The "Let Trump Be Trump" Strategy

Transcript

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Speaker 16 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau and hosting with me today, my friend, mentor, the man I miss working with every day, the brilliant David Axarod is here.

Speaker 17 Hello, brother, good to see you.

Speaker 17 I guess the stars are on vacation and left you to man the ship here, huh? Those boys are off doing something.

Speaker 16 They're doing something. I got all three PSAs this week.

Speaker 16 So on today's show, we're going to talk about Kamala Harris's plans to define her economic agenda this week. Tim Walls stepping out on his own with a big union speech.

Speaker 16 We're also less than a week away from the Democratic National Convention, so we'll talk about the opportunity there for the Harris team and what we're hoping to hear. But first,

Speaker 16 Donald Trump just keeps reaching voters where they are with his hallmark message discipline,

Speaker 16 which is why I guess he appeared on a glitchy Twitter spaces feed with red-pilled billionaire Elon Musk that took about 40 minutes to get started because of all the tech issues.

Speaker 16 Once they finally got going, it was two hours of this.

Speaker 18 Our country is becoming a very dangerous place. And she is a radical left San Francisco liberal.

Speaker 18 And now she's trying to protect, now she's looking like she wants to be more Trump than Trump, if that's possible. I don't think it's possible.
If she's going to be our president,

Speaker 18 very quickly, you're not going to have a country anymore. And she'll go back to all of the things that she believes in.
But she's getting a free ride. I threw a picture of her on Time magazine today.

Speaker 18 She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing and actually she looked very much like our great first lady, Melania.

Speaker 18 She didn't look like Camilla, that's right. But of course she's a beautiful woman, so we'll leave it at that, right? Now, Biden's, you know,

Speaker 18 close to vegetable stage, in my opinion, okay? I looked at him today on the beach, and I said, why would anybody allow him?

Speaker 18 The guy could barely walk. Well, you, you're the greatest cutter.
I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike.

Speaker 18 I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that's okay, you're all gone.

Speaker 16 Axe, did you catch any of what the Trump campaign billed as the interview of the century?

Speaker 17 Yeah. Well, it felt like it took a century.
I'll say that.

Speaker 17 In fact, the 40-minute delay was sort of a metaphor for where their campaign has been since Kamala Harris became the candidate because they can't get started. And it's just him out there

Speaker 17 really grieving the fact that this race that he thought he had won is now competitive. And he doesn't quite know how to handle her,

Speaker 17 how to deal with her as a candidate. And you can see him just throwing stuff against the wall, which is how, by the way, he approaches his speeches.

Speaker 17 You know,

Speaker 17 one of the notable things at the Republican convention was,

Speaker 17 you know, they all said, well, this near-death experience of the assassination attempt has changed him. He's a changed man, and he's ripped up his speech.

Speaker 17 And he really wants to talk about unity in this speech. Well, he talked about unity for about seven minutes.
It wasn't going over well with the crowd at the convention.

Speaker 17 So he threw it out and just went back to his rip-snorting, you know, divisive,

Speaker 17 you know, stand-up shtick.

Speaker 17 That's what he was doing. But he's been there ever since.

Speaker 17 He has been ever since. He has.

Speaker 17 And really, I mean, we could talk a little bit about the sort of strategic or lack of strategic wisdom of that. But yeah, the interview was a disaster.

Speaker 17 And my favorite part was Elon Musk trying to break in, you know, thinking, how am I going to dragoon this guy away from the mic for a second here?

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's two small egos. So

Speaker 16 it does seem like the, you know, some of the news out of that interview was he handed Democrats a bit of a win by praising Elon for firing workers who want to unionize.

Speaker 17 Yeah, UAW filed a complaint with the Labor Department after that for intimidation.

Speaker 16 Yep. And then the Teamsters, who the president spoke at the Republican National Convention, put out a statement calling it economic terrorism.

Speaker 16 You think that's the message the Trump campaign was going for?

Speaker 17 No, you know,

Speaker 17 honestly,

Speaker 17 It does raise a serious question, or should, in the minds of union workers around the country, the fact that Trump so admires union-busting tactics should really tell them something.

Speaker 17 And I think it'd be harder for any labor leader with a straight face to go and talk to the members and say, you know, this is our guy

Speaker 17 after something like that. So, you know, and I'm sure Musk was very excited to be

Speaker 17 lionized in that way. That probably, he felt, well, this really helps me.

Speaker 17 Yeah. But

Speaker 17 no, listen, Donald Trump is out of control right now. I think he is rattled.

Speaker 17 He feels like he could lose this race.

