Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 9/27/24

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: With less than six weeks to go before Election Day, Kamala Harris confronts one of her political vulnerabilities, immigration.

Foreign policy takes center stage as Harris and Donald Trump meet with Ukraine's president.

And J.D.

Vance and his Democratic rival, Tim Walz, prepare to debate in New York, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

I'm Laura Barron-Lopez.

Jeffrey Goldberg is away.

Vice President Kamala Harris is visiting the southern border in the critical swing state of Arizona, looking to flip the script on immigration.

Her visit coincides with another round of baseless claims from former President Trump about Haitian immigrants.

And the candidates' foreign policy differences were on stark display this week.

Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Wendy Benjaminson is a senior editor for Bloomberg News, Adam Harris, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and Heidi Przybyla, Politico's National Investigative Correspondent.

Thank you to all for being here tonight.

Peter, I want to start with you.

We're going to get to immigration, but we're less than six weeks out from Election Day.

Just give us a quick state of the race right now.

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, if you went to sleep last week and you're waking up now, it's pretty close to where it was last week.

We are in a period of the campaign where the numbers are inching up incrementally.

Small numbers are being examined and given larger meaning, perhaps than they have.

But Harris is building a slight but meaningful edge.

That's in the national polls.

In the state polls that matter, the seven states that we all really care about, it really is about as tight as a tick.

And some of my colleagues at the Times this week did something really interesting.

They tried to apply a filter, looking at how polls have gotten things off in the past, right?

So, if you look at the polls in those seven battleground states, and we assume that the polls are off in the way that they were in 2020, when Trump's support was underestimated, Trump wins all seven.

If you assume that we're off by the way we were in 2022, when Democrats were underestimated, Harris wins six of the seven.

So, tell me what we're supposed to make of that.

We don't know.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: It's a margin of error.

What are we supposed to make of that?

Wendy, Bloomberg has its own poll out this week.

What stood out to you from that?

WENDY BENJAMINSON, Deputy Managing Director, Bloomberg News: Well, a lot of things stood out to me.

First of all, it did exactly what Peter said that it should do, which showed a deadlocked, tight race between Harris and Trump.

She is within the margin of error above him in our poll in all seven states, but just barely, and dead even in Georgia.

So, it absolutely could go either way.

But what struck me as even more interesting than that was this idea of where Kamala Harris is gaining ground that Joe Biden could not.

She is now only two points -- or excuse me, four points behind Trump, gaining two points.

When we asked voters, who do you trust more to steer the U.S. economy?

Now, it's only a four-point difference between her and Trump.

Just last month, it was six, and when Joe Biden was running, it was far greater than that.

She is also gaining ground with voters on who do you trust to steer, to help the middle class.

And her policy proposals, when we offered a blind taste test, of here's some policy proposals that are out there, which ones do you like?

Her's were far more popular than his except for ending the federal tax on Social Security.

That was the most popular policy position.

But it shows that she is gaining ground.

The one place that is still really hard for her is the issue of immigration, where she is 14 points behind Donald Trump on trust on immigration.

And that really struck me partly because, given Trump's rhetoric, given Trump's attitude toward immigrants, what it says about how swing state voters feel about new arrivals to the country.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Well, you gave me the perfect segue, because, Adam, we do want to talk about Arizona, which is where the vice president is right now.

And in a New York Times poll of Arizona voters, it found that Harris is behind Trump by five points.

When voters were asked if the election were today, who would you vote for, and they said 50 percent would vote for Donald Trump, 45 percent would vote for the vice president.

So, Adam, right now, she's attempting to flip the script on immigration there and really challenge Donald Trump.

Are voters responding to this?

ADAM HARRIS, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Yes, well, you know, it's interesting because over the last several months, we've actually seen her make up some ground that Joe Biden had already lost on immigration, right?

There was a CNN poll back in July that had her -- that had Joe Biden somewhere around 22 points behind Donald Trump on immigration.

Now, she's somewhere around eight in that same CNN poll.

So, what the Harris campaign sees is an opportunity to sort of be a little bit more aggressive, right?

