The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 7, 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: On Sunday, The New York Times published an extraordinary piece detailing Donald Trump’s deteriorating mental state. Importantly, the piece made Trump’s increasingly deranged lies, distortions, and outright fabulism central to its exposé. This comes as Trump held a rally over the weekend in Pennsylvania where, predictably enough, he lied in all kinds of repugnant ways about the federal response to Hurricane Helene. Can Democrats capitalize on all this in the closing days of the campaign? Is there a way for them to centralize Trump’s profound mental unfitness for the presidency, including all the ways his nonstop lying about the response to Helene is fundamentally disqualifying? Today, we’re talking about all this with Democratic strategist Maria Cardona. Thanks for coming on, Maria.
Maria Cardona: Thank you so much for having me, Greg.
Sargent: The Times piece is pretty amazing. It recaps Trump’s increasingly bizarre ramblings, his incoherence, his weird digressions, his cognitive confusion, and his flights of rage. But what also struck me was the focus on all his lying. The piece says Trump regularly makes fantastical and outlandish claims that are made up out of whole cloth, and really makes an issue out of that and spells it out in grotesque detail. This is the key. Trump is inventing an alternate world that’s wholly detached from reality. Maria, how often do we see the press state this so plainly?
Cardona: I think it needs to happen more often, Greg, frankly. We have to consistently remind voters that this is not somebody who is fit for the presidency. I don’t think he was fit for the presidency in 2016, and he is certainly not fit for the presidency now. With another four years, if he wins, it’s going to be detrimental, it’s going to eviscerate so many of the rights and freedoms that we have as Americans, and it will specifically target vulnerable communities across the country whom he sees as not being American enough. And you know who I’m talking about. I’m talking about immigrant communities, I’m talking about the Black community, the Latino community, Muslims, across the board, LGBTQ+, transgender. All of those communities and all of those voters have everything to lose if Donald Trump becomes president again.
Sargent: Speaking of the deterioration of these lies into something profoundly dangerous, his dishonesty has been singularly focused on the federal response to Hurricane Helene lately. He’s been falsely claiming that Republican areas of the state are being deliberately neglected, deliberately denied disaster resources. At his rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, he made a similar suggestion about Kamala Harris herself. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): This has been the worst hurricane response by a president and vice president since Katrina, and this is simply not acceptable. Kamala wined and dined in San Francisco and all of the people in North Carolina, no helicopters, no rescue. It’s just ... What’s happened there is very bad ... If you want a president who won’t even try to save you when the floodwaters are rising, vote for Kamala.
Sargent: Now, even Republican governors have said all this is false. It’s all baloney. What’s your reaction to what the president’s been saying along these lines in particular?
Cardona: This is one of the things that we should respond strongest to because literally lives are in danger. I take this personally because I grew up in Puerto Rico. I remember very clearly I had family during the onslaught of Hurricane Maria and remember Donald Trump’s response. I am told now, and there’s reporting that shows this, that Donald Trump had to be shown maps and facts about Puerto Rico being a part of the United States before he actually released FEMA funding to go help them. He talked every day about how he would give himself and his administration an A plus rating in terms of the response while people were losing their houses in Puerto Rico, while there was no food available for people in need, while people were still out of power, out of light, had no water, people were in the streets.
There [is] other reporting about how when California was suffering through wildfires during his administration, they had to show him maps that some of the districts that were hardest hit by those wildfires were Republican districts, Greg. He had to be convinced that those voters were people that voted for him. That was the only reason why he would then say, OK, I guess we have to help them. It’s not just weird and insane from a normal person’s perspective, it is downright dangerous and he is putting American lives at risk.
Sargent: When it comes to the lying about the response to Hurricane Helene, I don’t think we talk enough about how disqualifying this lying is in a president. This effort to spread disinformation and enrage people against each other at a time when both parties are uniting to pull the country through a very trying crisis. But Maria, could Democrats themselves say more clearly that this is disqualifying in someone who wants to lead our country?
