Will Harris Get Trump to Self-Destruct at the Debate?
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I was at a dinner the other night and two of the people at the table were just kind of marveling about the fact that they're like, God, I thought I understood. I thought I knew J.D. Vance. I mean, there's a I don't think I can think of somebody who's had as dramatic and rapid a transformation in his reputation in Washington over the course of the last few years before he was in office. But when he was just a kind of, you know, an author.

There was this feeling that, oh, this guy could go in a lot of different directions politically. And to see him now as the most slavish lapdog for Trump, it's just the kind of thing that comes up a lot at dinner tables these days. Well, that's how he got his Senate seat, right, is prostrating himself to Trump. Trump marveled on the rally stage when J.D. Vance ran for Senate. He was laughing at him and saying, can you

believe this guy. He criticizes me now. He's begging me for my endorsement, which I think is the modern GOP. It's what qualified him, right? Anybody who will give up all their moral compunctions and swear fealty, what could be better for Donald Trump as a running mate, basically?

Welcome to The Political Scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane Mayer, and I'm joined by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Evan Osnos. Hi, Susan. Hey there. So great to be with you. Hi, Evan. Good morning, guys.

It may be the second presidential debate of the season, but Tuesday will be the first time that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris square off. Harris' surprising entry into the race has supercharged this post-Labor Day sprint to Election Day. With the two candidates neck and neck at this point, the stakes could scarcely be higher.

The last debate changed history, and viewership for this one is expected to be off the charts. So what can we expect on Tuesday? We wanted to dig into both Trump and Harris' past debate performances, as well as the dynamics leading up to this moment, to get a sense of how they might approach this epic showdown in the 2024 presidential campaign. So, Evan, I wanted to start with you.

You've been doing a lot of reporting on the campaign all over the country. What are the overall stakes here for Kamala Harris and for Donald Trump as you see them? And what do their respective campaigns think they need to do in this debate? Well, I mean, the stakes are

genuinely huge. And that's not just the kind of carnival barking you sometimes hear in the political press. The reason they're big is, as we've learned this year, debates can be actually decisive. They really can have a profound effect. They're one of the few moments when people on both the left and the right are watching, paying close attention. Harris is, and this is just a genuine fact, largely, I want to say, underdescribed. One of the things that comes out over and over again in focus groups and in polls is

is people say, I don't really know what she's been up to. I don't know much about her. Now, that's a very positive thing in some ways, because it means that she has a chance at this point to fill in that outline and give people a much richer sense. Look, it drives the campaign crazy when they hear that, because they're like, oh, well, she's out all day giving speeches and doing stuff all the line. She's been in the vice presidency for three and a half years. But it doesn't change the fact that that's how people feel. And one thing Joe Biden learned is you can't tell people how to feel about a candidate. You have to actually meet them where they are.

So they in some ways, you know, she's there to on a couple of key points, I think, make a big impression. One is to show that she has, you know, to use the blanket term, a kind of leadership presence, a commanding presence in the face of a bully like Donald Trump. People want to see that she's improvisational. She's nimble.

And then on his side, of course, we know what he's going to do. He's been doing the same thing for nine years since he's been in public life. But in the strictest sort of strategic sense of what Trump needs to do. And by the way, it's going to be tired and repetitive from him because he's tired and repetitive himself.

at this point, but you're going to see him try over and over to sort of link her to the things people don't like about the Biden years, inflation and immigration. Now, look, both of them are a lot better than they were months ago, but most people don't pay that much attention to politics. Then he just needs to hit those sort of strum those notes over and over again in order to fortify his image of her as a, quote, San Francisco radical. So that's where I think he's going. Susan, what do you think? How do you see this?

