The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the October 2, 2024 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Greg Sargent: With just a few weeks remaining until election day, Donald Trump has decided that the way to close the deal with swing voters is to rhapsodize about police violence, threaten to prosecute anyone who displeases him, and above all, unleash childish and disgusting insults toward his opponents, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. What if there’s a way for Harris to use Trump’s unhinged tirades and threats to her advantage in the final stretch of the race? A.B. Stoddard, a columnist at The Bulwark, suggested this in a new piece that’s all about how Harris can close strong on this campaign. We thought this idea was worth exploring in some detail because it challenges some unspoken assumptions in our politics right now that really deserve scrutiny. Great to have you back on, A.B. You’re becoming a regular around here.
A.B. Stoddard: It’s great to be with you, Greg. Thanks.
Sargent: So a quick recap. In recent days, Trump has called for “one really violent day” for police to be unleashed to solve crime for good. He’s threatened to prosecute Google for displeasing him. He pushed the deranged lie that disaster relief in the South is being denied to MAGA areas. And on Fox News, he said this about Tim Walz, “I would love to have two or three more debates. I like it. I enjoy it. But they’re so rigged and so stacked. You’ll see it tomorrow with J.D. It’ll be stacked. He’s going up against a moron, a total moron. How she picked him is unbelievable. And I think it’s a big factor. There’s something wrong with that guy. He’s sick.” That was before the debate, obviously, which is when we’re also recording. What do you make of all that, A.B.?
Stoddard: Well, there was a lot of talk during the primary campaign earlier in the year that Donald Trump had finally seen the light, and to avert prison, he was going to find discipline and he was going to do a big reset of all his ways, which had been successful for him in the past. In 2016 and 2020, let Trump be Trump, that was his charm. He galvanizes people, you don’t have to like it, but he gets them out and he has this following and he can get to a majority doing his thing. And it was all turned around. He got an organized, professional adult team in place and he was sitting back quietly. Everyone thought that was going to be the new him because he couldn’t risk anything in 2024. He had to win. He had to stay away from prison. What you see in the last couple of weeks is the reality setting in with Trump, that she is close in the polling and often in the lead, that he could be beaten by a Black woman and that he might be looking at some convictions down the line. So he’s becoming unhinged.
He is more liberated from whatever he used to do in politics, the rules he played in 2020 and 2016, because look how far he’s come, Greg. He’s gotten away with January 6, had it become a big fantastical fiction of great lore. He’s become the nominee for the third time, he’s remade the party, he’s decimated the party so that it is wholly dependent upon him. He controls all the money, the Republican voters who donate pay his legal bills. It’s really astounding in so many ways. He’s not a split person anyway, but given all the factors I just laid out, he’s decided to throw that all out the window. He’s going from his gut and we’re seeing the real Donald Trump, right? He is an authoritarian, he’s a dangerous, reckless man. He’s a sadist, he has fantasies about control and dominance and power and brutal crackdowns. So he’s letting his freak flag fly in the final days, hoping that that is going to energize what he believes is a majority of Americans who are Trumpers, and he’s going to win with that kind of language.
Sargent: Yes. A lot of the time, when pundits are talking about this stuff, they make a basic mistake, which is they say, Oh well, Trump is just not actually thinking about how this will impact swing voters. I think he actually believes that this works with swing voters, this kind of stuff, that it activates their latent MAGA tendencies. What do you think of that?
Stoddard: Yeah, I think so too. I think he believes that there are dark forces in the country and that it is a chaotic time. We’re coming out of Covid. Things cost too much. They’re very upset about that. There’s a bleak outlook on the right track, wrong track of the country and the near future anyway because of the economy. People don’t like foreign conflicts. Now we have natural disasters. There’s a feeling of panic and he feels that he can layer on another dose of fear that it will basically lead people into his camp. Tim Alberta was on one of our podcasts, Beg to Differ, Mona Charen’s podcast on The Bulwark, this week, saying that he actually believes that suburban security moms in very critical areas around the cities in the swing states, Philly, Atlanta, Detroit, on and on, are going to be captivated by this message. Even though they might not want to vote for him, they’ll come back around. Of course he’s counting on a lot of men in this country, white people in this country to go into the booth and say, I really can’t, I can’t vote for a woman commander in chief, not a Black woman either. And it just may work.
