FRANKLIN FOER: It's closing time, and with just over two weeks to go until November 5th, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ratcheting up their rhetoric in key battleground states.
DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: Any African-American or Hispanic that votes for Kamala, you got to have your head examined.
KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. Vice President, Democratic Presidential Nominee: He wants to send the military after American citizens.
FRANKLIN FOER: And what the death of the mastermind of October 7th means for tensions in the Middle East, next.
Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.
I'm Frank Foer.
Jeffrey Goldberg is away.
The race for the White House is deadlocked, and with two and a half weeks to go before Election Day, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are running out of time to win over undecided voters and dramatically alter the trajectory of what's becoming a more intense, aggressive, and sometimes bizarre contest.
Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Francesca Chambers is a White House correspondent for USA Today, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and Vivian Salama is a political reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
Susan, I want to ask a question about what the kids call the vibes.
It feels like there's not a tsunami of excitement overwhelming us right now.
Are we sleepwalking into this election?
SUSAN GLASSER, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: You know, Frank, eight years into the Trump era in American politics, we're still asking and not yet answering the same question.
You know, is Donald Trump, who's broken every norm of American politics, of the American presidency, really going to be the first president in more than a century to be returned to power despite everything?
And what's remarkable right now is that there is at least an even chance, if not better than an even chance, of that happening.
And yet this vibe that you're talking about, you know, we've lost the summer of joy.
It seems to me we've moved way beyond that.
Kamala Harris is no longer making fun of Donald Trump and saying he's weird.
She's saying he's a threat to democracy, as we know it.
And Trump has escalated his rhetoric in a way that seems determined to prove the point that she's making.
FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.
Just how do you account for that apathy?
SUSAN GLASSER: You know, Trump fatigue, I guess, is a real thing.
You know, we've been overwhelmed with a fugue of lies and misinformation and scandal and disinformation for so long, we all know people who've just tuned out of that until perhaps just now.
Democrats, I have noticed a very marked shift just in the last couple of weeks, a dawning realization that a Trump second term is a true possibility.
My question is, is this realization coming too late for them in the election cycle?
FRANKLIN FOER: Vivian, I just want to double check what Susan said and get your sense because, clearly, within Democratic circles, there's a lot of handwringing about the election and implied in what she said or what she actually said is that Donald Trump has the upper hand right now headed into this last stretch of the election.
Do you think that that's right?
VIVIAN SALAMA, National Politics Reporter, The Wall Street Journal: I spoke to a top Trump official just before the show, actually, and he told me they're cautiously optimistic.
At this point, they see the polls working in their favor to an extent.
Obviously, you know, it's anyone's race at this point, but he does have a slight advantage in most of the swing states at this point.
They do feel that he's in a comfortable position.
And that's reflected in the type of events that he's done just in the past week, but also in the coming week, where a lot of it is more sort of splash here, big media events and not necessarily directly targeted at a particular strategy.
They're looking to just get him out there, get as many people as possible and just amplify his shtick, if you will, without necessarily honing in on any particular groups.
And that's where we are at this stage.
FRANKLIN FOER: Wait, does anybody disagree with Trump having the upper hand right now or do we all -- your consensus?
PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, with all respect, I mean, I know the vibe is the vibe, but the truth is, like it was a tie a month ago, it's a tie today.
And nature of horror is a vacuum.
And the political media class of horror is a static story.
But that's what we've got.
We've got a static story.
So, we look for small changes in the polls.
It's a point here, a point there, and we're trying to make large conclusions out of it.
I think the honest truth is we don't know.
We're not going to know for two more weeks.
We might as well go to sleep for two weeks and wake up on Election Day because that's when we'll start to really know.
But the truth is, we're not changing anybody's mind at this point.
People have made up their minds.
There's a small number of people out there who may yet be winnable by Kamala Harris who otherwise probably won't vote, they're not going to go to Trump.
He's not gaining any voters, he's not losing any voters, it's all about whether she can get those small number of people who voted for Biden last time, not because they were Democrats maybe, not because they liked Biden maybe, but because they didn't like Trump.
And she's out there now reminding them why they didn't like Trump, in a sort of belated way, making that contrast the last part of her pitch to the audience.
