The NPR Politics Podcast - Allies' Racist "Jokes" Overshadow Trump; Harris On Abortion

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

Donald Trump's campaign disavowed one of several bigoted remarks made by his allies ahead of the candidate's Madison Square Garden speech Sunday night. Vice President Harris has a broad message in the final days of campaigning, focused on turning the page from Trump as well as bread-and-butter issues like abortion care and the economy.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, campaign reporter Stephen Fowler and White House correspondent Asma Khalid.The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Elena Moore. I cover new voters for NPR. That means people who've never voted before, especially young people. Their numbers and power are growing. What issues do they care about? How do they feel? What they say can tell us where this election is headed. My job is to bring their voices to you. To help support our work, sign up for NPR Plus. Just go to plus.npr.org. Hey, it's Miles. Real quick before the show, it has been a wild, exciting, oftentimes exhausting election season. And here in the homestretch, we want you to know about a few other ways you can keep up with everything happening each day. First, there's NPR's morning

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It'll be all over this election and its aftermath as well. And of course, we will be here with you pretty much anytime there's big news with the context and analysis you need to understand it. So up first in the morning, consider this in the evening, and the NPR Politics Podcast every weekday and anytime there's something big happening. This is your election news survival kit from NPR podcasts. Okay, thanks for listening. And here's the show. Hi, this is Chris.

And Theo. And we are currently in our garage pulling rivets on our father and son airplane build project. This podcast was recorded at 104 PM on Monday, October 28th, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. But we will be one step closer to flying our airplane. Here's the show.

That's amazing. Like actually flying? At first I thought this was a toy airplane. That's what I'm thinking. Terrifying and very cool. Hey there, it's the MPR Politics podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign. And I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. And it is the final full week before Election Day. So there was a lot of news over the weekend, and I think we should just kind of go chronologically to start here. Friday night, there was a podcast that was dropped on the Joe Rogan podcast,

Joe Rogan interviewing Trump for hours. Stephen, you listened to this interview. Can you give us the highlights? Well, it was three hours long miles. That's a lot of interviews. Trump bragged that it was the longest interview he's ever done, and I would tend to agree. There was a lot of ground covered over the course of three hours. I mean, Rogan kept trying to get Trump to talk about things like how he felt when he first stepped into the Oval Office after he won. But Trump had other plans. He rambles a lot when he's on the rally stage. He rambles a lot in interviews. And this was no exception.

There was a lot of different topics like a history lesson about Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee and talking about how he hired a bunch of people when he first took office and Trump continues to attack Vice President Kamala Harris. He said that she can't string two sentences together. He said the same thing about Joe Biden and that she talks in a nonsensical way like he's mentioned in the past and then bragged about his own oratorical skills. Here's a little bit of what he had to say there. But when you do the weaves,

and you have to be very smart to do weaves, when you do the weaves, look at this, just in this one thing, we're talking about little pieces of it, but it always ends up, no, no, it comes back home for the right people, for the wrong people, it doesn't come back home and they end up in the wilderness, right?

So that three hour interview also led to Trump being three hours late to a rally in Michigan Friday night Tons of people left but he apologized and said I had to do something important. We had to win I should note Trump has been late to many rallies recently and people have kind of started the notice Osma there was another moment in the Rogan interview that Harris has started jumping on. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, this was a bit of policy detail in which Donald Trump referred to the bipartisan Chips and Science Act that was passed by Congress as a bad deal

and said that essentially the subsidies went to rich companies. And if he were in charge, if he were president, he could have imposed tariffs to get more companies to build semiconductor facilities in the United States. Now this caught my attention because as I mentioned, this Chips and Science Act is fairly popular in the states where it's being implemented. You know, you have the former Republican governor of Arizona who's on board with it. This had Republicans in the Senate who support this legislation.