She's not necessarily defining her own immigration policy.

There are a couple of differences between her policy and Joe Biden's policy.

I know that she wants to change some of the conditions for citing asylum restrictions or for changing the asylum restrictions.

But, effectively, they see that there is a possibility for an end there, where the former president, right, he's sort of running on a policy of fear when you think about immigration, right, things where him and J.D.

Vance will say that, you know, it's a million migrants are coming across the border each month when, you know, data shows that it's never been more than 200,000 a month, right?

So, it's really a sort of campaign of fear, policy of fear, and there's a ceiling to that, where the Harris campaign thinks that there's a floor, and she can only go up on her immigration policies.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And border crossings are down right now as well.

Heidi, on the Republican side, despite repeated debunking, despite the governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine saying -- telling members of his party to stop spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town, eating pets, a Republican congressman this week, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, tweeted this.

He said that Haitians are wild, speaking about those Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets, voodoo, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, that Haitians are slapstick gangsters, and that all of these thugs need to get out of the country by January 20th.

What does this say about the state of the GOP?

HEIDI PRZYBYLA, National Investigative Correspondent, POLITICO: But what is so I'm so pernicious about this is that many in the Republican Party constantly say we are for legal immigration.

We're not anti-immigrant.

Well, this is blatantly anti-immigrant because these Haitian workers are here legally fulfilling jobs that are needed.

But there are no consequences in the party right now for comments like this.

Yes, he was told to pull it back.

But, overall, we're in a climate now of unprecedented political violence.

We haven't seen something like this since the 1970s.

And it's worse by several metrics.

Because in the 70s, we were talking about property damage, not assaults on individuals.

We didn't have like the shootings of black shoppers in supermarkets in Buffalo.

We didn't have neighbors shooting each other because they thought they were of the opposite political party, which did happen last year in Ohio.

So, right now, the whole narrative about political violence though, has been driven by Trump saying, well, I've been the target of assassination attempts.

But what the data shows is that a lot of the political violence is actually taking place on American people, on the American citizens, on election officials, the threats against election officials.

But none of that is resonating within the GOP.

They're not disciplining their own.

And so there are no consequences, and comments like this just continue to be made.

WENDY BENJAMINSON: And, in fact, if I may, just for a minute, Heidi, you made a very good point about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield.

They are actually reviving the economy there.

The population had gotten very old.

Young people were leaving this town as soon as they could, not filling all those jobs.

Well, here come the Haitians on temporary protected status from Haiti because of, I guess, a coup or natural disaster.

And they're taking the jobs.

HEIDI PRZYBYLA: And they're actually paying Social Security taxes, but can't collect on the benefits, just to put a bow on it.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes.

Adam, go ahead.

ADAM HARRIS: Well, I would say and it's also, you know, squarely within that sort of GOP strategy of sort of vilifying the supposed other, right?

It's just sort of it's a sort of dehumanization.

One of the lines from that tweet that really stuck out to me was, you know, when there was -- you know, if they don't feel all sophisticated, right, and it's hard to hear that and not think of, you know, people calling, you know, black people uppity, right, supposing that they think that they have more rights than they should have.

And as you were saying, right, these are Americans or these are migrants.

PETER BAKER: I was going to say, it's striking how -- I'm sorry, but it's striking to go back and watch Trump rallies in the last few months, which I've been doing lately for a story.

And if you watch rally after rally after rally after rally, it is really -- it's almost like a single issue campaign for him, right?

The rally is border, border, border, inflation, crime, border, border, border, Kamala is a communist, border, border, border.

He comes back to it again and again and again.

Because that's where his energy is and that's what he thinks he won in 2016, build the wall.

It was the accidental slogan.

He didn't know it was going to become popular.

As soon as he saw it was popular, he grasped onto it like a lifeline.

And from his point of view, it worked.

So, now he's trying it again eight years later.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Is it just about winning though, Wendy?

Because, I mean, tweets like Higgins' don't happen in a vacuum.

And as Peter says, this is what Trump's entire campaign is about.

But he and Vance aren't just saying Haitian immigrants are eating pets.

