Transcript of 12 Days to Go: French Fries and Fascism

What does Beauty have to do with sports or advanced technology or the economy? I am Isabella Rossellini, and in each episode of This is not a Beauty podcast, I uncover stories that explain beauty's fascinating and often hidden role in modern life. Listen to This is not a Beauty podcast now on your favorite podcast platform. Brought to you by L'Oréal Group. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. John Kelly told the New York Times, former President Trump is, Certainly an authoritarian who falls into the general definition of a fascist. With two weeks to go in the race for President. We should point out these are not terms casually thrown about in American political dialog.

Certainly not this close to a presidential.

Donald Trump's longest serving Chief of Staff is warning that his election could lead to fascism. Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable. Kamala Harris is seizing on the message of Trump as a threat to democracy. In just the past week, Donald Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans the enemy from within. And Trump himself. Here's the story. Ready? I'm going for a job right now at McDonald's. I really wanted to do this. Is relying on viral stunts and vulgarity to break through to undecided voters. So you have to tell Kamala Harris that you've had enough, that you just can't take it anymore. We can't stand you. You're a shit vice president. Today, I gathered four of my colleagues, Mike Schmidt, Lisa Lair, Reid Epstein, and Nate Cohn, to make sense of those developments. It's Thursday, October 24th. Hello, friends.

Hello.

Here we are again, our fifth campaign roundtable. I just want to say, as I have in the past couple of episodes, when we're talking, because news tends to happen after these conversations and can be difficult to account for. It is about 1:20 PM on Wednesday, and I want to welcome you, Nate Cohn back.

Thank you, Michael.

Reid Epstein, welcome to the Roundtable.

Thank you, Michael.

Here for the first time, Mike Schmidt.

Thanks for having me.

We're going to start with you, Mike, because you have brought us some really important new reporting that candidly, we didn't anticipate being a part of this conversation, but it just feels too important to not make very central to this episode. As a result, this roundtable is going to feel a little bit different because we want to spend time with the reporting that you're bringing us. Just by way of explanation, Mike, this reporting you did, we've been talking about it, you and I, for a really long time. You have been trying to speak on the record with a single former high-ranking Trump administration official for years. How many years?

Four.

Four years. He's not just any official. He's John Kelly. He's President Trump's former Chief of Staff. He's a highly decorated former Marine Corps general, and he's somebody I think that people in both parties hold in very high esteem. Over the past couple of days, after saying no to you for four years to have this conversation you wanted to have, he said yes. Just tell us about that.

I have been trying to get John Kelly to talk and allow me to record it. I tried really hard to do this because I believe that his story is central to the Trump story. Kelly Kelly spent more time behind closed doors with Trump when he was in the White House than anyone else. Right. Longest serving chief of staff. His longest serving chief of staff. I had pushed Kelly over and over again to do an on the record third interview, and he finally agreed to it.

Why do you think he says yes? Just to begin with, what changed?

I think that Kelly saw Trump's comments in the past few weeks.

I I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within.

About using the American military on Americans.

We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. It should be very easily handled, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military because they can't.

For Kelly, the idea of using the military domestically is a red line. That is beyond the pale for him. When he When we saw Trump say that, he felt compelled to speak out.

I think we should play some of this audio of your conversations with John Kelly. They were phone conversations, correct? This is a key moment in the conversation where you ask him the rather provocative question of whether Trump, in his mind, would preside as a fascist if reelected. I'm going to play that clip now.

Do you think he's a fascist?

Well, I'm looking at the definition of fascism. It's a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized hypocrisy, militarism, forcible suppression of- It's interesting that he decides to look up the word fascist.

He's being very careful.

I didn't ask him for the definition of it. I didn't ask him to look it up. He went ahead and did that on his own. For me, actually, to hear that, it was actually helpful because it gave more texture to Trump's behavior here.

The former President is in the far-right area. He's certainly an authoritarian, and admires people who are dictators. He has said that. So he certainly falls in It's the general definition of a fascist, for sure.

