Transcript:
Colin Seeberger: Hey everybody, welcome back to “The Tent,” your place for politics, policy, and progress. I’m Colin Seeberger.
Erin Phillips: And filling in for Daniella Gibbs Léger, I’m Erin Phillips. Colin, the election is just around the corner, and I’m getting stressed out, but I will say the increase in celebrity sightings on the campaign trail is kind of keeping me going. I think the Eminem stuff this week was really fun.
Seeberger: Oh, I have gotten lost in the moment, no doubt, Erin.
Phillips: I don’t think I can pull out any Eminem puns at the moment, but that was good. Well, with that in mind, I heard you had a great conversation on the state of the race this week.
Seeberger: I did. I talked to political strategist Simon Rosenberg about recent polling, the impact of MAGA extremism on Republicans’ odds up and down the ballot, and we also talked about what the next few weeks are going to look like as we approach Election Day.
Phillips: Yeah, I know you probably talked about what they might look like and no one can really predict the future, but I was hoping you’d say that Simon pulled out his crystal ball and gave us an answer so we could just put this to bed for the next two weeks.
Seeberger: That would be nice. Then again, we seem like we’re getting new fantastical headlines and stories by the hour. And our listeners, they may have heard us spending a lot of time talking about Trump’s antidemocratic rhetoric and the unprecedented threat to democracy that he poses. Unfortunately, we’ve got to talk about it again. Donald Trump has a penchant for dictators. He’s praised Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Viktor Orbán of Hungary, among others. His Project 2025 agenda reflects his clear desire for unchecked power. It would gut America’s system of checks and balances to enact an extreme far-right agenda that would serve him, not the American people.
So against that backdrop, I guess I shouldn’t be totally shocked at a news report we got earlier this week from The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who reported that Trump has grown more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship and the absolute control over the military he thinks it would give him. He specifically said to his longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly, that, quote, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had—people who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders,” close quote.
I really encourage all of our listeners to go and read the piece. It’s full of other jaw-dropping, horrific details—that Trump praised the Chinese government’s violent response to pro-democracy protests during the Tiananmen Square massacre; that he told the U.S. military officials during the George Floyd protests to shoot demonstrators who were speaking out talking about the importance of protecting Black lives; and that some of his own military officials are coming forward and saying outright: “The man is a fascist.”
In a separate interview with The New York Times, Kelly also called Trump, quote, “the definition of a fascist.” Kelly said Trump has made admiring statements about Adolf Hitler—of course, the man responsible for killing six million Jews, including hundreds of thousands of Americans. He expressed contempt for disabled veterans and called U.S. soldiers who died in battle, quote, “losers” and “suckers.” This is the kind of man we’re talking about.
Phillips: Yeah, he really did all that, Colin. And let’s just point out that when The Atlantic report broke, Trump was in the middle of being on stage at a rally praising Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, both autocrats. He was in the middle of doing this when the report broke.
Seeberger: I just don’t even know where to begin with that.
Phillips: Yeah, and as if all of that wasn’t enough, we’ve also recently learned, thanks to a new report from ABC News, that Judge Aileen Cannon is on the shortlist for Trump’s possible attorney general picks.
And if her name sounds familiar to listeners, it’s because she is the lackey judge he appointed in Florida, who, for absolutely no good reason, threw out the case regarding Trump’s handling of classified documents. She has proven she’s willing to do his bidding, which is likely why she’s on the list to begin with—
Phillips: —and let’s not forget that Project 2025 would end the independence of law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the Department of Justice. It would give the president power to use all the resources of the federal government to investigate and prosecute whoever they want with no repercussions. And considering the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. United States, which declared that the U.S. President is above the law, this is even more concerning.
I mean, under Attorney General Aileen Cannon, the risk of a commander in chief using their unchecked power to act illegally would be far higher. And it’s a risk the public needs to take seriously because let’s be clear: Using the government to assail your political opponents is a trademark of authoritarian regimes, the ones that Trump looks up to.
Phillips: Putin, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, and Egyptian President el-Sisi have all done it. Another reported contender for attorney general that we should mention—
Seeberger: Hit me with it, Erin, hit me with it.