Cardona: Yes. Absolute yes, underscored and highlighted. That’s what we continually need to bring up and we need to underscore. With the perspective of hurricane relief, Project 2025 completely guts FEMA. It guts responses to these kinds of natural disasters. That is something that Democrats absolutely need to, frankly, lead with.
Sargent: To your point, NBC News reports that Democrats are preparing to seriously ramp up the negative messaging about Trump in the final days of the race. Apparently, Harris campaign officials feel that there’s still this bloc of undecided voters that hasn’t quite decided that Trump is unacceptable, that these voters still aren’t moving, and that the right kind of messaging about Trump can finally get to them. Should Trump’s worsening mental state and derangement, and the dangerous quality of these new lies we’re talking about here, should those things be central to the closing argument? What does that look like if they do that?
Cardona: Yes, they should be central. But that doesn’t mean that they should do that at the risk of not talking about anything else. I know that they won’t. And this is another thing that drives me crazy about the coverage of this, Greg, because now some media will say, Oh well, Harris is not going to talk about the economy, she’s not going to talk about inflation, they’re just going to talk about how horrible Trump is. Right?
Sargent: Oh, I hate that.
Cardona: I know, exactly.
Sargent: It’s the worst. Is it possible to do two things at once? Why, yes, it is.
Cardona: Thank you! Thank you. I want to talk about this in two perspectives. The first one is exactly what you just said. A campaign, as you know very well, can talk and chew gum at the same time, right? They can even listen to music while they’re doing it. A campaign, and especially this campaign, which is flush with money. They have offices everywhere in the battleground states. They have thousands of volunteers. They have the ability to not just turn on a dime, but they have the ability to do many things at once, and to target messages to the key voters that they know will move with specific messages.
This is now going to become one of those key messages to the voters that they know—exactly the ones that you’re talking about, Greg—might not be convinced for whatever reason. I’m not convinced that there are that many undecided voters out there, by the way, but they might very well need a push to go out and vote because everything is actually on the line. The big focus and endgame here for the campaign as it should be is to get those, again, not so much maybe undecided but unmotivated voters, and specifically the independent, suburban, Republican-leaning voters who were the ones who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
I think there are more of them now, and that’s why you’re seeing a big push and so many people joining Republicans for Harris, because they do understand. They either worked for Donald Trump or were around his sphere, and understand from a personal standpoint just how dangerous he will be for another four years. How unfit he is, how undeserving he is. Here, I think, is the bottom line: to remind voters that every single thing that Donald Trump does is for the benefit of one person, Donald Trump. No one else, no other reason. He’s only running for office to stay out of jail. Let’s remind people that.
Sargent: To your point about these Republican voters that are still out there, these moderate, independent, nonMAGA voters. The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina had a scathing editorial hammering Trump for making the tragedy worse with his lies. The editorial specifically singled out how disgusting it is for Trump to tell people that Republican areas are being neglected. Now, about these voters ... The disaster is hitting western North Carolina pretty hard. That’s mostly a very red area. Is there some way for the Harris campaign and Democrats to say to people in that part of the state, Trump is lying to you, he’s treating you with utter contempt, this man has no business being president. Could they reach the type of voter you’re talking about in that geographic area with a message like that?
Cardona: I do think that they can, and I think that they should. They need to do it carefully though, because right now, Kamala Harris herself, as she is and as she should be, is focusing on getting them help, getting them the relief that they need. Here’s the other big difference: She has not politicized this issue one iota. When she talks about hurricane relief, like when she is with FEMA and getting a briefing from FEMA and talking to voters who have been hard hit. She doesn’t talk about Donald Trump. She talks about them. She talks about what they are going through. She is consoling them about what they’ve lost. And then she’s telling them how the administration is going to help them, and how they’re going to get their lives back on track, and how they’re going to work together to make sure that that happens. Donald Trump is out there completely politicizing this issue and frankly injecting lies.
