The Journal. - 'Phony' and 'Weird.' Trump and Harris Size Each Other Up

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

As Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign gets underway, Democrats and Republicans are rushing to define her. And Democrats are shifting the way they talk about the GOP. WSJ’s Molly Ball explores the strategies behind how both sides are framing each other.  Further Listening: - The Week That Changed the Presidential Race  - Takeaways from the RNC: Trump Is in Control  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, it's been a week. On a scale of one to ten, would you say that it was like ten being the most exciting, one being the most boring? How would you rank this past week compared to the other weeks that we've been having in this campaign season? Well, compared to the month of July, it was like a zero. This, of course, is Molly Ball, the Wall Street Journal's senior political correspondent. I called her up this morning to talk about

the state of the presidential race. I would say was on the grand scheme of things a solid five, right? Like nice, normal campaign week where I think we learned a lot about the candidates and sort of what you would expect for August of an election year. We ended our conversation last week talking about how the race was now on to define Kamala Harris. The Republicans were going to try to do it.

The Democrats were going to try to do it. How would you say that's going for each candidate? Well, I think on the Republicans part part, it's not going great, just because their message has been a little muddled. And on the Democratic side, I think it's still a work in progress in the sense that Kamala Harris clearly has a lot of momentum in this race. But I don't think we still have a good sense of who she is and what she would do as a presidential candidate and what

her vision for the future is. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, August 2nd. Coming up on the show, Molly Ball on the race to define Kamala Harris. Whether it's the weekend, the beginning of summer, or the end of the school year, celebration cookies celebrate good times. So I want to talk about some of the stuff that happened this week on the campaign trail. Harris had this big rally in Atlanta that seemed very large. Megan Thee Stallion was there performing. And if you want to keep loving your party, you know who to vote for.

Do you think she's still in her honeymoon phase or is there like real momentum that you're seeing build up behind her? I think it's a little bit of both. We are seeing proof that there is some real momentum behind this campaign, that it wasn't just a quick burst of relief. Now, she clearly benefits from how low the bar has been set, the fact that there was so little enthusiasm for Joe Biden's candidacy, and in fact, Democrats were sort of actively depressed about him being the candidate. So just by virtue of not being him, she gets a bump. It has been what 12 days.

So it's now long enough for us to say that there is something about Kamala. There is something that she has generated in her own right. And what I'm hearing from so many Democrats is it's just the first time in really years that they've been able to feel happy about their candidate, and that's really saying something. What have you seen so far from Harris in terms of how she's been trying to define herself? Like, is she sort of centering around a single message about who she is, the kind of politician that she is, and the message that she wants to send in the campaign?

Yeah, it's a few different strands of messaging here. The first campaign ad they rolled out was set to the tune of the Beyonce song, Freedom. Making freedom a theme is something that Democrats and particularly abortion rights activists have been very enthusiastic about, I think, ever since the midterms. The idea that you can tie together the idea of reproductive freedom and women's freedom to control their own bodies with a larger freedom agenda that taps into sentiments about patriotism and liberty and American history. You know, she has, in her speeches so far far heavily emphasized her background as a prosecutor, contrasting that with the fact that Donald Trump is a convicted felon.

And the other big thing she's been saying that I think Democrats are also broadly enthusiastic about is this idea of being oriented toward the future, this line of hers that we're not going back. Georgia, America has tried these failed policies before, and we are not going back. Woo! And it's not the most original political phrase I've ever heard, but it taps into this idea that as a younger candidate, she has the opportunity

to position herself as the candidate of the future, to position herself as a candidate who is taking the country into a new age, instead of wanting to say, make America great again, on the basis of a sort of nostalgia for the past. And there's also this stuff that I'm seeing from a lot of Democrats about how the Republicans or JD Vance in particular or Trump are weird. Yep. And by the way, don't you find some of their stuff to just be plain weird? We're using this fake living room to talk to you about a super weird idea from JD Vance.

The way they address people. It is bizarre. It's weird. It's weird. It is weird. Where did that come from? It's a funny story. This came about when Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who is a sort of long shot on the Veepstakes list but a popular Democratic governor, went on TV and said, you know, the thing about

these Republicans is they're just weird. And I think it also has to do with how quickly this campaign is being assembled, that rather than do what they might like to do and spend a year sort of workshopping and focus grouping and testing various different buzzwords, the Democrats are kind of improvising. And, you know, campaigns are always trying to position, trying to sort of otherize their opposition, trying to convince voters that this person, this candidate I'm running against isn't like you, can't relate to you, isn't one of us. So it has that valence to it, but it's fundamentally, it's sort of light, it's dismissive.

