Friday Morning Politics: Let's Talk About Those Dueling Town Halls

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Brian Lehre: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. What did you do last night? The dueling town halls were ridiculous. Did you watch? I think probably only journalists tried to watch both to actually compare the candidates that way. NBC would schedule their second could have just put it before or after ABCs with Biden. Personally, I mostly boycotted and watched the baseball playoffs and got my highlights from the news like most people. Listeners, you know I usually watch anything like this end to end so I can report on it here, but with the dueling town halls, it was just too strange.

Now, one way that Trump event made news was when the moderator, Savannah Guthrie, I now know, from the Today Show pressed the president on his debt. Here's part of that exchange starting with Trump answering a question about how much money he owes.

Donald Trump: I have a very, very small percentage of debt. In fact, some of it I did as favors to institutions that wanted to loan me money. $400 million compared to the assets that I have, all of these great properties all over the world. Frankly, the Bank of America building in San Francisco, I don't love what's happening to San Francisco. 1290 every year they mortgage,-

Savannah Guthrie: If I hear right, it sounds like you're saying $400 million isn't that much?

Trump: - one of the biggest office buildings.

Savannah: Are you confirming that yes, you do owe some $400 million?

Trump: What I'm saying is that it's a tiny percentage of my net worth-

Savannah: That sounds like yes.

Trump: - and you will see that soon.

Brian: That sounds like yes, as Savannah Guthrie said, so the president did appear to confirm last night that he currently owes, we don't know who, $400 million while he's sitting in the White House as president. Guthrie followed up and asked him who we owe that money to and here's how that went.

Trump: No, I don't owe Russian money. I owe a very, very small, it's called mortgages. People have a house, they put a mortgage.

Savannah: Any foreign bank, any foreign entity?

Trump: Not that I know of, but I will probably because it's so easy to solve.

Brian: No hard no on that question of whether the president owes money to any foreign bank or entity. He did say no there to Russia. On that and more, we're joined by Washington Post national political reporter, Philip Bump. Hi, Philip, welcome back to WNYC.

Philip Bump: Good morning, how are you?

Brian: Good. What did you do when both these things were on TV last night?

Philip: I watched Trump for the first hour, and then I was writing about his failure to reject QAnon for most of the second, so I basically caught up on Biden clips.

Brian: Right, okay, and we will get to that. What do you think about the exchange that we just played with respect to the money that he owes to we don't know who?

Philip: I think there were a couple of interesting aspects about it, which you highlighted. The first is that it did seem to be confirmation that the New York Times report on his finances had at least that part right, which I don't think really surprises anyone. Trump's point, of course, is that a lot of this is tied up in mortgages and when you own a massive building, you're going to have a massive mortgage, but the question is about some of the details, the issues at the edges.

We had, for example, this week a report from CNN suggesting that people may remember this, there was this big, strange, well-hidden fight between Mueller, the special counsel Robert Mueller's team, and an unknown entity over a subpoena. CNN reported this week that that was actually a bank in Egypt, which Mueller's team suspected had provided a loan to Trump shortly before the election which gave him some liquidity to invest in the election, potentially. A lot of unknowns about that, but that's the sort of thing that, it's only $10 million as compared to the $400 million, but that's the sort of thing we still don't know about, and which I think he didn't say wasn't something that existed.

Brian: How much leverage does Russia or anybody else have over him? The question of whether he owes money to Russia, the way he said, "No, I don't owe Russia money," all that really says is he doesn't owe money to the government of Russia. He could still be indebted to Putin in a host of indirect ways, right?

Philip: Yes, sure, or anyone, frankly. There are a lot of oligarchs who work in Russia, there are a lot of nefarious actors around the world who might be willing to make investments, or might have been willing in the past to have made investments which Donald Trump jumped at. Yes, that's the big question mark, we simply don't know.

Brian: Let me jump to something from Biden's town hall. He was asked about court-packing and his refusal to say whether he would support adding members to the Supreme Court if Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, and here's a little bit of how that went with George Stephanopoulos. Biden speaks first.

Joe Biden: I have not been a fan of court-packing because I think it just generates what will happen. Whoever wins, it just keeps moving in a way that is inconsistent with what is going to be manageable.