Fascist is a term. You're a fascist. He's a fascist. Trump's a fascist. These things are thrown around. But when he provided a definition to it, these are the boxes that fascist checks, and Kelly believes Trump is those things.

He would comment it more than once that Hitler did some good things, too. Of course, If you know history, it would be pretty hard to make an argument that he did anything good.

What would you say- Mike Kelly, in his conversation with you, also confirmed previous reports that Trump had said to him that Adolf Hitler did, quote, good things. Correct. To me, so much had been written about it, but it all had been in text. Hearing it was different. Hearing it from this person who looked into Trump's eyes for a year and a half when he was chief of staff is different.

He's certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about and what makes America, America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything.

Another really stunning thing that Kelly talks to you about is about how Trump feels really about any commitment to something larger than himself. Mike, can you just set this clip up?

It's Memorial Day of 2017. Trump has just become President. He's at Arlington Cemetery, and he's walking with Kelly through this special section where soldiers and Marines who were killed in recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried, including Kelly's son. As they're walking through that section, there's something that Trump says to Kelly that really takes him aback.

He came down. It was the first time I heard him say it. I said, What was in it for them?

Trump is saying to him, What was in it for them?

The soldiers who died.

Correct.

And I thought he was asking one of these rhetorical questions, but I didn't realize he was serious. He just didn't see what the point was. As I got to know him, selflessness was something he just didn't understand.

What Kelly is saying to me is, yes, Trump referred to those who died on the battlefield as losers and suckers, but there was something worse than that to Kelly. And that was the fact that Trump said, What's in it for them? Trump is not asking a larger question about the meaning of service or what that means to the country. And Trump is doing that to the highest-ranking American military officer to lose a child on the battlefield in the post-911 wars. All right. Whatever you think of John Kelly, few Americans understand sacrifice and selflessness more than him. And Trump's saying, So what was in it for them? In a way that cheapen their sacrifice. Is there anything else that we need to talk about, or is this enough?

I think it's plenty. But like I said, Mike, I'm not... Just make it clear, I'm not recommending anything to anybody. I'm just saying, other than that when you're looking to vote for someone, regardless, you got to look at the character and all of those things.

Kelly's whole thing is, look, I'm not going to tell you who I'm voting for. I'm not going to endorse a candidate. I'm not going to recommend anything. I'm going to answer factual questions about what I saw, and I'm going to tell you that I think that fitness and character are important.

Reid, where does all of this audio that Mike collected fit into Kamala Harris's campaign strategy in these final weeks of the race? It feels like it fits in quite powerfully.

I mean, the Venn diagram of what John Kelly is saying and the argument that Kamala Harris has been making the last few days is almost complete. It is that it is more important to pick someone with the right character and temperament to be the president, regardless of whatever you think of their policy positions. It is an argument that Harris has been making herself as the campaign gets closer and closer to the finish line.

And In fact, just moments before we all gathered in this room, Harris came out and pretty much held a news conference based on Mike's reporting.

She spoke at the Naval Observatory, her residence in Washington, which is rarely a place for these types of campaign or political events.

The closest she gets to a White House backdrop.

Basically said, Please read and listen to these clips of John Kelly. She made the case that it proves that Trump is unfit for office. I think we can expect to hear her make that case again and again as she campaigns in the closing days of this race.

Nate, what's important about what we just said is that Kamala Harris's closing argument is increasingly focused on questions of whether Trump is, in her words, unstated Able, unfit, a threat to democracy. For a lot of us who watched the original Joe Biden campaign that she has now replaced, we recall lots of conversations about whether that was effective. You, I remember vividly telling me telling our listeners that you were finding in your review of polling and in polling that you've done yourself, that that's not really resonating with people. That's complicated because we're talking about really, really important audio and revelations. Is it mattering to voters? Will it matter to voters, even if Kamala Harris decides to make a very big deal out of this?

