JEFFREY GOLDBERG: On Tuesday, Vice President Harris and former President Trump faced off in what, as of right now, stands to be the only debate between the two nominees.
KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. Vice President, Democratic Presidential Nominee: Kamala Harris.
Let's have a good debate.
DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: Nice to see you.
Have fun.
KAMALA HARRIS: Thank you.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Harris had a bit of a slow start, but then she managed to drive Trump off the rails, triggering him with talk of crowd size.
By the end of the debate, it was obvious to most observers, including this one, that there was a clear winner, but will it matter on Election Day, next.
Good evening and welcome to Washington Week, where tonight we will not make a single joke about cats or dogs, because we are a serious show about the once serious business of a serious city.
I'm so old that I can remember a time when you can get through an entire presidential campaign without once hearing about immigrant cat-eating or the relative death-dealing qualities of sharks and boat batteries or windmills and their relationship to bacon shortages.
I'm not complaining, I'm just observing.
Tonight, we'll talk about Tuesday's debate and how Kamala Harris exceeded expectations and how Donald Trump ended the week by saying, essentially, not going to do that again.
We're 53 days out from the election and I'll discuss the state of the race with Ashley Parker, the senior national political correspondent for The Washington Post, Eugene Daniels, a White House correspondent for Politico and co-author of Playbook, Jerusalem Demsas, my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic, and the author of the new book, On the Housing Crisis, and Asma Khalid, NPR's White House correspondent and an ABC News political contributor.
Thank you for joining me.
Eventful week, no cats, no dogs.
I'm serious about it.
I'm trying to - - and I'm saying that to myself, obviously.
Jerusalem, let me start with you.
This is a fact insufficiently known in Washington, as far as I'm concerned, but you were voted Speaker of the Year for the American Parliamentary Debate Association as a college debater, which meant that you were the best college debater in America.
So you're the expert.
You have the floor.
Tell us what we saw Tuesday night.
Tell us what we -- not just what we heard, but tell us what we saw.
JERUSALEM DEMSAS, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Well, you definitely didn't see a college debate on Tuesday night.
So -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You mean the level was too low?
JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Exactly.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, all right.
JERUSALEM DEMSAS: You know, it's funny.
I mean, when you're in college debate, you like to think that most of what's happening is, are your arguments winning, but there's this, you know, element that you realize, especially as you start getting good later in, you know, college career, that a lot of it also has to do with how people are perceiving you.
And you can see that, you know, Vice President Kamala Harris really knew that.
She was really trying to get under his skin.
She's using her facial expressions to inspire a level of ridicule in the audience from, you know, the metaphorical judges, the voters, that there was something ridiculous about him without having to respond to specific arguments.
She was able to inspire a sense that, you know, you don't have to respond to the cats and dogs.
All you can say is, what is there to say to this, other than, we're going to move on.
Now, how important that is in the long-term?
Who knows?
Obviously, it's the case that both the Trump campaign and the Harris campaign felt like they won that night.
And in the long-term, what will matter is the fact that he wasn't able to answer whether or not he would veto a national abortion ban, what he said about Ukraine, but at the same time, it's clear that when it comes to how people feel about that night and the days after, they really feel like she did a good job.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Ashley, does Donald Trump and does Donald Trump's team actually think that he won?
ASHLEY PARKER, Senior Political Correspondent, The Washington Post: Donald Trump's team absolutely does not think that he won.
Donald Trump has insisted that he believes that he won, and he has that ability to convince himself of certain untruths, so that's more of an open question.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But from your reporting, there's no doubt that the Trump people know that was not a great -- ASHLEY PARKER: No, and that's what you saw midway through the debate, them starting to attack the moderators, them starting to attack ABC, them saying, look, it's him debating three other people.
That's not the messaging or the spin of a dominant candidate out there.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
Eugene, does it matter?
EUGENE DANIELS, White House Correspondent, Politico: I mean, yes and no, right?
At the end of the day, Vice President Harris had to perform.
Her team knew that there was more pressure on her than Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has done the most presidential debates of any presidential candidate in history, both primary and seven general election debates.
And so she had to kind of step up, one, and show people that she had a command of the issues.
She had to and poke and prod him, I think, better than any of the people he's ever debated, right, getting under his skin, I think, from the very first moment when she like walked over behind his lectern to shake his hand, making very clear, as we called it and said in Playbook this week, like the alpha female, right, like, making it very clear.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It wasn't expected.
