Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Today: politics after the assassination attempt. Later in the show: The Nation’s Joan Walsh has been following Kamala Harris for months, as she campaigns for Biden, but also provides evidence of her own potential as a presidential candidate. But first –will the assassination attempt change Trump’s campaign?  Harold Meyerson has our analysis – in a minute.

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Will the assassination attempt on Saturday change the campaign? Will it bring new support for Trump among voters? And will Trump himself make the campaign more of an upbeat call for unity, less a dark and angry demand for retribution? The Republican National Convention, underway as we speak, provides some evidence, and Harold Meyerson has been following it. He’s editor-at-large of the American Prospect. Harold, welcome back.

Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.

Jon Wiener: The first poll after Saturday is from Morning Consult, it came out on Tuesday as we speak. It shows that the assassination attempt did not create more support for Trump. This poll has Trump ahead now by one point nationally, 46 to 45, which is almost exactly where he was in this same poll before Saturday. And, interesting to note, Kamala’s support in this poll is exactly the same as Biden, behind Trump by one point, 46 to 45.
I have to say, I’m not surprised. Nothing has changed the polls much since April, not Trump’s felony convictions, not Biden’s debate. Almost everybody has known what they think about Trump, and what they think about Biden, for a long time. I wonder if you are surprised that this first poll after the assassination attempt shows that that had basically no effect on voters.

HM: I’m not surprised. As you yourself stated, people have their opinions, and people in this country have largely divided themselves into two quite distinct and non-overlapping tribes. Would I have been surprised in 1861 the way the states sorted themselves out at the beginning of the Civil War? No. When there are really fundamental cleavages dividing the American people, it takes a hell of a lot to change the percentages you just cited.

Jon Wiener: The assassination attempt may have had little or no effect on voters, but it seems to have had a big effect on Trump himself. He announced after the assassination attempt that he was tearing up the angry speech he’d written for the convention. “Honestly,” he said, “It’s going to be a whole different speech now.” CNN said he was feeling calm and grateful to be alive and would call for unity at the convention rather than for retribution. I wonder if you think Trump himself is capable of sticking with this new feeling he has about life, based on gratitude, calm, and unity, or is anger and megalomania built into his DNA?

HM: That’s why we should turn on the TV on Thursday night and see which half of Trump prevails. This is like the old Donald Duck cartoons with Angel Donald on one shoulder and Devil Donald on the other.
However, what we do know is that the Republicans enforced a upbeat tone on some of their most divisive speakers on the opening night of the convention on Monday night. They had placed perhaps their two most inflammatory speakers right at the start before any of the big networks other than C-SPAN were actually covering the convention in hopes that if they did damage, if they were true to themselves, as it were, at least it wouldn’t be that widely broadcast.
But both Marjorie Taylor Greene, who on the day before the convention was talking about “Democratic pedophiles” and how they were directly responsible for the shooting of Trump; And Mark Robinson, who is the lieutenant governor of North Carolina running for governor in that state, who recently said in meeting in a church, speaking of the Republicans adversaries, said that “some of them need killing” and it was time that somebody said that. Both of them didn’t get anywhere near that kind of talk as the Monday night session of the Republican convention began. They were praising Jesus and not really using the kind of descriptors that they normally use. And once they had established that, it was clear that all Republican speakers were under strict orders not to go there. We will see if Donald himself is under those orders.
And look, I mean, I don’t doubt that a near-death experience such as the one he had can have a real effect on a person, even on Donald Trump. So we shall see.

Jon Wiener: Biggest news from the first day, of course, was the Trump picked JD Vance to be his vice presidential running mate. Who wanted Vance on the ticket — and who did not want Vance on the ticket?

HM: Well, let’s state this rather bluntly. JD Vance came with one hell of a dowry — because it was very clear that the Silicon Valley, right-wing, libertarian gazillionaire contingent was going to come in big time if Vance was on the ticket. He had worked after all for Peter Thiel, who was kind of the founding father of Silicon Valley, right-wing libertarianism to the extent that he doesn’t like institutions like the nation’s state because they impose constraints on people like himself. And so as soon as Vance came in, none other than Elon Musk pledged that he would give $45 million a month to approve Trump PAC. I think Trump was probably clued into this. I mean, he’s the kind of guy who is very cognizant of who’s giving him big money.
Now, there was another big money part of the Republican Party, the old business establishment, which was assiduously against Vance because they thought he was too populist, not enough of a globalist.

