The Munk Debates Podcast - Maggie Haberman On Trump’s High Stakes Re-election Bid

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast Maggie Haberman, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times' White House correspondent, joins us for a behind the scenes look at President Trump's re-election bid.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Thank you for listening to the moment. Monk Debates podcast. For the next couple of weeks leading up to the U.S. election on November 3rd, we are changing up the format for this podcast. Instead of a debate, we are going to provide you

with in-depth interviews with some of the world's smartest thinkers on the big issues driving the U.S. election, from the pandemic to the economy to the polarization of U.S. politics and society. We're calling this mini-series the Monk Dialogues. Like our debates, the focus of each Monk Dialogue is smart and civil conversation, free of spin, and focused on the facts. Up first is Maggie Haberman, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times White House correspondent, with her unique behind-the-scenes look at President Trump's high-stakes re-election bid. Here is her dialogue with Monk Debates chair, Rudyard Griffiths, recorded last week. Hello and welcome to the Monk Dialogues.

I am Rudyard Griffith, the chair of the Monk Debates. It's my privilege to have the opportunity to host this our second season, starting this Wednesday, and continuing for the next 10 weeks. We're going to have some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers on this program to talk in depth about the big issues transforming our world from the U.S. election, to geopolitics, to the pandemic. We're going to cover it all. And we're going to cover it in a way that we feel isn't being reflected in a lot of the traditional media. We're going to do this through an in-depth conversation, a true dialogue and exchange of ideas. It's a real pleasure

to welcome on this program, someone that I and many people consider one of America's finest political journalists. She is, the New York Times, Maggie Haberman. She's also a lot of a political analyst with CNN. As we'll hear tonight, she's a veteran New York City political reporter, and she's someone that carries the honor, the distinction. Very few people in the press corps in the United States have, which is the president, Donald Trump, shouting out that she's a quote, third-rate reporter. I know she bears that as a badge of honor, and it's great to have her on this program with us now. Maggie, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thank you for having me. Well, let's kick off a bigger picture with you, Maggie, because that's part of what we want to do through these conversations over the next 10 weeks is kind of pull back from the immediate news and events of the day.

I just want to start by having you talk to us a little bit about where you think America is at in this moment. Do you think that we're seeing a country that's kind of dealing with the pressures and strains of an extraordinary election? happening in an extraordinary environment, a global pandemic? Or do you feel that there's a risk here that something bigger is brewing and that there is the potential for a crisis? So first of all, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. There's no question that the U.S. is dealing with a global pandemic,

which has led to not just wide-scale loss of life. There's more than 200,000 people dead, and the numbers that are predicted before the end of the year are high. there is tied to that the reality that this has created an economic crisis. The layoffs that have been announced by major corporations in the last two days has just been staggering. And all of this is taking place during a time when the country has a president who is the most divisive president in, certainly in my lifetime, and somebody who eagerly plays to racial politics, who, as we saw in the last 24 hours, declined to overtly condemn a far right group called the Proud Boys after sort of stirring

them up to, quote, stand by last night. And all of that is taking place, you know, with the backdrop of systemic issues of racism in this country, racism in policing, racism in education, racism and institutions, racism in the economy, combined with systemic inequality, all of these various factors are colliding. And it's just a time of tremendous anxiety in the U.S. Again, coming back to our president, while I happen to think that some of the talk about how he will try to remain in power is a little overwrought, I do think that leaders have responsibility to be careful in what they say. And this president has chosen instead to leave a kernel of fear with people about what his intentions are.

Maggie, just to kind of mind this vein a bit deeper, I guess what a lot of people are trying to grapple with, you know, looking at, let's say, last night's extraordinary debate, really a substance and a tone to a political conversation that I think few people ever expected to hear on a presidential debate stage. Are the words, the rhetoric of the president, in your experience, do these lead to actions, or is this political theater? Is this something that's kind of, calculated, maybe miscalculated in terms of whether or not it meets his long-term political interest. But I guess what a lot of people worry about is just the harshness of that conversation last night and the feeling that kind of something broke in American political culture with the president

and with that conversation with Joe Biden. So I think it's an excellent question you just asked of how often does he actually act on these things that he says? He often doesn't. He often makes threats and then he doesn't live up to them. he is creating distrust, unrest, anger, and fear just by the fact of what he said last night about, you know, for instance, voting in Philadelphia. Bad things happen in Philadelphia. He's talking about Pennsylvania. It's just a state that is crucial for him. He wouldn't say whether he would accept the results of the election. And then there's just the broader, as you say, angry, visceral engagement. We have never seen a president interrupt their opponent on a debate.

