The NPR Politics Podcast - Roundup: Harris Courts GOP; Trump Returns To Shooting Site

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Vice President Harris traveled to the birthplace of the Republican Party in Wisconsin this week to campaign with a one-time senior Republican congressperson: Liz Cheney. And Republican nominee Donald Trump has upped the frequency of his campaign events. He'll return to Butler, Pennsylvania, for a rally this weekend — where he was shot in July.And the federal judge overseeing a federal election interference case against the former president unsealed new allegations this week that assert Trump repeatedly rebuffed aides pleading with him to condemn the violence at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, as Congress worked to certify the election.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, campaign correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.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

Hello, this is Nick at the gas station filling up on the first stop from my long drive from Knoxville, Tennessee, back to Baltimore, Maryland. This podcast was recorded at 1119 a.m. on Friday, October 4th, 2024. Things may have changed since the time that you've heard this, but I'm officially going to be a Marylander again after 18 years away from home. Here's the show. Hooray, join me in Maryland, sir. Welcome back to the...

Welcome back to the DMV. Yo, you got worries I'm going to say things to? Jinx. Jinx. Yes. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the campaign. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And today on The Roundup, voting has already begun in many states across the country. And we're going to talk about what Vice President Harris and Donald Trump have been doing on the campaign trail.

Danielle, let's start with Donald Trump. He's been scaling up his events, I think, starting to do multiple events a day. Can you tell us a little bit more about what he's been doing this week and what his plans are this weekend? Absolutely, yeah. So he has been, like you said, doing quite a few more events. It had been pretty quiet there for a while for a variety of reasons. Earlier this year, he had his trial in New York, which slowed him down from campaigning. At any rate, he is now doing often an event a day, sometimes two events a day, sometimes even more, just really, really ramping things up in this

final month-ish until Election Day. And speaking of which, he has a big event tomorrow. I speak to you from my car in the parking garage of Dulles Airport outside of D.C. because I am going to Butler. Trump is doing a big rally there tomorrow, Saturday. And Butler, of course, is the place where someone shot at him on July 13th. So the campaign really seems to be billing this as a triumphant return, as Trump showing that he's not afraid, that he is happy to come back and to bring all of his friends with him. We just this morning got a list from the campaign of his many special guests, and it's dozens. And it's everyone from Elon Musk, the guy who owns Twitter now, CEO of SpaceX, all the way down to a guy who owns one of the cranes that was the equipment on July 13th.

So he's really, really padding this out with a whole bunch of people. So talk to us a little bit about what you've been hearing in his speeches, Danielle. I know that as I've been kind of watching clips, I have to admit I have not watched an entire Donald Trump speech in a few days. But I know he generally brings things back the way Vance did during the debate this week, back to immigration. And then for Trump, it's back to the 2020 election often. Is that still happening? Yes, very much. And like you said, he keeps bringing things back to immigration in every speech he does. And his speeches are long. They are an hour, hour and a half, sometimes more. And he did this in a speech in Michigan yesterday, where in Saginaw, he was

talking about hurricane relief efforts, the federal response to the hurricane. At one point, Trump lied and said that federal help is not reaching these areas. This is not true. And he attributed it to undocumented immigrants, that they're the reason that the federal response is not reaching these places. Wow. So, yeah, it does feel like every problem in the country kind of does kind of go back to the problem of immigration for the Trump campaign, right? Right. Yes. And one other bit of news we got from the Trump campaign this week is he was asked at one point by Ali Bradley of News Nation about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

Again, those immigrants are in the U.S. legally. They have something called TPS or temporary protected status. And he said he would revoke that. In Springfield, what's happening there is horrible. You have a beautiful community, 52,000 people, and about 30,000 people were put into that community rapidly. And the community is so nice and they want to be so politically correct. You have to remove the people. You cannot destroy. We cannot destroy our country.

You had a beautiful, safe community. Everyone's in love with everybody. Everything was nice. It was like a picture community. And all of a sudden, in a short period of time, they have 32,000 more people in there. It doesn't work. It can't work. It has nothing to do with Haiti or anything else.

It doesn't work. You have to remove the people and you have to bring them back to their own country. They are, in my opinion, it's not legal. It's not legal for anybody to do. It's not even on a human basis. It's not acceptable to the people that are there and certainly to the people that are in Springfield. Springfield is such a beautiful place. Have you seen what's happened to it?