Jon Wiener: And he had joined a picket line not too long ago.

HM: He had joined a UAW picket line, yes, a brilliant political move on his part. And so Rupert Murdoch in particular is known to have really strongly lobbied Trump against Vance. And when Vance was in fact selected, Murdoch’s minions on the Wall Street Journal editorial board delivered a indignant snort at Trump’s pick of Vance, saying this is dangerously a pro-union guy. But here’s a real question, since I don’t think the Republicans are shifting to a proletarian base as such, I think they are shifting elites from the old Murdoch crowd to the newer — and richer, I should say — Musk, Thiel, that crowd.  Here’s a question: Do we think Elon Musk would walk a UAW picket line if they threw up a picket line around a Tesla plan? Which at some point they will do, seeing as how Musk probably was the ultimate factor in Trump’s selection of Vance. That would be an interesting question to pursue.

Jon Wiener: And do you think JD Vance helps the ticket? Michelle Goldberg says Vance “does nothing to help Trump. He is loved by MAGA, but no one else. He s as demagogic as Trump, but entirely lacks his dark charisma.” And of course, when Vance won his Senate seat in 2022, he didn’t really do that well. He ran 19 points behind the Republican candidate for governor in his own state of Ohio. Does Vance help the ticket?

HM: Well, it’s funny. I think Vance has been misrepresented by much of the media as we speak, like 24 hours since his anointment, as somebody who can talk to the workers of Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin. Whereas actually, what he has done, beginning with “Hillbilly Elegy,” is try to explain the workers of Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin to his fellow intellectual elites. That is very different from having a populist touch. So I don’t really think he helps much electorally. I think there are some core democratic constituencies that will be even more mobilized to oppose the Republican ticket, given what he said on abortion, given that he more or less made it clear that he would act as Mike Pence did not act in a January 6th context. But those constituencies are not swing constituencies, so I don’t think he really helps the ticket. And if he hurts it, I think it’s only in a very small way.

Jon Wiener: The first night speakers, you said, were pretty much predictable and familiar — with one exception, shocking, and dismaying, for us: Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters.  A featured speaker at the Republican National Convention. What did he say?

HM: He balanced between two things and a massive omission, which I think towers over the speech. On the one hand, he said things that Republicans don’t like to hear historically, that corporations roll over workers; that, they need the kind of legislation — he didn’t name the PRO Act, but that was one part of it — that would enable workers to join unions without fear of being fired, which is illegal, but employers have negligible penalties if they do it. He laid out that terrain, but then he blamed it on the amorphous DC establishment where corporate lobbyists invariably have the power to block pro-worker legislation.
What he didn’t say, what is the towering omission, is that the people they help convince or who don’t need convincing to take their side, the side of the corporate lobbyists, are universally the Republicans on Capitol Hill, and that the Democrats virtually to a person support things like the PRO Act, strong enforcement at the National Labor Relations Board, raising the minimum wage over its current ridiculous level of $7.25, and $2.13 For tipped workers — all of which Republicans oppose. He just blamed Washington as such, without making the distinction between Democrats and Republicans, which in the age of Joe Biden on labor questions is a very, very big difference between the two parties.

Jon Wiener: So what’s the background story here? Why is the Teamster president apparently with Trump when Biden has been the most pro-union president in American history?

HM: I think he’s made a calculation that Trump has a good chance of winning, and he wants an open door at the White House. And I think he thinks since the major organizing target, not that they’ve really done much organizing yet, is Amazon, and since Amazon is owned by the same guy, Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, which Trump is known to hate, that he might get a few little things out of the White House that would help them, help the Teamsters, at Amazon. Of course, nothing like just making across the board workers free again to join unions, but maybe he’s thinking of that. And maybe he’s thinking of the fact that in most unions that are composed of blue collar workers, I think polling shows that Biden runs no better than even and often worse than even.

