The NPR Politics Podcast - President Trump Officially Launches His 2020 Reelection Bid

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

President Trump officially launched his 2020 reelection bid on Tuesday at a massive rally in Orlando, though much of the event picked up where his 2016 campaign left off. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello, this is Tycho, and I'm celebrating my first Pride Month in Samoa, where I'm serving as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English literacy. This podcast was recorded at 926 Eastern on Wednesday, June 19th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover politics. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Last night, President Trump made it very official. He kicked off his re-election campaign. With every ounce of heart and might and sweat and soul, we're going to keep making America great again.

And then we will indeed keep America great. We will keep it so great. Better than ever before. We're going to keep it better than ever before. And that is why tonight I stand before you to officially launch my campaign for a second term as President of the United States. This is no surprise since, of course, President Trump never really stopped running for president. It's been holding political rallies all along, but it's official. He is running for re-election.

Tamara Keith, you were there last night. You are currently in the airport in Orlando, and it sounds like someone is watching a Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon near you because I've been hearing a lot of meeps. Well, it is Orlando, and there are a lot of children in this airport with mouse ears. I am not wearing mouse ears. But you were at this event last night. So I guess, first of all, was anything different from last night's rally compared to the dozens and dozens of dozens of political rallies the president has been holding since the early days of taking office. You know, I was sort of surprised at how similar it was, and maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but he hit all the greatest hits. But there was there was a little bit of new language around sort of what what he's saying Democrats would mean for

America. Yeah, they would strip Americans of their constitutional rights while flooding the country with illegal immigrants in the hopes it will expand their political base and they'll get votes someplace down the future. That's what it's about. Mara, how would you of course, the message of President Trump's reelection campaign is going to be whatever he's tweeting about that day. But big picture, we do kind of have a sense at this point of what his campaign at least wants to lay out to voters, don't we? Yeah, we certainly do. One thing that I was struck by was that he doesn't feel any urgency to provide anything new. In other words, usually Donald Trump has acted as though he understands that to keep the cable nets on him 24 hours a day, he has to constantly be saying something new or something more outrageous than he said before. This really was a greatest hits

rally. And it tells me that his campaign believes that he can win reelection by doing the same thing, hitting the same themes, the resentment of his base against the elites who look down on them, Democrats who refuse to concede. There was so much talk about Hillary Clinton. I thought, oh, whoa, is she running? So but but but I think that it's not an implausible theory because they're going to be able to run the same campaign with hundreds of millions more dollars, a huge head start on the Democrats, tremendous advantages in social media and data mining. And but that is what they're going to do. The same thing as 2016. You know, Hillary Clinton is not running. He did mention her a bunch of times. There were lock her up chants. But the fact is, he doesn't really have an opponent yet. He has 23 people running to be his opponent. And and maybe that is part of why there was such a lack of focus or why why they're just there wasn't something new, even in terms of here's our second term agenda. If you put us back in the White House, this is what we're going to do.

Well, there was a lot of the flip side of that, though, right, Tim? You were saying that there was a lot of if I don't stay around for another four years, terrible things will happen. Can you can you flag some of the key moments of that for us? Right. So let's just let's just go to it. He he he was talking a lot about the Mueller investigation and Democrats in Congress. And and, you know, some of the lines that he said before about wanting a do over. But then he put a much, much finer point on it. They tried to erase your vote, erase your legacy of the greatest campaign and the greatest election probably in the history of our country. And they wanted to deny you the future that you demanded and the future that America deserves and that now America is getting.

Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage. They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it. Not acceptable. It's not going to happen. So this is not like a simple disagreement about policy. He is framing this in a much more apocalyptic way. Mara, can you effectively run on it's us against them, it's us against the system campaign when you're the president of the United States and sitting on top of that system? Well, until 2016, we would have said no. Now we say anything's possible. I mean, sure. This is what he's running as an insurgent. He's battling the

establishment, even though he's the president of the United States. And for two years, he had complete control of Congress. But in terms of the apocalyptic nature of his speech, and it was very apocalyptic, don't forget, Joe Biden is out there saying that if he wins a second term, it's an existential threat to America. So the Democrats are pretty apocalyptic, too. It's not going to be a campaign for understatement on either side. No, but the interesting thing now is, look, he has a record. He has something to measure his promises against. In 2016, a lot of people took a flyer on him. They decided, let's try something new. We need someone to disrupt the system. He was a businessman.

Some people even thought the more extreme statements he made during the campaign were just an act. And the fact is that he hasn't, his approval ratings have not exceeded his ballot from 2016 ever since he's been in office. He got 46 percent. He's been stuck in the mid 40s ever since. So I mentioned this at the top, but but I'm still wondering this like this wasn't that much different than what he's been doing all along. He filed for reelection on Inauguration Day. So like what was the point of this rally other than or was it just a show of force of saying, look, I can get 20,000 people in a key swing state? That really seems to be what it is, is that they they filled this arena where the Orlando Magic play.

It was a really big building and there were a lot of people there. And, you know, what what they say is that the most valuable commodity the campaign has is the president's time. These rallies bring a focus. What they say is that the most valuable commodity the campaign has is the president's time. These rallies bring a focus. They allow the campaign to collect data on people because in order to get in, you have to give them all your information. So there's a data collection aspect around this. But really what it is, is there have been 23 Democrats declaring that they're running for president. Kamala Harris, you were there. She had a gigantic rally in Oakland, California. And the president has not been able to get that kind of attention for his rallies

because his rallies are like a dime a dozen these days. And so guess what? Last night, he got that attention. There were more than 500 reporters there at that rally. And there was a lot of coverage. Eventually, the cable, some of them cut away. But he got attention to a rally in a way that data collection, because that's so different than this 2016 campaign. Let's talk about that after the break. We're going to take a quick break, come back, talk a little bit more about how President Trump is focusing his re-election campaign. Evangelicals play an important role in today's politics. But how and when did this religious group become so political? This week on ThruLine, the history of evangelicals in America. ThruLine from NPR, the podcast where we go back in time to understand the present. Okay, we are back. A big part of President Trump's reelection message is going after the Democrats. He doesn't know who his opponent's going to be yet. He certainly spends a lot of time talking about former Vice President Joe Biden, but he's really been mixing it around. But one of the big

picture attack lines that we were hearing last year in the midterms and even more of this time is this idea that the Democratic Party is drifting toward socialism. America will never be a socialist country. Ever. You know, Mara, last week, Senator Bernie Sanders gave a big speech defending the idea of democratic socialism. He is, of course, a democratic socialist. That's how he identifies. And he put it in the framework, not of scary South American dictators, but rather programs that a lot of Americans like, saying it's all about the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt, spirit of government, talking about Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.

Of course, all programs that over time Americans have said, don't even think about taking these away from me. Right. What was so interesting about the president's comments is right after he says Republicans don't believe in socialism, he says, we will protect Medicare and Social Security. And this is going to be a big debate because the Democrats are going to say, we want to allow people of a certain age and a certain income, parts of the country, to be able to buy into Medicare. We want a public option. Is that socialism, Mr. President? He's going to have to answer that because right now he's trying to straddle this line, we don't like socialism, but we like Medicare. When most of the Democrats, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, are talking not about socialism, not about government takeovers of big chunks of the economy like the private health insurance industry, but about expanding the social

safety net, making Medicare cover more people or making Social Security cover more people. That is going to be the debate when it's engaged. Right now, he has the field to himself. One phrase or one theme that both Vice President Mike Pence and then President Trump hit on in their remarks at this rally was sort of pitting socialism against freedom, saying Republicans don't believe in socialism. They believe in freedom. And, you know, I was out reporting this week in in Florida and visited an adult active senior community known as the villages where most people are over 55 and interviewed a bunch of people and and they're mostly Republicans. They kept bringing up socialism unprompted, saying, you know, I fought against socialism in the Vietnam War. I fought, you know, I was against socialism. I came up this messaging. And for the generation of voters or a couple of its power, because Republicans and conservatives have

