Trump Camp Aims at Kamala, With The Bulwark's Marc Caputo
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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. I think it's fair to say that the 2024 race officially started on Sunday, whether the Republicans like it or not. And they were pretty flat-footed over Biden's announcement that he was dropping out of the race, even though I'm pretty sure they expected it at least towards the end.

They were outraged. They called it a coup. They were getting conspiratorial, which to me sounded desperate. So I brought in the Bulwark's Mark Caputo on the show to talk about the Trump campaign's new strategy now that they have an entirely new candidate to deal with, with just 100 days until the election.

Mark, I want to start with the headline from your latest piece. Trump campaign is planning to Willie Horton Kamala Harris. You write, the question is not just whether it will work, but whether Republicans, including the former president himself, will have the discipline to keep the racial subtext of their new strategy from becoming the text.

Where do we even begin? Well, we begin with the fact that this is probably going to be a mess of an election if it hasn't been one already. I don't know how what the demographic is of your viewers, but Willie Horton is the 1988 infamous political ad that was done by an outside group to support George Bush's presidential campaign against Democrat Michael Dukakis, who was governor of Massachusetts. And while governor, they furloughed a guy named William Horton, who was nicknamed Willie Horton by the Republicans. And

And while on furlough, this murderer raped a woman and battered her fiance. And they the Republicans kind of put this around the neck of Dukakis to show that he was soft on crime. But at the same time, especially in the eyes of Democrats, there was a strong racial component of this. They made sure to prominently display a very scary picture of Willie Horton, albeit, you know, rapists probably don't always take great pictures. And he was black.

And Jesse Jackson denounced it as racist. And ever since then, it's been held up as the textbook example of how to do dog whistle politics effectively by conservatives. So what does that mean for Kamala Harris being Willie Horton? Well, as a prosecutor in her past, there have been a number of times where some of the defendants

in the eyes of the Trump campaign, in the eyes of conservatives, were treated with kid gloves. So specifically, you have a case of a young man who had committed battery, was instead of sent to prison, was given probation, and then he proceeded to commit murder. And Harris was the DA in San Francisco at the time. Now, Harris's campaign says, look, uh,

Yes, the young man was given probation, but that was consistent with all the other young men at the time. So, you know, it's not quite a Willie Horton case. And then there are a few other cases she had contributed to a bail fund, which later on had paid for bail for people who went on to commit murders or allegedly commit murders.

And then there are other cases concerning the illegal immigrants or undocumented immigrants who were released during the Biden administration and went on to do what they did. So in the Trump campaign's official posture, like in the MAGA Inc., the super PAC, this is them just bringing up a record. And a few of Democrats, they're going to say, no, no, they're really trying to racialize this. You know, I think this might be an issue of both and.

It's interesting, too, that Trump's pollster, Tony Fabrizio, was actually involved in creating this Willie Horton ad. Right. The Trump campaign has a number of real hard hitters. You got Tony Fabrizio, who was on, and I can't remember the name of the political committee. It was an outside political committee supporting George Bush that had made the ad. But, you know, Chris LaCivita is the campaign co-manager.

for Trump, and he was part of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004. So these guys know how to do attack ads. Now, what exactly are they going to do with this? Is this stuff going to appear in ads? How's it going to look? We don't quite know. I think it's a better bet to assume that MAGA Inc., the super PAC, will probably lead the way on this. If you go through their Twitter account, I think it's MAGA War Room, you'll see all of the hits that they're planning to do

And a number of them kind of revolve around this. And there's a feeling that there's a separation between church and state, between super PAC and campaign. Is that the feeling? So the super PAC can go a little bit harder into those territories where the subtext becomes text. Is that what you're trying to say? Well, I think both of them want to keep the subtext from being text. So for instance, the Trump campaign does not want to call

And they don't want their candidate to call Kamala Harris a DEI pick. Yet all these members of Congress have been, and they've actually been reprimanded for doing that from leadership. Well, Mike Johnson, the House Speaker is just like, hey guys, don't call him a DEI pick. And then Marjorie Taylor Greene rolls right out like she is a DEI pick.