It's been overrun. You can't do that to people. They have to be removed. So you would revoke the temporary protected status? Absolutely. I'd revoke it and I'd bring them back to their country. What if they won't receive them like they're not? Well, they're going to receive them. They'll receive them. If I bring them back, they're going to receive them.

Which, by the way, gets at one difficulty that Trump could face with any of his planned mass deportation efforts, is that the U.S. cannot simply fly a bunch of immigrants in the U.S., legal or illegal, to another country. There have to be relations with that country and a discussion about, hey, we're going to return X number of your citizens back. Will you take them? It is interesting, though. I feel like Trump has done an effective job over the last few years mainstreaming a lot of ideas that a few years ago we would have thought were kind of pie in the sky, impossible things that were kind of outlandish. I was covering this week a new poll from NPR, PBS News and Marist that showed that a majority of Americans support deporting all people who are in this country illegally. And a majority of Americans feel like

they're concerned that voter fraud is going to occur in the 2024 election. And so I feel like they're concerned that voter fraud is going to occur in the 2024 election. And so I feel like there are these ideas that maybe a while ago seemed a bit more fringe, but it doesn't seem like the majority of Americans are completely turned off by some of these things at this point. Right. And on that note of election fraud and election interference, and we do not have evidence that that has happened on any sort of a widespread basis. But he got into that as well this week at an event in Wisconsin with press. He gave a long speech. And after that, he took questions. And a reporter asked him, do you trust the election process this time around? And here's what he said. I'll let you know in about 33 days. No, look, I mean, 33 days.

The idea that Democrats cheated in 2020 and that he actually won, again, not true. And he is very much setting the stage for him and his supporters to deny the results of this election if it doesn't go how they want. He said that, I'll let you know in 33 days, right before on the same day as the vice presidential debate where J.D. Vance was asked, did Trump win the election in 2020? And J.D. Vance pointedly did not answer. Then Trump, after that, doubled down, saying, I won. I won. I won. So he is both saying that he won an election that he lost and saying he's not going to say whether the process is fair until he finds out whether he wins again. This is very similar to what he did and said leading into the 2020 election. And we know what happened in the 2020 election. He lost. He applied pressure to state officials and others to try to overturn that result. And then January 6th happened.

Well, and I feel like we've talked a lot the last few years. The conventional wisdom is that this sort of conversation around the election results might play well with Trump's base, but that it probably turns off independent voters. What was weird about this poll that came out this week is it found that the majority of independent voters are concerned that fraud is going to occur in the 2024 election. So I do wonder whether this is maybe, politically speaking, less of a liability than we may have thought coming out of the midterms. I don't know. That is just something that I'm going to be watching pretty closely. But I do want to turn now to Vice President Harris and what she's been up to this week, there was a clip that kind of struck me as shocking, seeing her campaign with Republican former House member Liz Cheney.

Tam, did you have the same reaction I did when seeing them on stage together? It wasn't just that they were on stage together in Wisconsin. They were on stage together in Ripon, Wisconsin, which is known as the birthplace of the Republican Party. And yes, there was a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, I think probably for them as well as everyone watching, the idea that Liz Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney, who, you know, Democrats considered to be Darth Vader back when he was vice president, that she would be standing up on stage with Vice President Harris and saying that she was going to vote for a Democrat for the first time in her life in this election. Vice President Harris has dedicated her life to public service.

I know, I know that she loves our country and I know that she will be a president for all Americans. As a conservative, as a patriot, as a mother, as someone who reveres our Constitution, I am honored to join her in this urgent cause. There were signs at the event that said country over party. Harris is selling herself and trying to sell herself to Republicans and independent voters as someone who will be president for all Americans, who will respect the rule of law and who will respect the Constitution. Liz Cheney, in her remarks, also in very stark terms, laid out why she didn't believe and she was on the January 6th committee that investigated what happened, why she didn't believe that Trump would respect the Constitution or put the country

