Kamala Dominates Trump at the Debate

Transcript

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Speaker 17 In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats.

Speaker 17 They're eating the pets of the people that live there.

Speaker 1 So that was 30 minutes in to a debate that

Speaker 1 I think by all accounts, including people on Fox News. Britt Hume, Britt Hume,

Speaker 1 Kamala Harris won. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It was, I think, the best debate performance against Donald Trump I have ever seen of any of the primary debates, any of the seven presidential debates he's participated in. I think she

Speaker 1 crushed him. This was the moment that people have been waiting for for nine years.

Speaker 1 Someone got on stage with him and took him down, and he had no response. He got angry.
Towards the end, he got kind of sad.

Speaker 1 And it was exactly, it's what people, it's what everyone's been wanting, waiting for, and Kamal Harris delivered tonight.

Speaker 1 Dan, do you think it was a mistake to, rather than do actual debate prep for Donald Trump to do what he called policy sessions with Matt Gates and Tulsi Gabbard?

Speaker 1 Maybe he didn't do enough policy sessions with Matt Gates and Tulsi Gabbard. Fatal mistake, I think.
Love it. What did you think?

Speaker 1 There's a moment that we'll get to where basically Kamal Harris says, I'm not Donald Trump. I'm not Joe Biden.
I'm a new generation of leadership.

Speaker 1 And the closest experience I've had is: remember when I had to go to the hospital after that show in Austin? And I was in a lot of pain. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 And I was in a lot of, and they didn't know what was wrong, but they decided to give me morphine anyway.

Speaker 1 And there's this morphine, there's this moment where the morphine kind of hits your bloodstream. Jesus Christ.
And

Speaker 1 I just think she did great tonight. And

Speaker 1 just took the Chris Matthews thrill up. It's like that.
I just said. Just fucking took it to another level.

Speaker 1 It was relief. It was relief.
Sweet relief.

Speaker 1 They walked out on stage at the beginning, and she went to shake his hand. She had to like go all the way over to his podium because he did not want to shake her.

Speaker 1 He looked scared. She looked in command.
And that was basically just symbolic of the entire debate because she was in control the entire time.

Speaker 1 I think what is most impressive about the performance, and we'll get into all of it, is she went into this debate.

Speaker 1 She is the vice president of an incumbent administration where the president of that administration is quite unpopular and has been for some time.

Speaker 1 So there was plenty of fodder for Donald Trump and the moderators of the debate to put her on the defense.

Speaker 1 And it very easily could have been a debate where we came out of it and it was talking all about a lot of Kamala Harris's positions that she's changed over the years, this, that, the other thing.

Speaker 1 And she just wasn't on the defense in

Speaker 1 90 minutes of the debate. A very small percentage of the time when she was defending her positions.
And what she did is she walked in there and realized that she had a playbook.

Speaker 1 She had the points she wanted to make. She had the attack she wanted to level against Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 She had what she wanted to say about her own plans and her own policies and her own positions and her own values. And she did that.

Speaker 1 And every time Donald Trump spoke and rambled, and we'll get to that, like she didn't. She didn't respond to different things that he said and she didn't chase him down the rabbit holes.

Speaker 1 She just sort of responded by doing what she had prepared to do and say. She had a plan.

Speaker 1 For every single question, she went in there and she baited the hook and she dipped it into the water and he took it every time. She baited him into talking about his crowd size.

Speaker 1 She baited him into unloading about his court cases and felonies. She even baited him into ranting about COVID and ventilator production, like things that in no world should he be talking about.

Speaker 1 And yeah, he looked like a maniac. So to keep things simple here, we're just going to go more or less chronologically through the debate, pick out what we thought were the most important moments.

Speaker 1 Let's start with abortion. First big moment of the debate was an exchange about abortion where Harris jumped all over Trump because he was saying everyone wanted him to overturn Roe.

Speaker 1 And then the discussion shifted to talk about a national abortion ban. Here's how it went.

Speaker 18 One does not have to abandon their faith. or deeply held beliefs to agree.
The government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.

Speaker 18 You want to talk about this is what people wanted?

Speaker 18 Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she's bleeding out in a car in the parking lot.

Speaker 18 A 12 or 13 year old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term?

Speaker 18 They don't want that. Understand.
If Donald Trump were to be re-elected, he will sign a national abortion ban.

Speaker 18 Understand, in his project 2025, there would be a national abortion, a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages.

Speaker 17 I'm not in favor of abortion ban, but it doesn't matter because this issue has now been taken over by the state.

Speaker 19 But if I could just get a yes or no, because your running mate, J.D. Vance, has said that you would veto if it did come to your desk.

Speaker 17 Well, I didn't discuss it with J.D., in all fairness. JD, and I don't mind if he has a certain view, view, but I think he was speaking for me, but I really didn't.

Speaker 1 Here's what I can't understand there. The Trump campaign and Donald Trump went through great lengths to say that at one point he would veto a national abortion ban.

Speaker 1 And he basically, in a national debate, just decided to walk that back, make news on his abortion stance, which is something that they have been trying to avoid for some time now.

Speaker 1 What was going on there? I don't think he's on camera saying I would veto a national abortion ban. I don't think he's ever said that.

