Cats and dogs. Truth and lies. Substance and spectacle. The second presidential debate of the 2024 election, and the first between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, took place on Sept. 10. In stark contrast to the first debate, which put the final nail in the coffin of the Biden candidacy, Trump was clearly on the defensive in this round. Yet with the candidates neck-and-neck in the polls, it seems unlikely that this debate will meaningfully swing voter opinion in favor of Harris. Maximillian Alvarez, Marc Steiner, Stephen Janis, and Alina Nehlich respond.
Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome, everyone, to The Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News.
Stephen Janis: My name is Stephen Janis. I’m an investigative reporter at The Real News.
Alina Nehlich: My name’s Alina Nehlich, and I am an editor here at The Real News and co-host of the Work Stoppage podcast.
Marc Steiner: I’m Marc Steiner, host of The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News.
Maximillian Alvarez: And it is so great to have you all with us.
Now, before we get going today, I want to remind y’all really quick that The Real News is an independent, viewer- and listener-supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash. We don’t have ads, and we never put our reporting behind paywalls. Our team is fiercely dedicated to lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the world. But we cannot continue to do this work without your support, and we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. Just head over to therealnews.com/donate and donate today. It really makes a difference.
All right, well here we are. It is Wednesday, Sept. 11. Last night, former President Donald J. Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris met in person for the first time in Philadelphia, where they squared off in their first and possibly only debate in the 2024 election season.
Early polls taken over the past 24 hours suggest that the majority of viewers felt that Harris delivered the winning performance. And given the openly vented frustrations from the Trump campaign surrogates and the jubilant spin from Harris surrogates, that is certainly the narrative that has begun to crystallize after the debate.
Harris’s campaign said today that she was open to a second debate in October, but Trump said he was “less inclined to do another debate.” So this may very well have been the one and only time the country will get to see the two candidates that they’ll be voting on in less than two months debate on stage.
There were so many storylines going into this high-stakes debate, and there are lots of storylines coming out of it. And our whole Baltimore-based team was here at The Real News studio last night watching the debates live. We’ve been furiously discussing as a team how we’re going to be moving forward from the debate with more on-the-ground reporting on the election between now and November.
But before we all rush back into the field with our cameras and microphones, we wanted to get some of our team together here on The Real News podcast to break down the debate itself. And I’m so excited to have my colleagues Marc Steiner, Stephen Janis, and Alina Nehlich on to tackle this beast.
So I got tons of thoughts. I know you guys do too. Let’s dive right in. All right, so I want to go around the table here, and we’re going to put our pundit hats on. Not something that we normally do —
Stephen Janis: No, we don’t.
Maximillian Alvarez: …Here at The Real News. Of course, we’re focused on-the-ground reporting. And just as a constant disclaimer, I want to remind everyone The Real News Network is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit news outlet. We are not here to tell you how to vote. We’re not here to electioneer, but we are here to give you the information and perspective you need to act. So that is the frame in which we are going to be having this discussion.
I want to go around the table and start by having us give our pundit reflections on the debate itself and the expectations that we had going into the debate. What were we going into this debate looking for, and what were some of the key takeaways that stood out to us? Stephen, let’s start with you.
Stephen Janis: Well, I think everyone went into this debate wondering if Kamala Harris could perform in a national forum like that against Trump and distinguish herself to the point where she could actually move the needle a bit. I do think that was what people were looking for, and I do think she delivered on that. Clearly, by all accounts, by the snap polls, by the punditry that we listened to, she won that debate decidedly on that.
But I think what’s going to be the interesting question going forward, will that actually matter? And if it doesn’t matter, what does it say about the dynamics of this election? Because, in some ways, when you watched it, it was like watching two different realities never intersect. She was making points, and Trump was making points, but neither really seemed to be situated in a reality that was cohesive or coherent.
So I think it’ll be interesting, very interesting to watch to see if this really changes any people’s minds. That’s what my question would be.
Alina Nehlich: Yeah, I think that that’s pretty correct, Stephen, with at least what most people were expecting. I know that some of us, or I should say that some people maybe more on the left, were watching to see what the expectations were going to be surrounding the responses from the more liberal side of the electorate and just see the way in which things were going.