Well, look, we learned something very clearly in the debate earlier this year, which is that debates matter, as Evan said. But more to the point of this week's clash between Harris and Trump, what we know pretty clearly is that if it's about Donald Trump, he loses. If it's about Kamala Harris, that's more of a question mark. And I think that, you know, this is the last big debate

what you might call a la Rumsfeld, the last big known unknown of the 2024 campaign. You know, there's a lot of external wild events we could imagine in this crazy year. The unthinkable should be very thinkable to all of us. But in terms of things we know on the calendar, early voting begins in Pennsylvania literally within days after this debate. And for that reason, I think it's the last moment where it's possible

possible to anticipate a change in momentum. Perhaps this joy and the Harris honeymoon fades and it settles into just a grinding battle of attrition. Perhaps one of the candidates stumbles in a way that, you know, breaks out of the bubble of their own supporters and, you know, really changes the dynamic in the race. So, of course, we're looking for that. But I think Donald Trump didn't get the scrutiny

in that first debate with Joe Biden, that he's now starting to attract. And I think that has to be and is the strategy of the Harris campaign. If it's about examining and exhuming every time she's flip-flopped on a policy issue, if it's about talking about her record in San Francisco, then, you know, I don't think that's winning for Kamala Harris. Donald Trump is the best candidate ever.

to bring Democrats together. He is the uniter of Democrats. He is the turnoff to swing voters. He is decelerating before our very eyes. I mean, you know, his ability to formulate sentences, to speak coherently, it's degrading so rapidly. And what I notice, and I'm sure you guys notice this too, is that for so many people,

independent voters, people who aren't tuned into politics at all moments, they avert their eyes often from Donald Trump. And this is a moment when, in theory, if Harris plays it right, they're forced to confront what Donald Trump actually is, not mediated through polite words and short clips, but just listen to the guy. And I think that that is its own enormous potential turnoff to voters. So that's what I'm going to be looking for. But I don't know

I mean, do you am I wrong? I just noticed that people don't like to tune in to Donald Trump except for his hardcore fan base and that they may be shocked by what they hear. Well, we certainly know from many, many polls that when it was Trump versus Biden, the overwhelming sentiment in the country was none of the above. You know, there were the double haters. And so it does seem true that the public has really tired of Trump already.

But what I wonder also, I got to ask you, Susan, because of your fabulous book, The Divider, about Trump, what have we learned in the nine years we've seen him since he descended that escalator at Trump Tower? What have we learned about what he's like on the debate stage? What are his sort of strategies and what are the sort of characteristics of his performance? Is he a good debater? Susan

Strategy is, you know, a word used at great risk. You know, I remember close Donald Trump observer Chris Christie once practically having his head explode in a television green room when somebody talked about Trump's strategy. And Christie, who knew Trump well, said, listen, guys, please don't ever use that word with Donald Trump. You know, he's always coming in hot. He doesn't like to do things like

prep in a conventional way. He doesn't, you know, have coherent plans as much as instincts. But he's a very experienced debater at this point because he has become the only three-time consecutive nominee in the history of the Republican Party. So he's had presidential debates now in 2016 primaries and general election in 2020 and this one unprecedentedly early debate in 2024. What you see about Donald Trump is it's a sort of condensed

and intensified version of the Donald Trump of the rally stage. He is much more aggressive and willing to go on the attack than many conventional candidates are who tend to have one or two pre-planned attacks, but to be more cautious. He has used his physical bulk to

It's relevant because he debated Hillary Clinton. He's now debating Kamala Harris, who has a chance to be the first woman president. And he is running a campaign that's emphasizing, in fact, himself as a strong man against implicitly the kind of weak, feminized party of the Democrats in the form of this nominee. So I imagine there's going to be a lot of macho signaling and posturing here.

But the other thing that's striking when you go back and exhume the history here a little bit is that Donald Trump is often gives these coherent wild man performances in debates that, you know, the sort of polite commentary. It says, oh, my God, that was terrible. He lost. He's lost on points almost every debate he's ever had, in fact. And yet he emerges as a political winner often in ways that are kind of hard to quantify and to talk about.

Evan, are you expecting a lot of gorilla dust to be thrown around? Is that what we should expect? That's a nice image. And it seems he's had a very hard time adapting to the idea that he's up against...

Kamala Harris instead of Joe Biden. I'm just curious, what are you expecting in terms of if you look at his past performance, what do you think of his strategy? He has a couple of ticks, things that he does over and over again. One of them is he is, of course, a compulsive talker. So when he's not talking, he's extremely uncomfortable. And

And so he does this move where he'll say, excuse me, excuse me, trying to get the moderator or the other person on the stage to stop talking. I have never gone bankrupt, by the way. I have never. But out of hundreds of deals. Excuse me. That's your line, but your company has gone bankrupt. What am I saying? You know, there's been this whole, you know, inside baseball business about the microphones. Will they be silenced or not? In this case, they're going to be silenced.

