Preet Bharara:

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.

Kamala Harris:

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.

Preet Bharara:

Joining me to recap the debate in its key moments are two longtime political strategists, Patti Solis Doyle, a former Obama and Clinton advisor and current partner at the Brunswick Group, and Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist and the co-founder of the Lincoln Project. We dive into Harris’s triumph, Trump’s outrageous statements, and whether any of it really matters on election day. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

The presidential debate Tuesday night looked a whole lot different from the last one. I’m joined by political strategists, Patti Solis Doyle and Rick Wilson, to break down what happened. Patti Solis Doyle and Rick Wilson, welcome to both of you.

Patti Solis Doyle:

Thanks.

Rick Wilson:

Good morning.

Preet Bharara:

So here we are. We’re recording this on Wednesday morning, September 11th, the 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. This is now just a slaughterhouse.” Do you stand by that?

Rick Wilson:

Absolutely. Look, I think he went in there hoping that he would 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.

Preet Bharara:

Patti, 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 you start to have something approaching the view of Rick’s if you ever got to where Rick got?

Patti Solis Doyle:

Well, I definitely got to where Rick got. I wasn’t so much holding my breath as I was just nervous. I knew Kamala Harris has debate chops, honestly. She proved them in 2020 and she proved them 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 moment that just put him off kilter.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think there was a moment of potential risk when you choreograph a physical thing like that, like that handshake? Couldn’t that have gone wrong? It’s a small thing, but things like that sometimes matter and go viral.

Patti Solis Doyle:

I don’t see how it could. He could have rejected it, which I think would’ve made him look bad, but he took it and it made her look strong and tough and confident and presidential. And really for me, that was the big takeaway. Everyone was talking about the 28% of voters from the New York Times Siena poll 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 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.

Preet Bharara:

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, is that because she did extraordinarily well or Trump did extraordinarily poorly, or as I suspect you might say, a combination of the two?

Rick Wilson:

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 we 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. Her physicality last night was excellent. I mean, that’s a big part of these debates, is 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 and he lost this debate-

Preet Bharara:

He did not look at her.

Rick Wilson:

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’s got to tell, he makes a little sort of a duck face when he’s nervous. He purses his lips a little bit and squints 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.

Preet Bharara:

What’s interesting about that is, over the years we’ve come to understand that Trump, if he understands anything, understands a 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 relief that Kamala was winning and Donald was losing. How do you think he lost the thread on the visual? Patti, do you have a thought on that?

Patti Solis Doyle:

That’s what good debate prep does for you, right?

Preet Bharara:

I mean, this is the guy that remembered the visual when he was just shot at and that came out of nowhere. Here, he had days and weeks to prepare for this. I’m trying to understand as a matter of preparation, or maybe it’s a matter of lack of self-control and discipline?

Patti Solis Doyle:

I think it’s the latter, I think it’s lack of self-control. I think she, 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, 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 those facial responses, the smiling, the amusement, the putting the hand under her chin and leaning in like she was 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.

Preet Bharara:

So you said rehearsed, often that is a negative, pejorative word. And when I was scrolling through Twitter last night, I wonder what you think of this, in my household, we are Kamala Harris supporters obviously and we’re thrilled at her performance. I thought she hit it out of the park, I agree with both of you in terms of how she did both substantively and stylistically, but I wondered 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.

Rick Wilson:

None whatsoever. Television is an ephemeral media. In the political nerd community, people like us who pay a lot of attention might’ve watched her opening statement and said, oh, that’s the set piece. That’s the big stage setter for this moment, and it’s rehearsed. As a professional, I sure hope it’s rehearsed, but I don’t think it will change a single vote 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. I think prepping shows respect for the audience, respect for the American people, and she was very well-prepared, but not overly so. She didn’t sink into the sort of frame of, well, on page 714 of my climate plan, we talk about these six. She didn’t get into the weeds of policy.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a little bit of Bill Clinton. It’s a little bit of Bill Clinton.

Rick Wilson:

A little bit. But she was very clear 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.

Preet Bharara:

Now, some Republicans or people who are on the Trump side of the political divide were more critical than you might’ve expected. This is Britt Hume from Fox News who said last night, “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, my opinion, no doubt.” Do you think that’s the consensus on the Trump side this morning?

Patti Solis Doyle:

The fact that he went into-

Preet Bharara:

To the spin room.

Patti Solis Doyle:

… the spin room tells you everything you need to know.

Rick Wilson:

Desperate.

Patti Solis Doyle:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Why couldn’t his people keep him out of the spin room? I guess he decides.

