Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show Harris Had a Theory of Trump, and It Was Right About this episode Tuesday night was the first — perhaps the only — debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. And it proved one of Harris’s stump speech lines right: Turns out she really does know Trump’s type. She had a theory of who Trump was and how he worked, and she used it to take control of the collision. But this was a substantive debate, too. The candidates clashed on abortion, health care, the economy, energy, immigration and more. And so we delve into the policy arguments to untangle what was really being said — and what wasn’t.
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You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:23 Ezra Klein? It is Wednesday, September 11th. Last night was the first, maybe the only, presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. And I think to understand what happened at that debate, it's worth going back to a criticism of Trump, you could maybe say, an observation about Trump, that Harris and other Democrats made repeatedly in their speeches at the Democratic National Convention. Here's Harris.
0:51 Kamala Harris? I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong Un, who are rooting for Trump. Who are rooting for Trump.
1:03 Kamala Harris? Because, you know, they know. They know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors.
1:12 Ezra Klein? That isn't just an attack line Democrats use on Donald Trump. At the high levels of power, among the people in the Democratic Party who have governing, and particularly who have presidential experience, this is what they believe about him. That Donald Trump is easily manipulated, that he is distractible, he is undisciplined, he is egotistical, he is interested above all in one topic, and that topic is himself. It's why it was such a big theme in the speeches of the former presidents over that couple of days. Here's Barack Obama from the DNC.
1:47 Speaker 02 Here's a 78-year-old billionaire, who has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. It has been a constant stream of gripes and grievances, that's actually been getting worse now that he's afraid of losing to Kamala.
2:14 Speaker 02 There's the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes.
2:34 Speaker 02 It just goes on and on and on.
2:38 Ezra Klein? Here's Bill Clinton from the DNC.
2:40 Speaker 03 I mean, what does her opponent do with his voice? He mostly talks about himself. Right? So the next time you hear him, don't count the lies. Count the eyes.
3:05 Speaker 03 Count the eyes.
3:08 Speaker 03 His vendettas, his vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies.
3:19 Speaker 03 He's like one of those tenors opening up before he walks out on stage like I did, trying to get his lungs open by singing me, me, me, me, me, me.
3:34 Ezra Klein? What Kamala Harris did at the debate on Tuesday night was to turn this attack line into a debate strategy to show that Trump is like this rather than just say Trump is like this. The key moment, the key turn in the debate came in the section on immigration. David Muir, one of the moderators, asked Harris a good and a tough question.
3:55 Speaker 04 We know that illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration. This past June, President Biden imposed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly. But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act? And would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?
4:15 Ezra Klein? Harris doesn't quite answer that question. She talks instead about the bipartisan border bill that was negotiated in the fall of 2023 and scuttled by Trump. So that does move the clock backwards a bit, and it moves the blame onto Trump a bit. But it leaves open the underlying question and criticism you hear of the Biden administration here. Why did they wait until the fall of 2023 to do something substantial on the border? But Harris doesn't even try to explain that. Instead, she uncorks a line that was clearly prepared. Clearly, she walked in with this one. And when I first heard her say it, it felt like it had been dropped into the wrong section of the debate.
4:52 Kamala Harris? And I'll tell you something. He's going to talk about immigration a lot tonight, even when it's not the subject that is being raised. And I'm going to actually do something really unusual, and I'm going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump's rallies, because it's a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early, out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.
5:25 Ezra Klein? What Harris is doing here is unleashing a test of these Democratic theories about Donald Trump. She says Donald Trump is easily manipulated, and she is here on national television at the debate, manipulating him in an obvious and even clunky way. Obama says Trump is obsessed with conspiracy theories and crowd size. And so here's Harris baiting him on crowd size and conspiracy theories. Clinton says Trump can't resist talking about himself. And so Harris is turning a question about immigration into a question about Donald Trump, whether he's interesting enough to keep people compelled during his rallies. So Harris dangles this bait in front of Trump.
6:08 Ezra Klein? She does it in the section of the debate that should be Trump's strongest, the section where her record is hardest to defend, the section where Trump is most personally interested in the underlying issue. And Trump could easily have just ignored the bait, ignored the jab about his bored crowds, told Americans that Harris is trying to distract them from her failed record on the border by using some pre-cooked debate line about crowd sizes. If Trump had the presence of mind, the discipline to do that, I think that would have gone quite badly for Harris. Instead, he does this.