Speaker 1 I think that the the campaign has come up behind and cleaned up after something he said in the past but he has studiously avoided being on camera saying that he has said he would not sign one yeah he is because there's been this iteration of this where it was for the first answer was it will never come into my desk and then that was seen as insufficient and then it was i won't sign one right he said i won't sign right and then the campaign has said i didn't realize it was jayd vance but the campaign has and i thought trump had said it but the campaign has answered questions to say that they would veto it because when jdance said it on the sunday show they said jd vance reiterated the Trump campaign's position.

Speaker 1 His right, but he said that,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 when he said

Speaker 1 I think that when he has said in the past some version of I won't sign it, he's saying it's not going to happen. It's not coming to my desk.
I'm not going to sign it. That's not going to happen.

Speaker 1 He's never explicitly said, if it's passed, I will veto it. There's two reasons this happened.
The first one is he went out last week.

Speaker 1 and said he would vote for the abortion amendment in Florida and he got smacked on the nose by the far-right abortion extremists who run the Republican Party.

Speaker 1 And so I think he is now hesitant about that because he would, I think they were pretty, the phone lines blew up.

Speaker 1 People made, you know, essentially threats about evangelical turnout in the Battleground States. I think he's scared there.

Speaker 1 The other reason is he's a 78-year-old, pretty dim, declining man, and he doesn't really know what he's doing. And he was knocked off his game pretty early there.

Speaker 1 This is a theme of the entire debate.

Speaker 1 There were a couple of debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump was ranting and raving in those debates.

Speaker 1 He would lie a lot in those debates, but he made a little bit more sense back in 2016 than he did tonight. He made more sense in 2020.
The first debate with the COVID was when he had COVID.

Speaker 1 It was a little brain fog. Yeah, a little brain fog there.

Speaker 1 But he really just sort of lost the plot on a lot of these answers. I mean, I think that's the theme of this whole thing.
I was kind of kidding about...

Speaker 1 prepping with Matt Gates and Tulsi Gabbard and doing policy sessions, but like Kamala Harris was prepared for every single answer. She had practiced.

Speaker 1 She knew how to look in the cut shot, right? She knew how to call him a liar with her eyes, her face, her smile. And Donald Trump did not seem prepared.

Speaker 1 And just to sort of like big picture this abortion answer, David Pluff tweeted: 40-point difference with undecided voters on their abortion answers, widest gap I've ever seen in debate dials.

Speaker 1 What debate dials are is campaigns do what are called dial tests. Basically, you can figure out in real time if undecided voters or whoever is behind the dials like or dislike an answer.

Speaker 1 He's saying that the voters, the distance between the voters on the Trump answer and Kamala Harris' answer was the widest he's ever seen. This is a very experienced campaign operative.

Speaker 1 So that was a masterful answer from Kamala Harris.

Speaker 1 And, you know, we've been talking about how one challenge the Harris campaign and Democrats have had is convincing voters that not only is Donald Trump responsible for

Speaker 1 the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, but that he would actually pass an abortion ban.
That's what they've been trying to say. And Donald Trump's been trying to run away from that.

Speaker 1 And now at a national TV audience of, I don't know how many tens of millions of people, he basically left open the idea that he would sign a national abortion ban.

Speaker 1 Six of the seven battleground states have either abortion amendments already in the Constitution or Democratic control of the governorship and or the legislature to protect abortion rights in those states.

Speaker 1 And so if you want people to care about it, they got to understand that

Speaker 1 we have to defeat Donald Trump. Otherwise, it doesn't matter who your governor is, doesn't matter what your state law says,

Speaker 1 you can still lose your reproductive freedom in your state under Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 So the other thing that Harris did in this debate is she went in with mostly a plan to talk about her plans and to contrast with Donald Trump's policies, but she also had a strategy to get under his skin a few times in a sort of subtle way that didn't look like it was too, too planned or too artificial, I guess.

Speaker 1 It definitely looked planned, but it wasn't artificial. And this was one of the first moments.
Let's listen.

Speaker 18 And I'm going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump's rallies because it's a really interesting thing to watch.

Speaker 18 You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter.

Speaker 18 He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.

Speaker 18 And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. And I'll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first, and I pledge to you that I will.

Speaker 17 She said people start leaving. People don't go to her rallies.
There's no reason to go. So she can't talk about that.
People don't leave my rallies.

Speaker 17 We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.

Speaker 1 So what was the original question about? We didn't know.

Speaker 1 We were going through the clips. We're like, what was that in response to?

Speaker 1 Immigration. Obviously.
Obviously, of course. Donald Trump, because we're going to talk about the Republicans all complaining about the moderators.

Speaker 1 Donald Trump had an opportunity to talk about Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's record on immigration, which polls show is Trump's best issue. And she wisely pivoted right to this rally line.

Speaker 1 And he just took the fucking bait, just didn't even talk about immigration off the top, went right to the rally stuff immediately. She was like when Bugs Bunny draws a fucking tunnel

Speaker 1 on the side of a brick wall and then moves the road over and he's like, gotta follow the road.

Speaker 1 Unbelievable. It also makes you wonder.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, sometimes you see, you know, ads that are created for Twitter and a Twitter conversation, like Obama doing the kind of hand gesture that looks like he's talking about dick size, but he says crowd size.

Speaker 1 And then you have to wonder, did that get in his head? Because he sure seems mad about it these days.