Patti Solis Doyle:

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’s very, very divided, and the 46% of voters that are with Trump and will stay with Trump no matter what, no matter convictions, no matter January 6th, no matter what, they’re going to stay with him. 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 undecideds and independents. And I think the contrast 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.

Donald Trump:

In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, 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.

Preet Bharara:

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?

Rick Wilson:

I haven’t seen that yet.

Preet Bharara:

But that’s an extraordinarily high number. So I think we should-

Rick Wilson:

I was privy to 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 that is something that I think he was in such a terrible trap on that question in particular, I’d love to hear what Patti thinks about this too. 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.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I want to hear what Patti 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 line number 657. That is not true. And he said a phrase, he said, “They wanted that. I gave them what they wanted”. And then Kamala Harris, 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’d 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.

Kamala Harris:

I have talked with women around our country. You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage being denied care in an emergency room because the healthcare 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 turn? 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.

Preet Bharara:

I thought that was incredibly powerful and moving. Patti, what’d you think?

Patti Solis Doyle:

No, I agree completely. To me, that was the most impactful moment is when she really humanized these women who were going through this terrible, terrible personal ordeal, 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 was 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. 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.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Patti Solis Doyle and Rick Wilson.

Later, I can’t remember if it was later or 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?

Rick Wilson:

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-

Preet Bharara:

But he can’t say that, he thinks?

Rick Wilson:

He thinks it, 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 it was always an idiotic conceit, it was always something just completely off the wall. 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 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.

Preet Bharara:

Did Trump lose any members of his base yesterday? I would think not, right?

Patti Solis Doyle:

No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he can, in all honesty.

Rick Wilson:

Yeah. Here’s the way we analyzed it last night, and I was talking to our pollsters last night and our voter file analytics guys last night about this. I’ll have some numbers today, but their take was essentially this. There’s been some softening in Trump’s base of generic Republicans, of Republicans who are just sort of behavioral Republicans, or oh yeah, I’m going to go for Trump, otherwise it’s a communism, blah, blah, blah. The crazies will always stay, but we’re probably talking 1 to 3% of Trump’s current base 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.

Preet Bharara:

But I guess the reason I’m asking is, if he can do anything he wants, perform at his rallies and he’s going to keep the base, what was his strategy for getting independents last night? Or was there none?

Rick Wilson:

There was none. There was absolutely no strategy.

Preet Bharara:

There wasn’t like a strategy that failed, he just didn’t have one at all to get independents?

Rick Wilson:

There was none.

Patti Solis Doyle:

No, 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 being a lefty liberal from San Francisco.

Rick Wilson:

Maybe, yeah.

Patti Solis Doyle:

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

What I did find interesting though is that he didn’t attack her personally. I thought for sure he was going to call her-

Preet Bharara:

Nasty woman?

Patti Solis Doyle:

Not a nasty woman, but a stupid woman or a non-intelligent woman, and he didn’t do it last night. So I think he did try and be somewhat disciplined, but it didn’t come off that way.

Preet Bharara:

What’s funny is 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, then 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 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?

Rick Wilson:

No. Look, I mean, 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, 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 ally that question, but then later in the debate he’s talking about trying to re-litigate the Central Park Five, which utterly, I mean, if you want to put it in the largest category of unforced errors in that debate. Sure, the dog stuff is right up there, but going back and talking about five men who were not only exonerated in the courts, but who were absolutely proven to be innocent, a guy who still thinks they should be executed 40 years later? It’s insanity. And 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-

Preet Bharara:

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 tired playbook, same old grievances. My favorite in this category was how she baited him on the rallies, when she looked into the camera and said, I mean, it was unbelievable, and looks in the camera and says, “I invite you to go to his rallies.”

Kamala Harris:

And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.

Preet Bharara:

Boredom and exhaustion, and she hit those two words like a musician might hit two notes. And then go back to him, and that guy sounded like a six-year-old, right? It’s like my rallies are, 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?

Patti Solis Doyle:

I’m voting for Kamala.

Rick Wilson:

Yeah, voting for Kamala. Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

They’re also thinking, do I really have to go to a Trump rally?

Rick Wilson:

Right. Is she punishing me for something?

Patti Solis Doyle:

But it was so brilliant, and you’re right, Preet, it really did follow up nicely to Obama’s speech at the convention where 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.

Preet Bharara:

The whole thing as we were talking about it, it occurs to me that something someone said struck me, and that was it is perhaps true that at least in recent years and possibly maybe 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 and 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, 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?

Rick Wilson:

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.

Patti Solis Doyle:

Yeah. I got to say, when he first entered the political stage coming down that escalator in 2015, he mowed down a bunch of really well-respected, very experienced politicians, whether it was Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton, 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, I’ve 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. I was like Bulworth, I am aging myself.