Sargent: Right, he thinks at least in his lizard brain that he’s activating these tendencies that will reflexively assert themselves in the minds of voters and turn them against the Black woman. That’s how he sees it. I think he’s got that wrong. My belief is that this does alienate suburban moms or whatever and certain types of swing voters, critical ones, but that he can win anyway if people end up not factoring it in. That leads me to your argument, which is hiding right in plain sight: in the closing days of the campaign, Harris’s surrogates should be out there reminding voters of this kind of stuff, and also things like Trump saying the invasion of Ukraine was the U.S.’s fault. How might doing this make the difference in the campaign’s final days with the voters that are on the fence right now?
Stoddard: So I think it’s really incumbent on the Democratic coalition to speak to the small universe of swing voters about the risk we take with him, the danger of Trump, the uncertainty, the destabilization, not only at home, but abroad. While Harris has been so intentional and run such a smart campaign, she’s avoiding certain things, we know for sure. Identity politics, trashing Trump, talking about democracy and January 6. She is avoiding taking the bait, he’s trying to run ads about trans issues. But she doesn’t want to take his bait. So she stays on the high road and avoids a lot of this stuff. And my argument is: that’s over, with now that we have five weeks left to today until election day.
We cannot let these, not only attacks on her as mentally disabled, but the thing that you just mentioned, the idea of saying that Russia invaded Ukraine, that’s our fault, and Ukraine is gone and these types of things. The fact that these things are going unanswered and that Tim Walz is “sick,” that there’s something “sick” about him? There should be someone every day, and I understand it’s not going to be the candidate, but it should be somebody every day saying, This man is unwell. This is not how we need anyone to talk in this country. This woman is focused on your problems. He is full of grievance and rage. They just need to keep pounding. These things cannot go unanswered, Greg. We are normalizing Donald Trump…
Sargent: Yeah.
Stoddard: …and MAGA and the way that they have degraded our discourse and our politics and the way that they relish in instability and cruelty and hominem attacks and being offensive. At this period, I think the Democrats, should she lose, would regret looking back and saying, Why did we let him just go and say, Well, that’s just Trump, he just goes on Fox and Friends and says batshit, horrible, mean things that are usually untrue, we just got tired of it, so we moved on to other kitchen table issues. You can do both things at the same time.
Sargent: Yeah, and you make a powerful point there when you say that not taking the bait, which seems to be what Harris wants to avoid doing, that that actually can translate into letting all the deranged lunacy seep into the discourse unchallenged and thus normalizing it. By the way, a lot of political professionals and journalists, the elite opinion-making and consensus forming class, take it as given that Trump’s deeply debased character and low morals are “baked in” for voters, to use a horrible cliche that political professionals will not stop using.
I’m telling you, I’ve said this before, we need to banish that phrase “baked in” forever. I really question that idea that this stuff is baked in. I think voters actually keep forgetting why they despise Trump’s first term and every time they’re reminded he loses ground and then when he recedes, he gains ground. Let me ask you, it sounds like you think there’s a way to keep it front and center, this stuff in voters minds. I still don’t quite have a feel for what it would look like if it’s done correctly. Can you explain that?