Speaker 1 He was, well, the funny, the, the, one of the many fun things about this debate was watching Donald Trump get progressively angrier with each passing minute.

Speaker 1 He didn't start that way, and then he just got angrier and angrier and angrier. They all had a dog, and he was hungry.

Speaker 1 I also thought it was just great in that that, you know, when in her rally bit, when when she looked at the camera and she did this a few times in the debate and said, like, he has no plan for you, right?

Speaker 1 Because that is, it's fun.

Speaker 1 The big challenge for her in this debate was it's fun to get under Donald Trump's skin, right? It makes us excited. It makes it throws Donald Trump off his game, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 But you also want to deliver your message that's going to actually move undecided voters. And the part that's going to move voters is he has no plan for you and I do.

Speaker 1 And here's how I'm going to improve your life. And she, she wove that in really well in a lot of these like rehearsed bits.
So it wasn't just to like get under his skin and that was it.

Speaker 1 There's a way to just club Donald Trump over the head that is cathartic. Right.

Speaker 1 But she did, she did it in a way that's constructive to her campaign, which is, I think, the most impressive part about this debate performance.

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Speaker 1 So we know from the polling that the big lie is one of the most unpopular parts of Trump's shtick, but you know what?

Speaker 1 He stuck with it tonight.

Speaker 1 David Muir tried to get Trump to admit that he actually lost the 2020 election based on some recent statements where he sort of appeared to concede that maybe he lost, would not do it.

Speaker 1 And then Kamala Harris jumped in with this.

Speaker 18 Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. So let's be clear about that.
And clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.

Speaker 18 But we cannot afford to have a President of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election.

Speaker 18 And I'm going to tell you that I have traveled the world as Vice President of the United States and world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.

Speaker 18 I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you're a disgrace.

Speaker 18 And when you then talk in this way in a presidential debate and deny what over and over again are court cases you have lost because you did in fact lose that election, it leads one to believe that perhaps we do not have in the candidate to my right the temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact.

Speaker 18 That's deeply troubling, and the American people deserve better.

Speaker 1 What do we think about that, guys?

Speaker 1 Tommy?

Speaker 1 It's pretty good.

Speaker 1 That was pretty good.

Speaker 1 I mean, also,

Speaker 1 he then gives this long, defensive response. And I saw someone tweet this, and I can't remember who it was.

Speaker 1 And I'm sorry for stealing your joke, but it's very funny and weird that Trump refers to them just as J6, like they're a K-pop band.

Speaker 1 You know, he's as Tim Miller pointed out at one point when he was talking about them storming the Capitol. He said, we.
We.

Speaker 1 We. He said, we.

Speaker 1 There's, um, you know, do when do you want to talk about the moderators? Uh, go for it.

Speaker 1 So there's our, look, I, I think it's a great sign that Democrats feel like they want a cigarette and Republicans are like, the moderators, fuck this. Like, I think that's like a great sign.

Speaker 1 Like, which is, it's their only response. It's their only response.
You look on Laura Ingram, all the rest of them. They're all saying, oh, the moderators, it's the moderators.
It's the moderators.

Speaker 1 It's the moderators. Josh Holmes, the whole, all of them.

Speaker 1 If you went through and look at the questions that the moderators asked Kamala Harris, they were, where do you differ with Joe Biden on immigration?

Speaker 1 Why did you not focus on this problem since the last six months? How have you, why have your positions changed so dramatically since you ran for president in 2020?

Speaker 1 She got a bunch of hard questions, but she had a plan for each of those questions because they thought about what would happen if she would ask them and how to turn them to her advantage and turn them to Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 She made hard questions look easy. Donald Trump made hard questions look impossible.
And like over and over again, like that is what happened over the course of this debate. David Muir, basically,

Speaker 1 it is, I guess, for Trump a hard question. You've now admitted you lost the election.

Speaker 1 A rational actor would take that and say, well, because we shouldn't be talking about that, David. We got to talk about what we're going to do for the country.

Speaker 1 There's a hundred things a rational actor in the position of Donald Trump would do with a question like that.

Speaker 1 But he turned it into, actually, this is an incredible choir of people and we got to pardon a bunch of these people and

Speaker 1 like kind of goes on a rambling tirade that she can, she had a fully prepped answer for.

Speaker 1 But you can see that there were like seeds of debate prep that must have happened because he did that whole rambling response. And at the end, he goes, but none of that matters anymore.

Speaker 1 we got to look forward right

Speaker 1 that was in there it was in there for sure i also there will be complaining about the moderators and the fact-checking but that to the extent there was fact-checking it was things like actually sir uh nowhere in this country can you murder babies right actually sir there is no evidence that they're eating dogs for people like this is what made me so basic thing so annoyed like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went back and forth on tariff policy and taxes and immigration, all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 They didn't fact check any of that, even though Donald Trump lied a whole bunch of times during that policy section, right?

Speaker 1 But yeah, when you talk about people, Haitian immigrants eating dogs, which is just wrong.

Speaker 1 Or made a Facebook post.

Speaker 1 Or the fact that the election was stolen, which is wrong. Like, yeah, you know what? They have to fact-check Donald Trump because he's telling really, really big lies that are out of it.