Which is a great benefit to him because left to his own devices, all he does is slather the American public with the memory of life under Trump. And so, you know, I think he will very likely start off in a simulation of self-control.

That's very often the move. And then he goes as long as he can, which is usually five or seven minutes before he just allows himself to luxuriate in that environment. And then he will begin to do what we know he is inclined to do, which is to

try to undermine her credibility, to try to use essentially undisguised racist and misogynistic tropes to try to go after her. Remember, he said that she wasn't until recently that she wasn't black. His ability to actually keep himself productive is pretty limited. And I also think he's going to make a big mistake if he underestimates her capacity to

to turn it against him. I mean, she really does have this history of being able to allow somebody else's words to hurt them, most famously when she was running for the attorney general in California. I'd like to welcome you to this first ever debate between the Republican and Democratic nominees for the office of California attorney general. And there was a moment when her opponent...

had just made this kind of catastrophic comment where he was asked basically, would he continue to take a public salary and a pension at the same time? This was a big issue at the time. And he said, yes. Yes, I do. I earned it. 38 years of public service. I definitely earned whatever pension rights I have. And she just let it hang in the air.

and I will certainly rely upon that to supplement the very low, incredibly low salary that's paid to the state attorney general. Anything you'd like to add to that? Go for it, Steve.

When you get there, you'll want yours, too. You've earned it. There's no question. The answer was pretty definitive. There's no question. People called it a Vin Scully moment because he was the great baseball announcer who would let the silence do the talking, just let the sound of the game play out. And it was masterful. She then packaged it into ads, and it probably made the difference in a very close race. If you look back at one of her debates that people remember, it was the one against Pence.

And she was helped then by a fly that landed on Pence's head. I don't know if we can count on another fly coming in and landing on Trump's head. But that was maybe the unknown unknowns that Susan's been talking about, other animal life that may come into this debate. Susan, I know that in the last debate, Trump told people that his strategy was to just let Joe Biden talk.

I don't know if he really lived up to that, but do you expect that that's what he's going to do here too? Absolutely not. No, you know, Trump was smart in how he handled the debate with Biden in the sense that, you know, first rule of politics in life, right, is if your enemy is in the process of blowing himself up, stand back and don't do anything to get in the middle of that. That is against

every instinct in Donald Trump's body to do that. But he did do that and it worked. What was interesting was that he himself did not get a huge benefit from it because he wasn't able to make an affirmative case for himself in that debate. But he did what he needed to do, which was to allow the story to be about Biden. Harris is going to take such a different approach. And I will tell you that she is going to, you know, one assumes go after Trump in a way to try to pique him in a

to try to get him going off ranting about stolen elections and the like. And the interesting thing psychologically for Donald Trump is that he

He is a firm believer that if you're punched, you have to punch back. That is the sort of core principle of Donald Trump's life. So whether the punch that gets him going is a pointed question from the moderators, whether it is from Harris herself, the question is going to be how he responds. The other flag that I think we should be looking for right away is that Donald Trump is

has already begun the process of essentially working the refs expectation setting. He's been attacking. He used an entire interview with Sean Hannity this week to rant and rave about the unfairness of ABC and it's biased against him and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He actually even did that in the run up to the debate with Joe Biden because he's always worried about being perceived as

as the loser in an encounter like this. So, you know, he's going to complain about unfairness of something and probably attack the moderators at some point very early on as well. Okay, well, we are going to take a quick break. But when we come back, we'll take a look at what we can expect from Kamala Harris. The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back. ♪

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Because here's the thing. Our electoral system works and Democracy Decoded will help you understand why. Listen now at DemocracyDecoded.org or in your favorite podcast app. And a big thanks to Democracy Decoded for sponsoring the show. So, Evan, Harris is now in a position of having to both defend the work of the current Biden administration and also show voters a new way forward while also keeping Trump at bay.

What tools do you think she's got at her disposal and how can she accomplish all three of these things at once? Does she need to do that? I don't know. I mean, it's people remember how a debate made them feel rather than the actual information that was imparted.