It seems like a very different style than what I'm used to hearing from Democrats, which is, I feel like has been so much more serious and so much more about how, you know, Trump is this danger to democracy who must be stopped. Right. That even though they all feel that way, uh, that Trump is a threat, that when you talk about him in those terms, it sort of elevates him and makes him seem strong to a lot of people.

Makes him seem like someone who, sure, maybe he's gonna be a dictator, but he's gonna get things done and sort of break the stalemate. And it also seemed like people were concerned that like, oh, or they would hear that and they would say, you guys are just being so overblown. There's being so hyperbolic, like relax.

Yep. And so the weird thing has the benefit of being dismissive and in a way that strikes people as funny. And the hope is that rather than being terrified of Trump, people can just sort of laugh him off. Mm-hmm. One thing I did notice over the past week is that it seems like Harris is staking out some somewhat big policy changes from at least what she campaigned on in the 2020 campaign.

Like, she now says she no longer wants to ban fracking. She no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program. She's talked about wanting to increase spending on the border. Do you think there's anything to read into that? Or is she just sort of moderating? Or is it just the fact that she has a little bit less, you know, people don't know her quite as well as a politician on the national stage.

She sort of has like a bit of a blank slate. I think it's a little bit of all of the above there. And I think, number one, it underscores this idea that she does need to come out more strongly and articulate what her policy vision is. A lot of these reversals have come as like, you know, background quotes through a spokesman, rather than her actually articulating where she stands, which I think she should do. But you know, what the Trump campaign is certainly saying is that she's just a flip-flopper with no ideological core, that she just sort of says whatever she feels appeals to whatever

audience she's put in front of. So you guys want to hear that truth about Kamala Harris? Kamala Harris is a phony. Because everything about Kamala Harris rollout, it's phony and it's fake. She's flip-flopping on literally every single position she has ever taken. That she's a phony, that she's fake, that she cannot be trusted, that she takes whatever position, you know, suits her at the time, and therefore,

you can't know what she's gonna do as president because she changes her positions based on the situation. So on Wednesday, Trump was interviewed at the National Association of Black Journalists Conference, and his presence there garnered a lot of attention. Why did he agree to speak there? Well, the NABJ has been inviting presidential candidates from both parties for decades now.

You know, George W. Bush spoke to them, Bill Clinton, I believe, Barack Obama. And I would say good for Donald Trump for taking up the invitation. He didn't necessarily handle it very graciously, but I think it's always good when candidates are willing to get in front of tough questions and tough audiences and he did that and Kamala Harris, at least so far, has not done that. One of the things that he said that got some of the most attention was that at this conference he said that he didn't know that Kamala Harris was black. And 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? Of course she has a Jamaican father and an Indian mother and she identifies as black. Is there any kind of deliberate or logical strategy for Trump by making comments like that? Or you think that was something more where he just said it off the cuff because he was feeling a bit flustered by the questions that he was getting there. I'm not inside Trump's head and I would not pretend to speak to what he was thinking in that moment. But his pattern is he likes to create controversies, he knows what gins up outrage,

and when he creates a controversy he sort of basks in the negative attention and he never backs down. So since he made that comment, which I think we should point out, as you said, is not true. Right. I mean, this is someone who was bussed to integrate her elementary school and then went to a historically black college. So clearly from a very, very young age, she has identified as both black and Indian American. And, you know, I have biracial children.

This idea that you only get to choose one of your identities and which one is it is deeply bizarre, I think, to many Americans, including the 30-some million Americans who identify with more than one race, and, you know, including the biracial children of vice presidential nominee JD Vance. So he probably knew he was going to create this controversy, and he has now tried to spin it as a part of this argument

that Harris is a phony, right? That she opportunistically chooses different identities depending on the audience, that she's this sort of shape-shifter who's untrustworthy. And that was the way that Vance, when he was asked about it, tried to spin what Trump had said and defend it. This interview at the NABJ felt so reminiscent to me of 2016 when Trump would do these interviews and say these, you know, pretty outrageous things that would generate all kinds of negative attention, but then it only seemed to give his campaign more oxygen.

I don't think Trump has ever benefited from being so controversial. Let's remember he's won one election in his life. I'm not counting Republican primaries. He has won one election in which he did not win the popular vote and was unpopular throughout his presidency. So it is not the case that there was some groundswell of the majority of the electorate to Donald Trump based on him being offensive and unapologetic and un-PC and not afraid to say what he thinks even if people think it's racist or sexist.