Well, you can't control her. She's like a feral animal. Yeah, the problem is, is, you know, the genie's out of the bottle. One of the people that I spoke to who was a confidant of Trump said, look, you know, he's probably going to call her DEI pick. And then, you know, we'll see what we see when we see it. Like, they don't want him to do it. But if he does it, like, they're prepared to adjust to it. Because remember, what makes the Donald Trump campaign different from all other campaigns is...

is you've got the candidate and you got the campaign, and they're not always on the same page. And the candidate kind of leads the campaign, and so it sort of follows him or has to. But it's been better than before in the sense that they've managed to keep him on track for a while, I would say. Sure. A great example of that, though, is the convention, right? Donald Trump was arguably the low point of his own convention, which otherwise had fantastic results.

production values. I'm sorry, I passed out towards the end of the speech. Oh, I know. In a green room. It turned into this Del Castro-length speech, right? So the campaign had been hyping up ahead of time, like, he's going to be unifying and he's going to kind of give a sober-minded speech and bring the country together. And you can see Dr. Jekyll, for the first 19 minutes, is going through the motions and he's reading

The teleprompter, you know, talking about how he got shot at and like his kind of come to Jesus moment. And then all of a sudden, Mr. Hyde's like, fuck this.

And then it became the old Donald Trump. Yeah, he went off script, teleprompter, greatest hits. This is the same reason why you really don't need to go to his rallies anymore, because it's the same material over and over again. Although with some new things like electric boats, which I don't understand, but they've been talking about it for months. I saw him do that. The first time I heard him do that was in California at the California GOP meeting and like after the Simi Valley debate of the Republicans in like September, October. So about a year ago. Yeah, correct. Okay. So he's been

on electric. There's more sharks out there, Tara. There's more sharks. So it's more of a threat. I'm kidding. They've actually been swimming up from Mexico. You wouldn't believe it. We

We need a wall in the ocean. Anyway, as someone who works in an aquarium, the bull shark is able to swim in fresh water upriver. So that's an important fact to know. Wait, you worked in an aquarium? I was the Key West Aquarium tour guide for a number of years. I give it a tour now if you want. I bet you were good at that, actually. Yeah, I mean, I liked it. Like there was this turtle named Hector who used to like to have a shell scrubbed. I still miss Hector. He's a hawksbill. But anyway.

A whole other kettle of fish. Oh man, you are a character, Marco Puto. And that's how we keep bringing you back over and over again. And you have all the juice. So it's a twofer. But let's talk about the other ways that they are trying to define Kamala Harris. Because again, they have a new candidate. They've got to define her in a very short period of time before she gets ahead of them and defines herself. Because it turns out a lot of

polling shows that independents don't have, they don't know a lot about her. Some of them feel negatively towards her and really her team needs to step up right now. And it's really a race to defining her, but they're definitely trying to saddle her with the Biden administration with

the baggage like immigration. That was her policy that she was supposed to deal with. The root causes. I never understood the quote unquote root causes. We should talk about that. Yeah, that was just frustrating. You'd be getting calls being like, she's not dealing with the migration. She's dealing with the root

causes. I'm like, how are those two not the same? What is she suddenly going to make the and I'm sorry if this isn't I use the word developing world. She's suddenly going to make the developing world not border the United States. Like that's the only way to deal with the root cause of immigration in the end. But I think it should be stated just just what a perfect clusterfuck the media is in covering this specific issue, because the media early on when she was appointed as

whatever the root cause immigration person borders are, which they didn't want to use that word. They were like, they said, Oh, she's in charge. Like there were a number of stories at the time, lots of news reports saying she's in charge of the border.

And then the Republicans push back on it. And then the Republicans like, oh, she's the border czar, which is a shit sandwich, by the way. No one has been able to solve the border. So that was a shit sandwich. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Here, you know, you're solved world hunger. Right. Enjoy. But, you know, so now the media is is having to correct its sloppy coverage that the Republicans are using as a cudgel.

Kamala and then they're attacking Republicans for getting it wrong by reading the media coverage. I don't think the media was wrong about it. If you're dealing with the border, it's just a phrase, the border czar. Everyone slaps czar on something. I think they were getting precious, to be honest. If your job is to stop the root causes of migration, if your job is to stop the border crisis, you got to own that. And fair or

Fair or unfair, this is what vice presidents do. They do a lot of the things that the president doesn't want to deal with. Especially, I guess, at the time, Biden did not see himself. He saw himself as a very long bridge at that point. Well, he was not selling her out for success. That's for sure. What's indisputable is that there was a load of pent up demand for migrant crossing.

that suddenly exploded across the border once Biden became president and after he rolled back a number of Trump's restrictionist policies. Now, can we say there's cause and effect? I'll let other people argue that. But the fact is they campaigned on like

All this mean stuff Trump is doing at the border is bad and we're going to stop it. And then after they stopped it, a bunch of people came. And so, yeah, Harris is going to own that. Now, whether that's going to be persuasive for a majority voters, I don't know. But here we are. She also has to deal with Biden's handling of inflation, fair or not, or at least that is what the Republicans are trying to saddle her with. We'll see how effective they are on that issue.