6:42 Donald Trump? First, let me respond as to the rallies. She said, people start leaving. People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go. And the people that do go, she's bussing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So she can't talk about that. People don't leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That's because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We're a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War III, just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what's happening to the towns all over the United
7:27 Donald Trump? States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk. It's not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame.
7:50 Ezra Klein? And after that, Trump never really recovers. The whole rest of the debate, he's red-faced, pissed off, free associating, conspiratorial, not the guy you'd want sitting behind the Resolute Desk in a crisis. Not a guy you'd want at your dinner table. Not a guy you would want at the next table over when you are having dinner. This was more than just debate strategy for Harris. It is an actual point about Donald Trump, about the way he thinks and acts and governs. He is easy to manipulate. He is unfocused. He is obsessed with grievance and flattery and criticism and, yeah, crowd size. He couldn't hold it together for 90 minutes, 90 minutes, in a debate he had weeks to prepare
8:34 Ezra Klein? for, on the issue he is best prepped to handle. So why should anyone watching that think he can handle a presidential crisis? You think Putin doesn't know how to flatter him? Or that oil company executives can't get a briefing on how to butter him up? Or that he'll have reserves of focus and perspective and groundedness on day three of little to no sleep, when everyone is yelling at him, when people aren't being relentlessly polite to him, when the stakes are high, when he has antagonists with real power? You think he will then have this focus and perspective and groundedness that he could not summon here? This was not, in my view, a perfect debate for Harris. She was much stronger at disqualifying Donald Trump than making the case for her own candidacy.
9:17 Ezra Klein? If your theory of the election is that Americans needed reminding of Trump's chaotic, conspiratorial, childish temperament, then she did the job and then some. Even if the problem is they don't know enough about her, that they're unhappy with what the country feels like under Joe Biden, and they want something different, and they don't know or don't trust that Joe Biden's vice president will offer that, I'm not sure she did all that much to reassure them. Her canned answers seemed canned. She's not the kind of light-footed debater who can sidestep a tricky question while appearing to answer it. When she got questions she didn't like, she just didn't answer them, obviously didn't answer them. But that leaves those questions, like why the Biden administration didn't lift the
9:59 Ezra Klein? Trump tariffs on China, or whether she would have done anything different in the Afghanistan withdrawal, that leaves them lingering in voters' minds. Given a number of opportunities to distance herself from Biden, to say the way she would actually be different, or have done something different, she took none of them. That might be respectful towards Joe Biden, it may not be good political strategy. But as Joe Biden used to say, "You don't compare candidates to the almighty, you compare them to the alternative." And what Harris did last night was create a contrast, create an alternative. She turned Trump into his worst self, you might say his true self, reminding Americans
10:39 Ezra Klein? who haven't seen that guy for a while, what he looks and feels like, how he thinks, how he acts. And she showed her ability to master a moment, to perform under pressure, to do the very thing Donald Trump could not do, which is prepare a strategy, execute it when it mattered, and remain focused and consistent under pressure. Those aren't just skills you need to win a debate, those are skills you need to be president. I'm joined now by our senior editor Claire Gordon to talk through more moments from the night. Claire?
11:12 Claire Gordon? Hi, great to be here. It really seemed like Harris's theory of this debate was to remind people of the worst of Trump. And it seemed like Trump's theory of this debate was the border, the border, the border. He pivoted to it in many of his answers when it wasn't the question. Do you think that despite his weak and wild performance in other ways, that there could actually be validity to that theory? It was the theory in 2016, and to the surprise of many liberals, it was effective, and the crisis of the border has only gotten worse since then.
11:50 Ezra Klein? This feels appropriate as an analogy, given the day on which we're talking, which is September 11. In the 2008 primary, Joe Biden's best line of that whole primary, and you got to think back to a period in time when Rudy Giuliani seemed like a significant political force in American life. But Rudy Giuliani was running for president, and Biden, who was of the Democrats, the best at talking about national security and meeting Republican weakness baiting with his own very specific brand of condescension, had this devastating line, where he said that for Rudy Giuliani, a sentence is a noun, a verb, and 9/11. And
12:30 Ezra Klein? for Donald Trump, a sentence is sometimes a noun, a verb, and the border. That it is his sort of unified field theory of everything. And he can lay claim to at least, under his version of this, some success. If you look, and we've been preparing for an episode on the border, so I've been kind of deep in this data. If you look at border encounters, which is the way we track the migrant flow to the southwestern border, as soon as Joe Biden takes office, they spike. It goes from around and often below 50,000 a month, I think it was, under Trump, to as high as 300,000 in, I think it's December of 2023.