FRANKLIN FOER: It would just have - - I mean, you only look spry, but I think you have a great beard, and just play the role of historian and compare this to where we sat in the races in 2016 and 2020.
It feels Different than those campaigns.
BAKER: It does.
Well, in 2016, obviously, Democrats were somewhat overconfident, right?
They thought they had in the bag.
Everybody assumed, including the media, that Hillary Clinton was definitely going to win.
Now, obviously, that last-minute intervention by James Comey on the emails changed the dynamics in the last few days.
But there was, clearly, you could argue, some complacency they didn't necessarily know what's going to happen and they didn't necessarily see Trump as the threat that today's Democrats do, right?
They didn't necessarily see him as a threat to democracy.
Today's Democrats have no doubt about that.
In 2020, Biden had the upper hand most of the time.
I think most people felt like he was probably going to hang on.
He had a better lead going into the Election Day than he actually came out of Election Day.
So, there are two maybe over overestimating it.
But today, we feel very different than either of those elections because it is tight as a tick.
FRANKLIN FOER: Just how much you both covered, Susan, Peter, you both were in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
You saw what post-communist life looked like, political life looked like, Anne Applebaum, I should guess, and they keep warning us about that the apathy that emerges when a figure like Trump confronts us.
Does it feel like we're repeating that type of cycle?
SUSAN GLASSER: Listen, I would say this if there's anybody in America who's not aware of the stakes at this moment of time, I think it's more the exhaustion than it is a lack of awareness, Frank.
But I'll tell you, Peter and I lived through Vladimir Putin's rollback of Russian democracy 20 years ago, his first few years.
And the time to defend democratic institutions is before they're taken away.
And that's where I'm really -- I am stunned in particular.
Look at the specificity with which Donald Trump has promised mass deportations, with which he and his advisers have said they would round up a million people and put them in camps They've actually used that phrasing.
And I remember in January of 2017 the absolute hysteria and shock that greeted Donald Trump's Muslim ban just on seven countries.
What is it going to feel like in this country on the first weekend of the Trump presidency in January of next year when people are being arrested and camps are being opened and it's going to be a level of hysteria.
I don't think that people have really processed how quickly this can happen and how dramatically the country's set up can be changed in a very short amount of time, especially if Republicans win all three branches of government.
FRANKLIN FOER: Chilling.
So, Francesca, all right, take us inside the Harris campaign.
You cover the Harris campaign.
Does it have a sense that Trump has the upper hand?
What's its strategy for this closing stretch of the campaign?
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS, White House Correspondent, USA Today: So, there's two very different strategies taking place here, the way that the Harris campaign sees it.
With Donald Trump, they see him having a ceiling of support and they feel like he is reaching that ceiling.
With her, the vice president, you know, her ceiling isn't as well known because she hasn't been in the race for very long, but if you pay attention to just what she had in terms of support coming out of Joe Biden, dropping out of the race, and there was all that enthusiasm for her, even though it's been within a point or two points, you did see those subtle shifts in the battleground states.
Her way, you were seeing in the RealClearPolitics average, that she was up in the battleground states.
So, certainly, she could get back to that support and enthusiasm level among voters.
They feel like he's out there at his rallies trying to really fire up his base and turn them out while they're still in persuasion mode.
They're still introducing her to people, which, you know, when you're only a couple of weeks out from the election, still trying to persuade people to vote for you and tell them who you are, as to your point, maybe not where you want it, you want to be, but that is exactly where they are.
So, at this point, she's trying what I call an all-of-the-above approach, which is reaching out to disaffected Republicans, trying to get those independents.
You saw her just within like the same set of days, talk to black male voters as well as do a manufacturing event today and talk to laborers, so anything and anywhere that they think that she can do.
And I don't think it's a throw it at the wall and see what sticks, because it is really targeted and very intentional, but certainly they're trying to create a scenario so when they get to the end of the election, it does not feel like, well, what if we had done this or what if we had just done that?
FRANKLIN FOER: So, Vivian, contrast that to the way the Trump campaign, I mean, you've given us a little bit of sense of how they're thinking about things.
But there's a clear strategy there about adding to the coalition at the same time they're revving up the base.