Speaker 1 And it would be embarrassing for them as journalists to sit there and to say, well, you know what, to teach the controversy and whether Haitian immigrants are stealing fucking dogs and eating them.

Speaker 1 And lies that like incite people. You know what I mean? When you tell people that Democrats are murdering babies after they're born, that leaves to people doing crazy things.
Yeah. Violent things.

Speaker 1 Right. And also, there's the complaints about the moderators.
It reminds me of like some people after the Biden-Trump debate was like, oh, it was the moderators. They didn't call out Trump's lies.

Speaker 1 And at the time, it's like, no, it wasn't about them not calling out Trump's lies. Joe Biden had an opportunity to go after Trump and didn't take that opportunity.

Speaker 1 And tonight, the same thing happened. Donald Trump spoke.
I think the final tally was more than Kamala Harris. He had plenty of time to go after Kamala Harris to prosecute the case.

Speaker 1 He didn't prosecute the case because he couldn't. And by the way, every time Donald Trump said, I need to respond, I need to respond, he did.

Speaker 1 There were times where Kamala Harris wasn't given that chance. I actually don't think that's a fault.
Like, that's how it goes in a debate. You're making decisions on the fly.

Speaker 1 Like, I think in both in the Biden-Trump debate and in the Kamala Harris-Trump debate, these were moderators that asked pretty tough questions, fact-checked where necessary, here and there, and mostly got out of the way.

Speaker 1 And in both debates, it was the candidates that were responsible for what happened in that debate. Again, on that immigration question that he turned into a response to her on his rallies,

Speaker 1 the initial question was, President Biden, you signed this executive order to close the border. Like, why did you wait three and a half years? Donald Trump could have gone back to that.
The moderator.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was the debate equivalent of, sir, this is a Wendy's. Right.
I mean, it really was.

Speaker 1 There was a foreign policy question. They talked about the war in Ukraine.
They talked about Afghanistan. And the moderators also brought up Gaza.

Speaker 1 It was interesting to hear what Donald Trump had to say about it. Here it was.

Speaker 17 She hates Israel. At the same time, in her own way, she hates the Arab population.

Speaker 1 I mean, if that's true, that's a problem.

Speaker 1 I just like that because it's such a perfect encapsulation of who Donald Trump is and like what his politics are. It's like, it's a divisive issue.

Speaker 1 There's some Arab Americans and Palestinian Americans mattered her.

Speaker 1 But there's also a potential to get some Jewish Americans matted her. I'm going to say that she hates them.
I want to suppress the vote in Michigan, but I want the Jews in Florida.

Speaker 1 So I got to say she hates them all. Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he, yeah, it was pandering to everybody and making sense to no one.

Speaker 1 He also, like, his key kind of national security validator that he kept mentioning is Victor Orban, who's the quasi-dictator in Hungary, who is very famous in kind of like right-wing CPAC Republican circles, but unknown to everybody else.

Speaker 1 And that was another theme throughout the night that we actually talked about on the Monday, Tuesday pod, which is

Speaker 1 Jake Tapper came on CNN and said that many of Trump's answers were 4chan posts come to life. And that is exactly right.
Like Donald Trump, he lives in truth social. He speaks this right-wing language.

Speaker 1 And that if you are not fluent in it, you do not know what he's talking about half the time. I mean, we watch his rallies, and this is what they are.
That's how he talks all the time. There is no...

Speaker 1 I think we all probably went back and watched at least portions of the 2016 and 2020 debates. What is different now is his brain is fully pickled.

Speaker 1 He does not have a Fox speed and an everyone else speed. He only has Fox speed.
And it's even like, it's even actually, it's more like Newsmax these days than Fox. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's just, you can't, no persuadable voter who watched this would understand 90% of what he was talking about. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, the Washington Post convened 24 undecided voters, and they were asking them, did you understand what the answer Trump just gave? I forget what the question was.

Speaker 1 And one of them said, I couldn't follow anything that he was saying right there.

Speaker 1 Wouldn't it be nice to kind of understand or maybe live for one day as the two people that thought Trump won the debate out of that group of undecided? Like, what's it like to walk in your shoes?

Speaker 1 Yeah, what happened? We got the CNN post-debate poll, by the way, on who won.

Speaker 1 63% Harris, 37% Trump. Sounds about right.
That sounds fine. That sounds about right.
Remember when those advisors told New York Times that their goal is to get happy Trump?

Speaker 1 Policy Trump? How to go. What happened to Happy Trump? Was this Happy Trump? Did they win? Did they get Happy Trump?

Speaker 1 And John, to your point on speaking time uh stephanie ruhl at msnbc tweeted that kamala harris spoke 23 times for 37 minutes trump spoke 39 times for 41 minutes moderators were unfair yeah unfair moderators couldn't couldn't didn't have time to prosecute his

Speaker 1 i would say the uh the ugly headogeny removes its head again

Speaker 1 oh boy

Speaker 1 so Lovett mentioned this earlier, but at one point, Trump was trying to give an answer on inflation, and he walked into a trap.

Speaker 1 A line that I think it's fair to say Kamala went into the night planning to use. Let's listen.

Speaker 17 She is Biden. The worst inflation we've ever had.
A horrible economy because inflation has made it so bad that she can't get away with that. Thank you.
Your time is up.

