The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Trump Rambles As Harris Rallies

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Former President Trump held a long, meandering press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence on Thursday, where he committed to a Sept. 10 debate with his main challenger, Vice President Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are barnstorming the country and holding large rallies. This podcast: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Stephen Fowler, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.The podcast is produced by Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our intern is Bria Suggs. 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

Hi, this is Heather at Second Fortune Lake in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula. I'm enjoying a few last quiet moments on a lovely summer morning before engaging in a time-old tradition of dragging a variety of children around the lake behind a boat. This podcast was recorded at 12.17 p.m. on Friday, the 9th of August. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Now, on with the show. That sounds like fun. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, Senior National Political Correspondent. And today on the show, it is our campaign roundup. And let us start with the Trump campaign. Yesterday, the former president held a meandering, lengthy and often rambling

press conference that included numerous attacks against his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. She's not doing any news conference. You know why she's not doing it? Because she can't do a news conference. She doesn't know how to do a news conference. She's not smart enough to do a news conference. And continued ranting about attendance at his rallies versus hers. He also just did this mind-boggling thing where he compared the size of the crowd at his speech on the Ellipse before the January 6th insurrection to the one Martin Luther King Jr. had for his I Have a Dream speech. It's very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture of a small number of people relatively going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd. The biggest crowd I've ever spoken, I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's

spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people. If not, we had more. So, Stephen, what was Trump trying to do here? Well, Tam, it is a different Trump, but also a familiar Trump. I mean, for most of the 2024 campaign, Trump had all of the attention. He was leading in the polls. He was victorious in his messaging and his vision for the future. But now things have changed. So yesterday's press conference was something that is familiar to the Trump of old, and that's attention seeking.

He gave this hour plus press conference to invited reporters down at Mar-a-Lago, and he proceeded to hold court on a lot of different topics and basically used this to kind of filibuster for attention to turn things away from the surging attention and excitement around the Democratic ticket that has been reformed in the last week or so. So Mara, he was asked, why aren't you traveling to swing states? Like, Harris and Walls are making this multi-swing state tour. And Trump is holding a rally today in Montana, which is not a swing state, though it does have a Senate race. And he was asked, like, why aren't you traveling? And what are you doing to adjust to this new reality?

Yeah, well, he said he was doing so well in the polls that he didn't need to adjust. In fact, the polls showed that the race has tightened to a dead heat. He's still the favorite, although by much, much less than he was a couple of weeks ago. And I'm kind of mystified by this. And I wanted to ask Stephen why you think he's so flummoxed and why he's had such a hard time adjusting because it seems like the campaign has three pretty potent lines of attack on Harris, which is, one, she's too liberal. There's lots of things she said in the past that sound too liberal. Two, inflation.

Three, immigration. Those are big attack lines, and he wasn't delivering them. I think there's two things at play here. One is that for much of this campaign, the message and the messenger have been rowing in the same direction. Everything that the Trump campaign has put out with surrogates and press releases and campaign videos and attack ads has all been mimicked by Trump himself. And so it's been this cohesive message. And that message is attacking Joe Biden. And now they've gone all in on that message.

And the Democratic Party has gone in a completely different direction. And the campaign hasn't really adjusted. But the thing about Trump is, and I've been thinking about this, he has never faced an opponent who was able to generate crowds like Harris is generating this week. And Trump has always measured himself by the size of his crowds, by his poll numbers. At least this election year, he's been able to measure himself by the poll numbers until now. He was just so set on winning. And Hillary Clinton never had crowds like this. Joe Biden never had crowds like this, certainly not in 2020 with COVID, but not in his campaign this year. And so suddenly this thing that matters because lying used to be his superpower. He would just say he had bigger crowds. But it sounds like the fact that he actually doesn't, in reality he doesn't, is kind of shaking him up, shaking his confidence. And I will just quickly add that this is something that the Harris campaign has been intentionally doing with their messaging.

They've been needling Trump about crowd sizes. Last week in Georgia, both Trump and Harris were at the exact same convocation center. They had the exact same capacity crowds. But the Harris campaign used a screenshot of a video feed where there was some empty space in a press riser to say, look, Kamala Harris filled the rally. Donald Trump didn't. And it drove him bonkers for much of the weekend after that. So this is a completely different messaging warfare going on between Trump and Harris versus Trump and a weaker Biden. And I think that's a big part of the dynamic of this campaign switch.

