The NPR Politics Podcast - Foreign Policy Has Entered The Chat

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

The South Carolina Republican primary is less than two weeks away, and both candidates are talking foreign policy. Nikki Haley, the former UN Ambassador under former President Trump, brings that experience to this debate, and the former president is garnering attention for his comments on world leaders and foreign trade. This episode: national political correspondent Sarah McCammon, political reporter Stephen Fowler, and political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.This podcast was produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Erica Morrison. 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.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Howdy, y'all. This is Russell, and I've been listening to the NPR podcast since 2016. I just moved to North Carolina from Texas, and after driving around here for six months, I have finally visited both Wawa and Sheetz. This podcast was recorded at 1055 a.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, February 13th, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but one thing is for certain. Like Haley and Kennedy, Wawa and Sheets are just scrapping over second place. Buc-ee's has had this from the start. Yes. Now that that is settled, here's the show. Let's not get into Iowa gas stations, right, Danielle? Absolutely. But I appreciate the callback to an old school politics podcast rivalry.

That is some really deep cuts right there. Throwback. Well, thanks for listening for that long. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Stephen Fowler. I also cover the presidential campaign.

And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I, too, cover the presidential campaign. Today, South Carolina is back in the spotlight. Nikki Haley, the state's former governor, is campaigning hard there ahead of the state's primary later this month. And so is her chief opponent, former President Donald Trump. Now, Danielle, I want to start with you. Donald Trump made headlines in South Carolina over the weekend with some of his fiery comments on foreign policy. One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said,

well, sir, if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us? I said, you didn't pay? You're delinquent? He said, yes, let's say that happened. No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills. He questioned America's commitment to Ukraine and its NATO allies. He praised China's President Xi and suggested he's prepared to escalate a trade war should he be elected. Now, Trump has used foreign policy issues repeatedly to attack President Biden. But, Danielle, you were just in South Carolina. Isn't he giving Haley a huge opening here on foreign policy? And what's she doing with it? How's she reacting? Let me start with the second half of that first. How is she

reacting? She's reacting by saying, I have foreign policy experience under Donald Trump, by the way, as his UN ambassador. And I, Nikki Haley, think that he is the chaos candidate. And that is a message we have heard from her throughout this campaign. I know, yeah, both of us heard that in Iowa, New Hampshire. This is one of her major lines. And so when he amps up that rhetoric on President Xi, on NATO, on all sorts of things, then she has more ammo to use on that. Here she is responding to those NATO comments. Now, let me tell you something. I dealt with Russia every single day at the United Nations. Putin kills his opponents. He invades free countries.

This is not someone you ever want to pal around with. And you certainly don't want to give them the right to invade a friend. So she's trying to make a contrast here. She's going after Trump directly. Right. Yeah. And so that question you asked about whether Trump is giving her a huge opening on foreign policy, the unsatisfying answer is yes and no. Yes, he is, in the sense that foreign policy is one of the biggest ways that Haley can draw a contrast to Trump, both in terms of policy positions and in terms of experience, because she has that experience as ambassador. And it also allows her to emphasize not just her foreign policy positions and experience, but the story she is telling. And the story she's telling is,

I am responsible. I have the temperament to do this. I have my stuff together. And Donald Trump, you have to worry about him doing foreign policy. You don't have to worry about me. But on the other hand, I can tell you, and Stephen was there too, at that rally in Conway when those NATO comments happened, the crowd didn't react. The crowd is not sitting there worrying about foreign policy. When Trump says stuff like that, they hear it as Trump's tough. He's a loose cannon. He's set in a good way. He says what he thinks. And they reacted in kind, which is to say approvingly. And Stephen, you've also been in South Carolina. What are you hearing from voters about this race? Well, you know, a lot of voters in South Carolina have been on board with Donald Trump and they remain on board with Trump.

Recent polling shows him winning anywhere from, you know, 60 to 70 plus percent of the vote in a lot of these cases. And it might seem surprising because Nikki Haley was the state's former governor. She was popular when she was governor, remained popular after that. But there's a couple of things, I think, in voter interactions that explain that and kind of explain the overall way this primary is gone. So Donald Trump is very, very popular with Republicans, very, very popular with primary voters. And if given the choice between the very, very popular option and something that's kind of the same, but a little bit different, nine times out of 10, these voters are going towards the real thing. I talked to a voter who was wearing a shirt that said, basically, no matter what happens to Donald Trump, if he's indicted, convicted,

whatever, still voting for Trump. And so it's not necessarily that voters in South Carolina don't like Nikki Haley. It's that they like Donald Trump better. And there's not necessarily enough different between the two politically with the policies that they better. And there's not necessarily enough different between the two politically with the policies that they want, that there's much of a difference. Now, we talked about Haley responding to Trump. Trump also went after not only Haley this weekend, but also her husband, Michael. She brought her husband. Where's her husband? Oh, he's away. He's away. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband? Where is he? He's away. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband? Where is he? He's gone.