Phillips: —is Jeffrey Clark, the person who, if you remember, tried to get the DOJ to make false claims in 2020 to interfere with the election in Georgia. I mean—
Seeberger: This is like “Hollywood Squares” meets MAGA, MAGA, & MAGA, LLP.
Phillips: Yeah, and even the MAGA people don’t like Jeffrey Clark because at the time, Trump tried to make him acting attorney general, his top leadership in the Justice Department all threatened to resign. So he backed off, but it’s clear that this time around, he’s weeded out anyone who would object to a pick like that.
Seeberger: Yeah, the guardrails are gone.
Phillips: Yeah, the guardrails are totally off. He can appoint an extreme loyalist like Jeffrey Clark if he wants to, and he doesn’t have the same roadblocks.
And that’s what’s so concerning, Colin. He could—and clearly wants to—implement many of Project 2025’s antidemocratic plans if he’s elected. And once these policies trigger democratic backsliding, it’s incredibly difficult to fix things like that.
Phillips: I would really encourage our listeners to think about what has happened in countries like Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, some of these places we’d mentioned. These are all places that used to have vibrant democracies before their authoritarian leaders, like Victor Orbán or Nicolás Maduro, seized power and ripped away people’s rights.
So the proposals Trump has shown affinity for could leave the U.S. looking more and more like these autocracies around the world, and it’s really scary.
Seeberger: It is scary. And I think it really drills down to, for the American people, do we want to be the world’s premier multiracial democracy in the world? That is ultimately what this is about. Are we going to continue the 250-year experiment that we’ve been on and have been perfecting for many decades now? And it’s also about, are we going to put someone like Trump, who is saying that he’ll do anything he can in order to get into office—including lying about the election, yet again, in order to try to manipulate the result—are we going to give him the keys to be able to manipulate the levers of power in our government?
And that’s exactly why Vice President Harris has said she and her team have been aggressively preparing for the possibility that Trump and his allies may prematurely or with no basis declare victory in the upcoming election.
But speaking of threats from Donald Trump, the threat to our democracy is not the only one, and we really need to drill down into some of the threats that he’s been making to people’s pocketbooks lately and specifically around his tariff proposals, which continue to get more and more extreme. So, here to break it down for us is our colleague Brendan Duke, senior director of Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Brendan, thanks so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Brendan Duke: Thanks for having me on, guys.
Seeberger: So we know that Donald Trump loves tariffs. He talks about them on the campaign trail all the time. He’s long proposed an across-the-board import tax that would actually raise prices for everyday Americans. Can you explain why he’s doing this and whether there’s logic behind this idea?
Duke: Sure. So I’ll explain why he’s doing it, and then I’ll explain why he says he’s doing it. So why he’s doing it is it would raise trillions of dollars of tax revenue, and that is tax revenue he can use to cut taxes for billionaires and corporations. So it’s a way to basically pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.
So what he would say he’s doing is this is all about creating manufacturing jobs. But the proposal, it makes no sense for doing that. It’s a 10 to 20 percent tax on every imported good coming into the country, including coffee, including mangoes, including strawberries in December—all of these things that we do not produce here in the United States, right?
Duke: So the whole point of a tariff is to raise the price to help domestic manufacturers, but in this case, the United States is still not going to produce coffee if you do that. So it’s just raising costs for Americans without any benefit. And again, the only benefit then is the tax revenue he can then use to cut taxes for billionaires.
And he did do tariffs during his first term. It actually led to a manufacturing recession during his last year of office. Manufacturing was falling even before COVID, and then I think you just look at this and you just know it’s going to increase inflation.
At the same time, the Biden-Harris administration, they have made an unprecedented investment in American manufacturing. We are seeing an industrial renaissance of factory building through direct investments, through targeted tariffs rather than taxing imported coffee. So I think we have a manufacturing strategy that’s actually working, whereas Donald Trump is just pro something that’s going to cost Americans when they’re at Walmart or at the grocery store.
Seeberger: Also, even if you accepted that tariffs were going to produce a manufacturing renaissance for the United States, it’s like addressing concerns around American manufacturing by cutting off your arm, basically. At the same time you’re ignoring the fact that you’re going to hurt all these small businesses that rely on bringing their own goods to market, right?
Seeberger: That would be shouldering higher costs in order to be able to do so. It’s just ridiculous.