And were it not for the 5 million members of the two teachers unions who overwhelmingly support Democrats, unions would not be carrying the aggregate union vote at all.  Because look, the working class by and large is hugely de-unionized. It’s the class that really can’t organize without fear of being fired. If you’re a grad student or a hospital intern, they can’t fire you because they can’t get a replacement very easily. You can get all kinds of replacements for construction workers, truck drivers and assembly line workers. And so they’re largely in a non-union environment, where they get social media, they get Fox News. The kind of counterweight that unions when they were present in those communities used to present is absent. And so they are prey to all of this right-wing drivel, and that goes for a lot of union members too, and including unions like the Teamsters. I think all of that was part of his calculation.
But look, I have to say, when the American Rescue Act passed, it included a huge rescue for a pension plan that was on the verge of insolvency that had 350,000 Teamsters as its members. And no Republicans voted for that. Only Democrats voted for that. Biden signed it at the White House, and Sean O’Brien was at Biden’s side. So there’s a considerable act of amnesia also being willed by O’Brien in the kind of thing he did Monday night.

Jon Wiener: We’ve been talking mostly about the Republicans and Donald Trump up to this point. We also need to talk about the Democrats and Joe Biden in the wake of the assassination attempt. The Biden campaign’s argument is that the assassination attempt should make the Democrats unite behind Biden because the country needs stability and continuity, not the uncertainty that would come with his pulling out as a candidate. What do you think about that argument?

HM: I think most Democrats have concluded that if he stays in the race, the least unifying figure in American politics, Donald Trump, will become president. And so there are a hell of a lot of elected officials who were scared to death that Biden will drag down the entire ticket, that the Democrats will not only lose the White House, but the House and the Senate. As yet, most of them have still not gone public on this.  But time is a-wastin’, and there may be some clashes up ahead.

Jon Wiener: I have to point out that if the polls to come later this week and next week are pretty much the same as the Morning Consult poll, which shows basically little or no change in the percentage for Biden, I think that helps Biden a lot. If Biden’s support cratered after the assassination attempt, if he lost five or six points, that would create, I think, irresistible pressure for him to withdraw. The fact that the first polls at least remain where they’ve been for months helps him at this point, doesn’t it?

HM: No.  Because the polls, as they exist, show him losing virtually every swing state. There are some private polls that are worse. Stan Greenberg, the veteran Democratic pollster, who is also a member of the board of my magazine and writes for us frequently, has some polling data that looks really bad. And I think most democratic electeds are cognizant that if a Democrat is leading, not just trailing, but leading a Republican by one or two points, nationally, that basically means the Republican will win the White House. While it is true that if Biden cratered, that would make his case all the weaker. But look, I mean, we are in this, as I’ve mentioned, 1861 environment in which the nation is already divided. The problem is, even if Biden is apparently running even at a national level with Trump, that is not enough for him to win.  That is the problem.

Jon Wiener: The big question this week is, do Democrats have enough time to choose a replacement for Biden? Right now, the convention delegates are scheduled to vote on the party’s candidate virtually online. There is a virtual roll call that’s going to be held, the plan is, before the Democratic National Convention. Right now, it’s scheduled for a week or two from now. This is the Democratic National Committee that passed this rule, which they no longer have the rationale to support. The DNC I understand is meeting on Friday of this week to finalize the plans for the virtual roll call. Please explain what the heck this is about and what it would take to abandon it.

HM: Well, initially, this was a reaction to a state law in Ohio, which said, “We’re only going to put on the ballot party nominees were nominated by early August,” and the Democratic Convention is in mid-August. So the Democrats created this as a way to get around that Ohio law.  But then the legislature changed, and it’s now set for the beginning of September, which means the Democratic Convention should have the same power it’s always had since 1832, that being the time when the candidate is officially nominated.
But the Democrats in the Biden camp have ignored that change in the law and are pushing ahead on this, which indicates that they are scared of what might happen at the convention, which is not exactly a sign of strength. And this may require some leading Democrats to speak publicly against this between now and Friday. So we shall see.

Jon Wiener: The news as we speak on Tuesday afternoon is that the House Democrats are organizing a letter protesting holding a virtual roll call before the convention. What do you know about that?

HM: I know it is started by a California member of the House. I don’t know as yet how many signatories there are to that letter. And that if there were no repercussions for signing it, I know that you would have a majority of House members publicly stating that they were on that letter.