So I do want to ask you, Stephen, until this press conference that Trump had, he had basically ceded the stage for the week to his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. Vance had been essentially trailing Harris all over the country, doing sort of counter-programming and taking a lot of questions from the press himself. How has that been? Yeah, so J.D. Vance had a rough rollout in his first week as the vice presidential nominee. He did a hometown rally where there were some jokes that he made that fell flat. There were some past comments that he had made that had gotten a lot of viral attention for negative reasons. But this was kind of J.D. Vance's breakout moment for the campaign. He was traveling

in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin, offering these sort of pre-buttled conversations with local and national media, where he could attack the Democratic ticket and the Democratic record and expound a lot on the Republican theory of the case in a way that was a lot more effective than trying to hold dueling counter rallies and talk about, oh, 10,000 here, 10,000 there. So this was J.D. Vance showing one reason why he was added to the Republican ticket. Yeah, very traditional and typical role for the vice presidential candidate as a tack dog. All right, we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we will have more from the campaign trail.

And we're back. And the one piece of news that Trump may have come to deliver at that press conference is that he has committed to a September 10th debate with Harris on ABC. He also expressed a desire for more debates. This was a change because he had previously backed out of the ABC debate. So is this surprising, Maura? He's done three 180s on this. First, he said, I'll debate them anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Then all of a sudden, he said, I'll only meet her if it's on Fox. And now he's agreed. Now, he had to agree. His whole brand is about toughness and strength, and he would have looked like a complete wuss if he backed out. And, you know, the Harris campaign was taking full advantage of his cold feet. David Plouffe, her new strategist, Obama alumni, said maybe Donald Trump only wants to debate people his own age.

So there's going to be a debate. It's going to be, I think, the most watched ever. And we'll see if Donald Trump can figure out how he wants to go after Kamala Harris between now and then. I mean, Stephen, I'm thinking about this debate and wondering how Trump will handle it. He certainly in this press conference gave the impression that he thinks that Harris, you know, isn't up to it, that she can't handle a debate, that he will be able to dominate. Look, Trump essentially ended Joe Biden's presidential campaign at the first debate that they held earlier this summer. He's not going to force

Kamala Harris to drop out if they do it again. But you have to argue, if you're the Trump campaign, that facing off against her again, you could do something similar and damage her, and especially if she's going to be surging in the polls, because we've got the new campaign launch, we've got the DNC later this month. So the campaign will be riding high, and that debate will be the opportunity for Trump to take the momentum and switch it around right as people are voting. That said, Tam, I also am not sure how this debate is going to go, because Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are two very aggressive personalities on the debate stage. And so this will arguably be a much better debate for the American voter to watch because we're going to have a lot more meaningful news made from this,

I think. Well, you know, that's just another completely mystifying thing about Donald Trump. Why does he constantly lower expectations for his debate opponents by saying she's not up to it, she can't do it, she's stupid? It makes no sense at all. If you lower the bar, it's easier for your opponent to hurdle it. And I don't know why he would want to do that with Kamala Harris. And an update on something that we talked about yesterday on the podcast, Trump and Vance had been making this big push to demand that Harris answer questions from reporters, or maybe what they really wanted was to make it look like she was dodging. And no sooner did Donald Trump's press conference end than Harris walked up to the group of

reporters traveling with her and took some questions on the tarmac at the airport in Detroit yesterday. So I guess the countdown clocks have to go away again. Well, but he was raising something that's legitimate, but maybe not for the reasons he raised it. Kamala Harris has not interacted with the press a lot. And she also hasn't done a really tough one-on-one interview. She hasn't had a town hall. I think the other day she said we're trying to schedule an interview sometime this month. So I think this is an important, almost an exercise to prepare yourself for that debate. She needs to expose herself to some really tough questions so she can get in

shape for going on the debate stage with Donald Trump one-on-one, and she hasn't done that. Right. And she definitely gave herself a little bit more time by answering those questions yesterday before, you know, the pressure will continue to build. You know, the thing is, she's been doing these feel good rally speeches, and supporters are eating it up and the number of the size of the crowds keeps growing. But at some point, she really does have to get into the nitty gritty of what she wants to do. We do know now that what she wants to do as president, we do know now that next week, they have announced an economic address, an economic speech that she and President Biden will be doing together

in Maryland. And also, in theory, the first real policy speech of her still very young presidential campaign. And we should point out that Donald Trump, in his own scattershot way, has been offering a whole lot of tax policy ideas. No taxes on tips. Social security benefits shouldn't be taxed. I mean, he's rolled off, even if they seem like they're off the top of his head, a whole bunch of tax policy ideas. So she needs to get into that mix. Right, and the economy continues to be