13:13 Ezra Klein? The problem for Donald Trump is that he's not really making a policy case about the border. He's making an expressive case about the border. That's also why it's significant that he repeated these sort of social media, seems to be largely bullshit, stories about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats, that he's motivated by dislike of immigrants. He's motivated by a desire to not have them in this country. There is some position nearer to his than Democrats would like to admit that has become quite popular. And you see it in how far right Democrats have moved. What was Kamala Harris's pitch on the border? Not comprehensive immigration reform, not more humane treatment of immigrants, but a quite far right border security bill that would actually be about stopping this flow, right?
13:58 Ezra Klein? Democrats have moved quite a bit further to the sort of policy positions you might have associated with Donald Trump or someone more from his side of things a couple of years ago. And they've had to do that because under Biden and under their, both their policies and their sort of expressive governance, they lost credibility on the border. The situation got much, much worse. The flow got much higher. It actually became a policy problem, not just an invented Fox News thing. And now they're trying to win back credibility on deterrence. They're trying to win back credibility so people can manage an orderly border. And you gotta, you gotta have that credibility before you can do anything else. I don't know that it is helpful to Donald Trump, who scuttled that bipartisan bill, to just seem like a guy who is monomaniacally obsessed with the border,
14:42 Ezra Klein? because most people don't think the border is everything. And Donald Trump, I think, at this point is not doing a good job explaining, aside from the signal that, that he would be somebody who immigrants would understand would not want them here. And he would try to do things to make their lives miserable and hassle them and deport them. There's not a lot there beyond it. And so the, the effort to kind of connect everything else to it. I don't know, at least for me, it falls flat. You could imagine a better candidate making it work, but he was at least not that candidate on Tuesday night.
15:12 Claire Gordon? And as you said, is expressive, and I think that people, and for good reason, trust that he would shut down the border.
15:20 Ezra Klein? He means it. I'm actually writing a column about this. I think a lot about this line from Mark Schmidt, who is at the New America Foundation, but is an old political mentor of mine. And he used to say that it's not what you say about the issues, it is what the issues say about you. The reason policy communication matters is not because every voter is a policy expert with a highly detailed sense in their mind of whether or not they believe in the taxation of unrealized capital gains. It is because policy is a way of communicating who you are and what you think is important. And Trump, who is very scattered on policy, is a master of this kind of communication. The way he communicates about immigration communicates something very true about him. He does not like immigration.
16:04 Ezra Klein? He thinks there are too many immigrants here. He does not want more coming. That if you elect Trump, you are electing somebody who will look at the immigration situation and will try to think of ways to lock down the border, try to think of ways to make the lives of immigrants worse, try to think of ways, anything he can, to keep people from coming to this country. I actually think this is a place where, on a lot of issues, Harris, I mean, Democrats more broadly, but Harris in particular, struggles. She talks about policy in a clear way, like she will describe her policies correctly. She does not fall into the word salad that Donald Trump falls into. But they don't feel like they are saying that much about her. At her core level, what is Kamala Harris' belief about immigration?
16:48 Ezra Klein? At her core level, what is Kamala Harris' belief about fracking? The problem is that the signal for many people is muddled about what it is saying about her. Compare that to the way she talks about something like abortion, where you can feel that the policy communication is a value communication. She's been steady on the issue her whole career. And when she talks about it, you get an immediate sense, right? If you were a voter watching that on Tuesday and you looked at this, Donald Trump is kind of all over the place. He's not really saying what he clearly thinks. Kamala Harris wants to restore abortion protections. You would walk away with no doubt about that at all. And that would be a true statement about her. Whereas what does Donald Trump actually want to see happen on abortion? Unclear. So that's a place where he's communicating policy a bit, right?
17:32 Ezra Klein? Return it to the states, but without communicating what the policy says about him, because there actually is a disconnect between the policy and what he seems to believe.