Speaker 17 And remember, losing this race for him carries a much greater risk than it would for the normal candidate because he still has these legal issues to face, including one conviction with sentencing still awaiting.

Speaker 17 So,

Speaker 17 you know, I think that he is completely out of sync and out of sorts. And that's redounded, frankly, to Kamala Harris's benefit.

Speaker 16 Well, let's talk about the Trump strategy, because I noticed this morning, just before we started recording, that Trump is scheduling another press conference for Thursday outside of

Speaker 16 at Bedminster, his country club in New Jersey. So it sort of feels like they're going with a let Trump be Trump strategy or like a more Trump is better strategy.
Do you think that's smart?

Speaker 17 No.

Speaker 17 And I wonder how much that is their strategy and how much that it's his strategy, you know, because Trump believes that he is the best ball carrier.

Speaker 17 And his idea is, just call my number on every play and we'll get to the end zone.

Speaker 17 And he keeps going backwards and he keeps getting tackled behind the line of scrimmage. And yet he wants to get up and call the same play again.
No, it doesn't make any sense. You know, look.

Speaker 17 If you were over there, if you were saying, well, what would be a sensible strategy? What you'd try and do is make her the incumbent.

Speaker 17 You'd try and link her to, you know, Biden's economic policies and, you know, all the things that, you know, certainly the border, which they're trying to do.

Speaker 17 But what's happened and what they've allowed to happen is she has become the turn-the-page candidate in this race.

Speaker 17 She is the vice president of the United States, and yet she is the turn-the-page candidate in this race.

Speaker 17 She has changed. He is the embattled incumbent.

Speaker 17 And that is a huge, huge strategic problem problem for them.

Speaker 17 I suspect because they've been a very competent campaign, leaving him aside, that, you know, Chris La Cevita and Susie Wiles and some of the sort of rational professionals around him recognize this.

Speaker 17 But I wonder how much control they have over Trump right now.

Speaker 16 Doesn't sound like much.

Speaker 16 I mean, like, I think that they're, if you look at their ads, you know, they're sort of settling on a message that she's the San Francisco liberal trying to tie her to the Biden administration on inflation and the border.

Speaker 16 But you can't just run a campaign based on television ads. You need a candidate to deliver the message, too.

Speaker 17 I think people miss this: that, you know, especially at this phase in a campaign where these candidates are covered wall to wall, that the candidate has to be in concert with the paid media message because people are going to default to what they see that's unscripted.

Speaker 17 So when he's out there and he's talking, that is the thing that's going to be the signal to people as to what the campaign is about.

Speaker 17 And so even if you thought that the spots that they're running, I have a couple of some thoughts on that, that the spots that they're running are exactly the right spots.

Speaker 17 If he's doing something completely different, it's going to erode the efficacy. of those spots.
I think that they're, you know, they love on their side the whole kind of Willie Horton,

Speaker 17 scary left-wing radical message. And it may may be energizing to the base,

Speaker 17 but she just doesn't look or seem like that person.

Speaker 17 And the more people see of her, the less she looks like that,

Speaker 17 or the less credible that is. I suspect this convention that's coming up, and we'll talk about that in a bit, is going to be

Speaker 17 more evidence that she's very much in the mainstream and very focused on the day-to-day experiences of people.

Speaker 17 And so

Speaker 17 I think they're overshooting the runway, you know,

Speaker 17 and it may make what they're doing less effective.

Speaker 16 It seems like it's not just Trump struggling to come up with a message or an explanation for Kamala Harris's appeal.

Speaker 16 Kellyanne Conway, who was Trump's campaign manager in 2016, she was on Fox last night venting about Kamala Harris. Let's listen.

Speaker 19 Kamala Harris is just one big old blind date, and everybody's making her whatever they need her to be. She's so good-looking.
She's so smart. She's so wealthy.
She's so funny. She's close to her mom.

Speaker 19 She goes on really cool vacation. She'll never break your heart.
Everybody's making her what they need her to be.

Speaker 16 I'm Kamala Harris, and I approve of that message.

Speaker 17 Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 16 It does, it reminded me a little bit of how the McCain campaign sort of approached Obama in the summer and early fall of 2008.

Speaker 17 Did you think of that too? Yes, although they

Speaker 17 presented an alternative. What made their, yes, they said he's, you know, he's like the Paris Hilton, it's a name from the past, the Paris Hilton of politics, meaning a star, but nobody knows why.

Speaker 17 That was their,

Speaker 17 and, you know, he's drawing this big crowds, but why?