a really important issue in this race. I do also want to talk about the rollout of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as Harris's running mate. He, too, is eager to debate. Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, J.D. studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on. That's not what middle America is. And I got to tell you, I can't wait to debate the guy. That sort of folksy jab, like Midwestern nice. I think that's probably part of why he is on the

ticket. Mara, why do you think he was picked over the other finalists like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro? I think he was picked for a number of reasons. The first rule of thumb in picking a vice presidential candidate, a running mate, is do no harm. He had the least problems of all the finalists. He also had a lot of Midwestern dad energy, like you're talking about. And I think third, maybe this was the most important. She felt comfortable with him. She was looking for someone who she could govern with and she got along better. She had a better bond with him than the other two. She didn't have a

long history with him, but they just hit it off. And they believe, the Harris campaign believes, that even though he's not from a battleground state, that he has appeal in all of the blue wall states because he's got that Midwestern background and vibe. And Stephen, how are Republicans feeling about the wall's pick? How are they going after him on policy? Well, in public, they are saying in private that they are glad that he's the pick because he's obviously much more progressive and liberal and easier to beat. But the policy point is something that will be interesting to play out, that we heard J.D. Vance mention a lot in his bracketing tour, that Tim Walz, when he was in Congress, was not a progressive Democrat. His voting record was very moderate, bipartisan, you know, something that wouldn't necessarily raise a lot of attention or eyebrows. But since becoming the governor of

Minnesota, he has signed into law a lot more progressive policy agenda that the Minnesota legislature has brought to him. And so it has given a lot of opportunities for Republicans to attack policies and things that feed into some of the more cultural battlefield that we've seen play out. And so at the same time, having these policy discussions, both Republicans and Democrats are like, bring it on. So much of this year has been dominated by Joe Biden's age, Joe Biden's fitness, Joe Biden this, Joe Biden that. So now both parties are kind of looking to this final 90-day push to be like, yes, this is our policy vision for America. This is what we want. Bring it on. And we will definitely be following all of that as this campaign continues. We're going to take a quick break.

And when we get back, can't let it go. And we're back. And it's time for can't let it go the part of the pod where we talk about the things from the week that we just cannot stop thinking about politics or otherwise. Stephen, what can't you let go of? Okay, so as you know, the Olympics are happening. And as you may also know, I have a 15 month old and so the crossover that I have been living for this week is the Sesame Street characters being at the Olympics interacting with American Olympians and gold medal champions and so there's been a number of things three swimmers were doing a cookie relay with Cookie Monster you know seeing how fast they could eat the cookies the three guys were just

losing their minds giggling laughing the entire time. And the thing that stands out to me the most is the uber-talented gymnast Simone Biles was with Elmo. And for those of you who don't know, Elmo is nice to everybody except for this rock named Rocco. Elmo hates Rocco. And Simone Biles is like, hey, let's take a picture. And Elmo's getting ready to say cheese. But Elmo wasn't the focus of the picture. It was Rocco. Simone

Biles took a picture with Rocco. And Elmo was about to flip his croissant. But he's like, okay, does anybody have a camera? And so that for me, as an adult, as an Olympics watcher, as a Sesame Street fan, embedded in the lore, Simone Biles curving Elmo for Rocco is my can't let it go. I have to say I have enjoyed all of the Snoop Dogg content as well. But that's not for toddlers. So Tam, what can't you stop thinking about other than this ever changing presidential campaign? Well, because I have been deeply embedded in this ever changing presidential campaign, the thing that I cannot let go of is all of these now quite viral tweets out there of people describing Tim Walz as basically America's dad. So Tim Walz is the

type of guy where if you ask if he got a haircut, he'd go, I cut them all. Or Tim Walls 100,000% stands at his doorstep when it's raining and says, we needed this. He is like the ultimate walking dad joke. He's just so normal. Well, speaking of dogs. Yes, Mara, what can't you let go of? So this is a story from Tulsa, Oklahoma. There was a fire and the security cameras in this family's house caught the cause of the fire, which was the dog. And I'm a dog owner, so that's why I picked this. had grabbed a charger for a cell phone that had a lithium-ion battery inside of it and was chewing it on his dog bed, and it burst into flames. Apparently, lithium-ion batteries are very dangerous. And the fire department came, and there was a lot of damage to the house, but the dogs escaped. There was more than one because there was a dog door in the house. So I feel this is a story

about the danger of lithium ion batteries and the importance of having dog doors in your house so your pets can escape if you're not home. Maybe the dog should also learn how to use a fire extinguisher. Yeah, right. All right. Well, that is all from us this week. Our executive producer is Mathani Mathuri. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Jung-Yoon Han, Casey Morrell, and Kelly Wessinger. Our intern is Bria Suggs. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.