I think it might. Measuring the effect of these things is so challenging. But just stepping back for a second. This is a campaign between two candidates with enormous weaknesses. Harris is weighed down by immigration, the economy, and her record. Donald Trump is weighed down by the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs, his conduct on January sixth, the idea that he's a threat to democracy. There are a lot of voters who are weighing those two things. They sympathize with both of those set of concerns. While it may not be the case that the democracy issue disqualifies Donald Trump for 60% of the electorate or whatever it is that Democrats would have hoped a year or two ago when Donald Trump clearly was on a track to become the Republican nominee. It is nonetheless the case that this is one of the arguments that a majority of voters do side with Harris on. They think she's better on democracy than Trump. To the extent that's what they're thinking about over the final two weeks, They're one of those conflicted voters who has some negative feelings about Donald Trump. If this is what is on their mind as they enter the voting booth, you can see how it could be decisive.

Now, in such a close election- But who does it matter to, really, in this There's a group of relatively moderate and conservative, traditionally Republican-leaning voters who are deeply troubled by Donald Trump's conduct. Sometimes they have voted against Donald Trump, whether that's for a third-party candidate for Joe Biden. They've also voted for Democrats in some critical Senate governor's races in recent years. In the midterm election, there were a number of races where Democrats clearly managed to appeal to this group of voters. If they win them again, or if Harris can win them again, then path to winning looks much better than if those same people are thinking about, oh, Harris is a candidate who's too far to the left, who's presiding over inflation, and who has unleashed chaos at the border.

Mike, how do you think John Kelly would feel to hear that there is a chance that this might move people, but it's a pretty small slice of people who seem movable and might be moved by this. Do you think he wanted to change people's minds when he agreed to do this interview with you?

I think he's deeply conflicted about it. I think that he hates partisan politics. He didn't want to have to do this. He doesn't want to be seen as injecting himself to the election, and he's not really sure how to handle that. He gets there by essentially saying, I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, but I will answer your factual questions, and I will say that character and fitness are more important than policy.

If we're reading between the lines, though, I have to think he's trying to put his thumb on the scale of skepticism of Trump. He's trying to get people to vote for Harris.

I think he's essentially saying, Look, I've been inside the room with this guy. I've seen him up close, and I think he's a threat to democracy.

That would be the sound of you emphatically hitting the table, just in case anyone- One thing that's worth noting, though, and it's part of why the audio is so credible and so compelling, that he isn't pounding his fist on the table.

It's so matter of fact in a way that you can't not take it. I don't see how you can listen to it and think that he's trying to move an election, even though that may be a motive in what he's trying to accomplish.

Mike, we're going to say goodbye to you, and we're going to tag in our colleague Lisa Lair for the second half of this conversation. Thank you for coming in. Thank you for this reporting.

Thanks for having me.

We'll be right back.

I'm Shane Goldmacher. I'm a national political correspondent for the New York Times, covering the 2024 election. I have, off and on for years, covered the role of money and politics, and that means sifting through tens of thousands of line items and campaign reports, looking at who's getting paid, how much they're getting paid, who's donating to these campaigns, who's reserved the most ads on Google, who's this billionaire changing the shape of the race with a single check? Look, the campaign spin. The strategists tell you one thing, the numbers don't really lie, and those numbers help us ask the right questions. That's what's so special about the New York Times. We get to tap the collective knowledge and wisdom of my colleagues who have expertise in every nook and cranny of this country in this campaign trail to tell you the full story of what's happening in these critical moments in the last few weeks of the election. If this coverage is important to you, you can support it by subscribing to the New York Times at nytimes. Com/subscribe.

Okay, we're back. Lisa Lair, it is very nice to have you return to the Roundtable. Mike Schmidt warmed your seat for you.

Happy to be back. I'm here for the mugs.

You can't take them still. Really? No. I want to talk, Lisa, to you about something else that Kamala Harris has been doing over the past week. In addition to the news conference she held responding to Mike Smith's reporting on that conversation with John Kelly, what Harris has been doing is campaigning with former congressman Liz Cheney to court voters that we don't tend to think about as super gettable for Kamala Harris, and that's Conservatives, including those who are anti-abortion. Can you tell us what's going on there?

