Harris Trumps Trump (with Patti Solis Doyle & Rick Wilson)
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From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I'm Preet Bharara. On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris took the debate stage against former President Donald Trump for the first time. Clearly, I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump. And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country. Joining me to recap the debate and its key moments are two longtime political strategists,

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all while managing to leave you inspired and uplifted. Strict Scrutiny is the perfect show for decoding the drama and protecting your sanity. New episodes drop every Monday. Subscribe to Strict Scrutiny wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. The presidential debate Tuesday night looked a whole lot different from the last one. I'm joined by political strategists Patty Solis Doyle and Rick Wilson to break down what happened.

Patty Solis Doyle and Rick Wilson, welcome to both of you. Thanks. Good morning. So here we are. We're recording this on Wednesday morning, September 11th, a somber day in our nation's history. But we're here to discuss the aftermath of the debate from last night, which was not that many hours ago. Rick, you had something interesting to say early on in the debate on the great platform of Twitter. He, meaning Trump, lost the debate in the first 15 minutes of the debate.

This is now just a slaughterhouse. Do you stand by that? Absolutely. Look, I think he went in there hoping that he would sort of have another night of great luck, but he started to descend into the rabbit hole of his various conspiracies. And once she understood that she could bait him, and once she understood she could manipulate his psychological state in that debate, it was over.

And you saw it very early. And she just took him to school. It was brutal. Pat, you mentioned before we started recording, obviously, this was a very different experience for a Democrat watching compared to the earlier debate with Joe Biden, which effectively forced him from the race. Were you holding your breath at the beginning of this debate? Were you feeling pretty confident? Do you never get overconfident? How long into the debate did

Did you start to have something approaching the view of Rick's if you ever got to where Rick got? Well, I definitely got to where Rick got. I wasn't so much holding my breath as I was just nervous. I think I knew Kamala Harris has debate chops, honestly. She proved them incredibly.

2020 and she proved him against Pence. I was nervous in that if she had enough chops to really be able to do what she did last night, which is turn the tables on Trump's crazy. I thought she won the debate the moment she walked on stage and sort of got in his space and reached out her hand to shake his and he had no other choice but to take it. And I think that really was the sort of moment that just put him in

off kilter. Do you think there was a moment of potential risk when you choreograph, you know, a physical thing like that, like that handshake? Couldn't that have gone wrong? It's a small thing, but, you know, things like that sometimes matter and go viral. I don't see how it could. He could have rejected it, which I think would have made him look bad. Yeah. But he took it and it made her look...

strong and tough and confident and presidential. And really, for me, that was the sort of big takeaway. You know, everyone was talking about the 28 percent of voters from the New York Times-Siena poll, you know, wanting to know more about her. I think what they came away with after this debate was that she's up for the job.

Maybe they didn't, either candidate didn't go into the specifics of their policy agenda, but we saw the character of both of them. And I think that is going to go a long way. Rick, do you think the reasonable conclusion here as to why the debate was fairly one-sided? And we can talk about people who disagree with that, but I think the overwhelming consensus, it was one-sided in favor of Kamala Harris. Was that because she did extraordinarily well or Trump did extraordinarily poorly or

Or as I suspect you might say, a combination of the two. Well, you were correct. It was a combination of the two. Look, in the first debate with Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Joe Biden just lost the debate. Donald Trump didn't win it. If you wrote his transcript, it sounded like the same sort of insanity you heard last night. But Joe Biden lost it. But last night, he lost it.

And she won it. She was in control of herself, of her emotions, of her presence on the stage. You know, her physicality last night was excellent. I mean, that's a big part of these debates is, you know, looking that part, looking confident, looking like you've got it together, looking like you were on the ball. She stared at him the entire time when he was speaking. He would not meet her eye. He did not look at her.

He couldn't look at her. I don't know what it was, but he would stare down at the camera. He would stare down at the microphone. He would make that – he's got to tell. He makes a little sort of a duck face when he's nervous. He sort of purses his lips a little bit and squinted his eyes. And I call it the duck face. And he was doing it. If you watched the tape last night, he was doing it throughout the debate and could not look at her.

She saw her prey there on the floor of the debate stage, was playing with her food. What's interesting about that is, over the years, we've come to understand that Trump, if he understands anything, understands a sort of visual stagecraft, and that he famously, reportedly, watches interviews of himself and rallies of himself with the sound off, because you can tell a lot about how it's going from the visual. And if you watch yesterday's debate with the sound off,

Even maybe more dramatically, it would bring into sharp belief that Kamala was winning and Donald was losing. How do you think he lost the thread on the visual? Patty, do you have a thought on that? That's what good debate prep does for you, right? I mean, this is a guy that remembered the visual when he was just shot at.