I think, you know, some of her best moments is when she's asking the questions. This is what we know from her time in the Senate, especially. I think that she's really mastered the ability to let people who are accustomed to being deferred to, people like Brett Kavanaugh or Jeff Sessions.

or Bill Barr, let them say things that really damage them. Attorney General Barr, has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone? I wouldn't... Yes or no? Could you repeat that question? I will repeat it. Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone? Yes or no, please, sir? Um...

The president or anybody else. Seems you would remember something like that and be able to tell us. Yeah, but I'm trying to grapple with the word suggest. I mean, there have been discussions of matters out there that they have not asked me to open an investigation. Perhaps they've suggested? I don't know. I wouldn't say suggest. Hinted? I don't know. Inferred?

You don't know. OK. And so I think one of the things she did in the 2019 primary debate in the Democratic presidential primary was that she used an opportunity to answer a question to actually turn it against Joe Biden at the time. And people will remember this is when she talked about having been in the second class of students who were bused in Bay Area where she lived. It was hurtful.

to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day.

And that little girl was me. And Biden at the time, his reaction was a kind of subdued self-defense. But Trump doesn't do subdued self-defense. So what he'll do is he'll come back furious and basically do a lot of the work for her of showing, to borrow one of his favorite adjectives, what a nasty guy he is. And I think that could be pretty effective for her.

I thought most of his nasty comments were when he calls someone nasty, it's usually women who he describes as nasty. That's exactly right. One of the things that I found memorable from her earlier debates was in her performance with Pence when he was patronizing her and she said, Mr. Vice President, I'm speaking.

I'm speaking. I think she has, you know, really figured out how to deal with a guy who's trying to dominate her that way. And I'll be very curious to see whether she can do this with Trump. You know, that idea of I'm speaking, which is essentially really a big kind of philosophical thing.

Susan, where do you think she's most shown to her best advantage in these kinds of situations in the past?

Yeah, I think Evan is right that when Harris is prosecuting a case in a political sense, she's been at her most confident and her most effective and her most successful. That was the high watermark in some ways of her 2020 Democratic primary campaign. But remember, she never made it to the voters. And in some ways, one of the reasons that contributed to why she didn't ever make it into the voting in

2020 is also instructive for this because it was a debate moment as well. And that was a confrontation with Tulsi Gabbard. I want to bring the conversation back to the broken criminal justice system. The sort of provocateur, not really Democrat, who's no longer a Democrat and is in fact

now advising Donald Trump on how to debate Kamala Harris in this campaign. So we've come full circle there. But in that confrontation, what was interesting to me is that Tulsi Gabbard is doing a pretty straightforward thing, which is jabbing at someone who was ahead of her in the polls. Senator Harris says she's proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she'll be a prosecutor president. But I'm deeply concerned about this record. Harris was one of the top candidates, top tier candidates at that time.

you know, trying to poke on an inconsistency in her record. 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. She blocked evidence. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death. And Harris, even though she was prepared, she's not able to respond. And I think that's the question I have is how is Harris going to respond when Trump

attacks her as he inevitably will. And is she going to have the confidence to move on from it? Is she going to handle it the way that she did with that, her one television interview that she's done so far on CNN? This was an interesting moment. They brought up Trump's, you know, sort of crazy statements about Harris's racial identity. And she just said, same old tired playbook.

Next question, please. That's it? That's it? Okay. You know, that might be a response we could see from Harris. Sometimes she laughs when she's, you know, pushed against the wall. That's what happened with Tulsi Gabbard. It gave rise to years, years of Republican attacks that sort of demeaned her and belittled her and were somewhat effective. She's really moved beyond that. You know, she's in this campaign campaign.

So far in the six weeks that she's had, we haven't seen any of those kind of mistakes. So I'm just really going to be curious to

Whether it's the prosecutor, cool, calm, collected, take the case to Trump, Kamala Harris that we see, or, you know, is she going to get bogged down in, you know, defensiveness or having trouble respond to his inevitable attacks on her? You know, her dismissive refusal to take the bait from Diana Bash about the racial taunts from Trump is

It reminded me a lot of how in 1980, Reagan said to Carter, there he goes again. There you go again. Governor Reagan again, typically, is against such a proposal. Governor?

