The NPR Politics Podcast - How Harris, Trump Prep For Tuesday's Debate

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have their first — and, so far, only — scheduled debate on Tuesday. What are the stakes, and what is each candidate doing to prepare? This episode: White House correspondents Asma Khalid & Franco Ordoñez, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.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

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hi, this is Dana. And Brian. And our Black Lab Brooke. And we're starting our road trip back

from Wisconsin to Idaho after two weeks of fun visiting family and friends. This podcast was recorded at 2.38 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, September 9th of 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but we'll still be enjoying our drive across this beautiful country. Okay, here's the show. I'm really envious of these vacations in the midst of our crazy election news cycle coverage. Hey, you know, Wisconsin to Idaho, that's a hell of a trip. I mean, Idaho is beautiful. I was there about two weeks ago in Sun Valley. It's awesome. All right. Well, hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Frank Oredonez. I cover the campaign.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, what to watch for in the first and so far only presidential debate scheduled between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Franco, I want to begin the conversation with you. These are two candidates who have never met in person, never really spoken before. So how is Trump preparing for this moment? I mean, Trump will tell you that he does not need to prepare, that he doesn't do, you know, the formal preparation that we've known about, you know, the mock debates, the stand-in opponents. I was just on a Trump campaign call, and they say he's preparing by being on the trail. He's had a bunch of events

over the last week on the key issues that are going to come up. He spoke at the Economic Club of New York on the economy, of course. He spoke to the Fraternal Order of Police to talk about crime and safety. And the campaign also points out that he's also had town hall meetings, some long and short interviews. I'd argue that most of those were with friendly media and friendly audiences. But the campaign argues that he is already taking all different kind of questions in all different forms and that he is ready. They even went as far as to argue the case that they compared his style or his debating prowess to that of Muhammad Ali and that Harris could not prepare for him. And on that note, I'm actually curious, since I've been covering Trump

so much, you've been doing Harris. How has she been preparing? So different tactics here, right? She's been hunkering down in Pittsburgh. This debate is going to be in Philly, so nearby in Pennsylvania. She has been really sort of leaning into traditional classical debate prep. Harris is known as someone who is, I would say, a fairly solid debater. If you've seen some of her performances during that 2020 presidential primary, she's also known as someone who likes to prepare a lot and have all that information. Look, I will also say, though, that the Democratic campaign is trying to set expectations here. They were saying that they believe Donald Trump will be ready for the debate, that he is a showman, they say, who won the last debate, and they expect him to be prepared. I mean, part of, you know, the unknown here is that while Harris might be more of like a

traditional debate prep person, she has never actually debated in this high stakes of a moment. This is her first time being a presidential nominee. In contrast, Donald Trump has been in the limelight here and has actually been on the debate stage running for president a number of spotlight and pressure on Harris and people looking at how she does in this debate, because as we know, Joe Biden's debate performance in June is what derailed his presidential candidacy. And the first few minutes of that debate, it was pretty clear that he was going to have a rough night. Harris has a couple of things that she needs to do in answering some of the attacks that Trump has been leveling at her, things like why she's changed positions on XYZ issue. But the thing is, if she can attack those things in a fairly economical way, then I think a lot of the questions about Harris as a candidate or as a debater and the scrutiny

on her suddenly will probably shift away and it'll move much more cleanly toward Donald Trump, because we know what we're going to get from Donald Trump. It's not a secret. This talk of will he be disciplined? No, he won't be. We know what he does. He lies in a lot of these things. He meanders. He's going to do what he does. But, you know, if that kind of level of incoherence shows up while Harris actually answers questions, I think you're going to have a different sort of scrutiny that happens after the debate compared to what we saw back in June. Yeah. I mean, back in June, too, if I recall, I mean, Donald Trump was not necessarily the most

coherent himself in answering some of these questions. He did not have a great debate, I will say. But the reason I think that by and large, people didn't pay that much attention to it was because of just how drastically poor of a performance it was. It was probably the worst debate performance by any presidential candidate in the history of debate performances, not to quote Trump or to sound like Trump, but in without hyperbole. That's like what what happened. I mean, I would say, though, you were surprised in some sense by Trump. While, of course, he did continue to talk many, many falsehoods that we've known and heard so many times. I think the muted mics was able to kind of mute some of the worst tendencies that he has to kind of bulldoze over his political opponents. Let's talk more about format in a moment after the break.