But what she managed 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?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Patti Solis Doyle:

Which is tough for a woman.

Preet Bharara:

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? 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 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?

Rick Wilson:

I think that’s right. I wrote about her in the course of the 2020 campaign, and I said, her debate performances are somewhat inconsistent. She’s like a .125 hitter sometimes, but then she’ll go out and just knock Grand Slam after Grand Slam. At some point in the last three and a half, four years, she has transformed into a star in this space. She is. And I don’t know what caused it or what elevated her.

Preet Bharara:

What she batting, Rick? She batting .400?

Rick Wilson:

She’s batting .400 right now, she really is. Look, I was impressed by even the opening speech she made after Biden stepped away. The convention speech was 38 minutes of performance 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 quick, but she also kept connecting back to people. It wasn’t about her, it was about us. Trump is always about either this imaginary version of himself or his real and imagined grievances.

Patti Solis Doyle:

Yeah, you said something, Preet, that really struck me, and that is prior to July, her political skills were very much in question. 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 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.

Rick Wilson:

That’s a technical term, but true.

Patti Solis Doyle:

An incredible convention that because of the circumstances, sort of had to be rejiggered quite a bit.

Preet Bharara:

Not one false step that I can think of.

Patti Solis Doyle:

It has been flawless, absolutely flawless. So anybody who says her skills are not, I think they’re wrong and I think we completely underestimated her from the jump.

Preet Bharara:

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 Ioffe who said something like, remember, Hillary Clinton won all the debates too.

Rick Wilson:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Does this debate victory matter? And how do you compare how she did against Trump to how Hillary did against Trump?

Rick Wilson:

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 beat Trump on the basis of the predicate of her campaign, which was a lot more, the motto of the Hillary campaign was, I’m with her. And it felt internal and it felt like break the glass ceiling for Hillary to a lot of people. And look, 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 just lacked it.

And I will say this, Hillary, 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 crude, and it was like that phony alpha male BS that Trump loves, but it stuck with a lot of people. And last night, Kamala Harris striding across that stage like she owned the place, sticking her hand out 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.

Preet Bharara:

And Patti, as you answer that question, add in the idea that it’s 2024, not 2008, as Rick was saying, is it that Kamala is so different or we have changed?

Patti Solis Doyle:

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/candidates. 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 presidency. 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, so many things have happened since she lost to Trump in 2016. There was sort of the birth of the resistance 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.

Preet Bharara:

Totally agree. Totally agree with that.

Patti Solis Doyle:

So we needed her before we got Kamala, is my view.

Rick Wilson:

I think Patti’s exactly right. When Hillary Clinton talked about the risk of the overturning of Roe v. 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 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.

Preet Bharara:

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?

Donald Trump:

Concepts of a plan.

Preet Bharara:

That sounded like the worst dog ate my-

Patti Solis Doyle:

Was that so, I mean, I just couldn’t believe he said that.

Preet Bharara:

So you never know, is that line going to live on forever?

Patti Solis Doyle:

I’m getting T-shirts made, for sure.

Preet Bharara:

Concepts of a plan.

Patti Solis Doyle:

I have concept.

Preet Bharara:

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.

Rick Wilson:

That is the worst dog at my homework I’ve ever heard.

Patti Solis Doyle:

But that’s a fireable offense, right?

Preet Bharara:

It’s a rare misfire. Look, Trump has lots of problems rhetorically and substantively. He doesn’t say that kind of nonsense, that particular kind of know mealy-mouth, he’s not mealy-mouthed, right? He just lies. 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?

Patti Solis Doyle:

I think that is fair. And I’m also going to say something probably I shouldn’t say, I think he’s-

Preet Bharara:

No, that’s what we want you to say.

Patti Solis Doyle:

… I think he’s getting old. I think he’s losing a step.

Preet Bharara:

No, you should absolutely say that. We should say that again and again and again, because it was true with respect to the other person.

Patti Solis Doyle:

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.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Patti and Rick after this.

Could we talk about some of the other issues that came up and how you think the audience and in particular independents would’ve 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?

Rick Wilson:

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 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 issue is one that Republicans look at as a big cut, but honestly, I’ve polled it. There’s not a big there, there, or not the there, there that they think exists.

Preet Bharara:

Do you agree with me, I made this point ad nauseam on the podcast with many guests that in the modern era, in the current era, people care about flip-flopping less than they used to? What they really care about is, do you agree with my position today?

Rick Wilson:

Yes, 100%.

Patti Solis Doyle:

I agree with that. I 100%-

Preet Bharara:

In the ’80s, in the ’90s, if you changed 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?