18:03 Claire Gordon? So let's talk about Trump's abortion policy, because this was a pretty interesting moment, I thought, in the debate, where Trump says that he doesn't support a federal abortion ban, but then he's specifically asked whether, if that came to his desk, he would veto it. He doesn't answer, and then he's asked directly.
18:24 Speaker 07 But if I could just get a yes or no, because you're running me, J.D. Vance has said that you would veto if it did come to your desk.
18:31 Claire Gordon? And this is what he said.
18:32 Donald Trump? I didn't discuss it with J.D. in all fairness. J.D., and I don't mind if he has a certain view, but I think you're speaking for me, but I really didn't. Look, we don't have to discuss it, because she'd never be able to get it, just like she couldn't get student loans. They couldn't get student loans. They didn't even come close to getting student loans. They taunted young people and a lot of other people that had loans. They can never get this approved. So it doesn't matter what she says about going to Congress. Wonderful, let's go to Congress, do it. But the fact is that for years, they wanted to get it out of Congress and out of the federal government. And we did something that everybody said couldn't be done. And now you have a vote of the people on abortion.
19:13 Claire Gordon? So Trump has already said in this debate that he's against an abortion ban. J.D. Vance said he would veto it. Why wouldn't Trump just say he would veto it?
19:23 Ezra Klein? I think that is one of the good questions of the debate. And Trump's unwillingness to simply say, no, I will not sign. I would indeed veto a six-week, a 12-week abortion ban spoke volumes. What he does here is very strange. He tries to move off of abortion. He's so uncomfortable talking about abortion. He begins inserting student loans as the example to talk about instead of the thing that he's actually talking about. And the argument he goes on to make, both about him and about Harris, is if I'm being generous to it, this argument is in a way correct, neither of them, under the current rules of the Senate, are going to be sent an abortion bill of any size.
20:07 Ezra Klein? That right now, you can't run abortion through budget reconciliation, so it is subject to the filibuster. Neither party is going to have 60 votes in the Senate. So Harris always phrases this very carefully. She says, if and when Congress sends me a bill codifying Roe v. Wade, I will sign it proudly. She doesn't say she will be able to do that. She says, if she's given that bill, she will sign it. What Trump says is she won't be given that bill. What he is kind of saying repeatedly when he is pushed on this is he won't be given the bill either. I've got two problems here. One is that one of them might be given the bill. We were not that far in 2021 from seeing the filibuster opened up. There's already been significant talk of carving out an exception to the filibuster,
20:52 Ezra Klein? and there are exceptions to the filibuster, including, by the way, for nominating Supreme Court justices, which is how Trump was able to get these people on the court in the first place. But there are exceptions to the filibuster, and there are people in both parties who want to make abortion one of them. And so if that happened, if Republicans had 53 votes or Democrats had 52 votes and they carve out an exception, either President Harris or President Trump could indeed get one of these bills. And what Harris has said is that she will sign a bill codifying Roe v. Wade. And it's worth noting that that is actually a climb down for Democrats. That is her taking a more moderate position than what the Democratic Party has taken recently.
21:33 Ezra Klein? What Democrats wanted to do around the Dobbs decision was pass something called the Women's Health Protection Act. It banned all kinds of things that red states were doing when Roe was still in force to make abortion harder to access. In saying that she will sign the protections of Roe back into law, she is very notably not saying that she will sign the Women's Health Protection Act into law. Maybe she would if it got to her, but her actual position is Roe. And Trump, I suspect because he does not want to actually make pro-life voters angry at him, is refusing to take the other side of this. Now, he has said in his platform that the states should decide.
22:14 Ezra Klein? What he has not said is if he gets a Republican Congress and they send him an abortion ban, that he would veto it. And I think you should take that seriously. It may not be literally his position, so not his position in the campaign, but he's a pro-life politician who appointed a pro-life majority to the Supreme Court, who governs in a pro-life coalition. And he also did not say, in a way I think was telling, that the states that have passed these severe bans are doing, in his view, something wrong.
22:42 Claire Gordon? But he seemed comfortable upsetting the pro-life voters in the past. What changed?