Of course, Michael Haley is deployed overseas with the South Carolina Army National Guard, as Trump no doubt knows. And Haley responded with this sharp rebuke. It's not even personal about me and Michael. It was the bigger issue of how much we value those who serve. Danielle, I wonder what you make of this attack, not just on Nikki Haley, but on her husband and really his military status in a way. Right. Yes. And what Trump was really getting at with that insult, what he seemed to be getting at, I should say, is that Nikki Haley's husband is perhaps not devoted that, you know, sort of asking the question of why isn't he here? It really does, of course, seem to be pretty gendered. But also, yes, we have heard him attack military members before. You'll recall way back in the run up to 2016 when he insulted John McCain, saying, I like people who weren't captured. I mean, this is, speaking of thumbing your nose at the system, this is what Trump does. His voters, no matter what, believe that he supports the troops. They

believe that he's patriotic. But Trump can kind of say whatever he wants, and he's displaying that here. And do you think this one matters, Stephen? I mean, this was an attack in a pretty military heavy state. Right. You know, South Carolina has several military bases. It has a very heavy population of active duty members as well as veterans. But at the same time, this is really this dynamic we've seen over Trump where his supporters take him seriously, but not necessarily literally. And his opponents take him seriously and literally. And then, you know, as you've seen some of the responses from members of Congress, they try to not take him seriously or literally whenever they have the option to.

So I think to understand these insults and to understand the attacks, you have to remember that it's more about the needling of his opponent or more about kind of poking fun or mocking somebody and less about the actual substance of it. Because if this were any other Republican candidate or any Democratic candidate that had crosswords to say about military service, there would be an entirely different response to it. But in this arena, this safe space of the Trump campaign and these rally and this kind of circus-like event, it's a completely different thing. So what goes on inside these rallies and what is said and what the reaction to it is very, very different from what people take when they see clips of it or

even watch the full thing outside of the rallies. You know, this whole conversation around whether to take Trump literally or seriously or neither or both. You know, that was a big conversation in 2016. I think it needs to be said, not taking him seriously is not really an option anymore. He's been president once and he is looking very likely, almost certain to be the Republican nominee once again. And we're going to take a quick break more about voters. Danielle, we've mentioned you were at the South Carolina rally on Saturday where former President Trump made those very controversial comments about NATO, among other things. What did you notice about the crowd? Yeah, so this event was at a college in Conway. And so the usual Republican crowd that you see at any rally, Trump or otherwise, tends to be a bit on the older side. This crowd had quite a few younger people, first of all. That was notable.

Not only that, I definitely noticed the T-shirts that people were wearing. People who are listening to this podcast who have never been to a Trump rally, it is a sea of Trump paraphernalia, both official and unofficial and homemade. It is sequined shirts. It is hats. It's capes. It's all sorts of things. Whatever you can imagine, people have it. But I also noticed some of these shirts had, there were a lot of shirts that say FJB, which refers to a phrase that we are not going to say on this podcast. But the JB would be the current president. Yeah, the JB being Joe Biden, of course.

There were also some shirts with a slur about Kamala Harris, a sexist slur that we are also definitely not going to repeat. Shirts with several women wearing that I saw that said, yes, I'm a Trump girl, get over it. A lot of shirts really, again, thumbing their nose is the polite way of putting it at politeness itself? I mean, you're sensing sort of an escalation. What did you notice compared to eight years ago, the last time we really had a campaign, right, because of the pandemic? The misogyny is still there. We still

remember some of the slogans, the chanting, the T-shirts that there were about Hillary Clinton. So that's still there. The things that we cannot repeat, the swear words are still there. I think it's a little too soon to tell to say that, you know, it is amped up from the 2016 election because that was a very intense atmosphere. But, you know, at its core, things really have not changed. Another thing that Trump said at this rally is that the media is the enemy of the people. He still asks his crowds to turn around and look at the press riser and boo at all of us reporters. All of that is still quite similar. Stephen, what did you notice while you were there? Yeah, I mean, I was struck, having covered a number of Trump rallies in Georgia over the years, that it does feel different in a certain sense. I mean, we're almost on a decade now of Donald Trump in politics, Donald Trump running for president, being president, running for president again. And the environment

and the atmosphere of these rallies, it's not a typical campaign rally in that sense. I mean, there was something that was new to me. It's not new to Trump rallies. But for maybe a year or so now, the end of these rallies features Trump stopping with his riffing, pausing as this dramatic music swells. sort of soliloquy about how things used to be better in the old days and when he was president and how terrible things are under Democrats and how he can fix it and make America great again and returning to greatness. And it's this giant monologue that really evokes this sense of an altar call at the end of a church service. And the people that show up to these rallies, I heard people come as far away from New York for this rally.