EUGENE DANIELS: He wasn't expecting that.
I don't think he liked it either.
And so whether voters actually care how they did on the debate stage, it was about making sure that she got up there and did better than people wanted and thought she was going to do.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Asma, I want you to comment on something that I want to play for you all.
It's a moment from the debate that really gets at the heart of the challenge that Kamala Harris poses to Donald Trump.
Let's listen.
KAMALA HARRIS: It's important to remind the former president you're not running against Joe Biden you're running against me.
I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up.
And that's not who we are as Americans.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The thing that he hasn't been able to do in the last month or so is adjust his view or become accustomed to the reality that he's running against this 60-year-old, very sharp African-American/South Asian woman, not ancient Joe Biden, which was the target in the long lead up to this moment.
Why is he not showing a learning curve here.
ASMA KHALID, White House Correspondent, NPR: I would say a couple of reasons.
One is that he had not anticipated this change to happen, right?
You heard for weeks after it happened, all of this sort of nostalgia for Biden, he was cheated out of the race.
It's the kindest messages I think we heard from Trump about Biden in many years.
But also I would say, I mean, the reality is that what we saw in the debate stage to me was that, you know, Trump's central message for much of this campaign cycle was one major thesis, and that was that Joe Biden, his opponent, was too old.
That argument has gone out the window now that he's running against a woman who is nearly 20 years younger than him.
She has suddenly become sort of physically the change candidate.
I mean, her campaign talks about a new way forward.
I would make the argument that not very many of her policies are actually different than Biden, right?
I mean, Republicans have tried -- I would say Trump didn't do it that well during the debate because he was rambling, but they have tried to tether her to Biden.
And whether it was on, you know, Ukraine -- support for Ukraine, whether it was on the war in the Middle East, whether it was on the economy immigration, pretty much to a tee, most of her policies echo President Biden's, but she is physically manifesting change and a new way forward.
EUGENE DANIELS: And her, and Trump's campaign wanted him to do that on stage, but instead he said that Joe Biden hates her, he can't stand her.
So, he was supposed to tie Kamala Harris and Joe Biden together, and what he did was draw even further for voters a line between the two.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's so interesting, I mean, as I'm watching it, and I'm familiar with some of Trump's trigger words.
It seems as if -- it almost is like somebody asked ChatGPT, give us a list of 20 words that always trigger Donald, and you had, I mean, from crowd size to the words that he cannot stand to hear, John McCain.
ASHLEY PARKER: With the thumbs down hand gesture, and also more subtly mentioning Wharton, that he has a lot of pride in to rebut his economic argument.
I mean, those Easter eggs were both subtle and very blatant.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, the goal was to psychologically undo him.
And I'm fascinated by the internal Trump campaign dynamic, where they obviously had to anticipate the people advising him that she would try this.
And they probably told him, but it doesn't seem, Jerusalem, that it matters.
JERUSALEM DEMSAS: It's also clear, though, like at the end, you know, when he was doing his closing remarks, it's almost like he came back to himself and he remembered the message he was supposed to be getting.
It's the first time you really hear him make the claim, you know, that she's going to be a continuation of Biden, that, you know, if she'd want to do all these great things she's talking about, that why didn't she do it in the last three and a half years.
And it was almost like you saw him re entering his body after being pushed to, you know, his trigger points on all these different topics.
So, you know, I do think that it was a situation where he was not expecting to be rattled by her and was clearly underestimating her.
ASMA KHALID: But one thing that was also striking to me is if you listen to Trump rallies, he's not been shy about saying Kamala Harris' name.
I would argue he often mispronounces it, calls her Kamala, I mean he mispronounced it a whole host of ways.
But during the debate, I don't believe we ever heard him once utter her name, which was just striking to me because Harris repeatedly did, you know, talk about -- talk to Trump by name.
He just never spoke to her name, and she or her, yes.
ASHLEY PARKER: Something about the way he speaks about her publicly and has been reported privately is he's very dismissive of her.
He has said he doesn't believe she is smart.
And so there's something also about someone who he views as somehow other and beneath him.
I mean, he's made that very clear.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I wonder if he feels that way anymore.
ASHLEY PARKER: Then going up against him toe to toe and getting under his skin.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, he underestimated the adversary, is what you think?
I mean, it's -- ASHLEY PARKER: He underestimated -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's kind of an Occam's razor thing, that's the most obvious conclusion we could draw, that he just went in there thinking that, well, what is this woman?