Speaker 17 But the bigger, the thing that made that message actually somewhat concerning to me at that time was the flip side, which is John McCain's all about country first.

Speaker 17 You know, they had a positive message for him that

Speaker 17 made him look big and substantive and, you know, larger than life against this cartoon character that they were creating or trying to sell

Speaker 17 about

Speaker 17 Obama.

Speaker 17 And that got shattered when he named Sarah Palin as the VP candidate, which wasn't exactly, I had great admiration for John McCain, but I think even he would say that probably wasn't the country first move.

Speaker 17 So, you know, but yes, I think, listen, she's not wrong, John.

Speaker 17 I mean, she's, she, there, there is such a sense of relief in this country that there's an actual choice other than the one they feared there would be.

Speaker 17 And she is coming across really well, and people are imputing to her a lot of qualities that they hope that she has.

Speaker 17 And it's up to her to deepen that feeling by telling, you know, through the telling of her story and the telling of other people's stories who she's connected with.

Speaker 17 So she's not wrong about that, and I'm sure it's frustrating.

Speaker 17 But

Speaker 17 the question is, Barack Obama ultimately didn't disappoint. Barack Obama was largely the person that they hoped he would be.

Speaker 17 I think the standard for her is a little lower.

Speaker 17 The race is shorter. The opponent is more flawed.

Speaker 17 I think she just needs to be an acceptable alternative to Donald Trump. You know, I mean, a majority of people in this country do not want to vote for Donald Trump.

Speaker 17 They just want an acceptable alternative.

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 16 And the story of the Democratic Party since 2016 is that at all levels, when we have nominated and put forward candidates, Senate, House, governor, president, who are mainstream Democrats broadly acceptable.

Speaker 16 to most of the electorate, Democrats tend to win, especially running against MAGA candidates or people like Trump. And I think that's why it's one reason why.

Speaker 17 Nobody's liked Trump more than Trump. Right.

Speaker 16 And obviously, it's why Joe Biden won in 2020. And it seems like in 2024, he was no longer broadly acceptable to the electorate because of age concerns.

Speaker 16 And she is, you know, I saw this, Nate Cohn said this in the New York Times. She's basically like a generic Democrat now.
That's not an insult.

Speaker 16 That's an asset, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 17 I will say, and you know, I've gotten scolded by

Speaker 17 your friends on social media about saying this.

Speaker 17 Not my friends.

Speaker 17 I get scolded too.

Speaker 17 We're both in the crosshairs. I mean, this is a very close race, okay? I'm not sure what would happen if the election were called today.
She's clearly got momentum. She's closed the gap.

Speaker 17 What was a clear Trump advantage is now a coin flip race, and she's closed the gap in a lot of these battleground states, I don't think, to the degree the New York Times poll suggested.

Speaker 17 But still, she's in the hunt and she could win

Speaker 17 some or all of those states.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 this is a real race. But

Speaker 17 they say in baseball, look the ball into the glove. In other words, when the ball comes your way, don't assume you're going to catch it.
Look the ball into the glove.

Speaker 17 There's a lot of work to be done between now and November for Kamala Harris to win this race. But she's in a position to win this race, which is an amazing turnaround in just one month's time.

Speaker 16 Yeah, my view of the race is that she is much closer now to Biden 2020 numbers than obviously Biden 2024 numbers.

Speaker 16 But Biden won 2020 by 40,000 votes across a couple of states. Exactly.

Speaker 16 And I think the difference other than

Speaker 16 the increased enthusiasm and sort of the base coming home for her with Biden is that she's opened up sort of more paths to 270 than he had because it

Speaker 16 seems like the blue wall states are still easiest, but now we got Georgia's back in play and Arizona, Nevada, maybe even North Carolina.

Speaker 16 So she has more of a chance, but it still seems like she hasn't even quite hit Biden 2020 numbers with a lot of demographic reasons.

Speaker 17 I mean, there's work to be done. The convention will help do some of that work.
The debate, obviously, is going to be very important.

Speaker 17 But think about this.

Speaker 17 because

Speaker 17 this happened so late,

Speaker 17 she now, they had their convention already. She has her convention.
That convention will take us to the end of the month, basically, because you've got Labor Day in there.

Speaker 17 And then 10 days after that, you've got the debate.

Speaker 17 And I like her chances of doing better than the last debate that we saw. But I think, you know, Trump can call, you know, Trump for

Speaker 17 in playing to, you know, race and bias and all that stuff, you know, calls her low IQ

Speaker 17 and all that stuff.