22:50 Ezra Klein? I think there are red lines in his mind, and possibly actually in politics, that he cannot cross. I think a lot of pro-life voters understand that he is trying to win in elections. And they're not happy with his repositioning here, but they are accepting of it. Making a clear promise about the future to oppose the single thing pro-life movement voters want more than anything else is different. A bit of pandering during the campaign is different than a commitment to oppose this. And by the way, a commitment to oppose it that would then be used against any other Republican. If Donald Trump made that commitment in that debate and he loses in 2024, well, then in
23:31 Ezra Klein? 2028, when Marco Rubio and Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis and J.D. Vance and so on are running for the Republican nomination, they'll all be confronted with Donald Trump's position. And they'll say, well, do you agree with Donald Trump, your former standard bearer, that you would veto a national abortion ban? So for him to make that step is to betray, or at the very least oppose, the pro-life movement in a much more substantial way than simply saying not that much about it in his platform.
24:03 Claire Gordon? So, talking about another policy piece, Trump's tariffs. And Kamala Harris has been attacking Trump for the tariffs, saying there are sales tax.
24:12 Kamala Harris? My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.
24:41 Claire Gordon? And Trump pointed out in his answer on that, that the Biden administration has kept some of his Chinese tariffs in place.
24:48 Donald Trump? In fact, they never took the tariff off because there was so much money, they can't, it would totally destroy everything that they've set out to do. They're taking in billions of dollars from China and other places they've left the tariffs on.
25:00 Claire Gordon? And then Kamala Harris was directly asked about that by the moderator, and let's just play that clip.
25:05 Speaker 04 Vice President Harris, I do want to ask for your response, and you heard what the president said there, because the Biden administration did keep a number of the Trump tariffs in place. So how do you respond?
25:14 Kamala Harris? Well, let's be clear that the Trump administration resulted in a trade deficit, one of the highest we've ever seen in the history of America. He invited trade wars. You want to talk about his deal with China, what he ended up doing is, under Donald Trump's presidency, he ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military, basically sold us out, when a policy about China should be in making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century.
25:48 Claire Gordon? Can you read the tea leaves there on what her trade policy would be, what she believes on trade, and why wouldn't she want to answer that question more clearly?
26:00 Ezra Klein? Here's what I wish Kamala Harris would have said here, what I think is actually true. I wish she would have said something like... Donald Trump has a lot of bad ideas. But I'm a big enough person to say he has some ideas that have had kernels of truth in them. And when he ran in 2016 on a much more skeptical position towards China, he was right. And one of the things we did in the Biden-Harris administration is to not change things where we thought Donald Trump had a point. We changed things where he didn't have a point, but not where he did. So, yes, we kept his relatively modest tariffs on Chinese goods.
26:40 Ezra Klein? That is a different policy than putting a 10% or 20% tariff on anything that any country, including Canada or Ireland, might export to the US. And Trump's presentation on his own policies here, that people are not going to pay this, the countries will pay it, it's going to be eaten up. We know how tariffs work. Of course it gets passed on. Of course it does. But this is a place, I think people think so much about the way Trump lies, that they don't think that much or talk that much about the places where he just has a misguided view of how economics of the world works. You might want to put a tariff on a very particular kind of good, where you're trying to either stop unfair competition from elsewhere, or nurture in a very specific way a domestic industry, right?
27:24 Ezra Klein? You might say, "We want America to be the leading semiconductor manufacturer, so we're going to put a tariff on semiconductors from other countries." There are reasons you may not want to do that, but that's the kind of theory you would do. You don't put a tariff on fruit that you import from other countries, and you have neither the climate nor the intention of growing here. That's stupid. That's just raising costs for no reason. And Trump's policy here is stupid. But on China, it is a surprising and very important fact about the Biden administration, that they were to Trump's right on China. They went further than he did. They didn't just keep his tariffs on China. They went further. They gated technologies. They've done a whole number of things.
28:08 Ezra Klein? They've done more in terms of alliances than he was ever able to do. The critique they can make of Trump on China is that they've been harsher China hawks than he has.
28:16 Claire Gordon? And she did kind of communicate that. She challenged him on chips.
28:20 Ezra Klein? But I think without admitting, again, this is where I think it's important to admit what people already sense. They believe Trump is tough on China, telling them he isn't, it's not going to work. But he's also not true. Trump occasioned a huge shift in how American politics thinks about China, and that is his victory. You can say that he did some things wrong, whatever, but the unwillingness to sort of admit that things have moved and then build on that, right? Which I think is a more convincing presentation is weaker. So I thought she didn't do a good job. I thought he did a bad job. I thought she didn't do a very good job of separating out what was going on here, that there's a set of China policies and then this universal tariff policy.