That's never been, I don't think, beneficial to him. It does get him attention and attention is important in politics. And certainly there is a segment of the Republican base that is animated by this. But Trump already had those voters. So who is he winning over who wasn't already listening to him by activating these arguments? It just isn't something that at least a lot of Republicans feel is productive for him. And Democrats certainly aren't fans of it either. There's a lot of outrage on the left when, whenever Trump does something like this. Coming up, is America ready for a female president? This episode is brought to you by the Kraken Goldspiced Rum.

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So if Harris wins the election, she'd also of course be the first female president. But the last time a woman was running for president when Hillary Clinton ran against Trump in 2016, she of course did not win. So do you think that that much has changed in the electorate since then in terms of how Americans feel about voting for a female candidate? Yeah. I just finished reporting a story about gender in the campaign, and it was really remarkable to me how palpably people felt that things had changed.

In particular, talking to liberal democratic women, I spoke to Senator Amy Klobuchar, who ran for president in 2020, and she and Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, who comprised a record-setting field in terms of the number of women candidates, they all were constantly under pressure to prove they were electable, to prove that they would not be done in if they were the nominee by a sexist electorate in the way that Democratic voters felt that Hillary Clinton had been. Political scientists who have studied

candidates running at lower levels have found that being a woman actually is not a disadvantage in politics today. That despite what people overwhelmingly believe, especially on the left, it isn't true that women candidates face a systematic disadvantage from the electorate or are covered differently by the media or get more scrutiny for, you know, their hair and clothes and that hurts

them in the election. There's just abundant evidence that actually when women run, they do as well as men do. Nevertheless, I think particularly among the Democratic base in the wake of Hillary, there was this feeling that a woman just couldn't win. One of the things that was surprising about the 2016 election, if I recall, was that there were more white women who voted for Trump than I think people were expecting at the time.

Does that say anything about this race when Trump is going up against another woman? Well, we don't know how he's going to do, of course, with these various groups. But what I think you saw at the Republican convention, which feels like a lifetime ago, but was actually less than two weeks. It does. But think about the testosterone that was on display, particularly on the final night, right?

Trump being introduced by Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt, and Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. But it was really a signal, along with the pick of JD Vance, that this is a party that has decided as a matter of political strategy that there is more promise in trying to get more of those working class men than in trying to win back the suburban women that they have lost. They've clearly made a bet that going in on this man's world idea, and there are women who are attracted to this idea as well, right? We have seen conservative women also being galvanized in recent years, whether it's by, you know, the sort of moms

for liberty and the education debates that played out during COVID, the women who've been galvanized by aspects of the trans debate, the trad wife movement, right, women who are attracted to a more traditional conception of gender. So it's not the case that he's alienating all women with these appeals, but it's women and men who have a more traditional conception of the roles of both genders. And that's clearly where the Trump campaign sees more promising political potential than with those suburban women who I think reacted to Trump from the moment he was elected and really have not turned back toward him.

Alright, so the next bit of big news that we're expecting is the Harris VP pick. What are you looking for there? I think the vice presidential pick is going to be a fascinating answer to a lot of questions that I've been asking about this campaign. First and foremost, it's a bet on political strategy, right? And currently the names we're hearing the most are Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, big important swing state, and Mark Kelly, senator from Arizona, another big important swing state. Both of them crucially have credibility as moderates, have not taken stances beloved by the left in a lot of cases.

Kelly has been critical of the administration on immigration and border issues. Shapiro has also compiled a moderate record as governor and he's quite popular in his state. So you know for a campaign that's clearly focused first and foremost on winning, who they choose is going to tell us where they think the map is and where they think their best chances are politically in terms of the states.

And then also it's about the signal that Harris wants to send to the electorate as a whole. So by picking, you know, someone who is her age or even younger, is she doubling down on this future-oriented idea? Is she, you know, picking someone who's sort of moderate-coded to send a signal that she can be trusted by moderate voters, not to go back to those liberal stances she had in the past. So all of these signals are going to be really important for a campaign that is still so new and so undefined in the eyes of many voters and journalists like me. Molly, it's so great talking with you.

Great to be here, Ryan. That's all for today. Friday August 2nd. By the way, if you have an election related question you'd like Molly to answer in a future episode, send us an email to thejournal at wsj.com. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Katherine Brewer, Maria Byrne, Jonathan Davis, Victoria Dominguez, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphreys, Matt Kwong, Kate Linebaugh, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pier Singie, Laying Tang, Jeevika Verma,

Lisa Wang, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zemmese, and me, Ryan Knudsen. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week by Katherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis, Najwa Jamal, and Kate Gallagher. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.