or the Constitution over himself. And so what Harris is doing, what Cheney is doing, and what, you know, a handful of other Republicans, anti-Trump Republicans are trying to do is to stitch together some sort of anti-Trump coalition that is not necessarily a pro, you know, an unqualified pro-Harris coalition. Because Cheney and many of the Republicans who have endorsed Harris are not going to agree with her on any number of policies she's already proposed. What they do agree on is the idea of respecting the rule of law and respecting the Constitution. people who are politically engaged anyway and who might, you know, say, know who Liz Cheney is or who might be might have strong feelings about democracy and bring them to her side. She's trying to persuade. Trump, meanwhile, shows no signs of moderation. He's trying to expand. He knows he's hit a ceiling. He's not trying to do any outreach. He just is constantly telling his crowds,

get your friends out, make sure everybody gets out and votes. He just wants to make sure that even lower propensity voters are coming out for him. Well, I keep thinking about something you said, you said, Danielle, about how Trump's strategy really for the last eight years has been kind of upping the ante over and over and over again, where kind of his ability to make news by saying things that no one thought possible in the kind of normal political landscape. And the fact that he's been able to continue doing it all the way up to a couple weeks now until the election is kind of extraordinary. All right, Danielle, thank you so much for joining us from the airport. Oh, of course. Happy to do it. Have good travels.

We're going to take a quick break and we are going to talk about a new legal filing when we get back. And we are back with Carrie Johnson, NPR justice correspondent. Hi, Carrie. Hey, Miles. So we are in the middle of a presidential campaign and we are still getting new details about Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the last presidential election, this time in the form of a filing from special counsel Jack Smith. Can you just explain what happened this week? Sure. Remember in July, the Supreme Court basically called into question a significant part of Jack Smith's case against Donald Trump here in D.C. That's that federal election interference case. And as a result, prosecutors are trying to show that the case should survive even that Supreme

Court decision that gave Trump and all future presidents substantial immunity from criminal prosecution for actions they took while in the White House. And so this huge brief, 165 pages filled with a lot of new details and new figures, really took up a lot of time and attention this week. Can you, I guess, talk us through it? I was kind of surprised that there can be, considering how many investigations and things have focused on these efforts, the fact that there is anything new still to learn. Talk us through kind of what the headlines were. Yeah, absolutely. There were new things to learn, even though reporters and the January 6th committee on Capitol Hill and many others have been spending a lot of time and energy digging up details. The difference here is that the Justice Department and the FBI had subpoena power, they could execute searches, and people felt the need or compelled to talk. And so we got some new details. Maybe the most significant to me

was on the day of the Capitol riot itself, on January 6, 2021, the prosecutors asserted that it was Donald Trump himself who was sitting in a dining room off the Oval Office, watching Fox News, and issuing some of the tweets himself that day. In particular, that tweet around 2.24 p.m. where he said his vice president, Mike Pence, lacked the courage to do the right thing. Remember, Trump and others had been leaning on Pence to kind of put a pause on the certification of the electoral votes and Pence refused. And, you know, there was violence at the Capitol that day. Within a minute of Trump's tweet, Pence had been evacuated by the Secret Service. And then an aide came rushing in to tell Trump that there was chaos and danger at the Capitol, including toward Mike Pence. And according to this new filing, Trump replied, so what?

So a lot of new detail here. Additional new detail. The former president allegedly said to his daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared, that the details about the election really didn't matter. And election fraud really didn't matter. You've just got to fight like hell. And so that is new evidence about what Trump said and did on key days, as well as his state of mind and about his criminal intent. There were other new things as well, including really the first mention of Steve Bannon. Remember the presidential advisor, now podcaster, now incarcerated Steve Bannon. And this filing also said that on the morning of January 5th, the day before the Capitol riot, Trump talked to Bannon on the phone.

And less than two hours later, Bannon went about his podcast, his War Room podcast. And Bannon said to his audience on January 5th, 2021, just a short time after talking with Trump, that all hell is going to break loose tomorrow. So it really raises some big questions. And you can draw some inferences about what Trump and Bannon knew and didn't know might happen the next day. Well, all hell did break loose, certainly. It certainly did. And prosecutors would argue that after Trump's bid to overturn the election through all kinds of legal challenges and then leaning on key officials in swing states failed, the last best gasp for this effort was leaning on Mike Pence and an effort that culminated in the riot that day that injured 140 police officers,

and it really shook the country to its core. And there were people chanting, hang Mike Pence, as Mike Pence was fleeing for safety, though he refused to leave the Capitol because he did not want to be out of position. And there's one more nugget in this filing. To demonstrate that Trump was acting as a candidate and not the president, at that Ellipse rally on January 6th, prosecutors say, you know, he walked in, he walked into the rally. They didn't play Hail to the Chief. Instead, they played Lee Greenwood and the Village People, which is his walk-on music at a campaign rally. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I don't know if I've heard the village people mentioned in a legal filing before.

