Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 8/9/24

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Both the Democratic and Republican presidential tickets are finally set.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are a month away from facing each other on a debate stage.

It's clear that Trump would rather be facing Joe Biden and that he doesn't know quite how to counter Harris' surge, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

So, Tim Walz is in the race.

J.D.

Vance is trying to make a positive impact for Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris seems to be having a good time, in part, perhaps because she hasn't given an interview since becoming the Democratic nominee.

As for Trump, in a press conference this week, he compared the size of his crowds to those of, yes, Martin Luther King, Jr., and then said some other things that were even more disconnected from observable reality.

I'll discuss observable reality tonight with Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, Adam Harris is my colleague and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and Michael Shearer is a national political reporter at The Washington Post.

Okay, so this is observable reality edition.

But before, before we get to observable reality Mar-a-Lago, I want to set the stage a little bit where we are In the race and where we are in the polling.

Adam, maybe you could give us a little scene-setter since you love crosstabs.

You know, I know how you love breaking it down.

So, the polls are shifting in Harris' direction what does it mean and does it mean anything?

ADAM HARRIS, Contributing Writer, The Atlantic: I mean, it's so nationally, right?

It's hard to really discern a lot what will happen in November by national polls, but Kamala Harris is trending, positively, right?

She's running for about four points ahead of Donald Trump in the Marquette poll, about three points ahead in the PBS poll, which is, you know, right within the margin of error.

But if you kind of dig into that a little bit more, right, you expand the pool outside of just Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

You add in Kennedy, you add in some of the other.

And all of a sudden the picture becomes really promising for Democrats, right?

They never really eclipsed around 40 percent when Biden was the candidate.

Now, they're running at about 47 percent, where Donald Trump is running at around 41 percent, with Kennedy receiving a smaller share of the vote.

So, that really tells you that she's pulling in a base of voter voters that wasn't necessarily excited about Biden, was looking for an alternative, but now really kind of has that.

And if you dig into the states in particular, Wisconsin was a really -- it is a really interesting example there where voters were just not enthusiastic about Joe Biden, right?

It was about 30-some odd percent of voters were enthusiastic about voting for Joe Biden.

But you add Kamala there and it jumps up to about the same enthusiasm that Republicans have for voting for Trump.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Peter, does that enthusiasm last?

And what do you take out of all the polls?

How much do you take out of all these polls?

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, I think, look, I think this is, enthusiasm is important because you saw a Democratic Party that until a couple of weeks ago that was incredibly depressed.

It was completely depressed.

It was in a fugue state.

They felt like it was a death march to Election Day.

They were not at all excited about doing it.

And why does that matter?

Because why would you go out of your way to go vote if you're not all excited?

So, yes, enthusiasm matters.

To see these crowds that she is generating is - - two points about it.

One is extraordinary.

Every Biden rally I've gone to in the last three or four years comes nowhere close to the worst rally she's had in terms of size, energy, and enthusiasm.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And on the joy meter.

PETER BAKER: And on the joy meter, exactly.

And then, secondly, it's driving Trump nuts, right?

You saw that yesterday.

He says, oh my gosh, he's only got a thousand people.

I get 10, 20, 30 times as many people as she has, not true.

Tonight in Arizona, she'll have 20,000 people.

She had 15,000 and 12,000 crowds in the Midwest this week.

These are Trump-size crowds.

And it doesn't mean she's going to win.

It means she's at least caught up to Biden -- or caught up to Trump.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, Susan, my question is on this question of, is this sustainable enthusiasm and perennial joy, or is this relief that it's not, what did you say, the fugue state death march?

Peter got really -- he went really low.

He went way down there.

But, I mean, is this sustainable?

SUSAN GLASSER, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Well, first of all it, it's been a long time in our politics since the word joy was trending.

It certainly wasn't on my bingo card for August of 2024.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It certainly has never been spoken on this show.

SUSAN GLASSER: No, wait.

Well, you know, I mean, I feel like I've written the words doom loop, you know, like a lot more times than I've written the words joy as a factor in American politics.

You have to go back, it seems to me, maybe Obama 2008, you know.

But even then you could say that was more inspirational.

Peter and I were talking the other day.