George Stephanopoulos: So you're still not a fan?

Biden: I'm not a fan. It depends on how this turns out. Not how he wins, but how it's handled, but there's a number of things that are going to be coming up. There's going to be a lot of discussion about other alternatives as well.

George: What does that mean, how it's handled? How will that determine [crosstalk]?

Biden: For example, if there's actually real live debate on the floor if people are really going to be able to have a time to go through this, I don't know anybody who's gone on the floor that's been a controversial justice in terms of fundamentally altering the makeup of the court that's gone through in a day kind of thing. It depends on how much they rush this.

Brian: Biden says he isn't a fan of court-packing, but it depends how much they, being Senate Republicans, rush this process. Now the Senate is going to be voting on Amy Coney Barrett's nomination before the election according to Mitch McConnell, so does that mean Biden is likely to endorse packing the court?

Philip: I think it's unlikely. Joe Biden spent a lot of time in the Senate, he's definitely an institutionalist there, but he's also someone who's trying to be responsive to what the currents in the democratic base are at the moment. I think that's one of the reasons he's been reticent to embrace the idea or even to be nailed down on it. If he doesn't want people to think he's simply going to let the Senate run as been usually the case, I think that's something that obviously is a lot of concern to people in the moment. At the same time, I don't think he wants to say that he's going to do something, which I think is probably unlikely he actually will.

His point is, who knows and we'll have to see what happens with the actual bear nomination. He seems to be saying that he wants to be able to give the senate space to have a real debate over it, instead of just having republicans push it through. That I think he's sending a warning shot more than indicating something he's actually going to do, but he's indicating the direction he'd like the Senate to go.

Brian: Listeners, I'm curious for the politically obsessed among you, did anyone try any version of watching both town halls last night? Did anyone listening right now watch either like, "I'm going to watch Trump because he's more interesting whether I support him or not, or I'm going to watch Biden because I support him," or any of the above? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, if you were watching television at all or consuming political media at all while these dueling Town Halls were on last night, what were you watching? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Or was your harder choice between the American League playoff and the Nationally League playoff.

With Philip Bump Washington Post national political reporter. I want to change topics away from the debate here and ask about a potentially bombshell article in your newspaper, The Washington Post, which reported that US intelligence agencies warned the White House about Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, former mayor of New York, I don't have to tell our listeners, being the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence. I know this wasn't your story, but what can you tell us about that?

Philip: I think this falls into the category of major revelation that is not surprising. We've known for well over a year that Rudy Giuliani was actively in Ukraine and Russia seeking out whatever information he can get his hands on, worrying not at all about the provenance of it, about how Joe Biden may have conducted himself in Ukraine when he was vice president. This is something that was a focus of much of the coverage leading up to and throughout the impeachment that blasted essentially from September into January or February of this year.

We have known that Giuliani has been working with this far-right news network, if you will, called One American News, and they've run a series of programs which highlight whatever dubious claims he's gotten. We know that one of the people with whom he was speaking was actually sanctioned by the US government for working with Russia intelligence. This is someone who he'd brought to One American News, someone who he'd actually elevated claims made by this person. It is similarly unsurprising that Donald Trump would shrug his shoulders at it.

We've seen a number of news reports that suggested that Donald Trump is less concerned about the intelligence communities worried about Russia than he is about having people talk about him and Russia in the same sense. This is not surprising given what we know about Giuliani, it's not surprising given what we know about Trump, but it still is stunning, obviously, that the president's personal lawyer is someone who US intelligence was worried about as being potentially a willing or unwilling ally of Russian intelligence.

Brian: Related to that, the so-called unmasking probe brought by Attorney General Bill Barr about whether the Obama administration improperly requested the identities of names that were redacted in intelligence documents, in other words, the very beginning of the Russia investigation. This probe came to an end, it didn't make much news this week, but this unmasking probe apparently didn't turn up anything substantive and they don't plan to even issue a report. This is the Obama spied on me claim, right?