Stoddard: Right. Again, I understand why she’s not going to do that. She wants to talk to voters about their problems and her solutions, and she wants to look forward and not back. That is why she’s run a great campaign. That is why she’s improved her favorability numbers. That’s why she is in a good polling position right now. I would like national security professionals who have endorsed her to come out, generals, retired generals, I don’t care who they are, to talk about how destabilizing this pro-Putin maniac would be and what that looks like and what that feels like. Then at the same time…I don’t care if it’s Eric Swalwell or Gavin Newsom or Senator Coons, but someone’s got to come on TV every day after he says this stuff the day before. Because it’s every day now. He’s in a rally in a swing state saying this stuff every day. They have to come up and say, This is beyond the pale, and go through whatever it was. It was anti-American or it was misogynistic or it was a lie or it was racist or cruel or whatever it was. But I want a police on him.
This is the third election of Donald Trump. This would be so existential for this country if he secures a second term. There is nothing left to lose but this election, these people have got to take him on because I think he’s just running around with free rein. Oh well, like you said, that’s baked in. Voters need to be reminded and they need it in their face. If you vote for this guy, this is what you’re doing. This is what you’re taking on.
Sargent: Yes, I think that the assumption that voters have already priced in Trump’s debased character is actually a form of 2016 brain, which is this tendency to see everything through the prism of the 2016 election that he won. A lot of people think, Oh Hillary Clinton tried to make the race about Trump’s debased character and morals and look how that worked out. The thing is, he’s been president since then and people saw his character translated into presidential action. He had kids in cages, countless needless Covid deaths, outbreaks of violence, insurrection. Americans didn’t like it. So isn’t this the challenge, A.B., to connect for voters, to reconnect his character with the type of president he would be? That seems to be the real key.
Stoddard: Right. We have talked last time we were together, Greg, about Project 2025 going from being this very unknown, invisible esoteric thing to into the mainstream of the political debate. People who are very politically disengaged now seem to know about it because they found a way to carpet-bomb social media about it. Harris does talk about that. The devastating flooding right now in the South, it’s a perfect occasion to talk about how they want to cut FEMA and emergency management relief funds for after natural disasters. You can talk about certain things that you know that he will do. She’s avoiding mass deportation talk because she believes a lot of Americans are for it. That’s fine. She uses abortion because that’s more salient and more concerning to a lot of voters. There’s a way, again, for this not to be Kamala Harris’s problem, but to be the work of her surrogates to get out there and say, This man’s policies, this man’s rantings, this man’s affinity for dictators, this is all really scary stuff. And yes, there are a lot of voters for whom it is “baked in.” They are willing, they say to themselves, things cost less when he was here, I don’t care.
But you know what? There are a lot of new voters. There are a lot of young voters who came up in the age of Trump. They don’t remember any of this stuff. There’s a lot they don’t know about his really corrupt relationships and dependence on foreign money from foreign governments. There’s all sorts of things that are unknown to a big swath of the electorate that’s dangerous. I also think that you have to drive home things like tariffs. I happen to believe that tariffs is like this huge political gift for Harris. I don’t think the voters yet understand, Greg, what this means. If she can find a way… They call it like the Trump tax, and people don’t really understand what that means, but this is like this weird thing where he’s obsessed with tariffs and he believes that they work a certain way, which is not how they work. If she and Tim Walz and all their surrogates can make it clear to the American people that he thinks it’s some weird carrot stick thing he’s going to use to dominate other nations and bring businesses in the U.S. to heal, to do exactly what he wants because he doesn’t believe in the private market. If they could use this as like, you’re going to go to Walmart in 2026 and you’re going to pick up this household item and this is what’s happening. This man is a lunatic.
That’s forward looking, she could do that. You want to be forward looking about the risk of him, but other surrogates can also look back and say, He did this. He wouldn’t let us have tests during Covid. We couldn’t go to each other’s funerals or baby showers because he didn’t want us to have at-home kits. We went months without them. People died unnecessarily. There’s a lot of things that you can do that’s looking into the past if you’re a surrogate. I understand that principles need to be to look to the future. The whole team has to be strategic about this. We are not going to play nice with Trump in the final five weeks of this campaign before he secures a second term. I’m sorry. People need to be terrified.
