Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 7/26/24

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We're now just a little more than a hundred days until the election, and the race for the White House has been turned upside down.

DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: We have a new victim to defeat, Lyin' Kamala Harris.

If you don't mind, I'm not going to be nice.

Is that okay?

KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. Vice President, Democratic Presidential Nominee: We are in a fight.

For our most fundamental freedoms.

And I say, bring it on.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The Trump team had a plan to defeat Joe Biden.

But with Kamala Harris as his opponent, it's a whole new race.

Next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

If you had fallen into a coma on June 26th and had awoken, say, yesterday, your doctor would have told you that Donald Trump, having survived an assassination attempt, is neck and neck in the polls with Kamala Harris, who is now weighing possible vice presidential running mates to face off against J.D.

Vance.

And you would have thought that your doctor was having, to borrow a term of art, a cognitive fluctuation.

Tonight, we'll talk about the entirely new race for president materializing before our eyes.

Joining me tonight at the table, Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Eugene Daniels is a White House correspondent and a co-author of Playbook at Politico, Adam Harris is my colleague and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and Asma Khalid is a White House correspondent for NPR.

So, yes, a year's worth of news in a week.

ASMA KHALID, White House Correspondent, NPR: That was a good intro.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, yes, I know.

It's true.

It's true.

You think about all the things that happened, it's too many things.

That's why we're going to talk tonight.

Peter, maybe you can start us off by just trying to lift up to 30,000 feet.

You know, in less than a month, we have reached this point.

JOE BIDEN, U.S. President: I revere this office, but I love my country more.

So, I've decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Even on June 28th, the day after the debate, I could not imagine that.

Kamala Harris is the nominee and running neck and neck in the polls right now.

How did we get here?

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Yes, it's extraordinary, isn't it?

That Oval Office address that the President gave was his fourth of his presidency.

It took three and a half years for him to give the first two.

He gave the second two, second pair in ten days.

That's how accelerated this news cycle has been.

And this is going to be a period that historians go back and look at for, I think, years and generations, right, like the period before Nixon resigned or before LBJ decided not to run, very different circumstances.

But the idea that a presidency ends in something other than an election is a pretty rare thing in our lifetime.

And we've now seen it happen in just 29, 30 days.

And as you say, nobody would have thought a month ago that Kamala Harris would be the nominee, a presumptive nominee, and that she'd be running even if not, in fact, ahead of Trump by a point or two.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Eugene, what's the most surprising thing to you in all of this?

EUGENE DANIELS, White House Correspondent, POLITICO: I mean, that it happened.

I mean, you know, I've been -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: All the journalists in Washington are still in a bit of like fatigue and shock, right?

EUGENE DANIELS: We're kind of all walking around like Frankenstein.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: There's a little bit PTSD.

EUGENE DANIELS: A lot of it.

You know, the thing that was on Sunday, right, when this letter pops off, everyone's kind of thinking, maybe he's going to do it later.

If it's going to happen, it's not going to happen.

We made it to Sunday, it's the middle of the day.

And when this comes out, I started calling folks.

And I think what I was so surprised by was the amount of people who did not know this was coming.

I talked to people on the campaign and people at the White House crying out of shock from what has just happened, people who up and moved to Wilmington, Delaware, to work for this man and get him elected and they have been promised up until that morning by senior advisers of the president, not the ones that were in Rehoboth with him, but the others and said, you know, go full steam ahead.

If a reporter asks you, you know, call them a big dummy, and same person.

And that continued over and over and over again.

So, I think.

And then you have, I was talking to aides of Vice President Harris and they're racing to the vice presidential residence, the Naval Observatory, because now she has to start making these calls.

She made a hundred calls in ten hours to senior officials in the party to basically say, you know, I want your support, and I didn't want the day to go by without you hearing from me.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How much notice did she have, though?

She didn't have very much.

EUGENE DANIELS: He called her that morning, is my understanding.

You know, he made the decision on Saturday night.

Him and his team start to write the letter.

In the morning, she's the first call of the people who weren't there, and lets her know, I am dropping.

It's on you, kid, and it's off to the races.

They talked a few times, is my understanding.

And she didn't have a lot of time.

And the aides that came to the Naval Observatory were basically told, like just come.

We can't tell you why.

And then they saw the letters, like, oh, that's -- we get it now.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Asma, you're in the White House all the time.

How did this, how did this materialize so quickly after all of these promises from the Biden team that is never going to happen?

ASMA KHALID: Yes.

I mean, the sense that we have is that Biden ultimately came to the conclusion, as he says, that it was just -- there was not a winnable path for him.