Right. And that came out of nowhere. Here he had days and weeks to prepare for this. I'm sort of trying to understand as a matter of preparation. Maybe it's a matter of lack of self-control and discipline. I think it's the latter. I think it's lack of self-control. I think she, you know, can I say pissed him off? She pissed him off in this debate from the get-go, right? And he just couldn't gather his composure again. But in terms of her, I don't know this for sure, but I suspect...

I know the people prepping her fairly well. I suspect that part of the strategy to compensate for the muting of the mics was to really rehearse sort of those facial responses, the smiling, the amusement, the putting the hand under her chin and leaning in like she was, you know, finding this comical. I just think that all was rehearsed and it was ready and it worked. And I just think he...

couldn't get back on kilter once he was off so you said rehearsed often often that is a negative pejorative word and when i was scrolling through twitter last night i wonder what you think of this you know in my household we are kamala harris supporters obviously and we're thrilled at her performance i thought she hit out of the park i agree with both of you in terms of of how she did both substantively and stylistically but

But I wondered, you know, how other people are going to think about the performance. And I think there are a number of Trump supporters who didn't think she was good. And I wonder if you think they have blinders on with respect to Trump or if some of the criticisms of her as being rehearsed and had answers in the can already have any weight at all. None whatsoever. Television is an ephemeral media company.

And, and the, the look in the, in the political nerd community, people like us who pay a lot of attention might've watched her opening statement and said, oh, that was the, that's the set piece. That's the, that's the big, you know, stage setter for this moment. And it's rehearsed, you know, as a professional, I should hope it's rehearsed. Um, but I don't think it will change a single vote in, in the, in the coming days and weeks in the 55 days we have left. I don't think it'll change a single vote that she was prepped for.

I think prepping shows respect for the audience, respect for the American people. She, and she was, she was very well prepared, but not overly. So she didn't sink into the, the sort of frame of one page 714 of my climate plan. We talk about these six initiatives. She didn't get into that. The weeds of policy. That's a little bit of Bill Clinton, a little bit of Bill Clinton, a little bit. But she, she, she was very clear about,

about one thing that came across, I think, as very natural, and that was the continued argument that she's presenting a better future for the country, that she's presenting a better path forward for the nation. I think that was a very compelling and important aspect of how she communicated last night. Now, some Republicans or people who are on the Trump side of the political divide think

were more critical than you might have expected. This is Brit Hume from Fox News who said last night, quote, she was composed. She was prepared. She kept her cool. She saw advantages and took them. She baited him successfully, which is the story of the debate in my view. So she came out ahead in this, in my opinion, no doubt, end quote. Do you think that's the consensus on the Trump side this morning? Yeah.

The fact that he went into the spin room tells you everything you need to know. Desperate. Yeah. Why couldn't his people keep him out of the spin room? I guess he decides. Why couldn't his people get him prepared? I think he does what he wants to do, and I think he thinks he's the smartest person in the room. But yeah, him going into the spin room really does tell you everything you need to know.

Look, this country is very, very divided. And the 46 percent of voters that are with Trump and will stay with Trump no matter what, no matter convictions, no matter what.

January 6th, no matter what, they're going to stay with them. Her job last night in terms of voter persuasion was to make sure the base remains energized and enthusiastic and they're going to go out to vote and they're going to tell their neighbors to go out to vote and their friends and then appeal to that small sliver of undecided and independence. And I think the contrast between

that she had with him last night. I just don't know how you can watch the 90 minutes last night if you're an independent voter and say, yeah, you know what? I'm going to vote for the guy who's telling me that migrants are eating my pets. Eating dogs. Yeah, like I just... In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating...

They're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame. Moments before we started recording, I caught someone on television, someone on cable television, quoting from a Washington Post poll, and maybe you folks saw it, claiming that 92% of uncommitted voters

thought that Kamala Harris won or something like that. Did anybody see that? I haven't seen that yet. That's an extraordinarily high number. So I think we should. I was privy to some, some results and some dials that were coming in from a focus group last night. And particularly on the question of abortion,

She was absolutely crushing him with undecided voters. And, and that is something that I think he, I think he was in such a terrible trap on that question in particular. I'd love to hear what Patty thinks about this too. Yeah.

