The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the October 2, 2024 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: With just a few weeks remaining until election day, Donald Trump has decided that the way to close the deal with swing voters is to rhapsodize about police violence, threaten to prosecute anyone who displeases him, and above all, unleash childish and disgusting insults toward his opponents, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. What if there’s a way for Harris to use Trump’s unhinged tirades and threats to her advantage in the final stretch of the race? A.B. Stoddard, a columnist at The Bulwark, suggested this in a new piece that’s all about how Harris can close strong on this campaign. We thought this idea was worth exploring in some detail because it challenges some unspoken assumptions in our politics right now that really deserve scrutiny. Great to have you back on, A.B. You’re becoming a regular around here.A.B. Stoddard: It’s great to be with you, Greg. Thanks. Sargent: So a quick recap. In recent days, Trump has called for “one really violent day” for police to be unleashed to solve crime for good. He’s threatened to prosecute Google for displeasing him. He pushed the deranged lie that disaster relief in the South is being denied to MAGA areas. And on Fox News, he said this about Tim Walz, “I would love to have two or three more debates. I like it. I enjoy it. But they’re so rigged and so stacked. You’ll see it tomorrow with J.D. It’ll be stacked. He’s going up against a moron, a total moron. How she picked him is unbelievable. And I think it’s a big factor. There’s something wrong with that guy. He’s sick.” That was before the debate, obviously, which is when we’re also recording. What do you make of all that, A.B.? Stoddard: Well, there was a lot of talk during the primary campaign earlier in the year that Donald Trump had finally seen the light, and to avert prison, he was going to find discipline and he was going to do a big reset of all his ways, which had been successful for him in the past. In 2016 and 2020, let Trump be Trump, that was his charm. He galvanizes people, you don’t have to like it, but he gets them out and he has this following and he can get to a majority doing his thing. And it was all turned around. He got an organized, professional adult team in place and he was sitting back quietly. Everyone thought that was going to be the new him because he couldn’t risk anything in 2024. He had to win. He had to stay away from prison. What you see in the last couple of weeks is the reality setting in with Trump, that she is close in the polling and often in the lead, that he could be beaten by a Black woman and that he might be looking at some convictions down the line. So he’s becoming unhinged. He is more liberated from whatever he used to do in politics, the rules he played in 2020 and 2016, because look how far he’s come, Greg. He’s gotten away with January 6, had it become a big fantastical fiction of great lore. He’s become the nominee for the third time, he’s remade the party, he’s decimated the party so that it is wholly dependent upon him. He controls all the money, the Republican voters who donate pay his legal bills. It’s really astounding in so many ways. He’s not a split person anyway, but given all the factors I just laid out, he’s decided to throw that all out the window. He’s going from his gut and we’re seeing the real Donald Trump, right? He is an authoritarian, he’s a dangerous, reckless man. He’s a sadist, he has fantasies about control and dominance and power and brutal crackdowns. So he’s letting his freak flag fly in the final days, hoping that that is going to energize what he believes is a majority of Americans who are Trumpers, and he’s going to win with that kind of language. Sargent: Yes. A lot of the time, when pundits are talking about this stuff, they make a basic mistake, which is they say, Oh well, Trump is just not actually thinking about how this will impact swing voters. I think he actually believes that this works with swing voters, this kind of stuff, that it activates their latent MAGA tendencies. What do you think of that? Stoddard: Yeah, I think so too. I think he believes that there are dark forces in the country and that it is a chaotic time. We’re coming out of Covid. Things cost too much. They’re very upset about that. There’s a bleak outlook on the right track, wrong track of the country and the near future anyway because of the economy. People don’t like foreign conflicts. Now we have natural disasters. There’s a feeling of panic and he feels that he can layer on another dose of fear that it will basically lead people into his camp. Tim Alberta was on one of our podcasts, Beg to Differ, Mona Charen’s podcast on The Bulwark, this week, saying that he actually believes that suburban security moms in very critical areas around the cities in the swing states, Philly, Atlanta, Detroit, on and on, are going to be captivated by this message. Even though they might not want to vote for him, they’ll come