this way. And yes, Joe Biden did interrupt the president first. Sure, that is absolutely true. But it wasn't the same thing in terms of the way they were doing it. President Trump is angry and he is angry that he is losing and he's scared that he is losing. And he is angry in particular that the person he is losing to is Joe Biden, who he does not respect and he is upset about it. So whether he actually carries out some of these either threats or just sort of painted notions remains to be seen. I understand why people have enormous anxiety about it. I think the mere fact of him, you know, talking about poll watchers, which doesn't, poll watching does not, you know, signify intimidation of voters on its own. But there's obviously the concern when the

president is saying, watch them really carefully, that people will feel like they have a license to do what they want. So, you know, will he do the worst case scenario that some of his, what, critics have suggested, such as, you know, deploy ice agents into the streets to try to keep people from voting in major metropolises and things like that. That's a very extreme scenario. But what he has done already is encourage people to be, quote, unquote, vigilant on his behalf. And we don't know what that will look like yet. Just to think about this, maybe, you know, in that classical way, you're in Washington, you're covering this culture, you're living it every day. Has the culture produced this president for this moment? Or has this president produced this culture for this moment?

So look, and I should just be clear for the people who are watching. I actually live in New York City. I go back and forth to D.C., which is a very different place now in the pandemic and post-protest world after the June first incidents near the White House than it was before that. I think about this a lot. I think that the president became president because of existing issues, forces, dynamics within the United States that had been going on for a very long period of time. It's really hard to overstate how enormous the sense of public distrust existed in institutions and in government after the fiscal crisis of 2008, which came after a war that was started on information that didn't exist about. weapons of mass destruction after a devastating terrorist attack, three of them on U.S. soil in 2001, which came after an election that had been settled by the Supreme Court. These are traumas in the

life of the nation. And so the U.S. had been through quite a bit. You know, Donald Trump was able to capitalize on a relatively small share of voters in the Republican primary who liked his nativist views. So I think that these forces existed well before President Trump got onto the scene, but I think the combination of Twitter and social media culture and entertainment media blurring together with news in the form of the show The Apprentice, which is how many voters across the country got to know him first, not through the New York real estate world, the way those of us who covered him in New York did. I think all of that sort of those forces combined along with him facing a candidate who had been Hillary Clinton. who had been defined over 30 years in public life and who, if we're being honest, faced the reality of sexism toward the possibility of the first female president.

So the president didn't create some of these dynamics, but he has thrown accelerant on them. He has not sought to try to increase trust in government. He has sought to further erode trust in government. He attacks his own government's intelligence agencies. He suggests that there is a quote unquote deep state, a term that used to be reserved for autocracies and authoritarian governments elsewhere. He has now just made it a routine part of the conversation in the White House.

So I think it's both. To build on this theme, you know, as a reporter, your currency, what you provide us as readers and what we extract as value from what you do is that big thing that starts with a capital T, which is called the truth. how have you felt as a reporter working in a kind of post-factual world that we seem to be living right now, where the truth just seems so hard to discern? There's no question. This is a challenging media environment, and it's very different than the media environment that I first came up in as a reporter.

I was a general assignment reporter at the New York Post in the late 1990s, and then I was a City Hall beat reporter at the New York Post and covered local government, and then some state government and then went on to national. But that's very different than the media environment that exists right now, which I think just very accurately described. You can find things that will reaffirm your existing beliefs if you want to. And I know I referred to Twitter before in terms of the president. Twitter has accelerated also just this lack of faith in facts,

this lack of existence of a shared fact set. Because on Twitter, everything looks the same. Some commentator looks the same as a news story. A tweet about a seven-part in-depth investigation about whatever topic in the government looks the same as a tweet about, you know, President Trump talking to Kim Kardashian or Kanye West. It has allowed people to sort of flood the internet with opinion and have it all look like it's diffused into news. I would argue that truth and fact are two different concepts. Facts are literally data points, right? And so I think that one of the challenges we have in this era is what I just referred to, which is that there's no longer an agreed upon fact set.