Jon Wiener: The letter says, I’m looking at the text of it here, “It is a terrible idea to take the unnecessary and unprecedented virtual roll call vote, which would deeply undermine the morale and unity of Democrats at the worst possible time. There is no legal justification for this extraordinary and unprecedented action.” The letter from House Democrats about the virtual roll call.

HM: Yeah, I think this would cause an eruption within the Democratic Party. I mean, my first convention when I was 18 years old and a kid on the staff of Gene McCarthy, with Chicago ’68, I’ve already seen a convention where a big chunk of the delegates hated another big chunk of the delegates. This would gratuitously turn this convention upcoming in Chicago into quite possibly a retread of ’68, minus the divisive issue of the Vietnam War, and instead over issues of strategy, which is why it’s just ridiculous that we’re plunged into this situation by the inner circle around President Biden, who otherwise would have a lovely legacy if he just walked away at this juncture.

Jon Wiener: Even if the DNC forces a virtual roll call in the next week or two, the underlying problem remains the same: Biden himself has to release his delegates. They are pledged to him. They are all party loyalists. They’ve been picked for their unyielding loyalty to Biden. Unless he releases them, it’s going to be virtually impossible, or extremely unlikely, let’s say, to get another candidate in. So it’s still basically up to Biden, whatever happens with the virtual roll call.

HM: To a degree. To a degree. I mean, delegates can vote their conscience at any given time. They’re really not bound by party rules to follow the dictates of the party primaries where effectively Biden ran unopposed. Look, it is also the case that there’s a real difference between the delegates to this year’s convention and those of 2020 and 2016, where there were a number of delegates who were there because they had backed Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Not so this time. But it’s also the case that it’s some of the more centrist Democrats who have taken the lead on ousting Biden. So this is still anybody’s guess where it’s heading.

Jon Wiener: It’s been a rough week for all of us here. I wonder if you have any final thoughts as we speak on Tuesday afternoon.

HM: This is what is sometimes referred to as hell week. We are right in the middle of a hell week right now.

Jon Wiener: Harold Meyerson is editor at large of the American Prospect. Harold, thanks for talking with us today.

HM: Always good to be here, Jon.

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Jon Wiener: Should Biden drop out? Could Kamala Harris do better? That’s the question all of us have been asking. For analysis of Kamala as a potential candidate, we turn to Joan Walsh. Of course she’s national affairs correspondent for The Nation. She’s also a co-producer of the Emmy nominated documentary, “The Sit-in: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show.” She’s author of the book, “What’s the Matter with White People?” And her new book is “Corporate BS: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America.” We talked about it here. Her reporting on Kamala Harris is the cover story in the August issue of The Nation Magazine. Joan, welcome back.

Joan Walsh: Thanks for having me, Jon.

Jon Wiener: First I think we need to talk about how the assassination attempt on Saturday might change the presidential race. We’re speaking here on Tuesday when we have one poll, the first poll to come out after the assassination attempt. This one is from Morning Consult and it shows basically very little change, Trump ahead by one point, nationally, 46 to 45. And they also asked about Kamala. And Kamala is exactly in the same place in the Morning Consult poll as she was before the assassination attempt, behind Trump by one point, 46 to 45.
The Biden people say the assassination attempt provides a reason why Biden should remain the Democratic candidate, why Kamala should not replace him – because, they say, we need stability, not more political turmoil, not the uncertainty that would come with his dropping out. Do you think the assassination attempt might change the presidential race?

Joan Walsh: Jon, I think it has changed it, to some extent. I think that people who were already trying to start something up have fallen back, to some extent. Obviously, the president helped himself out a lot with his press conference. I wrote at the time, I didn’t think it would be enough, but that combined with the assassination attempt, and I’m sorry I chuckled there because it’s not funny at all. But those two things combined I think have sort of pushed back the Biden doubters and the people who are so convinced that he’s a weak candidate and should get out of the race, particularly for Kamala.