Already, there's a new attack ad out of Pennsylvania. David McCormick, who is running against sitting Democratic Senator Bob Casey.

Calling her the most liberal senator ever. So you're going to hear a lot about that. And then you see the organic memes coming from the right wing ecosystem, which can be controlled, can't be controlled. Who knows? Maybe they are the maestro behind the scenes, the Trump campaign, but it's hard not to see the sexist and racist tropes behind a lot of it. Laughing Kamala, like that's Trump's new name for her.

Not very good. No, it's not his best work, honestly. I think he did Cacklin Camelot at one point. That would have been better. Yeah, because it has alliteration at least. Apparently that was deemed too edgy or something. So watch that make a return. Too edgy for Trump? I don't know. By the way, in that story I wrote about the Willie Hortening of Harris or the attempted or alleged or planned, I did also flick at some of the internal research that

from the Trump campaign about her and they think it's fertile ground to attack her on being unserious. Because she laughs a lot. Right. So that fits there. I do have a question about whether all these memes on the left that have just sort of exploded showing you're dancing and having a good time

Could that both attract younger voters as well as repel older voters? I'm not sure if it plays into that narrative. Maybe it doesn't matter. It's so tough to be a woman. If you're too cold, you're a bitch. If you laugh too much, you're unserious. You know? It sucks. Yeah, exactly. Heads I win, tails you lose. That kind of thing, right? There's no winning. Just ask Hillary. You know, a lot of people have been comparing this to Hillary Clinton's campaign. The fact that, you know, the media is very excited right now about Kamala Harris. There's no doubt about that.

And there is an echo chamber. But I think, you know, a lot of more sober Democrats I've spoke to have said, give it nine, 10 days and we'll get some real polling and see what happens. But there is even Republicans will admit that they think that she will be ahead of Trump by a few points out of the gate nationally, perhaps in some of the battleground states. And she'll get a bump when she chooses her vice president. Yeah. Important to point out, national polls by nature will account for lots of voters voting

in California and lots of voters in New York that battleground polls by definition won't have. Yes, she is going to do better proportionally in those things.

I do think she'll probably also do better in swing state polling because so far the Kamala Harris rollout has been pretty good. She's pulled in a truckload of money. And for the first time in five years, a Democratic nominee for president has given a cogent speech without slurring words and having to squint into the teleprompter to stumble and mutter over words that someone else had written for him. Yeah.

people might be underestimating the anti-Trump venom and the desire for someone else, which I think existed before, but I don't even know if people could stomach a president who wasn't.

really there. Well, that's true. I mean, the reality is Joe Biden didn't look as if he could do the job, especially in the end. And that became apparent on June 27th. Yeah. Kamala Harris is going out there and making it look as if she can do the job. That's important. OK. Do you think the Trump campaign should be taking her more seriously? I think they are taking her seriously. I don't think that they took her seriously enough early on. And I do think there is some time searching my skull for the right words.

I do think that Republicans overall have sort of made a mistake by not thinking she could win. So, for instance, when all of the discussion was like, should Joe Biden step down? Oh, Joe Biden doesn't believe Kamala can win and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's probably some of the sexist and maybe racial related things or racist related things you were talking about.

I think Republicans internalize that thinking, well, if Democrats don't think she can win and since she's cackling all the time or whatever the verb is, then she's not serious. And they're waking up to the reality like, oh,

Actually, you know, it's a very polarized electorate. You know, Joe Biden collapsing on stage mentally on June 27th didn't really cause a huge drift in his poll numbers or in ballot share. Donald Trump almost getting shot and having a good convention outside of his weird, rambly Jekyll and Hyde speech.

didn't really most people tuned out after 20 minutes I give him a pass on that because I don't think people watch things most people wouldn't and the first five minutes were decent they were right we're calling a harrowing experience yeah and saying like I'm not supposed to be here today and all that but I'm saying like these kind of major events him almost getting shot and you know Biden sort of is mentally collapsing they didn't really

move the needle a lot. Like a lot of stuff is not going to move the needle a lot. So Kamala Harris or whoever probably get in there and probably wind up with 47, 46% ballot share right off the top. Even though she only has an approval rating about two points above Biden, who had a historically low approval rating at 36%. Hey, compare her to the alternative, not the almighty, as Biden would say.

