Exploring Kamala Harris' Dodged Policy Questions: Insights from Jason Willick, Henry Olsen, and Noah Rothman
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Welcome to another exciting episode of Breaking Battlegrounds. I'm your host, Chuck Warren. Sam Stone is off at the Trump rally today to cut a podcast episode and talk to rally goers and see how excited they are. He's also going to attend the RFK Jr. press announcement this morning. On with us today is Jason Willick, friend of the show and a columnist at the Washington Post. He writes about law, politics, and foreign policy for Post Opinions. Jason, welcome to the show.

Good to be back. So were you disappointed Beyonce wasn't at the DNC last night?

Yeah, you know, the mystery guest, I didn't know who it was going to be. It seems like Taylor Swift may be staying out of it this year. That would be the real powerhouse mystery guest. The funny thing I was laughing about all day yesterday was on X was the amount of conservatives that said, oh, it's going to be Romney or George Bush. It was never going to be Romney and George Bush. Yeah.

The Bushes, the McCains, the Romneys are so on their heads, I don't even know where to begin. It's like they can't make a rational decision about people that may be 10% off on their conservative beliefs. It's weird. Would you agree? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you got your Kinzinger, you know, it could have been, I don't know if Liz Cheney is basically a Democrat now, but yeah, Mitt Romney does not actually hold conservative. No, no, not at all. So look, you know, you've watched it, you're following this closely. The press is basically a PR machine for Kamala Harris, it seems like.

What questions do you believe the legacy media should be asking Kamala Harris to explain more and that the public deserves to know besides the fact that she believes in hope and opportunity and makes life wonderful for all of us? See, they should ask her if she wants to cut the defense budget. They should ask her if she...

If she wants to ban fracking still, and if not, what change? They should ask her if she wants to decriminalize border crossings still. And I think more generally, you know, people are interested in what happened with the way that Biden was replaced as the nominee and the things that Democrats said about him that they no longer stand by. So, yeah.

I think voters would definitely like to hear her perspective on this extraordinary turn of events that someone has explained. And especially on foreign policy, I've got to say, she needs to be pressed on Israel-Gaza. She says nice things about both sides in the convention. The rumor is that she's more dovish in Israel, less supportive of Israel than President Biden is.

Explain that. I mean, look, we've never seen her talk at length and unscripted about policy to get a sense of how she thinks. I think any of these issues would help a lot.

Do you think she can talk unscripted about the nuances of foreign policy? Do you think she can talk unscripted for 15, 20 minutes with a cognitive reply about Ukraine, China, North Korea, the border crisis, the Mexican cartels and Israel Hamas? Do you think she can do that?

We haven't seen evidence of it, and there was no primary where she had to do it, and she hasn't done it since the last four weeks that she's been the nominee. So, look, I mean, she can discuss it. I think there would be then a lot of – the reason she's not doing it is that she knows that –

There would be a lot of fodder that she would give for people in terms of contradictions, inconsistencies, misunderstandings. We have to assume, right? Correct. Otherwise, you'd be out doing it. Jason, okay, so you write about law. You do opinions on law for the Washington Post editorial page. My question to you is,

How do you think Republicans should press her on what did you know really about Joe Biden's cognitive decline? I mean, how would you go about it if they came to you and said, Jason, you're in charge of our strategy to get to the bottom of this? How would you approach it? That's a good question. I mean.

Like I said, I think that's an important issue. And I think because a lot of people were caught with their pants down telling us that Joe Biden is very sharp, can't keep up with him, et cetera, et cetera. And,

And now the conclusion was he had to be ousted as the nominee. So I think, you know, she's the vice president. She definitely saw him. I think, you know, I think voters will cut her some slack. Like it's her boss and she sees him stumbling. She's not going to broadcast it. But I think you have to just pose these, pose these questions, you know, quote back. You said, you said this at this time when the,

reporters asked you about President Biden's fitness for office, you said this, do you still believe this? I mean, look, you're not, you know, it's not a cross-examination in a courtroom where you're going to force her, pin her down, really. But, you know, it would underscore the magnitude of what just happened in terms of a president who Democratic political elites really don't think is up for the job of being there and then telling the public that

he is up for the job. So I think you quote back at her what she said about him and what she said about Robert Herr, for example, the special prosecutor who issued the report that questioned Biden's memory and so on. And you ask her if she still stands by those words. We're with Jason Willick. He is a friend of the show and he is a columnist for The Washington Post. Well, let me ask you this question, Jason.

Let's say Joe Biden is the president of a publicly traded company and Kamala is his COO. And you come to find out that they had been telling stockholders, which the American people basically are, telling stockholders that everything's fine with leadership. He's got a tight control in the reins of the company, yada, yada, yada. What would the SEC do?

I'm not totally familiar with the securities law on that, but the thing is... He would have a class action lawsuit, right? If the stock went in the dump and people knew what was going on, would there not be a class action lawsuit? No.

I mean, there have to be material misrepresentations to shareholders, which in this case, of course, you know, shareholders are voters, so they get to decide. Correct. So they get to decide. You know, so I'm not sure the lawsuit analogy is necessary because the shareholders just know the truth and they're going to.

get a vote if they care to find out. But the point, your broader point about misrepresentations, obviously, misrepresentations took place. Now, politicians misrepresent stuff. You know, will people forget? My sense is that hammering Kamala Harris's knowledge of this is not necessarily...

particularly effective for Republicans, but it's, you know, maybe, you know, on the top issues, right? Because that's not going to affect voters' lives if she's president necessarily. But if it was part of a larger narrative that, look, she's not telling you the truth, she's saying what she needs to say, that's always an effective way to tar a politician. So I think,

So drawing out the misrepresentation might be helpful for Republicans, but it shouldn't come at the cost of making a policy case. Right. So you came out and wrote on August 21st a new opinion piece for The Washington Post, how Alexis de Tocqueville explains Democratic Party conformity. Would you tell our audience a little bit about that, what your premise is for the article, and how it explains the Democratic Party today? Sure. So...