I think what's remarkable to me, though, is how quickly the party seems to have coalesced behind Kamala Harris.

I spent a lot of time over the last three and a half years, Eugene, too, covering the vice president.

I will argue there's not a lot of journalists in Washington who've really spent that much time paying attention to her.

There was a sense that the first year of her vice presidency was really rocky.

And folks sort of thought she didn't have what it took to be president.

I would argue that over the last year at a lot of her public events, she was bringing out pretty sizable crowds, particularly on reproductive rights issues.

But still there was talk in the party that maybe she wasn't the right person.

Maybe she wasn't going to be able to beat Donald Trump.

You look at what -- it was a 24-hour span in which she basically had accrued.

By Sunday, Biden dropped off, Monday night, she had enough, you know, pledged, committed delegates to be the likely presidential nominee.

That is extreme rapid speed.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, the obvious question is, how much preparation did they do behind the scenes, in secret, just in case he dropped out?

It seems like this thing kind of came off pretty smoothly given the chaos.

ASMA KHALID: I mean I heard from people who were helping her to organize those delegates that they started rapidly making calls on Sunday.

I don't know that there was advanced notification.

I heard that particularly black women within the Democratic Party quickly coalesced around her.

I think there became this inevitability to her very quickly.

But I don't get the sense that there was an advanced operation.

EUGENE DANIELS: I don't think there was.

I mean, they were -- the folks that are around her and are allies of her, I was calling them, and they were like, what do you want?

I got two minutes, you know, and so those kinds, because, you know, people like Donna Brazile had just started calling delegates for her, kind of creating kind of a whip operation.

Her team quickly put together a list of these more than a hundred Democrats to call.

This all happened very fast, and it speaks to kind of an understanding of the gravity of the situation, but also a fear and a concern that there might have been a mini primary, even with President Biden saying that it should have been her.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Now, clearly, Barack Obama wanted a mini primary.

I mean, that's the -- I mean, he just endorsed today.

And I wonder, I mean, if you're getting -- any of you are getting the sense, Adam, anyone, getting the sense that there's any kind of regret that they didn't have a mini primary or is this week going so well, has this week gone so well for Kamala Harris, not just in comparison to J.D.

Vance's week, which we will get to in a moment, but is it going so well that people are like, oh, maybe this is the way it was supposed to go?

ADAM HARRIS, Contributing Writer, The Atlantic: Yes.

And I think that there's been a sort of groundswell of enthusiasm, not just from within the party, but also sort of the voters, right?

If you're looking at polls of, you know, likely voters, you're looking at polls of registered voters, You're seeing already these sort of large gaps that she's made up from where Joe Biden was, you know, early in July.

If you're thinking about black voters, if you're thinking about Hispanic voters, Joe Biden was running at about 63 percent favorability with black voters, 31 percent favorability with Hispanic voters.

You fast forward to now and, you know, with Hispanic voters, she's really blowing that out of the water.

She's at about 64 percent and 77 percent.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, is this -- ASMA KHALID: The same with young voters has been a key problem for Biden.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Is this the end of the discussion, Peter or Eugene, is this the end of the discussion about Donald Trump making huge inroads into the black and Hispanic population, especially males?

PETER BAKER: I mean, it seemed hard to imagine he's going to do what he thought he was going to do, right?

He thought he was going to sort of rewrite the political playbook, if you will, to be this -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He's always rewriting the playbook.

PETER BAKER: Yes, in which he's rewriting every night.

But, yes, I mean, I think so.

What's so striking is, to Asma's point, is that this is not the Kamala Harris of year one, but the Kamala Harris of year four, right?

She clearly is more seasoned.

She is more confident.

She gets up there at that rally in Milwaukee, and she's got that crowd, the biggest crowd that that campaign has had, bigger than the crowd that Joe Biden got, eating out of her hands.

You and I, we've all been to these rallies for Joe Biden.

They're tiny, and they're not enthusiastic.

They're polite, but they're not like energized.

They were energized for her.

Now, part of that's her, and part of that is that she's not Joe Biden.

Honestly, let's be real.

For a lot of people, I think, that felt like it wasn't a campaign until this week, and suddenly they remember what it was like to have a candidate get up there and prosecute the case against Trump and deliver a line in a coherent, cogent way.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How long does not Joe Biden work, though?

EUGENE DANIELS: I mean, we only have like 102 days.

So, you know, it doesn't have to work that long.

I was at that rally in Milwaukee and, you know, me and some other reporters who had been covering her for a long time were like, oh, my God, like this is so -- it was such a -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You were not expecting to see what you thought -- EUGENE DANIELS: It was like was such a strange situation for some reason.