But he was struggling between wanting to brag about ending Roe v. Wade, pretending he's somehow the leader on IVF, and trying to say, I have nothing to do with what the states are doing with the Dobbs decision. Well, of course you do. You put the court together that enabled the states to do this, Donald. But those dials were just destroying him last night.

If you're a late deciding voter, a low information, low propensity voter, you are coming into the phase where you pay attention to the campaign right around now. And a lot of people probably said, that's the big debate. We're going to watch that.

And the despair that has to exist in Trump's world this morning and his professional staff is incalculable after having a night like that in the face of her performance. It was just, there's no good news in Trump world today. Yeah, I want to hear what Patty has to say, but I want to just pause on that for a second and say that in my view and to my ears, her performance on the abortion questions

were among the most powerful, maybe the most powerful of the evening, among other things, tonally and substantively. And when Donald Trump says, and I take personal point of privilege on this as a legal commentator, when he says every single legal scholar in the country wanted the question to go back to the states, that is lie number 657. Right. That is not true. And he said a phrase, he said, you know, they wanted that. I gave them what they wanted.

And then Kamala Harris, and I don't know if this could have been scripted in this way rhetorically, but she painted horrifying picture after horrifying picture of someone who had been raped and can't have an abortion and other dire consequences. And she punctuated each of those with, they didn't want that. They didn't want that. I have talked with women around our country. You want to talk about this is what people wanted? No.

Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she's bleeding out in a car in the parking lot. She didn't want that. Her husband didn't want that. A 12 or 13 year old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. They don't want that. And I pledge to you.

When Congress passes a bill to put back in place the protections of Roe v. Wade as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law. I thought that was incredibly powerful and moving. Patty, what did you think? No, I agree completely. To me, that was the most impactful moment ever.

Mm-hmm.

whether it was the young girl victim of incest. Now, these were not specific people, but the picture that she painted, the young girl being forced to carry a child to term, the woman who is bleeding out in the car because the ER couldn't treat her, I mean, that just spoke to me as a woman, as a mother, as a daughter. And also...

So everything you both said on the abortion issue, but also the fact that he could not say he would veto a national ban. I mean, he was given every opportunity and he just didn't do it. I found that shocking. Shocking. I'll be right back with my conversation with Patty Solis Doyle and Rick Wilson.

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Later, I can remember it was later earlier in the debate, but in parallel fashion in a completely different topic area, he also couldn't say who should win the war between Ukraine and Russia. Why can't the glib Donald Trump figure out a way to square those circles?

Well, he's on the other side. I mean, that's the real answer. He does not want Ukraine to win the war. He still believes that they can't say that he thinks he thinks it, but he, I, I, but he can't say it. His long running animus toward Vladimir Zelensky comes in part because he was convinced by Rudy and others that there was some secret tranche of intelligence over there with Burisma that was going to bust up the Biden operation. And, and,

And it was an, it was always an idiotic conceit. It was always something just completely, you know, off the wall and,

But the fact that he still thinks that that was something that helped defeat him in 2020, he would rather see a country fall under the heel of Vladimir Putin. He would rather see Russian tanks in the street than help Ukraine. There is no secret deal, except he will say to Zelensky, you're cut off and you give Russia whatever territorial chunk it wants out of Ukraine. That's Trump's secret deal.

Did Trump lose any members of his base yesterday? I would think not, right? No, I don't think so. I don't think he can, in all honesty. Yeah. Here's the way we analyzed it last night. And I was talking to our pollsters last night and our data and our voter file analytics guys last night about this.

And their take, and we'll, well, I'll have some numbers today, but their take was essentially this. There were, there's been some softening in Trump's, in Trump's base of generic Republicans, of Republicans who are just sort of behavioral Republicans or, oh yeah, I'm going to vote for Trump because otherwise it's, you know, communism, blah, blah, blah. The crazies will always stay, but we're probably talking one to three percent of Trump's current base of

has gotten softer. That doesn't mean that they're not still with him. That just means they've started to crack a little bit. I guess the reason I'm asking is if he can sort of do anything he wants, perform at his rallies, and he's going to keep the base, what was his strategy for getting independence last night? Or was there none? None. There was none.

There was absolutely no strategy. There wasn't like a strategy that failed. He just didn't have one at all to get independent. There was none. No, I think I disagree. I think he did have one. I think the strategy was to go after her on her flip flops or supposed flip flops and, you know, being a lefty liberal from San Francisco. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah.

But he didn't do it. He couldn't execute it because he was just from the jump completely rattled and angry, you know. So I just think he went back to his tried and true of yelling and screaming and everything.