You should be working for her, actually, Mark. I think it's time to hang up the journalism. I'm going to get in trouble for even saying that. But, I mean, I'm not saying she's going to win. I do think

I mean, the reality is, and I think Amy Walter from ABC had pointed this out and a story written last week about like the overlooked segment of the electorate, white male voters, especially in swing states and the role they play. She does need to have an appeal to that broad Obama coalition, which also included white male voters, white working class voters. And that's an open question to see how she does. White people over 65, which was a group of the demographic that actually, you know,

Joe Biden had a real grip on until the debate, older white voters. And they seem to come back to Trump in some of the battleground state polling. There's obviously fears that she could take back the gains that Trump made with black Latino and youth voters. I certainly can see it with youth and, uh, black voters, but to the degree they're Hispanic voters who are not use, I, I, I would wait for more polling on that. Uh, understand what there's a, there's a trick in polling Hispanics, uh,

is that the Hispanic demographic electorate is among the youngest in the United States. So there are two frames of looking at them. But, you know, the polling is all over the map right now as far as whether she's doing well with younger voters. I suspect she's doing rather well, but I could be wrong. But the problem with younger voters is they're actually not reliable voters, let's be honest. Yeah, totally. They're probably not even registered right now. They probably don't even know how to vote. But I can imagine.

I can't get my kids to do the fucking dishes here. They can't get out of bed. Exactly. No, you should see. I should take you right out of my daughter's room. Like you're trying to get her to clean it up. It's just impossible. Yeah. It sounds like a mess. I'm kidding. It's lovely. This episode is brought to you by Jersey Mike's Subs. Jersey Mike's uses only the highest quality meat sliced right in front of you. Piled high with the freshest toppings. It is a Jersey Mike thing. My favorite is number 13, the Italian.

Love the Italian. I'm half Italian. I like Italian subs. I especially like Italian subs made in good places. Like Jersey Mike's. Planning your summer picnic, backyard adventure, or beach day? Well, Jersey Mike's. They have you covered with everything you need to beat the summer heat. They have your favorite summer sub combo. They have everything you want at Jersey Mike's. A sub above. Order on the app today or visit jerseymikes.com to learn more. Great app, by the way.

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Do you think Trump needs to get out on the campaign trail more to keep up with Kamala? I mean, I think Trump was pretty much thinking that he was going to run against someone who would be out on the campaign trail once or twice a week, which is what Biden was doing one stop. Like he was running against an 81-year-old. Now he's running against a woman who's 20 years younger, more than that. Trump's going to need to get out there and hustle. I think so. I think Donald Trump was used to the fact that he was running against an occupant of the White House who was treating it as if it was an assisted living facility. Yeah.

And now, now he's, now he's got someone serious out there, but, and I don't want this misrepresented. So understand I'm saying, uh, this is a term of comparison and not of absolutes, but it's also incumbent on Trump. Who's basically hit his ceiling on his ballot chair to act more normal and make more of the case more clearly than he has against his opponent. Uh,

And now he has a different opponent. To your point, he's got to define her. You do that through paid, but you also do that through unpaid. And now he needs a little more discipline. I'm not saying he's going to be disciplined. I'm not saying he is disciplined. I'm not saying he is normal. But yes, like Donald Trump is going to have to step up his game. And I think the campaign knows that. But again, there's the Trump campaign and then there's Trump.

And so to what degree can the campaign influence the candidate and what degree can the candidate execute? Yeah. Speaking of that, I have heard from people that know Trump very well that they think it's almost impossible that over this next hundred days, even though it was a very short period of time to campaign, that he doesn't fall into some sort of sexist or racist trope and that it ends up alienating women or African-Americans or any sort of

outside of his core constituency. Oh, yeah, that's a concern. As I said, like one of those advisors had said, like, look, he's going to call her a DEI pick, like, and then we'll see what we see, right? They're hoping he doesn't. But yeah, they're thinking it might. All right, J.D. Vance. What do you think now? Was he the right choice now that we've got Kamala at the top of the ticket? I haven't heard what other people have heard that there is this buyer's remorse by Trump.