I was starting with sort of this tension where Democrats are saying, look, we got rid of Joe Biden. This is democracy at work. Our party, unlike the Republicans, you know, can change its nominee and serve its interests and try to win. And it's not devoted to one person. So this is a very Democratic thing. And the Republicans are saying and, you know, frankly, the Democrats were saying before Congress.

or Biden was saying before he was kicked out, this is undemocratic. People voted for Biden. This is illegitimate. This is like a coup.

And I was talking about Alexis de Tocqueville, who was a Frenchman who famously came to observe America in the early 1930s or maybe, yeah, I believe in 1930, 1931. And he wrote a lot about the character of American democracy. And one thing he said happens in democracy is democracy.

once the majority decides on something, it's really good at suppressing opposing views. So once the majority said it was Biden, you know, there was no dissent allowed, really. There was a few marginal voices, but basically there were murmurs that were quashed. Once then the stampede to Harris, which is, you know,

disorienting, Tocqueville sort of explains democracy sort of moves violently and stampedes all at once in terms of what opinions are allowed. So before Kamala Harris was a failed vice presidential pick, mediocre in her public performances, Biden can't step aside because it might be Kamala Harris as the nominee to she's just been transformational, she's incredible, she's grown, blah, blah, blah.

The way these opinions change so quickly, I find a little bit surreal. But I found Tocqueville going back and reading his account of democracy in America sort of puts it in context that democracies do this. They sort of

from one side to the other as soon as there's a change in what the majority thinks. So Tocqueville's broader point was like, democracy is actually, you know, can look like autocracies in certain ways in terms of everyone conforming to one opinion.

They you know, that that is it's funny. That was still Phil's idea. And I found it helpful for explaining this extraordinary political turn of the last month. Yeah, I guess in today's parlance, we would call it the big mo. Oh, right. You just get the big mo going. We've got we've got two minutes left here. I want to go back to an article we discussed with you several weeks ago, but I want to bring it up again. See if your opinions changed on it.

There's a death penalty controversy with a person that killed a cop, cop killer, and she did not seek the death penalty. If you are a Republican consultant or if you're an editor of the newspaper, do you think that's not being pressed enough to get more answers on that? And do you think that would matter to the public? No, I don't. I mean.

I think that, so yeah, for people who don't know, somebody killed a police officer in San Francisco early in her tenure as district attorney. She said she wouldn't seek the death penalty. It was a big issue in her attorney general race in 2010, but ultimately she won very narrowly. I wrote that piece mainly to

just try to understand how she thinks about things. I don't think that she actually comes off looking so terrible in that. It seems like she sort of bungled the handling of it from a political perspective. But in the end, as I know on the piece, the guy actually wasn't even convicted of a death penalty eligible offense. So I think, you know,

Her call on that was not wrong, but it shows what her impulses are and how she tries. She went out a little bit ahead of the Democratic Party in California and so got criticized by her party. Right. Well, Jason Willick of The Washington Post, thank you so much for joining us today. Hope you have a fantastic weekend, and we'll talk to you soon, my friend. Talk to you soon. Have a good weekend. Breaking Battlegrounds. We're going to be right back in a bit with Noah Rothman of The National Review.

Thanks for watching.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. I'm your host, Chuck Warren. Sam Stone is at the Trump rally today getting some interviews from the Trump rally goers. We are excited to have with us a personal friend and friend of the show, Henry Olson. Henry is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center Studies and provides commentary on American politics and also is a opinion writer for The Washington Post. Henry, how are you doing?

I'm doing fine. How about you? Good. As I was telling you this morning, I was in England this weekend. I was thinking about you when I was at a couple of premier soccer games and how much you would enjoy it. The weather was perfect, so I wish you had been there with me. Yeah, I wish I were, too. You were at two of Tottenham Hotspur's great rivals, Arsenal and Chelsea, but they are wonderful teams on their own right and wonderful teams.

And if you've never been to a Premier League game, seeing it in person with 60,000 or 40,000 of your closest buds is indescribably excellent. Yeah, the energy is amazing. So you had an article come out August 16th. Donald Trump must do better among white voters if he hopes to win in November. And I thought this was just a brilliant take.

Because I keep seeing these polls and it shows Kamala doing well with black voters, Hispanic voters, youth voters, but not at the margins Obama or Biden did. And I keep saying this is a this is a red flag for her, you know. And so she's making up the difference with white voters. Tell us a little bit about that and what Trump needs to be at to win.

Yeah, no, that's exactly right, is that you take a look at all these polls and Kamala is still running behind where Democrats traditionally have been with blacks and with Latinos, is that Biden won Latinos with a low margin historically of about 24 points. Well, right now, the average, depending on which average you look at, has her ahead by 14 to 17 points among Latinos. And with blacks, it's even worse, is that you've got on the...

political average traditionally Democrats win blacks by 80 or more points she's winning them by less than 60 there's other averages that have her doing a little better but the fact is there's also clear evidence that she is losing white voters by the smallest margin in 16 years the one poll has

had her down by 10 points. The average seems to be to have her down by like 13 points. Trump needs to get that up to the 15 or 16 point level. If he gets that up to the 15 or 16 point level, which is less than he beat Biden by, less than he beat Hillary by, less than Romney beat Obama by, but if he can still win white voters by 15 or 16 points, that gain among blacks, Latinos, and presumably multiracials will propel him to victory.

