The Daily - Inside the Three Worst Weeks of Trump’s Campaign

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

For much of the past year, Donald J. Trump and those around him were convinced that victory in the presidential race was all but certain. Now, everything has changed, after the decision by President Biden not to seek a second term.Jonathan Swan, who covers the Trump campaign for The New York Times, discusses the former president’s struggle to adjust to his new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.Guest: Jonathan Swan, who covers politics and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for The New York Times.Background reading: People around the former and would-be president see a candidate disoriented by his new opponent.At a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump tried to wrestle back the public’s attention.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

Hey, it's Michael. Before we get started, I want to tell you about another show made by The New York Times that pairs perfectly with The Daily. It's called The Headlines. It's a show hosted by my colleague, Tracy Mumford, that quickly catches you up on the day's top stories and features insights from The Times reporters who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes or less. covering them, all in about 10 minutes or less. So if you like The Daily, and if you're listening, I have to assume you do, I hope that means you're going to like the headlines as well. You can now find the headlines wherever you get your podcasts. So find it, subscribe to it, and thank you. And now, here's today's Daily. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

For much of the past year, Donald Trump and those around him were convinced that victory in the presidential race was all but certain. Now, everything has changed. but certain. Now, everything has changed. Today, my colleague Jonathan Swan on Trump's rude awakening and his struggle to adjust. It's Monday, August 12th. Jonathan, welcome back. Thanks for having me back. So the last time we spoke was at the Republican National Convention. Last night, the New York Times bureau there was literally being deconstructed during our interview.

And to say that a lot has changed for Donald Trump since that moment feels like an understatement of the highest possible order. When you talk to Trump's aides, the convention in Milwaukee seems like a distant, foggy memory, almost like it never happened. Like, I think back to that first night at the convention when Trump, remember, he'd just been shot two days before. Please welcome the next president of the United States,

Donald J. Trump. And he comes into that arena the first night and he's got the big white bandage on his ear and he's a living martyr. He is here tonight to show his courage, his defiance against somebody who tried to kill him. You will not take this man down. He has the courage, the strength...

And I just remember that whole week, there was a giddiness and a overconfidence that was just pulsating through the place. Like, remember, Biden was still the candidate and there was just a certainty. I don't think I even spoke to a single Republican there who really gave Biden any chance of winning the election. Trump is going to win. If the election was today, he was going to win. If the election was tomorrow, two months from now, he's going to win and he's going to win in November.

He's going to win. The only question, the only suspense, the only mystery was how big is Donald Trump's victory going to be? And then overnight, when Biden drops out, Donald Trump's in a whole new race. The race that him and his team had prepared for, built their whole operation around, you know, spent a year and a half thinking about, planning for, spent tens of millions of dollars on, all of that is gone. Right. And that's really what we want to talk to you about. Trump's behavior, how he has campaigned

since everything changed, and what that tells us about how he is adjusting or not adjusting to the realities of this new race. The sense I've gotten from talking to a lot of Trump's advisors and allies is that he was genuinely blindsided by this. And, I mean, he has been in a foul mood for much of the last three weeks. He has been complaining about the unfairness of what has happened to him. Unfair how? Well, I'll give you an example. So he has been telling people that Democrats are trying to, quote unquote,

steal the election from him. And he's comparing it to 2020 and COVID. Wow. What he's saying is he's saying, you know how they changed the voting rules, you know, all these different state legislatures, you know, in the middle of COVID, which is his whole part of his false claim about the election being stolen. Well, here he's saying, we had this race won, and then they pulled this bait and switch and they replaced the candidate. So in his mind, Harris replacing Biden, which of course Democrats thought was overdue and necessary, is a kind of pre-stealing

of the election. Exactly. And it's bewildering for Trump because the race that he thought he had no longer exists. He's facing someone who's 20 years younger, who doesn't have trouble completing sentences, who actually has energized Democrats, who's drawing big crowds, who's moving up in the polls. And all of these factors are making him extremely frustrated less than 100 days out from the election. And you can see this projection in his public statements and Truth Social comments.