Phillip: Yes, essentially. It is one facet of the sprawling Obama spied on me claim, which is generally unfounded, but this was something that because it involved a lot of nefarious sounding terms, unmasking, and Joe Biden had requested this unmasking, and all these various things, I was a mainstay of Fox News, the Fox News defense of President Trump, and President Trump's own attempts to undercut the Russian investigation. For those who were familiar with it, no one at any point in time thought anything untoward had happened.

No one who does this sort of work, who looks at national security issues, had worked in prior administrations Republican or Democrat saw this and said, "There's something unusual about this." This is simply how it works the way that Michael Flynn, who was apparently the target of this, he had been having these conversations with someone who's obviously under surveillance, a Russian diplomat, that he would be swept up in surveillance as a result of that simply because he was talking to someone who obviously the government will be surveyed. Nothing about that rang warning bells beyond President Trump's Twitter feed and on Fox News.

The conclusion that nothing untoward appears to have happened. Again, we'll see what the actual report says, but it is not surprising that this did not bear out.

Brian: This is the one that Connecticut US attorney, John Durham was leading?

Phillip: No.

Brian: No, that one's still going on looking into the origins of the Russia investigation as well?

Phillip: That's exactly right. This was a separate investment. We've had a few side probes that were going on. Attorney General Barr has been very active in trying to get these probes going and pretty obviously in order to defend President Trump on this issue. This was a side one, this isn't the main Durham probe, which apparently, is not going to be concluded by the election.

Brian: Even that would be newsworthy because I think Trump has been hoping that the Durham probe would report something even an interim set of conclusions before the election so that Trump could further try to run on, "Biden illegally spied on me."

Phillip: Yes, that's exactly right. He very much wants, and this is one of the reasons he's expressed personal frustration with Barr, is he wants to have something in hand where he can go and say, "Look, this proves that they spied on me," which again, is an unfounded claim. It depends a lot on how you define, "spy and me," and I think too Bill Clinton with it. Yes, he very much wants Barr to drop some sort of bombshell like Tommy did shortly before the 2016 election. We may still see it, but it's not clear that there's going to be much bomb to the shell.

Brian: Philip Bump with us, Washington Post national politics reporter. Philip, are you ready to see what some of our listeners' viewing habits were like last night when the dueling town halls were going on?

Philip: Always.

Brian: Here's Casey and Lyndhurst, you're on WNYC. Hi, Casey, thanks for calling in.

Casey: Hey, Brian, I love your show. I watched most of Joe's, I would flip to the Trump town hall when Joe Biden's would go to a commercial break. Trump's was the same as it always is. The same stuff he repeats over and over. I caught those moments of like that woman who complimented him and then smiled. It just was a little all over the place watching his, and I really thought that Joe had one of his best nights. It was personable, he was interacting with people, he was giving facts based answers, actually talking about policies and things that he would actually do with his presidency. I was proud of Biden [unintelligible 00:14:24] were lovely.

Brian: Casey, Thank you very much. Michael in Hoboken, you're on WNYC. Hey, Michael, thanks for calling in.

Michael: Oh, you're welcome. Oh yes, Brian, I’d just like to explain how I watched both town halls simultaneously very easily. Similar to the fellow you just had on, but I recorded both of them on my DVR. Started with Biden, watched through Biden's town hall until the first commercial breaks, and went over to playback on Trump's through to his commercial break. Then once the commercial [inaudible 00:14:56], I fast-forwarded through those commercials, listened to Biden, and so forth back and forth. It took about two hours in total to listen to them all back to back bouncing back and forth. It went quite smoothly.

Brian: Why did you go to the effort?

Michael: Because I wanted to see what both candidates had to say in full. I wanted to hear them as opposed to read the reviews the following day such as this morning.

Brian: Are you an undecided voter, is that why or for other reasons?

Michael: Oh, no, I'm a very much decided voter. I just always like to have the facts and I still like to be educated on what all the candidates have to say regardless of whether I've already made my decision.

Brian: Michael, you be the journalist, what would you say was the biggest highlight from each or were the most important [unintelligible 00:15:47] from each or however you want to put it?

Michael: Oh, I guess I would sum it up and say that Trump's town hall, he just continually played the victim, continually evaded answers, made excuses, where Biden's town hall seems much more presidential. It was very substantive. He went on a little too long, I think he dragged-out a lot of his answers, but he had a lot to say. That was really my impression in a nutshell.