What does he need to do to get there? What does he need to press? Just pure economic immigration issues? Yeah. I mean, the thing is, he's got the edge on the issues with respect to Harris. And he's got the edge with the fact that she's saying if she wants to lead us to the future, she's not a change candidate.

She's the candidate of the party that represents the status quo, and she is part of the administration that voters still very largely disapprove of. And these are things that Trump has to remind voters of. And once he does that.

He should be able to drive her positives down, is that there's a 98 percent chance you'll vote for a candidate if you have a favorable impression of them. Trump is only at 45 and a half percent right now, which is high for him, but still not a majority. He needs to get Harris down closer to him. And that only means moving forward.

A few points among white voters who don't like him are entranced with the Harris hype right now, but need to learn something about her. And he needs to do that. And he's probably got about six weeks in which he can make that case.

Let's dig a little bit more further down on this. What does he have to get to that percentage you're talking about? Let's say 16 percent margin with white voters. Where does he need to be at with white males? Because that seems to me where he can gain it. I'm not sure he's going to get – I think there's two growth opportunities for Donald Trump. It's Hispanic voters.

And I'm not guessing on that. I'm saying that firsthand. Hispanic voters and white males. What does he need to have that margin be with white males on Election Day? The real thing is what he needs to do is convince independent white males who don't like Democrats on policy but don't like him to give him another chance. In 2016, the reason he won was because independent white

white men voted for him. Independent white women voted for Hillary in 2018 and 2020. Independent white men voted against him. He needs to flip them back. And these are people who don't want

price controls on groceries. These are people who don't like what's going on at the border. These are people who don't think that Democrats represent a growing economy, particularly for people like them. This is where things like DEI really come into play is

You can talk about a growing economy, but if it's not going to be for the voter that's thinking about it because they think they'll be disfavored, which is something that a corporate DEI policy would do to white men, that is something that Trump should talk about. And once he does that, he should be on much better ground. This is a quick shift in Harris's favor. It can be a quick shift against her if Trump knows what he's doing.

With Henry Olson, he is also the host of a fantastic podcast called Beyond the Polls, which I highly recommend you download and make it part of your listening every week. Henry, let's quickly before we go to break. What do you think the chances are the Republicans get the majority? Is it just simply picking up Montana and West Virginia? And you feel good about that? Yeah, I think the chances of Republicans being the majority party in the Senate are higher than 90 percent that you're talking about a gimme pick up.

as Republican state and Joe Manchin has retired, there's no real chance of the Republicans losing a currently held seat. And there are already polls showing the challenger to Jon Tester ahead. Trump will win Montana by 15 to 20 points. And I don't think in this age, Jon Tester is going to convince

fifteen percent of trump voters to switch parties and that gives you fifty one and then after everything after that is great the obviously republicans would like to pick up as many seats as possible but a lot of that has to do with donald trump uh... we know that in the last a few elections the only

person who has won a presidential run a Senate seat against the presidential victor in their state that year is Susan Collins of Maine. So if Trump runs well and he's close or winning Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, there's a chance for more pickups. But if he doesn't, then it's really Ohio where he'll win regardless of how close the election is likely to be in Montana. And Republicans will get at least one of them.

What does he – I'm going to take it we get Montana. I'm going to take it Republicans get West Virginia. What does he have to win by to pull Bernie over the finish line in Ohio?

do you think? I think he needs, he got 53% of the vote last time. J.D. Vance in 2022 basically mirrored Trump's percentage. The margin was closer because there were no third party candidates on the ballot. I think if Trump wins Ohio by 8 to 10, Moreno's got a fighting chance. If he wins by more than 10, Moreno's a lock. And then what do you think the next best chance pickups are?

Next best chance pickup is Nevada. The reason why is that you've got a substantial Latino vote. You've got a substantial black vote. They're souring on Democrats. You've got one of the worst economies of any state in the country. And you're already seeing, even in the Harris hype, Harris is not polling great in Nevada. So I think that Sam Brown versus Jackie Rosen is your next best pickup. And then after that...

It's the three Midwestern states. Fantastic. Henry, let's carry this over to the next segment. This is Chuck Warren of Breaking Battlegrounds with Henry Olson of The Washington Post and the host of the podcast Beyond the Polls. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. We're finishing or having continuing our conversation with Henry Olson. He is a columnist at The Washington Post, and he is also the host of a podcast, Beyond the Polls. Highly recommend you download that today, especially in this election season. You'll learn a lot. So Nevada, you think is the next big chance. Do you think there's a chance for Hogan?

Not really. I think Hogan's running a great campaign. Every ad I see is striking the right image. The question is, is he going to pull 13 to 15 points ahead of Trump? I think that's a really hard ask in these times. It's a tough lift. All right. So the press has been basically a cheering squad recently.

For Kamala Harris, I don't know any way to say it. It doesn't seem like there's anything critical being written or asked of her. First of all, is that a very biased opinion on me or do you see it the same way?

Yeah, it's hard for me to know what the regional press is talking about, and that's important. But the national press, it is pretty much a Harris cheering squad outside of the obvious conservative leaning networks and outlets. So what are the questions that you think, not only the press, but what are the questions that the Trump campaign, J.D. Vance, should be pressing her to answer over and over and over, that they should just pound it away? What should they be asking?

Well, you know, I think the first thing that they should be doing is using whatever press they have to drive home their points, which is the ones we talked about before. Can she defend the current policy on the border that she had a role in devising and implementing? Can she defend the Biden spending policy? Can she defend Trump?

the poor job market for native-born people who don't have a college degree. All of those things are documentable, and those are the things they should be talking about. But what I would be doing, if I were them, is to go to the national press. Every time I have a rally, I would sit down for an interview with the anchor of one of the three leading networks. So Trump

Trump is in Phoenix. If I were him, I would be making time to sit down with one of the anchors and do a 30-minute interview. And the point is that people watch local news. They don't just watch national news. Local press will want that because they rarely get that opportunity. And every single time, he can use some of that to say, and you should ask Vice President Harris for the same thing. And what they'll do is they'll ask questions.