Maybe it was -- you know, you have to go back to 1992 and the Bill Clinton-Al Gore, you know, jubilant duo coming out of the Democratic Convention in New York City.

Whatever, you know, your analogy is it's been a while, first of all.

Second of all, I do think to the polls, there is an interesting question I have, which is, Harris has clearly consolidated the Democratic vote that had not been consolidated under Biden, right?

So, a lot of the reason for Biden's softness in the polls was because Democratic voters or Democratic-leaning independents, you know, they just were uncomfortable casting another vote for Biden.

It wasn't that, you know, Harris has not converted a ton of Republicans.

So, I think the question is, does she not just pull even with Donald Trump and put us right back into essentially a dead even election, or are we going to see her coming out of the convention with something more approximating a lead, even if a small lead?

I don't know the answer to that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

You know the answer?

MICHAEL SCHERER, National Political Reporter, The Washington Post: Well, I think that's the right point that Susan made that right now we're back to consolidating some of that.

But if you go back to 2020, Biden won that race by four points.

If you look at the polling averages now, she's up by one point.

If you go back to 2020, at this point in 2020, Biden was ahead by seven points.

So, she doesn't yet have the full Biden coalition behind her.

There's still, if you talk to the Biden campaign, a lot of Biden voters from 2020 who will say in focus groups or will tell pollsters, I don't know if I want to vote.

This is all kind of depressing.

I don't really like Trump, but this is not something I'm excited about.

So, she still has a ways to go.

And I think the real question is whether, the next two weeks, those people get there, and we walk into September, and she's back where Biden was at this point in 2020.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Michael, talk about the role of the vice presidential nominees helping and hurting.

Do both, and we could - - everybody can join in, but Walz and Vance.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Wait, so I think the first thing you have to say when you're talking about vice presidential nominees is there's not a lot of historical record of them mattering in November.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

MICHAEL SCHERER: They matter as attack dogs.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's why we're only having one question on it.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Right, they matter as attack dogs, they matter as surrogates, they help shape how people think about the person at the top of the ticket.

And I think if that's the scorecard, Trump has probably been hurt by Vance over the last couple weeks because Vance is sort of a sourpuss in the Trump mold.

And Kamala, who's -- the rap against Kamala, she's, you know, a San Francisco elitist, she picks someone who is totally against type, who loves being in front of the camera, who is sort of refreshing and different, at least for Democrats, are getting them going.

So, I think, at least in the short-term, there's an advantage to Harris.

I don't know what that means in the moment (ph).

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Anybody want to argue that vice presidents really matter?

PETER BAKER: Where they matter is, first, do no harm, right?

Because they're not going to help you win a state anymore.

That hasn't happened since Johnson in 1960 helped Kennedy.

They can make a difference, as Palin did, for instance, in 2008, in which you have to explain away problems or mistakes or what have you, and that's clearly where Vance was for Trump, because he's explaining the childless cat lady's stuff.

Now, the question is whether the Walz -- you know, the attack on Walz's military service will try to do the same to him.

At the moment, it doesn't seem to have the same traction, I don't think.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, let's talk about that for a minute.

Adam, you have a lot of experience with the Army and the idea of stolen valor.

The accusation that he got out of the National Guard early doesn't seem to be sticking.

He did kind of play a little bit fast and loose with the, I carried a gun in war when that war was in Italy.

I mean, do you think that this is a thing where -- I mean, look, Chris LaCivita, Trump campaign manager, invented swift boating, more or less.

John Kerry, who had a tremendous war record, was somehow -- it turned against him.

It was sort of a presage, something horrible in politics, right?

Do you think that this works or people kind of just moving on saying, well, he serve 24 years or so in the National Guard, leave it alone?

Where is it going?

ADAM HARRIS: The average service time in the National Guard is somewhere between like six and eight years, right?

So, serving 24 years, right, having that longevity, saying that he got out right before his unit was about to deploy doesn't necessarily carry the sort of, you know, heft that Republicans might want it to.

The thing that might might stick is that, you know, saying that I carried these weapons in war, right, when you were serving in Italy, but it doesn't seem to have yet gained that traction.

Even though, you know, the idea of stolen valor is, you know, this sort of chief (INAUDIBLE).

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: No, that's radioactive, yes.