But before we do that, you were talking about the fact that a lot of voters already know what they're getting with Donald Trump. With Kamala Harris, she is still trying to introduce herself to the American public. You know, it strikes me that one major challenge she has as a candidate is that she's trying to get people to know who she is. She talks about being a new way forward, a change candidate. But she's also been vice president to the incumbent president for four years. So how or what does she need to do, in your view, Domenico, to define herself? Well, I think it's some of what she's been trying to do in her advertising and the way she's talking, which is talking about the economy in a way that's a little different than Joe Biden, talking about prices being an issue for people

that the economy has done better, but that there's more work to do. And I think that you're going to hear more of that kind of message as compared to what Biden used to sound like, which was a little bit more defensive and wanting to talk about economists and what they're seeing. And Harris's campaign clearly has taken a little bit different tack. And I think that's why in polling, you actually see the disparity between Trump and Harris on who you trust more to handle the economy is tighter than it was when it was Trump versus Biden. I think immigration is going to be another huge issue. And Harris has advantages on abortion rights by much bigger margins than Trump has on immigration or the economy over Harris. And I think that reducing the margins might wind up being the story of this campaign, not only as the Harris campaign tried to campaign in rural areas to try to reduce those margins,

and to try to attack some of these vulnerabilities to try to reduce the margins of the advantages that Trump has. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. And we're back. And before we dive back into the show, just a quick note here. Don't forget to hit follow on your preferred podcast app to make sure you get notified whenever we have new episodes available. And I want to talk about the format here because there was some back and forth about this.

You know, Domenico, you mentioned the issue of muted mics, unmuted mics. Remind us of the broad ground rules here. Well, you know, Trump and Joe Biden agreed to rules that had basically the mics muted for both candidates. And that's something that the Biden campaign wanted because they didn't want Trump rolling over Joe Biden. Now, the Harris campaign wanted something different because they saw after the debate that Trump came across as more, quote unquote, disciplined, even though part of that is because the mics were shut off. So you don't know if there was him trying to barter on these rules. The Trump folks saying, keep the rules the way they are. The Harris campaign saying, no, we think that the mic should totally be open. This is a new candidate. Their sort of compromise here was to have the mics muted initially. And then if there's a lot of crosstalk, then the network has the right to be able to open the mics. No audience here as well.

Yeah, no audience. And they're both behind lecterns on the stage. And this idea of muting or unmuting the mics, though, is ultimately up to the discretion of the network, which is ABC News. Is that right? Yeah, because we don't have a standardized debate format anymore or group that runs this because the Trump folks were upset with the Commission on Presidential Debates. So now we have this sort of Wild West free for all, like we see in the primaries, where you have the networks pitching themselves to both candidates, trying to get them to agree, you know, and get them to be on the same stage together and agree to different rules and

different moderators. So I recall during that last debate between Biden and Trump, there was some criticism, particularly from folks on the left, that the moderators, CNN, did not fact check the candidates in real time. And they thought that that was to Biden's detriment. Any difference here with ABC on fact checking in real time? This has been the complication of Trump in this world for a while. I mean, you know, this goes all the way back to the 2012 campaign where, you know, Candy Crowley, then with CNN, stepped in and fact-checked something that Mitt Romney said very lightly, I mean, compared to what we see now. And the Romney campaign was just furious about this because Romney had been sort of talking very quickly and trying to race over what Obama had to say, and she sort of cut that off. And

that's sort of where the genesis of this comes from. And now we have Democrats who are really upset because they see Trump being able to say whatever he wants, whether it's true or not. And he said a lot of things that were not true at that debate. CNN warned people ahead of time that they would not be fact checking in real time, that they're going to leave it to the candidates to do. It might be incumbent on Kamala Harris to try to do, even though she hasn't wanted to take the bait from Donald Trump and certainly doesn't want to go down Trump's rabbit holes while she's, you know, trying to maintain a vision for her candidacy. Yeah. I mean, I think it matters about what kind of how savvy is her response going to be. I mean, I think one of Biden's kind of downfalls at the debate is he had no response. I mean, he, you know, Trump obviously was, you know, just, you know, lying and lying about so many things, but Biden just had no response whatsoever. He was just not equipped to give a response. And I think allies of Harris feel like that she will be able to give a response. I think the challenge for Harris, to me, is how she's able to articulate an affirmative case for herself. When we've seen