Duke: Yeah. Half of what we import is inputs for businesses to use for other stuff, frequently for exporters. And we actually saw that U.S. exporters really got hurt by Trump’s tariffs last time because they just weren’t able to compete on the global market because their costs went up, whereas a manufacturer in China, in Europe, had a cost advantage because they weren’t paying this extra tax.
Phillips: So, despite the fact that this will do basically the exact opposite of what he’s saying, he’s doubling down on it, and he’s done so even more in recent days. He suggested he wants to eliminate income taxes for a number of groups and replace that lost revenue with even more tariffs.
So I’m sure on the surface some people may be excited about the possibility of not having to pay income tax because, like, at first glance, maybe that sounds appealing, but can you explain what this policy would really cost us?
Duke: Yeah, so I think the easiest way to think about it is the typical middle-class family in America pays about a thousand dollars in income taxes, right?
But we’ve calculated that the 10 to 20 percent tariff would cost up to $4,000 in income taxes. And two, if you could make up all the revenue on the tariff side from getting rid of all income taxes, we’re talking just thousands of dollars away from middle-income people. It’s actually low-income—the poor—who are going to pay the most—
Duke: —because they spend a lot of their money, they don’t pay anything in income taxes. And basically everybody outside of the top 10 percent gets a big tax hike and their incomes are lower. The top 10 percent would really benefit from it.
There’s a lot of things we can do to make the income tax more fair, more progressive, but getting rid of it and basically replacing it with a national sales tax is no way to help Americans.
Seeberger: Yeah. So not only would Donald Trump’s plans increase the prices that people are paying, but we’ve also seen a lot of evidence that some of the proposals that he’s put forward on the tax side would also have real devastating impacts on the programs that the American people rely on—things like Social Security benefits and the long-term sustainability of that program.
Can you talk about what some of these impacts might be and specifically talk about why Social Security really matters to countless seniors in America?
Duke: Yeah. I mean, it’s the most popular program in America. It’s our largest antipoverty program. I think everybody wants Social Security to be there, to be able to rely on it, right? So the way Social Security works is there’s a trust fund and money comes in in taxes, and money comes out through benefits. And for years, we had more money coming in than money was coming out, but as the country’s gotten older, we now have more money coming out than coming in. And when that trust fund runs out of money, there’s going to be an across-the-board cut to all benefits—about 21 percent, right?
What Trump’s proposals would do is just basically cut off even more revenue from entering the trust fund, but we’re still going to have those costs. And at the end of the day, what that means is that it’s going to accelerate the date that Social Security runs out of money to 2031 from 2034, and then on top of that, since less money will be flowing in, those ensuing cuts to benefits are going to be deeper. They move from a 21 percent benefit cut to a 33 percent benefit cut. So it both accelerates and deepens the cuts that are scheduled to happen in the Social Security program, hurting seniors, making it much harder to get by. I think we would just see a dramatic increase in poverty as a result of this.
So I think, again, it’s kind of the Trump University of tax ideas where it sounds good, but it really screws Americans.
Seeberger: Yeah. It’s all a mirage.
Duke: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Phillips: Yeah, kind of throwing spaghetti against the wall and none of it sticking.
Phillips: Well, it’s all terrifying, but Brendan, thank you so much for joining us today to help break it down so we can understand what this might mean for our listeners and Americans.
Duke: You mean tariff-ying?
Seeberger: It is Halloween, right?
Phillips: Well, that’s all the time we have for today, folks. If there’s anything else you’d like us to cover on the pod, hit us up on Twitter, Instagram, and Threads @TheTentPod. That’s @TheTentPod.
Seeberger: And stick around for my interview with Simon Rosenberg in just a beat.
Seeberger: Simon Rosenberg is a political strategist and commentator who writes a newsletter called “Hopium Chronicles.” He previously founded and was president at the New Democrats Network and the New Policy Institute. He’s worked for the DNC, the DCCC, and two presidential campaigns.
Simon Rosenberg, thanks so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Simon Rosenberg: Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Seeberger: So it’s hard to believe we are less than two weeks to Election Day. And because of that, we’ve got a lot of Americans who are hopping on the poller-coaster, and they are following this race like they perhaps haven’t been over the course of the last 100 days since Vice President Harris took the reins over from Joe Biden.