Yeah. They basically took Liz Cheney, who, of course, is a very prominent Republican who had come out against President Trump, on a roadshow of the three Blue Wall states and did these moderated conversations in key counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Really what they are hunting for here is something that's called the shy Harris voter. This is someone who maybe is a Republican, probably a woman, more likely a woman, who maybe doesn't want to tell her friends that she's voting for Harris, but is concerned about Trump's rhetoric, his divisiveness, all the chaos that this person remembers from when Trump was in office, and is going to the Harris campaign believes, could go into the voting booth and pull the lever for Harris. Now, as our friend and colleague and frequent podcast guest, Maggie Haberman, reminded me earlier this morning, this is a common idea that we hear about in presidential politics, the shy voter. Maggie reminded me of the shy Romney voters, which was a thing that I'm sure the three of us who covered Romney together at this table all remember. That, of course, didn't manifest. Romney lost that election. But then in '16, we had a lot of talk of the shy a Trump voter, and those people were there in Trump won.

It's a similar idea that there are these secret voters out there that the Harris campaign can pull, even if they're not out there volunteering or even saying publicly that they're going to vote for her.

But they have to be activated.

They have to be activated, and they believe they are available to her. It's a pretty big bet, and it's a bet that could end up determining which way this election goes.

There was something Cheney said that I'm now remembering from one of these events that I think taps into this idea. I certainly have many Republicans who will say to me, I can't be public. Let's just play a clip and listen to Cheney for a second. They do worry about a whole range of things, including violence, but they'll do the right thing. I would just remind people If you're at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody. There will be millions of Republicans who do that on November fifth, vote for vice president Harris. You don't have to tell anyone, as if it was literally a secret.

That was really an amazing moment when she said that because it had come after she had said, It's okay to be pro-life and vote for Kamal Harris. She was just building these different elements of a permission structure to say to Conservatives, particularly, Conservatives women, it is okay, you can do this. I did it, and you can, too.

It's interesting because I have a story that was up today on how gender is such a defining piece this election. One detail we had in that story are these post-it notes and stickers that are popping up on women's bathrooms in the stall saying, Woman to woman, nobody knows your vote, basically encouraging women to vote for Harris, even if they don't want to say so publicly, and obviously part of this, we have to say, is abortion rights as well as intertwined in this argument.

But how appealing is that message, Lisa, to conservative women who are opposed to abortion? Because I got the sense that Liz Cheney's message was meant to reach them, too.

Well, we know that about 30% of Republicans support abortion rights in some form. Those people could be inclined to vote for Harris, even if they don't typically vote for a Democrat on this issue. If and this is a big if, if it continues to have the same potency that we saw abortion have in the midterm elections, which we just don't know because this is the first presidential election we're having in a post-Roe world.

Right, because it's not just Democrats who think that the restrictions at the state level since the fall of Roe have gone too far. In some cases, it's going to be moderate Republicans. Interestingly, though, Reid, even though you're not a woman, neither Harris nor Cheney talk much explicitly about Harris being a woman, especially the first woman who could be president.

Well, Harris doesn't talk about that at all on the campaign trail. I mean, she came into this race after Joe Biden dropped out with a huge burst of energy, but everything was implied. She did not come out and do the Hillary Clinton, I'm with her type of sloganeering. She does more to make herself a generic Democrat than the trailblazing path-breaking Democrat that she would be if she were to become the first woman President and the first Black and South Asian President. But she, throughout her career, has not gone out of her way to emphasize that piece of her biography. She has gone in to talk about her qualifications. In this race, We've known, and Nate has told us for more than a year, that a generic Democrat beats Donald Trump in this race, and that is where she's trying to frame herself.

Self-genericizing. I don't mean that in a negative way, just making yourself less pioneering in that way.