And also to what extent Kamala was going to keep moving right. Because what we did see was lots of war hawk talk and anti-immigrant sentiment. And so I guess we were kind of expecting that, but we definitely got plenty of it. Not only from Trump, which we definitely expected, but we also got plenty of that from Kamala.
Marc Steiner: Well, I think that she came in strategically equipped. She was talking to the undecided. She was talking to the middle of the road. She was there to make Trump look like a fool and lace it with a little bit of policy.
But really, I think strategically, having lived through a lot of politics and run a bunch of campaigns as well, when you’re prepping somebody for a debate, you focus on what the weak point of the opposition is, and you go after it. And that’s what they did. She was there to make him look stupid and not prepared and unpresidential. That’s what she did.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and to take a step back even further. Going into the debate. This was something that we discussed a lot here at The Real News Network. Stephen, you and Taya Graham were at the RNC in July.
Stephen Janis: Yes, we were.
Maximillian Alvarez: And we were talking about just how much the political scene has changed since you guys were in Milwaukee less than two months ago.
And let’s think about what you guys were going into. We had a plan. We had a plan for your coverage going into the RNC, and then two days before it started, someone tries to assassinate Donald Trump. It was a really intense moment for all of us. I can really only imagine what it was like for you and Taya to be in there at that moment when the fervor, post-assassination attempt fervor was so intense, and it had, as you described in one of your pieces, a religious kind of tone to everything.
So you had that. And out of that moment where Trump survived, his supporters were effusive with praise, and it really felt like, compared to the decaying Joe Biden, that this race was over. There was an act of God tipping the scale for Donald Trump. It was in that haze that I think he made the pick of J.D. Vance for his vice presidential running mate. And I think he regrets that a lot.
So since then, again, Biden dropped out, Kamala took over the ticket. Her momentum has been surging. She picked Tim Walz as her vice presidential candidate. The DNC was in August. Democrats had somehow, in the span of a month, managed to retake the momentum that felt so unshakably in the control of Trump and the Republicans.
Stephen Janis: I think one of the things that, watching the convention up close, is that Trump, his drama, his dramatic hold on our attention depended a lot upon Joe Biden and Joe Biden’s inability to offer anything appealing or any sort of visual contrast or even ideological contrast, because Biden was not a very good communicator at this point or ever really was.
And when you’re at the convention, there was this dystopian vision of American life. It was a constant drumbeat of things like inflation and crime, without any policy whatsoever.
And I think the Trump campaign had based its entire strategy on the aesthetics of Trump somehow being stronger, invoking fear, and then having this very… I mean, let’s say, I don’t want to use the word feeble, but that’s kind of what… Feeble old man, and what happened to them.
Of course, as you point out, when he showed up with the bandage on his ear, there was an ecstasy in that room that was very unsettling in some ways. Because it wasn’t really attached to any political reality, it was more a rhetorical statement.
But then when Kamala comes in, suddenly that contrast in the aesthetics and all that dynamic shifted in a second. And suddenly, as we could see last night in playing this out last night, Trump looked old, mean, bitter, and somehow disconnected from reality. So that’s a really good point, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and I just wanted to, again, remind folks about how much has actually shifted since the last debate.
Stephen Janis: Oh my God.
Maximillian Alvarez: There’s a constant knee-jerk assumption that we all make, and that people we know make, which is that the debates don’t matter. People who support Trump are going to keep supporting Trump, people who support Biden are going to keep supporting Biden. Then the debate at the beginning of this summer happens, and the result is Biden drops out of the race.
The result was seeing an open revolt with the party elite. The donor class, the media class rebelling against Biden staying on the ticket. That’s a significant thing to happen in a presidential race, but it’s already… It’s old news at this point.
And that is the other part that I wanted to mention going into the debate. What I was looking for and what I was thinking about was, what I was really fascinated by is that over the past two months, it feels like Donald Trump has become victim of the very things, the very qualities of the internet age that have catapulted him to his success and his star power up until now. The very things that have allowed Donald Trump to thrive as a political force in the internet age have been biting him back over the past two months.
And the two examples I would give is one, Trump has always thrived on the fact that the internet age has conditioned us all to have the long-term memory of goldfish. And he weaponizes the insatiable pace of the 24-hour news cycle to constantly just generate new headlines with the crazy stuff he says, the crazy things he’s doing in office, the crazy accusations that he’s making.