He's also saying that non-citizens are voting in hordes.

He's also saying that migrants are poisoning the blood of the country.

Why is he talking this way about immigration?

WENDY BENJAMINSON: Well, I assume it is, part of it is winning, but I think also part of it is that sort of demonization of the other, as you said, Adam, is also building the popular support for the deportations that he wants to carry out for incredibly tough draconian immigration policies that he wants to put in.

And if you can make America angry about it and not see these as people in need who came, just like all of our ancestors did, then that is -- then he can shove them out of the country.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And, Heidi, we were just in Michigan where a bunch of election officials were meeting.

I mean, some of this rhetoric seems like it's also just an attempt to lay the foundation to say that the 2024 election is being stolen by non-citizens?

HEIDI PRZYBYLA: Well, yes.

In 2020, there were conspiracy theories in very specific states, like Michigan, that ballots were being harvested and dumped and taken in suitcases.

And now the predicate is being laid that illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants are voting, and you're seeing this in numerous states and the elections officials that we talked to said, use the media, play a really vital role in this.

Because we know in the disinformation spin cycle that when you can pre-bunk information and say, hey, listener, hey, viewer, this is what you are going to be told, it is false.

let me repeat that.

But this is what you're going to be told and here's the truth, that the more that we can get that out and tell them that this is actually pre-planned and being hatched right now, that the more effective it might be at keeping some of the civil unrest that, frankly, those elections officials are worried about because they told us, look, we got it, okay, there are no election deniers that won in these states.

We're going to be able to administer a very fair and efficient election.

What we're worried about is the aftermath and the disinformation and the people who believe the lies and what they might do.

WENDY BENJAMINSON: And another good point, though, is that they are -- the new thing in this cycle that we didn't see in '20 or we didn't see in '16 was this notion that, yes, I'm lying.

Sure, I am lying.

J.D.

Vance says he knows the Springfield, Ohio, story about Haitians eating pets isn't true.

But he says he wanted to get our attention on -- the media's attention on the issue of immigration.

But it sort of backfired and it became an issue about them spouting disinformation.

But that's the thing is that now it is okay to lie, it is okay to admit that you're lying, and still campaign on that.

It's really startling.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And at rallies, a lot of the voters believe those conspiracy theories.

I do want to get to another big contrast this week, which was on Ukraine, between the two candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who clashed, and Trump essentially suggested that Ukraine may need to make some major concessions.

DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: Because Ukraine is gone, it's not Ukraine anymore.

You can never replace those cities and towns, and you can never replace the dead people.

Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now.

If they made a bad deal, it would have been much better, they would have given up a little bit.

KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. Vice President, Democratic Presidential Nominee: These proposals are the same of those of Putin.

And let us be clear, they are not proposals for peace.

Instead, they are proposals for surrender, which is dangerous and unacceptable.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: So, a big split screen, big contrast there, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in town.

And Trump was later asked, Peter, if he thinks Ukraine should turn over some of its land to Russia.

And he said, quote, we'll see what happens.

It appears to be pretty clear at this point that if Trump thinks that a way to end the war is for Ukraine to make some major concession.

PETER BAKER: Absolutely.

He says he can end the war in 24 hours.

I don't know anybody who deals with Russia who thinks that's at all possible.

If it were, the only way it would be possible would be to basically say, okay, Putin, you win.

And J.D.

Vance has said this.

He said that the Ukrainians are going to have to accept losing their land and for swearing any NATO membership, you know, swearing to be neutral, in other words, everything Putin wants.

That is, in fact, what that J.D.

Vance stipulation is, that Putin gets to illegally cross borders, use force to take territory that is not his, of a sovereign country, that Russia had pledged previously to respect and that he gets to therefore keep that territory.

So, that's not much of a deal, and I don't think anybody in Ukraine thinks that's a deal that they want to live with.

But they know that Putin -- I'm sorry, they know that Trump, where he's left (ph), is not on their side.

And they know that if he wins, they are going to look at an America that's very different than the one right now, that isn't going to be sending them weapons, isn't necessarily going to be sending them aid.