Jon Wiener: The Biden campaign said last week, “There is no indication that anyone else would outperform the President versus Trump.” Now, that’s not really true, at least not in some of the polls, which are from before the assassination attempt. The Washington Post poll showed Kamala ahead of Trump nationally, 49 to 47, while Biden was tied with Trump at 46 each. The CNN poll, which was two weeks ago, found Harris two points behind Trump, which was better than Biden, who was six points behind. And The New York Times poll right before the assassination attempt tested Kamala and Biden against Trump in Pennsylvania and in Virginia, Pennsylvania, a key swing state the Democrats have to win, Virginia, assumed to be a blue state. In that poll, Kamala did better than Biden in both states.  And all of these polls were taken without Kamala being a candidate. What do you make of those polls?

Joan Walsh: I don’t know. I started writing this profile of her before Biden’s sad debate performance and before any of this talk that she would replace him potentially on a ticket. And in a way, what’s sad to me is that she was, I would say, really coming into her own.  She was owning the issues of reproductive justice, as I put it, because it’s not just about abortion, it’s about maternal mortality. It’s about having the support to have a child if you want a child. On voting rights, she was really the campaign’s emissary to the Black community on so much that has been done to help Black communities, plural. And she was out on the road, and she told me, “Send me out on the road every day. I love that.”
And so in a funny way, I feel bad for her now because everything she’s doing is now through this lens of can she take over, should she take over? which just has to be excruciating. She has been his most loyal surrogate. So I don’t know what to think, Jon. I think that some of this gets really heated for some of us on the left, because we don’t really know. And so people decide they know, and then once they know they are right, and you are wrong, and more than that, you are just a horrible person. There’s been a lot of that lately, and I’m just kind of like, I honestly don’t know. I honestly can’t look at these polls. I was anti-polls before any of this happened. I don’t believe the polls.

Jon Wiener: A little history here. The biggest concern her advocates have about her as a presidential candidate is that she was a presidential candidate once before, very briefly in the 2020 Democratic primaries, where she dropped out before the first delegates were chosen in the Iowa caucuses. You know a lot about that campaign. What went wrong there?

Joan Walsh: I think that there were too many cooks in the kitchen, which is funny because she’s a cook. I think that there were just too many disparate power centers. And between Oakland, where she’s from, and Baltimore, where they placed the campaign, and everywhere in between, I really did think that there were too many people empowered to make decisions — and a lot of them were bad. I thought she started out strong, and I found it very, very dispiriting.
On the other hand, I would say that she’s just been so strong in these two years since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. She’s just had her voice in a very, very relatable and clear way that I don’t feel like was as accessible to her in 2019 when all that was going on. So I think that a lot of things have come together for her, including herself.

Jon Wiener: You sat down with Kamala a few weeks ago.

Joan Walsh: I did.

Jon Wiener: This was before Biden’s disastrous performance in that debate. For starters, you were told there were some things she did not want to talk about. Maybe we should start with those.

Joan Walsh: Yes. I was told a little bit by her staff, but also by her friends, and we have a couple of mutual friends, that she does not like this idea that she’s “having a moment.” I think I did stupidly use the word “moment,” and she came back to me and she said, “Well, it might seem like a moment if you haven’t been paying attention to my entire political history, but if you have. . . ” which I have, give me a break, Madam Vice President. “But if you have, you know that I’ve been working on all of these issues almost my whole life.” She doesn’t really like the idea that she “found her voice,” because she feels like she’s always had her voice and we didn’t listen to it.
I felt for her because I do think she’s been way, way underestimated for a long time. And so I was sympathetic to her point of view. It was a very warm interview. I think I got some really great things that other people haven’t gotten.  But it was also sometimes contentious because at a certain point I turned from being this person she’s known for 21 years to this idiotic reporter who-

Jon Wiener: I must say, you’re not the idiotic reporter. You’re our national affairs correspondent and we need you.

Joan Walsh: Thank you Jon, I think she does know that, but she just can get her back up — and again, as I say, I get it because she’s been treated really poorly.

Jon Wiener: Of course, as you said, her biggest political assignment as vice president has been outreach to African-Americans. Polls show Trump doing better with African-American men than any Republican since the ‘60s. You write about asking her specifically what was happening with Black men. How did that go over?