ASHLEY PARKER: And then could not maintain the self-discipline that his aides had tried to prep him for 90 minutes, because he was so frustrated that this woman who he did not believe is on the level of him was getting the better of him time and time again.
EUGENE DANIELS: If you ever wonder how -- the way that he's interacted with women, whether they be women politicians or women reporters, the ones that kind of catch the worst from him are often black women and women of color who are reporters, especially, when you think about people like April Ryan, people -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: My predecessors, Yamiche.
EUGENE DANIELS: Yamiche, right?
Like the way that he spoke to them was different than the way that he definitely how he spoke to men, and also how he spoke to white women.
And you saw that on stage.
He often does not think that black women or women of color, it seems, can rise to the same level as him.
And if you think that way, watching someone do that and actually get under your skin and have a strategy in poking at little things that bother you, that is going to come out.
JERUSALEM DEMSAS: And there's an irony to it too, because he thinks he's such a populist, right?
And there's a level, like you said, he's so proud of at Wharton, this Ivy League school.
And Kamala Harris is someone who did not attend an Ivy League school.
She feels she doesn't have the academic credentials, the intellectual credentials to stand up next to him.
And then when she's able to get under his skin, and I think it's even more shocking to his senses.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, no, is this -- that's an interesting point.
I'm trying to understand the reason that he didn't look at her during the -- I wonder if it goes to something that Eugene is talking about or if it goes to a strategy.
I mean, she was directly right at me and it can be interpreted as fear.
It can be interpreted as contempt.
It could be interpreted as just I'm going to look at the audience the whole time and I don't care about her.
I don't know what.
EUGENE DANIELS: Or I'm not going to look at her because I might get too pissed off and make a face that might return off the white suburban women.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But that assumes a level of discipline.
No, yes, discipline in his approach.
And, obviously, you know, I'm just imagining, and there's a little reporting around, but I'm just imagining that there is -- you know, she's going to try to get under your skin, she's going to try to get under your skin.
And, you know, obviously, for Kamala Harris, they did endless prep.
EUGENE DANIELS: And real debate prep, because he does not do that, right?
He talks about it as like going out and talking to the people and doing his rallies is the way that he does debate prep.
That did not work.
She did actual debate prep where a former Hillary Clinton aide, Philippe Reines, who played Donald Trump for Hillary Clinton, did the exact same thing for her, where they sat across -- sat, you know, near each other and had an actual debate.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
And Philippe, those we know him from years of covering, Philippe is a person, I'll put this diplomatically, he doesn't mind getting under your skin when it's appropriate to the moment, from his perspective.
ASHLEY PARKER: He could be a method Trump.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, probably.
He didn't leave character, actually, as they say.
I want to play something else.
This is a compilation of Trump's statements from that night on a particularly dark theme.
DONALD TRUMP: Our country is being lost.
We're a failing nation.
If she's president, I believe that Israel will not exist within two years from now.
We're playing with World War III and we have a president that we don't even know if he's -- where is our president?
We're a failing nation.
We're a nation that's in serious decline.
This is the most divisive presidency in the history of our country.
There's never been anything like it.
They're destroying our country.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, on the general theme of I'm old enough to remember X, I'm old enough to remember Ronald Reagan, morning in America, Ronald Reagan as this sunny Republican antidote to the malaise and the moroseness of the Carter years.
And, you know, the Republicans are traditionally the party that says you know, it's all sunny uplands, America is a great place.
It's the party that in recent years has embraced visible change signs of patriotism.
This is dark.
I mean, this is really, really dark.
Ashley, what's going on here in his mind?
Maybe nothing new.
He's just harked back to American carnage, but I was really struck by this, this view of America, as this dystopia.
ASHLEY PARKER: Well, if you've been paying attention to his rallies, his posts on social media his interviews, he, for a while now, has been painting this incredibly vivid, sort of grotesque caricature, dark, dystopian, and generally utterly fictitious of America.
And so, for instance, I mean, I could take the whole show, but I'll be quick, he talks about transgender kids going to school.
You send little Johnny off to school in the morning and they come home from school having undergone gender reassignment surgery, is one.
He talks about how you can't go out to get a loaf of bread without getting raped, mugged, or shot.
He talks about how people are aborting kids after birth, which is actually infanticide and illegal.