You have all of these 3,000 people who, for the first time this entire election, are excited.

And there's an energy that is like hard to kind of quantify other than, you know, is it her, is it not Biden.

It doesn't really matter at the end of the day, because they're excited, they're giving money, and more importantly, they're volunteering.

ASMA KHALID: I also think it's the moment, because I remember you would go out with her, this is back in, you say, 2021, 2022.

And voters would ask me, you know, I don't hear that much about her, what has she been up to, this was a routine question I would hear.

And she's been doing a lot, I would say, particularly on abortion issues.

But I think it's this moment.

It's this moment where she is able to make the case and say, as she often has been now on the campaign trail, that she's a prosecutor.

He, Donald Trump, she says, is a convicted felon.

It is a line that she can articulate in a very, I would think, compelling to the Democratic base.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Both things are true.

It's interesting, Adam, though, we were talking about this, and we've been talking about this for years.

Her, in 2020, after George Floyd, after the racial reckoning period, that being a prosecutor was not considered a positive on now that time has elapsed, time has passed, and it turns out that she's running against the first convicted felon to ever be nominated for a major party nomination.

Talk about the shift in the zeitgeist around her resume.

ADAM HARRIS: Yes.

You know, going through that primary season, going into the election season, even after she was chosen for V.P., you did hear a lot of young voters say that, well, you look at her record in California as a prosecutor, right?

It wasn't something really -- yes, something that they weren't really excited about, was also something they were kind of knocking her for.

But in this cycle, right, you're, one, prosecuting Trump, you're also saying, you know, this is a guy who is trying to run his campaign about law and order, you know, someone who is a prosecutor, it's like, well, which one is it going to be?

Is she a cop or is she so liberal that she's going to be really soft on crime?

And they have to pick one of those lanes.

But, you know, her position is that, well, you know, you saw me engaging Jeff Sessions when I was in the Senate.

You know, you've seen how I operate and how I'm able to prosecute this case against Trump and his attacks on democracy, and I think that that's (INAUDIBLE).

ASMA KHALID: I also think that she is far better and appeals more to a Democratic base when she is on the offense against Trump than she is when she's trying to articulate an affirmative vision for herself.

I think that's why she struggled, you know, during that primary cycle.

It was a crowded field of Democrats in 2020.

Her job is different in this moment.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, in the primary cycle, we couldn't really get a sense of what she believed.

I mean, she was running from parts of her record and -- PETER BAKER: Very tactical.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, it seemed overly tactical.

PETER BAKER: So now, I mean, she owns the Biden record, the Republicans say that's a bad thing.

But for the Democratic base, it's actually a good thing.

And she didn't have to necessarily articulate a new vision, but I think that part of the problem was that the people who have drifted away from Biden 2020 are people who the Democrats believe need to be reminded why they didn't like Trump in the first place.

And she's able seemingly to prosecute that in a better way than he was.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But let's talk about strengths and weaknesses for a couple more minutes.

The Trump -- look, we know that the Trump campaign is run by a very smart guy, Chris LaCivita who, among other things, turned John Kerry's Vietnam service -- wartime service against him, the whole swift boating incident.

So, my question is, obviously, the Trump people are -- they're scrambling.

They weren't planning on running against her, and that's clear.

But when they figure out what to do, how effective are they going to be?

And what weaknesses or alleged weaknesses are they going to be targeting?

EUGENE DANIELS: The biggest thing they're going to do is call her the border czar, right?

They're going to say that she was in charge of the border and that that's why it's so bad.

She wasn't the border czar.

I was on the press call when they explained it.

You know, she was dealing with Northern Triangle, irregular immigration and the issues and why people were leaving the countries.

It doesn't really matter, right, in this time.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Because border czar makes it sound like you're in charge of law enforcement at the actual line.

EUGENE DANIELS: Obviously, they're going to come at her with Bidenflation, right, Bidenomics, that that was a bad thing.

You know, they're going to, they've already been hitting her on that she is mealy mouth, which is not true anymore, right, that she's someone who kind of had a struggle at the times talking about different types of things.

That's gone.

I will also say something that's really important is that, you know, we've already seen a lot of racism and sexism.

And that's going to be a huge part of this campaign.

And Republican leadership are talking to them behind the scenes and saying, please cut it out.

There are things that we can actually talk about here.

But calling her a DEI hire and being sexist about it, I won't say the things that they've been saying.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Wait, I want to get clear on this.

Who is saying not to do it?