And since 2016, the media and the political class have never really figured out how to deal with that, how to counter that. But Trump is a creature of the internet in that way, and he knows how to swim in those waters, and it’s helped him so much over the past eight years in the Trump era.
And yet, he forgot that lesson when the assassination attempt happened. He thought that that vibe that you were feeling in the RNC, Stephen, was going to carry him all the way through November. And something as consequential and historic as an attempted assassination on a former president, current presidential candidate, that shit got memory holed in a month, less than that. People forgot. People stopped caring, and Trump doesn’t know what to do with that.
So he’s a victim of the thing that made him a success. In the same way that Trump is an internet troll, as we all know how great and adept he is at the art of trolling, he picked J.D. Vance as his vice presidential ticket. And then the internet just had a field day with that. They’ve been trolling him left and right and ridiculing Trump, Vance. Democrats had pounced on the “these guys are weird” messaging, and stoking the internet meme machine that has been attacking Trump and the Republicans.
I don’t think Trump knows what to do with that quite yet because he spent the whole of August complaining about how Biden should have to get back on the ticket because he was an easy opponent.
And so going into this debate, I was like, how is Trump going to attack? Because I think he’s got a lot of pent up rage and aggression, of course. But he’s also shown a lot of vulnerabilities in the past two months. So that was also what I was going into.
And the last thing I’ll say, because I’ve been talking a lot, is we knew that this debate, for all the reasons we’ll talk about in a few minutes, was going to be a carnival-esque display of capitalist politics crafted in the capitalist spectacle of horrors that…
Again, we all know what’s wrong about this system, what’s wrong about the election, the way we talk about elections and all that kind of stuff. So we knew it was going to be a carnival-esque display, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t going to be a consequential one. Just like the last debate, this debate could have had, and may still have real, ramifications for the shape of this election and the fate of the country that hangs in the balance.
And so I want to pick up on that and ask if we could focus in a little more on the debate itself and our impressions of how Trump and Harris handled themselves with all of that leading up into the debate itself.
Alina Nehlich: Well, speaking a little bit to what Stephen was mentioning with the RNC and Trump being a strongman in contrast to Biden’s more feeble, or however you want to phrase it, position in the election. I think that what we saw in the debate was Kamala trying to take that strong person narrative and use it against Trump in that same way. I believe at one point, she even called him weak on things. There’s always this, “I’m tougher than you.”
And it’s really interesting how the Democrats have gone in that direction compared to… Maybe I’m still a little young in that I’ve only seen, what, five elections in my lifetime, but I don’t always think of the Democrats as the, “I’m the strong person,” compared to the Republicans. And the fact that that is now Kamala’s take was surprising to me.
But also looking at the way that, as you were saying, Max, about the very short attention span of people, they do want to just have an image in their head. I think that even part of the purpose of this debate was to put Kamala up there on stage and remind people that this is the candidate, in a certain sense.
Sure, I bet some people have seen press conferences, maybe some people have seen clips of her rallies. But I don’t know if they really had a true mental image of her as the potential president and her being up there on stage with the camera and her looking nice in the suit and all that. It really did actually give that kind of presidential look. And I think that that was another major purpose of the debate itself, along with the interesting change in the way that the rhetoric is going from the Democrats.
Maximillian Alvarez: And just a quick note on the Democratic posturing outflanking Republicans by being more Republican than they are. It’s been a back and forth thing, but it was really in the early ’90s when the new Democrats with Clinton… After getting their asses whooped by Reagan and Bush, Democrats were really soul-searching. And the answer they came up for was let’s out-right the right and be tough on crime, and let’s take the gun out of their hands because they’re always calling us weak, and yada, yada, yada.
And so for my lifetime, it’s been a back and forth between trying to position themselves as the more compassionate side, the more progressive side. While at the same time, as Alina was saying, I’ve witnessed, at first as a conservative who grew up in the first 20 years of my life, and now as the lefty nut job you see before you, I’ve seen the ways that Democrats have jockeyed for position to establish themselves as the more, the stronger, no BS, tough on crime. The party that could simultaneously say, we are the compassionate party that wants to have the most lethal fighting force on the face of the planet, kind of thing.
