• Eight years after Michelle Obama’s famous “When they go low, we go high” speech, Democrats have been changing their rhetorical strategy on the campaign trail and meeting former President Donald Trump on his level when it comes to personal attacks and trolling. When Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, he’d already received praise for coining a phrase that Republicans still haven’t figured out how to defend against: “Weird.” Governor Walz has continued to show a knack for mocking his opponents, recently alluding at a rally to a viral but fake story involving JD Vance committing salacious acts with a couch. Aaron Blake, senior political reporter for the Washington Post, talks about the Harris-Walz campaign’s willingness to trade barbs on social media and “go low” as the general election approaches in November.
• And in headlines: The death toll in Gaza reaches 40,000, Vice President Kamala Harris will give a highly anticipated economic policy speech in North Carolina Friday focusing on the cost of living, a Vice Presidential debate is set for September 18th, and the SAG-AFTRA video game actor strike continues as animation workers enter negotiations and Crooked Media unanimously ratifies our first union contract.

• Check out Aaron’s reporting – https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/aaron-blake/
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TRANSCRIPT

Tre’vell Anderson: It’s Friday, August 16th. I’m Tre’vell Anderson.

Priyanka Aribindi: And I’m Priyanka Aribindi and this is What a Day. The show where we have never felt closer to Kamala Harris than when she reacted with horror to VP nominee Tim Walz, saying that he doesn’t put any seasoning on his tacos. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Listen, the DNC wanted the whitest man they could find to be her running mate, and they delivered. 

Priyanka Aribindi: He said meat and cheese only. [laughter] [music break] On today’s show, the death toll in Gaza has reportedly exceeded 40,000 people. Plus, the Veep candidates have set a date to debate. 

Tre’vell Anderson: But first, eight years after Michelle Obama famously told the Democrats, when they go low, we go high. The party seems to be taking more of a yeah but approach to the high road this election cycle. And it looks like it’s getting under former President Donald Trump’s skin. During a press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Thursday, Trump said that he’s, quote, “entitled to personal attacks” against Harris, because according to him, she does the same. He lashed out, insulting her intelligence and said that no one knows who she is and of course, mispronounced her name. Here he is spiraling. 

[clip of Donald Trump] She certainly attacked me personally. She actually called me weird. He’s weird. It was just a sound bite. And she called J.D. and I weird. He’s not weird. He was a great student at Yale. 

Priyanka Aribindi: The way he says weird is just so weird [laughter] I can’t. Anyways. This all feels very reminiscent of second grade. Like I’m allowed to call my brother a name because he called me a name, so that is okay. That all is bizarre, but I will say while this is getting under Trump’s skin, it’s certainly not getting under mine. I, for one, am really enjoying watching them. Not like go low but like have fun with it. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah yeah yeah. They’re not quite going low if we’re being honest. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Exactly. The most notable examples of Democrats sidestepping the high road was when Minnesota Governor Tim Walz alluded to a buzzy internet story about his Republican counterpart, JD Vance. He did it during his first rally with Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta earlier this month, just a few hours after she announced Governor Walz as her running mate. 

[clip of Tim Walz] And I got to tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy. [cheers] That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up. So. [audience laughter] You see what I did there? 

Priyanka Aribindi: Yeah. If you have been on the internet at all in the past few weeks, you definitely see what he did there. You know the story about Vance having, um shall we say, an American Pie moment with the couch? This is a family friendly program, so we can’t really get into further details, but please feel free to Google. 

[clip of Aaron Blake] It is not a real story. No, and it’s the kind of story that we have to dance around until a vice presidential nominee decides to say it out loud on a rally stage. 