Brian: Michael, thank you very much. There is a very engaged citizen, Philip, right? Michael gets the engaged citizen award for this morning.

Phillip: He does, but it really is to your point earlier, a little bizarre that this is the choice people had to make. Although I will say that in contrast, everyone who's watched the first debate came away from it just baffled at a minimum. I will say that I think that this contrast itself was very informative going back and forth between the two or even just watching clips of the two. It really gives you a sense of the differences between these two candidates in a way that you're not going to get from a debate when they are challenging one another. They just have very different approaches, and I think that the caller just summarized that well.

Brian: Mary Ellen in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mary Ellen.

Mary Ellen: Hi, good morning. Brian, you really surprised me when you said that you hadn't watched last night and my first thought was, "Who is this person? Where is the real Brian Lehrer?" [laughs] I assume that’s still you.

Brian: I watched every moment of the Democratic and Republican primetime conventions, I've watched every moment of their individual town halls prior to this, I've watched every moment of just about all the Democratic primary debates and how many of those were there, how quickly we forget, I certainly watched every moment of the presidential and vice-presidential debate, and I thought, "This one, no." Judge me if you want, but that's where I came down. Go ahead.

Mary: No, I completely understand. I don't know how you do it. In any event, I watched Biden, and during the commercials, they actually did have commercial breaks, so during the commercials, I jumped over to NBC. I was disappointed in NBC since the Biden one was scheduled first. I was very disappointed that NBC chose to go up against them. They could have done it earlier, they could have done it later, they didn't. Also, Trump's, the NBC one was only half an hour compared to Biden, and I thought Savannah Guthrie did a great job with some real-time fact-checking.

One of the things, and I did hear during the commercials when I switched over to Trump, I did hear the exchange about the $400 million and she pushed back and got him to acknowledge that, yes, he is in debt at least to that extent. I don't think she pushed back, and again, I didn't hear the whole thing. He claims he's worth gazillions of dollars, but of course, that's based on his imaginary and, oftentimes, fraudulent over-inflation of whatever he does own. We know from news reporting that he varies the valuations according to whether he wants to brag about it or whether he needs to pay taxes on it.

One of the things that I don't think has been mentioned yet this morning is the exchange about healthcare, and once again, Trump said, "Oh, yes, we're working on a plan." Nothing of substance, no details. He's in office nearly four years now, when is this mysterious magical plan going to appear? All that he's done is attack the ACA, Obamacare, and absolutely nothing specific. In the moments that I was listening, I didn't hear any pushback on that. As your previous caller just said, in contrast, Biden was very specific about a lot of things and he really spoke to people. I think he really got a sense of who he is, of what a really genuinely decent person he is.

Were all of his answers perfect? Certainly not, but they never will be, but you could see he's really trying and I think you've got a sense of the person that he is.

Brian: Mary Ellen, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you for all of that. You get the co-engaged citizen award along with Michael in Hoboken who was on before you. Please call us again. One little fact check from Mary Ellen's call, she said one of them was only a half-hour, that's not right, right?

Philip: That's right, yes. Trump went on for an hour and Biden went on for an hour and a half, and then apparently stuck around for a while after that to talk to other people which wasn't televised.

Brian: Biden did have a half-hour of primetime in the clear last night without Trump on the other channel, right?

Philip: That's exactly right.

Brian: The thing that Mary Ellen was saying at the end I've heard in a lot of the media reviews that Biden was trying to connect directly with the people in these town halls who are asking him questions, and Trump was just being Trump, talking about himself, going off on whatever he wanted to go off on, but he wasn't trying to connect with the individuals. Yet Trump has all this enthusiasm out there among his supporters who really feel like he speaks for them, so what would you say about that dynamic or that disconnect?

Philip: I'd say a couple of things. The first is that Joe Biden has, in fact, been a politician for a long time and that has meant really understanding how to do the retail politicking that politicians normally have to do. This is a guy who ran for Senate numerous times, he's run for president, and he's someone whose political brand is really based on the guy that people like. This is who Joe Biden is as a politician, so it is very much in keeping with who he's been as a politician that he's very schmoozy with folks, that he's very empathetic to what it is they have to say. He listens and he follows up "Did I answer your question?"