It's worth noting, she was asked that question directly by NBC News on Tuesday night, and she made it really clear she does not believe that Americans want a president of a particular race and gender. She is running to be a president for everybody, and that is the focus of her message. She also said she's not worried about sexism hampering her bed. She is pushing hard to generify, as you've said. Genericize herself.

On to Trump's week for just a moment. His closing argument seems very much attuned to viral moments. Nice to see you all. Nice to see you. How are you? Nice to see you. How good are the barbers here? Excellent.

I can see that.

He was at a barbershop in the Bronx talking to voters about the economy. The viral moment that really seemed to break through was a stunt. I love McDonald's. I love jobs. He went to work. Open it up. Keep it tight. You got the salt on it. Kind of at McDonald's for 15 or 20 minutes. Hello, everybody. This is not a normal situation, is it? I'm curious to read to someone who covers Kamala Harris. This felt like the stunt that Kamala Harris would never do. But of course, it was fundamentally supposed to be about her. I've now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala. Okay? She never worked here.

Right. Almost every time she speaks, she talks about her own middle class upbringing. She has talked in the past about working at McDonald's as a summer job when she was in college, which is a story that the Trump campaign has tried to cast out that it ever happened. And so he went to McDonald's to try to illuminate this idea that she was inventing a piece of her biography, and it was a big troll of the Harris campaign.

Nate, who was that event for? Besides Twitter and every front page.

It's for a group of working-class Black and Latino voters who have traditionally voted for Democratic candidates, but who are really upset about inflation and who are They're curious, at least, and perhaps leaning towards voting for Donald Trump in this election, in no small part because they believe that he'll do best on the economy. To the extent that he has a weakness on the economy, it's on this cares about people like you question. They may think he's a good manager of the economy, but they don't really buy that he's in it for them in any way. I think that this is an attempt to address maybe his single biggest weakness in this space, that he has any capacity to empathize with the struggles of the voters that he is hoping to win over.

Effective? Important?

I mean, I don't know. It's hard to know what's important when you're in the middle of it. It certainly was a piece of political jiu-jitsu, and it's part of his effort to cast her as too liberal, too elite, out of touch with mainstream America who's working at and eating at the golden arches. I mean, my big question about all of this is what we know is that when voters see more Trump, they tend to like him less. I do wonder if putting him out there more helps him or hurts him.

We witnessed something else from Trump over the past few days, which just seems notable because it's a continuation of, Lisa, what we started talking about in our last roundtable, a growing vulgarity and delivered outrageousness. Trump ended up speaking about the manhood of the great golfer Arnold Palmer. He called Kamala Harris lazy. He called her a vulgarity in front of the word vice president. That began with S and ends with T. This felt like intentional crudeness.

Yeah, look, I think Donald Trump is trying to motivate as much of his base as possible, and he knows that many people in his base love that about him. They think it's authentic, they think it's real, they think he's flouting political correctness. But that, I think, does carry a real risk, because what we also know is that for the past eight years, the biggest motivator in Democratic politics has been Donald Trump. It's comments like that that remind people of what they didn't like about him in previous races. I do think that's part of what the Harris campaign is trying to capitalize on in these final days. There can be a cost for courting his base, and that cost could be exactly the people that Harris is trying to pull into her camp, these more moderate, probably more female Republican voters.

Nate, as we conclude this conversation, I want to remind you, you weren't here last week, so we talked about you behind your back. We talked about how in Lisa Lair's infamous words, it's time to get off the polar coaster, the addiction we have to polls.

You weren't supposed to repeat that to him.

Because the polls are so close. You said what? Then you write a column in which you say, Basically, I don't know how much attention you need to be paying to all these polls because they're really close. But within that column, you also said, The past week's polls made a clearer case for movement toward Mr. Trump. So which is it?