back around. Of course he’s counting on a lot of men in this country, white people in this country to go into the booth and say, I really can’t, I can’t vote for a woman commander in chief, not a Black woman either. And it just may work. Sargent: Right, he thinks at least in his lizard brain that he’s activating these tendencies that will reflexively assert themselves in the minds of voters and turn them against the Black woman. That’s how he sees it. I think he’s got that wrong. My belief is that this does alienate suburban moms or whatever and certain types of swing voters, critical ones, but that he can win anyway if people end up not factoring it in. That leads me to your argument, which is hiding right in plain sight: in the closing days of the campaign, Harris’s surrogates should be out there reminding voters of this kind of stuff, and also things like Trump saying the invasion of Ukraine was the U.S.’s fault. How might doing this make the difference in the campaign’s final days with the voters that are on the fence right now? Stoddard: So I think it’s really incumbent on the Democratic coalition to speak to the small universe of swing voters about the risk we take with him, the danger of Trump, the uncertainty, the destabilization, not only at home, but abroad. While Harris has been so intentional and run such a smart campaign, she’s avoiding certain things, we know for sure. Identity politics, trashing Trump, talking about democracy and January 6. She is avoiding taking the bait, he’s trying to run ads about trans issues. But she doesn’t want to take his bait. So she stays on the high road and avoids a lot of this stuff. And my argument is: that’s over, with now that we have five weeks left to today until election day. We cannot let these, not only attacks on her as mentally disabled, but the thing that you just mentioned, the idea of saying that Russia invaded Ukraine, that’s our fault, and Ukraine is gone and these types of things. The fact that these things are going unanswered and that Tim Walz is “sick,” that there’s something “sick” about him? There should be someone every day, and I understand it’s not going to be the candidate, but it should be somebody every day saying, This man is unwell. This is not how we need anyone to talk in this country. This woman is focused on your problems. He is full of grievance and rage. They just need to keep pounding. These things cannot go unanswered, Greg. We are normalizing Donald Trump…Sargent: Yeah. Stoddard: …and MAGA and the way that they have degraded our discourse and our politics and the way that they relish in instability and cruelty and hominem attacks and being offensive. At this period, I think the Democrats, should she lose, would regret looking back and saying, Why did we let him just go and say, Well, that’s just Trump, he just goes on Fox and Friends and says batshit, horrible, mean things that are usually untrue, we just got tired of it, so we moved on to other kitchen table issues. You can do both things at the same time. Sargent: Yeah, and you make a powerful point there when you say that not taking the bait, which seems to be what Harris wants to avoid doing, that that actually can translate into letting all the deranged lunacy seep into the discourse unchallenged and thus normalizing it. By the way, a lot of political professionals and journalists, the elite opinion-making and consensus forming class, take it as given that Trump’s deeply debased character and low morals are “baked in” for voters, to use a horrible cliche that political professionals will not stop using.I’m telling you, I’ve said this before, we need to banish that phrase “baked in” forever. I really question that idea that this stuff is baked in. I think voters actually keep forgetting why they despise Trump’s first term and every time they’re reminded he loses ground and then when he recedes, he gains ground. Let me ask you, it sounds like you think there’s a way to keep it front and center, this stuff in voters minds. I still don’t quite have a feel for what it would look like if it’s done correctly. Can you explain that?Stoddard: Right. Again, I understand why she’s not going to do that. She wants to talk to voters about their problems and her solutions, and she wants to look forward and not back. That is why she’s run a great campaign. That is why she’s improved her favorability numbers. That’s why she is in a good polling position right now. I would like national security professionals who have endorsed her to come out, generals, retired generals, I don’t care who they are, to talk about how destabilizing this pro-Putin maniac would be and what that looks like and what that feels like. Then at the same time…I don’t care if it’s Eric Swalwell or Gavin Newsom or Senator Coons, but someone’s got to come on TV every day after he says this stuff the day before. Because it’s every day now. He’s in a rally in a swing state saying this stuff every day.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186615/transcript-trumps-fury-sick-tim-walz-gives-harris-way-forward