Number one, she said... The other thing that happened here that was really notable is Trump is asked a direct question whether he would veto a national abortion ban if it came to his desk. And the questioner, Lindsay Davis, says, you know... But if I could just get a yes or no, because your running mate, JD Vance, has said that you would veto it if it did come to your desk. Your running mate, JD Vance, said that you would veto it if it came to your desk.

Well, I didn't discuss it with JD in all fairness. And Trump says, well, wait a second, I didn't discuss it with JD. And I don't mind if he has a certain view, but I think he was speaking for me, but I really didn't. Look, we don't have to discuss it because- So Trump sort of starts wriggling around and suddenly it's Trump that's uncomfortable and the dynamic seems to have shifted. Right, so this is the moment when it feels like Vice President Harris's debate prep

has been very extensive and is starting to kind of emerge on the stage. Yeah, and you really see this in the next line of questioning. We're going to turn now to immigration and border security. We know it's an issue that's... Harris has asked a tough question about immigration, which is obviously one of the most unpopular aspects of the Biden and Harris administration. This past June, President Biden imposed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly.

But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act? And would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this? So I'm the only person on this stage who has... She does two things very quickly. She goes straight on to offense. She talks about how she's the only person on this stage who's prosecuted transnational criminal organizations. Then she attacks Trump for getting Republicans to kill an immigration bill that would have put more border agents on the border. Donald Trump got on the phone, called up some folks in Congress and said, kill the bill.

And you know why? Because he'd prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem and understand. And then she introduces this very interesting line where she talks about Trump's rallies and some of the strange things he mentions at his rallies, like he talks about Hannibal Lecter and windmills causing cancer. And she drops this line, which is just a clear, blatant troll. And what you will also notice And she drops this line, which is just a clear, blatant troll.

And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early, out of exhaustion and boredom. She says, people start leaving his rallies early, out of exhaustion and boredom. And you can see Trump sort of twitching. Trump is, and I've covered him since 2015, he's not exactly a sort of psychologically complicated character. It takes about two minutes of observing him to know that one of the things he cares most about are his crowd sizes. And he just takes the bait. Explain that. He just takes the bait. Well, there's a follow-up question that's put to him about why he tried to kill the border bill.

First let me respond to the rallies. She said people start leaving, people don't go to her rallies, there's no reason to go. And the first thing he says is, well, let me respond on the rallies. And he says people don't go to her rallies and they like going to my rallies and we have the biggest and the most incredible.

But from that moment on, he starts on this rant. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people From that moment on, he starts on this rant. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. That is infused with anger and irritation. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. And it leads him into undisciplined territory. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating

the cats, they're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame. So in that same answer, he starts talking about how Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating dogs and cats, which is a debunked Facebook rumor that has been flying around right-wing circles. And he actually gets fact-checked. I just want to clarify here, you rig up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there.

He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or aborted by individuals. And Trump doubles down on it. People on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that, and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager. One of the key goals of the Harris team

was to get under Trump's skin and to bring out the more unhinged version of himself to remind voters why they voted him out in 2020. And this moment was the first time in the debate where I thought, oh, she's actually succeeding. Right. I mean, and it's worth noting that he's become derailed at a time when he's being offered a chance to talk about one of the strongest issues for him in this campaign, immigration, and in the process ends up doing the very thing Harris has warned the audience that he does at his rallies, which is make these completely outlandish, unfounded claims about migrants eating domestic pets.

It is an extraordinary moment because on an issue where Trump should be dominant, she has managed to get under his skin and he ends up doing great damage to himself and she sees the moment. Talk about extreme. And she says, talk about extreme. extreme. And she says, talk about extreme. This is perfectly teed up moment for her to say, look how extreme this guy is. And what's clear at this still fairly early point in the debate is that she's gotten under

his skin and she's running the debate on her terms. [♪ MUSIC PLAYING [♪ MUSIC PLAYING We'll be right back. Jonathan, it really feels like this theme of Kamala Harris trying to and succeeding in getting under Donald Trump's skin really ends up kind of permeating the rest of this debate. Yeah. So they continue on the theme of immigration.

Let me continue on immigration. It was what you wanted to talk about earlier. So let's get back to your deportation proposal. And David Muir asks Trump about what he's called the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. How would you deport 11 million undocumented immigrants? I know you basically asked him how are you going to do this? You know, you say you're going to deport 11 million people. Look like will authorities be going door to door in this country? Yeah, it is much higher because of them.

They allowed criminals, many, many millions of criminals. And Trump doesn't really answer the question says, you know, it's this really huge number of migrants, many, many millions more than anyone thinks. And then he starts talking about how crime is through the roof. And then he gets fact-checked again. President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down in this country. Excuse me, the FBI defrauding, they were defrauding statements. And Trump gets derailed a little here.