Speaker 18 I want to respond to that, though. I want to just respond briefly.
Clearly, I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump.

Speaker 18 And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country.

Speaker 1 Now, the morphine was just hitting Love,

Speaker 1 but the rest of the office was all cheering and and screaming at that because

Speaker 1 that is the message. So

Speaker 1 I do think like, so that was Donald Trump was ricocheting all over the place. So that is where he kind of came back to inflation.

Speaker 1 There had been an economic section at the very top of the debate, and it was like the first 10 to 10 or 15 minutes of the debate, I thought, was like almost like, I mean, she was doing fine, but it was kind of a wash.

Speaker 1 It was just sort of like people arguing. I didn't like think it was going that well until the abortion section and then on, like she was crushing and he was on the ropes.

Speaker 1 Um, but it's interesting because it's like then they come back to inflation here, and she is so on top of her game by the time you get to this part of the debate that she's just as sort of like ready with this line.

Speaker 1 And it was,

Speaker 1 it was nice whenever she's about to deliver a line that she knows is going to take Trump down. We saw this after he questioned her racial identity.

Speaker 1 She kind of laughs to herself because it's just, it's the, it is the joyous warrior, warrior thing that Doug Emhoff was in here talking about the other day. It's the

Speaker 1 joy of somebody who had a binder and knows what page they're on.

Speaker 1 It's the joyous worry thing, but it's also like Kamala Harris and we and Doug Amhoff was here in the studio and we talked to him. They are still normal people.

Speaker 1 They have not been in Washington that long that they have, you know, like, and so a normal person standing on stage next to Donald Trump, when Donald Trump says shit like that, when he talks about eating dogs and cats, is going to laugh because it's a crazy thing to say.

Speaker 1 And like, we don't have to pretend that you have to compose yourself yourself for when he says something like that. Of course you're going to laugh.

Speaker 1 Of course you're going to laugh when you say, I am not Joe Biden and I am not Donald Trump and it's a, and it's a new generation and we're going to move forward. Like that just makes sense.

Speaker 1 And as she laughed, I mean, you could watch his face go from very, very orange and made up, like extremely caked on, to redder and redder.

Speaker 1 And by the end of the debate, he was screaming almost all of his answers. Yeah, he was

Speaker 1 shouting into the answer. He was furious.
Yeah, I would say that it's the like the little chuckle of someone who realizes that they can do a double jump and get kingdom checkers.

Speaker 1 You know, like that sort of like a few moments throughout the debate where it was just like, oh my God, look where he went. He doesn't see it.
Bop, bop, king me.

Speaker 1 Yes, I like that. So much of the punditry leading up to the debate was about like how she might separate herself from Joe Biden.
Like, are there policy? We talked about this on Tuesday's pod.

Speaker 1 Are there policy differences? Are there decisions that she's going to point to? But really, all she had to do was in that line. Like, I'm not Joe Biden.
Obvious. It was what we talked about.
Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And like, I'm not Donald Trump.
I'm something new. I'm a younger generation of leadership.

Speaker 1 And like, you don't need to get into the specific policy differences and this and that and whether you support Biden on this or that. She just, that's all you need.

Speaker 1 That's, that's like, I think that turned out to be more true than we have any right to expect it to be because Donald Trump was so bad at tying her to Joe Biden in this debate, right?

Speaker 1 Like he missed so many opportunities to make this a referendum on the Biden administration, which is what he was supposed to do, but didn't have the aptitude to do.

Speaker 1 So she had even more space to basically just sort of separate herself just by being someone new and talking about the future. I mean, that's the argument, right?

Speaker 1 That she's going to turn the page to a new general solution.

Speaker 1 She's going to have to, over the course of the next 50-some days here, make that argument over and over again to offer the proof points to that. In a debate, it's one line.
It's a great line.

Speaker 1 There are very similar lines in her convention speech. But now the test will be, it opens the door for these voters.
Now you got to meet the threshold of change.

Speaker 1 Well, and there's basically, you can tell that there's two moments that Donald Trump had, I think, that seemed like they were prepared moments or prepared lines.

Speaker 1 At one point, she talks about all the people who worked for him that no longer support him, that call him dangerous, out of touch, whatever. You know, Mike Pence, all the rest of them.
The ad,

Speaker 1 all part of the ad. All part of the ad, right?

Speaker 1 And that they released the week of the debate with Pence and everyone else. And then he said to her, well, you know what? You didn't, why didn't your administration fire anyone?

Speaker 1 Because of the border, because of inflation. And you could tell it was this prepared line that I'm like, oh, that's so far, that's the only good response Donald Trump has given the entire debate.

Speaker 1 And then at the very end, when he gives his closing argument, he starts the closing argument by saying, like, she had three and a half years. Why didn't she change any of this?

Speaker 1 Which is what the campaign had telegraphed they wanted their message to be. It was so sad.
And then, of course, then he went on and just rambled and didn't really close.

Speaker 1 He didn't land the plane on that closing argument. But those are basically like two messages that you can tell they might have practiced, but he didn't practice anything else.
And it showed.

Speaker 1 And it's really like. Or he did practice, but he couldn't execute because, like Dan said, his brain is pickled.

Speaker 1 He got angry, and then he had to tea teta, you know, he just followed her wherever she went.