Speaker 17 I hope he goes into the debate with that attitude because

Speaker 17 what he's going to find is someone who's very, very good at forensics and at debate. So, you know, she could extend her momentum into late September.

Speaker 17 And then, you know, lots of folks are voting around around this country or starting to vote around this country. So she's in a very advantageous position.
And,

Speaker 17 I mean, it turned out to be a gift that Biden waited as long as he did.

Speaker 17 I know the Trump people think it was a big conspiracy.

Speaker 17 To me,

Speaker 17 you know,

Speaker 17 yeah, exactly. Exactly.
They're imputing too much to the Democratic Party.

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Speaker 16 Well, let's talk about what Kamala Harris is doing to define herself this week.

Speaker 16 Even though she currently has maybe the slightest lead in the polls, Trump still has a lead in most polls on the question of who voters trust to handle the economy, and voters still rank affordability and cost of living issues as their top issues.

Speaker 16 So, Harris is going to be delivering her first big policy speech on Friday in North Carolina.

Speaker 16 She's going to reportedly focus on lowering the cost of groceries, housing, and health care, according to Axios, which says this will be part of an effort by Harris to put some distance between herself and her current boss, Joe Biden.

Speaker 16 Trump's going to give an economic speech of his own later tonight in North Carolina.

Speaker 16 His campaign also took a whack at Harris in response to today's inflation numbers, which were actually pretty good, dipping below 3% for the first time since 2021.

Speaker 16 But Trump said that, quote, under Kamala Harris, everything costs 20% more than it did under Donald Trump.

Speaker 16 Working families are having to pay 30% more for baby food, and the price of gasoline is up 50%.

Speaker 16 Certainly doesn't sound like Trump's voice. The statement also branded this

Speaker 17 Kamalanomics.

Speaker 17 Is that right? Kamalanomics, which it really rolls off the tongue yeah

Speaker 17 yeah well i'd love to hear him say that but um

Speaker 17 look i those words are the you know if you were running their campaign those would be the right words right try and impute everything that people hate about the economy to her and shift their

Speaker 17 you know their dissatisfaction from biden to her you know i think you know when you hear some there'll be obviously new elements to her economic program some of it will be familiar uh The difference is,

Speaker 17 you know, in a strange way,

Speaker 17 Biden was so eager to get credit for his economic accomplishments that when he talked about the economy, he talked a lot about himself and what he had done.

Speaker 17 And what she's done very well in the first weeks of this campaign, and what I suspect she'll do well in this speech, is to talk about people

Speaker 17 and the lives that people are living and their struggles and aspirations and how we can help, how she can help, how government can help, and make it prospective and make it value-oriented and less about her than about them.

Speaker 17 You know, and I think that's really important.

Speaker 16 It seems like she's also going to try to be a little bit more economically populist, specifically towards corporations and price gouging.

Speaker 16 And she, of course, has a record to back that up when she was Attorney General of California. She took on the banks.

Speaker 17 You know, Biden, Joe, but on that Favs, you know, Biden did try and do that. He just wasn't very, he didn't seem particularly wedded to the words.

Speaker 17 You know, he didn't, it didn't, it seemed sort of synthetic, whereas it seemed, you know, she seems a little bit more connected to the words.

Speaker 17 And maybe it is her tenure as Attorney General, where she fought a lot for consumers and against, you know, banks and,

Speaker 17 you know, for-profit colleges and pharmaceutical companies and so on.

Speaker 16 I wonder how much of that is, you know, Biden always had sort of the Scranton Joe persona at times, and I always thought that was his most effective

Speaker 16 economic message. And, you know, I was always wondering how much is the white, is just being in the White House, right?

Speaker 16 And you have all this economic policy, and you have all these people trying to like get their policies in and sort of tout accomplishments because you feel like you're in a foxhole and you're beleaguered all the time by the press.

Speaker 16 And so you want to like make, you know, make sure you get credit for stuff.

Speaker 17 Yes, I know the syndrome. I think we were subject to it at times.
For sure.

Speaker 16 For sure. And it feels like she is, in a way, unburdened by all that, or at least has learned the lessons of that and is like, well, look, I got less than 100 days left.

Speaker 16 I might as well run a campaign. You know, and I don't think it's contradictory.

Speaker 16 She can say, you know, we did some great things in the White House, but prices are too high and people are still struggling. And that's going to be my main focus.