And then it becomes a local issue, and it becomes – once Harris starts saying yes to local press, she's not going to say no. She can't say no to national press, and national press can't let local press get that access. Trump needs to press this every time he's in a swing state. Well, and the thing about that, and that's a fantastic strategy, is if he really sets down for 30 minutes with one of the local anchors –

They will literally do a two or three part series on that over the week. They won't just finish it with one episode. They'll air those things for two or three days. I mean, I've watched you do it before. And it seems like in this age of digital media, that used to be done a lot, Henry, back in the 80s and 90s. It's been sort of a lost art.

People have become so nationalized, they forget the importance of local press, and particularly local television. When you take a look at congressional primaries, it used to be you'd want somebody who had a record, represented an area, be a TV anchor. I mean, Carrie Lake in Arizona is a perfect example. You're a TV anchor, people know you, people trust you, so sit down with the people that people trust, and these TV anchors will salivate.

at the opportunity to get that time with one of the leading cases. You know, you bring up a fantastic point about that. You know, Carrie Lake was an anchor for two decades here. I mean, tell our audience, what does that mean? I mean, she had a following. She had fans, right? I mean, you just don't do that job and stay there for two decades because it's a pretty...

Rough industry. It's a very rough industry. What it means is that she had people who tuned in because they liked her. You know, at all of these local areas that have longstanding anchors, people tune in because they like them.

And what that does is it translates into name identification. It translates into votes and that translates into money. Mark Alford, a congressman from western Missouri, was the anchor in the Kansas City market and just cleaned up pretty easily in a primary because he had that advantage. Yeah, he has that faith. Last question. Do Republicans, what do you get the chances Republicans keep the House?

I'd say a little better than 50-50. And it all has to do with Trump. Is that if Trump can keep Harris's margin to the... Obviously, if he wins the national popular vote, Republicans keep the House. If he can keep

Harris's margin below Biden's margin. So if she wins by one or two points, he can win the presidency. But it's very hard to see Democrats flipping the House if Harris is doing worse than Biden nationally, because that means she'll be doing appreciably worse in the swing district. Fifteen seconds here. Tell us the three House races to watch. If the Republicans win it, they keep the House. If they lose them, they lose the House.

North Carolina won a 50-50 seat Biden-Trump, significant black population. They picked that up. That means that they keep the House. Ohio 9, Marcy Kaptur, Democratic incumbent, Trump won by three. They passed. They beat that. They keep the House. And Mike Garcia, California 27, Biden plus 12, Hispanic district. He sold that seat. They keep the House.

Henry Olson, always a pleasure. Thanks for joining us today. This is Breaking Battlegrounds. On our next segment here, we'll have Noah Rothman. Henry, we'll talk to you soon. Folks, we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. For our final segment, we have with us Noah Rothman. He is a senior writer at the National Review. I suggest you follow him on National Review. His writing is always great. They're always introspective, and they ask great questions. Noah, welcome back to the show. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. So, besides Beyonce not showing up at the DNC yesterday, what did you think about the convention? It just seemed like a homecoming cheering squad event.

basketball arena type thing. It didn't seem like there was not much policy talked about except orange man bad and we're going to make everybody great. Yeah, listen, I'm not the target audience for this. So my impressions are informed by my biases, which are not favorable to Democrats. And insofar as I thought the exuberance was positively oppressive and to an extent almost

Right, right.

And so you had members of this institution, political institution, dating back 40, 50 years who've been participating in this process for quite a long time. And if you're keen to be an institution builder and a member of something exclusive, and exclusivity is a human yearning. We're a tribal species. We like to be involved in groups that are cohesive and coherent.

That's an attractive thing. If you saw Kamala Harris and Tim Walz sort of change, shift Joe Biden's approach to campaigning against Donald Trump, shifting from he's an existential threat, dour, downbeat, scary, almost a little bit overwhelming.

You saw something very different from this approach thematically. You saw a party that was inclined to make fun of him. Yes. To dismiss him, to undermine his influence over the – not entirely. You had Kamala Harris say he wants to be a dictator, he wants to be an authoritarian. There's still nods to those thematically. But it wasn't –

overpowering. It wasn't the overarching theme of this convention. I think it did everything the Democrats needed it to do. The big question is whether or not Kamala Harris cannibalized her convention bump.

because the party rallied around her over the last month. So is there a coming home effect, or has that already been established in the polls? That's something I'm willing to watch. Historically, convention months really do matter. And we'll see whether or not she gets one coming out of this thing. I'm inclined to think she could peel another one or two points out of this electorate. But it's a very polarized electorate. And

And we're about to get into the real meat of this campaign. One last note, because I know I'm monologizing, but we've seen this campaign in defensive mode.

Since it really, Joe Biden left the race. Correct. By which I mean, it's avoiding the press. It's truncating the information, throttling the information that it's providing to the public. It's introducing, reintroducing the candidates in positive ways. And it's not engaging with the candidate. What we finally saw last night from Kamala Harris, and to a lesser extent during the campaign, or during the convention, but mostly,

during her speech was a preview of what offense is going to look like. And that's a risk. When you stick your head above the parapet, you can get shot.

And they're exposing themselves. But I think that the offensive lines that they're retailing, at least telegraphing, are going to be pretty effective. And we have not seen the Trump campaign nimble enough to shift the message away from Joe Biden towards Kamala Harris yet. It's been a month. And Donald Trump is still out there saying, you know, Joe Biden was robbed. Aren't you mad about it? Which no one cares about it. No one's mad about it. Even I am.

who dislike her thought he should simply resign. I think they need to pull the 25th Amendment. I don't think he's coherent enough to be president right now.