And he talks about, I apologize for bringing this up here, but immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs.
And that is just the image of the nation that he is painting.
He thinks it will work to his political benefit, clearly.
But some of those are just so caricatured.
I mean, there's parents who send their kids to school and can't get them to come home doing basic math, right?
The idea that surgeries are going on in elementary schools is just absurdist.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, go on with that theme.
The question I have, maybe this is his -- maybe this is a strategy?
I mean, it's not a strategy for expanding the base necessarily, but it's a strategy for keeping the base -- ASMA KHALID: I think it's his familiar place.
It's his familiar place, right?
Like, I feel like even when you saw in 2020 -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Are you saying that dystopia is his happy place?
ASMA KHALID: I think dystopia is his comfortable place, right?
I mean, you go back to, what, 2015, 2016, that cycle, when he first announced he was going to run for president, it was these allegations about Mexicans sending not their best into the country, some of them are rapists.
I mean, that is his familiar line.
I think what is unusual and maybe different this time to me, particularly with the allegations about what's not true going on in Springfield, Ohio, is that he pinpointed a specific community, and as has been reported, I mean, that community is facing repercussions.
They're -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, schools are being closed out of danger.
The -- JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Also a sense of it, you know, he is someone who excels when people feel like it's a change election, right?
Like there's a reason why he did not do well in a reelection race where he has to say, let's talk about how great I just did for four years.
Like, you know, even if there were things he was pointing to around the economy that he thought were specific achievements, he couldn't inspire a sense of pride in America.
I mean, obviously it was a dark time.
There was COVID in the country, so it's hard to do that.
But he really does well when he inspires fear in the electorate.
And his goal is to say, I'm here to be your champion against these dark forces that are amassing.
And when he can't play that role and, in some ways, Harris is precluding him from doing that by not representing the previous administration, and she's kind of a new, fresh face, but for him, he wants to be a change candidate, he wants to be someone who's talking about how dark things are.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.
One of the most remarkable moments in the debate came when Trump was asked if he wanted Ukraine to win in its war against, Russia, Russia's war against Ukraine, I should say, and the remarkable thing is he didn't say, yes, which would be the easiest, most bipartisan thing for an American politician to say, yes, I want Ukraine to win.
And I want to play something for you.
This is his running mate, J.D.
Vance, talking at greater length about their view of this war.
So, listen to this.
SEN. J.D.
VANCE (R-OH), Vice Presidential Nominee: So, I think what this looks like is Trump sits down, he says to the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Europeans, you guys need to figure out what does a peaceful settlement look like.
And what it probably looks like is something like the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine that becomes like a demilitarized zone.
It's heavily fortified so the Russians don't invade again.
Ukraine remains its independent sovereignty.
Russia gets the guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine.
It doesn't join NATO.
It doesn't join, you know, some of these sort of allied institutions.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, Jerusalem, what's going on here?
JERUSALEM DEMSAS: When, well, we saw post, you know, the Iraq war, that the whole country's mood towards intervention really turned, right, like Democrats, Republicans across the board.
But there was still a sense in most of the foreign policy establishment, most of the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican Party, that, you know, we have allies in the world, and there are people you should fortify with, and there are people that you stand against, and liberalism is still a thing that people stand for.
But Trump has always been very outside of that sort of dynamic, right?
He doesn't view the rest of the world that way.
He sees strong men that he allies with, people like Putin, people like Xi and people like Netanyahu.
And then there are people who he thinks are weak.
And that's his vision of the world.
He doesn't really see value in investing in his allies.
He sees NATO as, you not a place where American strength can be found and can be built and allyship can be found, but a place where they're taking advantage of us, right?
They're making us -- EUGENE DANIELS: He's transactional.
JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Exactly.
And they need to pay in more and are not doing enough.
ASMA KHALID: I do think he's also found, though, that there's domestic appetite for, okay, enough is enough, right, with sort of endless support for Ukraine because, you know, this is an argument, it's an argument you'll hear when you go out and talk to voters in certain parts of the country that they feel like the roads aren't being built or that their schools aren't sufficient or that they don't have enough money for groceries.
Now, whether these things, I'm not saying if you stopped sending money to Ukraine and weapons, you would suddenly have money to build, you know, state of the art schools, but there is a frustration with high costs of things here and people see that.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But it seems, and maybe this is a failure on the Biden administration's part to explain something, but the money that's going to Ukraine is in the form of weapons that are built, made in America, in American factories by American workers, paid for by the U.S. government.