Can you talk about where you see the presidential race as it stands right now, what does the polling look like, and how much stock people should be putting in it? And then also, do you think that that polling actually gives us an accurate picture of the race?
Rosenberg: All really good questions. I do a lot of commentary on polling because it actually does affect people’s understanding and the general vibes, right? And so, it’s a new domain of the information war that we’re all in every day.
And so, let me tell you where I think things are. I think the election has been remarkably stable and steady since the debate in early September. Kamala Harris has been up two, three, four points in the national polling since then.
She’s also been, in my view, in better shape in the battlegrounds and closer to 270 than Trump. And I don’t think the race has slipped away, I don’t think it’s changed. I think what happened is that the Republicans flooded the zone with more than 80 polls by 31 different organizations. And they did this in 2022, and it changed the narrative about the election from a close competitive election to a red wave election. They’ve done it again.
And over this past weekend, after they dropped 10 polls into the national averages, a bunch of the averages tipped over and made it look like all of a sudden Trump was ahead. I don’t believe that that’s been confirmed by independent polling this week. The independent polling we’ve had this week shows the exact same race that we had last week—
Rosenberg: —and the exact same race that we had two weeks earlier, which is that she’s got a modest lead and that we’re in better shape than they are.
And so, should people pay attention to polls? They shouldn’t pay as much attention as they do. I mean, particularly in this election. This election, all we know today is that it’s really close and that it’s going to be close today and tomorrow and every day until Election Day. And this idea that somehow the election has shifted or there’s some kind of big momentum one way or the other—as of today, I don’t believe that’s the case.
I think it’s been, frankly, a remarkably stable and consistent election for a long period of time—and in part because there hasn’t been some kind of major event like a debate. Something that may have shifted the election a little bit was that week around Helene. I think it’s possible that Kamala Harris lost a half a point or a point in that period because there was a disaster and things kind of seemed unsettled. But it’s been remarkably consistent, and I will tell you right now, where things stand today, I would much rather be us than them.
Seeberger: And maybe there’ll be some movement in light of the recent reporting from The Atlantic and The New York Times about Donald Trump’s professing affection for Hitler’s generals. So there’s definitely—the race is not over. And in a race that’s this close—
Seeberger: —little shifts could make a difference at the margins.
Rosenberg: It could make a huge difference. And I do think there’s some evidence—and it’s still early—that the questions around his fitness and his behavior and his unhinged ways has broken through to voters, and that is starting to move things.
I mean, I was on a panel yesterday with a Republican pollster, a prominent Republican pollster, who said in their tracking polls they’re seeing the race shift towards Harris a little bit because Trump has been so visible and so obviously unhinged. And Harris has also made it an issue, right? She went after him really hard. The campaign made a decision to engage him on this.
How do the Republicans change that dynamic, right? They need to put him out there because they’ve got to go get their voters to go vote. They don’t have a strong ground game. We have more ads on the air than they do. So what they’re doing is they’re using the tool that they have to talk to their voters, which is him. And you know what? It’s proven to be a big problem for them.
The guy—his performance on the stump the last few weeks has been disastrous for them, and there is some evidence that it’s really starting to matter. And to your point, just by little margins here and there—we’re not talking about some big swing—but it’s very possible that Trump’s unhinged behavior is starting to become material in the close here, in the final two weeks.
Seeberger: So Simon, there’s a lot of talk, obviously, about the presidential race, but we also know that there are a lot of key down-ballot races that are going to shape the trajectory of our government over the years to come.
Which races should we be watching, are you watching closely? And do you think that the MAGA extremism that we’ve seen have an impact on Republicans’ performances over the course of the last few cycles may be a problem once again?
Rosenberg: Yeah. I mean, look, there are a few things to take away here as we go into the end. One is the Republicans have, again, underperformed expectations in the Senate. I mean, they may end up winning this thing by a seat. We don’t know what’s going to happen in Montana. It’s very close. And certainly, I’m encouraged by the party now leaning into [Rep.] Colin Allred (R-TX). The data backs that up. It may be a little bit late given the size of the state.
But the Republicans—it doesn’t look like they’ve made any of these states in the battleground, these races in the battlegrounds competitive. They underperformed again.
[Sen.] Sherrod Brown (D) looks like he’s holding in Ohio. I think we’ll know about Montana on Election Day. There are some people who believe that race is tilted one way or the other. I don’t think that we know that yet. [Sen. Jon] Tester (D-MT) has been resilient and pulled things out before and has raised a lot of money.