EUGENE DANIELS: Speaker Mike Johnson has talked to House Republicans and told them to cut it out, because it's not helpful.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Oh, and they always listen.

EUGENE DANIELS: Yes, he has lots of control over that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, somebody thinks they don't listen to him.

EUGENE DANIELS: Yes.

PETER BAKER: Part of what they're going to do, they're not going to say DEI candidate, at least some of them won't.

They're going to say socialist, right.

And that also has an obvious connotation, right?

And they couldn't really say it very effectively about Joe Biden because he's well known to the country.

He's been here for 50 years.

He's kind of, you know, Scranton Joe, nobody thinks he's a socialist.

She is a person of color, a woman of color, from California, from San Francisco.

And even though in San Francisco, she was thought of as being too right wing, to the rest of the country, that's an easy sale to make.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Adam, let's talk about it frankly, how big an issue will racism and misogyny be, where, you know, she's a twofer.

Obviously, she's a woman of color, we've never, you know, seeing this in a presidential campaign.

Does she lose support because of who she is or are the people who are not apt to vote for a woman of color, the people who would never vote for a Democrat anyway?

ADAM HARRIS: Yes.

I mean, you know, it seems like there's a base of people who it might be built in where if you're not going to vote -- if you weren't going to vote for a woman of color, you weren't going to vote for a woman period, then that's sort of who, who you were, right?

But I think what Kamala is looking at now, or the vice president is looking at now is sort of how she's going to be able to expand that base, right.

Part of that comes through the V.P.

pick.

You know, looking at, you know, maybe she won't pull in as many white working class voters in places like Pennsylvania or Michigan, right?

That's something that could be solved by the vice presidential pick.

But she's also pulling back people who the party assumed that they lost, right?

The Detroit News poll today, right, has her at about 88 percent with black voters.

You know, there were a couple of irregularities in that poll, but -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

So -- ASMA KHALID: One of the big glimpses of that is, this week, there were a number of sort of what I would call affinity group Zooms and, right, the largest one that they say crashed was white women for Harris.

And there is this -- EUGENE DANIELS: So, the white goose for Harris.

ASMA KHALID: Right, yes.

But I think these are like popping up.

There were ones within the South Asian community, the broader Asian community, black women, black men.

And, to me, you know, there are certainly voters for whom her identity will be a liability.

I would also argue there is a chunk of the electorate for whom it is viewed as an asset.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, let's talk about the vice presidential sweepstakes for a moment.

It seems there's different, you hire different vice presidents to serve different needs, Eugene, you've studied this.

It seems on the face of it that Josh Shapiro, popular governor of, let's say, the most key state, the absolute keystone state, it seems like a pretty obvious thing to do, especially because he has more of a centrist Reputation.

He pulls the pulls the ticket a little bit toward the middle.

But talk about how they might be thinking about who we hire for this role.

EUGENE DANIELS: It's kind of an old saying in politics, there's three types of vice presidential picks.

One is the one for June, November and January.

June is to get the party excited during the convention.

November is to win.

January is a governing partner.

People around Harris are saying that she's looking for a governing partner, right?

So, she's looking for someone that kind of thinks the way that she thinks, sees the world and the way that she views it, and this kind of thinking about like, you know, their middle class, you know, from the bottom up, middle out kind of thing that they've been talking about.

She's also going to have to, at some point, decide which of these men, because they're largely looking at white men, she's going to pick who could help in one of these states.

You could probably make an argument for any of these men, Josh Shapiro, obviously, Mark Kelly in Arizona, right?

That's a pick where then you pick up a different type of state, you know, Roy Cooper at North in North Carolina, how does he help there.

PETER BAKER: And maybe Georgia.

EUGENE DANIELS: Maybe Georgia, right?

And so there's all these different types of calculations that that they're trying to make, and they're vetting them at the fastest vetting that probably has ever happened.

And so the -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, the fastest vetting since J.D.

Vance, which we'll get to, promising that we're going to get there.

EUGENE DANIELS: Yes, we're going to get there at some point.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

But -- so in other words, you think that they're arguing that they're looking for a governing partner, but let's not kid ourselves.

Peter and I are like, yes, okay.

EUGENE DANIELS: But she's done this.

She's been the vice president.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I know.

But, Peter, what was the cynical logic?

PETER BAKER: I don't want somebody who could be president.

I want somebody who could win the state.

They don't say that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But they have to win Pennsylvania.

PETER BAKER: They have to win Pennsylvania.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Or a combination of -- PETER BAKER: Yes.