I had never operated under the assumption that the CHIPS Act was actually something that Trump was thinking to rescind in any way. He's talked a lot about, say, the Inflation Reduction Act and other things. So this was new, caught my attention and certainly caught the Harris campaign's attention because they decided to capitalize on it. And today she is campaigning in Saginaw, Michigan, visiting a semiconductor facility that received some investments from that Chips and Science Act. So then going forward into the weekend, I feel like everyone has been talking about what

was being said yesterday at Trump's rally in Madison Square Garden, but not by Trump himself, right, Stephen? Yeah, so Trump held this massive rally at Madison Square Garden. New York, not a presidential swing state, though it could be key to the balance of power in the house, but it's a big famous arena. Trump's a New York man through and through. And this was kind of this exclamation point to the final week of the closing message of Trump's presidential campaign. But that got overshadowed. Trump himself didn't really do too much outside of his usual stump speech, where he talked about Democrats as the enemy of within, and he talked about

wanting to deport migrants and other things like that. There were hours and hours of pre-show speakers that got way more attention and not for the best reasons. One of them was a comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe. It is absolutely wild times. It really, really is. And you know, there's a lot going on. Like, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it's called Puerto Rico. Okay.

All right. Yeah. And that joke did not go over well. Immediately, several Republicans, Florida Senator Rick Scott and others denounced that sort of attacks against Puerto Ricans. The Trump campaign also disavowed this message saying in a statement, quote, this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign It also resulted in several prominent Puerto Rican celebrities coming out and endorsing Harris in response to that and that wasn't even the most Vulgar joke that he told there were crass sexual references to Latinos

There were comments about Israelis and Palestinians and it kind of went downhill from there up until Trump spoke. You know at the same time that we saw the news of this pre-show speaker talking about Puerto Rico I was covering Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania and she was at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia trying to court specifically Puerto Rican voters. She outlined her economic agenda for the island, talked about wanting to invest in the electrical grid. To me, I think there have been many moments of contrast in this campaign. But that moment that I think was rather unanticipated right

from the Harris campaign, they didn't know that a pre-show speaker was going to say this, really I think exemplifies the contrast that we saw. And you know, as Stephen was saying, shortly afterwards, then we saw the Harris campaign really lean into the support of a number of Puerto Rican celebrities for Harris. And that, politically speaking, Stephen, I guess I just wonder what does that moment say to you about how the Trump campaign is thinking about this kind of final push to Election Day? Is there more emphasis on staying on message? Is there kind of trying to bring that kind of independent voters who traditionally have been kind of turned off

by the rhetoric? Is there an effort at all to tamp some of this down? Miles, the entire closing argument of the Trump campaign, both optically, rhetorically, is about getting his base to show up the Madison Square Garden Rally and all the pre-show speakers and all the pomp and pageantry is not designed to get the votes of Moderates and independents and people who maybe don't like the way Trump speaks this was kind of the culmination of nine years of

Trump's extreme rhetoric around immigrants and his extreme rhetoric about his enemies and opponents and everything about that and the final week of these arenas and other stops that he's doing is geared towards his supporters and his supporters only. The question remains, will that be enough to win? All right, let's take a quick break and when we come back, let's talk more about how Harris spent the weekend. With more electoral college votes than any other swing state, Pennsylvania is largely seen as the make or break battleground. Getting those last couple yards in the red zone in Pennsylvania is really, really tough.

The presidential candidates have their eyes on it and so do we. All this week on the Consider This podcast from NPR. Come along. On the Embedded podcast, every Marine takes an oath to protect the Constitution. Against all enemies, foreign and domestic. This is the story of a Marine in the Capitol on January 6. Did he break his oath? And what does that mean for all of us? Listen to A Good Guy on the embedded podcast from NPR. Anxious? This October, Shortwave is helping wrangle that fear. And the trick may have to do with horror movies.

I feel more alive when I am in situations like this. Learn the surprising science to conquering fear when you subscribe now to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Truth, independence, fairness, transparency, respect, excellence. This is NPR. And we're back. And so let's talk a little bit more about how the vice president is spending these final days of voting.