What I did find interesting, though, is that he didn't attack her personally. Like, I thought for sure he was going to call her a nasty woman. Not a nasty woman, but a stupid woman or a non-intelligent woman. And he didn't do it. So I think he did try and be somewhat disciplined, but it didn't come off that way. What's funny is, you know, you could tell at points that he was prepared on something.

So he was asked about his comments previously where he said Kamala Harris was Indian and she turned black. And he put that off. He's like, I don't care what she is. That's not what's important, which is, you know, along the lines of a reasonable answer. But he was asked again and then he lapsed right into the same ridiculousness from before. So he's not really educable, is he?

No, look, I mean, the, there are two schools of thought in Trump world and people who work for Trump. The first is that you have to let Trump be Trump.

You have to let Trump do what Trump wants to do. The other school is you sort of put up some soft barricades around him and say, you know, people are saying that it would be really smart, Donald, if you were to say, yeah, the thing about her race doesn't matter. But he can't constrain his impulses at any time. He is governed entirely by a broken compass of what looks good for him.

And so last night you saw him sort of try to elide that question. But then later in the debate, he's talking about trying to relitigate the Central Park Five.

Yeah.

It's insanity. And I think that really, I think that to me was one of those windows into Trump's character where he's this accumulation of all these old fights and beefs and outrages and- - That's one of the great framings that Obama at the convention, I think articulated very well. And Kamala Harris did yesterday too. Same old type playbook, same old grievances. My favorite in this category,

was how she baited him on the rallies. Yeah. When she looked at him and she looked into the camera and said, I mean, it was unbelievable, and looks in the camera and says, you know, I invite you to go to his rallies. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. Boredom and exhaustion. And she hit those two words and

Like a musician might hit two notes. It was so beautiful. And then go back to him. And that guy sounded like a six-year-old, right? It's like my rallies are great. Nobody even goes to your rallies. You pay people to go to your rallies. They don't leave my rallies early. What is a reasonable, thoughtful, independent, moderate American thinking about that performance? I'm voting for Kamala. Yeah. Yeah, voting for Kamala. Exactly. Exactly. They're also thinking, do I really have to go to a Trump rally? Yeah.

Right. Is she punishing me for something? But it was so brilliant. And you're right, Preet, it really did follow up nicely to Obama's speech at the convention where, you know, he talked about crowd size and then moved his hands closer together, which we know got under Trump's skin, right? So it was just a really nice one-two punch for him. Well, you know, the whole thing, as we were talking about it, it occurs to me that Trump

Something someone said struck me, and that was, you know, it is perhaps true that at least in recent years and possibly maybe, you know, never in decades or ever has Donald Trump been spoken to in that way, in that tone, and with those criticisms. The kinds of things that Kamala Harris said last night are the kinds of things that we say in these conversations.

or that pundits say, or that people say at speeches about Donald Trump at their own conventions. She got to use that pointed language and that analysis of the tired beefs in the same old playbook and the lies and the $400 million from his dad and the six bankruptcies and all of that directly to his face. And I'm sure everyone in this conversation has come across people, whether they're CEOs or generals or whatever, saying,

notwithstanding all the talents they have, and federal judges, I will say, and many of them are my friends, after you've been in those positions for a long time, you're not used to being talked to in a particular way. Does that make sense? Sure. I mean, being a politician in America, a generic politician, not even Donald Trump, involves having a group of people around you who every day tell you that you are the smartest, tallest, most insightful, most handsome man in the room.

And with Donald Trump, that's a job requirement. He is always told, you are brilliant, you are the best performer, you can control every stage you're on, everything about you will automatically persuade the voters in your favor. And the inconsistencies of Trump's

performance last night were because she was poking these emotional buttons inside of Trump's brain and he could not resist. He could not stop himself. He could not control himself. He had no ability to shape that debate because she was in his head with a chainsaw.

Yeah. I got to say, you know, when he first entered the political stage, coming down that escalator in 2015, he sort of, he mowed down a bunch of really well-respected, very experienced politicians, whether it was Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton, you know, and not only in the debate format, but

On the campaign trail, at rallies, at town halls, et cetera. And no one knew what to make of him because I don't think – I mean, I certainly have been in the political business for 30 years, and I've never seen anything like his kind of performance on the political stage and be successful. You know, it's like Bullworth. I am aging myself. But –

What she managed to do last night was something that no other politician who has been against him in any sort of political matchup has been able to do.