29:26 Claire Gordon? Another policy piece in the debate, which I just have to ask you about because this has been your bread and butter for a long time, was the healthcare section. And it was the most incredible flashback to 2016, having the moderator ask about whether Trump had a plan if he were to repeal Obamacare.
29:45 Donald Trump? I had a choice to make. Do I save it and make it as good as it can be? Or do I let it rot? And I saved it. I did the right thing. But it's still never going to be great, and it's too expensive for people. And what we will do is we're looking at different plans. If we can come up with a plan that's going to cost our people, our population, less money and be better healthcare than Obamacare, then I would absolutely do it. But until then, I'd run it as good as it can be run.
30:16 Claire Gordon? So just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan?
30:18 Donald Trump? I have concepts of a plan. I'm not president right now. But if... We come up with something, I would only change it if we come up with something that's better and less expensive. And there are concepts and options we have to do that. And you'll be hearing about it in the not-too-distant future.
30:37 Claire Gordon? Were you surprised to hear that Trump saved Obamacare?
30:41 Ezra Klein? Yeah, I was surprised to hear that Donald Trump saved the Affordable Care Act, though obviously I thank him for his service. I thought a lot of things were interesting in this. That Obamacare has a lot of imperfection to it, right? There are many things many of us would do differently. But actually beating it is not easy. There isn't a plan that just tastes great, is more filling, costs less money, induces less disruption than Obamacare. And so for Trump now to take partial ownership of Obamacare, right? That is political victory. But I also think this speaks to a genuine weakness of him as a candidate. Look, Harris's policy bucket is a little unfilled right now.
31:24 Ezra Klein? Because she didn't go through a primary, which would have been a long period of time in which her policy teams could be working and meeting with her and testing things out and talking to experts and talking to groups. Policy development takes time. But Donald Trump was president. He has been running this whole time. And he still has nothing, the concept of a plan. It's not that that's like a crazy thing to say on some level, that, you know, he's not done his plan yet, but you do have to ask why? What have you been doing that was so much more important than coming up with a good healthcare plan? Why don't you have anything here? And the truth is, like, it reflects something else among Republicans now, which is that they have given up on healthcare.
32:08 Ezra Klein? There isn't a good plan that has adherents in the Republican caucus and also has some political savvy to it that Trump can take down off of a shelf. The Obamacare appeal effort failed. And that has sort of left Republican healthcare wonkery in a state of rough devastation. They don't want to go back into the dark room where the bad thing happened. And you see that here, right? The Trumpists don't know what they want to do on healthcare. The GOP broadly doesn't know what it wants to do on healthcare. So Donald Trump doesn't know what he wants to do on healthcare. And so he fumbled around. And what Harris's position on healthcare was, which he didn't go into in any detail, but has been what you saw with Joe Biden, is like, yeah, we're going to keep tweaking
32:49 Ezra Klein? the Affordable Care Act, make it a bit bigger, make it more generous, make it more expansive. We're going to negotiate down Medicare prescription drug prices. There actually is like a playbook Democrats know how to run now. And Republicans, like not just Donald Trump, are kind of nowhere on this issue.
33:07 Claire Gordon? I know you wish we lived in a world where this was all a policy debate, but the differences in tariff policy and healthcare policy, how much is the election at all about that? How much does any of that stuff matter?
33:23 Ezra Klein? I never know how to answer this question because I think the way policy communication works is a little tricky. What I will say is that if you watched Kamala Harris on that stage, what you saw was a candidate who does think policy positioning is meaningful. And it goes back again to this point that the point is not the policies per se, but policy is one way and record is another, that voters intuit who a politician is. And she is trying to signal who she is to the electorate, which does not know her very well, and so is Donald Trump. And what she did last night was bait Donald Trump into reminding the electorate of something
34:06 Ezra Klein? much of it already believes about him, which is that there is a crazed side to the man that while he might be right about some things, you can't trust this guy. He's not normal on some fundamental level. He doesn't have it together. And she tried to offer, I think, a pretty straightforward view of who she is. In a way, I thought that the Kamala Harris presentation on Tuesday was a huge victory for Joe Manchin. On abortion, her position is not what the Democratic Senate Caucus's position was. It was Joe Manchin's position. He did not vote for the bill Democrats supported and said, no, no, what we should do is just Roe v. Wade. If you heard her on fracking, she got pushed a few times. Well, didn't you say you had banned fracking?
