Trump tries to set low expectations, and floats excuses, for debate with Biden

June 21, 2024

A few minutes into his speech at a campaign rally on Tuesday, June 20, Donald Trump asked a question of the few thousand who’d turned up to hear him speak. “Is anybody going to watch the debate?”

Trump was in Racine, Wisconsin, but it was clear his mind was in Atlanta,—the site of his debate matchup against President Biden next week, reports The New York Times.

He repeatedly mused about the potential scenarios, lowering expectations that he would dominate Biden and then, as if he couldn’t help himself, raising them again.

The expectations game is a particular challenge for the Trump campaign. Trump, 78, has spent months casting the 81-year-old Biden as a husk of a man who can barely walk or formulate complete sentences. Republicans have pumped out a stream of videos of Biden walking stiffly—some deceptively edited—that are meant to be proof of Biden’s decline.

Trump’s supporters in Racine showed they have been marinating in this content. “Biden can’t stand up!” one woman yelled during Trump’s speech. She stood near another woman who wore a T-shirt with a picture of Biden that read, “Impeach me. I won’t remember.”

But Trump also was preparing for his caricature of Biden to be punctured next week. He openly wrestled with the obvious question: What if Biden clears the very low bar that Trump has now set for him?

He had answers: If that should happen, it’s only because Biden will be “pumped up,” he told his followers, suggesting that the president would hoover up a pile of cocaine beforehand, since the drug was recently found in the White House by the Secret Service—although investigators never did figure out how it got there and it was not linked to the president or anyone in his family. (Still, it was an acutely cutting notion, coming a week after the Delaware trial that publicly aired the first family’s struggle with Hunter Biden’s addiction.)

Trump also told his followers to be suspicious of the whole debate enterprise, although his campaign negotiated the terms of his participation.

They should keep in mind, he said, that he’ll be up against multiple adversaries at once—not just Biden but both of CNN’s moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, whom, Trump added, were constitutionally incapable of treating him fairly. “I’ll be debating three people instead of one-half of a person,” he said.

While it’s clear Biden has physically slowed and his gait stiffened in recent years, his doctor in February called him “fit for duty.” Trump has not disclosed a detail summary of his health. Neither man has released a comprehensive assessment of his mental fitness.

Lately, Mr. Trump has been experiencing his own adventures in aging for all to see. Last week, he bragged about passing a cognitive test when he was president but mixed up the name of the doctor who’d administered it. He also has confused Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley, and Biden with Barack Obama.

And so Democrats have their own set of video clips they’ve been consuming—seeing evidence of aging in Trump’s curious tangents about sharks and boats with electric batteries; or in the way he bollixes up words, as he did at the rally on Tuesday, when he barked at the Biden campaign for saying that “the videos of crooked Joe shuffling are clean fakes.”

He asked the crowd, “Do you know what a clean fake is?” The term Trump was reaching for is actually “cheap fake”—real footage that has been edited deceptively, omitting context by zooming in or cropping out.

In Racine, some of Trump’s supporters took a more nuanced view of the videos of Biden, the age factor, and how it all played into expectations for the debate.

“Oh, absolutely, we see them on every channel, and all over the Internet of course,” Marjean Stern, 79, a retiree from Kenosha, Wisconsin said of the videos of Biden. But, given her own age, she confessed to feeling a little queasy at the way her candidate has revelled in Biden’s seemingly senior moments.

“We’re elderly, so we don’t like that,” she said. “I don’t want to make fun of him. I [am] him.”

Research contact: @nytimes

September 26, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on Wednesday, September 25—fielding questions on her economic agenda, former President Donald Trump’s economic plans, and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D), reports The Hill

.The MSNBC interview was a friendly forum for the vice president, who has been under pressure to ramp up her media presence. Harris sat down with Ruhle in Pittsburgh, following an economic-focused speech in which she laid out a framework for her manufacturing agenda.

Here are five takeaways from Harris’s interview on MSNBC:

Harris lays out pricey agenda

Much of the interview was spent talking about the economy and involved Harris outlining her agenda. Her “opportunity economy” involves a housing plan to help first-time homebuyers, a child tax plan that involves expanding credits to families, and a plan to boost small businesseswith tax deductions for entrepreneurs, among other proposals.