And therefore, they're going to be under pressure to give up something that they otherwise don't want to give up.

HEIDI PRZYBYLA: Of all the policy positions that Trump puts out, this is the one that you can bet he will stick to.

Because it is the one thing over the arc of his entire public career that he has remained consistent on.

I was looking at the origins, his political origins.

He registered as a Republican a few days before going on his first trip to Moscow in the 80s.

When he came back -- he was escorted, by the way, by Russian colonels on this plane to go and scope out real estate, but when he came back, it was only a few weeks later that he entered politics.

And the way he entered politics was with advertisements in major newspapers taking a position that no one was taking at the time, which was that our allies are ripping us off and that we're paying too much.

This is the position, as you all know, that you can draw -- trace a direct line to today, that he has not changed.

And so there's no reason to believe that once he gets back into office again, that he would do anything that isn't pretty much in the pro-Russian category when it comes to Ukraine.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And even though voters don't tend to make their decisions based on foreign policy, Adam, Harris is trying to take advantage of this essentially, potentially, you know, highlighting her position on, in defense of Ukraine in front of Nikki Haley primary voters.

I mean, is that something that you think is working so far?

ADAM HARRIS: Yes.

I mean, what the vice president is doing right now, right, is projecting this idea of unity, right, this idea that isolation isn't insulation, as she said, right, that protection of democracy elsewhere means protection of democracy at home.

And it's really painting that contrast with the president.

And Republicans, you know, under the leadership of President Trump, have really sort of gone on to this idea that, you know, as Heidi was saying, right, it's not necessarily in our best interest to go into a foreign war, particularly when, you know, they could do a thing, right, whether that's ceding some of their land to Russia in order to end the war.

And even in his meeting with President Zelenskyy, he came out of it and wasn't willing to just say that, oh, well, you know, we support Ukraine.

It was more so we'll try to work together to figure this out.

And it was interesting, you know, where this sort of tizzy kind of started where President Zelenskyy was effectively just arguing that President Trump believes that he can solve this quickly when people think that, they get into it, they really start to study the details, and they see that this is not a simple issue.

But Trump sort of reverted to that sort of strategy that he has of, I was backed into a corner and so I attacked.

And so you've seen that dynamic already play out and they've said they want to have a better relationship going forward, but it's hard to see when they're sort of divided on that policy.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: There is a debate coming up.

I don't know if any of you guys know.

Just another one between J.D.

Vance and Tim Walz.

And before we get to the debate, J.D.

Vance is going to be heading to Pennsylvania this weekend.

And I want to bring this up because I think it's pretty striking, this appearance that he's going to be making, Wendy, at a town hall in Pennsylvania that's hosted by the evangelical leader, Lance Wallnau.

Wallnau is hosting these religious political road shows in battleground states across the country where he repeats lies about the 2020 election being stolen.

He, at some of these events, has called January 6th a, quote, election fraud intervention.

And he's also, this Lance Wall now, has accused Harris of witchcraft and has called her a, quote, Jezebel spirit.

For some people who may not know, that's a promiscuous woman.

And it's also a racist stereotype that was used during slavery in Jim Crow eras.

Why?

Like why appear alongside an evangelical leader like this?

WENDY BENJAMINSON: I have no idea.

I will tell you that if there is one person among the four of them, well, maybe Trump too, but if there's one person who needs to make up some ground with female voters, it is J.D.

Vance.

He is the one who started the childless cat ladies thing.

He is the one who said, okay, my wife's not white, but I love her.

She's a great mom, which is I wouldn't appreciate that if they were talking about me.

He has, you know, spoken out against abortion rights and against reproductive rights.

And now he is standing on a stage next to a man who, forget 21st century misogyny, this is like 18th century misogyny, to call her a witch who was -- during the debate he thinks she was using witchcraft to make Trump say things that he didn't mean to say.

I mean, this is not just conservative Christianity.

It's not at all.

It's -- PETER BAKER: That's right after he's agreed to appear on Tucker Carlson, a couple days after Tucker Carlson has on a person who's called a historian who says that World War II is really Churchill's fault and Hitler didn't really want to fight.