It's an experience. Somebody got shouted out for attending the rally. This was maybe about the hundredth or so rally that they had been to, Trump had said. And so it's not just a place to show up and show support for a candidate and the future that they want to bring about in the politics. This is an experience. And as Daniel mentioned, the crassness of the chants, the crassness of the conversations I have with voters that speak in very blunt and explicit and conspiratorial terms about Democrats and about President Joe Biden and other things, it isn't like anything else in politics.

And I don't think that's necessarily something that's going to change. It is an at-capacity crowd. The capacity of the venues differ. But the one thing that doesn't differ is how many people are there and how many people wait to show up outside. And so, you know, it is a Trump rally like years past, but really, it's a different vibe. You know, I want to take a step back here. I mean, Trump is very popular in the Republican Party. We have established that. We know that. But Nikki Haley was a popular governor in South Carolina. She was elected in 2010 as part of the Tea Party wave by, you know, many of the same types of voters that are now supporting Donald Trump.

So I have to ask, I mean, why isn't she doing better in her home state? Well, I think it's kind of as you mentioned. You know, back in the olden days, aka about a decade or so ago, there were multiple different lanes of the Republican Party. And the Tea Party kind of had this shortcut to reaching a lot of different people that weren't necessarily as active in politics and tapping into a lot of economic concerns and a lot of cultural concerns and kind of bulldozing a new path on the right wing of the Republican Party. But if they had their own lane then that Nikki Haley rode, Donald Trump bulldozed the entire freeway and now there is one express lane, Trump train, all aboard and they've moved on to bigger, better things and the bigger, better candidate of Donald Trump.

And so it's hard to put that lightning back in the bottle. And so it's not that Nikki Haley is unpopular in South Carolina. It's not that Nikki Haley is necessarily unpopular with voters. It's just that Trump is this singular focus. And why would you want to settle for anything less than that? I mean, Danielle, who is the voter in South Carolina that's still backing Haley, still hoping maybe somehow she can pull it out? The voter that likes Nikki Haley in South Carolina is often older, although many Republican primary voters are older. So it's a little hard to distinguish there. But it is someone who remembers her as governor and liked her then and still likes her now, who feels a personal connection to her. I talked to one voter who said she did know Nikki Haley personally as a girl.

I talked to another voter who said she feels like she knows her. It's voters like that. It's voters who are scared by Trump, who say that they don't like the idea of Donald Trump, especially on foreign policy. So in that sense, Haley's messaging is working, at least among her voters. Now, the problem is she has to expand that outward right. But the interesting thing is that often the Haley-Trump difference gets laid out incorrectly, I think, or sort of shorthanded as moderate versus conservative. And that really is not true. And I think that it's really important to get at kind of what Stephen was saying there. As Stephen was saying, there's a sort of one Trump express lane, which is a great way of putting it. It's that Trump is that Haley is a part of a very Trumpy party right now. And her rhetoric has changed to embrace that. And the question is whether she can win people over with that, like while embracing the Trump policies by like, for example, talking about trans children playing sports, that sort of

thing, or being really, really, really tough on China, being a China hawk, that sort of thing. The question is whether she can embrace the Trump policies while also projecting, I am a staid, non-chaotic, orderly person, and to whom that really does appeal. And not only that, by the way, but also I am younger. That is another big part of her message that she is hammering a bit more now. And her voters, I will say, really responded to that as well. Right. I mean, the thing she's been doing that I've noticed from the beginning of this campaign is trying to pitch herself to more moderate voters, especially in those earlier states. At the same time, she can't ignore the Trump phenomenon, and she has to speak to that part of the party. And her roots, once again, are in a very conservative wing of the party. So you kind of see, I think, a mix of that in

her candidacy. Stephen, what are you hearing about that? Well, yeah, I want to leave you with two voters that I talked to that I think are emblematic of the challenges Nikki Haley faces, the challenges Donald Trump faces in a general election, and kind of the overall shape of this Republican Party primary as we head into South Carolina. I talked to Marie Barber and Sarah Ferillo at a Nikki Haley rally in Charleston just after New Hampshire, And this is what they said about Haley. The American people need to get sick of two elderly white males and that being our only choice. You know, she's young.

She's a great thinker. I think she's got a lot of appealing qualities. I think that she appeals to the moderate independents. And I think it's just the Republican Party saying, OK, it's time for somebody other than an 80-year-old white male to run the country. I totally agree. But I just don't know what she needs to do. And case in point, they both said that if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee,

they will gladly vote for him over Joe Biden. We're going to leave it there for today. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Stephen Fowler. I also cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I too cover the presidential campaign. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.