He's been like, look like a sort of this exercise in wishful thinking on true social, where he's saying, I'm hearing Biden's really angry and wants to get, you know, regrets dropping out. And maybe he gets back in, you know, and it's sort of like, that's actually the way Trump feels. I know that's what you want, but that's not really what's happening. And so you're seeing this sort of Trump kind of publicly emoting for poor Joe Biden and how mistreated he was. But really, it's just a projection. It's the race Trump wants again. Right. And he can't have it. And he's still sort of pining for that race that no longer exists. Okay, so those are the inward pains and frustrations

that you have been picking up on in your reporting. Let's talk about how they are manifesting out in public on the campaign trail. the Secret Service were grappling with this huge mistake of allowing him to be almost assassinated. Right. So there's this really big increase in his security. You know, they don't want him doing events outdoors, which he loves doing. He feeds off these open air events. Even his golfing is constricted. So he's feeling cooped up. But there's also just this, I don't know what the right word is, I guess sort of cement footed aspect to his campaign at this point. Suddenly, he's not out there doing much. He's not dominating media. And the person who has seized command of the moment, who is on every television screen, who is the fresh thing that everyone is

paying attention to and talking about. Is not him. Yeah. Is his new opponent, Kamala Harris. Right. So we're sort of waiting to see what is the Trump plan to take on Harris? You know, you can see him fumbling around for a nickname for her. You know, he sort of cycles through. First, he calls her Laughin' Kamala to try and make fun of her laugh. And then according to his advisors, he decides that one doesn't work. So then he goes back to Crooked. He used that for Hillary Clinton. He used that for Joe Biden. Then he decides he doesn't really like that. Then he tries out Crazy. And then he has this event, which could have actually been a real opportunity for him, which was he decides to go to Chicago

on stage for the National Association of Black Journalists Conference. And as we know, Trump has been trying to eat into Democrats' African-American support. So this could have been a moment potentially for him to reset and take control of the race again. And it felt especially bold because he was going to speak to a largely Black audience of journalists at precisely the moment that the Democratic Party had decided a Black woman would be the party's nominee. So there seemed to be kind of a strategic wisdom to it. Yes, that's what it looked like anyway. But then Trump opened his mouth. Some of your own supporters have labeled Vice

President Kamala Harris as a DEI hire. Is that acceptable language to you? Trump gets asked a very sharp question by the ABC reporter, Rachel Scott. How do you define diversity, equity, inclusion? Okay, yeah, go ahead. Is that what your definition? That is, that is literally the word. Give me a definition then, would you give me a definition? And Trump takes great offense at the question. So he starts off on this very angry and aggressive footing. Do you believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a black woman. And then he decides to question whether the first black woman vice president is actually black. She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage. 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. So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black? He says absurdly that she only recently decided to embrace her black identity for political purposes when, of course, her father is Jamaican-American. She went to a historically black college. I mean, it's not even really worth engaging with. historically black college. I mean, it's not even really worth engaging with. It's so outlandish, but he basically programs the chyrons on every broadcast news program around the country. You know, that is the story that comes out of this is Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris's race. It's not, you know, his team is desperate to focus on policy attacks,

you know, her being this dangerously liberal candidate. But what's the story that comes out of it? It's Donald Trump questioning her race. Right. So even Republicans end up wincing at this, thinking like, of all the things you could do, why do this, which makes you sound racist and also just with somebody not having their eye on the ball. Yeah.

And then he goes off to Georgia for a rally. So just think about this for a second. So Georgia is a state with roughly 30% of the voting electorate is black. Okay. It's a state that Trump needs to win. I think their clearest path to victory involves Georgia. So you need to appeal to black voters. What have you done? You've just questioned whether Kamala Harris is actually black. Then you go to Georgia, you go to the rally, and Trump decides to bring up again this old feud that he has with Georgia's Governor Brian Kemp. Your Governor Kemp and Raffensperger are doing everything