Speaker 1 But, like, the fact that he didn't get to a sentence like that until the closing of the debate should have been in his first answer, right?

Speaker 1 She started with a tough question: like, are you better off than you were four years ago? A question that, like, Trump would love to be able to dig in on. And she went right to her message.

Speaker 1 She went to her plans, her policies, her vision. That was an opportunity that Trump couldn't take advantage of, right? Like, that happened throughout the debate.

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Speaker 1 So towards the end of the debate, the moderators asked Trump about his plans for Obamacare and

Speaker 1 again,

Speaker 1 did not seem to be prepared on that one. Let's listen.

Speaker 17 If we can come up with a plan that's going to cost our people, our population, less money and be better health care than Obamacare, then I would absolutely do it.

Speaker 17 But until then, I'd run it as good as it can be run.

Speaker 19 So just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan?

Speaker 17 I have concepts of a plan.

Speaker 1 You'll be seeing that in an ad. That is

Speaker 1 so embarrassing. Critics to Lindsay Davis because she was like, so it's been nine years.
Have you come up with a plan yet? You've been talking about repealing Obamacare.

Speaker 1 You've tried 60 some odd times. Do you have a plan yet? And that's the best he had.
Concepts of a plan.

Speaker 1 It was interesting because he, this was another moment where he, they had practiced this in some way, shape, or form, at least the idea that they were going to keep Obamacare and just try to run it better.

Speaker 1 But he just, he needs to be the center of it too much. He has to have his own possible plan to replace it.
He just can't take the obvious answer on the table and he walks right into a trap once again.

Speaker 1 Well, also, the trap is set by the fact that he knows nothing about healthcare. And so he's never, he has never come up with a plan.
He doesn't know what to talk about. He just doesn't know.
But

Speaker 1 he's never had a plan to replace Obamacare. He has said for years that he had a plan.

Speaker 1 Like, this is God that gets to the kind of like, he's out of practice, didn't prep, hasn't thought about this in a long time, and is older than he used to be.

Speaker 1 Like, there are a few moments in this debate where he just sounded like a politician. One of them was around abortion.
Another one was this moment. Do you have a plan? I have the concept of a plan.

Speaker 1 Like, you're a fucking world-class liar. Just say you have a plan.

Speaker 1 You'll be hearing it soon.

Speaker 1 After that, he said, you'll be hearing it soon.

Speaker 1 But also, a freshman member of Congress could talk about healthcare for 60 seconds, what possible ideas would be in the plan, but he cannot for five five seconds talk about healthcare policy.

Speaker 1 So there's nothing he could say there other than concepts of a plan. But I think this is where in the coming weeks, if I was her, like would expose him, right?

Speaker 1 Because what you could see after this debate, if you were an undecided voter, and I haven't listened to the focus groups yet or all that, but what they might say is, okay, yeah, like she, she seemed commanding.

Speaker 1 She was a little bit like, I still don't know enough about what she's going to do versus what he's going to do, right? Like that's what it's going to come down to for people.

Speaker 1 And I think the case that she can prosecute, even more than all the fun traps she laid for him, is like, this guy is full of shit. He has no plan.
He has no plan for you.

Speaker 1 She said it a couple of times tonight. And here's what I'm going to do.
Here's what I'm going to do to bring costs down. Here's what I'm going to do on healthcare.

Speaker 1 Here's what I'm going to do on reproductive rights. And this guy,

Speaker 1 he has no idea what he's going to do. He's going to be led around by the people that he hires who are all extreme, crazy people.
He only cares about himself. He doesn't care about you.

Speaker 1 And he doesn't, he can't even talk about health care. Yeah, I feel like there was like the next step that I felt like I didn't hear in the debate.

Speaker 1 Like she did at the beginning, which talked about the child tax credit and a few other things.

Speaker 1 Like she was, I think, hitting the message, but not getting into a lot of the details about what exactly her plan is versus what his plan is.

Speaker 1 And, you know, she says Project 2025, he says it's not my plan. Like hitting like, these are his advisors.
These are his plans. This is exactly what he's going to do.

Speaker 1 Here are the details of what, because she said that at one point, saying he doesn't have a plan, but there's Project 2025 and it's very detailed.

Speaker 1 And it's like, there's a little bit of a dissonance there.

Speaker 1 And I just think like being specific about making him own the plan, that it's his advisors, it's his people, and then more specifics about her stuff.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, so that leads us to like what happens next and also what this debate does. Do we think it's we're all very excited.
We're exuberant right now.

Speaker 1 Do we think it could move the race here or what? On average, the first debate of the last several elections has moved the polls about 1.7%.

Speaker 1 And that includes the Biden-Trump debate of earlier this year. Do we consider this the second debate or the first? I'm counting this as a second, first debate in the same campaign

Speaker 1 for that reason.

Speaker 1 But 1.7%

Speaker 1 would be a big shift in this race. This is right now the closest race in recent memory and maybe history.
And so if it were to move something like that, it would do it.

Speaker 1 The last big poll movement, just I'm not trying to rein on anyone's parade here, was after the

Speaker 1 first Romney Obama debate. The polls moved 4%

Speaker 1 in one week. And then

Speaker 1 basically by the third week, they'd moved basically back to where they were before. And so this is, I think we should think about this as the beginning, not the end of her final push here, right?