called every government program socialism. They called the Interstate Highway Project socialism. They called mandatory vaccine socialism, and they certainly called Medicare and Social Security socialism. Trump broke the mold in a way by campaigning very vigorously in favor of Medicare and Social Security and saying he would never touch them. But you're right. Younger people, when they hear the word socialism, they think of a stronger social safety net, not some kind of totalitarian communist government taking over industry. And if you look at the front runners on the Democratic side, I'm talking about the top five candidates in polling, and there's a really large gap after that top five.

You've got Bernie Sanders, of course, giving speeches defending the idea of socialism and democratic socialism. But other than him, nobody else is really out there talking about it. Like Elizabeth Warren certainly wants to have a very active government in terms of regulating and restructuring the economy. But she says she wants to do that within a capitalist framework. Joe Biden certainly is not talking about that. Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg aren't either. So I am really curious about does that message stick to whoever the eventual nominee is? Or does this go the way of like the socialism argument in the midterms, which didn't really seem to work that well?

Well, the Trump campaign hopes it sticks. Yes. And the Trump campaign believes that it can paint any nominee as a far left socialist, when in fact, what the Democrats are doing right now is having a debate about capitalism, how to make capitalism do what it's supposed to do, which is provide broadly shared prosperity and economic mobility. Elizabeth Warren doesn't just say, I'm not a socialist. She says, quote, I'm a capitalist to my bones. She believes in well-regulated markets, but she does believe in markets. And it'll be interesting to see, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, can the Trump campaign paint all the rest of the Democrats as way too far to the left, Venezuelan-style

socialists? A couple other things I want to hit on before we wrap this up. And Tam, I know you've talked about this on the podcast before, but for all of the things that were the same in this rally in terms of the messaging and Trump's approach and going on the attack, there is something really different about the 2020 campaign compared to 2016. And that is the fact that there is a widespread, organized, methodical campaign with a lot of staffers and working with the Republican National Committee and doing a lot of other professional campaign things that just didn't happen last time around. Yeah, I mean, they're talking about wanting to have two million volunteers. And this week, the RNC has been doing trainings all over the country with volunteers who are going to volunteer

for the RNC. But the RNC and the Trump campaign are in lockstep. They are sharing office space. They are the same operation. So out there at that rally yesterday, there were all of these volunteers wearing bright green shirts, walking around, registering people to vote, and also collecting information about them, contact information. And the reason that the campaign says that this matters, not just because registering people to vote is something that Democrats have done quite effectively and Republicans want to do it too, but also they say it matters because a lot of the people who go to these rallies are not traditional Republican voters. They're not necessarily even regular voters. And so they are trying to capture people

and they are learning information about them because they may not have been in their voter file because they aren't necessarily the likely voter. Though, of course, obviously getting this information about voters so you can follow up with them is important, but it doesn't win an election in and of itself. I mean, we remember that Hillary Clinton was having Beyonce concerts in Cleveland in order to get information about voters and make sure they got out to the polls. And that did not translate to a high enthusiasm level for her in places like Cleveland. Bully Pulpit Media is this group that tracks online ad spending. And in the two weeks leading up to this Trump rally, they sent me the numbers.

And President Trump, his campaign, has spent more money on Facebook ads than essentially all the Democratic campaigns combined. And, you know, Florida is a state that will be necessary for the president or the Democrats. I mean, it's a key state in deciding who becomes president in 2021. Such an important state that 20 different Democrats will be in Florida next week, holding their first debate of the primary season over the course of two nights.

Mara, you and I will be there in Miami. Yes, we will. And I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be exciting. We're going to have podcasts after both of those debates. So it's going to be a late night for all of us a couple nights in a row. We will, of course, be back in your feed before then, starting with tomorrow's weekly roundup. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover politics.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.