Speaker 17 And Biden tried to do that, but it always was sort of an afterthought,

Speaker 17 you know, after a litany of,

Speaker 17 you know, accomplishments and insistence that

Speaker 17 which is statistically true that the U.S. has outperformed all the other countries and so on.
Even that, you know,

Speaker 17 you would advise a candidate, give the credit to the American people and their hard work, you know, but be that as it may,

Speaker 17 yeah, I think that

Speaker 17 I think she's going to push forward. And what she's going to try and do is say, here's what I am going to do.
I think she'll do the same, by the way, on immigration.

Speaker 17 She's doing the same on immigration. She's pushing the conversation into the future, giving people a sense of what she would do.
And she's definitely carving out her own identity as a candidate.

Speaker 16 How detailed do you think she should get on economic proposals? I saw the New York Times story about this, and it basically said she's going to be light on details.

Speaker 16 And, you know, of course, the downside of that is then the press complains that you're not detailed enough in your agenda, and maybe it opens you up to attacks from Republicans though Donald Trump is not so detailed on his agenda either um but the upside is that you know you're talking in values yes and and also like you want to give yourself a little room and not

Speaker 16 sort of debate yourself and and and open up a debate within the party over like details of a health care plan.

Speaker 16 We all want to do that in 2020.

Speaker 17 I say this behind your back and I will say it on your podcast.

Speaker 17 You are one of the great presidential speech writers of all time. And it was such a pleasure to work with you and read your prose and

Speaker 17 which were off, which often was poetry to me.

Speaker 17 But you remember, because you wrote a lot of these speeches, when Barack Obama was in a deep hole in the fall of 2011 after the debt ceiling debacle of the summer of 2011.

Speaker 17 And we were looking forward to a race that we thought would be with Mitt Romney at a time when people were very jaundiced about the economy, angry at Wall Street, angry at

Speaker 17 the people who had precipitated the financial crisis. And you wrote a series of speeches,

Speaker 17 including one that he gave at Osawatomi, Kansas, where Teddy Roosevelt gave his new nationalism speech. And yes, there were specifics in those

Speaker 17 speeches, but there was a fundamental sense of values, of

Speaker 17 identification with people, working people, and so on, that were so much more important.

Speaker 17 Because at the end of the day, even on Election Day, Mitt Romney won the polling on who is best suited to manage the economy. Barack Obama won the day on who's going to fight for me.

Speaker 17 And that was what was conveyed in those speeches.

Speaker 17 So I wouldn't worry about the spectators on the sideline who are, you know, and it also gives her a chance to unpack some of the things that will be in that speech and offer a little more detail down the line and focus on a specific economic challenge.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 I'm fine with it.

Speaker 16 Now, Trump is leading her on the question of sort of who do you trust to handle the economy, manage the economy, by certainly more than Romney did Obama on Election Day.

Speaker 16 Do you think that she needs to narrow that gap a little, or do you think she just needs to sort of reframe the choice?

Speaker 17 I think you've got to stick to the fight that you can win and that ultimately I think will be more determinative in terms of the people's votes who you need to get. And that is,

Speaker 17 you know,

Speaker 17 is she connected to my life? Does she understand my struggle? And will she try and do things to help me,

Speaker 17 to help me and my life and people like me and my kids and so so on. I think that, you know,

Speaker 17 one of the things that's coursing through this race is whatever Donald Trump says, and yes, people say, I did better when he was there, he still has a patina of economic mastery that flowed from 14 years of a bullshit reality show.

Speaker 17 But there is this lingering feeling that he augments every day that really what he cares about is himself. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 17 And if you want to get into a fight about the economy, understand that the centerpiece of his economic plan is another huge tax cut for the same people he gave a huge tax cut to the last time.

Speaker 17 And the question is, that reflects his economic priorities.

Speaker 17 Elon Musk is his economic priority.

Speaker 17 So I think there's a great contrast to be set up here. And you shouldn't get focused on the things that you may not win.
Just focus on the things you need to win the race. Yeah, no, I agree.

Speaker 16 Tim Walls made his solo debut with a speech to a convention of public sector union members. Here's a little bit of what he said.

Speaker 26 You heard the story. You knew Vice President Harrows grew up in a middle-class family, picked up shifts at that McDonald's as a student.
I keep asking this to make a contrast here.

Speaker 26 Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald's trying to make a McFlurry or something? It's...

Speaker 26 Oh, he knows, he knows us, he knows us. He couldn't run that damn McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.

Speaker 26 So he sits there and tell his friends, you're rich as hell and we're going to cut your taxes.

Speaker 26 I believe him when he says that. But he also turns around and tells workers their wages are too high.

Speaker 26 I keep bringing this up.

Speaker 26 Who do you know who's asking to cut taxes on billionaires while stiffing working people? I don't know anybody.