I'm sure it has happened, but not in my recent memory. Probably there's been a lawsuit about the costumes or the copyright. I'm sure. So I do want to ask you, though, Carrie, a lot of this information coming from Jack Smith in this filing is pretty damning. It is, at this point, the eve of an election. Why is this coming out so close to Court on July 1st, after waiting months and months and months to take up this case and waiting a few more months to issue its landmark decision on immunity for Trump and future presidents, the Supreme Court said this case can't survive unless the Justice Department meets a fairly high bar. And this was the special counsel's effort to show that he can meet that bar. Additionally, it wasn't the DOJ who issued this filing this week. The Justice Department actually filed this document under seal a week beforehand. And it was the decision of a judge, Judge Tanya Chutkin here in D.C., to make this information public at this time. Trump, of course, is going to have his own chance

to respond to this in a few weeks. The deadline is right after the election in November. So Jack Smith is trying to clear this very high bar, as you mentioned, the Supreme Court set around presidential immunity. I'm hoping you can kind of clarify that a little bit for me, Carrie. Exactly what does Jack Smith need to prove for Donald Trump not to have immunity based on what the Supreme Court ruled? Yeah, good question, because this is actually a significant change in the understanding of the law, right? The Supreme Court ruled that a president is absolutely immune for taking acts that relate to his core powers. That's things like diplomacy, military issues, and the Justice Department.

So the entire part of this case against Donald Trump in D.C. that had to do with him leaning on the Justice Department and threatening to fire the acting attorney general and replace that guy with a crony, all that is now out of this case. It's not in this filing at all. Now, as for a significant and important bucket of other allegations, that relates to official acts that a president takes in the White House. And the presumption, according to the Supreme Court majority, is that a president is presumed to be immune, but prosecutors have to clear a high bar in order to get rid of that presumption. And that's the bucket of information we're talking

about here in this filing. We're talking about tweets, campaign speeches, the speech on the ellipse on January 6, 2021, that Trump gave some of his orders and the fake slates of electors and the election officials you cover every day, Miles, all of that was private conduct. That was conduct, prosecutors say, that Trump was undertaking as a candidate for office, not the sitting president of the United States. And what's interesting is his relationship with Pence, too, right? Because my assumption, I guess, when you first hear that is, well, that's the vice president. That probably should be in the Justice Department bucket where this doesn't come into play. But that's not what Jack Smith is arguing, right? It is not. And this is going to be the most hotly contested part of this case moving forward if this case does survive the election.

And that's because Pence is the running mate of Donald Trump, but he's also the vice president of Donald Trump. And prosecutors are saying they're using Pence and want to use evidence about Pence, including five pages of personal notes that Mike Pence took about his interactions with Donald Trump, because Pence, on the day of January 6th, was acting in a very narrow capacity in his role as presiding over the electoral count, which is kind of a low-key role, a ministerial role, if you will. And on that basis, he was not acting as the vice president. He was acting in charge of the count. And in fact, the president and the vice president and the executive branch, prosecutors say, have no role in choosing the next president. So that should be completely within bounds, prosecutors say. Trump's lawyers have said anything related to Pence should be off limits for

this prosecution. They say if the grand jury in this case heard anything related to Mike Pence and Donald Trump, the whole indictment should be thrown out. And we're going to have a lot of legal fights about that moving forward. Tam, has Trump said anything about this filing so far? As he has many times before with other cases and this case, Trump is calling this election interference because it is coming. This filing is coming so close to the election. He, of course, also has said that he did not commit a crime on January 6th or in the lead up to it. And as we talked about in the last segment, he is still insisting that he won that election. All right. Well, let's leave that there for now. Let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we will do Can't Let It Go. And we are back and it's time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, where we talk about things that we cannot stop thinking about, politics or otherwise. Tam, why don't you start us off? Yeah, so when I was driving into work today, I was listening to Fox News,

trying to see what was going on in the news. And this ad came on. It's your favorite president, Donald J. Trump, here to introduce something really special. I think you're going to love it. My new Trump watches. So I thought, oh, I'm going to get to hear a campaign ad. Haven't heard a lot of those lately.