But, , I mean not to put it in a cynical sense, but it's also a jobs program.
So, it doesn't say -- ASMA KHALID: We heard this at one point from the United Nations.
EUGENE DANIELS: And that's the thing.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: They did that for a while.
EUGENE DANIELS: I was so confused that didn't keep harping on that, right?
Like it is such an easy, to me, and maybe you guys disagree, but like easier to tell the American people, we're selling this, you guys don't understand, but we're sending these because we're also doing the jobs here.
Everything we're sending over there, we're replacing here.
The job -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And we're not sending troops.
EUGENE DANIELS: And we're sending troops, your daughters and sons are not going to -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The signal difference between this and that.
ASMA KHALID: But that message does not seem to have resonated.
EUGENE DANIELS: Well, they didn't do it for very long, right?
It popped up in a couple of speeches and then they just moved on from it.
And to this day, it's probably one of the best arguments they have for continuing to send it for those who have issue with it.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.
I want to ask a question about a controversy involving something that Kamala Harris has said.
Donald Trump brought it up in the debate.
He said that she supports transgender surgery for immigrants being held in federal prison.
There was a lot of back and forth, oh, you know, she doesn't believe that.
But, in fact, she did tell the ACLU in 2019, I think it was 2019, there was a question on a questionnaire that she supported taxpayer funding for gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners.
So far as I know, the campaign has not said, or she has certainly not said if she still believes in this or if she's shifting her position on this.
Eugene, Asma, what's going on with that particular issue?
EUGENE DANIELS: I mean, she hasn't talked about it since, right?
It's not been an issue that she has talked about.
There's a few issues that she's kind of changed her position on now after three and a half years as vice president.
I think largely, what's happening with kind of the different vice president -- the different Senator Harris in 2019 and now is that at the time, there was a Democratic Party that was kind of chasing itself to the left.
And you had all of these, what was it, 20 people who were on stage, almost other than Joe Biden, who were saying, I'm going to chase Bernie Sanders.
I think the party is a Bernie Sanders party.
They learned the hard way that that's not the case.
And so they had these different types of positions, whether it's that one, or fracking, or all of these others that she held at the time.
I think, you know -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: She's running as a prosecutor.
EUGENE DANIELS: And now she's running as something completely different.
ASHLEY PARKER: And I think if and when we see her campaign address this, if they're forced to, it will fall into the, my values have not changed bucket, right?
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
My values have not changed, but policy-wise.
ASHLEY PARKER: My positions have, but my values have not changed.
EUGENE DANIELS: What she said about immigration when she kind of came out with some different ideas on immigration is that the last three and a half years watching and dealing with immigration has kind of influenced her decision, which is, I think, you know, most Americans probably will give them credit for that, but she hasn't said that about the other issues.
JERUSALEM DEMSAS: And I think it's worth like thinking about the dynamics of a primary too, right?
Because the way that this policy position came out is that the ACLU sent a questionnaire to candidates, and people had to respond to it.
And, you know, that dynamic does not exist in -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.
First rule of Fight Club, never respond to a question.
In the minute that we have left, I was going to ask about Laura Loomer, but I kind of feel like just saving it for next week and maybe that issue won't be around.
I'm going to go and give you 50 seconds, Jerusalem, to talk about your book in the context of the campaign, housing crisis.
How does it relate to the immigration crisis?
JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yes.
I mean, this has been a big talking point for J.D.
Vance and Donald Trump.
They're looking for an answer because, you know, the Harris campaign has been very clear that they're going to be focusing on policies, like building more housing and providing down payment assistance.
And there has to be an answer to that that plays into this sort of populist rhetoric.
And so they've decided to focus on the fact that, you know, immigrants have come into this country and are contributing to demand for those houses.
There's not good evidence for this.
We know that actually the majority of home price appreciation happened because of Americans seeking houses and remote work demand shifts.
But, you know, you can read more about it in my book.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That was a perfect, enlightened, self-serving pivot.
I appreciate it very much, but, unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.
Do read her book.
I want to thank our panelists for joining us and for sharing their reporting.
And to our viewers at home, thank you for joining us.
For a close look at the way stricter abortion laws affect OBGYNs, please read Sarah Zhang's article, That's Something You Won't Recover From at a Doctor's Office, at theatlantic.com.
I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.
Goodnight from Washington.