There you go again. You know, it's to make these slights look like they're just old hat and boring. And that's what she did in that particular case. And I wonder if she'll try to do that again in the debate. You know, there you go again. Same old playbook kind of thing. Yeah, that line, the same old tired playbook is something you're going to hear over and over again because it's a

essentially a proxy for saying, hey, Americans, do you really want to listen to the same stupid stuff again for the next four years because you're bored? Do we have to go back? Yeah. Which is sort of her mantra. A new way forward. Yeah. You know, critics have mocked

her a lot, though, over the years, her public performances and for her sort of homespun quotes like the one from her mother, you know, do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree? My mother used to, she would give us a hard time sometimes and she would say to us, I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? Yeah.

Evan, you've watched her for a while. Do you think her style has changed? Has that criticism had an effect on her? No, actually, to the contrary. I think that that, quote unquote, criticism has actually proved how out of touch a lot of those people.

people were who thought, ah, we've got her. She's laughing in public. Well, turns out, actually, a lot of Americans were happy to have a president or a presidential candidate who could laugh both at themselves and at the world and sort of have this balance of what she so often describes as a joyful warrior. I mean, I think there's a way in which, no, she has decided that

Actually, as Susan pointed out earlier, it's an important idea that really authenticity is the corner of the realm in a presidential campaign. I remember David Axelrod saying to me recently that, you know, you can take a great political performer, but when they get into the very specific spotlight of a presidential campaign, that's the moment when you begin to see the rust come through the paint. And if somebody is just ultimately kind of not at home in their identity, whether it's, you know,

John Kerry in 2004 or John McCain in 2008, who were struggling against their own party of what they were supposed to be. That is in its own unannounced way. The public picks up on it and it's a disaster. She has so far been able to really just say, look, I am who I am, to use a quote that she sometimes says.

And that can be very effective. Yeah, I'd love to pick up on that point, Evan, because I think that nobody's really going to remember the nuances of any policy discussion. And Donald Trump doesn't really do policy discussion at all. Let's be real. He's more likely to bring up Hannibal Lecter than the earned income tax credit. But she always says the late, great Hannibal Lecter, which is just

An expression that has yet to be explained. No, I think it means that he thinks he was real. Honestly, I think he thinks that was a documentary. A biopic? Exactly. Words that have never been used to describe Silence of the Lambs. Sorry, go ahead. You know, you made a super important point around the authenticity piece that I just think is really interesting.

important. Harris has so far succeeded in the six weeks in some ways by turning those foibles of who she is and that Republican mockery of her laughter, of her laughter, the coconut tree thing, you know, into actually a humanizing thing for a character who was not so well known. Joe Biden actually did that. I think that one of the keys to his success in that—

2020 debate, which in my view actually did matter. That was the moment when Biden kind of put away the campaign against Donald Trump. I think that from that point forward, it was pretty clear, barring some other event, that Biden was going to win and Trump was going to lose in 2020. And Trump was so out of control and interrupting everybody. Matter of fact, even the people who testified under oath. So let me ask you this. Go ahead, Mr. I'm listening to you. People under...

You got three and a half million dollars from Moscow. He testified under oath in his administration, Sid. I think, you know, Fox News ultimately did a count and showed it was like number of interruptions well in the triple digits. And remember, what was the moment that we all remember from that debate? It was Joe Biden.

You know, throwing up his hands in exasperation. Would you shut up, man? Who is on your list, Joe? And, you know, he spoke, of course, for I think the whole country, the whole world at this point. But it was consistent with who Joe Biden is, with his character, with what we knew of his persona. And so it was authentic. It wasn't just some line, you know, that he had memorized in a debate prep conversation.

And so I think that is one of the things you've got to look for. Can Harris not only challenge Trump, but do so in a way that feels, you know, both strong but authentic to who she is? I mean, again, this is why the turning the mics off in between while just having one speaker at a time may deprive Harris of being able to show Trump being out of control. I don't know. I mean, it's a hard thing, isn't it, for her to be a picket door to try to set him off and get under his skin?

when he also can't really react on the spot when she's speaking. I think, though, that she's pretty good at figuring out where somebody's vulnerabilities are. You know, where's the flesh between the armor plates? And you've seen it in these great Senate moments. Yeah.

And I think he is in his own way a kind of confounding Freudian case because there's nothing hidden. You know all of his vulnerabilities. Like everything is immediately apparent. And so she can go after him on things like being liable for sexual assault, on overturning Roe v. Wade and saying how proud of it he was because here he is sort of trying to wriggle out of that legacy.