I haven't either. And I was sort of told to fish around for that, but I, I haven't really heard it. Nor have I. I mean, you know, maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. I think the, to the degree that, that there is like a 2020 hindsight, uh,

It probably should have been, look, Kamala's definitely going to take over very soon. And let's have you, JD, get out there, to your point about what Trump should do, get out there on the campaign trail, do more media, do more speeches. Vance, a good New York Times story that came out the other day, is doing a lot of fundraisers, right?

And so they're probably going to need him to do a little more media to sort of get his message out there. But speaking of being defined, the Democrats are doing a good job of defining him. Oh, yeah. He's a misogynist. He thinks that childless women are cat ladies. I don't appreciate that.

He said it on TV too. Your name is Pinchetta. I got two cats. I was more of a cat person until we reluctantly got a little dog. You're a cat man. That explains it all. It really does now. You worked at an aquarium and you have a cat. What's the old phrase? The cat loves the fish, but hates the water, right? Yeah, that's true. The example of the fundamental conflict of man. But yeah, Vance is going to have some work to do to define himself.

And at least the social media dialogue against Vance, the Democrats, the left liberals or whatever you want to call them, have done a very good job right out of the gate of spreading the messages. Trump has buyer's remorse about Vance, which, again, I don't see any evidence for. Vance is a weirdo. Vance is a sexist.

And they've done a good job of kind of saturating that message out. Because he's an undefined candidate as well. Okay, I've read Hillbilly Elegy twice. But how many people... My parents actually said last night, they're like, we're going to watch Hillbilly Elegy tonight on Netflix. I was like, okay. You North Carolina swing voters, you go do that. So again, is he a bad pick? I don't think so right now, but we'll see. And CNN made a big deal of the fact that, oh...

Vance is the most unpopular vice presidential candidate or running mate in history because of his net negatives. And there was a ridiculous assertion made that Vance is dragging down Trump. I think it's the other way around. Vance is just sort of absorbing the negatives of Trump. But to the point about white voters is the biggest demographic group

that cost Trump the election in 2020 was white males. If you look at all the battleground states out of all the major demographic groups, it was white male voters who fell off the sharpest and the hardest from him. The biggest in Georgia, by the way, where his margin among white males decreased 19 percentage points. It's staggering. And no other group had that. Uh,

uh, the, the thinking of the campaign is that Vance, because of hillbilly elegy and also because, you know, he's kind of a brainiac, his Yale law degree and finance whiz or whatever it is that he's well situated to speak to both, uh, major camps of white guys, basically white working class males, as well as white college educated ones. Uh, we'll see how that goes, but you know, he's got a part to play and we'll see how well he plays it. I,

I thought he was incredibly awkward when he was talking about how the liberals will say that he's racist because he drank Mountain Dew or he drinks Mountain Dew. And it was his laugh was weird. If we're going to start going after people's laughs, I think that was one of the weakest laughs I've ever heard. He also fucked up.

It was almost like the teleprompter said, laugh now. But it was very bizarre. You know, I didn't really find his speech at the convention to be that great. I thought it was a little too long as well. I just assumed that he would be as good of an orator as he is in these quick hits on Fox. You know what I mean? Or in the book where he writes this beautiful...

memoir. I thought he'd be better at telling a story. And I didn't really walk away from it being like, I really understand his story. Like he should have just told Hillbilly Elegy in 30 minutes and gotten out. Yeah, I agree on all points. The, you know, back to the Mountain Dew joke,

This is an example of a guy who, you know, he he was sort of riffing on stage and he needed to drive the point home. That joke came out joke or whatever it was when he was talking about voter I.D. He was saying, look, voter I.D. And he meant to say Democrats say voter I.D. is racist. And oh, by the way, at a Mountain Dew today or Diamond Dew, they'll probably say that's racist. And then he should have returned to the whole voter I.D. spiel. And he didn't. He just got caught up laughing. And then he wound up being distracted by people in the crowd.

So the candidate needs to be a little sharper to the idea of buyer's remorse. Again, I haven't heard it, but as someone based in Florida and someone who knows Marco Rubio and I covered 2016 campaign and has covered his other campaigns, Rubio would have been a more polished candidate. Well, he has more experience on the stump. That's exactly what I was told from some people close to Trump. They're like, listen, it's the first time out. I doubt Rubio would be subject of memes, accusing him of fucking a couch.