And so it was really arresting to me to watch on the debate stage, all of that political maneuvering, all of the policy decisions, all of the messaging campaigns that have had real harsh, real world impacts for working people culminate in the thing that Democrats wanted to get out of that, which was taking out of a Republican candidate’s hand the ability to say, well, you guys are soft on the border. You guys are soft on Gaza. And Kamala could say, no, we’re not. I love Israel more than you. We’re stronger on the border than you. My running mate and I are gun owners.
And then that’s it. Is that what it was all leading to, just like that rhetorical, nope, you can’t get us there, so we win, kind of thing?
Marc Steiner: I think what you said is true. I think it’s also more complex than that. I think that because, being someone who’s a deep believer in dialectics [laughs], there’s an intertwining of things here. And so first of all, take into account that we’re living in an America at this moment where a Black woman, a Black Asian woman, is running neck and neck, if not a little bit in front, to be president of the United States in a country with a deep racist past.
We might live on politics and the intricacies of that. Most people don’t. People look at this very symbolically. They look at it as, look where we’ve come. Look what’s happened.
Think about our country historically. We had a civil war. We had Reconstruction that destroyed everything they fought for in the Civil War and began the lynching of Black people and disenfranchising Black folks in the South. And after Reconstruction, we had the Civil Rights Movement and all the pushback from the right and a large part of the white world against everything we fought for in civil rights. And I say we, because that was me.
And now you’re seeing this complexity up there. When Kamala Harris was up there, she was — And I’m not talking politics at the moment. I’m just talking about what people take in. Here was this woman standing solid, strong, taking on this big white fat buffoon, and she wiped the floor with him. And so yes, that has something to do with the complexity of how you appeal to people in America. Why did Teddy Roosevelt win? Because he came off as a badass, I’m a bull moose. We’re not going to take anything from anybody. That’s why he won. That’s not all of America. That’s part of America.
Stephen Janis: Obviously Harris was much more competent than Trump as a debater.
Marc Steiner: Absolutely.
Stephen Janis: Okay. And so it’s been a mystery to me the past four years, because as leftists, or people who lean left, we’ve seen a lot of progressive legislation, we’ve seen a lot of progressive ideas actually become reality under the Biden administration, but it hasn’t affected the electorate at all. And that’s what I’m wondering about the debate. Obviously Harris was more competent, did a better job. But will it change people’s minds in the sense that they seem inured to any sort of policy?
The Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS Act. All these things have been implemented in a much less neoliberal way and more — Well, some of them are market-based. But some of them, like the Infrastructure Act or the Inflation Reduction Act, are much more traditional, leftist, progressive, let’s say.
But it doesn’t really… And Marc, I don’t know, or Max, or anyone can weigh in on this, it doesn’t seem to connect with people. Everyone thinks everything is miserable, and Biden’s done a horrible job in the economy. And yet, what we would want as progressives to see happen happened, and even we don’t like it. So it just makes me wonder whether the debate matters, in that sense.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I think it’s a great question. It does speak to the spectacle of the debate itself. And I think this partially answers the question. But it’s something we talked about after the RNC and the DNC. These are spectacles manufactured for the camera. They are politics made symbol at its highest point. It’s politics made for the camera.
And the same is true for the debate stage. Marc, you mentioned the image, the symbolism, and the impact that that has on people. Let’s not forget that television, the first televised debate swung that presidential election away from Nixon towards Kennedy. Nixon looked sweaty.
I watched it. I did watch it. [Steiner and Alvarez laugh].
Stephen Janis: So you can testify.
Maximillian Alvarez: Nixon was not ready to be on TV and glow and shine through the way that Kennedy did, and that had a major impact. And so I mention that just to mention that in terms of stage managing the spectacle and the symbolic value that people project onto that and that’s projected back at us, is almost its own thing.
Stephen Janis: Max —
Maximillian Alvarez: Divorced from policy.
Stephen Janis: Just one thing. [Inaudible]. Marc, I’m sorry, but Marc, you can answer this. Oh, I’m sorry. Oh my God. But just quickly, I want to throw this question out. Nixon got in trouble for being a little sweaty, and yet Trump was insane. Why does that —
Marc Steiner: Different era.
Maximillian Alvarez: Oh yeah, our country’s gone…
Stephen Janis: Sorry, I just wanted to ask that question. I apologize.