I feel like the Harris campaign over the last couple of weeks has been defined by just as much about what Harris is saying as who she's saying it next to. I feel like every time on TV in the newsroom, there's like a different celebrity or a different there's Liz Cheney, there's Beyonce. And this weekend, it was Michelle Obama. Asma, can you tell us a little bit about what Michelle Obama said on Saturday night? On Saturday, Harris was campaigning with the former First Lady Michelle Obama. And Michelle Obama had this very direct plea to men to show up and vote for Harris. So I am asking y'all from the core of my being to take our lives seriously. Please.

Do not. Do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through, who don't fully grasp the broad reaching health implications that their misguided policies will have on our health outcomes. Democrats saw abortion as being a really effective issue for them to message on ahead of those 2022 midterms. And Harris was the Biden administration's main messenger on this. She has often argued that it is because of Trump and the justices he appointed to the Supreme Court that Roe versus Wade was overturned.

And you know, in detail, you've often heard Democrats talk about abortion bans in states and what that has meant for women. It is a message that you heard from I would say earlier on in this campaign cycle. And it seems like in these closing days, they're circling back to it. Harris and the Democrats are trying to leave no stone unturned, whether it's Republican voters against Trump, or young voters, or black voters, or women voters. And the Trump campaign instead is telling everybody, butt the base to go kick rocks. It does feel like the Harris campaign is spending a lot of time and energy trying to get those, for lack of a better term, those kind of Haley voters, Nikki Haley voters in the Republican primary to support Harris. How does that make progressives feel as they kind of watch this push towards the center

as opposed to really focusing on the base in these last couple of weeks? So I think there's a couple things to bring up here. One is that, you know, the Harris campaign will say that they are trying to reach out to, you know, base voters, independent, moderate voters. But there is this assumption that the remaining undecided voters tilt more towards the independent moderate ideological stream than sort of left leaning. That all being said, I did a story that aired actually over the weekend where I revisited a number of folks on the left of the Democratic Party, progressives, who had deep hesitation

with Biden when he was running at the top of this ticket. They are now by and large supporting Harris as the nominee. They're not out there necessarily all knocking on doors really enthusiastic about her. And that raises questions for me because they seem to be a bit wary of the outraged folks like you mentioned like Liz Cheney, former Congresswoman Republican, and this courtship towards the middle. And some progressives want to see her lean more into economic issues. Look, I mean, I think at the end of the day, the Democrats here are trying to message to a very broad ideological tent.

And there's a challenge in that. She is speaking to many different political audiences at one time. And going back to Stephen's point about the contrast that I feel like the Harris campaign over and over again is really trying to push to voters. Tomorrow night, she is going to be giving this speech in the same location that Trump spoke to those thousands and thousands of people on January 6th before they marched to the Capitol. I gather that that is an intentional choice.

Asma, can you tell us a little bit more about what we know that she's going to focus the speech on? Yeah, I mean, it's a very deliberate location choice. The Harris campaign wants to remind voters of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They really want this to be front and center in this final week of the campaign. And you really have seen Harris zero in on Trump. You hear this as sort of a central thesis of her closing argument. She'll talk about the fact that it's time to turn the page, move on from, in her view,

the sort of divisiveness and chaos of the Trump era. You're going to see her try to present this contrast of what a Harris presidency would look like in comparison to a second term of the Trump presidency. Stephen, can I just ask when you're talking to voters, this idea of democracy, this idea of protecting institutions, one of the candidates tried to overturn a free and fair election in 2020. Does this stuff come up very often for like the average voter you talk to? You know surprisingly it does and not just for Democrats. I mean for Trump's supporters, the ones that feel he won the 2020 election even though he didn't, you know they see the outgrowth of that in the last four years as an assault on democracy. I mean you hear Trump talk often about calling

Kamala Harris a threat to democracy. And so both the Democrats and Republicans that I've talked to, many voters, feel that the stakes of this election are the future of America's democracy. And in many ways, I mean, this is kind of a January 6 election, no matter which side of the aisle you view it from.

All right. Let's leave it there for today. A lot to watch over the next couple days. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign. And I'm Asma Khalid.

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