Weekly Roundup: Trump Rambles As Harris Rallies

This episode delves into the contrasting campaign strategies and public appearances of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as the 2024 presidential race heats up.

1. Trump's campaign is characterized by attention-seeking and nostalgia for past campaign strategies.
2. Harris is gaining momentum, drawing large crowds and effectively using media to challenge Trump.
3. Trump's reluctance to adjust his campaign approach despite a tightening race reveals a disconnect with current political dynamics.
4. The episode highlights the strategic importance of swing states and the contrasting approaches of both campaigns to engage these crucial areas.
5. JD Vance's role is analyzed, focusing on his effectiveness as a vice presidential candidate and his counter-programming efforts against Harris.

1: Campaign Dynamics

Trump's recent press conference is a mix of attacks against Harris and nostalgic references to past successes. He attempts to undermine Harris by comparing crowd sizes and dismissing her capabilities. Donald Trump: "She's not smart enough to do a news conference." Heather: "What was Trump trying to do here?"

2: Swing State Strategy

Discussion on Trump’s campaign strategy, particularly his decision to campaign in non-swing states like Montana, despite the upcoming elections being tight in pivotal states. Mara Liasson: "He said he was doing so well in the polls that he didn't need to adjust."

3: Vice Presidential Dynamics

Analyzes JD Vance’s role in the Trump campaign, including his activities across key states and his impact as the vice presidential nominee. Stephen Fowler: "This was JD Vance's breakout moment for the campaign."

1. Engage with Swing States: Focus campaign efforts on swing states to maximize electoral impact.
2. Adjust Strategies Based on Polling and Feedback: Continuously update campaign strategies in response to changing political landscapes and voter feedback.
3. Leverage Media Effectively: Utilize media appearances to shape public perception and counter opponents’ narratives.
4. Monitor and Respond to Opponent’s Moves: Stay responsive to the opponent's strategies, especially in closely contested areas.
5. Maximize the Role of Running Mates: Utilize vice presidential candidates effectively to complement and enhance campaign messaging.

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.

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Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, JD Vance

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Heather
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 9 August. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Now on with the show.

Mara Liasson
That sounds like fun.

Heather
Hey, there. It's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

Stephen Fowler
I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign.

Mara Liasson
And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.

Heather
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.

Donald Trump
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.

Heather
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 6 insurrection to the one Martin Luther King junior had for his I have a dream speech.

Donald Trump
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.

Heather
So, Stephen, what was Trump trying to do here?

Stephen Fowler
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, 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.

Heather
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?

Mara Liasson
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 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.

Stephen Fowler
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.

Heather
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 Trump has always used to measure himself, to tell himself that he's winning, is not a thing that he can look to in the same way.

Mara Liasson
Ah, which sounds like you're saying that reality actually 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.

Stephen Fowler
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 and 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 dynamic of this campaign switch.

Heather
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 JD 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?

Stephen Fowler
Yeah, so JD 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 JD Vance's breakout moment for the campaign. He was traveling in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin, offering these sort of pre bundled 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 JD Vance showing one reason why he was added to the republican ticket.

Mara Liasson
Yeah, very traditional and typical role for the vice presidential candidate as attack dog.

Heather
All right, we are going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we will have more from the campaign trail.

Mara Liasson
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Jen Chavez
Dot Evergreen trees are Pacific Northwest icons in journalism. An evergreen story isn't tied to one news cycle. It goes deep and helps you understand the world. The Evergreen is also a podcast from OPB about the Northwest. I'm Jen Chavez. Listen to the Evergreen podcast from OPB every Monday, part of the NPR network.

Heather
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 10 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?

Mara Liasson
Mara, he's done 3180s on this. First he said, I'll debate them anywhere, anytime, any place. Then all of a sudden he said, ill only meet her if its on Fox. And now hes 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 Plouff, her new strategist Obama alumni said maybe Donald Trump only wants to debate people his own age. So theres 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.

Heather
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.

Stephen Fowler
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 launched, 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 gonna have a lot more meaningful news made from this, I think.

Mara Liasson
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.

Heather
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.

Mara Liasson
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.

Heather
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, 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.

Mara Liasson
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, she needs to get into that mix.

Heather
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 Walls. As Harris's running mate, he, too, is eager to debate.

Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD 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. Why do you think he was picked over the other finalists, like Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro?

Mara Liasson
I think he was picked for a number of reasons. The first rule of thumb and picking a vice presidential candidate or 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.

Heather
And, Stephen, how are Republicans feeling about the walls pick? How are they getting going after him on policy?

Stephen Fowler
Well, in public, they are saying in private that they are glad that hes the pick because hes 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 JD 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.

Heather
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, cant let it go new from embedded who gets to compete as a woman? This question came up in ugly form at the Paris Olympics, but its not new.

Mara Liasson
If she runs like a man and talks like a man, is she a man?

Heather
Hear about the long history of sex testing women athletes on tested, a new series from CBC and NPRs. Embedded podcast.

NPR and WBUR
The Olympic Games are underway in Paris, but you forgot to buy your flight to France. No problem. We've got you covered on here and now. Anytime, a podcast from NPR and WBUR.

Throughout the games, we'll keep an eye on the athletics and the intrigue outside the arenas. You're not an Olympic sprinter, but you can stay up to speed with here and now. Anytime, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Heather
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. Steven, what can't you let go of?

Stephen Fowler
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, you know, 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 Rocko. 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 to the lore, Simone Bile's curving Elmo for Rocco, is my can't let it go.

Heather
I have to say, I have enjoyed all of the Snoop Dogg content as well, but that's not for toddlers.

Stephen Fowler
So, tam, what can't you stop thinking about other than this ever changing presidential campaign?

Heather
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 Walls as basically America's dad.

So Tim Walls 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.

Mara Liasson
Well, speaking of dogs.

Heather
Yes, Mara, what can't you let go of?

Mara Liasson
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. He 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.

Heather
Maybe the dog should also learn how to use a fire extinguisher. Extinguisher.

Mara Liasson
Yeah.

Yeah, right.

Heather
All right. Well, that is all from us this week. Our executive producer is Muthani Muturi. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Jung yoon, Han, Kacey Morell and Kelly Wessinger. Our intern is Brea Suggs. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

Stephen Fowler
I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign.

Mara Liasson
And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.

Heather
And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics podcast.

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