Timing here is important, Greg, because it’s not the time for the vice president to be doing this, but it is the time for all of the surrogates who are going out there and campaigning for her to be absolutely making that contrast and making that comparison in those red states. As you know, one of the things that the Kamala Harris campaign is doing, and smartly so, they are expanding the map already. They were expanding the map even before all of this happened. They’ve been going to rural red counties in Pennsylvania, rural red counties in North Carolina pre-Helene, and they’re expanding that map. They’re going to places that is Trump country.
Sargent: I do think Democrats are a bit hamstrung by 2016 here. They tend to think Hillary tried to make Trump’s debased temperament and character an issue, and she lost, and so there’s no real point in doing it again, they think. But people have seen Trump as president now, and they know this is what they don’t like about him.
Cardona: Yes.
Sargent: And Trump has gotten visibly worse as you laid out earlier. So I do think Dems can make a case here. But what do you hear from fellow Democrats about this? Is there a reluctance to go down this road?
Cardona: There is some reluctance to go down that road, Greg, because of exactly what you just laid out. But I think you’re also seeing and hearing, and what I’m seeing and hearing anecdotally and from some focus groups and polls that I’ve seen, people are right for that message because voters tend to forget. Voters tend to think of the here and now, and they tend to look backward with rose-colored glasses. There is a sliver of voters that are ready to hear this message, that are open to understanding what the reality was. You’re not only seeing that the Harris campaign is going to do that on hurricane relief, but you’re also seeing that they’re doing it on the economy. She’s doing it much more often too, which is when Republicans say, Oh, people were much better off four years ago ... Are you kidding me? Four years ago, the economy was in a tailspin. Four years ago, Americans were dying because Donald Trump refused to accept the science of Covid, told people to inject bleach, while he himself was taking the vaccine in secret. Dozens and dozens and dozens of families were losing their businesses. Millions of Americans were losing their jobs, and that is specifically a direct consequence of a president who was wholly unprepared, uninterested in dealing with one of the greatest tragedies and disasters that has faced this country in a century. If that is not something with which to measure the fitness of a president, then I don’t know what is. But people need to be reminded of that.
And here’s another thing that I think is really important. When we heard the news of President Obama going out on the campaign trail, which I think is just great and fantastic. As you know, he is still a rock star not just with Democrats but with voters in general. He will also be instrumental in reminding people, especially those people who think back fondly to the economy pre-Covid with Trump, that he was the one who handed Trump the economy in recovery, the economy that was expanding, the economy that people remember very fondly. And what did he do? He took that economy and he flushed it down the toilet.
Sargent: Maria, final question. What do you see in Democratic polling and in focus groups here? Is there a sense from this data and from these focus groups that there are Republican voters out there that really could end up moving to Kamala Harris in large part because of the derangement we’re seeing from Trump in these situations?
Cardona: I believe there is a secret Kamala vote out there, Greg. You know how in 2016 there was the secret Trump vote? Now it’s completely flipped, and it’s flipped because ... and I’ve seen this in democratic polling and in focus groups and with groups that are going door-to-door talking to voters, they’re hearing this. For the Kamala Harris campaign, it’s really smart of her to message this in a way that is about the voters. Yes, they talk about all of his lies and all of his conspiracy theories and how that’s a danger and detrimental to the country, but she talks about it in a way that focuses on voters: It’s time to turn the page, it’s time to get away from the crazy and the fearmongering and the divisiveness and the dark vision that Donald Trump has for the country, and focus on what we can do together to give people the tools to not just get by but to get ahead.
Sargent: I do think there probably is a secret Kamala vote out there that just wants to move beyond MAGA. That’s really the bottom line here. Maria Cardona, thanks so much for coming on with us today.
Cardona: Thank you so much, Greg. I appreciate it.
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.