Speaker 1 This has opened the door to new voters. It's given her momentum.
Can't believe we've gone this far into the debate without mentioning that she got Taylor Swift's endorsement.

Speaker 1 That was nice.

Speaker 1 We're talking about the debate, Dan. We're substance people.

Speaker 1 Also, after the debate, Taylor Swift posted on Instagram that she's voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walls, signed the post, Childless Cat Lady. It's a big win.
It was fantastic.

Speaker 1 The campaign said they didn't know she she was going to do that, which I assumed was true. But some people were like thinking about the timing.
There was no timing.

Speaker 1 Taylor Swift just watched the debate and was like, yeah, I'm going to vote for Kamala Harris.

Speaker 1 Well, she also said in the post that there was some like AI-generated fake endorsements for her and Donald Trump, but I think she wanted to get ahead of that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, the question of, I think we probably shouldn't be looking for some sort of definitive polling bounce.

Speaker 1 I think things to look for are, do we start to see fewer voters say, I don't know enough about her. I don't know what she would do for me on the economy.
You know, I don't know enough about her plans.

Speaker 1 We learned a lot of interesting things tonight. I don't think that I knew that Kamala Harris was a gun owner.
Yeah. That was loose.
I'm also. I was a cop and a gun owner.

Speaker 1 I was very happy.

Speaker 1 A cop, a gun-owned cop endorsed by Dick Cheney.

Speaker 1 Let's get to the fucking doors.

Speaker 1 And John McCain's ghost.

Speaker 1 I was very happy that Kamala Harris informed tens of millions of people that Donald Trump invited the Taliban to come hang out at Camp David. I bet that was new information.
For you.

Speaker 1 That's a little treat for you. Yeah, in the world of space.

Speaker 1 I bet her Ukraine answer was one of the least popular things she said tonight, just because people don't love sending money to foreign places for wars.

Speaker 1 But she was smart enough to say that Putin will go into Poland next because she knows a lot of Polish Americans live in swing states. She knows exactly how many

Speaker 1 as a prepared candidate. Yeah, like if you look at like the CBS poll of Pennsylvania, that

Speaker 1 they like, you know, it was, it was like whatever, 48, 49, 48 is really close. And basically of all the people, like 5% of Trump voters said they were open to voting for Kamala Harris.

Speaker 1 And then there was like 2% or 3% undecided. If you got half of the undecided voters and 20% of the people that were leaning towards Trump that were open to it, you would see what?

Speaker 1 Like a point or two change

Speaker 1 in the vote in Pennsylvania, which means it's like a huge shift in the people that are still deciding would barely register in the polls at this point. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And look, there's voters who are going to say, I wanted to know what she's going to do versus what he's going to do.

Speaker 1 There's also voters who are just going to make their decision based on impressions of the two candidates. And she seemed like I would look at the strong leader numbers.

Speaker 1 I would look at the like who's going to bring change numbers in some of these polls.

Speaker 1 We'll see what they bring. Who knows? Maybe everyone watched and just the race is still polarized and tight.
And that's probably the most likely outcome. But it also could have gone badly.
It did not.

Speaker 1 It actually could not have gone better for her, I don't think.

Speaker 1 And you know that Trump thinks that too, because his top surrogates, like Lindsey Graham, told Tim Miller that the debate team should be fired, and Trump was unprepared, and he called it a disaster.

Speaker 1 And Trump made an unscheduled visit to the spin room, which I don't ever do. And then he went on Sean Hannity, right? They were running scared.
They wanted to look weak. J.D.

Speaker 1 Vance was talking to Caitlin Collins, trying to defend the dogs and eating the dogs and cats. I'm here.
Like, actually, some city geese have gone missing.

Speaker 1 And I would just say that if at the end of a presidential debate about who's going to be in charge of the nukes and Medicare and health care and foreign policy, if you're telling CNN that some city geese in Springfield, Ohio may have gone missing, I don't know that you're where you you want to be messaged with me.

Speaker 1 He was literally defending his posts. He used the terms.
He was abducted.

Speaker 1 And he was like,

Speaker 1 and here's the thing. It may not have been true, but you know what? We wouldn't have had this conversation about immigration if not for our memes.
The memes were important.

Speaker 1 He literally defended the memes. Do you think that somewhere right now...
Like, I don't know who it is, the all-in guys are having a drunken podcast where they're calling on Trump to be replaced.

Speaker 1 Do we think that? Oh, that would be great. Yeah, they want him to be replaced with his running mate if he could go back in time and choose his running mate as not JDI.

Speaker 1 You don't think they like JD?

Speaker 1 Those guys probably like JD. Are city geese like the king's deer? Are you not allowed to? I mean, like, I don't think pets should be kidnapped, but like, I don't know if we're going to really

Speaker 1 cry over a city goose? Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's a city goose. I don't care.
One last thing. One last thing we have to cover here.
After the debate, the Harris campaign said, we'll see you again for the second debate.

Speaker 1 We challenge Trump to a second debate in October. Maybe in Ohio.
What do we think is going to happen there?