And she can just hammer him on it over and over again. And I wouldn't be shocked maybe to see if she goes after his crowd size obsession. His size obsession in general. All right. Well, listen, after the break, we are going to talk about how Tuesday's debate could also impact the rest of the election. So we'll be right back.

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It's Madeline Barron from In the Dark. I've spent the past four years investigating a crime. Believe it or not, sooner or later we will kill some of these folks who need to be killed. A crime that for almost 20 years has gone unpunished. I heard M16. They went into the room and they were just taking shots. Me and Noor, we were under the bed. He get his rifle under the bed and start shooting at us.

I remember I opened a Humvee and I just see bodies stacked up. How did they not perceive that these were children? A four-year investigation, hundreds of interviews, thousands of documents, all in an effort to see what the U.S. military has kept from the public for years. You know, I don't know what's to be gained by this investigative journalism. Season three of In the Dark is available now.

wherever you get your podcasts. So Susan, I want to talk a little bit about money. The Harris campaign says it raised a staggering $361 million in August. That is almost three times as much as the $130 million that the Trump campaign said it raised last month.

Both Biden and Trump saw donations spike after the last debate. So to what extent do you think that Tuesday's debate is a fundraising opportunity for both campaigns? And if it is, what does that imperative do to have the candidates discuss things during the debate? Does it

push them to try to juice up their bases to get small contributions? Or does it make them go soft on issues that might offend big donors? I'm just curious. Do you see this thing as a money raiser in addition to everything else?

Well, yeah, of course. I mean, look, the truth is that, you know, money is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. And so in a way, it's a proxy for things like the level of enthusiasm that donors have or a party's base has. And that's why the Harris tally is so remarkable, because there were –

not only hundreds of millions of dollars that she's raised in this short six-week campaign, but from a lot of Democrats who didn't give a penny to the Biden campaign. So the fundraising in that sense is a useful proxy for understanding a broader political dynamic. It's also true that Democrats historically have a bigger, small donor advantage, and the Republicans are

are somewhat less reliant on small donors. Trump changed that a little bit because he has his passionate fan base. But basically, you know, he's been wooing the billionaires like Elon Musk because with the way that our legal system has sort of thrown out all restraint in campaign fundraising, you know, a few billionaires have the opportunity to give sums that were literally unthinkable, literally unthinkable. One of my early beats,

And I'm working on a piece about this for The New Yorker. But one of my early beats was writing about campaign fundraising. And I just went back and looked at a piece that I wrote in the 2000 presidential campaign between George W. Bush and ultimately Al Gore. Both were very accomplished fundraisers at the time. They were in this brutal competition for $1,000 hard money competition.

contributions, $1,000. Now a guy like Elon Musk, you know, is giving potentially billions of dollars to his political candidates and causes. So it's a revolting development. But I think that something like the debate, again, it's going to, the money's going to follow the perception of how the candidates do. What they are looking for is the viral moments, Jane. You know, that's something that I think is really different than how debates were even just a few years ago.

I just have to interject as someone who also has been doing a lot of reporting on money in politics. Of course, the difference, in case anyone doesn't remember, between 2000 and now is 2010 Citizens United, which changed everything and corrupted American politics beyond all belief. But anyway, I'm sorry, Evan, you were about to add something. No, no. I actually was just going to underscore. I think, you know, Jane, you were ahead of the curve on this issue. There's a reason why dark money is a truly classic thing.

and immediately urgent book all the time on politics because the money is really at the center of the story. And I think, you know, one of the interesting ways in which we're seeing it play out on the Harris side is that when somebody gives money for the first time, like one of these small donors, somebody in your neighborhood, you know, your aunt Bessie gives money for the first time, people around them pay attention. This is one of David Plouffe's observations is that

Or when they volunteer for the first time. It's that when somebody goes from inert politically to active, that causes these interesting repercussions around them. And so there's a way in which having all of these first-time enthusiasts suddenly activated has a secondary and third-order effect. And I think that's something that doesn't always show up immediately in the numbers beyond what are pretty staggering figures on her side.