Joan Walsh: It didn’t go over well, actually. She pushed back. She thought I was kind of stereotyping or making assumptions about a demographic group that were not fair. But as I say in the piece, I kind of get it and then I also didn’t get it because we both know this is not a good situation for the Democrats, and I would like to have talked to somebody who might’ve given me more insight into what she sees these men perceiving or going through. But she also made the point that the most insulting thing is Trump, and his sons, acting like dad’s just going to rack those votes in because they’re all relating to him being a felon.

Jon Wiener: The mugshot. Black men will love the mugshot, because —

Joan Walsh: ‘Black men love the mugshot,’ which is so racist. No evidence that that’s true. So that was a little bit uncomfortable, but I also, I got her point.

Jon Wiener: We have to talk about Kamala and Gaza. Of course Biden is unpopular, especially among young people for his support for Israel’s war. At the Gaza encampments on campus, they were calling him “Genocide Joe.”  And Biden did send Kamala out to call for a ceasefire back in March, before he did.

Joan Walsh: I’ve been challenged by people, Jon, that he actually did call for one a couple days before that. We did some fact checking on this. So he was kind of right there with her. I think the real difference though was tone and that she talked in perceptively emotional and distraught terms about what she was seeing in the suffering in Gaza and what people weren’t eating. One of my favorite lines is, she’s like, “Hey, Joan, I like to cook. So when they kept telling me there’s flour going in there.  I’m like, ‘Okay, but where’s the clean water? Because you can’t make,’ and she used the term S-H-I-T, ‘with just flour.'”  And so there’s a pragmatism, but there’s also a deep empathy to the way that she asks questions. And I think that that has made her remarks at every step of the way stand out from Biden’s.
And people ask with decent reason, would her policy be different if she were the president? And I can’t say for sure, but I think rhetoric matters. And so I think there’s a decent chance it would be somewhat different. It would always be pro-Israel, but whether there’s any ability to reign in the way that Netanyahu is both using these weapons but also not doing his damnedest to get aid in and protect civilians, I feel like she would do more.  But that’s totally me. That’s just speculation.

Jon Wiener: What was your favorite moment traveling with Kamala over the last few months?

Joan Walsh: I got to go see her at the Sherri Shepherd Show. It’s actually called “Sherri,” but she was a host of The View. It’s based in New York. It’s a Fox show, it’s an afternoon show. It runs, as shows like that do, different times all over the country, but it’s widely distributed and it’s very popular, especially among women and especially among Black women. And so heavily Black audience, really fun, with DJs and hype men to get you on your feet and dancing during the commercials. And that included her during the commercials, although she would kind of settle down when the cameras came back on.
I just saw her getting very, very comfortable in that setting. And I also got to meet her high school best friend, Wanda Kagan, and they were in a dance troupe called Midnight Magic. And so I really got to see her as she is when she was comfortable, funny and fun, and she likes to dance and she knows all the words to “Atomic Dog,” as do I, and it was a really bright, light moment for me to see her that way and also given everything else she’s going through.

Jon Wiener: Now Trump has emerged triumphant from this assassination attempt. Biden is hard at work trying to demonstrate that his disastrous debate was simply a bad night. You spent months reporting on Kamala Harris. Where would you say things stand now with the possibility that Biden would step down and she would become the candidate?

Joan Walsh: I feel more pessimistic about that than I did last week because of the things that we’ve discussed: decent press conference, the distraction of the assassination attempt, the convention in Milwaukee. I don’t feel like it’s imminent, but you and I both know, and so do our listeners, if poor Joe has another bad moment, all of this will return. All of this will come back, the tide will come back in.
I’m not hoping for that. I’ve been kind of agnostic, even though there’s a part of me that thinks she would do a better job and that she would really add some excitement to this ticket and to this whatever we’re going to go through next month in Chicago. I can imagine that being very, very, very exciting. I can also imagine it being chaotic.  And if he doesn’t want to go, he’s not going. That’s where I am. He seems to be sticking in and I did not love it last week when he kept insinuating, not insinuating, saying he is the only one who can beat Trump, and he’s just invaluable. Because I think she can, but he is who he is — and this is how I think it is right now. But talk to me in two weeks.

Jon Wiener: Joan Walsh — Her report on Kamala Harris will be the cover story in the August issue of The Nation Magazine. You can read an excerpt right now at thenation.com. Joan, thanks for talking with us today.

Joan Walsh: Thanks for having me, Jon.