And I think that those of us who report on this administration have tried to put our attention there. We have tried to make it that there is focus on a fact set. And then readers can decide what they think of that. We obviously have a president who has done a great deal of damage to faith in the media. the president has been very eager to try to undermine the media to raise questions about the legitimacy of coverage he doesn't like, which is almost all coverage, unless it's very fawning of him. The flip side of that is that some readers who don't like the president are so angry at the reality they're seeing that they have been very hostile toward reporters who are really just relaying what is going on. And all of that has created, I think, a challenging environment. What are you going to be looking for to understand the risk of a potentially bigger political

crisis unfolding after the election? And maybe to try to be a little bit optimistic here tonight, what might we look for to be hopeful, in fact, that that really profound post-election crisis that seemed to surface at last night's debate is not going to be on the table? So a couple of things, I would say, number one, in terms of whether that's on the table or not, It's going to be on the table until we have a sense of what happens on November 3rd. And if it is a close election, what happens in the days after? I think the Republican Party's appetite for backing Donald Trump on this fight that he wants to have is not what he would like it to be. And so I think that if people are looking for some sense that there is, I think that one of the things that's been very frustrating for people in this moment is that there is no umpire, for lack of a better word.

I think at the end of the day, Republican leaders will probably be in that role if the president has lost and is refusing to back away because I don't think that they think this helps them in terms of their own legitimacy. What do we see in terms of questions around election sites, you know, whether there are stories about ongoing clashes between Republicans and Democrats, about the counting of absentee ballots and how that will go? I think those are all things to be watching for. And then my big question is with the new rules that the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has put on these faceoffs between the Democratic and the Republican nominees for many decades, the new rules they're planning on putting in place because last night was such a spectacle, does that give the president a reason to say he's not showing up? Biden's team has already said they will show up.

Right. That'll be an interesting proof point as to where this conversation is going to go. Some questions have come in by email over the last 48 hours. So let's start putting some of those to you and get the dialogue started. So we'll look for the first question board to come up. It's from Robert. He's asking, what is the best way to combat both the growing distrust of mainstream news outlets, such as the New York Times, as well as the large amount of misinformation being pushed online?

Maggie, are you at all optimistic that there can be some return to that kind of golden age of of journalism and democracy where we did share a set of facts? I think that'll require a reader buy-in much more than people want to acknowledge. I don't think that that's something that the news media can control, right, other than making sure that they're following best practices. Readers really need to be smart consumers, and they need to make sure they're getting their information from a source that is generally reliable.

We all make mistakes. We have all had mistakes. I think what all we can do is try to, you know, be as diligent about making sure our facts are correct as we can. I think in general, what news outlets can do is as good a job as possible at making our processes clear, making people understand why we use anonymous sources, making clear how many sources we have heard things from. Let's go to our next email question. This is from Steve saying there have been numerous reports of ongoing investigations of Trump in his organization on many fronts.

Megga, you've broken a lot of those stories. Steve asks, is it expected that there will be indictments brought forward once he is out of office? We know that the Attorney General of New York is investigating the Trump organization. We know that Sy Vance, the Manhattan District Attorney,

is investigating the president's finances. So there are already two investigations that are well underway. One of those cases, the Vance case, went to the Supreme Court in terms of the argument of whether Vance can have access to the president's tax returns and just let me put in a plug for the Times bombshell over the weekend

that revealed a lot of data about what is in the president's tax returns. I don't think we really know what this is going to look like because the leadership of the DOJ, the Department of Justice by Bill Barr, has been so atypical and so beyond the norms of what we have seen from that department, that I think there is going to be a lot of reviewing of a lot of stuff, if by, Biden comes in and is the president and has a new attorney general. I think the question of whether the president gets investigated will be top of mind for some, but I think there are a number of other questions about decisions made by Barr and by his office and his closest advisors that will be under review. You mentioned the big Times Expoise, the bombshell, the final kind of release of

these much sought-after tax returns of the president going back almost a decade. What was your takeaway of what was really important there? So there were two details that I thought were very important. One is just the mere fact that we had a number of what he paid in personal income tax for 2016 and 2017. That number was $750 each year. That is a shocking amount of money for a lot of Americans who make a lot less money than President Trump did, whether Trump is actually a billionaire or not in terms of how liquid he is. That's sort of beside the point that $750 is a really small amount of money. And there are a lot of people who can understand that, right? This is not obscure. This is not a Mueller investigation into possible conspiracy between Russian officials