And I don't know if it was the prosecutor in her. I don't know if it was because she was a woman who was not necessarily as polarizing as Hillary Clinton. But she pulled it off and she pulled it off in a way where she did not come off less likable. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Which is tough for a woman. Yeah. Do you know what it proves to me? And this is something that people don't talk about as much.

but it's incredibly important. And there were moments I remember thinking in 2008, this exact issue with Barack Obama. And you want to know, ultimately, because politics is difficult and it ain't beanbag, as they say, does the candidate want it, right? Does a candidate really, really, really want, because to become president of the United States and want to be president of the United States requires a steel spine. It requires the ability to go for the jugular.

The ability to be ruthless, hopefully in a benevolent way, if you know what I mean. And Obama, at particular junctures when his campaign was flailing back in 08, showed that he had grit and a steel spine or whatever stronger than steel. And Kamala Harris, from the moment that Joe Biden stepped away and made her opening sort of statement about running for president,

the way she shored up support, the way she has dealt with the public, the way she has rolled out what she wants to do, the way she prepared for and perfectly executed whatever debate strategy she and her team had come up with, all shows me, among other things, that she really wants it. And she has massive skills as a politician, which is something that wasn't completely clear to everyone until recently. Is that fair? Yeah.

I think that's right. And, and, you know, I wrote about her in the course of the 2020 campaign and, and I said, you know, her debate performances are somewhat inconsistent. She's like a one 25 hitter sometimes, but then she'll go out and just not grand slam after grand slam at some point in the last three and a half, four years, uh,

She is transformed into a star in this space. She is. And I don't know what caused it or what. What's she batting Rick? She batting 400. She's batting 400 right now. She really is. I mean, I am, I am impressed by, by look, I was impressed by, by even the opening speech she made after Biden stepped away and,

The convention speech was 38 minutes of performance and at a level that I was absolutely, I mean, it was Reagan level, Obama level performance. And those two men are the greatest political communicators of our generation. I was blown away by last night because she is mentally agile. She is, she's quick, but she also kept connecting back to people. It wasn't about her. It

It was about us. Trump is always about either this imaginary version of himself or his real and imagined grievances. Yeah, you said something, Preet, that really struck me, and that is prior to July, her political skills were very much in question. You know, she –

dropped out fairly early in the 2020 race, in the primary season. She had a rocky, I think it's fair to say, a rocky first year and a half as VP. And even when there was all this talk about Joe Biden withdrawing, there were some in the party who was like, okay, but should it be Kamala? And

And what she pulled off as soon as Joe Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the race was, in my view, just complete stellar performance in terms of uniting the party right away. A rollout that was wildly impressive.

Raising more money than God in a very short period of time. That's a technical term, but true. Yeah, an incredible convention that, you know, because of the circumstances, sort of had to be rejiggered quite a bit. Yeah, but not one false step that I can think of. It has been flawless. Absolutely flawless. So anybody who says her skills are not, I think...

You know, I think they're wrong. And I think we completely underestimated her from the jump. Yeah. So I'm going to make a comparison or ask you to make a comparison based on some comments I saw last night. One of the people who made this comment was Julia Yaffe, who said something like, you know, remember, Hillary Clinton won all the debates, too. Sure. Does this debate victory matter? And how do you compare how she did against Trump to how Hillary did against Trump?

Order of magnitude better. I mean, look, Hillary Clinton came from a different generation of communicators where she was trying to articulate policy and was trying to, um, and was trying to beat Trump on the basis of the predicate of her campaign, which was a lot more, uh, you know, the, the, the, the motto of the, of the Hillary campaigns, I'm with her. And it, it felt internal and it felt like break the glass ceiling for Hillary, uh,

to a lot of people. And look, she, Hillary, for all her merits, lacks that sort of natural felicity that you saw on the stage last night. That ability to just go so fast and she was, she just lacked it. And I will say this, Hillary's

The presence of Trump on that stage lurking behind her became an indelible image in the minds of a lot of Americans. And it was, it was crude and it was, it was like, you know, that phony alpha male BS that Trump loves, but it stuck with a lot of people. And last night, uh,

Kamala Harris striding across that stage like she owned the place, sticking her hand up to shake Donald's hand. You could tell he was rattled. He didn't get it. And that is something I think that is underestimated in how we score a lot of debate stuff. But her physicality and her presence was different than Hillary Clinton's was on the stage. And Patty, as you answer that question,

Add in the idea that, you know, it's 2024, not 2008, as Rick was saying. Is it the common or so different? We have changed, yeah. That's exactly right. I think it's a combination of both things. 2024 is vastly different from 2008 and 2016. And Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, gender aside, are two very, very different politicians slash candidates, right? You know, Hillary Clinton...