That's actually happened to J.D. Vance. To be very clear, Hillbilly Elegy does not have like on page 174 Vance saying he fucked a latex glove and a couch. But there's been a very clever Twitter troll who's claimed that that's the case. And it's now a meme everywhere. This is the other thing I don't understand. Why do the Republicans think people read books? What are they thinking? You know what I mean? I mean, I do. But yeah.

Yeah, but that's because you worked in an aquarium and you have cats. I think I should be insulted, but I'm not. I'm just kidding. But all right, before we wrap this all up, put a little bow on it. Is there anything more that we should be waiting for in terms of how Trump will define Kamala Harris? I saw in your piece, Chris LaCivita, who's the co-campaign manager, said, oh, we're just waiting to throw our red paint on her. What do you think that red paint will look like?

I'm being led to believe it's going to be an advertising campaign that's going to begin a lot sooner. They're going to have to spend more money, frankly, on advertising than they thought. I mean, they have not spent really anything on advertising.

on advertising right now. In the general, right? I mean, I had pulled this, I had gotten ad analytics to pull the ad buys and literally just haven't looked at it yet. But the Trump campaign has been very disciplined in not spending money. And if it were Joe Biden that they were facing, they were going to wait a number of more months before throwing money on television. Because the idea was, is Joe Biden's already completely defined

The negative attack ads on Trump really haven't worked so well. So there's no point to advertise. Whereas now you have someone new and Kamala Harris new and you

They can't right now, the Trump campaign, pierce the earned media juggernaut that has been unleashed by Kamala, right? She's raised $100 million in like 28 hours. She is like this mean darling of the left. She's a historic pick. The media is loving her.

It's an eco chamber in a lot of ways too. Oh, dude, more than, more than a lot of ways. I mean, I mean, you know, the national media, especially after the collapse of regional and state newspapers is all concentrated in two cities, New York and DC. And, you know, those, those are, are, you know, pretty left-leaning cities, charitably speaking. And a lot of the employees of those various media enterprises reflect that. And the Trump campaign is aware of that. And they know like, look, I,

in order to deal with the earned media bonanza that Kamala Harris has benefited from, they're going to need to start doing a paid media campaign. They're going to have to do it sooner. So they are going to have to spend more money than they thought. She's getting a ton of grassroots money that Biden was not getting. I mean, they must be feeling anxious about the fact that they're going to have to actually compete dollar for dollar with this person. Right. They're not confessing to me that they're anxious, but the reality is, is if you could face a guy who could barely string sentences together,

or someone else, in this case, Kamala Harris, who would you rather face? You'd probably pick option one. What do those ads look like? Do you think they're going to look like that David McCormick ad where it's like she's the most liberal senator ever and then everything she's ever said? See, this is the issue back in 2019 when she was running. She really ran to the left because that's how you win a primary, right? A Democratic primary. And so she made a lot of statements, anti-fracking. You fill in the blanks for me. Healthcare for illegal immigrants. Right. Being against criminalizing border crossings.

Immigration is probably the number one hit on Harris for a few reasons. Number one, it is kind of a quantifiable, clear thing that has shown that there's this huge spike of people crossing the border under Biden. Number two, she was put...

however you want to say, whether she was a czar or a Caesar or a czar or whatever, she was put in some respects in charge of that. Uh, number three, back to white guys, uh, the polling shows that the people who are most concerned about the flow of illegal immigration are white males. Uh, so that's another way to do it. And then lastly, there have been cases back to the Willie Horton idea of some of these undocumented illegal immigrants or migrants or whatever we want to call them. Uh,

uh, getting released, not being incarcerated and then killing people. And so that I think is what the ads are going to look like. And for her, she's going to tie Donald Trump to project 2025, which she already has done so far. And it's going to be about abortion rights, the prosecutor versus the criminal. And I think that message is pretty clear so far. I think she has a campaign slogan at this point. When we fight, we win. I guess, uh,

They're still kind of testing it out. They're like a weird space right now where they're creating a campaign kind of. Yeah, it's strange. I mean, Democrats have done a great job of kind of driving home the project 2025 message. But, you know, after like seven, eight years of calling Donald Trump Hitler, you

for them to be like, okay, well, maybe that didn't work. I know we found Hitler's think tank plans and we're going to hang this around. But yeah, I mean, abortion is certainly a weakness of Trump's and character is. And that's where that the prosecutor versus the criminal frame, I think, you know, it's not bad. I would use it if I were her or her campaign. But I think the effectiveness there is they just want to make this a character campaign. If the race is about

abortion and character, Donald Trump loses. If the race is about immigration and inflation, Donald Trump wins. Or a continuation of the Biden issues. And they have to figure out ways to separate her from Biden and show ways where she deviates. This is obviously the problem that vice presidents before her, like Al Gore, have had to deal with, stepping out from your boss who you still work for.