and the Trump campaign in 2016. That was kind of esoteric for a lot of folks. This is not the impeachment inquiry, which related to military aid earmarked for Ukraine that was being withheld by the president because he wanted political investigations into the Bidens. That, too, was a little complicated for average people and just not close to their lives. But $750 a year in taxes is something that taxpayers understand. Whether it matters, I don't know. But I think it did give us a fuller picture of this president. I, you know, covered the Romney Obama race in 2012, where Mitt Romney was pummeled for not releasing his tax returns for months. And then when he finally did, it turned out that he paid, I think, something to the effect of 13.5% in an effective tax rate for his

personal federal taxes. And that was still a couple million dollars. And yet he still got really heavily criticized. So we'll see. The other point that I did think mattered, and it hasn't gotten as much attention, is that there was no evidence of some, at least from the reporting, that we ran in the paper of a deep tie to Russia in some way. And since that has been, I think, speculated about pretty widely for years, I thought that was interesting. Great. We've got a question here from a viewer, Jeff Galloway. You've referenced the role that Republican leaders may play if Trump loses the election. Are you surprised about the fact that the Republican leadership over the last two to three years has not been more vocal about pushing back in response to the president's statement and

actions. And I can even think, Maggie, of last night's kind of extraordinary mention of the proud boys get really not a lot of condemnation or pushback, so to speak, from senior figures in the Republican Party, including in the Senate. It's pretty consistent with how the Republican leadership has dealt with this president's repeated eruptions on a number of topics, which has generally been to avert their gaze. And they do that for a couple of reasons, but one of which is that the party's base of supporters, many voters who many of these senators need to back them, really like this president. And so it is part of their out of self-interest about their own jobs that they do it and preserving their Senate majority, which for Mitch McConnell is vital.

The other project that has been vital to Mitch McConnell has been pushing through judges. It's not just the Supreme Court justices, which the president's on his third nominee, but it's a series of judges on federal benches around the country that the president has pushed through. I think it's more than 200 at this point. That is something that McConnell is really invested in. And, you know, Hill reporters who have watched McConnell for a very long time say that he, well, he is a very different politician than President Trump. He shares President Trump's laser focus on winning. President Trump sometimes changes how he defines winning, but McConnell's is pretty consistent, which is wins for his caucus.

wins on specific policy and wins on getting people onto the judicial benches. And that's what they're looking toward. I think that what has been interesting right now, just to hone in on this judge's point, they are pushing through a vote on a Supreme Court justice nominee where politically you can argue that they should have picked a different nominee who might appeal a woman named Barbara Lagoa had been on the list and she's in Florida and she conceivably could have appealed to Latino voters in Florida and Arizona who support the president has been playing for and needs. But you can make the broader argument that instead of ramming this vote through before the election, that it actually might motivate his voters more if they did the vote afterwards.

And the fact that the Republican Party is pushing this vote so quickly, I think is an indication of how aware they are that the president's political chances are not great on November 3rd. Thank you for listening to the Monk Debates podcast. If you enjoy the civil and substantive conversations we convene week in and week out on this podcast, please consider becoming a monk debates member. As a member, you get unlimited access to our 10-year-plus video and audio online library of world-class debates. You also get three complementary memberships you can use to share the art of great debate with family and friends. Still not convinced?

Order one of over a dozen Monk Debates book publications for free if you become a member now. Monk Debates memberships are 30% off this month for new enrollees. Visit monkdebates.com slash membership for more details. Now, back to our Monk Dialogue with the New York Times, Maggie Haberman. Linda Brofie just emailed saying, it seems the Supreme Court of the United States has become thoroughly politicized. How do you see the way forward for the court? And maybe, again, it would be interesting to kind of game out what happens maybe post-election

and explain to viewers the key role that the U.S. Supreme Court could play in a contested election result. In terms of the argument that the court has become completely politicized, that is actually an argument that has been made at many different points over the last couple of decades. It was certainly made in 2000. Supreme Court ultimately decided the election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, there has been a lot of criticism from the right of John Roberts because they believe that his votes have become, and his opinions have become outside of the conservative milieu that they would like to see and that they thought they were going to get. And there's always this question when you have a Supreme Court nominee