was well, well defined when she entered in 2008 and even more defined when she entered in 2016 in the race for the presidencies. And she was and probably continues to be a wildly polarizing figure. You either loved her

which I did immensely, or you hated her. And that does not bode well for running for president, in all honesty. And secondly, you know, so many things have happened since she lost to Trump in 2016. There was sort of the birth of the resistance, you know, in terms of women being royally pissed off that a misogynist beat

potentially the first woman president of the United States. Roe, the Me Too movement. I think it's just a totally different environment for candidates. And to Hillary's credit, I don't think we would have Kamala Harris today if she didn't do what she did in 2008 and 2016. Totally agree. Totally agree with that. So we needed her before we got Kamala. Yeah. Is my view. I think Patty's exactly right. There is a...

there's something, you know, when Hillary Clinton talked about the risk of the overturning of Roe versus Wade, at that point, Roe had been the law of the land for almost 40 years, well, 35 years at that point, and it did not feel like something that was pendant. It did not feel immediate for people. Now, it

It has been overturned. We are seeing the impact on real lives in the states. We do understand that if he's elected, no matter what he's saying right now, Mike Johnson and the rest will go to him and go, we need the national ban. They know it now. So she's now a leader in the midst of a crisis about where the future of this country goes, particularly for women.

But she's not making the race about her gender. She's making the race about being a great president, which I think is a perfect strategy in this. For everyone. Can I ask a question? Do you think the reason for Trump's bad performance at the debate was that he didn't have a plan but rather had concepts of a plan?

That sounded like the worst dog ate my... I just couldn't believe he said that. Is that line... So you never know. Is that line going to live on forever? I'm getting t-shirts made. For sure. Concepts of a plan. I have concepts. Imagine I start telling my clients, like, what's the plan? How are we going to go into court? What are we going to say? What's our plan for this meeting with the government that wants to take a pound of... Well, I have concepts of a plan. That is the worst dog ate my homework I've ever heard. It was...

But that's a fireable offense, right? It's kind of a rare misfire. Look, Trump has lots of problems, rhetorically and substantively.

He doesn't say that kind of nonsense, that particular kind of, you know, mealy-mouthed. He's not mealy-mouthed, right? He just lies. Now, he never said, I have concepts of a plan for infrastructure week. He just said, I'm having infrastructure week. The Mexicans are going to pay for the wall. How are the Mexicans going to pay? He didn't say, I have concepts of a plan of how the Mexicans are going to pay. He just said they're going to pay. So maybe that's a sign about how much he was put on his back foot because it was a particular...

specialized kind of error

that I don't think he makes that often. Isn't that fair? I think that is fair. And I'm also going to say something probably I shouldn't say. Oh, that's what you want to say. I think he's getting old. I think he's losing his step. No, you should absolutely say that. We should say that again and again and again. Because it was true, you know, with respect to the other person. Correct. I think he's losing a step and it's getting more and more prevalent as he's doing more and more rallies and...

Certainly in this debate last night, I think he's just not as with it as he was four years ago and certainly not as with it as he was in 2016. I'll be right back with Patty and Rick after this. Support for this show comes from Mercury. It's time banking did more than hold your money. Now it can. With Mercury, you can pay bills in seconds, close the books faster, and even send invoices.

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If we talk about some of the other issues that came up and how you think the audience and in particular independents would have viewed the exchange. So on fracking, where people think there's a legitimate basis to quarrel with Kamala Harris and that she has changed her mind. How did that go, you thought? Look, I think that that was one of Trump's attempts to have a coherent, strategically driven attack on her.

but it just didn't work. He wanted to hit her on Pennsylvania and say, Pennsylvania, if you don't vote for me, she'll take away your fracking jobs. Well, she handled it and it didn't, it didn't bite the way he thought it would bite. And because of that,

I think this is one of those moments once again, where he tried something, he tried to be a grownup campaigner for a second and it just fell apart. It just wouldn't hold up because he can't stop talking about the crazy. And look, the fracking, the fracking issue is one that Republicans look at as a big cut and

but honestly, I've, I've, I've pulled it. It's just not that there's not a big there, there are not the, not the there, there that they think exists. So do you agree with me? I've made this point ad nauseum on the podcast with many guests that in the modern era, in the current era, uh,

People care about flip-flopping less than they used to. What they really care about is, do you agree with my position today? Yes. 100%. I agree with that. 100%. Like in the 80s, in the 90s, if you change your position, you were portrayed successfully often as a sellout or as an opportunist. And that was a basis not to vote for you. Now, Trump has been all things at all times during the course of his adult life on abortion.