Maximillian Alvarez: Oh, no. We got decades of insanity that have compounded from that moment on [laughs]. But yeah, but Trump still, again, he’s able to… He’s a product of that same lineage that itself has gone through decades of evolution with the transition to 24-hour news cycle, cable TV, reality TV, streaming, the internet. So I think you can connect a through line to Donald Trump today to Nixon 60 years ago.
But I think that the media environment, our expectations, the ways that politicians have played to the debate and to the television, and the ways that has shaped the very politics that our two-party system bases itself around. There’s a whole… Don’t worry. We can have a whole long discussion about that, but at another time.
I guess the point I was just trying to make, though, is that in terms of the symbolism and the spectacle of these debates, they almost operate on their own terms, divorced from policy and the political reality that we all live in. There is some semblance of a connection, but it’s almost like a production that we have to analyze on its own terms.
And I wanted us to just hover there for a second because, on the terms of the debate that we all watched, I think, to extract some of the key points that we’ve offered here, Kamala Harris went in prepared. Like Marc said, she had a key objective there, which it seemed apparent to us that she achieved.
My two cents in watching that is that where she was most effective as a debater was baiting Trump and distracting him. I don’t think she nailed a knockout punch against Trump because you just don’t do that against Donald Trump. He’s going to keep going no matter what. He’s going to keep talking even if he sounds like an idiot. That’s his strength. He will just keep going and move past it.
But what she managed to do with all of these traps that she laid, calling him weak, like Alina said, mentioning his crowd sizes, mentioning people in his own party who have called him out as a failure, mentioning world leaders around the country who think he’s a disgrace. She knew each time she mentioned those, that the next time Trump got to speak, he was not going to address whatever he was asked to address. He was going to go back to the insult, or the thing that he took as an insult. And he did, every single time.
And so what that did was it distracted Trump from being more of an attack dog against Harris and the Biden-Harris record. And so in that way, she was a success on the debate stage, but again, it was more of evading the kill blows from Trump and knocking him off kilter, making him look like more of a buffoon.
But in terms of articulating a positive vision for the country, in terms of really hammering home what Harris and the Democrats are going to do to address the things that Trump was speaking most directly to, like people’s pain in today’s economy and the inflation squeeze that all of us have been feeling, things like that, this narrative of national decline. I don’t know, personally, how well she parried that, with the exceptions being when she talked about abortion. And I mean, that was honestly the main one.
Her message on the economy was still, I mean, she mentioned the small business thing like 800 times. But I don’t know, what do you guys think?
Alina Nehlich: I guess when it comes to — And I’m sorry if I’m jumping ahead of other people here.
Marc Steiner: You’re not. Go ahead.
Alina Nehlich: I was just thinking about the spectacle nature that you’re talking about and how it was a question of how can Trump be so divorced from reality? Not to give Kamala way too much credit, but she’s at least a little bit more grounded than Trump.
You think, you look at what is happening on the internet today, it’s just loads of memes. Whether it’s the silly, the ridiculous pet eating story, or the one where Trump’s like, Kamala’s letting trans people get gender-affirming care in prison, which is fine and good if it was real. And that’s why some of the memes are out there being like, wow, so trans people are now trying to go to prison to get these things that were promised to them by Donald Trump.
I mean, I think some of those memes are a little distasteful for a couple of reasons. But I do think that the fact that the memes are going around, that is emblematic of what this whole thing is really about.
Marc Steiner: I think most people in America, most people period around on the planet, are not into the intricacies of policy. They’re just not into the intricacies of policy at all. That’s not their lives. They know what they believe, what they think is right and wrong.
And you had Kamala Harris there talking about… She didn’t go into detail. You talked about opportunity economy. She talked about reproductive freedom in America. She talked about making housing more affordable, things people can relate to. She didn’t have to point out, this is how I’m going to do it. I’m going to give X number of people houses. But what she did was articulate a vision that appealed to people’s gut. She was talking last night to the undecided voter in America, to those in the margins, to those who will make a difference in who wins this election.
My take on this, what happened last night, it was a very savvy, strategic move on the part of the Democrats and Kamala Harris, the way they handled the debate. And she came off tough as nails. And we’re in a world now where a tough Black woman — I know she’s Black and Asian, but a tough Black woman in America was anathema to this country. It’s not the same anymore in terms of the visceral reaction people have because America’s changed. It is changing, not changed. It’s changing. And so the old white way is not the only way in America that people look at. And I think that she played into all that.