of whether they are going to have fealty to conservative ideology, liberal ideology, certainly Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a liberal icon, but she had an enormous role in policy that impacted women across the country. I think that Brett Kavanaugh, after a very contentious process in 2018, has been trying to show that he is not simply going to do what President Trump might favor. There will obviously be a couple of key tests of that potentially in the coming months. The role that the court could play in an election is if there are lawsuits related to that. to ballot fights in various states, those could end up in an expedited fashion before the Supreme Court. What is very different in terms of the politicization of the court is the president is openly saying,

said last week that, yes, I want to get Amy Coney Barrett in there because I think the election is going to go to the Supreme Court. And he said a version of that last night at the debate, too. That is very unusual. I mean, he is just openly talking about it as a political body that will settle an election as opposed to voters settling it. there's a reason that the fact that the election was settled the way it was in 2000 left such a residue of anger among voters who did not support George W. Bush, which is that, you know, voters who supported Al Gore believed that they had been disenfranchised. Megan, we'll take another question that's come in by email over the last 48 hours.

This question is from John. I mean, asserting a widespread fraud, Trump has succeeded in changing the electoral results from a question of math to one where opinion on which neither camp will accept the validity of the other side's data. That goes back a bit, Maggie, to our discussion earlier, just about, you know, being in a post-truth world and holding an election in a world where people are not only entitled to their opinions, but seemingly now entitled to their facts. I have to say in this conversation with you, I'm somewhat encouraged because you seem more relaxed than I am about the potential here for, you know, a really painful post-election phase. Do you think that the president's

kind of purposely playing this out? Is this part of a grand strategy or a plan? Or is he just acting on gut and instinct here? And we're just going to have to see what happens. So a couple of things. Number one, I don't actually view the idea that as accurate that both sides are going to question the results of the election. I think you have one side, which is led by a person very clearly saying, I'm not going to accept that. I don't really think Biden has said that. I think Hillary Clinton has said things like Biden should not concede that, frankly, are statements that not all Democrats wish had been said. It's such asymmetrical warfare that I think it is important to make that point. Why am I more relaxed? Because I have seen a lot of these cycles around what the president does. That is not

to say that people should not be anxious. I'm not saying that anybody is wrong for being anxious. but, you know, I am saying that I think that if you look at this through the lens of whether Donald Trump is really going to do anything he can to cling to power, which is the statement that gets said over and over again, I don't happen to share that view. I think that Donald Trump is very good at redefining what his idea of winning is. I think there's a real question about how much longer Donald Trump actually wants to do this job because I don't think he is enjoying it. I don't think he's enjoyed it for a very long time. I mean, I'll give you a, for instance, I once asked a friend of his in 2017 if the president was liking the job.

And the friend said, oh, absolutely. And I said, what about it? And they said, oh, you know, Air Force One, Air Force Two, Marine One. I mean, he likes, I think, the trappings that come with it. I don't think the day-to-day is something that he is particularly built for. And in reality, I think he knows that. So that does not mean that if November 3rd comes around and it's incredibly close, that he won't try to create chaos.

I think he lights fires and I think he watches them burn. And I think way too often it is described as some grand strategy. I was on a panel earlier today with a former colleague who's currently at the Washington Post, Ashley Parker, and she and I covered the president together. And Ashley and I had this conversation about that there was a blind quote in a Politico story that stays with me constantly. And it was a former administration official. I think I know who it was saying that everybody thinks that the president is playing some game of 3D chess. but more often than not, he's just eating the pieces. And I do think that that is a pretty accurate assessment.

Now, does that mean that his language is not dangerous? It's very dangerous. The things he was saying last night are dangerous and could have consequences that, you know, may not be what he's intending or what he realizes will happen, but he just realizes that it will create uncertainty and chaos. That is what he likes to do. I'm not telling you not to be concerned or afraid. It could be very messy after November and December.