Just the things that are honed over the course of multiple decades of being a politician, particularly in a small state where he probably knows a solid 10% of the people who live there. Donald Trump, that's not where he comes from. I was with him when he came to the Iowa state fair in 2015, and it's fascinating because it was one of the first times that he really was on the ground engaged with people. He just literally operated surrounded by security guards, walking through these massive crowds of people who were gawking at them.

There were not really a lot of times over the course of the 2016 campaign, and certainly now with the pandemic, in which he's doing that direct real interacting with actual voters who can ask him questions into which he has to respond. It just doesn't happen that often. Maybe six times over the course of the past five years he's actually had a situation like that. He doesn't have that skill. It's not who he is, instead, he builds up his base based on the things he says in social media and so on and so forth, and that worked for him certainly successfully in the primaries in '16 and the general election that year, but it's just a very different style of approach.

Brian: Some responses to this question about what people watch coming in on Twitter. Erica writes, "I watched the town hall on ABC news and checked in on the NBC show via Twitter, where lots of recaps and clips gave a good summary." Somebody posting as Myrebut wrote, "I primarily watched Joe to see if I could pick up tips on how to argue with Don supporters and occasionally flipped to Don." Katie writes, "It was easy--" This just flipped off my screen, sorry. Katie writes, "It was easy to watch Biden live, recorded Trump, then watched him, easy peasy." Finally, "We watched The Good Place instead on Netflix," writes Mike. One more of these, one more. Aaron in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Aaron.

Aaron: Hi, so I watched Trump last night. I am a Biden supporter, but I just felt like it would be the more entertaining town hall to watch.

Brian: There you go. I'm glad somebody admitted that. Aaron, thank you. Phillip, I'm a Biden supporter, but I watched Trump because it would be the more entertaining. That's part of how CNN got us into this presidency in the first place, right? They carried so many Trump rallies in 2016 live just because they were going to be spectacular in some way or another. Sensational I mean to say.

Philip: Sure, I think that's right. I think too that that has worked both for and against President Trump, that his tendency to make everything into this massive circus certainly keeps attention on him, but I think that it also means that this election is entirely about Donald Trump. If you look at polling, yes, Trump supporters are more enthusiastic about voting for Trump than Biden supporters are about voting for Biden, but what's motivating Biden supporters more is voting against Trump. Trump keeps himself at the center of this.

There was a study that was done a few months ago that came out that essentially showed that when Donald Trump injected himself into racism 2018, he did more harm than good because Democrats would see him and he'd come out and he'd be on the stump for these Republican candidates and the house districts during the Senate and Democrats would say, "Oh, no, I got to go vote now. I got to go vote against this guy." This is essentially what this study said. Having Donald Trump be the center of attention, Donald Trump loves it. I don't think it's good for him politically.

Brian: All right, one more because Debra in Rosendale has been waiting a long time. Debra, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Debra: Thank you, Brian, for everything you do. Anyway, I toggled back and forth on commercial breaks and I think Savannah Guthrie did a really good job and tried to hold his feet to the fire. He's very slippery. It's just like Trump world, planet earth, Trump world, planet earth, and then there's these women in masks behind him nodding and in shadow, it was very weird. It was kind of like a Greek chorus with him talking about him. It was always about him. We go over to Biden and then we get these long answers where he goes into detail and he talked historically and he puts things in perspective, and I'm like, "Oh, I'm getting answers versus I'm getting entertained."

I'm not even getting entertained because I'm so PTSD about all this, it's just like I hear his voice and I just jumped, but in any case, I don't know why NBC did it the way they did it. I then went to Rachel Maddow after Trump and listened to her talk and listened to Giuliani's daughter. It was just like, where are we living and who are we? I actually think Biden was proved a good politician, kept things clean, did it the way he did it and history is sweeping him into the presidency, which is what happens to people. Cuomo did it with COVID, I think Churchill did it with World War II, and hopefully, Biden will bring us into another age where we can have more people come to the table and be heard.

Brian: Andrew Cuomo would be very happy with that comparison.