He says that the FBI figures are fraudulent. And then Kamala Harris seizes the opportunity. She's clearly prepared for this. Well, I think this is so rich coming from someone who has been prosecuted for national security crimes, economic crimes, election interference, has been found liable for sexual assault and his next big court appearance is in November at his own criminal sentencing. She seizes the opportunity to bring up all of Trump's indictments. Now, this is something that Trump had prepared for in his private sessions.

He'd been doing them with some of his aides. Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman, had been needling Trump, bringing up his criminal convictions, doing exactly what she does here. But you can see, I think, I mean, I don't want to get too much inside Trump's head, but just watching him, he was still so angry about the crowd size comment and everything that had come before. He was basically angry Trump. But those are cases, it's called weaponization, never happened in this country.

They weaponized the Justice Department everywhere. And he then says, well, no, this is all a weaponization of justice. Biden and Harris are responsible for every single prosecution against him, which we should say is factually inaccurate. Right. There's no evidence whatsoever that they've had any involvement in any of the cases. This is the one that weaponized, not me. She weaponized. I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me.

And he ends this section by basically blaming Biden and Harris for the assassination attempt against him. A pretty extraordinary, completely unsubstantiated claim. Right, and there's no evidence that the shooter was motivated by any democratic claims that he heard about Donald Trump. And so he's kind of at this point angry Trump, as you have labeled him, he's kind of lost the plot here in his effort to define her. Yeah, he's lashing out, but nowhere in this section of questioning has he made a coherent case that she owns the Biden record, that she's irresponsible for inflation.

He's getting trapped in all of these little cul-de-sacs that she keeps drawing for him. And the moderators would seem to do Trump a favor in this section of the debate. They ask her about her history of changing positions. Vice President Harris, in your last run for president, you said you wanted to ban fracking. Now you don't. You wanted mandatory government buyback programs for assault weapons. Now your campaign says you don't. You wanted mandatory government buyback programs for assault weapons. Now your campaign says you don't. And once again, she doesn't really answer the question.

I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed? So my values have not changed and I'm gonna discuss. Right, Kamala Harris has come up with this very sort of gauzy, cliched answer, my values haven't changed. And at no time has she actually explained why she changed those positions. And instead of really pressing this issue on her, Trump gets caught up in

something that she slipped into that answer again, to get under his skin. The values I bring to the importance of home ownership, knowing not everybody got handed $400 million on a silver platter and then filed bankruptcy six times. She talks about how Trump was given all this money by his father on a silver platter and whatever. And of course, that's the thing that Trump opens his answer with. President Trump, your response? Well, first of all, I wasn't given $400 million. I wish I was.

My father was a Brooklyn builder, Brooklyn, Queens, and a great father. And I learned a lot from him. But I was given a fraction of that, a tiny fraction. And it takes him four or five sentences to even get to fracking. Even surprised. So we don't have to talk about that. Fracking? She's been against it for 12 years.

So again, she's just putting these little nuggets in her answers, which are just designed to trigger Trump. And time and time again, it's working. Lindsay, thank you. We have an election in just 56 days. And I want to talk about the peaceful transfer of power, which of course we all know. This anger from Trump really permeates the rest of the debate. In particular, he gets asked about January 6th.

Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day? I had nothing to do with that other than they asked me to make a speech. I showed up for a speech. He's pressed on whether he regrets anything about that day. He doesn't say that. It would have never happened if Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington did their jobs. He sort of rewrites the history of January 6.

He then gets caught up on an issue where his aides never want him to talk about. Mr. President, for three and a half years after you lost the 2020 election, you repeatedly falsely claimed that you won, many times saying you won in a landslide. In the past couple of weeks leading up to this debate, you have said, quote, you lost by a whisker. Which is relitigating the results of the 2020 election.

Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020? No, I don't acknowledge it at all. I said that sarcastically, you know that. And we said, oh, we lost by a whisker. That was said sarcastically. Look, there's so much proof. All you have to do is look at it, and they should have sent it back to the legislature's program.

Not conceding that he lost, and it culminates in this moment. You talk about a threat to democracy. He got 14 million votes and they threw him out of office. Where he accuses her of being a threat to democracy by overthrowing Biden. And you know what? I'll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can't stand her. And he makes this wild assertion that Biden hates her.

It sort of comes out of nowhere, but it's been building for a while. And it sort of reaches a, I guess, a point of absurdity at that moment. Right. And it's here at the peak of Trump's kind of personal fury at Harris that he's given a chance to change this approach. Mr. President, you recently said of Vice President Harris, quote, I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black. The moderators ask him about remarks

he has made in the past, which everyone understands to be problematic, about her racial identity. I want to ask a bigger picture question here tonight. Why do you believe it's appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent? Yeah, so he gets asked this question by David Muir and Trump knows this question's coming. I mean, I was at a press conference with him

in Mar-a-Lago a few weeks ago and I asked him this question and he was irritated by it and he knows it's bad politically so he quickly moved on. And here tonight in the debate, he starts out by sort of brushing it off. I don't care what she is. I don't care. Uh, you make a big deal out of something. I couldn't care less.