“If you are hardworking, if you have the dreams and the ambitions and the aspirations I believe you do, you’re in my plan,” she said.

When it comes to how to pay for some programs, Harris reiterated that she would not raise taxes on Americans making less than $400,000—maintaining a pillar of President Joe Biden’s tax plan—but that corporations should pay their “fair share” in taxes.

Much of Harris’s economic agenda would need congressional approval, particularly when it comes to tax policy. That would make it an uphill battle, should Congress see a Republican majority; but also if either or both chambers are closely split between parties.

Ruhle questioned the vice president on polling that shows likely voters think Trump is better on the economy. Harris recently closed the gap with Trump on the economy in one survey — an Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll that found Harris and Trump with equal support on the issue.

“Donald Trump left us with the worst economy since the Great Depression,” Harris said, citing data that about 200,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during the Trump years.

Walz pick was gut decision

Toward the end of the interview, Ruhle asked Harris when was the last time she made a “gut decision,” given that decisions made by presidents take “extraordinary instinct and guts.”

“When’s the last time you had to make a gut decision? This here is very prescribed. It’s very controlled,” Ruhle asked, referring to the interview setup.

“The biggest gut decision I made most recently was to choose my running mate,” Harris responded, referring to her decision to pick Walz to run as her vice president. “There were lots of good, incredible candidates, and ultimately that came down to a gut decision.”

Harris picked Walz in August, just more than a month after she announced her presidential bid. The governor emerged as a dark horse contender for the slot just before Harris made her choice, being selected over other more high-profile names Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly (D) ,who were largely viewed for weeks as the favorites for the position.

Harris knocks Trump on tariffs

Harris bashed Trump for his suggestion to place tariffs on foreign companies, which he has laid out repeatedly on the campaign trail.

“Part of it is, you don’t just throw around the idea of just tariffs across the board, and that’s part of the problem with Donald Trump,” Harris said when Ruhle asked about the former president’s plans to expand tariffs.

“He’s just not very serious about how he thinks about some of these issues,” Harris added. “One must be serious and have a real plan that’s not just about some talking point ending in an exclamation at a political rally.”

Trump gave an economic-focused speech this week in Pennsylvania, during which he spoke about his plan to use tariffs, continuing to expand on his claims that he wants to expand the use of tariffs if he’s elected.

He also threatened Illinois-based John Deerewith massive tariffs on its products if it outsources some of its manufacturing to Mexico, as it has previously announced.

Harris defends opposition to U.S. Steel sale

Harris defended her opposition to Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel acquiring U.S. Steel, after Ruhle mentioned the potential consequences of blocking it.

U.S. Steel warned earlier this month that it may cut staff and move its headquarters from Pittsburgh, if the company’s planned sale falls apart. Nippon Steel announced it would acquire U.S. Steel in December—prompting outcry from lawmakers, including Biden and Trump, who argued the deal could undermine national security and industrial capacity.

“It’s most important that we maintain America’s ability to have American manufacturing [of] steel by American workers for a number of reasons,” Harris said, defending the opposition.

“There is not a new industry that I can imagine that is not going to require steel,” she added, noting, “And having American workers in an American company manufacturing that steel for those industries is going to be critically important.”

Ruhle interview is Harris’s deepest on policy

Harris’s interview with Ruhle went deeper into her proposed economic policies than any of the other media appearances and interviews she’s done to date as the Democratic nominee.

Ruhle questioned Harris, for example, on how she planned to pay for such proposals and how the federal government would cut through red tape to reach municipalities on matters such as the shortage of housing.

The vice president outlined incentives the federal government can create for communities to build more homes and provide transit. Harris maintains that such proposals could be paid for with an increase in corporate taxes but has not gotten into details about how such hikes could get through Congress.

“I know that we have to reduce the red tape and speed up what we need to do around building, and that is going to require working from the federal level with state and local governments,” she said.

Research contact: @thehill