So that's still a live issue. I don't think that's going away. Yeah, but you're right. I mean, they knew this was coming. That's the worst part about it. So what – so let's go. Since the press isn't – so Henry Olson on before you said simply he thinks when Trump does a rally, he should grab one of the anchors from one of the local news stations and sit down and do a 30-minute interview and press them on questions on Kamala because he says that will be the bait for her to get involved. Right.

What do you think about that strategy and what else should they be doing? I think it's worth a try. Right. I don't know if it's going to work. So the Trump campaign's approach, and it was on paper, it made a lot of sense, was to contrast itself with

with Kamala Harris has causated insularity by making Donald Trump really available, by going out there and doing press conferences, by talking with anybody who wants to talk to him for like an hour and a half on end, like be as exposed as you can be. And no reporter in the Trump era would say that Donald Trump was not accessible to the press. He was maybe the most accessible president there was to media and microphones for good and for ill. But

But what the problem with that strategy so far is that when Donald Trump executes it, I mean, it's achieved. What he wants to achieve is done the second he walks out on stage. Everything else is ancillary. And then he ends up saying something that is off script, off beat, off message. And that's what makes the sound bite. That's what makes the headlines. So it just kind of swallows the effort. I mean, if he wants to just...

make that strike that contrast the press conferences such as they are should be like 10 minutes long yes and don't say anything that's not off script and just disappear and then do that again yes in two or three days and keep up the drumbeat but yeah an interview with a friendly reporter might might put more pressure on the paris campaign to do the same well talk about the length of interviews he gives so tim waltz gave a 17 minute interview i think kamal is a little over 30 minutes

I think that's brilliant because they both have nothing to say that's going to appeal to moderate Americans. Right. And all they do is talk about this background. And, you know, I have a friend out in Florida has a great line about an associate we know who always sort of fidgets the truth. And he goes, he always lies when the truth will do. And I sort of feel that sums up Tim Walz.

He served 20 years. He didn't need to exaggerate what he did, right? They had trouble getting pregnant, but he exaggerated it in an IVF. I mean, do you think Republicans should hit on that or just ignore him and go completely after Kamala's far-left policies?

Well, I don't know if I would ignore him. I think his tendency to inflate his record and his history and his personal story is a liability, and it's one he should be made to answer for. But people aren't going to be heading to the polls in November voting for the vice president. They never do. So it is a shiny object in that sense. Temper and tailor the message. The same goes for Democrats, to the degree that they devote a lot of attention to J.D. Vance. It's wasted energy.

But I wouldn't necessarily ignore it. And then to your point where they don't necessarily have anything to say to the middle of the electorate, I don't know if that's true. I don't know. I don't think what they're saying to the middle of the electorate is honest.

I think it's all a fabrication and rather flimsy one. The edifice of it is so fragile, I think it wouldn't take a lot of pressure to knock it down. It's just this invention that's only about a month old. But it's a pretty good invention because it is papering over what the record Kamala Harris established for herself over the course of her career in national public life, which is as a reliable source

progressive. That's not what we heard from this campaign for the most part. And certainly in Kamala Harris's speech, Harris's speech was tax cuts, was individual liberty, was economic opportunity as opposed to economic equality or the equality of outcomes. And it was toughness, especially on the world stage, toughness, extroversion, the projection of American force.

That's the middle of America. Yes, it is. And that's why they got to – Republicans should own. Yeah, and they got to be pressing on it hard. It's funny that she's getting this coverage that she's being able, with the press's help, and there's no other way to describe this, go to the center where you have, for example, in March of this year –

Washington Post opinion piece, for the country's sake, Vice President Harris should step aside. Or in the Intelligencer, the case for Biden to drop Kamala Harris. There was just tons of articles about that. And now that's just never happened. Like the last three and a half years, like the last failed presidential campaign where she didn't even make it to a ballot to get a vote. It's like it's all disappeared. It's like it never happened. Yeah, and I don't know exactly why.

And whether she has substantially improved in the year and a half she spent underground since probably 2022, or whether this is all completely manufactured, or whether it's a combination of both, either way, she had established for herself a reputation as an extremely maladroit campaigner. And it was an earned reputation. She built that for herself, much to the chagrin of the press that even...

primary campaign was really pushing hard on Kamala Harris. She was the lead fundraiser during the early stage of the primary campaign. There was a lot of pent-up hope and she failed to meet the expectation. Time magazine did a cover story on her in the primary and she dropped out three weeks later. I mean, it was just adoration.

during that primary. But I'm not confident enough in my impression of her yet because it is so staged that she has possibly improved because the speech she gave last night was better than any speech I've heard her give. Yes. Low bar, but she crested it. But I'm waiting to see whether or not she's actually developed some skills that were not present throughout her career just to see how she

She behaves in an extemporaneous situation, and we haven't seen that yet. I suspect she's still the same maladroit campaigner we've always known her to be, but she is showing a little bit more skill than I think just a well-stage-managed event could present. So the jury is out on that one just yet.

Noah, so you and I decide we're going to go to your favorite steak restaurant or deli or whatever you want to go. We're going to sit down and write some ads for the Trump campaign. What are the questions or the policy points you would hit her on?

So one of Donald Trump's, in my view, from this speech, one of Donald Trump's biggest liabilities will be this prosecutor versus felon dynamic. This is something Democrats have always wanted to see from Kamala Harris since she got into the race. And she previewed it yesterday. Like I was talking about the offense stage of this campaign. That's going to feature prominently. And she was really good at that. You're kidding yourself if you don't think she's good at it. That was good.