Sargent: Right, they have to get rougher on the end here. To your point about tariffs, Ron Brownstein said something interesting on Twitter that Republicans think the key swing group right now that’ll decide this are voters who retrospectively approve of Trump’s performance as president, but view him personally unfavorably. So clearly reminding voters of all this recent craziness could keep down those personal numbers, but the other half is his performance as president, which somehow voters look on fondly. The key to that is the economy. People have decided they were better off during Trump’s term. So have Democrats done enough to remind voters that they (a), didn’t actually approve of his presidency during it, and (b), have they done enough to make it clear, as you say, that a second term would actually be an economic disaster? Tariffs, mass deportations, that would be a catastrophe if you add it all up. I don’t know how far he could get, the very attempt to do it would also be a catastrophe, but that’s a separate aspect to all this. The bottom line is the personal stuff is only half the battle here, right? They really have to undercut the view of Trump’s performance as president, the favorable retrospective view of it.
Stoddard: Right, I think that part is a little challenging because people got out of the pandemic and came into the highest inflation of their lifetime or four decades, for most of us the first time. They believe it’s semipermanent and that we won’t be able to escape it for a long time. It factors into their near future and it really scares them. I don’t think there’s a way for Democrats to go back and say, Look, this guy wasn’t that strong on the economy before Covid. You’re just seeing it through rose-colored glasses now. It’s hard to explain that if Trump had been president in 21, 22 and 23, post pandemic, the same supply chain disruption would have brought the same global inflation visited upon his second term.
I think it’s too much to try to go there, which is why I think if you explain that this madman tried some tariffs the first time, now he wants across the board in massive numbers and high percentages. This is going to be a debacle. This economic prowess that people think he has is a fiction. If you try to walk it through again, it’s really hard to go into like, Look, man, inflation would have been on his shoulders. Sorry, you remember it so well. I think that the tariff thing is an easy… It divides the Republican Party. All the Republicans hate them. They make it economically nonsensical. You can get experts to come out and say it and back it up, right? And you just say, This guy doesn’t know how tariffs work. She did that in her MSNBC interview. I just want more bumper stickers to be able to explain to the voters, this is going to be a taxed import that hits a company that has to layer on the extra cost to you, and you and I are going to pay it. It’s going to be more than 4,000 a year per family, but it could be much higher. This is the crazy old man barking at cars in the streets.
That’s an easy…it’s a current plan that he loves. He talks about it all the time. You divide the Republicans on it, and you explain to the American people that a year and a half from now, this is what you’ll be paying at Walmart. It’s much easier for them to integrate than trying to remake their rosy feelings about 18, 19 and pre-pandemic 2020.
Sargent: Right. Also it’s an easier case for Harris in particular to make than it would then the case about mass deportations. I hate to say it, but they have to be really careful not to play into Trump’s attacks on her as this dangerous other who’s opening the borders and stuff. It’s really tough for them to talk about immigration without playing to Trump’s strengths. I think undeserved, but it’s just the fact of political life right now.
Stoddard: Yeah. Look, we’ve watched her now since July 22 and she has all the right instincts. She’s very cautious. I’d like her to give more interviews and talk about herself, but in most of her caution, the topics she avoids, she’s been right.
Sargent: So to come full circle, how does Harris close this out with regard to making her own final closing sale? She’s gotten pretty close to fighting Trump to a draw in the economy. It’s required immense sums on ads, broadcasting her economic agenda in the swing states. She’s battled some of the way back on immigration with her speech at the border recently. Still feels like she’s not there yet. It’s still incredibly close in the swing states. She’s still not where she needs to be with young voters and nonwhites, particularly working class ones. Are you worried or do you see the path to solving all that and closing the deal?