Speaker 1 Do we think, like, he, on Fox, they're saying, oh, they want a second debate because she lost which just hasn't really passed the smell test um but does he does he it sounds like he agrees to the second debate i think you guys were in the bathroom he wouldn't commit on hannity he wouldn't commit okay it's gonna depend on the polls right this is just how it was with well what do you think you think if he's losing he gets the debate and if it doesn't move the polls much he just says no he says no debate I hate to predict what this adult man would do, but if you were in his campaign, it's hard to see how another debate would help you.

Speaker 1 It's not going to be better. Well, so the other question is: where would that debate be? Because we're running out of networks.
So it's like it's Fox or NBC. It's Fox or NBC.
Or right here. CBS.

Speaker 1 It's a network.

Speaker 1 Yes, no, CBS definitely is a network. Yeah, here.

Speaker 1 But I do think it's he will push for a

Speaker 1 he will push for a Fox debate. I can see him saying Fox or Bust, is what I mean.
Max. Right.
You could do, sure. It could be Pluto TV, whatever that is, Ruby.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, your options are debate or have JD Vance over on MSNBC talking about how they're eating hamsters and guinea pigs and Pittsburgh.

Speaker 1 J.D. Vance is sitting there desperately like, don't ask her about her cycle.

Speaker 1 Don't ask her what you want to ask, you freak.

Speaker 1 Absolute freak. Do we think there's some people in the Harris campaign that are like, maybe we don't need another debate.
We should just go out on top here.

Speaker 1 I think it's great to challenge into a debate, then get mired in the technicalities of whether there will be a debate and then see what happens with the polls.

Speaker 1 I think she should, I think she wants another debate. She should have another debate.
She's good at it.

Speaker 1 Even after this debate, she is the underdog. And as the underdog, you have to just put your pedal to the metal the whole time.
Do not take it off. Keep going.
Be the aggressor. Have the most momentum.

Speaker 1 Be everywhere. She is so much better than him.
She benefits so much from the split screen. So push for it at every moment.
I agree with that.

Speaker 1 If there's any bit of sort of caution and risk aversion in her strategy, I think she would lose this race.

Speaker 1 If she stays the aggressor, as she has for much of these first eight weeks here, then she absolutely can win.

Speaker 1 I also think that's why they challenged Donald Trump to a debate five seconds after this debate was over. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. A couple quick things before we go.
Uh, there are just 55 days until Election Day, and we need everyone to step up and help because it is going to be a close race.

Speaker 1 If the polls don't move that much, which we don't expect them to, we're going to need every single person out there.

Speaker 1 In the last six days before National Voter Registration Day on September 17th, you can help Vote Save America reach their goal of 75,000 volunteer signups to their Organizer Else program.

Speaker 1 The race depends on voters turning out in key precincts, which is why Vote Save America curates high-impact volunteer opportunities and must-win districts where every vote matters.

Speaker 1 Do not wake up on November 6th regretting not doing more, thinking to yourself, oh, the debate was fun and it sounds like she won the debate. Why didn't she win the election?

Speaker 1 Well, because you didn't fucking sign up for Vote Save America. That's why.

Speaker 1 Just because Trump took debate.

Speaker 1 Sign up in less than five minutes at votesaveamerica.com slash 2024. It'll be so quick you won't even remember Lovett's pun.
Just right there.

Speaker 1 This message has been paid for by Votesave America. You can learn more at votesaveamerica.com, and this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.

Speaker 1 Also, check out What A Day with our brand new host, Jane Coston. Damn right.
She's joined Crooked Media, and she's now the host of our daily news pod, What A Day.

Speaker 1 Check out the latest episode of What a Day with Jane in the podcast industry's next big star, Tommy Vitor. Oh, yeah, I'm about to do that.

Speaker 1 As they make sense of this debate and what's next in the race to November 5th, Tommy, was talking about this debate for an hour not enough for you? Yeah, delete this shit.

Speaker 1 The good stuff's stuff's on what a day, so check that out. That's no day.
Hey, no day.

Speaker 1 Sorry. Hey.
All right, subscribe wherever you get your podcast. It's a warm-up act.
YouTube, Apple Podcasts, wherever. All right, everyone, that's it.

Speaker 1 We made it through a second debate. Much different than our last debate, I would say.
We sound a lot different. Choe would have won this one, too.
Trafalgar says Harris won. Trafalgar? Oh, man.

Speaker 1 That's a deep cut. That's a deep cut for the fans.
Is that real? They actually did say that? 55, 43. Wow.

Speaker 1 Who is that? 43%.

Speaker 1 Well, it's Trafalgar. That That mustache guy.
All right, everyone, we'll let you go. We'll talk to you Thursday.
Bye, everyone. Talk to you Friday.
Whatever.

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Speaker 1 Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our producer is David Toledo.
Our associate producers are Saul Rubin and Ferris Safari.

Speaker 1 Reed Cherlin is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

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Speaker 1 Thanks Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford, Joseph Dutra, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pelavieve, and David Toles.

Speaker 1 MSNBC presents The Threat of Project 2025, a four-part series from the How to Win 2024 podcast.

Speaker 1 It's an in-depth look at what could be the draconian blueprint for a second Donald Trump term while examining the biggest issues at stake.

Speaker 1 With Ali Velshi to discuss reproductive rights, Joy Reed to talk about education, Jen Saki to break down LGBTQ rights, and Chris Hayes to look at climate change policy.

Speaker 1 Search for How to Win 2024 wherever you're listening and follow.