That was a staccato, beat by beat, prosecutorial language, reading of the charging documents in a way that I don't think

Donald Trump has a response for just yet. It was so much easier with Joe Biden. With Joe Biden, you could just... The counter-narrative was already baked in. It was the big guy. It was his brother. It was Hunter. It was Burisma, the shell companies, the IRS whistleblowers, the impeachable offenses. It was all there to muddy the water. Kamala Harris doesn't have a corruption narrative around her. That's not her liability. Her liability is inauthenticity. She is a fraud.

She's an intellectual poser, and that's what you have to expose. But you also have to neutralize the prosecutor versus felon dynamic. And I don't know if Donald Trump has a message around this, and I don't know if my approach would work, but her record as being soft on crime –

Is I think the way to neutralize that she's presenting herself as this tough on crime prosecutor and her record is you know putting up the fronting the bail for offenders who were rioting in 2020 her record is not prosecuting violent criminality and allowing the Bay Area to go to pieces the Trump campaign has brought aboard Gabby are not getting Tulsi Gabbard

Former Democrat, a person I don't have a ton of respect for, mostly because I think her foreign policy views are anathema to what anybody who believes in the primacy and the value of the U.S. world order should support. Nevertheless, they brought her on board because Tulsi Gabbard dismantled Kamala Harris in the primary race. That's what everybody remembers. Nobody remembers what she said to do the dismantling. Tulsi

Tulsi Gabbard attacked Kamala Harris for being too tough on crime, for prosecuting criminals too aggressively, for going after quality of life crimes too hard. That was the sort of thing that undid her in the very progressive era that she was running in. That's not the Trump campaign's message. It's the opposite of the Trump campaign's message.

I don't know why they're bringing her on board, save for the fact that they think she's got kind of a celebrity around her, especially among the very online right-wing people whom this campaign is beholden. We have about 45 seconds left here, but I have friends...

who are just like, Tulsi should have been the VP. And I don't think they even know what she stands for. It's just that she's pretty and she punched Kamala in the debate. I mean, that's basically it. It's incredibly stupid. Do you remember when she went to Damascus? Yeah, I did. I know. It's just nuts. Bashar al-Assad, while he was slaughtering his people, a person, by the way, Bashar al-Assad, who facilitated the murder of American soldiers by

I know. And you can't make that crap up. But that's what the reality, that's how crazy 2024 is. Noah Rothman, thanks a million, folks. You can follow him at The National Review. I recommend he be part of your weekly reading. You'll understand a lot more about politics and policy. Noah, thanks a million for joining us. This is Breaking Battlegrounds. Please stay on for an extra episode of Podcast Time. Thanks a million. Have a great weekend.

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Welcome back to our podcast segment of Breaking Battlegrounds. Again, you can find us on BreakingBattlegrounds.vote or wherever you pick up your podcasts. Please listen, download, share. Anyway, we're here with Kylie's Corner. Kylie, how are you? I'm amazing. How are you? I'm doing good. I'm doing good. So what do you got for us today?

I got some interesting stories, actually. So the first one, I have two stories today. The first one is happening in the chess world. And crazy things are going down in the chess world. Boy, the poisonings, the chicaneries. It's amazing. Yeah. So a chess player was suspended after allegedly poisoning her rival. So the incident unfolded during the Dagestan Chess Championship on August 2nd. By the way, she was Russian, right? Right.

Yes, this happened in Russia. Amina. So she's being accused. So she asked someone if the cameras were in operation in the chess room and she had been told that they were not. There is then security footage. You can go see it on Twitter of Amina Amina walking over to the board where her opponent was going to play 20 minutes later and smearing deadly mercury from a thermometer. And so 30 minutes later, her opponent then became became sick and was rushed to the hospital. And doctors eventually concluded that she was poisoned.

She had said she confessed to this and said that she just wanted to knock her opponent out of the tournament. And this was meant to scare her and not harm her because her opponent had actually beat her the week prior in a tournament on tie breaks. So she's now facing a lifetime ban from chess and three years in prison. I'd be worried more about the three years in prison than the lifetime bad. But if you chose chess, you know, because maybe sports was dangerous and

I don't know. You got to keep your head on a swivel there. Well, the funny thing about that is, is, you know, Russia is quite well known for poisoning dissidents and people. So I don't know. Are they teaching this in middle school in Russia? I mean, it's just like, hey, you got poison 101 today that you have to get to move on to high school. I mean, what's going on there? Yeah. I don't think it's too far fetched, to be honest. I don't either. I don't either. You know, so what else do you got for us?

Okay, the next thing I have Jesse Peterson. We do not have a happy ending for her unfortunately yet But a woman named Jesse Peterson from Northern, California, she's been missing for over a year Well a hospital morgue had actually found her body She admitted herself to the Mercy San Juan Medical Center on April 6th last year because she was having type 1 diabetes difficulties of some kind so she admitted herself and

Her mom had called the hospital the next day and San Mercy had said she checked herself out of the hospital. She wasn't able to contact her daughter, so they filed a missing persons report with the county sheriff's department.

They posted notices around the town, interviewed homeless people. They thought maybe when she left the hospital, she had, you know, something happened, a medical emergency and she passed away or something. So there was interviewing everyone around town, held press conferences. Well, on April 12th this year, a year later, they get a call from the hospital that she had actually died a year prior on April 4th.

And her body was being stored in an off-site cold storage unit is how they described it. And her body was so decomposed at this point that they're unable to see if medical malpractice played a role in her death. Do you think this is incompetence or you think this was done with ill intent?