And I was like, no, this isn't a campaign ad. This is an ad for a watch. He is selling watches. And there are ads out there of him selling these watches. Do young people still wear watches when they have cell phones? I have one. I have one right here. So I guess I'm the market.

But I do think that this came up a couple weeks ago where I feel like he was pushing a cryptocurrency. I feel like he's been. There were Bibles. The blend of Trump businessman and Trump candidate never really. It is all one package, it feels like. Yeah. So let me tell you a little bit about this watch. There are different versions of it.

There is a $100,000 version. What? Yes. And I'm not a watch dork, so I don't really understand what could make a watch be worth $100,000. But it claims to have special dials and things that make it super precise. Waterproof, I hope. Yeah. Also gold and diamonds.

But then I actually went to the website and it turns out that there is a cheaper version, a sort of down market version, one that is $799, one that's $499. There's a red one. Anyway, they're sort of a variety, but the Fight, Fight, Fight watch is just $499, and it has a red watch face. Well, we will see if there's a lot of people wearing them in Butler tomorrow, I guess. Carrie, what can't you let go of? Okay, so in a world that's inundated with lots of news, I find my escape on television. Great. And one of the things that I cannot let go is this HBO show, My Brilliant Friend. It is so good.

It is about a pair of friends, two women, post-World War II in Italy. And the cinematography is amazing. The characters are amazing. The dialogue is amazing. Miles, it is so good that sometimes I'm sitting on the edge of my couch and these two women are talking or the other characters are talking and it's so intense. I'm like sweating. And I have not felt this way since The Sopranos because you do not know what is going to come

next. And it's not normally, although sometimes it is physical violence, it's like the emotional intensity. And so I can't believe in the year 2024 when my it is physical violence. It's like the emotional intensity. And so I can't believe in the year 2024 when my job is this intense. That's what I was going to ask. Yeah. How is this what you're like? But I feel the same thing.

Like somehow during these election months, because we just binged Presumed Innocent on Apple TV, which is the same kind of like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. For like eight straight hours. And why am I drawn to that right now when I'm already doing that for like like many hours a day? You guys are watching all this highbrow intense stuff. And I, uh, I can't let go of chimp crazy on HBO, which is, uh, very lowbrow, very lowbrow. Tell us more. Uh, uh, it's about a woman who, uh, has, uh, chimpanze has chimpanzees as pets. It's like the new tiger show. Oh, it's the new tiger.

Yes, thank you. It is the new tiger king. But here's the thing about a chimpanzee. They're cute when they're little, and then they'll rip your face off when they get bigger. All right. Note to self. No chimps. Miles, what can't you let go of?

So the thing I cannot let go of, which is like one of those things that, I mean, a true can't let it go. Whenever I come in here and I have a true can't let it go, it's the thing that when people, anyone all week has asked me, like, how are things going? And I just blurt it out. We, as I mentioned on the podcast earlier this week, we welcomed our daughter a few months ago. So on Monday, we survived our first cross-country flight with a baby. And I do feel like I deserve like one of those Universal Studios t-shirts that's like, I survived flying from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. with a five-month-old. Because we, and I'm going to like talking about starting to sweat, like I'm literally feeling myself, like my blood pressure. We were not able to get seats next to each other, my wife

and I. I did do a lot of begging of the airline to find a way to switch us. It was a very full flight. That was not possible. So we ended up in middle seats in different rows, passing the baby back and forth, trying to keep her from all out mutiny, which was mostly unsuccessful. We got a little nap in there, but I did change the TV. This was like, I feel a representative of my mental state. You know, they've got the TV for long flights on the back of the seat. I changed it from being entertainment to just a countdown to landing. And I literally for five and a half hours just watched the countdown. But we survived. And you know, it is one a half hours, just watched the countdown. And, um, but we survived. And, you know, it is one of those things where I'm like, now we can do anything, you know?

All right. That's a wrap for this week. Our executive producer is Mathoni Maturi. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Jung Yoon Han, Casey Murrell, and Kelly Wessinger. Special thanks to Ben Swayze. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.