Tre’vell Anderson: That is Aaron Blake, a senior political reporter for The Washington Post. So, yeah, the couch story is fake. But Blake says Democrats’ willingness to even hint at it is a notable departure from the last few election cycles. Previously, Democrats had focused on drawing a contrast with Trump in his over 30,000 lies and falsehoods, according to the Washington Post. And that was just during his presidency. And to be clear, the Democrats aren’t anywhere close to dabbling in Trump levels of misinformation and disinformation. Not even close. But we have seen lawmakers more willing to stretch the truth this cycle. It’s something Blake has been following. Here’s the rest of our conversation. Now, I’m old enough to remember that this used to be the party of Michelle Obama when she said, okay, when they go low, we go high. But now it seems like the Democrats are more and more getting comfortable going a little low. What does that say about where the party is right now? 

Aaron Blake: Yeah, it is really interesting. You know, Michelle Obama is known for they go low, we go high. That was something that she said during the 2016 campaign. Then I think we’ve seen even up until recently, the Democratic Party feeling like they would rather be high minded about things. They didn’t want to sink to Donald Trump’s level. They’re certainly not going to his level at this point. Like Donald Trump has done things throughout his time in politics that have no modern precedent. But Democrats have gotten more comfortable doing things like making allusions to the couch. You know, I think there’s kind of been a gradual acknowledgment that they need to employ some of these tactics, even if they’re not quite as far as what the Republican ticket has been doing. 

Tre’vell Anderson: So beyond the couch story. What other attacks have we been seeing from the Harris campaign that fit this profile? 

Aaron Blake: One is the weird attack, you know, calling J.D. Vance and Donald Trump weird. You know, certainly that’s not far afield from what Democrats have talked about before, but it’s different than calling someone a threat to democracy, which is at least kind of based on a policy dispute and actions. The other thing that I think hasn’t got a whole lot of attention is you do see social media posts from the Harris campaign, posting clips of J.D. Vance and Trump and adding text to them that kind of suggests they said something that’s different than what they said, or zapping some context out of it. This is something that campaigns often do, so it’s not that far afield from what Democrats used to do. But some of the captions on these social media posts have been pretty misleading. So, for example, there was an instance where Trump was talking about how Americans who opposed him were animals, and that was the caption for this video that they put out. Well, Trump didn’t say that. He was talking about specifically the people who wanted to put him in prison. So kind of small, misleading captions on these social media posts that I think gets at kind of a willingness to kind of think outside the box and get a little bit more loose with how they’re running the campaign. 

Tre’vell Anderson: So the contrast to all of this would seem to be how Harris handles the chants of lock him up that we’ve seen at some of her rallies. This, of course, was a favorite chant at Trump rallies in 2016 directed at Hillary Clinton. We’re going to play a quick clip of how Harris responded at her rally in Nevada last week. 

[clip of Kamala Harris] Hold on, hold on. Hold on, hold on. The court’s going to take care of that. We just gonna beat him in November. We’ll beat him in November.

Tre’vell Anderson: Aaron. What do you make of her comments there? 

Aaron Blake: A couple thoughts. One is that even as the Harris campaign has embraced some of these quote unquote, “lower strategies tactics,” they have sought to have this kind of overarching theme of joy and optimism. So they’re not going whole hog down into the mud. The other thing that I think is reflected in that clip is the idea that the courts are not probably going to rule on these other cases that are going to matter more politically before the election. So to the extent that Democrats were actually going to rely on that as an argument against Trump, these things are going to be in limbo. They’ve been in limbo, and they’re probably going to be in limbo even on Election Day. You know, but that’s also a contrast to how Republicans have handled things for a long time. You know, Trump really played into the lock her up chants. He didn’t do it initially. But by the time the debates came around in 2016, he told Hillary Clinton, you know, you’d be in jail if I were president. So there is a difference between how the parties handle these kinds of things. But that is an important kind of dividing line between how the Harris campaign is conducting itself. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And like you’ve already said, right. You know, we’re not trying to equate what the Democrats are doing to Trump’s thousands and thousands of outright lies and absurdity. That being said, though, is it even realistic to expect that Democrats would avoid even mildly dabbling in these questionable tactics, especially in light of so many of them talking about how this election is existential at this point? 

