The Headlines - A Final Week of Campaigning, and Measured Words After Airstrikes on Iran

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

Plus, hear a long-lost Chopin waltz.   Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. On Today’s Episode:State of the Race: National Polls Tighten With 8 Days to Go, by Nate CohnTrump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism, by Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman and Michael GoldIsrael Calls the Shots in the Mideast as U.S. Plays a Lesser Role, by Mark LandlerCalifornia Governor Proposes $750 Million in Annual Film Tax Credits, by Shawn Hubler and Derrick Bryson TaylorHear a Chopin Waltz Unearthed After Nearly 200 Years, by Javier C. Hernández

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracey Mumford. Today's Monday, October 28th. Here's what we're covering. With eight days to go until the election, the race for the presidency remains extraordinarily tight. The polls show Donald Trump and Kamala Harris effectively tied, and it will be a race to the finish for both candidates.

Yesterday, Trump put on what his team billed as a capstone event for his campaign, though he did not hold it in a battleground state. I just want to say a very big hello to a special place, New York, and to an incredible arena, Madison Square Garden, incredible. The Trump team held the rally in Manhattan, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 10 to 1, making the event more about putting on a show than winning over voters. Kamala, you're fired. Get out. Get out. You're fired.

For Trump, the importance of this rally was to come back to a city and a state that he feels rejected him and show that he could attract a crowd and fill the stadium. Times political reporter Maggie Haberman was at the packed rally, which featured a parade of speakers including Elon Musk, Hulk Hogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and a rare appearance from Trump's wife, Melania. Maggie says that Trump's rhetoric has been growing darker in the final weeks of the campaign, and that was reflected in the tone of the event overall. The content of a number of the speeches leading up to Trump's was pretty inflammatory.

There were racist comments. There were misogynistic comments. There was a lot of cursing from one speaker. The main person who struck racist notes was a comedian who performed named Tony Hinchcliffe. And he talked about Puerto Rico as a barge of garbage floating in the ocean and jokes like that. This is a city with a large Puerto Rican community, and it's almost certain that Kamala Harris' team is going to put those comments into ads for the final days of the race. And we'll see if Trump pays any price for it. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris will deliver her own closing arguments tomorrow with a speech in Washington, D.C.

In the Middle East this weekend, Israel carried out its long-awaited retaliation against Iran in response to Iran's missile attack earlier this month. And for the moment, things are quiet. The Israeli strikes destroyed air defense systems near oil refineries, a gas field, and a major port. Notably, they did not hit the energy infrastructure itself or any of Iran's nuclear facilities, which American officials had urged them to avoid, fearing that it could escalate the conflict even further. But Times reporter Mark Landler says that, more broadly, America's influence over Israel's decision-making has been shrinking.

I've been talking to former diplomats and analysts from both the United States and Israel over the past couple of days, and one thing is very clear. Where in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, the United States played really a pivotal role in the Middle East, setting the blueprint for solutions, guiding the course of events. In this conflict, the U.S. is not really the pivotal player as it was so much in the past. You've seen the United States struggle to persuade the Israelis to allow enough humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza. You've seen the Israelis largely rebuff efforts for the United States to broker a ceasefire. They're not the only ones, of course. Hamas has been resisting one. And you've also seen Israel escalate exchanges with militants from

Hezbollah, expanding this conflict into a sort of a two-front war, which is another thing the U.S. had really, really tried to avoid. So in most of the major developments of this conflict, the Israelis have really been setting the tone with relatively little regard for the U.S.'s views. But even as the U.S.'s influence over events has diminished, you've seen the U.S. get drawn militarily more and more into the conflict. The U.S. deployed warships to the Mediterranean. Commandos have been deployed to help look for hostages. You've seen the United States play a major role in helping the Israelis shoot down ballistic missiles that were fired by Iran into Israel. So across the board, you're seeing more and more of an American military role in a regional war over which it doesn't seem to have that much strategic and long-term influence. California used to be the place to film for TV and movies. It has the studios,

the sun, the whole Hollywood infrastructure. But for the past 20 years, other states have been chipping away at that. Almost 40 states have rolled out tax incentives to lure productions. Check the credits and you'll see Georgia, Louisiana, and New York as the locations for everything from Marvel movies to indie dramas. But this weekend, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a proposal to fight back. He wants to more than double the state's film tax incentive program to $750 million. The industry as a whole has been struggling to bounce back from recent writers' and actors' strikes, and there are fears that new technology like AI could also

threaten Hollywood work. Newsom said he hopes the program will generate thousands of jobs in California. But tax incentives for the film industry often cost more than they're worth. Study after study has found that for every dollar spent on the tax breaks, states get as little as a quarter or even just a dime back in revenue. And finally, this spring, a museum curator in Manhattan was sifting through a collection of papers, some postcards from Picasso, that kind of thing, when he came across a scrap of sheet music the size of an index card. On the top was a very famous name dashed off in cursive.

Chopin. The scrap appears to be an otherwise unknown waltz by the composer, Frédéric Chopin, who died almost 175 years ago. The pianist Long Long performed the waltz for the Times, possibly the first time it's ever been played for the public. There's a history in classical music of fakes and forgeries and long-lost pieces emerging out of nowhere, but the penmanship matches, and there are little drawings on the page, which fits.

Chopin liked to doodle. It's not clear what the composer himself would make of anyone playing this waltz now. He often covered up his drafts with furious scribbles or blacked them out with ink. And he told his friends that he wanted his unpublished works to be destroyed after his death. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, inside Donald Trump's unorthodox campaign to win over voters in battleground states. That's next in The New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Tracey Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.