Speaker 16 How do you think Walth did there?

Speaker 16 And what do you think about him as a messenger?

Speaker 17 Well, he's obviously

Speaker 17 a very, very talented communicator, you know, and that's why he is where he is.

Speaker 17 He basically talked his way into this position by doing every network but the Home and Garden network in the weeks leading up to the vice presidential decision.

Speaker 17 And what you see is a guy who he speaks in a colloquial way that is very accessible to people. And

Speaker 17 so he is a, you know, I mean, there'll be debate about the vice presidential pick if Kamala Harris loses the race and she loses it by the margin of losing the state of Pennsylvania, then there'll be a revisiting of this.

Speaker 17 But Walz is a,

Speaker 17 he's, he is one of these sort of,

Speaker 17 he sneaks up on you, right? He's, he's like, he, he is a great communicator who is, comes in the package of every man.

Speaker 17 And so I think he's good. I will say when he was talking, though, that,

Speaker 17 you know, Trump may not have

Speaker 17 worked in a McDonald's, but he certainly patronizes McDonald's.

Speaker 17 And probably more than Kamala Harris does, from what I can see.

Speaker 16 He's much more on the other side of the counter than

Speaker 17 as usual. He's the consumer.

Speaker 16 I thought that the McDonald's hit, the way that Walls did the comparison was funny and great.

Speaker 16 I also liked the latter half of that clip where he really got into the what you were saying is the Trump wanting to give a tax cuts to his friends.

Speaker 16 Because then I think it sort of connects the character of each with the policy which is probably the connection you want to make there this is um this is why the debate is so important because

Speaker 17 she can really prosecute this case uh on that stage i mean the fact is that uh you know trump uh you know policy is pretty meaningless to trump and he doesn't go very deep on it but this is the centerpiece of his first term this tax cut and he's promised to make it permanent 4.5 trillion dollars over the next decade uh and i think there are a lot of folks in america who probably have a different set of priorities and you know it's just it's just uh hanging there for her

Speaker 16 do you think that the his position on tariffs the sort of the across the board tariff on everything imported um that would uh obviously be quite a uh price hike for consumers do you think that's like fertile territory or do you think it's too confusing for people Yeah, you know, I think this is a really good question.

Speaker 17 I did a podcast that'll go up Thursday with Ezra Klein, and Ezra went into a long,

Speaker 17 who's brilliant, obviously, went into a long disquisition about tariffs and the impact of tariffs and so on, you know, and what 10% tariffs on China would mean and on all products and this.

Speaker 17 And like,

Speaker 17 I don't think people understand tariffs, and I'm not sure that I'm always loath to be involved in trying to educate the public in the last 90 days of a campaign about something.

Speaker 17 I think it's fair to say that when you add up all of Donald Trump's economic policies, it's going to raise costs on people by X number of dollars.

Speaker 17 You don't have to get into the sort of mechanics of how that happens, but you should make that assertion because it's true.

Speaker 17 And, you know, look, he wants to take over the Fed and hold interest rates down artificially. That may sound positive to people, but the result of it is going to also be more inflation.
I mean, he has

Speaker 17 an economic program that would explode inflation, and I would assert that.

Speaker 17 You know, I would not get into the ins and outs because it's easy for him to say, look, I know

Speaker 17 you want to give a pass to China. I don't.

Speaker 4 I'm Lacey Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it. Each week, I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time.

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Speaker 16 All right, Democratic National Convention is next week

Speaker 16 in your hometown of Chicago.

Speaker 17 Can't wait to be there.

Speaker 16 Full lineups have not been released, but it looks like we'll hear from Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton on Monday night, Barack Obama on Tuesday night, Bill Clinton and Tim Walls on Wednesday, and Kamala Harris, of course, on Thursday.

Speaker 16 We will be doing a reaction show every night. Pod Save America will be there.
Acts, you've been involved in a lot of these. Big picture.

Speaker 16 What does the Harris campaign and Democrats more broadly need to accomplish here?

Speaker 17 Well, I don't know if I said this earlier, but

Speaker 17 look, if it were a Biden convention, this would be 80%

Speaker 17 just

Speaker 17 assault on Trump.

Speaker 17 carpet bombing on Trump, because the mission there would be to make Trump so unacceptable

Speaker 17 that whatever misgivings they they had about Biden, that they would vote for Biden. And there would be some stuff about his accomplishments and so on.

Speaker 17 This is an entirely different task.

Speaker 17 The task here is to tell the Kamala Harris story in a way that builds on what she's been doing and makes people feel more comfortable and give them a deeper sense of what it is that she is fighting for and who she's fighting for.