Whatever she wants to be is okay with me. You're making a big deal about it. I don't care. And then he trips up. I don't know. I mean, all I can say is I read where she was not black, that she put out. He falls back into it and he says, I read somewhere she was not black. And then I read that she was black and that's okay. Either one was okay with me.

That's up to her. So even in this moment where it's perfectly teed up for him, he just goes back into these self-destructive patterns. Vice President Harris, your thoughts on this? I think it's, I mean, honestly, I think it's a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people. I thought Harris's answer here was really interesting because until tonight, when she's asked about this, she has this canned line where she brushes it off.

She says, oh, it's just the same tired playbook from Trump. But tonight she actually sees the moment to make another point, a different point, which was it's a tragedy that he's tried to use race to divide the American people. He was investigated because he refused to rent property to black families. And she brought up the DOJ case against the Trump business for refusing to rent property to black families. She brings up his full page ad in the New York Times, calling for the execution of the five young black and Latino boys who are innocent, the Central Park Five.

This is the same individual who spread birther lies about the first black president of the United States. She brings up the birther claims about Barack Obama, and she kind of closes with this idea. We don't want a leader who is constantly trying to have Americans point their fingers at each other. A very sort of Barack Obama type message about we all have the same dreams and aspirations and tries to present herself as the unifier there. So what are you thinking at this point?

Well, I was sort of thinking that at this point she sort of pulled off a coup, which is that she's avoided basically answering any substantive questions about her own policy backflips, about her association with Biden, about their economic record. She's gone on offense on every issue and she's managed to catch Trump in a trap on pretty much every question, pretty much every response she's embedded something in there, a sentence or a line that has unraveled Trump and got him on an angry tear. And so you get to basically the end of the debate. I built one of the greatest economies in the history of the world and I'm going to build it again. And you see Donald Trump sort of remember why he was there in the first place.

But they're destroying our economy. They have no idea what a good economy is. Which is, oh whoops, I have to actually remind people that this is Kamala Harris's administration too. And remember this, she is Biden. You know, she's trying to get away from Biden. I don't know the gentleman, she says, she is Biden. You know, so he makes this last ditch effort where he says, she is Biden. She is Biden. He repeats it. Right. And, you know, at this last moment, remembers to tie her to Joe Biden and all

these other parts of the Biden administration that are unpopular. But at this point, it's kind of late in the game for Trump to figure out what, as you said, he was originally supposed to be up to from the start. It is. The worst president, the worst vice president in the history of our country. President Trump, thank you. And that is our ABC News presidential debate from here in Philadelphia, the National Constitution Center.

I'm Lindsay Davis. And I'm David Muir. Thank you for watching here in the U.S. and all over the world and from all of us here at ABC News. Good night. And, you know, when you look at the debate overall, he was fine for the first 15 minutes. He was angry and unraveling for, let's call it the middle 40, at least, and then sort of got his footing back at the end. I think there'll be a lot of analysis saying how catastrophic it was.

Really that word you think will be used? I think you're already seeing a lot of commentary to that effect. I don't see it quite like that. I see it as basically a huge missed opportunity for Trump. This was Trump's chance to define Kamala Harris. Might be his only chance, by the way. We still don't know if the Harris and Trump teams will agree on the terms of another debate. So it was a huge missed opportunity for Donald Trump and even Trump allies privately, I don't

think this, I know this, will acknowledge that she passed that minimum test that she needed to present herself as a plausible president and he missed the opportunity to define her as a radical leftist, as someone who owns every bit of the Biden record that you don't like. Hmm. I guess this explains why you so crisply assessed this very early on as a debate where she achieved her goal and he not so much. I spent so much time talking to particularly the Trump people before the debate I knew how they thought about this debate and I could tell within probably half an hour that this was not going how they wanted it to go.

Just think about it from their perspective. There's eight weeks left in this race it's an absolute absolute toss up of a race. And there's a huge number of undecided voters who are up for being shaped about their view of Kamala Harris. They're never going to have potentially another opportunity like this. At best they'll get one more close to the election. But this was their opportunity before a huge audience to define her and he flubbed it.

Well Jonathan, thank you very much. Thank you Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to nerday. Moments after Tuesday night's debate, Kamala Harris was endorsed by one of the country's most celebrated and influential pop culture icons, Taylor Swift. Swift called Harris a gifted leader and in a jab at Trump's running name, Senator JD Vance signed her endorsement as, quote, childless cat lady, a reference to comments made by Vance about women without children. And the European Union's highest court has delivered a major defeat to both Apple and Google.

It ordered Apple to pay more than $14 billion in unpaid taxes to the government of Ireland, and ordered Google to pay a fine of more than $2 billion for giving preferential treatment to its own products over that of its rivals. The rulings were a victory for European governments in a years-long campaign to regulate big tech, a battle that American regulators are just beginning to wage. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto, Stella Tam, Mujsadi, and Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Devon Taylor, contains original music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Niemisto, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley and Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily.

I'm Michael Bobarro. See you tomorrow.