What I am telling you is that I don't think that, you know, unlike what we have seen over four years, that if he is losing and looks like he is losing, that his party has a huge incentive to back him in a charge forward. I think it's important for viewers to know that before coming to the New York Times and Politico, you were a reporter in New York City working at tabloids and you had a lot of opportunity to see Donald Trump as a business person, as a businessman, as a real estate developer in that city. So if you go back to your experience then, how do you think? think this president could characterize post-election losing as winning? If it's clear that he is

going to lose, then if you look at his past business history, is there a way there that he could kind of spin this out that doesn't lead to kind of riots on the streets and, you know, American democracy pushed to the greatest, you know, crisis in a generation? Look, I think it's important to look back on Donald Trump's history as a casino developer and his bank. and he had several bankruptcies, where his creditors were the ones who suffered. He did not personally. And so I think that if he can come up with a way where he tries to raise questions and so doubt about the fairness, quote unquote, that's a word you hear from him a lot of the election. Again, this is if it's close. If it is a land side victory for Joe Biden, that's going to be a very different story for Donald Trump. I think that if it is a close election and the polling right now shows it is likely to be fairly close. close, you know, these races are one within the margins, that's what we saw in 2016, that he will do what he did last night, which is say, you know, we're never going to know, but okay, I'm going to go.

That is a scenario that I think is likely. I will not say definitely, I'm just saying I think that that's how he makes a loss into a non-laws. Yeah, interesting. That's really a new takeaway for me tonight that maybe some of this messaging of his around, you know, the fairness of the election is actually, him kind of softening the ground, setting the terrain for rationale for his defeat that's somebody else's fault. I think that's a really interesting insight. Let's go to another question

that's been emailed into us. Deborah Campbell asks, what do you think the likely mood at the White House was last night after the conclusion of that extraordinary debate? So it's a great question. What the mood should have been was alarm, but what the mood actually was, and is it often is was blame. And there was lots of finger pointing on how did we get here. The president, to be clear, thinks he did great. He was really happy with his performance. And he was aided in that by certain top aides and some of his relatives. Privately, there are plenty of people around him who acknowledge he didn't do well. One of the people who briefed him and prepared him for the debate, Chris Christie said on ABC last night and this morning that he thought the president was too hot.

And that was an honest answer based on just some other stuff I had heard from people who had the president who agreed. But look, there is a constant in this White House, as I said, which is that when things go badly, it's not time to pull back and reflect. It's time to just point the finger. So look back at what happened at the president's rally in Tulsa earlier this summer. They blamed Brad Pascal, who just stepped down from the campaign today, had been demoted as the campaign manager in July. And sure, he probably could have tried to put up a warning flare for the president and not hyped it so much. The rally was hyped as having a million respondents to come,

and there were attendance of about 6,000 people. But that's what they do. It's just all somebody else's fault. It's never the president's fault. So if the president was too hot last night in the debate, it had to be because people were briefing him badly or prepping him badly. And he's a 74-year-old man. He went out on stage, and he was angry,

and he just unloaded on his rival and on the moderator. So I think that the more that the president absorbs the news coverage of this, he might start to realize it wasn't that great, but that was not the reaction last night. Yeah. Just building on the theme of debates, Mike Pride is asking, what impact, if any, do you think next week's vice presidential debate will have on the election? And I guess it's kind of a big national debut for Kamala Harris as vice presidential candidate for the Democrats. Sure. I'd call it a bit of a re-debue for her. I mean, she clearly had her national coming out when she was announced and then and she was at the Democratic National Convention.

But remember, she was a presidential candidate last year. She did not do well. But that was how most people were introduced to her. I think for people who are looking a little more closely at the vice presidential running mate of a nominee in Joe Biden who's close to 80, they might be listening a little more carefully to what she's like and how she sounds. There has been an effort by the Trump campaign to paint her as two extremes. to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. I think that's going to be something she is mindful of. Mike Pence is a good debater. He was a good debater in 2016. He did very well against Tim Cain. I expect he will be very well prepared. I know he's been taking his prep very seriously, which is not something that the president did. So I think that that's what people are going to be looking for. And I think because she is a female vice presidential nominee and because there have been

rather few of them, more people might tune in than they would otherwise. But also, again, because of Biden's age. Yeah, just to pick up on Pence, Marion Thompson-Howell is asking you, what's your sense of his role in everything that's happening? He seems to, I mean, this is my perception, is he seems to have kind of faded somewhat from public view, having taken a bigger role in the earlier months of the pandemic, leading Trump's response. So where do you feel? that Pence fits in the kind of calculus of this president? And maybe what are Pence's own prospects for the future? Sure.