And Vance was asked, well, why would you go on Tucker after he just had this person on?

He says, well, I don't get into that game where you have guilt by association just because he has that person on doesn't mean I have to not go on.

So, he's, you know, applying the same rules there, basically.

I'm not going to -- there's nobody that I would feel so ashamed to be next to that I won't be.

HEIDI PRZYBYLA: But this is not necessarily a fringe character, and this is all I say, because, well, Lance Wallnau has live streamed from Mar-a-Lago.

These folks are very much plugged into major figures, and this is an example of that.

WENDY BENJAMINSON: And the Trump campaign seems to be bringing in more and more of these people.

You know, for a while, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita were running the campaign.

They're pretty smart Republican operatives, well known.

And then we start seeing more of Laura Loomer.

We start seeing this Wallnau guy.

We start seeing more and more of those sort of fringe characters surrounding Trump, and perhaps shaping his recent views.

ADAM HARRIS: And it's interesting, right, because if you think about the Trump strategy generally, right, all of these things, whether it is talking about Haitian immigrants, whether it is going to, you know, where the shady Vance meeting with Wallnau and appearing with Wallnau, there's like this implicit strategy that is effectively should try to get the base to think about race.

As Peter said a little bit earlier, right, he had this thing that worked for him in 2016, you know, build the wall.

It was a sort of xenophobic play that sent -- that worked -- PETER BAKER: After years of the Obama birther lie.

ADAM HARRIS: Exactly.

And so the more that -- he believes that the more that he can get his base to think about race, the more that they might be -- even if it's to lie about it, right, they may be more inclined to turn out to vote and presidential elections are often turnout elections.

HEIDI PRZYBYLA: Before the pet-eating fiasco, it was that Congo was releasing prisoners onto the border and that the Venezuelans were releasing prisoners onto the border.

And as Peter says, everything comes back to immigration.

And it's the reason why when there was a bipartisan deal on the table, Trump picked up the phone and said, don't do it.

He wanted to run on immigration, which I'm sure we're going to hear a lot about at the debate.

And with the final time we have left on that debate, Vance is underwater right now.

I mean, his unfavorable rating is about at 45 percent compared to Tim Walz, who's unfavorable is 36 percent.

Peter, what are you looking for at this debate?

Is it going to be far more consequential than any other vice presidential debate that we've seen in modern history?

PETER BAKER: I mean, maybe.

I mean, I think we always look to them to be very consequential, but in the end, people were voting for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

Having said that, we've got two characters who will be appearing on this stage who have never been on a national stage before, really, right?

People do not really know J.D.

Vance and Tim Walz that well.

They're only getting introduced to them now.

For Vance in particular, as you say, underwater, this is one big chance to introduce himself or change his introduction, if he wants to, to the country.

Now, they're both, I think, pretty engaging debaters, actually.

I mean, Walz talked his way onto the ticket by being a pretty good basher of Republicans on MSNBC, let's say.

And Vance, of course, is willing to mix it up with reporters more than any of the other candidates.

He gets out there every day, and he doesn't mind tough questions, and he's willing to give back.

So, I think seeing the two of them go at it actually could be quite interesting.

And, of course, with Vance, it's also worth remembering that Donald Trump is 78.

He will be the oldest president if he's elected.

And therefore who this vice president is has more consequence than for a younger president.

HEIDI PRZYBYLA: Since there's not going to be a debate, another debate between Harris and Trump, this is it for primetime, even though it's the V.P.

candidates.

And I think Walz has kind of previewed what he's going to do with attacking Vance, like you're not really an everyday man.

You did Hillbilly Elegy, but you hang out with Silicon Valley billionaires, and he went to Yale.

And, by the way, I'm here to defend the honor of all women who own cats.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Unfortunately on the childless cat lady comment, we have to leave it there for now.

Thank you to our panelists for joining us and sharing your reporting.

And to our viewers at home, thanks for joining us.

For a look at why Donald Trump's tariff policy may be, quote, misunderstood by economists, visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Laura Barron-Lopez.

Good night from Washington.