GLASSER: I mean, look, even The Wall Street Journal today, you know, I think, cited the New York Post saying this was a pretty thin (ph) gruel and they're willing to entertain plenty of attacks on Walz.

It strikes me that the thing you need to know about this is that the Republicans are running for the third time in a row a man who essentially dodged the Vietnam draft and said that he had bone spurs.

When he was asked about where those bone spurs were, he couldn't remember what foot they were in supposedly.

So, this is not -- you know, if Republicans can turn that you know 24 years of service in the National Guard into some sort of a negative, I would be deeply skeptical about -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But this is Trump's -- one of Trump's magic tricks is he sort of has Teflon about all of these, right?

I mean -- PETER BAKER: I remember somebody reporting though that his view of military services, those people are suckers and losers.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I remember that.

PETER BAKER: I read that someplace.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I read that (INAUDIBLE).

GLASSER: Credible sources.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, very credible sources, actually.

The -- talking about spurious allegations, I want to bring up in a euphemistic way something that's happening in politics that I find disturbing, which is that there is a story that's very popular in social media about J.D.

Vance and the unnatural use of a couch.

Let's just leave it at that.

It's totally made up.

And the thing that's interesting and a little bit disturbing, we're talking about swift boating and the making of totally false allegations, it seems that the Democrats really love this particular shtick.

And you at home who aren't aware of this, God bless you for being normal, you could Google it if you need to, if you don't know what we're talking about.

But talk about that for a little.

You've had some thoughts on this.

MICHAEL SCHERER: I agree with you, I think it's actually sort of a terrifying development for our political discussion.

I mean, it used to be that you could sort of try and slime somebody, but you slime somebody based on something that has some connection to reality.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

MICHAEL SCHERER: This was an online meme, a joke based on absolutely nothing, basically a slander.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

MICHAEL SCHERER: But it's kind of because it's so absurd, and it has opened the door to that genre of slander for humor's sake, just to be mean, taking place all over the place.

Republicans were making up stories about Tim Walz this week and creating their own memes.

We won't talk about what they are, totally baseless, totally fraudulent.

And if we continue down this path, we're headed to a place where anybody who enters the public square will be immediately slimed with some joke about what they did with a rabbit once or something like that.

And it's just like a bottomless pit.

GLASSER: Yes.

I feel like we already went to the bottom place.

I mean, you know, the entire brand of Donald Trump in politics is to say lies about people and to, in particular, lies that demean them personally and whatever their personal characteristics are.

And he gets thousands of people to cheer and laugh and applaud at that.

And that has been a core part of his appeal to this country for the last nine years.

So, if we're talking about a race to the bottom, sadly, I just feel like we're living in that world already.

MICHAEL SCHERER: But we should call it out.

SUSAN GLASSER: By the way, I don't advocate this.

I'm not saying that this is a good thing that Democrats are now getting in on the act, but, sadly, we've been living in that world.

MICHAEL SCHERER: I'm not excusing anything Donald Trump's done.

I mean, we should, and we do call that out.

It's just once you say, well, they did it, so we can do it too.

SUSAN GLASSER: Oh yes.

I mean, that's -- ADAM HARRIS: And I should add, back to sort of the military conversation, right, Democrats clearly have a limit to what they will do, because, you know, they were asked about J.D.

Vance's service as well, and they said, well, we admire anybody who serves and, you know, who's willing to risk their life.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, there's some restraint somewhere.

ADAM HARRIS: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But most of the restraints are off.

Susan, I want to go to something that you wrote just yesterday.

You wrote a piece in The New Yorker about how Trump might very well be missing Biden at this point.

Go into that a little bit.

SUSAN GLASSER: Well, I mean, you know, it's amazing.

Obviously it's been an incredible whirlwind.

We are speaking today on day 19 only since Joe Biden dropped out, was pushed out, you know, decided to exit the presidential race.

And, you know, the world has sort of been reinvented since then.

The one person who's still talking about Biden in American politics has been Donald Trump.

He has repeatedly been posting on social media about him during this press conference at Mar-a-Lago yesterday.

He repeatedly unasked for, you know, kept going back to, he says that it's unfair that Joe Biden is not in the race anymore.