How does that contrast to the way that Trump is?
VIVIAN SALAMA: So, all along since, even before Kamala Harris entered the race as the lead, as the presidential nominee, the Trump campaign maintained that she would probably get a bump in the polls partly due to the enthusiasm of the party, but that they kept on calling it a honeymoon, that eventually it would even out.
And to an extent, we have seen that, and they point to that very heavily.
They also believe that some of the groups that they were really targeting, they had made a lot of advances, particularly with black men, as compared to previous cycles, not as compared to Democrats.
But Donald Trump is doing better this time around than he has in previous cycles with black men.
They felt like they still were able to maintain a lot of those voters.
A lot of black women peeled off and threw their support behind Harris when she became the presidential nominee.
But black men, they believe a large number that were supporting them before she was the nominee, they still stayed with Trump because of his economic message.
And that's where they draw the big contrast.
They say, because of the economic message and because of his hammering on immigration in particular, they have maintained their base, but also managed to expand that base.
The economy is the, they believe, that has enabled them to expand that base.
SUSAN GLASSER: What's really remarkable about that is that it's a strategy that relies on people ignoring Donald Trump and his inability to communicate even basic information.
Republicans, I mean, their success on one level is remarkable because, you know, here we are, and it's a dead even election, and they're, you know, polling strong on, you know, issues like the economy.
On the other hand, Donald Trump appeared before the Chicago Economic Club this week.
He couldn't utter a coherent expression of what his policy would be.
He has, as you know, offered an economic platform that economists, you know, non-partisan economists have said would add significantly to the deficit.
He's talking about tariffs.
He just throws numbers out there.
He said, oh, tariffs of as high as 1, 000 percent.
When he's asked basic questions, he starts to talk about, you know, sunbathing on the beach and, you know, electric boats and things like that.
And yet somehow this is translated through our political language into, oh, his economic policy.
It's a remarkable feat.
It tells you about American politics right now, that so much of the country is willing to vote for somebody whose policy is basically, I'm better than the other person.
VIVIAN SALAMA: A lot of it is also used through enticing slogans.
So, as you know, The Wall Street Journal's tax reporter calls it, he calls it the no tax on something policy that Donald Trump has, where he said, no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime.
And it's, it's very enticing for voters to hear.
What they don't realize is how much it could drive up the deficit, and so -- the national debt.
And so it is a big problem that Donald Trump has not yet been able to explain, but he goes out with the enticing slogans and people really rally behind him.
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: So now, Vice President Harris has taken out her rallies more recently to start playing clips of Donald Trump and what he's been saying out there to try and bring attention to some of the things that you said.
But when it comes to her economic policies, of course, Democrats are making the argument that she's putting forward plans of what she would do.
The voters that we've been talking to, it's just not connecting with them directly.
FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.
I want to play a clip.
One of the things that she's done in this past week is for the first time making a vowed break with the current occupant of the White House.
I want to listen to what she said to Bret Baier.
KAMALA HARRIS: Let me be very clear.
My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden's presidency.
And like every new president that comes into office, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas.
FRANKLIN FOER: Is that too little too late?
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Well, she actually went a little bit further than that in an NBC interview today with Peter Alexander, and he asked her about Biden essentially giving her permission structure to say that she'd do something different than him.
And she didn't want to criticize the president.
She said she didn't think it would be productive for their relationship.
But she did go on to say that her expansion of Medicare to include home health and to talk about her first time home buyer credit were things that she would do differently.
So, she is inching towards that but, repeatedly, she has declined to say what she would do differently from Biden.
But what I was referring to before in terms of it just not connecting with people is that voters have been saying that they just don't understand how her economic policies will help them personally when she goes out there and she talks about all the tax breaks and tax credits and talks it more of the 30,000-foot level.
That isn't always connecting with someone who might have diabetes directly and know how she wants to cap the cost of insulin and how that would help them.
And we've heard from voters that they feel that in their communities, they need to hear, you know, more directly from her how it would make their lives better.
PETER BAKER: So, I think that, of course, the difference between Biden and Harris on the home health care is not significant in the sense that like Biden's not going to disagree with her saying, oh, no, I don't think you should do that.