And so I think the Senate—we had the worst possible map we could have had, and I think we’ve performed unbelievably well in it. And I still think we’re going to find out—we’re not going to know who controls the Senate until election night or the day after. But certainly Brown in Ohio, Tester in Montana, Allred in Texas, I think are the most important Senate races.
And in the House, I will tell you, I was a senior strategist for the DCCC in 2018. I was part of the team that helped flip the House last time. The vibes in the House are unbelievably positive right now. Our candidates feel like they have enough money to complete the job. In many cases, they’re ahead or in a very competitive place—and the candidates who we need to flip seats, not the incumbents but the flippers who are the ones that determine the control.
I’ve interviewed a bunch of them in the last few weeks, and there’s sort of a universal message. They’re incredibly upbeat. They feel like they have the money and the volunteers they need to close properly. Their opponents are unbelievably unpopular. And I think one of the things we’ll look back on in this election is that period when they had the problems with the speaker, that whole period when McCarthy (R-CA) got taken out—
Rosenberg: —that extended period. I think that really created a deep mark on House Republican candidates all across the country. They are suffering from extraordinary levels of baggage in these races. And so, I’ve interviewed now, just in the last two weeks, four of the top candidates, of our top 15, and they all literally told the same story, and they all were really optimistic.
And you get vibes. I’ve been doing this a long time. I mean, I’ve been doing this over 30 years. I think the Harris campaign feels like it’s winning, and the Trump campaign feels like it’s losing in terms of vibes. I think the House, the vibes right now are very—I just am getting unbelievably positive sentiment about where they think things are.
And I was on a briefing earlier today where one of the team that works on the House races says that they’re now, based on where they see things are, they’re trying to put a few more races. They’re trying to expand the map. They’re trying to grow a little bit, which is a sign of confidence and strength.
So there’s going to be—we got a lot of races in New York and California, but they’re scattered all over the country, as always in the House. Iowa, Arizona—if we win, and I think we will win in the House, it’s still going to be probably 10, 15, 20 seats. It won’t be an overwhelming majority. But I think the likely scenario is now that the House flips. But we’ll see, I mean, the people get to make a decision on all that.
Seeberger: Well that may be why we’re already starting to see, from one side of the aisle, this increasing trafficking in misinformation about elections and democracy building off of the “big lie,” but we’ve seen it talking about noncitizen voting, lawsuits, about voter roll purges, etc., etc. And in recent weeks, both Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have expressed skepticism about the results in this election before votes are even being cast in many cases.
Can you talk about the legitimate reasons we should expect to see some delays, perhaps, in some race calls in the days and even the weeks following the elections, and how we should go about combating these narratives about the misinformation related to our elections?
Rosenberg: Number one, I think that the anticipation and the planning is that we have to expect that Trump’s going to contest the election, right? They almost got away with it last time, and the Supreme Court has proven itself to be compliant and complicit in his machinations. And so I think we have to anticipate that he will.
And I think, frankly, this flood of red wave polls that they’ve dropped into the system—I think one of the reasons they’re doing it, and it’s not the only reason, but one of them is to condition their supporters that they’re winning and that they’re winning the election, so therefore it makes it easier to argue that we cheated.
And so I think just in the way that they were able to convince 80 to 85 percent of their supporters through propaganda that the Biden administration stole money from people in North Carolina and gave it to undocumented immigrants—which, by the way, is polling at like 85 percent with Republicans right now, something that never happened—they are conditioning their audience right now to the notion that Trump’s winning and that the map is favorable. And they’re doing that through RealClearPolitics and Polymarket and all these other ways that they’re communicating on social media. And so therefore, 80 percent of his audience is going to go into Election Day believing that he’s winning.
And this is a very purposeful effort right now, I think, to create the predicate for him to contest the election that, “Hey, all the polls said I was ahead, and how did I not win,” right? And the thing is, you only do these kinds of things if you’re actually not winning. I mean, I think what’s important for people who are listening and watching to realize is that you only cheat and manipulate—I joke that Republicans are having to invent a Democratic Party to run against because they can’t beat the one that they actually are running against.