Debra: [laughs] I'm sure he would and he is not my favorite person, but he's done a good job in this case.

Brian: Debra, thank you so much. Maybe we'll ask the mayor about that when he's on next hour, who knows. Phillip Bump from The Washington Post, before you go, I just want to ask you briefly about the story in The New York Post that is supposedly based on emails from a laptop that Hunter Biden left at a computer repair shop in Delaware way back in April, 2019. One of those purported emails suggested that Hunter introduced his father, Joe Biden, to an executive at the Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, that was paying Hunter Biden. What do you know about the story and how would you explain to people?

Because this is breaking out and it is a big controversy that might wind up in the heads of Twitter and Facebook being called to testify in Congress by the Republicans. What can you explain about why, as dodgy as the story might be, Twitter decided to take it down and to actually ban the Trump campaign Twitter feed entirely for now?

Philip: I certainly don't want to be in a position of trying to defend what Twitter did here. I'm not sure it was the best strategy for actually approaching this, but I think the important thing to remember about this in the context of the way that we have political conversations now is that we tend to seize upon things that seemed scurrilous and aren't necessarily this report. Even if it's 100% true, which is in itself questionable, it doesn't actually suggest anything nefarious happened, it just sounds bad.

It sounds bad in the way that a lot of the emails that were released in 2016 sounded bad, even though they didn't really get to anything, didn't actually show us anything new, but that is really one of the driving factors of politics these days; people spreading things, adding spins to them on social media that sound bad and can be framed in a way that makes it seem as though something murky nefarious is going on even when it isn't. I think that's what Twitter and Facebook are actively trying to figure out, how do we keep that stuff, that nonsense that spin these representations of innocuous things as bad, how do we keep that from dominating what's going on on our platforms?

That's a very hard question to answer. I'm glad I'm not in the position of having to do it. I strongly encourage people, The Washington Post fact-checker has a good walkthrough of what the New York Post article says and what it probably means, but I encourage people to read to get actually objective context for it. This broader question of people who are always eager to find some smoking gun that's exciting and fascinating, it gets them a lot of retweets and likes on Facebook, that, however, does not necessarily comport with the actual meaning of these news stories that are emerging, which in this case, seems, even in this scenario where this is a legitimate email, to be minimal at best.

Brian: We were all through this during the impeachment period and before that the bottom line is there's absolutely zero evidence that the US government, when Joe Biden was vice president, ever changed its policy toward Ukraine because Joe Biden's son was getting paid by a Ukrainian company.

Philip: Yes, that's exactly right. This thing has been walked through so many times, the only people who are alleging that something bad happened are people who have a stake in making it seem as though something bad happened, including the person who was actually fired. The New York Post article, it's incredibly sketchy. Everything routes through Rudy Giuliani, who we were just talking about as someone who the US government was worried about acting on Russia's behalf, perhaps unwittingly. All of this is dubious and sketchy, but it all sounds bad.

The New York Post gets to splash "smoking gun email" on its cover, regardless of whether or not that's the case because it's trying to sell papers, and Trump allies and Trump supporters are trying sell a Trump presidency, so they seize on it too, and we start spiraling out of control pretty quickly.

Brian: Last thing on this, I heard one person say, but I don't know if it's true or how seriously suspected it is, but I actually heard somebody say on Fox who's hostile to the story, not hostile to Biden but hostile to the story, saying it appeared like it might have been hacked by foreign intelligence. This, like the DNC emails in 2016, might be a Russian or other foreign intelligence operation which, through hacking, would make it illegal and that's why Twitter and Facebook went after it. Can you confirm that The Washington Post confirmed that in any way?

Philip: I don't know if we confirmed what the motivations were for Twitter. That was Twitter's stated clarification yesterday was that they were worried about the hacking. I don't think hack is the right word here, I think there's some questions of whether or not this was planted somehow, but regardless, yes, that was Twitter's rationalization yesterday for how it was going to approach this issue moving forward.

Brian: All right, so much going on. Philip Bump following so much of it. He posts multiple times a day most days on The Washington Post website. A national political correspondent for The Washington Post, Philip Bump, thank you for joining us.

Philip: Of course, my pleasure.

 

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