He might not have opposed himself, but he's not, you know, ideologically against this.
So, it's not really making a huge break from Biden to say, I'm going to do something he didn't do.
What people are looking for when they talk about a break from Biden is particularly what is it, what would her position be on Israel and the Middle East?
And, of course, we had the killing this week of Sinwar, the leader of Hamas.
And what Biden quickly said was, let's use that as a way to wrap up the war.
Israel, you won, declare victory and let's get out of this.
And what a lot of people on the left, not just Arab-Americans, but also younger voters, want to hear from Kamala Harris that she's going to do something different than Joe Biden, because they've been upset with Joe Biden for being too pro-Israel.
But she's walking a tight line because she can't break with Biden on that without losing or at least risking losing people who are more pro-Israel.
She's going to get hit from both sides.
She's literally getting hit from both sides by the same organization in Pennsylvania.
She's putting out ads saying to the Jewish Americans, she's really not for you, and to Muslim Americans saying she's really for Israel, and they're trying to play it both ways.
SUSAN GLASSER: And, by the way, that's from Elon Musk, and that's another factor, you know, that I think has become very apparent in the late stages of this campaign.
The fusion between Donald Trump and the world's richest man is, you know, even though we've seen, you know, the influence of money in politics, you know, forever in our politics, the amounts of money in Watergate paled in comparison to what we're talking about today is an extraordinary fusion between Donald Trump and a small handful of the wealthiest people in the world.
The spectacle of Musk actually on stage campaigning for Trump, remarkable one, I think.
FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.
Well, this takes us back to the democracy question, of course.
And as you said earlier, the weird critique of Trump has kind of lost steam and Kamala Harris is returning back to this democracy argument, which she'd abandoned in the first place because it wasn't effective.
And so, Vivian, is there any reason to believe that the democracy argument is going to catch now?
VIVAN SALAMA: I mean, I think Susan started the conversation by saying that people know -- maybe it was Peter, sorry, that said, everyone knows who Donald Trump is at this point, and I don't think it's going to necessarily sway people in the final two weeks.
The Harris campaign would like to remind people, particularly with January 6th images and sort of the mayhem that could be attached to a Trump presidency.
But at this point, I mean, Trump has also pushed back on that narrative so hard, he's called them freedom-loving patriots and has really defended a lot of the people that have gone out there who took very violent actions in the Capitol that day.
And so it's hard to imagine it swaying anyone at the last minute.
There could be some undecided voters who are swayed at the last minute if something kind of clicks if they're at the polling station and see his name in front of them.
FRANKLIN FOER: But it's worth -- I want to play some of the footage of Trump talking about the threat within, because I think it's worth hearing it from his own words.
DONALD TRUMP: I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within.
And we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics.
And I think they're the -- and it should be very easily handled, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.
FRANKLIN FOER: Susan, you and Peter wrote an excellent book about Donald Trump.
Is that Donald Trump different than the guy who left the White House?
SUSAN GLASSER: That Donald Trump is the man who spent the entire last year of his presidency trying to use the military against American people in the streets exercising their First Amendment rights.
Where Donald Trump has escalated the rhetoric, and, by the way, he's often used the language of pure dictatorship when he has called his enemies vermin, enemies of the people, this is the language, you know, that is resonant to anyone who studied, you know, Russian history.
It comes straight from the Soviet past.
But where he's escalated, Frank, I think is he wanted to use the American military in the summer of 2020.
He was constrained by his own attorney general, his own defense secretary, his own chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
First of all, he's not going to have those kinds of people around him in a second term.
And, second of all, he's now outright saying, if you disagree with him in the election, that's what he wants to call the military out for now.
That's really a chilling thought.
FRANKLIN FOER: Francesca, when Kamala Harris, this week, for the first time, used the fascist label to describe, do you have any sense of what her thinking was when she made that term?
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: I think, Peter, you were touching on a really important point about this when it comes to the couch sitters and trying to get them out.
It's not just the folks who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
There's this whole other subset of people who maybe voted for Donald Trump in 2020, who were thinking about sitting this election out because maybe they don't want to bring themselves to vote for a Democrat in the election, but they also can't vote for Kamala Harris.