This thing with the red wave polls—they would only be trying to create an impression that Trump was winning if they believed he wasn’t. And so the hope I have is that we win this election by enough that there’s a clear and definitive outcome, and that there’s a clear repudiation of MAGA by voters, and that everything proceeds properly.
I do think the other thing that really matters for this is that the length of the early vote and the weeks and weeks and weeks of people seeing the normal voting happening without incident of any kind is also a problem for Trump.
I think it creates a counterbalance to what I was saying earlier, that people just saw an election take place. How did they rig it? I mean, people are out voting. There’s no challenges now. And so I’m like, “What do you mean they’ve been cheating all these weeks? How did they do that?”, right?
So I think these early vote windows—it’s one of the reasons I think Trump hates the early vote so much and mail voting is that it makes it harder for him to claim that somehow the system had been hacked and rigged over the last few weeks. And so this extended early vote window makes this problematic for them. And that’s why these stories about everybody voting and enthusiasm around voting is really important as a counterbalance to some of the stories that Trump is going to put out there.
But I think the key is, look, if we clearly are ahead in places like the eastern states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina early in the evening, and it looks like we’re going to win those places, if we flip North Carolina, if the Democrats win in North Carolina, and that’s known on election night, then it’s going to be pretty clear where this election is going.
And so there is an actual possibility that we know pretty clearly what’s going to happen early and on election night or one or two in the morning and not weeks later. But I think we have to recognize that there could be an aftermath period, and as exhausted as we may all be, it could be that there’s going to be weeks of this, the aftermath that comes, and no one should be surprised by that.
Seeberger: For sure. For sure. Simon, I’m really curious to get your take on—we’re seeing in the closing days of this election, the candidates taking completely different approaches to their strategies to grow their support.
Rosenberg: That’s a generous way of putting it, by the way.
Seeberger: Thank you. Thank you. Donald Trump seems to increasingly only be talking to just the MAGA base, is doubling down on a far-right, authoritarian vision. We’re hearing this with the talk of going after enemies within. And then you have Kamala Harris who is out there doing events with former Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R), who is talking about, “We may not always see eye to eye on every issue, but this is important. This is about the future of our democracy, if we’re going to continue this 250-year experiment,” and really inviting moderates, maybe disaffected Republicans.
Can you talk about what is driving the difference in those two strategies—
Rosenberg: That’s a great question.
Seeberger: —and where you think each candidate sees that they may have success?
Rosenberg: They’ve made a decision that they’re just going to pump MAGA full time and that they’re going to try to get as many disaffected and low-propensity Republicans to go vote based on these hot-button messages. And they don’t have a massive GOTV operation. They’re being outspent on television. And so it’s possible that the strategy is that he’s ratcheting up the authoritarian, autocratic MAGA sentiment in order to break through, in order to reach these lower-propensity voters, because he doesn’t have the normal political tools that he needs. It’s also possible he thinks he’s losing, and he’s starting to lose his marbles and fall under pressure, which I think there’s a lot of evidence that’s part of what’s happening with his performance problems on stage.
And I think we’re using a more traditional route, which is we want everybody to vote for us, and we’re going to fight to grow our coalition as much as we possibly can to not only pump the Democratic supporters, which we’ve been doing through all these rallies and through people like AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)] running all over the country right now.
I mean, we’re seeing an unprecedented effort to engage voters. And I think part of the reason this is happening, again, is that usually a presidential campaign has a late October debate that happens where it sort of forces people to realize the election’s coming. They get to make their case on TV.
Well neither candidate had that this time. And I think it’s really hurt Trump. I think they had to do it because I think him doing the debate could have hurt him more. But they just don’t have the tools that we have to create a lot of noise in the final two weeks on our own. And that’s why you’re seeing the campaign being very intelligent and strategic about being everywhere all the time, which only a campaign that has a lot of money and is very capable.
I mean, look what happened last week. Donald Trump has one event a day, and he had two of his events completely melt down last week. I mean, they had no mic for 17 minutes. Meanwhile, our campaign is producing eight, nine high-quality events a day, in five states and eight media markets and large crowds with scripts and everything else. Like, the production and the spectacle that the Harris campaign is creating right now is extraordinary. And they need to do it because they didn’t have that last debate. They needed to do more to engage in the close, the normal, because we don’t have those traditional mechanisms to wake up voters, right?