34:50 Ezra Klein? And she did say that or a version of that, and she has flipped on that. And she said, look, I'm here in Pennsylvania. Everybody here cares a lot about fracking, and I'm here to tell you that we've never had more domestic natural gas production than we have under the Biden and Harris administration. And not only that, in the Inflation Reduction Act, we opened up new leases for fracking, and I was a tie-breaking vote on that. Why was that in the IRA? Partially Joe Manchin, significantly Joe Manchin. She didn't brag about the climate investments of the IRA at any length. She bragged about opening up new lands for fracking. On immigration, what did she say? She didn't say she was going to restart a big comprehensive immigration reform process because we need to balance the humanity of how we treat immigrants with the national
35:34 Ezra Klein? interest with an orderly border. She said the bipartisan Senate border deal negotiated with James Langford, that she would sign that bill. This was, on policy, an extremely centrist presentation. Her economic ideas right now are fairly modest. She talks about building more homes, but is not specific about how to do that. Talks about an expanded child tax credit, which is a great idea and I hope does pass. Talks about this boost to small businesses. But there isn't a kind of uniting theory of it. What you're seeing here is a lot of policy communication meant to communicate to wavering voters in Pennsylvania that she is not too far left for them, that she is a kind of
36:16 Ezra Klein? moderate Democrat of a type they recognize. Maybe the vibe they associated with Joe Biden in 2020, even if in practice, Joe Biden governed to the left of that as president. So I think that was the message of a lot of what was happening there.
36:33 Claire Gordon? Do you think she successfully fended off the attack, at least from Trump, or the attempt to define her as a dangerously liberal Marxist who wants to give transgender surgeries to illegal aliens in prisons?
36:47 Ezra Klein? Man, Trump did her so many favors in that. I don't even think he tried very hard to make this argument. Everybody in the Republican Party is begging Donald Trump to focus on her positions from 2020. He's just not disciplined enough to do it. Now, I don't think she totally allayed concerns, right? You know, these were things that the moderator's pressing her on, and she would often just sort of dodge them. The problem right now for Harris, in my view, or the work that is left undone, is Harris is sort of dragging around two anchors in terms of her self-definition, which is she's dragging around the 2020 primary, which is the only time people really saw her on the national stage under her own definition. And she went
37:32 Ezra Klein? way to the left, way further left than her reputation was in California. And so now she's pivoting away from these positions, but without a very clear explanation of, well, these are all dumb. Why did you adopt them in 2020? I think it's hard for her to say, like, well, we all slightly lost our mind in that primary because we were terrified that we would lose to Bernie Sanders. And so we tried to co-opt his positions, but we were never going to do any of that, right? Like, that's the actual answer to that question, but it doesn't really work. And then the other is the Biden administration. And she could do a few things. She could try to forthrightly defend their record. Say, this has been a much better presidency than you give it credit for. But she's not doing that. They're probably wise not to do that because people's views of that are pretty stable, and they don't
38:14 Ezra Klein? like the Biden presidency. They just don't like how things have gone. So saying, I am running as the proud heir to this wildly successful presidency is not going to work. But nor is she exactly separating herself from it. So the Biden administration is also kind of an anchor she's dragging around. So she's sort of defined around the 2020 primary, to the extent she has self-definition, defined around the unpopular Biden administration, to the extent she has national, you know, vice presidential definition. And what they've done is sort of tried to sand the edges off of both of those things, but without creating, I think, in a clear way, a new definition for her, separate from just being the prosecutor who will prosecute the case against Donald Trump. So I think she wiped the floor with Donald Trump in this debate.
38:59 Ezra Klein? But that was the Donald Trump part of the debate. I think the Kamala Harris part of this is still a little bit of an open question. And the focus groups I was seeing of undecided voters sort of reflected that, too. Like, they didn't like Donald Trump. They thought she was better. But they didn't really feel like they left knowing her. What is the thing she is trying to say that Kamala Harris cares about most? And if you vote for her, this is what you're going to get. In terms of her own record, she's not been a politician driven by economics. But there are things that drive her, like for any president or candidate, and things that are a little bit more distant from her core. And I don't think she's managed to collapse the distance. I don't, you know, she doesn't burn with it in a way that I think you kind of need
39:44 Ezra Klein? to, in the way that Bernie Sanders did with Medicare for All, in the way that Elizabeth Warren does on corporate power, in the way that Donald Trump does on immigration. And the economy is big, right? Like, that's like the first thing often on people's minds. So I am extremely sympathetic to where they are in this. I mean, again, they have not had any of the normal time a candidacy at this level would have to figure all this out. They are trying to do everything all at once at warp speed with really only weeks to go until the election itself. And still, she is lucky that Trump has not been doing a good job defining her. She is lucky that he is undisciplined and chaotic.
