Fair and Malice
Both candidates appeared on Fox News yesterday. The respective broadcasts said everything about the state of the race.
Bill’s in Philly already; Egger and the rest of the crew are on the bus there now. The Bulwark is in motion, people.
Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose. Happy Thursday.
A Tale of Two Foxes
by Andrew Egger
Fox News aired events with both presidential candidates yesterday. If you squint, you can spot a few subtle differences.
Kamala Harris sat for a primetime interview with news anchor Bret Baier, who hit her with a relentless barrage of questions taking her to task for various failures of the Biden administration. The entire first third of the interview focused exclusively on immigration policy, while the closing third focused on Harris’s assessment of Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities and record. In between, Baier tried to talk about trans surgeries for prisoners and to lure Harris into taking a “deplorables”-style shot at Trump supporters. (She didn’t bite.) The economy barely came up; abortion didn’t come up at all.
Hours earlier, Trump got a somewhat different treatment. At a Georgia event billed as an “all-women town hall,” host Harris Faulkner worked hard to help the ex-president patch up his ill reputation among female voters.
But his biggest boost came from Fox’s production team. The network had quietly taken pains both to stock the audience with Trump-loving women and to obscure that fact in the actual broadcast. CNN reported that one woman’s question was edited to remove her statement that “I proudly cast my vote for you today. I hope they count it.” Meanwhile, the Georgia Federation of Republican Women posted on Facebook that they were “super excited for the opportunity of hosting this event!” After CNN asked them about it, they edited their post: Now they were merely “excited for the opportunity of attending” the event.
None of this was exactly surprising. Fox News favors Trump, more at 11. But it was emblematic of the two candidates’ diverging media strategies as the race enters its closing stretch. And it blows a hole in the MAGAville argument that Harris is the one getting the kid glove treatment from the fourth estate.
Harris knew she was going into deeply hostile territory when she agreed to the Fox interview. As we noted when the news was announced, there may not have been a riskier interview she could have agreed to than Bret Baier, who was going to be relentless in his questioning but also disciplined enough to give her few opportunities to turn the tables. This proved true: Baier minimized Harris’s chances to hit the strong points she wanted, often literally holding up his hand to her in an effort to get her to stop talking. Harris had to hustle hard to wedge them in. Occasionally, she couldn’t.
Still, she accomplished what she wanted to in that setting: Puncturing the right-wing caricature of her, regularly pumped out to Fox’s primetime audience, as an insipid airhead with no ability to think on her feet. Aides to her campaign were pleased with the result. The official Harris X account shared numerous clips from the sit down.
But it was the contrast with Trump, not Harris’s own performance in a silo, that may prove most telling. Fresh off his disastrous attempt Tuesday to survive a neutral-party interview with Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait, the former president had retreated to a curated-audience Fox tongue-bath.
Harris’s best moment came when she had a chance to juxtapose the two events. After she denounced Trump’s recent attacks on his political opponents as “the enemy from within,” Baier played a clip from Fox’s Trump town hall meant to imply that Trump was walking back those comments.
But the clip conveniently left out the moment, from seconds earlier, where Trump had doubled down on his “enemy from within” remarks:
It is the enemy from within. And they’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick. I use a guy like Adam Schiff . . . They’re dangerous for our country. We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries—if you have a smart president they can all be handled. The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis—these people, they’re so sick and they’re so evil.
Harris was ready. “Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within’—that he has repeated, when he is speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed.”
Then she really unloaded:
And here’s the bottom line. He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people that are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with them. This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake.
If any moment from the night will be remembered—and, let’s be real, we may not be thinking about any of this in a week—it will be that one: Harris, in hostile territory, denouncing her opponent for his appearance on that same network hours prior.
Going on Fox was a risk. (Though we continue to maintain it would have been smart for Harris to do this all along!) But it also turned out to have rewards.
And the Harris campaign should recognize that and react accordingly. There’s a whole world of vaguely to explicitly right-wing shows and podcasts out there. Over the next three weeks, she could have her pick of the litter. These are places mainstream media and Democratic messengers simply do not reach—but Harris could. Why let Trump wholly command their narratives? And why not continue to drive the contrast with Trump’s own risk-averse media strategy?
The sky is the limit! Kamala Harris: Go on Joe Rogan!
Paine, Carville, and Me
by William Kristol
PHILADELPHIA, PA—I write this morning from a great city. Independence Hall. The Italian Market. Big Five Basketball. The insufferable sports fans. What’s not to like?
But there’s more! Tonight, we have a HUGE Bulwark event with Sarah, Tim, JVL—and your Morning Shots correspondents!—at the Theatre of Living Arts on South Street. It’s sold out, but if you’d like to tune in, it will be live streamed here.
Sarah, Jim, and I headed to this area yesterday for a different reason: a Republicans for Harris rally, featuring the vice president herself, at Washington Crossing about thirty miles north of here.
It was an impressive event. Harris’s public remarks were excellent and our private conversation with her was heartening. It was moving to walk around the historic site and reflect that it was right here, almost 250 years ago, that Washington crossed the Delaware and helped ensure this whole American experiment could get launched.
I also took the chance at Washington Crossing to speak informally with several campaign operatives to try to find out what’s really going on in the election. And then last night, here in Philly, I was able to catch up with some Pennsylvania Democrats and interrogate them. It was a chance to get some inside dope on where the race stands, less than three weeks out.