Stoddard: I think that she needs to recreate the momentum that she had in August that dipped in September. She needs to be the story. She and her campaign are the story every day. And that makes her look like a winner so that late breakers, anyone who’s still holding out, right? Most of the double-haters went to her in early August. People who didn’t want Biden and Trump. The people who are still holding on, they’re pissed, OK? They’re hard-asses and it’s hard to break through. But the fact that she has made gains on the economy, the fact that she’s made gains with noncollege women, with whites, with seniors? People are listening. Those are actually impressive data points. They’re important. She needs to look like a winner. She needs to focus on the storm victims, do whatever she can, raise money for them, have a Live Aid. I don’t care what, just the Obamas everywhere, Bruce Springsteen, I want huge names so that there she’s the story in the news every day with big validators, lots of momentum, making Trump crazy.
It’s very important to actually surf a bunch of news cycles pretty regularly in the week, I believe, because the polls are close. Keep talking about the issue she’s talking about. More interviews. People who are looking for a gut check now need to see her on “All the Smoke,” the podcast, talking about family stuff. People just need a gut check. Like, she’s normal. They saw her at the debate. They’ve seen her. They know she has a good resume. Because that has totally helped her break into the lead, at this point, it’s a gut check. And she cannot take her foot off the gas on the border. That’s a huge issue. And I think she needs…It was interesting. In Sarah Longwell’s focus groups, a lot of people had not known about the Lankford bill, right? So people think everyone knows everything about Trump, but not everyone knows everything about what he’s done in this campaign. To go back to the Lankford bill, the most conservative immigration bill in generations, she would sign it if it came to her desk as president. Go back to that as much as possible. Voters, they don’t want you to avoid issues and to deny them, which is why she’s been so good on cost reduction and price increases. Again and again and again, say what you’ll do and say that Trump tried to stop you. It’s what she has, and she’s got to use it because that issue… I still want to see those numbers move in the next couple weeks.
Sargent: I wholly agree. She’s got to be everywhere. She’s got to be owning the news cycle. When Trump does things like curse wildly or rant wildly about Tim Walz, Harris can take that moment to take control, make it about how her character is preferable to his, how she’s a sane person now. She’s a real leader and he’s just a complete joke and buffoon and is dangerous. There’s a way for her to essentially take control of the news cycle and say you can’t let this man become president. She can do all those things at once.
Stoddard: One of her great lines, and there were 210 of them in the debate, was that she said, “I want to invite you to a Trump rally. He stands there, people start to leave, they get bored, but because all he does is settle into his grievances. You know what he’s not talking about? He’s not talking about you, he’s talking about himself.” She could open every rally from now until November 5 saying, You know what I heard Donald Trump say today? He thinks that Tim Walz is a moron. You know what we’re going to talk about today? We’re going to talk about you. Always bring it back that Trump is always talking about himself. He’s always indulging in grievance. He’s always on the attack personally. We’re going to talk about you. Then the surrogates can run around and nitpick exactly through what he said. But you’ve got to hammer this home, right? You’ve got to hammer home that fact that he’s the most unpopular politician ever, and we can’t let him win. Avoiding it and tiptoeing around it is a mistake.
Sargent: Right, and she can put it all together. She can say, here’s the economy and here’s the country that I envision for our future, that man’s the past. Get celebrities, big crowds to trigger his worst instincts, right? Take control of the news cycle, all those things. Here’s what I will do: trigger Trump, get him to act as crazy as possible. Put all that together, can we see a route to victory here or what?
Stoddard: I think so, because her focus has been her gift. She’s very focused. She’s run a good campaign because of that. She doesn’t get derailed by him, but I want her to lean into the momentum. Like I said, we need basketball stars, Willie Nelson, Justin or whoever, every Republican she can push to the floor. I want press, press, press, rallies, rallies, big events, and just lots of coverage so that the voters who are undecided believe, You know what, I’m going to go with the winner. She looks like the winner. I’m going to ride that ticket. That’s really critical at the end. People can attack Trump, but I want her out there just a ball of energy and getting all the attention. She did it in August, she can do it again.
Sargent: Make him the sad loser, right?
Stoddard: And yesterday, right? He’s the past.
Sargent: A.B. Stoddard, it’s always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Stoddard: Thanks, Greg.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.