I don't know. I think because the doctor signed off on her death certificate a year later on April 4th and then on April 12th is when they were notified. And so I don't know if maybe it was malpractice and something happened and so they had to hide it until they were able to, I don't know, report it of some sort. It seems a little, if they have this off-site cold storage unit, I don't know how people are going to miss that.

Yeah, I mean, don't you have to record putting somebody in cold storage? Exactly. And who are they reporting it to? The state? I feel like there's more checks and balances on human life there should be than just like someone just going missing. Yeah. It seems weird and fishy. All these always seem weird and fishy, right? And you always feel like even when they solve it,

That there was a lot more to it. There's a lot more to it. And I do wonder how often there is more to it. I think, well, I think half the time at least. Right? Yeah. Do you have anything else for us today? No, that's it for today. So anything stand out for you in our interviews today with our guest? I guess it's just, I don't know. The press is clearly...

pimping Kamala Harris and they're giving Tim Waltz I love the new we now call it misspoke instead of lie and Tim Waltz misspeaks all the time and the problem is he's like the guy that went and golfed right and he shot a 74 and he's entire but he shot a 71 and I feel that's all his stories

Right. It's just a little bit more to it. So, like, he served two decades in the military. You don't need to exaggerate that. But he wants to go and say, I served in combat. I don't know if that's because he's insecure about his manhood.

I don't know if he feels that gives him more gravitas to be a macho guy. I don't know. But two decades enough, you don't need to say more about it. Right. It's sort of two decades, period. Well, but I think he has said it for so long now he he may genuinely believe that he is. It's it's the old George. They lie and they convince themselves. Yes. The old George Costanza. You know, Jared, you believe it's true. It's not a lie. Right. And that's the same thing. And it's like this. The one I even find even interesting.

Just gross is this IVF thing he's been doing. This is not a misspoke. He has told people they went through IVF. That's not what they went through.

And he's done it purely because he's trying to make a political issue of it because of what Democrats are doing to make it a political issue. But he did not go to it. They had a hard time getting pregnant. And there's a lot of people do that. And that is gut wrenching for families. I don't wish that upon anybody. But he always just sort of, you know, he lies when the truth will do, as my friend Ryan Tyson says. And it's a really weird thing. And her.

Look, I almost think if you and I went out and we sat down and said, we're going to create an ad of Kamala Harris, I would just do a black screen with music and just have 30 seconds of questions. Ask Kamala this, ask Kamala this, ask Kamala this. That's it. I'd run that over and over and over on everything, social media, everything. Yeah. No. And I guess I, after today's conversation, it's more like, who is the communicator? Cause it's what questions should Trump be asking? But yeah,

How are we going to communicate that to the voters who haven't made up their mind? And I feel like that's in this time of the political realm is where I feel like exhausted of who can communicate to that group. It's almost you pay a bunch of high school kids to go do a drawer drop and just have it in black with white lettering. Here's the five questions Kamala Harris needs to answer for. I mean, something like that. Just make them simple enough they can ask the questions. Well, where does she really stand on price controls?

You know, where does she really you know, where does she really stand on? You know, was she lying about Biden? You know, I mean, there's just so many things that hit her on. I mean, she is really a left leaning, not even left leaning. She is far left. I mean, she is the most liberal senator when she was in the Senate. That is just a fact. When they are running for president 2020, her proposals would have added almost five trillion dollars more to the debt. That was like three trillion more than Bernie Sanders. I mean, well, and then she said she didn't want to tax Biden.

The service industry. Now, yeah. Now, then she then she, you know, I mean, she copies Trump. I mean, she's a mess. I just I feel like anybody voting for needs to take an IQ test.

That's really what I'm at on right now. Well, let's go have our sunshine moment since Jenna is out today at the Trump rally interviewing of Sam, Trump rally goers. Passing sunshine to those folks. Oh, passing so much sunshine today. It's unbelievable. Got a little Johnny Cash here, and I appreciate that intro. So I have two stories to close our segment today, and then Jeremy is going to close with –

A great John Stossel video on Kamala Harris and just had the press covers for her all the time. So a little humor at the end, which is sadly not that – it's not a ha-ha funny. But anyway, first of all, a woman passed away here this past week. She was 117 years old. And she was actually quite active, I guess, on X, formerly of Twitter. And she said that –

You know, she kept entries and she said she lived that long because she had order. She had tranquility. She had contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets. These are strong, stoic virtues, right? But she lived. Her name was Maria Morera. She lived 117 years and she lived.

claimed that having a good connection with family and friends, lots of positivity, and she stayed away from toxic people, which I think is probably important because anxiety and stress cause a decline of your physical health, right? Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. She was the oldest person alive until she passed away at a nursing home in Catalonia, Spain. She lived to meet 11 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

She lived through the Spanish flu, Spanish Civil War, both world wars, and was the world's oldest COVID-19 survivor at 113 years old. Tough old bird, wasn't she? Yeah. And when she passed away here, her family tweeted that she passed away in her sleep, and before her death, she told them, I don't know when, but very soon this long journey will come to an end. Death will find me worn down from having lived so much, but I want it to find me smiling,

free and satisfied. And it sounds like our friend Maria lived a very, very good life.

Oh, that's amazing. And then they'll have dinner with her. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'd love to as well. And matter of fact, it's interesting you say that in the article they talked about her. She says the problem with social the one problem with social media is people are not able to sit down enough with people of her age and collect their wisdom because they've seen a lot in their life. There's a lot to learn from somebody through their valleys and highs and so forth.

I want to finish on it before we do this John Stossel video ending our segment. So there was a foundation that a group of trainee female doctors from Afghanistan have traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland, to complete their medical degrees after the Taliban forced them to quit studying. As you know,

Since Biden and Kamala Harris pulled us out of Afghanistan, women are just under the thumb of Taliban rule. It's just, you know, for people who say women's rights, they have left these women to become basically indentured slaves. So these female trained doctors were told they can no longer study. So after a three year campaign by the parents of Linda Norgrove, as you remember, she was the kidnapped Scottish charity worker who died in a rescue attempt in 2010.