What did I learn? It was all off the record, so I’m limited in what I can say. But the general gist is: The inside dope is pretty much the outside dope. The private story is the public story. Things really are as they seem. The race is insanely close. It’s on a knife’s edge. There’s no reason for either complacent confidence or dark despair. The insiders are on the same roller coaster as the rest of us, doing their best and hoping that it results in the right outcome.
So I have no blinding insights to report from Pennsylvania. But I had a couple of thoughts.
As I was there at Washington Crossing, I thought of Thomas Paine, whose great pamphlet, the first in his series titled The Crisis, was read to Washington’s troops there, before they crossed the Delaware.
These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer
soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink
from the service of his country; but he that stands it now,
deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like
hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with
us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Pretty impressive. And then I remembered our modern Tom Paine, James Carville.
James had texted me that morning with a couple of notes about campaign tactics. As always, he was terse and sardonic. He uncharacteristically concluded his text this way, referring to the whole Bulwark team and Republican Voters Against Trump: “U doing important work. Do not let up.” Carville’s text reminded me of something he’d written almost exactly four years ago, a piece he’d sent in unprompted to the Bulwark. It was titled “A Crusade for Something Noble.”
You can read the whole thing here. But the heart of it was this:
This is more than a campaign. This is a crusade for America.
What this moment has done for all of us is that it has given us a sense of common purpose. Common purpose which we will be able to recall forever: that when our country and our Republic were on the brink of collapse, when our fellow Americans needed us, we took a blow torch to our past differences, our former conflicts and our old rivalries, and we fought together.
As I sit here, I can say with certainty that in all my years, joining in this crusade to take America back from the brink of destruction is the greatest thing I have ever been a part of in my life.
I was moved by the piece four years ago. I was moved thinking of it yesterday, and rereading it last night.
And as I write this morning—despite the lack of easy reassurance from the operatives with whom I spoke—I really do believe this: Yes, the election’s on a knife’s edge. But voters are going to look at the dark future on offer from Donald Trump, and the hopeful one on offer from Kamala Harris, and do the right thing. We’re going to win the election.
Quick Hits
NO SQUISHES ALLOWED: The Trump campaign may be blowing through deadlines to coordinate transition prep with the federal government. But don’t think they’re not hard at work preparing for their hopeful transition. They’re just focusing on different priorities than smoothly taking the reins.
One thing they are up to: “compiling lists of names of people to keep out of a second Trump administration.” Don Jr. is in charge of the effort, per Politico:
The lists of undesirable staffers include people linked to the Project 2025 policy blueprint; officials who resigned in protest of Trump’s response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; and others perceived as disloyal to the former president, said two former Trump officials familiar with the discussions. The former officials were granted anonymity to discuss private transition operations.
Blackballing both the hardcore MAGA heads who worked on Project 2025 and people who resigned in horror after January 6th? Truly, Trump is building the down-the-middle operation the people have been craving.
FRUIT OF THE POISONED TREE: Let’s check in on how the Southeast hurricane cleanup efforts are going, shall we?
Here’s local news station WJHL 11 out of northeast Tennessee:
There were some tense moments on Saturday when volunteers say they witnessed an armed group of people on side-by-sides confronting and threatening FEMA workers in the Elk Mills community of Carter County.
Tracy Elder is president and founder of the International Alliance of Community Chaplains. Her group has been working in disaster relief for more than 20 years. They are in Carter County at the request of the Elk Mills Volunteer Fire Department to help run the command center there, providing supplies and resources for those in need. Elder told News Channel 11 that she found herself between FEMA workers and a group of armed citizens criticizing the work of the government agency . . .
“They were all armed, open carry—not guns drawn—but they had surrounded them, and there was a lady there that was yelling and threatening them,” Elder said. She explained that she listened to their grievances about FEMA but explained that her organization was not associated with the federal agency. Elder said she felt the group was frustrated and she was able to hear them out but was firm in that the behavior wasn’t appropriate.
WHY FLOOD BUYOUTS CAN’T FIND SELLERS: “Congress has poured billions of dollars into programs to buy out homeowners and help them relocate to safer areas after natural disasters,” Politico’s Zach Colman writes. “But they’re not expected to win over many residents in flood-ravaged rural North Carolina.”
A plethora of obstacles, Colman writes, stand between affected residents and that federal relief: Longstanding ties to their region and community, rising housing costs across the state, unfamiliarity with navigating the labyrinth of aid applications, and plain old mistrust of Uncle Sam. “Especially in our area,” a local health worker said, “folks come in from the government talking about trying to buy your land—that’s not going to go over too well.”
That means many will simply try to rebuild in place—but they’ll face heavy burdens if they go that route too.
Colman’s is a smart piece that wrestles with all the tradeoffs involved. Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
Watching Bret Baier continually talk over and interrupt, reminded me to never underestimate the power of misogyny.
Also, can we finally lay to rest the notion that any on air personality from their “news” division isn’t completely in the tank for Trump.
In the VP debate, Vance called Biden's presidency, the Harris administration, which was slimy and dishonest. Baer, as he is wont to do, used a slightly sanitized version, calling it "your administration".
The first lie is that they are trying to portray her as the president. The second lie is that the Biden administration has been anything other than very successful. Deception is their game.