And the evangelical conservatives don't care because he's on their side now, potentially, although maybe not as his campaign comes to a close. So is that another reason why the fracking thing went the way it went?

Yeah. I mean, we, and Patty and I both come from an era where we used to send out these nerdy opposition research kids who would find somebody who changed their position on one issue in some, in some trivial fractional way. And we'd make it into this gigantic, how dare he change his position on, on carried interest tax deductions from 35.2 to 36.1 or whatever the, yeah, it would be some small little thing and we'd try to make it into something. And now,

And part of this also is the era of Trump where on the Republican side, voters have become denatured from the ideological and policy and philosophical predicates of the party. They just care about him. So he can say whatever he wants.

And on the Democratic side, I think there is a realization that the world changes pretty fast these days. And you want to make sure your philosophy stays intact and doesn't flip-flop wildly. But you're not as punished for a changed position in this day. Yeah. Is there any issue on which Trump gaslights more than tariffs and what the consequence of tariffs are in America? I watched that exchange yesterday.

And he just says, no, it's not going to have anything to do with prices. How does that play out? Is he counting on people being stupid or what? He comes from a mental era where at some point he read something about tariffs and thought, this is free money. He does not recognize that they are, in fact, a tax on American consumers.

And I will tell you, if you were talking earlier about like is this peeling off any Republican voters, there are – there's a subset of Republican like economically driven voters who are in favor of things like free trade and prosperous economy who recognize that tariffs are a bad deal. But he doesn't understand what they are.

which is why he speaks about them with such confidence. Yeah, I think he speaks about it the way he speaks about everything with such confidence. You know, he's ignorant to the very specific policy issues and the nuances and all of that. But when he says it with authority...

His base buys it. And I think he learned that lesson when he entered the political stage and he's sticking with it. I just, you know, he said with complete authority and belief that I'm going to say it again, that migrants are eating our pets. I mean, and he said it. He said it was like it is absolutely true. And beware. Well, the fact checking, we should get to that in a moment.

You know, a lot of the criticism from the Trump supporters was directed at the moderators who did, I think, you know, four mild mannered, three or four mild mannered fact checks of Trump when he was speaking egregiously, falsely, and maybe none of Kamala. And that showed their terrific and tremendous bias. And so the whole thing was rigged. Response?

I mean, look, you know the greatest gift of the Republican and the MAGA movement has been playing the media refs for a long time and saying, oh, if you're critical of us, it's because you're liberal communist bias, et cetera. And so last night, ABC's fact-checking was insane.

incredibly restrained, professional, correct, and proper. They did some fact-checking in real time, such as Trump's lie that babies are being killed after they've been born, which, you know, and they corrected him on eating the dogs and a couple of other small things. Those corrections came in the face of Trump telling Daniel Dale at least identified 33 lies last night.

And many of them were just repeated lies. He, he, he did them, you know, each of those counts as a separate lie, not just a separate repetition of the lie. Um,

So when you see Trump and his supporters saying, oh, well, you know, we got we get screwed by the refs. That's not something a winning team says. They know they lost. So they're trying to find some way to blame anyone. They didn't say that about Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. That is correct. Isn't that interesting? So interesting. And he didn't go in the spin room after that debate either. Right.

Which I'm telling you, that, as somebody who has been, and Patty and I both, we've been in many a spin room over the years. The idea of taking the principal into a spin room after a debate. Yeah. Fletcher, the principal, had no confidence in his subordinates. Can I ask a fundamental question? So let's even stipulate that Kamala Harris cleaned Trump's clock. And that a lot of people believe that, even people on the right.

How much is it going to matter? What did she accomplish by having a good night? I think she accomplished a couple of things. I think, one, she's keeping the excitement and the enthusiasm and the momentum going for our base, for the Democratic base. And that's, I think, critical. And I also think, as I said earlier, there is a sliver still of undecided and independents who are still fighting.

you know, figuring out what they're going to do in November or in some cases what they're going to do next week with early voting. And that performance, I think, two things. She proved that she's ready to be commander in chief and he proved that

that there's still a lot of crazy in him. And that contrast, I think, is going to be quite impactful to those undecided voters. Yeah, look, I think it does matter. I think, again, as we've been talking about, those undecided voters that tune in around now were reminded that Donald Trump is a guy who spent four years pouring chaos fuel into the fire.