Speaker 17 It's a much more,

Speaker 17 I think, a much more energizing kind of prospect for the folks who are planning the convention.

Speaker 17 If you come out of the convention with a deeper, richer sense of Kamala Harris as someone who identifies with people, fights for people, and has an idea about the very tangible things that need to be addressed to improve people's lives or help people improve their own lives.

Speaker 17 I think that would be a big win. And

Speaker 17 I think

Speaker 17 it is very, it's much less complex than it would have been.

Speaker 17 Clearly, there's going to be contrast drawn with Trump, and there should be, but I kind of think people have made a judgment about Donald Trump. I don't think you have to do that much work on Trump.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 16 I feel like the only work you have to do on Trump is they've made up their minds on his character, who he is, what he's done in the past. I wonder about

Speaker 16 his potential second term agenda and how much work you need to do sort of just laying out the choice for people on, you know, if he gets another term, he'll do X, Y, and Z. But I go back and forth.

Speaker 17 Well, it's interesting. But it's interesting that Bill Clinton is speaking Wednesday night because you remember the role he played at our convention in 2012, where he did a lot of that.

Speaker 17 I'm sure he'll do a lot of that. again.

Speaker 17 And I think particularly on economics, the discussion we were just having,

Speaker 17 doing some good work on that.

Speaker 17 You know, yes, and

Speaker 17 on rights and abortion rights in particular and reproductive rights,

Speaker 17 there's work to be done there. You know, I'm not like a huge believer in just uttering the words Project 2025 again and again.
I don't think the average person knows what it is.

Speaker 17 I don't think you should waste a whole lot. But I take some of the things from it.

Speaker 17 that are particularly egregious and extreme, and I would certainly raise their salience and create that contrast. But in the main,

Speaker 17 I think that this is Kamala Harris's great chance to introduce herself to the country.

Speaker 17 And, you know, when you're the sitting vice president, yes, you're a national figure, but you're really not known. Yeah.
And, you know, a great example is George H.W. Bush in 1988

Speaker 17 was, you know, the cover of Newsweek at the beginning of the campaign was, is Bush a wimp? Because he was like the understudy to

Speaker 17 Ronald Reagan. And that convention really, really broadened people's sense of who George H.W.
Bush was, the war hero,

Speaker 17 the guy who's really attached to, you know, his family and to American values. And

Speaker 17 it was a hugely important

Speaker 17 event for him. So vice presidents are known, but they're not known.
This is a chance for her to be better known.

Speaker 16 Let's talk about her speech specifically. You and I have worked on a lot of these convention speeches.

Speaker 16 I remember in 2008, there's just like a lot of business to get done in all of these speeches, right?

Speaker 17 That was a particularly hair-raising speech. It was.

Speaker 16 Well, it's they're state of the union-esque in that you want to talk about yourself. You want to talk about your opponent.

Speaker 16 You want to lay out your agenda, but you don't want to lay out too much of the agenda. You want to talk a little bit about your opponent's agenda and what the choice is.

Speaker 16 You want to wrap it up in, unlike a state of the union, you want to make it a little tighter and wrap it up in sort of inspirational rhetoric, uplifting.

Speaker 17 You don't have to deal with a bunch of bureaucrats trying to get their pet project into the spring. Right.

Speaker 16 Right. But I also remember

Speaker 16 that our those first couple drafts of the 2008 speech were very long because there was so much business to get done.

Speaker 16 What would you focus on, like specifically if you were her?

Speaker 17 Well, first of all, you know, again, I think more than even Obama needed to, because remember, he had a two-year campaign.

Speaker 17 She is literally one month into this race, or she'll be one month into this race.

Speaker 17 So she, you know, she needs to tie her own story to the values that she's fighting for. I think that's one big thing.
But I actually think that they're touching on some of this.

Speaker 17 She also needs to ask people, what kind of country do we want?

Speaker 17 You know, that's what elections are about. And what kind of country do we want?

Speaker 17 And contrast her vision with the vision of a Trump redo, a Trump 2.0, and really cast herself as a hopeful, forward-looking alternative. And I think if she does those things,

Speaker 17 it'll be a successful speech. You know, yeah, you...

Speaker 17 You have to resist the temptation to make it a state of the union speech. This should be as much poetry as prose.

Speaker 17 It has to have enough content to support the poetry and give people a sense of where you're going. But I think people want to, what we've seen in the last three weeks is people want to be inspired.

Speaker 17 They want to feel like there's a better day ahead, that, you know, we're not, you know, this is now a battle between hope and cynicism.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 she just needs to make a great case for hope here.