her in attack mode as the prosecutor, you know, questioning potential Supreme Court justices, she is, I would argue, at her most effective. Even people who disagree with her would say she is an effective questioner in those regards. And so she has, prior to even being at the top of the ticket, she was really sort of litigating the case against Donald Trump in terms of him appointing a number of justices, she said, that helped overturn Roe versus Wade. That's her comfort zone. To me, the question is, OK, how does she flip that then and ultimately make this case affirmative about herself?

Yeah. And also speaking of, you know, the role of the moderators and whether the moderators should fact check the candidates. I'm actually interested to see if Harris tries to fact check or if Harris tries to abut anything that Trump says, will they actually leave the mics open for that crosstalk? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think that it's been a difficult thing for the media to figure out what the balance is, because once you start down a fact check with Trump, then you're going to get stuck in a back and forth with him. It's going to take up a lot of time. There are some things that are fairly egregious that make it difficult not to when you know something's independently, verifiably true. You also don't want to look like you're

biased for one candidate. And I think that that's something where the trust in the media has been as low as it is, unfortunately, for us that sometimes when we take stances on what we say is independently true, you know, you have conservatives in particular who will say, well, I don't buy that anyway, and you're just biased. So it puts us in a really tight spot and in a really difficult position. But, you know, and we know as journalists, we have to be able to say what's actually true if we know it to be true. So this is the only confirmed debate between Harris and Trump. We all know that that first debate in this presidential election cycle between Biden and Trump, hugely consequential in reshaping the dynamics of this race. I would argue perhaps the most consequential debate we have ever seen, at least certainly in recent presidential history. to ask you both what you're watching for. But if I may just take privilege here and just say what I'm really interested in watching for, too, is how Trump particularly responds to having Harris

as his opponent. It strikes me that he has been struggling with how to run against Kamala Harris. And, you know, his main argument when he was running against Joe Biden was that Joe Biden was too old, in his view, too inept to be president. That is just not an effective argument in the same way that when you're running against an opponent who is decades younger than you. We also know that Trump seems to be particularly triggered by women, women of color. Right, Franco? I mean, I think it's a great point. I mean, I've actually been looking into some of this stuff about, you know, especially how he deals with the struggle that he has had, you know, dealing with women in power, particularly women he sees as competition. I mean, he's kind of presented himself all this time. It's like this alpha male who prides himself on being tough. At

the RNC, we were all there when he had Hulk Hogan, the wrestler, as well as Dana White, you know, the president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, talk about how tough Trump is. I mean, this is his persona. Yet when he confronts a woman in power, he really gets flummoxed. I mean, with men, he's able to bully them. He's able to emasculate them. He demeans everyone. But I do think it is a little bit different with women, again, especially those he sees as competition, like Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton. I mean, he criticizes their appearance. He belittles their intelligence. When I talk to people about it, researchers, he basically, in their words, kind of questions their right to be in the room. And I think that irks a lot of people because I think it speaks to some of the historic differences of power between men and women. Yeah, I mean, I think that Trump has sort of started to settle on a message against Harris. I think it's really comes down to that she's inauthentic,

weak and too liberal. But how he gets there and what his tone is and how he talks about Harris is going to be really important because as it is, we haven't seen much move the needle on how people view Donald Trump. And if he plays into that narrative of himself as a bully and somebody who doesn't respect women, I mean, good luck with the gender gap. You know, it's already been larger than it was with Joe Biden. And, you know, I think that he runs the risk of also turning off independents who are crucial in some of those swing states if he's going to come across in a way that seems disrespectful. All right. Well, lots there to keep an eye on as we watch the debate tomorrow night. And a reminder that we will be in your feeds quite late tomorrow after

the debate with analysis. And of course, you can listen to live special coverage of the ABC News presidential debate simulcast on your NPR station at npr.org or on the NPR app starting tomorrow at 9 p.m. Eastern. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.