40:25 Ezra Klein? So how do you replace the vague impression people have of Kamala Harris? Maybe impressed by her as a performer, think she seems better than they had heard, but they still don't really know who she is, with they do feel like they know who she is? And what are the fights you can pick that, like, give you a sense of her core commitments? I think that's their, their sort of unsolved problem.
40:49 Claire Gordon? And I just want to end by playing the moment of the debate that if there is any spark that animates the anti-MAGA coalition, this would be it.
40:58 Kamala Harris? Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. So let's be clear about that. And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that. But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election. And I'm going to tell you that I have traveled the world as Vice President of the United States, and world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump. I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you're a disgrace. And when you then talk in this way, in a presidential debate, and deny what, over
41:43 Kamala Harris? and over again, are court cases you have lost because you did, in fact, lose that election, it leads one to believe that perhaps we do not have, in the candidate to my right, the temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact. That's deeply troubling, and the American people deserve better.
42:07 Ezra Klein? I thought that was her best answer of the debate. After a while of baiting him, that was when she delivered a roundhouse. And the thing she did beautifully there and correctly, not just a debate tactic, but this whole sort of strategy they were playing out over that night, was to take something that was performance and make it indictment. What she is saying about Trump here, that the move she makes so adroitly, is that, on the one end, yeah, Donald Trump is lying about the election. He did not allow, or tried not to allow, the peaceful transfer of power. He has made us look terrible in front of the world.
42:51 Ezra Klein? But that gets to something fundamental about him. He is not able to process something like losing the election. He is actually confused or has confused himself about the facts of the election. This guy does not keep facts straight in his head. He does not know what to believe. He's like all up in his own grievances and personal narrative and conspiracies. And whatever else you think about him, whether you like his position on China or the border or tariffs, whether you like the Donald Trump economy or not, this is not the guy you trust with power. At the absolute core of this election is can you trust Donald Trump to be president
43:34 Ezra Klein? again, given what happened and what he did last time he was president? And also what happened last time he lost as president. And turning this not just into a question of who won the election, but of Donald Trump's cognitive fitness, not that you can't trust Donald Trump here because he's undemocratic, but because when you talk in this way in a presidential debate and deny what over and over again are court cases you have lost, elites want to believe that perhaps we do not have in the candidate to my right, the temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact? That's getting at the fundamental thing here. I don't think the guy you saw up there on Tuesday seemed like he could do the job.
44:18 Ezra Klein? I don't think you would want that guy in a negotiation with congressional leaders to say nothing of a negotiation with Putin or Netanyahu or Kim Jong-un in any set of directions. He was not cognitively strong. He did not have high levels of executive function. After the first debate, Democrats looked at the candidates and said, we are not drawing the fitness contrast we want to be drawing. They did something very difficult, persuaded Joe Biden to step aside, they united around Harris. And they basically tried to redraw the contrast. And I think they were pretty successful at that overnight. Debates don't just matter because of what happens that night.
45:02 Ezra Klein? They matter because of the stories they create in American politics and the way people respond to them. And it's not that I think this debate will end the Trump candidacy. But even if you watched how Republicans are responding, which is largely complaining about the ABC moderators, you saw their own dispiritedness. Donald Trump did not perform. He had a job to do and he didn't do it. And that sentiment in American politics, the vibes, I guess we now call it momentum, all that really does matter. And this is what I think Harris did to win the debate, that she fundamentally made Donald Trump look like he wasn't up to the job.
45:44 Ezra Klein? And she got Donald Trump to make Donald Trump look like he wasn't up to the job. And she had her own weaknesses or imperfections in that, but she looked like she was. And that was the fundamental contrast.
46:06 Ezra Klein? This episode of The Ezra Klontz Show is produced by Claire Gordon. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Will and Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin, and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Cemiluski and Chen Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
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