I mean, the question is whether or not, right, if she loses votes for whatever reason we just talked about in some of these states, does she pick them up in other states that they had basically given up?

They had basically given up Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, right.

PETER BAKER: Does she scramble that map?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Now, Mark Kelly seems like -- I mean, the resume is perfect.

There's one problem with the Senate seat, but, I mean, Mark Kelly seems like sort of an obvious choice.

I mean, I'm not asking you to speculate, but I am.

ADAM HARRIS: No.

Yes, it is.

If you think about his resume, right, you're running against an astronaut, John Glenn, right?

You're running against an astronaut.

But, as you said, right, you lose him in the Senate.

You lose a very popular person in Arizona.

So, you know -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You might not get Arizona, right.

ADAM HARRIS: And it was not a guarantee here.

ASMA KHALID: But I mean broadly, if you look at all the names that are on the serious shortlist, we're talking about white men.

And to me, this is interesting because what she seems to be trying to do and what Democrats want to do is to really broaden out the demographics.

And it is a striking difference.

Go back to J.D.

Vance from what we saw with Trump, which he doubled down on his own base.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Oh, and thank you for raising J.D.

Vance because like there's a guy who didn't have a great week, in part because of things like this.

I want you to watch this for a second.

SEN. J.D.

VANCE (R-OH), Vice Presidential Nominee: When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power.

You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our Democratic republic than people who don't have kids.

Let's face the consequences and the reality.

If you don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn't get nearly the same voice.

Now, people will say, and I'm sure, The Atlantic and The Washington Post and all the usual suspects will criticize me about this in the coming days, well, doesn't this mean that non parents don't have as much of a voice as parents?

Doesn't this mean that parents get a bigger say in how our democracy functions?

Yes, absolutely.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I just want to note, for the record, The Atlantic didn't say anything about this, to the best of my knowledge.

But in a couple of minutes we have left, what is going on with J.D.

Vance?

I mean, this seems like a troubled pick.

PETER BAKER: Well, he certainly, Challenges normal Americans who may or may not have kids but certainly don't believe -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But this isn't the only one.

PETER BAKER: No, of course not.

He says it again and again, forgetting, of course -- EUGENE DANIELS: Double down today on Megyn Kelly.

PETER BAKER: Yes.

And, by the way, George Washington didn't have kids.

He had stepkids, right?

We had the whole -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: like the father of the country.

PETER BAKER: Yes, this is never something the founders thought was a good idea.

Of course, everybody has an investment in this country, whether you have kids or not.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, my question is, is Donald Trump -- there's some speculation that Trump maybe regretting this pick, does it?

I mean, do we have any sense of that or is that just idle speculation?

EUGENE DANIELS: That he's uncomfortable with the coverage, I would say, of his of his vice presidential pick.

This is a man who cares deeply about what the media says about him, even though he fights with us a lot and how people look at him and the folks around his campaign.

He had beef with Steve Bannon because Steve Bannon was too far ahead and was kind of the mastermind, everyone was saying.

And so now you're looking at J.D.

Vance have not just a rough week where people are finding this oppo, Democrats are all of a sudden very good at finding oppo research on candidates, but, you know, he's having awkward interactions at rallies.

He's having kind of weird videos of what's happening right now.

That is making him and his folks uncomfortable.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: To be fair, let me ask you this in just 30 seconds, does he bring any advantages that you could see right now, because that could be quite very much the case?

ASMA KHALID: I think he doubles down on the already existing demographic that Trump had, so I don't think he really broadens out the party.

If anything, his comments about, you know, women in particular saying that they were childless cat ladies I think really hurts some Republican women as well.

College-educated Republican women have been moving away from the party, white college-educated voters.

I don't think this helps them.

There's a lot of people who don't have kids, a lot of people who want to have kids, who also struggle to have kids.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

In the couple of seconds we have left, just based on your survey of the possible Democrats out there, who would you most like to see for sheer illumination reasons, debate, J.D.

Vance, could be a very interesting debate, if they actually have a debate.

ADAM HARRIS: Yes.

Actually, I think, honestly, Governor Beshear would be interesting, and then also Josh Shapiro.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's going to be very interesting to watch this choice.

We'll talk about it next week, because, unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.

But I want to thank our panelists for joining us.

And to our viewers at home, thanks for watching.

Before we go, we want to congratulate Eugene Daniels, who recently took over the presidency of the White House Correspondents' Association.

Here's the current president with the current vice president.

And for some reason, the president doesn't have to wear a tuxedo to the White House Correspondents' Dinner like the rest of us.

And for more on how J.D.

Vance felt about Donald Trump back in 2016, please visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.