If there was a real left alternative in America, it’d be different there. There isn’t. Most of the left alternative is either inside the Democratic Party, inside the burgeoning labor union movement. They’re not in any coalesced group. We don’t have an NDP like Canada has. So I think people saw in her somebody who is fighting for them and not for the corporate interests, viscerally speaking.
Stephen Janis: To your point, Marc, the left has been very harsh on Biden. And a lot of the programs that have been passed were not cohesive because we don’t really seem to fixate on execution and competence. And that’s the thing. She was much better, obviously a masterful debater compared to Trump. But I just wonder if, three or four days down the road now and the polls are still the same, what do we conclude from that? Where are we? Is it because the left isn’t embracing this candidacy, or is it something else?
Marc Steiner: We’re a divided nation. We are a deeply divided nation. Since the Civil Rights Movement, to the anti-war movement, to the organizing that happened in the ’60s, politically, and with unions, there was this right-wing surge, and they are a powerful force.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I want to round us out by talking about that. How much do we think this debate is going to matter in the election?
Stephen Janis: Good question.
Maximillian Alvarez: And let’s also throw our pundit hats off for a second and put our reporter hats back on. Given the work that we do every week: Police Accountability Report, Work Stoppage, Working People, The Marc Steiner Show, I want us to round out by also talking about what and who was not being represented on that debate stage or in this election, and how should our audience and regular people out there navigate it?
So that’s where we’re going. But by way of getting there, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say, let’s at least go around the table and talk about our best, favorite crazy moments from the debate last night [Steiner laughs], because there were many, and I’m sure listeners don’t want to hear us be all serious all the time.
So what were some of the most ridiculous standout moments for you guys? I guess we took the most ridiculous one, so no one can use that. But Trump just farting out of his mouth this right wing conspiracy theory bullshit about undocumented migrants eating people’s pets. It’s just nuts. It really spoke to what you said, Stephen, about how, for one moment, we got to see these two alternate versions of reality sharing the same space. But they’re barely even talking to each other. They’re barely, if at all, on a shared terrain of reality.
Stephen Janis: Let me just go first because someone takes my — And I’ll make it very quick. I just thought the handshake moment was fascinating because Kamala comes out and just forcefully puts out her hand.
Marc Steiner: Walks to him.
Stephen Janis: And walks to him. And we talked about spectacle, symbols. I thought that was highly symbolic more than anything else, because she just demanded that… Because that was always a tradition, that candidates would shake their hands. Look, we all have different views and left, right, whatever, but we do want to see people be civil. We all want some civility. And the fact that she went out and made that statement and gesture showed that, I think, she was not to be trifled with. So that was my moment.
Alina Nehlich: Okay. So I already mentioned those two, so I’m not going to talk about the two that I brought up before. But I think that one of the moments that really stuck out for me was when Trump said, “I’m speaking to Kamala,” because that was just wild to see. Especially with the basically near pro-genocide rhetoric that was going on on the debate stage for Trump to call out that moment, which was based in a rally where Kamala was trying to stop anti-genocide protesters from voicing their demands and saying, “I’m speaking.” And then to see Trump do that, I don’t know. I thought that that was very funny to me, in an ironic but also horrible way.
Marc Steiner: There were so many jabs and barbs that she threw at him that he just didn’t know how to respond to. I mean, when she said, “81 million people threw you out of office.”
Maximillian Alvarez: No, she said, “81 million people fired Donald Trump.”
Marc Steiner: Fired! Fired!
Maximillian Alvarez: I’m sorry, fired. She very specifically used that word.
Stephen Janis: That was brilliant.
Marc Steiner: He came out, “You’re fired,” from his TV show, and 81 million people. That’s right. Right, exactly. I’m sorry. You’re absolutely right, Max.
Stephen Janis: That was brilliant.
Marc Steiner: I think what happened in this race at the moment because of the debate is that it gave the Harris-Walz ticket a boost, and it pushed them ahead. I think, viscerally, people liked watching what happened. Americans like seeing somebody’s ass get kicked. They do. It is part of nature; boxing, wrestling, rugby, football. And I think that this is really going to give them a boost. And I think that he’s nervous and frightened to death at the moment.