Aaron Blake: Yeah, it’s a really good question because we have seen Democrats run against Donald Trump before. I think the difference between 2016 and 2020 is that there was an expectation among Democrats that they were going to win. You know, Hillary Clinton was supposed to win that race. Joe Biden was leading that race throughout. So there wasn’t a premium on kind of going outside the box and maybe getting a little bit down and dirty. Whereas up until a couple weeks ago, Democrats were really concerned about the state of this race. They felt like they were behind in the polls, and certainly bore that out. And so that creates kind of an impetus for action and rethinking how you’re doing things. And what we see from the Biden campaign and now the Harris campaign is it seems like there were a lot of people kind of behind the scenes, raring to go, maybe not specifically with these kinds of strategies, but to get more active and to put more of a message out there, and that we just didn’t see that when Biden was at the top of the ticket. So they seemed to be freed up. They seemed to be more willing to try new things. And this is certainly one of those things. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Are there any risks that are out there by amplifying, right, even a fake story that’s ultimately innocuous, such as this one about JD Vance and the couch? 

Aaron Blake: There is certainly. From a strictly political standpoint, you risk people deciding that they don’t like that you’re doing this. You know, maybe this is something they didn’t like about Donald Trump making false claims and the nicknames that he has for his opponents. Maybe they decide that this kind of muddies the water for them a little bit when it comes to those kinds of things. And then just for our political process, you know, it does matter when one side does something and the other side doesn’t. When both sides start doing something or getting a little bit dirtier, that just kind of becomes the way things operate moving forward. So to the extent that the Democrats are kind of getting involved in making couch jokes and things like that, that kind of sets a precedent for future campaigns. And then the other thing that I think is important to consider here is this is something that the Harris campaign has not put this out there as, this couch story is true. They have not said that. It’s always been in a joking manner, but this is something that people who don’t pay much attention may be led to believe is true. And a lot of people don’t do their homework. They may just understand this to be something that’s actually real. And to the extent people are not understanding the real stakes in what candidates have said in the past or what they’ve actually done, you know that is not a good thing to, you know, result from all of this to the extent that that’s actually going to wind up being the case. 

Tre’vell Anderson: We are hearing a lot that this is a race that’s going to be won on the margins. So my last question to you, how effective do you think these lines of attack might be, specifically right for those voters who aren’t already party faithful? Because because I have to say, a lot of people in my neck of the woods, they like the little jabs. They’re like, yes. Finally, the Democrats are like not taking it laying down. 

Aaron Blake: Yeah. I mean, some people do want their side to fight or they want to see some fight out of the Democrats. Um. You know, this isn’t just a joke in a vacuum either. This is also a joke that gets at a central theme for the Democratic ticket, which is this idea that Donald Trump and JD Vance are weird. Like, what’s weirder than this joke that they’re making about JD Vance, which we don’t need to go into detail about. But it does get at this kind of central theme. And so to the extent that this kind of comes to epitomize that attack, maybe there’s some strategy in putting it out there beyond just getting an applause line and getting people to laugh at your joke at a rally. 

Tre’vell Anderson: That was Aaron Blake, senior reporter at The Washington Post. 

Priyanka Aribindi: We’ll get to some headlines in just a moment, but if you like our show, please make sure to subscribe. Share it with your friends. We’ll be right back after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Tre’vell Anderson: Let’s get to some headlines. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Tre’vell Anderson: The death toll in Gaza has officially passed 40,000, according to Palestinian health officials. It’s been more than 300 days since Israel launched its assault on the enclave. Officials say the deceased are mostly women and children, and more than 92,000 have been injured. Mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and the U.S. met with Israeli officials to continue talks for a ceasefire on Thursday, but Hamas did not attend the meeting after accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of negotiating in bad faith. Benny Gantz, a former member of Israel’s war cabinet who resigned from his post earlier this year over disagreements with Netanyahu related to the war in Gaza, also criticized the prime minister for the stalled negotiations. Gantz told Netanyahu, quote, “the time has come for you to stop worrying about the fate of the government and only concern yourself with the fate of the country for once, be brave.” 