They, they are not out for that. They don't want that. And she showed last night that she's cool under PR under pressure.

She's presidential. I mean, she, she almost, uh, my fiance said she's like a Sorkin character right now. Like that, that quick wittedness about her is something people really, I think will appreciate as for a candidate. Uh, what will also happen is Trump will spend all day today, all day tomorrow in a rage fest, uh,

He's right now demanding, as we're speaking, that ABC be shut down and that their, quote unquote, broadcasting license be taken away. That's constitutional. Yeah. Another area in which Donald Trump doesn't really know what that means. But he'll be in a fury for the next couple of days. That doesn't help his campaign. When he's behaving as bad Trump, and he's bad Trump today—

It drives off more of those moderate voters. And again, as Patty correctly says, it's a small number. It's not... It's like 11 guys. Right. It's not a big number. In a bar in Pennsylvania. Right. You can put around a table in a diner, right? But all of this will come down to a sense that she's in control of herself. She's got a vision for the country. And she's going to repeat that message. Right.

you know, they're going to try now they'll, they'll, they'll probably have to agree to another debate.

Well, I was going to say, like, one of the ways you know who won is that one side asked immediately for a second debate, and that was Kamala Harris' side. You really think Trump has to agree to that? I think his ego will force him to agree to it. I agree. I was going to say the same thing. I think he does not want to look like a loser or weak in any way, and I think he's going to do it, which will be great fun for me. Yep. Yep. I

I think so, too. Do you think it would have been the wiser strategy not to ask for a second debate and rest on this incredible performance and not risk mucking up the record or not? I think she knows she can get him. Look, he's not going to get in two or three weeks. He's not going to get better at this. He's going to get worse.

He is, his collapse is very, is very pronounced right now. I don't think he's going to improve in any way. He's not going to the, all the things he wrote tested last night that didn't bite were things that he thought, you know, that he had been fed by the conservative media bubble. He lives in, Oh, her father was a Marxist professor. He taught her well. And she just rolled her eyes and laughed it off. It didn't, it didn't cut. It didn't enter into the actual dialogue. So,

So right now he'll spend several weeks having to say that he can beat her. And if he doesn't beat her in the second debate, I mean, it's just time to take him out back behind the barn and put him out of his misery at that point. It's just he's done. You're speaking just for the record. Rick is speaking metaphorically. Rhetorically as always. I got to ask you, Rick, before we end this.

There was other late-night breaking news. Post-debate, something that everyone has been anticipating, waiting for, wasn't sure if it would happen or not. An earthquake, some people say, in the world of politics. What am I talking about? The endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz by Taylor Swift. Big or not? Gigantic.

Is it gigantic? It is gigantic. There is no larger cultural force in America today than Taylor Swift. What percentage of her fans are above the voting age?

Well, I actually asked that question of my voter file analytics people last night. I should ask my kids. Yeah, I mean, a lot of them, but not – but substantial percentages. But remember, the ones that aren't of voting age, their parents are taking them to the concerts. Yeah. And she's a global phenomenon. She's a national figure of –

100% name ID, highly favorable in the public ratings metrics that we've seen. She's got a moment here that is – and the Republicans are falling for the trap again. They're taking the bait again. And they're starting to attack Taylor Swift. They're like, how dare a musician endorse Donald Trump?

or not endorse Donald Trump. Why won't she follow? You can take your kid rock. We see your kid rock and we raise you Taylor Swift. No, yeah, no, it's going to be a big deal. And she's got a very, she's got a very passionate base and,

She's got a passionate base that is, that are also, they own every social media space they enter into. That's true. And I think Trump's people are making a gigantic mistake attacking her. Yeah, why do that? Reflex, reflex. They can't help themselves. Well, I look forward to the next debate and we'll talk again. Patty Solis Doyle and Rick Wilson, thanks so much. My conversation about the debate continues for members of the Cafe Insider community.

In the bonus for insiders, Rick Wilson and I discuss how misinformation is driving Trump's campaign and might backfire. Well, in Florida, a state where Trump cannot afford a big breakdown of any demographic, the Haitian community is very angry about this. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com slash insider. Again, that's cafe.com slash insider.

Well, that's it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guests, Patti Solis-Doyle and Rick Wilson.

That's 669-24-PREET.

or you can send an email to letters at cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Seffer. The technical director is David Tadishore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noah Azoulay and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernandez. And the Cafe team is Matthew Billy, Nat Wiener, and Leanna Greenway.

Our music is by Andrew Dost. I'm your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.