Stephen Janis: It’s got to be particularly humiliating for him because you had MMA fighters and wrestling and Hulk Hogan at his… I was there.
Marc Steiner: Right.
Stephen Janis: It was like a World Wrestling match more than a convention.
Marc Steiner: He plays a tough guy, but he’s a punk. [Laughs] I’m sorry. That’s not a partisan Republican/Democrat thing. I’ll stop here, Max. But when you grow up like I did, and like you did, you can tell a phony on the street when they act like they’re a tough guy. You know exactly [laughs]… I’m sorry, I’ll stop.
Maximillian Alvarez: No, no, no [Alvarez and Steiner laugh]. I think because, again, if we’re talking about how people are seeing this, that matters. And especially it matters for someone like Trump who has based his entire political career on being that strong person, and having that unshakable strength and virility.
And the only thing I would add to that is just that I think what Democrats and folks in the liberal center, for whatever that means in today’s political arrangement — In most other countries, our political center would be the far right of other countries. As you said, we don’t really have an institutional left to speak of, yada, yada yada.
But I do think one of the things that the Harris campaign has shown is that Democrats have been learning from the first time we saw Trump ascend in 2016. They have learned a few things.
Let’s be honest. None of us thought that Harris was going to make Walz her pick because it seemed like the right pick, it seemed like the obvious pick if they wanted to win and garner people’s votes. But just by everything we knew about the Democratic establishment, the past was telling us it was not going to be Walz. And then it was.
And then even them doubling down on the “these guys are weirdos,” messaging, it was like, holy shit, I’m not used to the Democrats being good on offense.
But at the same time, I think what the debate showed, hopefully, is that one of the things, one of the perennial psychoses of the Trump era is that everyone has been longing for that never going to come moment where Trump is cornered and admits defeat and admits he was wrong. He’s never going to fucking do that — Pardon my French — Ever.
The guy I always think of is the general in Mars Attacks when the Martian is shrinking him with a ray right before the Martian squashes him with its boot. And the guy is just shooting at the Martian the whole time yelling at him. That’s Trump. He’s not going to stop yelling and shooting ever.
And so stop trying to corner him into a moment where you’re going to get this admission of guilt or anything. He’s not going to give it to you. So the best that you can do is just expose him and make him look weak and use his personality against him so that the perception of him changes even if he never does.
Stephen Janis: Max, as we were taking an Uber to here to watch the debate, there was a man who had been a Democrat, and he was Muslim, and he said he was voting for Trump. And we were asking him about this, how he could reconcile Trump’s comments and things he said, and he got back to your point about Trump is strong. He will subdue dictators. Even though, as we point out every problematic aspect of Trump’s foreign policy and how bad he would be for the Palestinian people, he still stuck to his guns that Trump, he was going to vote for Trump. It’s strange.
Maximillian Alvarez: Strange is absolutely the word.
Stephen Janis: I can’t rationalize it.
Maximillian Alvarez: No, because so much of it is irrational. Again, that’s the burning core of Trump’s politics is there is an irrationality at the heart of it that doesn’t need to be bogged down by rational justifications.
Stephen Janis: Not at all.
Maximillian Alvarez: It’s just vibes and anger and frustration and all these ugly feelings given a direction to go in. That’s what you need. And that’s, again, why we got to stop trying to over-intellectualize the Trump movement, because if we don’t understand the role that irrationality plays in keeping that movement going and in keeping people believing in it, then we’re never going to understand Trump and his appeal.
The last thing I would say on the weirdness, the strangeness of the debate that kept hitting me was every single time Trump would go on a bonkers rant that he would end with, they are destroying this country. It’s going to be bedlam, everything, just the most batshit thing he could say, followed quickly by a, thank you, Mr. President, from the moderators and moving on to the next thing.
Just that dissonance, because it just shows that this is… I know in 2016 from the moment Donald Trump descended that golden escalator — Well, in 2015 — We’ve been reciting the mantra, “This is not normal.” It fucking isn’t, but it’s become our normal. But when I see stuff like that, it’s just these little hints that like, man, this is a ridiculous and dangerous and frightening political reality that is being treated with the gloves of political normalcy.