So I think that we are closing in a more intelligent way than they are, and we’re going to find out on Election Day. But I do think that—at the end of the day, I think that when Trump is challenged and things feel uncertain, he escalates around the ugly. And it’s sort of a pattern throughout all of his time. Whereas I think we’re being far more strategic, and I think our strategy is going to be more successful. But we’re going to find out soon.
Seeberger: Simon, you write a lot about the power of hope and optimism. Your Substack is aptly named “Hopium Chronicles,” right?
Seeberger: We love to end our interviews on a positive note here on “The Tent.” Why do you think hope is necessary in our politics today?
Rosenberg: So I think one of the central strategies of MAGA is to pump negative sentiment into our discourse every day. I think they want us to feel bad about our country, our leaders, our institutions, each other, and the American project. I think it’s a central strategy. For an extremist to take over, what they have to achieve is a sense that the system is broken and that we need a more extreme or radical response.
MAGA’s job, every day, is they’re a negative sentiment machine. They want us to feel bad about everything. Everything has failed. It’s failed. He says this all the time, right? Everything has failed.
And I think that part of the strategy we need to defeat MAGA is that we need to be positive sentiment machines. We need to talk up America when they talk it down. We need to operate, as the Harris campaign has been doing, out of love of country and patriotism to counter their rancid nationalism. And so I think that part of our job in defeating MAGA now and in the future is to take greater responsibility for the sentiment that we put out into the world and to do a more conscious job of being proud patriots who love our country and talk up this remarkable place that we all live in.
And that—so part of the Hopium project was to answer their darkness with light and to answer their malevolence and their negative sentiment with positive sentiment. And so I think this is both a mental health requirement at a time of enormous anxiety, but it’s also a political strategy.
And if you were to have on experts in authoritarianism, like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and others like that, they’ll talk to you about this issue, about—as Timothy Snyder says in the very first chapter of his book On Tyranny—about needing to not obey in advance. It’s just so essential that all of us end this election with joy and coming from joy and hope and confidence and strength and not ending with fear and worry.
They want us to end in fear and worry. They want us to crawl up in a ball and go into the corner. They want us to disengage. And so I think that this whole idea of hope and “Hopium” and “Hopium” in the “Hopium” world is hope with a plan, right? We just don’t hope the election’s going to turn out well. We go work to go make it so.
I have a phrase that helped me: Do more, worry less—which is channel this anxiety, this fear, this worry you have into good works, whatever they are. So that’s part of my vision, is that for those of us like CAP, who are in the information battle every day and doing—all of you do remarkable work every day—we need to have a greater consciousness of the need, I think, to counter their negative sentiment with positive sentiment as a strategy, not as something that just makes us feel better. And I think that this is a part of the information domain that we’re all operating in. And I think it’s far better.
I mean, I’ll just end on this note, is that one of the things I found remarkable about the convention was that Kamala Harris and her team that week—and I think most weeks, but that week in particular—it felt that the ideology of the Democratic Party wasn’t left or right or progressive or centrist or neoliberal or neoprogressive. It was based on love of country and patriotism. And I think we have tapped into some of the most powerful sentiments in our society and in the American project, the American creed, that you could possibly tap into.
Seeberger: Simon Rosenberg, that was very inspiring. I appreciate all of your sentiments and your expertise. Thank you so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Rosenberg: Thanks for the opportunity. Thanks for all that you guys do. It’s remarkable to be on the receiving end of your work every day.
Seeberger: Thanks so much for joining us, folks. Please go back and check out previous episodes. Erin, we have some exciting news to talk about.
Phillips: We sure do, Colin. I’m very excited to share with our listeners that “The Tent” has won an award! We’re now an award-winning podcast.
Seeberger: Well, thank you, and thank you to all of our production team, all of our listeners who have made this award possible for “The Tent.” It’s great to get to speak with you in these most pressing times for our country every single week. So, appreciate all the work that our in-house team does, as well as our listeners. We’re grateful for you every single day.
Phillips: Absolutely. And we’re grateful for you, too, Colin.
Seeberger: Aw, Erin, thank you.
Phillips: And thank you to the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts and the Davey Awards for recognizing “The Tent” podcast.
Seeberger: Yes, thank you indeed. We also have to talk about a really important topic as we approach the end of October.