possible to make 2024 difficult for Republicans to win. Brian Kemp is very popular, much more popular than Trump is in Georgia. And Trump attacks Kemp and his wife. But think of the wife. She said two weeks ago, I will not endorse him because he hasn't earned my endorsement. I haven't earned her endorsement. I have nothing to do with her. So like, if you were trying to figure out how do I give myself the best chance of losing Georgia, you might question the race of Kamala Harris, attack the popular Republican governor. Oh, and then by the way, just a little bit of a cherry on top to alienate a few more suburban women, attack his wife as well. So when I talk to Trump allies and advisors,

many of them view the last three weeks as Trump's worst sustained performance in a very long time. And of course, this is not just any moment in which to have Trump spiral. This is the moment that he most needs to figure out what he's up to because the Democrats have made this extraordinary candidate switch that very much seems to be working while he's just kind of fumbling around and, as you're saying, basically shooting himself in both feet. That's right. And Trump takes another shot at the recess. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate your being here. He has a press conference at Mar-a-Lago. Major

news outlets are there because his team is doing briefings with reporters. I was there. And the press conference goes on for about an hour. And this is not mission accomplished, to say the least. The biggest crowd I've ever spoken, I've spoken to the biggest crowds. He boasts about his crowd size on January 6th. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people. If not, we had more. Claims falsely that it was bigger than Martin Luther King's crowd when he gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. Wow.

So I think the abortion issue is written very much tempered down, and I've answered, I think, very well in the debate, and it seems to be much less of an issue. He equivocated and seemed to be sort of, frankly, confused when asked about abortion policy. Like Ronald Reagan, I believe in the exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. I believe, you know, I believe strongly.

I think that that's a very important thing. I think when you don't, you have to follow your heart. So, you know, what was supposed to be a reset after a very tough period actually just extended the very tough period. And, you know, there's not much time left. We're in the final 90 days of the campaign, so it's crunch time. We'll be right back.

We'll be right back. So, Jonathan, how anxious are the people around Donald Trump by the experience of these past two weeks, which they clearly think have been a bit of a mess? And are they convinced that Trump can right this ship and kind of meet the moment of Kamala Harris and her ascent? Well, they're in a real race now. And the dynamics have shifted to the extent that Democrats were not excited or motivated to vote for Joe Biden, and they are excited and motivated to vote for Kamala Harris. There's a different vibe, as they would say. But in the minds of the Trump campaign, the fundamentals of the race haven't actually changed. Just explain that. Well, yes, there are all of these indicators that are concerning to them. I'm not minimizing that.

But they still have a very clear path to victory. And in fact, it's a much clearer path than Kamala Harris has at this moment. They need to win Georgia. Trump has been consistently leading in Georgia. They need to hold on to North Carolina. He has been consistently leading in North Carolina outside the margin of error. And they have to win Pennsylvania, which is closer. So the path is there. There are actually many other paths that he could win, other different combinations of states. But the basic way that the Trump people see it is that Kamala Harris is simply winning back people that Democrats should have had in the first place. And it's not like the mood of the country has changed. It is still a country that is still very, very sour about the economy, anxious about high prices, worried about the border and immigration. These are all issues in which

Donald Trump holds huge advantages over Kamala Harris and Democrats. And when you talk to the Trump people, as I do every day, they have a very narrow, as they would say, universe of the electorate that they're focusing on, that they call target persuadables. These are voters who they believe are up for grabs. It's about 11% of the electorate. They are disproportionately male, under 50, non-white, independent, moderate, actually, in ideology. And even though you have an electorate that is overall very sour about the economy, this group is even more sour. These are not people who are following, who are reading newspapers, reading digital news

sites, following cable news. They are consuming non-traditional media, streamers, gaming, news sites, following cable news. They are consuming non-traditional media, streamers, gaming, et cetera, et cetera. And that's why you see the Trump campaign doing so much of this non-traditional media to meet these low information voters where they are. So the Trump team is betting that all of this Harris boom is a honeymoon, it's cotton candy, but they still believe that the fundamental issues that are going to decide this election are issues in which they can not just beat Harris on, but absolutely destroy her on. So in the eyes of the Trump people, just to put this all together, it might look like this race has changed a lot because there's so much energy around Kamala Harris,