Rick Wilson:

Yeah. And Patti 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 trivial fractional way, and we’d make it into this gigantic, how dare he change his position on carried interest tax deductions from 35.2 to 36.1, or whatever. It would be some small little thing, and we’d try to make it into something.

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.

Preet Bharara:

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 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?

Rick Wilson:

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, you were talking earlier about is this peeling off any Republican voters, there’s a subset of Republican 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.

Patti Solis Doyle:

Yeah. I think he speaks about it the way he speaks about everything with such confidence. 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. He said, with complete authority and belief that, I’m going to say it again, that migrants are eating our pets. And he said it like it is absolutely true and beware.

Preet Bharara:

Well, the fact-checking, we should get to that in a moment, a lot of the criticism from the Trump supporters was directed at the moderators who did, I think 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?

Rick Wilson:

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 your liberal communist bias, et cetera. And so last night, ABC’s fact-checking was 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, 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. Each of those counts as a separate lie, not just a separate repetition of the lie.

So when you see Trump and his supporters saying, oh, well, 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 else other than Donald.

Preet Bharara:

They didn’t say that about Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

Rick Wilson:

That is correct. Isn’t that interesting?

Preet Bharara:

So interesting.

Patti Solis Doyle:

And he didn’t go in the spin room after that debate either.

Rick Wilson:

Which I’m telling you, as somebody who has been, and Patti 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?

Preet Bharara:

That shows 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?

Patti Solis Doyle:

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’s a sliver still of undecideds and independents who are still 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 there’s still a lot of crazy in him. And that contrast I think, is going to be quite impactful to those undecided voters.

Rick Wilson:

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’re not out for that. They don’t want that. And she showed last night that she’s cool under pressure, she’s presidential. I mean, my fiance said, she’s like a Sorkin character right now. That quick wittedness about her is something people really, I think will appreciate for a candidate.

What will also happen is Trump will spend all day today, all day tomorrow in a rage fest. He’s right now demanding as we’re speaking that ABC be shut down and that their “broadcasting license be taken away.”

Preet Bharara:

That’s constitutional.

Rick Wilson:

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 Patti correctly says, it’s a small number. It’s not-

Preet Bharara:

It’s like 11 guys.

Rick Wilson:

Right. It’s not a big number.

Patti Solis Doyle:

In a bar in Pennsylvania.

Rick Wilson:

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. They’re going to try, now they’ll probably have to agree to another debate.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I was going to say, one of the ways you know who won is that one side asked immediately for a second debate, and that was Kamala Harris’s side. You really think Trump has to agree to that?

Rick Wilson:

I think his ego will force him to agree to it.

Patti Solis Doyle:

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.

Rick Wilson:

Yep. I think so too.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think it would’ve 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?

Rick Wilson:

I think she knows she can get him. Look, in two or three weeks, he’s not going to get better at this, he’s going to get worse. His collapse is very pronounced right now. I don’t think he’s going to improve in any way. All the things he road-tested last night that didn’t bite were things that he thought 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 cut, it didn’t enter into the actual dialogue.

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.

Preet Bharara:

You’re speaking, just for the record, Rick is speaking-

Rick Wilson:

Rhetorically, as always.

Preet Bharara:

I got to ask you, Rick, before we end, 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?

Rick Wilson:

Gigantic.

Preet Bharara:

Is it gigantic?

Rick Wilson:

It is gigantic. There is no larger cultural force in America today than Taylor Swift.

Preet Bharara:

What percentage of her fans are above the voting age? Half?

Rick Wilson:

Well, I actually asked that question of my voter file analytics people last night.

Preet Bharara:

I should ask my kids. Yeah, I mean a lot of them, but a substantial percentage is not.

Rick Wilson:

But remember, the ones that aren’t of voting age, their parents are taking to the concerts. 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 do attack Taylor Swift to be like, how dare a musician endorse Donald Trump? Or not endorse Donald Trump? Why won’t she follow-

Preet Bharara:

You can take your Kid Rock, We see your Kid Rock and we raise you Taylor Swift.

Rick Wilson:

Yeah, no, it’s going to be a big deal. And she’s got a very passionate base. She’s got a passionate base that are also, they own every social media space they enter into.

Preet Bharara:

That’s true.

Rick Wilson:

And I think Trump’s people are making a gigantic mistake attacking her.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, why do that?

Rick Wilson:

Reflex. Reflex, they can’t help themselves.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I look forward to the next debate and we’ll talk again. Patti 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.

Rick Wilson:

Well in Florida, a state where Trump cannot afford a big breakdown of any demographic, the Haitian community is very angry about this.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

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

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at (669) 247-7338. That’s (669) 24PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.