They worked it out, got all these women to come over to Scotland to attend medical school and finish their degrees. And I love the hope and optimism of these women because one gal just simply said, I really hope things change so I can go back to my country. And I really appreciate she still has that hope. And I also want to put my arm around her and say, there's nothing to go back to. And it's not going to change in nine years or three years or six years.

But credit this again. This shows what good people can do. They put this foundation together. They raise the money. And now they have these 19 women who are no longer able to pursue their medical degrees in Afghanistan. Now they're in Scotland and they'll get those degrees and probably help and save a lot of people in this world.

That's amazing. Yes. Well, on behalf of myself, Kylie and Jenna and Sam, who have a very long day outside in 110 degree weather at a Trump rally. We're so excited. All of us so much. We hope you have a great weekend. You can get more of our episodes at BreakingBattlegrounds.vote or wherever you download your podcast. Subscribe to our sub stack. You can get our weekly updates.

We do two or three a week. We're pretty consistent on that now. And folks, we hope you have a great weekend. Enjoy your family and we'll talk to you next week. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

Who is Kamala Harris? She won't hold news conferences and rarely takes questions from reporters. Instead, she reads the same speech off teleprompter again and again. The path to the White House runs right through this state. Her campaign also releases carefully produced videos.

We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead. That would be good. But would Harris's policies allow that? America's on track to bankruptcy. The vice president votes in the affirmative. Harris repeatedly casts tie-breaking votes to spend more of your money. Unlocking the ability to pass a COVID relief package without Republican votes.

Last election, I ran a game show that compared candidates' spending plans. It found that Trump and Biden wanted to increase spending by more than $200 billion, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders by trillions. But I was surprised that the biggest spending plans came from...

Kamala Harris. Her proposals would have exploded our debt. The highest inflation in 41 years. Biden's irresponsible spending ignited nasty inflation. Imagine what inflation would be like if Harris had been president.

In her first policy speech, she's proposed almost $2 trillion in new spending. Provide first-time home buyers with $25,000. And $2 trillion small compared to what she wanted to do during COVID. Give every American $2,000 a month. That would have cost $21 trillion. She's also endorsed eliminating private health insurance, having government take it all over.

Even CNN anchors seemed puzzled. So for people out there who like their insurance, they don't get to keep it? Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care. Now her campaign says she no longer supports entirely government-run health care.

She's flip-flopped on other issues. There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking. No question, she told CNN. But now Harris wants votes in Pennsylvania, where fracking provides jobs. Her campaign now says she won't ban fracking. And they even say Republicans claiming she wanted a fracking ban is false, an obvious attempt to distract.

But what's false? That's what she said. There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking. So, yeah. She also wanted to force gun owners to sell their guns to the government. I support a mandatory buyback program. Mandatory. But again, today… A Harris campaign spokesperson tells us that the vice president would no longer require this. So who is the real Kamala Harris?

She used to brag about being a tough prosecutor against even the smallest offenses. I decided

I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy. But then when progressives said abolish the police, she flip-flopped. And during the George Floyd riots, when people were looting and setting fires, Harris tweeted, help post bail for those protesting. Now that the policing pendulum has swung back, she again brags about locking people up. I took on perpetrators of all kinds.

During the 2019 Democratic debate, Tulsi Gabbard pointed out her hypocrisy. She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. That was true. Have you ever smoked? I have. Okay. And I inhale. I did inhale. Okay.

Another criticism of Harris is that she's nasty to people who work for her. Incredibly, there's been a 92% turnover on her staff. Politico called her office abusive, an unhealthy environment. Now, if she were a hard-charging boss who got results,

That might be okay. But we know what happened when Biden put her in charge of the border. More than 302,000 migrants crossed the southern border. Of course more people crossed. Harris promised them free stuff. Medicare for all to people who are in this country illegally.

I am opposed to any policy that would deny any human being public education or public health, period. Today, the legacy media want to protect Harris because they hate Trump so much. They were more honest when Harris ran against other Democrats. You're considered the most liberal United States senator. Somebody said that, and it actually was Mike Pence on the debate stage.

Well, actually, the nonpartisan GovTrack has rated you as the most liberal senator. GovTrack's ranking of Harris was up on their site for five years. But once it looked like she would get the nomination, they deleted the page. When questioned about it, they said, votes from one legislative session are not sufficient to create a reliable portrait. What can be?

unburdened by what has been. Harris needs this media cover because she says weird things. What can be unburdened by what has been. And radical things. Yes, we do talk about equity. We actually believe it is a good principle. Equality and equal opportunity aren't good enough, she says. There's a big difference between equality and equity.

Equality suggests, oh, everyone should get the same amount. Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place. So we need more government redistribution. Everybody should end up in the same place. Finally, Harris embraces the word "woke." We have to stay woke. Like, everybody needs to be woke. What's so funny about "woke"? Cause a lot of us to be woke.

She is the favorite to be our new president? And you can talk about if you're the wokest or woker, but just stay more woke than less woke. It's upsetting that this big government opportunist and this crass egomaniac are our choices. The good news is that America's founders wisely created checks on executive power.

Foolish media often say the president runs the country. Run the country. Run this country. The worst person possible is running the country. But the president runs just one of three branches of government, each of which was designed to be able to stop the other from doing something crazy. The founders demanded limited government because they'd seen the damage done by tyrants. With these two candidates, I'm grateful for those limits on executive power.

I sure hope they stick. We at Stossel TV will always stick to the principle of limited government power. And if you want to help us with that, click this button.