First, just a high level. This is one of the most stable final months of polling that we have on record. The numbers have moved a little bit. Harris had a three-point lead, and now maybe it's a little bit under two. But compared to prior years, there's almost no movement at all. Now, with the race so close, any little bit of movement is the difference potentially between whether one candidate can claim, and the claim deserves to be in quotes here, a nominal, substantively irrelevant advantage. I think there are signs that on balance, the race has nudged ever so slightly towards Trump over the last month. But big picture, extremely stable, extremely close, and that's how it's been for a long time now.

I think what Nate's really saying here is that my advice stands. That if you need to exit the roller coaster, you can get off. This is a really tight-In fact, it's so stable that it's very safe to just walk off the a roller coaster right now.

What's that ride at Disney World that goes five miles an hour past all of it? It's a small world? Yeah, it's that part of it. We're going to do some more polls, but I don't really expect them to show anything different. Maybe they will, but it'll probably be still really close on either side. We'll probably be able to win.

Well, let's just end rather than what we With the contemplation of whether your job should even exist at this point. That's a good question. With the reality that we don't have to rely so much on polling at this point because we have so much early voting. I think at this point, it's 20 or so million Americans who have voted early. Lisa, when I brought this up Last week, you, quite memorably with an R, said to me that I shouldn't consider this to be good news for the Democratic Party for the Kamal Harris campaign because we didn't know who was in that pool of early voters. What we have learned since then is that a lot of those early voters are Republican. Are we at a point where we can say that within this early vote, there's surprising energy among the Republican Party? No, not really.

I was going to give you more. I was going to update my with a Michael like, Hmm.

That's pretty good. Why can't we say that?

Almost all of the people who are participating in early voting at this stage are the people who are absolutely going to vote. It doesn't really matter whether they vote two weeks before the election or on election day, If you're the person who went to day one of early voting- You were going to vote anyway. You're going to vote. It's in the data. You can see like, Oh, hey, 95% of these people voted last time or something like that. Those that will vote on election day will be much different.

But I think what it does tell us is the Republican aversion to early voting- Has changed. Which was pushed by Trump has changed. We just don't have a baseline because the last election where early voting was so big- Was the pandemic. Was a pandemic. It was crazy. I mean, it was a politicized pandemic where how you voted itself became a political act. There's no baseline to measure the level of Republican early vote against the previous level. But I do think it's interesting. I will give it a Michael like, Hmm. Very good.

Okay, so the polls are so close that we shouldn't really obsess about small movements, and the early vote is so ambiguous that we should not try too hard to decipher it. With that new round of advice to our listeners, I thank you. Lisa Reid, Nate, and in abstentio, Mike Schmidt. Thank you all.

Thanks for having us.Thanks.

For having us.Thanks, Michael.Thanks.

For having us.

We'll be right back. Hey, it's Ben Fruman, Editor and Chief of Wirecutter. We put together the ultimate moving guide, and I wanted to find out a few of our writer's favorite tips. When you're first moving into your home, make sure that you change the batteries in your smoke detector.

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It's going to protect your mattress from the truck and the street.

Make sure you have towels on hand. You don't to end up taking a shower and using a dirty sock to dry off.

If you're getting ready to move, let Wirecutter help you make a plan at nytimes. Com/moving. Here's what else you need to know the day. During a CNN town hall on Wednesday night, Vice President Harris said that she agreed with the assessment of Donald Trump's former Chief of Staff, John Kelly, that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.

Let me ask you tonight, do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?

Yes, I do. Yes, I do. I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted. Again, look at their- And the US Secretary of Defense Alliance, Lloyd Austin, confirmed that North Korea has sent troops to Russia to join the fight against Ukraine, a major new development in the war.

If there are co-belligerents, their intention is to participate in this war on Russia's behalf. That is a very, very serious issue.

Austin described Russia's reliance on North Korean soldiers as a sign that Vladimir Putin has grown desperate.

This is an indication that he may be even in more trouble than most people realize. But again.

Today's episode was produced by Olivia Nat, Rob Zivko, and Shannon Lynn. It was edited by Lexie D. L. And Paige Cawet. Contains original music by Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansberg of WNDYRLE. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.