By the way, I have a question for you, Jane. Since we are talking, let's make this our dark money segment. And I will do the shameless pluggery that no author is required to do for their own book and point out that this was already named by the New York Times esteemed panel as one of the great books to emerge so far in the 21st century, justifiably so. But the world, even that you wrote about in dark money, it already had conservative billionaires. But I

I feel like even in the context of your doing that reporting, it was hard to anticipate, you know, the role that an Elon Musk could play in the Trump campaign. Do you agree with that? Like, what do you see as the new evolution in this 2024 race?

I'd say the loss of shame. I mean, when dark money came out, it was still considered shameful and scandalous and corrupt. Now it's gone from being dark to almost wide out in the open. And you've got people like Tim Mellon and Elon Musk pouring just –

unbelievable sums of money in. It's as if nothing is shameful anymore. That's what's changed. But, you know, if money is in some ways an indicator of public support, where that money is spent is also interesting as an indicator. And I'm curious where you guys think this money is going to be spent. I'm assuming much of it is on ads in two states.

Pennsylvania and Georgia. Yeah, if you watch television in Pennsylvania right now, you're going to be bombarded with, you know, ads from shadowy super PACs that, you know, you have no idea who's funding them and, you know, what the interests are.

Yeah. Somebody was pointing out that if you're, you know, a Gen Z bro in Georgia, you are just going to be subjected to a massive amount of advertising and whether you know it or not. Sheldon Whitehouse has a great way of pointing out how weird these groups are about how they have the all the same name. It's all for, you know, Americans for vitality or something. And it turns out that it's like four.

pharma combined with an oil company. You know, you're just like, what the hell is this about? And so, you know, I think people get pretty exhausted by it, which means that actually moments where you see a real candidate kind of revealing him or herself can have a more durable effect. Well, okay. I have one last question for you both. Not only do I want to know sort of how you're feeling about the debate, but I'm kind of curious.

How do the pros watch it? Will you be there with laptops taking notes? Are you going to tweet? Do you socialize during it? Do you have, you know, friends over? Or is this a deadly serious event for you guys? Well, an institutional obligation, actually, that I should remind our listeners that The New Yorker this time is going to be doing a live blog of the debate. So Vincent Cunningham and Claire Malone and I will be

reacting in real time and trying to keep each other sane. What about you, Susan? Where are you going to be? Well, and I've had to write off of all these debates. I think I've, you know, written live for The New Yorker, which is not something that The New Yorker used to do. Definitely wasn't in the live blogging business or the live columnizing business back then when you and I were watching debates together years ago in the early years of the 2000s.

So basically, you have a really short amount of time if you're going to write off a debate. It's very nerve wracking. I will say that in a way, that June debate where I covered it for The New Yorker, just sitting there watching it.

The one positive about an extraordinary news event was that the news was very clear within minutes. Right. We all saw what kind of a performance Biden was turning in, you know, so it made it easier to write it. But it can be very nerve wracking to have to absorb a debate in real time and write off of it and publish something within an hour or two of it. It's a high, high stress enterprise. Where are you going to be, Jane? Well, it's my husband's birthday. Oh.

But the thing is, it's not a social event for any of us, I think. And I have turned down invitations to watch it with other people other than my husband. And I think the key thing will be to try to keep the frosting from the cake off the keyboard. That's the challenge. Poor Bill. What?

Can I just mention one other thing, which is this is worth keeping in mind. I mean, Nancy Pelosi, as we are reminded, has a pretty keen sense of how political history happens. And she warned back in May. She told Joe Biden, I don't think you should be debating Donald Trump. In effect, she said, you know, he's not professional. He's not presidential. She was kind of sounding an alarm. And I think it's worth remembering that, you know,

Pelosi sensed something. There's a kind of dark chaos in the way that Trump does politics, and we should be prepared for anything on a debate stage. Oh, boy. Do not forget anything Nancy Pelosi warns you about. Exactly right. Susan, Evan, until next week. Meanwhile, thanks so much. It's been great to be with you. You too, Jane. Happy birthday, Bill. Great to be with you guys.

This has been the political scene from The New Yorker. I'm Jane Mayer, and we had research today from Alex D'Elia. Our producer is Julia Nutter, and our editor is Gianna Palmer. Mixing by Mike Kutchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks for listening.

My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I focus on stories where powerful people or institutions are doing something that's harming people or harming someone or something in some way. And so my job is to report that so exhaustively that we can reveal what's actually going on and present it to the public.

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