because there's so much media attention around Kamala Harris. But the fundamentals of the race, the electoral college math and the reality of who's actually gettable, those haven't changed. And the Trump people are confident that their plan is the more sophisticated one for actually pulling it off. I wouldn't say it hasn't changed. They acknowledge it's a tighter race, but they are betting that hammering those messages in the key states for, and I can't emphasize this enough, a very narrow, small slither of voters that are up for grabs will carry the day. So let's talk about their plan, not just to define an issue set that they think will win this election for them, but their plan

to define Harris herself. Because so far, as we established in the first half of this conversation, Trump hasn't quite seemed to settle on a path or a message for confronting Harris. Well, I think that's an understatement. One of the challenges when you talk to Trump advisors is that they need to narrow their focus. They have so much tape of Kamala Harris saying all sorts of things that are unpopular and very, very liberal and out of step with moderate centrist voters, that they actually need to go through a culling exercise and make sure that they're not just throwing everything at the wall. And in the end, nothing will stick. Voters will sort of tune it out. They've done this exhaustive

message testing. Trump's top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, has tested dozens and dozens of messages against Harris to see which ones resonate the most. The ones that they're going to just hammer her again and again and again on are immigration. Joe Biden appointed her to deal with the root causes of migration. They're going to talk about aspects of her record as a prosecutor in San Francisco to portray her as soft on crime. And they're going to tie her to the Biden economy, which while on many indicators is doing well, voters aren't feeling it and aren't saying that. So that's what they're going to focus on. But beyond policy, they're also trying to attack her

personally in a few key ways. Like what? So the two that they are doing with her personally is defining her as someone who is not presidential, who's not strong, who is unserious. There's a video they have internally. They call it the word salad video. We've been to the border. You haven't been to the border. And I haven't been to Europe. I mean, I don't understand the point. It's clips of Kamala Harris. You know, she goes on these sort of very unusual verbal excursions. It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.

Every day it is time for us to... She sort of repeats lines and says things that sound like at times a mangled self-help book. I can imagine what can be and be unburdened by what has been, you know? There's one where she talks about... Talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it,

there is great significance to the passage of time. They're trying to paint her as fundamentally unserious, not ready to be commander in chief. Right. They're basically going to start mocking her in compilations of videos that are intended to take the worst possible moments, put them all together, and hope that it somehow undermines her credibility. the worst possible moments, put them all together and hope that it somehow undermines her credibility. Exactly. The other thing that they're doing that's specific to her is they're trying to portray her as a fraud, as a fake, as someone who reinvents herself for political expedience every few years. And, you know, there's a bit of material to work with there. In 2019, when she was running for president, she basically co-signed every hard left position, whether it be a ban on fracking, abolishing private health insurance, abolishing ICE, giving free healthcare to undocumented immigrants. You know, it's a very long list. She's basically running away from that record now, but they're going to try and portray her as someone who, you know, doesn't actually stand for anything and flip-flops.

Right. I mean, in a very simple sense, it seems like they're going to try to make this campaign about her now, in the same way that for the past two weeks since she became the nominee, she's been trying to make this campaign about Trump. Her stump speech reliably has its loudest applause line when she gets to the idea that she knows Trump's type. And it seems like their plan is to kind of invert that and say, we're now going to tell you what type of person Kamala Harris is, and in their estimation, she's ideologically inconsistent and unserious. Yeah, and one thing that they're desperately trying to do is smoke her out. Their view in the Trump campaign is that Kamala Harris is good in scripted settings. They're very frustrated. She's having these very successful rallies, giving rehearsed stump speech. It's all very well produced and polished, but she has not been giving

interviews. She has not been submitting herself to tough questioning. They want to get her into these unscripted settings where they think she's very bad on her feet. I hear that again and again when I talk to Trump advisors, she can't think on her feet. That's what they think. They're trying to force her to take questions from journalists, to bully her into that, to get her on the debate stage where they think that she will wilt under pressure. They want to create new moments that, I guess, sound a bit like the videos they have in their offices, that word salad, that will become embarrassing in real time. Exactly. And what do they think those moments will look like?