Seeberger: And that is: Halloween is right around the corner! Erin, you need to hit me with your best candy takes.
Phillips: My best candy takes. I don’t know if everybody’s going to love these, but here they are.
Phillips: Best candy: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
Seeberger: Oh, I absolutely can get down. Love it. There’s really nothing that can top a Reese’s. Specifically, I really like, around Christmas time, the Reese’s tree.
Seeberger: It’s got the right ratios. It’s working for me.
Phillips: Oh, the jumbo ones?
Phillips: More Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup? Yes, please.
Seeberger: The better, the better.
Phillips: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Seeberger: So along these lines, though, I also like what’s called a NutRageous. I don’t know if you’ve heard Reese’s NutRageous. It’s basically like a candy bar Reese’s, but underneath the chocolate are whole peanuts—
Phillips: I’ve never heard of this before.
Seeberger: —in between the peanut butter puree that—
Phillips: I’ve never heard of it.
Phillips: I’ve never heard of it.
Seeberger: OK, listeners, if you’ve had a Reese’s NutRageous, you know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t—one, go have them, and two, if you don’t like them, I’m sorry, but there’s something wrong.
Phillips: I’ll have to run out and try a NutRageous this Halloween season. I have to share a take that not everyone’s going to agree with.
Phillips: I love candy corn.
Phillips: I love candy corn.
Phillips: I love the pumpkin-shaped ones.
Phillips: I love the chocolate ones. I love the classic ones.
Seeberger: I don’t want sugar chalk. Like, ew, it’s gross.
Phillips: Candy corn is just good to me.
Phillips: Not too many. Not too many. Just a small handful.
Seeberger: The texture, the chalky sugar taste—none of it is working for me. I don’t even like the colors that much. Like, just nothing.
Phillips: Those are classic colors!
Seeberger: I know, but they’re not my go-tos, much as my daughter would be very disappointed. Orange is her favorite color. That said, definitely not high up on my list. Really can’t stand them.
I also have to say, my candy tastes have really changed. When I was young, I loved an Airhead or Fun Dip—these ridiculous Halloween candies that now I go for and I’m like, “No, I really just want a classic, simple Hershey Nugget with an almond, and I’ll be completely satisfied.” I haven’t trick-or-treated for quite some time.
Phillips: Well, are you going this year?
Seeberger: Letting you in on a little secret, “Tent” listeners, but we are going to go trick-or-treating this year. My daughter’s going to be a mermaid.
Seeberger: Or, as she calls it, “A mermaid in the wah-wah.”
Seeberger: So we’re going to hit the neighborhood festival and go knocking door-to-door and get some good candy. Hopefully she’ll get a good stash this year.
Phillips: That sounds pretty fun. Are do you have a co-costume planned? Are you going to—
Seeberger: I have not yet. We’ll see what I may be able to pull together here in the next week.
Phillips: Yeah, well I’m sure you’ll get creative. Well, we will leave our candy takes there for our “Tent” listeners because I know in the coming weeks you and Daniella are going to get into it on Thanksgiving desserts as we enter the month of November. And Daniella has some pretty atrocious things to say about pumpkin pie. So everybody brace yourselves, is what I’m saying.
Seeberger: Yep, that is certainly true. Really needing to make sure that we all stay seated, we don’t end up jumping out of our chairs, because we could be at each other’s throats over those disastrous pie takes.
Phillips: Hey, if it didn’t happen with football, I think you’ll be just fine.
Seeberger: That’s true. That’s true. Well, that’s all the time we have this week. I hope all of you are finishing your costumes, getting them all ready for Halloween, taking tons of adorable pictures of your little kiddos, and of course, taking some time to take some deep breaths and exhale. We will get through the next few weeks, and we’ll do so together.
Seeberger: “The Tent” is a podcast from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It’s hosted by me, Colin Seeberger, and co-hosted by Daniella Gibbs Léger. Erin Phillips is our lead producer and guest host for this episode. Kelly McCoy is our supervising producer, Mishka Espey is our booking producer, and Muggs Leone is our digital producer. Hai Phan, Matthew Gossage, Olivia Mowry, and Toni Pandolfo are our video team.
Views expressed by guests of “The Tent” are their own, and interviews are not endorsements of a guest’s perspectives. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.