Speaker 17 And I think that she will. I think she will.

Speaker 16 I also think, you know, they are going to try to define her as other,

Speaker 16 right? She's, whether it's radical, whether it's flip-flop, she's, she, you know, it's, whether it's Trump talking about her, you know, biracial identity or it's more policy-oriented,

Speaker 16 the message is the same, which is she's not like us.

Speaker 16 And I think she has an opportunity here to really sort of reclaim patriotism and talk about her love of country and how this country sort of made her story possible and she wants to make that possible.

Speaker 17 And she's doing that, by the way, on the road.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 She should be doing that.

Speaker 17 You know, she has a disadvantage because, and it's not that so much because her parents are, you know, Jamaican immigrant and Indian immigrant

Speaker 17 so much as

Speaker 17 she is a cosmopolitan person. I mean, she's a coastal cosmopolitan person.
You know, Biden had an advantage. Scranton was a a huge advantage.
And in his convention, that was the touchstone.

Speaker 17 That was the thing that certified him. And so she has to approach it a little differently.

Speaker 17 And I mean, part of the challenge of the Democratic Party is that it's become too much of a coastal cosmopolitan party. So really re

Speaker 17 connecting with or connecting with fundamental kind of,

Speaker 17 you know, the dignity of just hardworking folks across this country who care deeply about their family and their communities. And just, you know,

Speaker 17 they want their leaders to be on their side and to help them do the things that they want to do in their lives.

Speaker 17 And I think, again, just looking at the speeches she's making, I think she's really touching on those themes and just expanding on those, I think, will be really important. So you're right.

Speaker 17 If she, you want people to feel when she comes out of this, I get her and she gets me.

Speaker 16 Yes. Yeah, for sure.
Finally, for anyone who's listening, who's headed to Chicago and might have some free time, any recommendations on restaurants?

Speaker 16 In addition to Manny's, of course.

Speaker 17 Well, you just took away my number one choice. I'm not going to,

Speaker 17 I'm going to duck the question as only a experienced political consultant can because I don't.

Speaker 17 I have some favorite restaurants, but I don't want to insult this is a great restaurant town I guess my my bottom line is this is one of the great restaurant towns in the world it really is and you can't go wrong and there'll be a million sort of guides to restaurants but there's a lot of great ethnic you know there's still ethnic neighborhoods ethnic foods this is a really diverse city you know and if you get a chance to move around a little I'd experiment with those but if haute cuisine is your thing there's plenty of it here.

Speaker 17 And I'm not going to bias you. You will find them.
But I think you should send into Pod Save America your favorites when this is over.

Speaker 17 And there should be a Pod Save America guide to Chicago.

Speaker 16 You can't go wrong, and you also can't go light.

Speaker 17 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 16 You're not going to Chicago to sort of cut calories.

Speaker 17 Well, in fairness, this is, you know, they call it the windy city. It's actually not about the wind, but it does get windy here.

Speaker 17 And so we'd like to bulk up here in case a big gust of wind comes along. You want to get blown away.
So

Speaker 17 we eat well here, and you will eat well here when you come. I can't wait to see everybody.
I love this town. And it's never more beautiful than in August.
So, you know, visit the lakefront.

Speaker 17 go, you know, walk through the parks on the lakefront. You know, just enjoy the city.
And in no way to denigrate Milwaukee, which is, I think, in its own way, a really charming town.

Speaker 17 But Chicago is the best city there is. And I think you'll be able to do that.

Speaker 16 Look, I'm excited to go check out some of our old haunts. Yes.
We lived there during the Obama campaign. And Chicago in the summer, I always say there's no better city.
There's no better city.

Speaker 17 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 16 Axe, thanks for doing this today. Thanks for being here.

Speaker 17 Man, it's always a pleasure to chat with you.

Speaker 16 This is great. And Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday morning.
We will talk to you then. David Oxarod, thanks again.

Speaker 17 Good to be with you, brother.

Speaker 16 If you want to get ad-free ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription community at cricket.com slash friends.

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Speaker 16 Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our producer is David Toledo.
Our associate producers are Saul Rubin and Farah Safari.

Speaker 16 Reed Cherlin is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Speaker 16 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis. Writing support by Hallie Kiefer.
Madeleine Herringer is our head of news and programming.

Speaker 16 Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Andy Taft is our executive assistant.

Speaker 16 Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford, Joseph Dutra, Ben Heathcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pelavive, and David Toles.

Speaker 4 I'm Lacey Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it. Each week, I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time.