How are they going to smoke her out? Well, he's challenged her to three debates, and notably, two of them are on networks he hates, ABC and NBC. So that shows you how eager Trump is to get her on that debate stage. And perhaps he, of course, thinks that what happened to Biden will happen to Harris on a debate stage.

In other words, it will be an indelible moment that could change the course of the race. Exactly. One thing I can't underscore enough is just how much contempt Trump has for Harris. He actually respected Hillary Clinton's intellect. As much as he despised her, he thought she was smart. He does not think Kamala Harris is smart. And in fact, he's been counseled by some advisors to try not to show as much of that contempt

publicly. So he does think he's up against someone who is incompetent and is not going to perform well in a debate against him. It could be a big miscalculation, but that's how Trump sees it, and that's how a number of his allies and advisors see it. It feels like the Trump campaign strategy to meet this moment rests on not just the first assumption, which is that Harris, if and when smoked out, will falter, but that Trump himself will be capable of being the kind of disciplined candidate who can deliver the policy messages you're talking about on crime, immigration, and the economy, and not keep doing what he did at NABJ and talking about whether she's actually Black or, as you

just said, demonstrating open contempt for her intelligence. Those are the biggest X factors, and the biggest one of the two of them is Trump. So far, he has been struggling to adapt to her as a new candidate. It has brought out some of his harshest instincts. And we don't know yet whether he's going to be able to sufficiently control himself not to turn off the voters that he needs to win this election. There was this sort of amazing moment two days after the Association of Black Journalists event, you know, the news cycle has gone crazy about Trump questioning whether she's black. you know, the news cycle has gone crazy about Trump questioning whether she's black.

Trump goes to the Hamptons and he's at this very high powered donor dinner. These are some of the wealthiest donors in Republican politics. And one of the donors asks this question that in any normal time, it would have just been this completely, you know, benign, forgettable question, which was basically what issues should you be talking about? But of course, this was a question that was sort of imbued with great meaning and relevance because he'd just been on this race-baiting spree. And Trump says, direct quote, I am who I am, which, you know, not exactly reassuring. At the same event, he said that he thought he was right to bring up the question whether she was really black. He said that, you know, we have to stop this deal, you know, relitigating his false claims about the 2020 election, which his advisors are

desperate that he would stop talking about. So, you know, this is a 78-year-old man who is not changing. So they're going to have to do the best they can with the candidate they've got. Right. I mean, the real risk for Trump is that he sabotages himself, which has always been a risk with Trump. But it's especially a risk, it would seem, in the final weeks of a campaign that he thought he was on a glide path to victory in when it was against Joe Biden. And now, despite everything that's happened, he's basically saying, as a candidate, as a person,

I won't change. I don't think I need to change. Exactly. And in fact, if there was ever a moment when Republicans were sort of saying, you know, oh, I think maybe he's a changed man was after the assassination attempt. He's now saying to people, if oh, I think maybe he's a changed man after the assassination attempt. He's now saying to people, if anything, I'm more angry. The press wants to say I got nicer after that. No, he's saying that out loud. No, in fact, not. If that doesn't change you, I'm not sure what does.

Right. Apparently not a new rival either. Not so far. Well, Jonathan, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Over the weekend, Trump's political troubles continued. His campaign said it had been the victim of a hacking operation allegedly linked to Iran that resulted in the theft of sensitive internal documents, including research on Trump's running mate, Senator J.D. Vance.

Some of those documents have since been shared with major news organizations, including Politico and The Washington Post, in what appears to be an effort to embarrass Trump's campaign. And. No timeouts here. It's Williams. That was a two. Faked it in. A two ball. And the United States is going to claim gold for the eighth consecutive Olympics.

What a finish. Williams with her foot on the line. On the final day of the 2024 Olympic Summer Games, the U.S. women's basketball team defeated France by a single point, allowing the United States to tie China for the most gold medals, 40 in all. A few hours later, the Games ended in Paris with an elaborate closing ceremony broadcast by NBC from the same stadium where the Games began two weeks ago. Thank you. by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow. you