And honestly, I still think like I know there's no way this is going to happen. It was hard enough to get by and to drop out of the ticket. But if they let her be president for a few months, that could be really big for her. I would think so. Someone had pointed out to me that that might be problematic because then she would actually have to be president and do things. Right. And it's probably easier for her to campaign.

But I mean, let's see what let's see how Joe Biden looks. But I mean, the president's not looking so hot at the moment. Like, just can they blame her for Biden's condition? I know they're trying to. I would if I were them, wouldn't you? I mean, she was among those people like, oh, Joe Biden's fine. You know, I don't like I guess if we look back through all those old stories of people writing like.

You know, when Joe Biden is meeting with younger aides, he's running intellectual circles around them and they can't keep up with the old man. He's angry. I love the background quotes of he was angry about immigration. He's really engaged. Yeah. No, he was he was angry because someone was on his lawn. I mean, I'm sorry. Mark, Mark, Mark. Come on. You are entertaining as always. That's always what gets me in trouble. My entertainment factor. So.

You deserve your own show. Don't put that one in. I'm kidding. I don't care. It's true, right? I mean, the reality is it's like some members of the media and some media enterprises do have to answer for the way in which they approach the issue of Biden's age. That is just a fact.

At the same time, this conservative narrative out there that the media tried to hide this and was completely complicit in, that's also false. Well, we didn't really get much access to him. Zero. And I think the problem was that the Republicans created these memes that were accurate, but the over-memification made it difficult in some ways. I guess.

I think there was a lot of common sense that got checked at the door by some editors and some enterprises who shall go unnamed. But if you rewind to the genius of the 2020 Biden campaign, they knew presidential campaigns are marketing campaigns, right? The campaign is going to sell the candidate the same way that Crest is going to sell toothpaste or Coca-Cola is going to sell soda or whatever.

Corvette is going to sell cars or Chevy's going to sell cars or whatever. And they had a product and the Biden brand in 2020 was still a pretty strong brand,

and an attractive product. But if you look at the fine print at its expiration date, it was getting pretty close to expiring. And so they were very skilled at kind of placing the product in front of the buyers or the voters and then taking it off the shelf so that not too many questions were asked about the sell-by date. And they were extremely vicious with reporters that wrote about it. I can say that on my end. Yeah. I wrote a story in 2019. In like June of 2019, it took me two months of Politico to persuade my editors to write it. Like, yeah, look, the guy's kind of old, right? And

But it is what it is. And then COVID happened. And then suddenly the bubble wrapped candidacy of Joe Biden, which was a political necessity, became a political plus because like, oh, he's just being safe. He's not going out there and contracting COVID. Right. And things change for Biden when the Afghanistan invasion happens or better said, withdrawal happens, because that is finally for the first time the president of the United States, Joe Biden. It's like August of 2020 or whenever it was.

Is there alone under the bright lights of the glare of the media and America has kind of suffered a humiliation. And then they notice like, wow, we're at a period of weakness and our president doesn't look that strong. And he never recovered. Yep. I think I totally agree with you on that. I think he lost the competency case. And I think a lot of people were expecting some people to be fired afterwards or some sort of action. But that never happened. But, yeah, no, it's been a weird time covering Trump.

Biden, but I'm sure from my sourcing that everyone has sort of believed that they have moved on from that. It's going to be a weird time covering anyone going forward. So I think that's the one thing we could definitely say. Yeah. I mean, this is a whole new race.

It is a whole new race and it's all happening right now. And let's check back in Mark, as always having you on the show. That was another episode of somebody's got to win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Christopher Sutton and Connor Nevins. If you like this show, please subscribe, rate it, share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, you can go to puck.news slash Tara dash Palmieri. And you can get 20% off a subscription at puck.news.

by using my discount code Tara20. I'll be back again, maybe tomorrow. So much breaking news.

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