He says that he's even repeated multiple times that it's somehow unconstitutional that Joe Biden is no longer the Democratic nominee.

I suppose in the interest of fact-checking, he has not been able to cite a provision of the Constitution that might apply in this case.

But, you know, what it speaks to is that Trump has spent not just this campaign season, but, you know, the four-year campaign before that, running against Joe Biden, thinking about how to tear down Joe Biden, you know, marinating in the idea that he had this race won because Biden was such a weakened incumbent.

And he has really struggled, I think, to come up with a retooled campaign for an entirely different thing.

And just the one thing that it seems to me most important about Biden's exit, as it pertains to Trump, is that it's just taken the issue of the future and given it back to Democrats, given it back to Harris.

It's now Donald Trump, who is the candidate who looks old, whose fitness for office is the issue.

And I think that press conference, in many ways, really showcased those questions.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Wasn't it Nikki Haley who said that the first party to dump its 80-year-old candidate will win?

I think it's an interesting observation.

I want to ask you about something else that Susan wrote.

You know, Trump seems to miss Biden.

The Democrats don't seem to miss him at all.

His name was not invoked at the opening rally in Philadelphia, Harris and Walz.

And it was a little perturbing.

I don't know if you -- I mean, I guess you all picked up on that too.

What's going on here with Biden and the party?

PETER BAKER: Yes.

Well, he's basically disappeared, right?

He has -- he's doing a few events here and there, and now he's off in Delaware for the long weekend.

He is going to do his first joint appearance with Vice President Harris next Thursday.

That's the first one since his departure from the race, and it's more than three weeks after, and then he's going to have Monday night at the convention instead of Thursday night at the convention.

Thursday night's the night, of course, the nominee gets.

Monday night's the night you get when you're the former president.

And so it's a real step down for him.

And then as soon as that speech is done on Monday night of that convention, he will disappear for the rest of the week on vacation.

So, he's kind of exiting the stage a little bit.

Now, you could say maybe he's a little, you know, perturbed that they pushed him out of the race.

Maybe he's a little unhappy about that, or he's leaving the stage to her so that she can build up herself as the candidate, maybe a little bit of both.

But no question about it that he has, in fact, sort of receded at this point while she has, you know, jumped -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, quickly.

PETER BAKER: Yes, so quickly.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Democrats are trying to make this a change election.

And, you know, Harris is an incumbent.

She's running as part of an incoming administration, but they very much want to present themselves as something fresh and something new to the country.

And so Biden complicates that argument and will continue to complicate it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Let's go to Mar-a-Lago, not literally.

Move the table there.

That would be a great place to film.

You just came back from Mar-a-Lago from that press conference.

It was kind of a greatest hits montage press conference.

I want you to watch one moment from it and we can talk about this and others.

DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: 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, it's same real estate, same everything, same number of people.

If not, we had more.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You know, one thing I noticed from that is that he took a break to call the I Have a Dream speech a great speech, which maybe that means that he still thinks that black men are in play.

I don't know, but it was -- that was even for Donald Trump, kind of the compare yourself to Martin Luther King Jr., I thought that was -- give us the general sense.

You were right there in the room.

He seemed simultaneously filled with a kind of a bragging quality, but also a little bit lost, couldn't hear the questions sometimes.

What was the mood there?

MICHAEL SCHERER: Well, you know, it was actually when he got the question about the crowd size that the tone of that press conference changed.

He came out just bashing Harris, bashing Biden, bashing Democrats, hitting them on issues, which is what his campaign wants them to be doing, hitting Walz.

And then as soon as he got the crowd size question, it was like a whole new -- like it was going straight to the heart of who -- what his identity is.

And it started to sort of go off the rails there.

I thought it was a, I mean, we came down to Florida, a bunch of reporters, for a background briefing that morning by senior campaign staff.

And when Trump found out that we were going to be down there, and this was a very classic thing that campaigns do, here's how we're targeting voters, here's what our polling says, I mean, just sort of the basics of a campaign, he said, let's get buses, let's bring them to Mar-a-Lago, I want to talk to them.

And what was striking about that day was how different the substance of the morning presentation was, in which the campaign is doing very traditional campaign things.

They have a message against Harris.

They're going to prosecute the message.

They have door knocking.