Priyanka Aribindi: Vice President Kamala Harris is set to announce her plan to lower the cost of groceries and other everyday essentials today at a rally in North Carolina. According to campaign officials, the vice president will call on Congress to pass a federal ban on price gouging during her speech. She’ll also outline other actions that she’ll take in her first 100 days as president to lower consumer prices if she is elected. Very excited about this one. I feel like it’s going to really resonate with a lot of people. This comes after Harris and President Biden hosted a joint campaign event on Thursday to announce the deal that they made with Medicare to lower the cost of some medications for senior citizens, which is expected to save them $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs. It was their first appearance together since Biden exited the presidential race. Take a listen to Harris thanking Biden for his work on the policy. 

[clip of Kamala Harris] Today we take the next step, thank you Joe, forward in our fight. [audience begins chanting]

[clip of rally audience chanting] Thank you Joe! Thank you Joe!

Priyanka Aribindi: The new drug prices go into effect in 2026. Okay, we’re talking drug prices. We’re talking the price of groceries, things that you’re buying every day for your household, these are things we know people care about deeply. So I’m very curious and excited to see how this goes. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Yes, I would like for eggs to be affordable again. You know what I mean? 

Priyanka Aribindi: Yeah. Slap that on a red hat. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Okay. [laughter] Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has agreed to a debate against Democratic VP pick Tim Walz. The debate will take place on October 1st and air on CBS. Both VP candidates have also been invited to a CNN debate on September 18th. So far, only Vance has accepted. Vance and former President Donald Trump continue to attack the Harris Walz campaign on social media for not making more unscripted appearances. Vice President Harris and Trump are set to debate on September 10th on ABC. 

Priyanka Aribindi: I cannot wait because we know JD Vance is just going to do the weirdest possible shit during this debate. Yeah, I got my popcorn. It is ready to go. And it’s been a big week for media unions. Sag-Aftra video game actors picketed on Thursday as their strike continues, and the Animation Guild also started contract negotiations this week. Both unions are emphasizing artificial intelligence protections, with many claiming that AI poses an existential threat to their industries. Speaking in front of thousands at a rally on Saturday, storyboard artist Nora Meek said that the only way to protect themselves from AI is to organize. 

[clip of Nora Meek] Is the head of Warner Brothers Discovery going to bring back human led artistry? If we work a little harder for him? 

[clip of union workers] No! 

Priyanka Aribindi: And they are not the only ones with union news. Here at Crooked Media, we have just unanimously ratified our first contract with the Writers Guild of America East after more than a year of negotiations. Representatives from the Crooked Media Workers Union said in a statement on Thursday that the contract, quote, “sets a new standard for the industry at large.” We just want to congratulate our colleagues on this. This is really incredible. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Oh, yes. Pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew.

Priyanka Aribindi: I know and the effort of a lot of hard work from a lot of people. So hats off. This really does set a new standard and I hope more places adopt it. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Absolutely. 

Priyanka Aribindi: And those are the headlines. 

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Tre’vell Anderson: That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, get your popcorn ready for the VP debates, and tell your friends to listen. 

Priyanka Aribindi: And if you are into reading and not just reports of big union wins like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Priyanka Aribindi.

Tre’vell Anderson: I’m Tre’vell Anderson. 

[spoken together] And protect Tim Walz from the spice aisle.

Priyanka Aribindi: Maybe I think a really cute campaign video would be Kamala Harris taking him to the spice aisle and maybe educating them a little bit on things he might be able to try. Let’s expand the palette. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Beyond black pepper. 

Priyanka Aribindi: Maybe it’s a learning lesson for us all. Maybe not us all, but like– [laughter] 

Tre’vell Anderson: Because you and I know a little bit about a little spice. Okay? 

Priyanka Aribindi: Yeah. The rest of you. I don’t know. [music break]

Tre’vell Anderson: What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Bill Lancz. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. We had production help today from Michell Eloy, Ethan Oberman, Jon Millstein, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. 

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