And so a lot of this is aimed at trying to get those folks up off the couch and out to the polls.
It's those disaffected Republicans.
It's the independents.
We saw her this week campaign with Adam Kinzinger.
She's been doing events with Liz Cheney as well, former members of the Bush administration, the Romney campaign.
That at this point seems to be a big part of how they think they could expand their electorate, is to get the anti-Trump Republicans to vote for her.
Now, to your point, you know, is that really going to work?
Are they really going to be able to turn all these Nikki Haley voters in Pennsylvania and all these other places out to vote for her?
It wasn't working for Joe Biden.
Perhaps they think that the -- it was the messenger and not the message.
VIVAN SALAMA: I mean, Nikki Haley herself has endorsed him at this point.
So -- FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Right.
And a number of those, and as I've written about, a number of those even national security-type Republicans have said that they're not voting for Kamala Harris in this election.
FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.
I want to pivot to the killing of Yahya Sinwar, because as you said, Kamala Harris obviously wants the war in Gaza over.
So, what's a type of turning point does this spark for the war?
PETER BAKER: I think because it happens just two weeks before the Election Day, it's unlikely that we will find such a shift in the dynamics on the ground there in that time that would affect things here, probably, right?
It does offer Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, an opportunity if he wants to, to declare victory and say, okay, we're done.
Let's get the hostages out and move on.
He doesn't seem likely to go that route and particularly doesn't seem likely to go that route in the next two weeks.
So, for Kamala Harris, you know, it does, it's kind of an X factor, right?
How much does that encourage people who otherwise might not want to vote for her to think, okay, well, at least the war is going to start coming to an end at some point, hard to say.
VIVIAN SALAMA: It is worth noting that Trump said that he spoke to Bibi Netanyahu today.
So, you know, I think he's -- Netanyahu has sought to keep Donald Trump looped in just in case he is the future president and he's going to be the one to basically support Israel moving forward and to get his blessings about whatever he wants to do next.
SUSAN GLASSER: Yes.
But his public comment was, these things happen.
I mean, you know, it wasn't exactly a brilliant -- FRANKLIN FOER: Arousing, yes.
VIVAN SALAMA: And Sinwar was a bad person.
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: I was going to say, he was a bad person.
SUSAN GLASSER: I just -- I think that that's sleepwalking into the election.
Come on.
Like we're pretending as if Donald Trump has a meaningful position on the world.
What he did in his first term in office was outsource American policy to Netanyahu and the far right in Israel.
He's very likely to do that again, but not out of some very deeply considered foreign policy view of the world.
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: But Netanyahu did call him, according to Trump, and we've seen recently that Zelenskyy is also calling Donald Trump, because, at this point, we are three weeks out from the election and soon Joe Biden will be a late -- FRANKLIN FOER: It's like the equivalent of the betting markets.
You watch where the foreign leaders go.
FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Well, in a couple weeks, we'll know whether it's Donald Trump or it's Kamala Harris, and they are already looking, in case it's Donald Trump, to start making those inroads.
FRANKLIN FOER: Peter, let me just finally turn to this question, because one thing that's been looming over this last stretch of the campaign is the almost inevitability that Israel will retaliate to the Iranian missiles that were launched against it.
What's taking so long?
Why the delay?
PETER BAKER: Well, I mean, I think they're having a argument inside Israel's own security cabinet and its structure about how far to go, right?
They seem now to have ruled out the most extreme version of retaliation, which would go against Iran's nuclear program or against its energy industry.
But now they're trying to figure out what targets would be appropriate from their point of view make the statement they want to make without necessarily escalating or forcing Iran to then have another tit-for-tat response.
But they're feeling their oats right now.
They have killed some really important people, not just Simwar, but Haniyeh and Nasrallah.
And they are feeling like they're on a run here, and they want to feel like they could reshape the region in this moment of opportunity.
They may be overthinking it, but that's where they're at.
FRANKLIN FOER: Unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.
Thanks to our panelists for sharing your reporting.
And to our viewers at home, thanks for joining us.
For more on what's next in the war in Gaza, visit theatlantic.com.
I'm Frank Foer.
Good night from Washington.