They have ads, you know, they know that they have something they're trying to do.

And then they have a candidate who they don't control.

And there's just a disconnect there.

You know, most campaigns exist to discipline their candidates.

And the Trump campaign is built differently.

The campaign exists, and they have their candidate, and then the campaign reacts to their candidate, and sometimes tries to manage it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to talk about - - it's fascinating.

We're watching in real time the Trump campaign and Trump separately, I guess, pivot to figuring out what's the argument against Kamala Harris that would work.

Something that obviously Trump was trying out last week, Adam, was this, she's not really black, she's Indian, she never said she was black, which is kind of interesting if you go to Howard University as an 18-year-old.

You're kind of signaling something about your sense of who you are.

But it seems to have dropped off a little bit.

Are we just in the sort of the tryout where he's seeing what will stick?

ADAM HARRIS: Yes, it seems like a really spaghetti on the wall sort of phase that we're going through where they're not -- they were really sure how to run against Joe Biden.

The entire campaign strategy was built around the idea that we're going to win because we're running against Joe Biden.

We're old, but he's older, right, all of these things.

He doesn't get people excited.

Our base is sort of built in.

They don't necessarily have that for Kamala Harris.

And so, effectively, what he's trying to do, you mentioned kind of the maybe he still thinks that black men are in play.

He says that at the press conference yesterday, right?

We're doing better with black men than Harris is.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is there proof of the polling of that?

ADAM HARRIS: Not necessarily, right?

He's running a little bit better than in 2020.

But, you know, the issue here is going to be whether or not he is actually going to turn those voters out or if those voters are actually going to stay home.

There is a sort of streak in the sort of black masculinity that would lean towards Trump, but black women are notably, you know, very much in the block for Kamala Harris.

Sort of we've seen the excitement shift in the polling where some of those voters who were willing to go with Trump when it was Biden are shifting back to Kamala.

But I think there's also -- there's a little bit about like thinking of the economy, right?

Most voters are saying that the economy is the thing that we are going to go to the polls about, right?

30, somewhere around 36 percent will save the economy over any other issue.

And, you know, Vice President Harris staying away from President Biden at the moment is probably a good thing for her to sort of keep a little bit of distance, as the campaign is trying.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But very quickly, I'm hearing that you're not necessarily thinking that the play that Trump might be running, what race is she, she's this, she's that, it doesn't seem to have a salience that, let's say, birtherism had a long time ago.

ADAM HARRIS: No.

Yes, it seemed like an offhanded remark, right.

As he was kind of going through that conversation at the National Association of Black Journalists, he was really just sort of throwing out anything that he could that might stick.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, you know, by the way, that's a huge -- you bring up a huge issue.

Susan, you're a day-to-day, hour-to-hour tracker of the many moods of Donald Trump, and the statements of Donald Trump.

You know, we sometimes think that there's a plan behind things but, you know, you use the term offhand.

When you're watching Trump and tracking him week-to-week, how much do you think is just stuff that comes out spontaneously and how much do you think that he's thinking, I'm going to create confusion about her, the nature of her racial identity?

SUSAN GLASSER: Okay.

So, I think that Michael's point is a very important point, which is that there's -- just as there was during the Trump administration, there's the Trump administration's policy and then there's what President Trump was doing, and they were often at odds with each other.

That clearly is the case in the campaign.

But to the point about Trump, he's obviously not some kind of like, you know, 3D chess player, okay?

He's very undisciplined, and so it's often revealing what he says.

However, my view is that he does have certain, you know, playbook.

And, you know, a 78-year-old man, he's not going to reinvent himself.

He's not getting a new playbook.

This kind of racism and race baiting and bringing this up is ingrained in him.

It is one of his plays.

And I think that his play here is not to get more of the black male vote, it's signaling very clearly to his white supporters, hey, remember, I'm running against a woman of color.

And it seems to me that, you know, we're overthinking this and we do this all the time with Trump.

We don't need to overthink it.

Like, yes, he wants to bring up race in the campaign because he thinks it's a liability for her.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, we'll find out next week what game he is playing, if it's not 3D chess.

But, unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our panelists for sharing their reporting and their observations.

And to our viewers at home, thank you for joining us.

For more on Donald Trump's press conference, please visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.