Stephen Janis: The moderators this time were a little bit better than the previous.
Maximillian Alvarez: They were. They absolutely were.
Stephen Janis: But you’re right. You’re right. It’s become normalized, and we cover it like that.
Maximillian Alvarez: Right.
Alina Nehlich: Well, and I was going to say, if we could get to the reporting part that you had mentioned a little bit ago before we wrap up here. I did want to mention, you mentioned the wildness and the contradictions. I think that looking at Kamala mentioning the existential crisis of climate change and then being absolutely against a fracking ban. We produced more oil and all of these things that are horrible for the environment, but then somehow still claiming to be so pro-environmental is, I think, one of the things that stands out in regards to that aspect of the debate to me. Specifically as someone who is younger and cares really a lot about the planet being burned to death.
Maximillian Alvarez: Yep. Well, let’s end on that because in a way, this is fitting [crosstalk]. Because again, we don’t do punditry all the time here. We wanted to give our reflections on the debate. But our bread and butter, what we’ve been doing before this, what we’re going to be doing after this, as you guys listening know, is we’re going to get out there and report. We want to tell your stories.
We want to see how this stuff is impacting you and your communities. We want to talk to the folks who are fighting back against this right-wing demagoguery, against this bipartisan consensus on doubling down on anti-immigrant sentiment, pro-genocide support for Israel’s war on Gaza. We want to go to the front lines of struggle where these things are not just talking points, but they are people’s lives and lived realities.
And so that, in a way, is what we’re going to be covering throughout the rest of this election season and beyond. So it’s like this podcast is the breather between.
But I do want to maybe just end on that point, like Alina was saying is, what from our reporting past and future do we really want to emphasize for folks that was not being addressed on the debate stage or that is not going to be impacted by this current election, or what either of these two candidates are saying? I guess just any thoughts we wanted to share on stories we really want folks to focus on or reflections that we want to leave people with before we ourselves head back out into the field to do our reporting.
Marc Steiner: If Harris wins, we have a lot of work to do. Different kind of work. And that is to talk more about the union organizing going on, people rising up from the bottom and fighting. It means taking on the right wing in this country and what they can do to America. It means fighting for justice, Israel, Gaza. There are things we have to really put out there that have to push the envelope and push the discussion.
Stephen Janis: I hope that we can emphasize, I see very little mention of what I think drives all of these problems, is economic inequality and rising economic inequality, and that we are going to continue to bring that context to our reporting.
Maximillian Alvarez: Yes. Absolutely. And like Alina said, the absurdity of how neither of the parties is really taking the climate crisis seriously as we are quite literally in the final years to do something to seriously change the outcome for our children and our children’s children. And we’re not doing it.
And so to see what is going to be the defining political and existential question of the rest of our lives and our children’s lives be batted around in such a blase, meaningless moment on a debate stage. When I look back, if I make it to 70 and I’m looking back at that, I have a feeling —
Marc Steiner: [Crosstalk] What are you talking about?
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I’m just saying I probably won’t make it to that. But if I do, looking back at moments like that and looking at the world that our parents’ generations left us with, I don’t think I’ll be able to really ever make peace with that.
But yeah, obviously we talked about this after the DNC. The cognitive and emotional dissonance between the joyful, jubilant nature of what was going on inside the convention and the reality that we’re reporting on every week of a genocide happening in our name with bombs made in this country, with our tax dollars.
We are showing people the human cost of that. We published two documentaries on it, one from the West Bank, one from Gaza this week. That is all happening while this is all happening. What we’ve seen from both parties is they are not going to change course on that.
So what we know is what we’ve been reporting on over the past year, that it’s going to depend on the people of the world to make that kind of change, to make power bend to their will. And that is where we’re going to be, at the places where working people here in the U.S. and around the world are building power and making power bend to their will.
And so with that, let’s wrap up this post debate podcast. I’m so, so grateful to my colleagues, Stephen Janis, Marc Steiner, Alina Nehlich for this incredible conversation. Please let us know what you thought, share your reflections on the debate and storylines that you want to see us cover moving forward between now and November and beyond.
And please, one more time before you leave, we need your support to keep bringing you more important coverage and conversations just like this. So head on over to therealnews.com/donate and support our work today. We really appreciate it. For The Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
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