So I guess if you mean on the calculus of just sort of generally where the White House is right now, look, the best thing that, frankly, that happened to Mike Pence was the fact that Donald Trump wouldn't let him just have the stage because the administration's response on COVID has not been a success story despite their efforts to claim otherwise. You know, the president tasked Pence with this telling people privately he didn't consider this to be a big assignment. When Mike Pence started doing briefings and was getting news coverage for it, President Trump did not like that and tried to step in himself and get more attention. And so Pence has been overshadowed. But again, that has meant that he has been not left holding the bag, which I think some people who support him thought was what was coming when the president tasked him with this at the end of February.

I think that Pence has survived this administration, but the way he has survived is by being as unobtrusive as possible and as client as possible and as agreeable to the president as possible. That has not positioned him in a particularly standout way. Thank you. Again, let's just wrap up on the pandemic itself and this again rush to the November 3rd vote. what are you hearing out there in terms of how the Trump administration is going to try to burnish its pandemic response with voters? Because it clearly is in all the public opinion surveys, you know, right behind the economy, the number one kind of issue driving voting intentions.

And you'd even say voting behaviorist, whether people are going to vote by absentee ballot or show up in person. It's definitely, your point, by the way, about how this pandemic is going to affect voting patterns is incredibly important. And one I wish I had made earlier, it's something that I think gets overlooked that while polling shows that Joe Biden has a lead, it's very hard to say what turnout is going to be. And the universes of turnout that are being modeled by Republicans and Democrats are not always the same. In terms of what the administration is counting on to burnish its credentials, it is a vaccine. The president is very blunt about that, you know, that he expects

a vaccine likely before November 3rd. And then sometimes he says maybe it'll be. after. There are a couple of different candidates. He is counting on that. Whether he will get credit for that, I think, is a big question because most voters seem to have made up their minds about how he performed on the coronavirus. And I think are not going to be likely to credit him with this, especially because there are so many questions within the public mind about whether he is heeding the advice of scientists and whether he's listening to people on his own administration. The other thing that I hear from some Republicans privately is even if there is a vaccine. And to be clear, everyone should hope that there's a successful vaccine that can make life start turning back to normal at some point in 2021.

Whether it is good for the president to start talking about the coronavirus again because so many people have decided what they think about him, that's not clear. And so if you're talking about the vaccine, you're just reminding people about the virus where they already don't really trust you. I think this is a problem. I think the cake is pretty baked for the president on that issue. And, Maggie, just back to, you know, voter behavior and the rush towards November 3rd, how important do you think that factor could be? And could we end up with a scenario where it seemingly, Republicans are much more likely to vote in person?

So therefore, you have some pretty good numbers for the president on election night, whereas the Democratic vote this year or this election will be disproportionately, allocated compared to past elections towards absentee and mail-in ballots, and therefore that support may only register possibly in the days and weeks after the election. It's certainly a scenario that has been discussed. I think we don't know yet what election day turnout would look like. So while we know that Democrats are vastly outpacing Republicans in terms of absentee ballot requests and returns, you know, whether that gets flipped in the other direction on Election Day remains to be seen, I do think that.

the Democrats are likely to start doing more to encourage voters to turn out on election day to avoid what you just said, you know, if they haven't voted an absentee. I think there has been so many concerns raised about what could happen on election day that I think that Democrats are going to try to tamper down some of that anxiety. I think it's too soon to say whether, because it looks like this right now in absentee is that therefore it means that it'll be flipped on election day voting. We just don't know. I really want to thank you for your time today. The purpose of this series is to provide these types of civil and substantive discussions.

Again, you've been so generous, the opportunity to go deep into some of these issues with you and to get a whole bunch of questions from our viewers answered has been a privilege indeed. So thank you for your insights. Thank you for the great reporting. We're all going to rely on it in the weeks to come to understand what the heck's going to happen between now November 3rd and the weeks after. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to the Monk Dialogues with Maggie Haberman.

We hope you enjoyed the opportunity to listen to smart, civil conversation on the U.S. election and its impact on the pandemic and polarization of American society. For more information on the Monk Dialogs, visit our website at monkdebates.com slash dialogue. We appreciate your feedback on this podcast. Please give us a rating and write a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download your audio. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public dialogue, one conversation at a time.