In an effort to make sense of the fast-moving 2024 presidential race and the chaos that has engulfed our national politics since the presidential debate on June 27 and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, I spoke with David A. Graham (T’09), staff writer at The Atlantic and adjunct professor at Duke’s Dewitt Wallace Center for Journalism and Democracy, about Harris, Trump, and the state of the race.
This is part of the The Lemur’s series of interviews with respected writers and experts who are closely watching the election. Thank you to David for his time and insights. We initially spoke on July 8th, before the Republican National Convention, Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate, and President Biden’s decision to drop out of the race. Our follow-up conversation after these developments is added below. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity:
Lemur: There seems to be an intense debate right now over what exactly a second Trump term, if he wins, would look like, particularly about whether Trump would be more emboldened and dangerous than in his first term. Some say those concerns are overstated and others believe that his past behavior indicates he is a real threat to democratic institutions. What do you think about that? I read an article you wrote within the past month or two about Trump’s rhetorical strategy of never ruling things out, when someone suggests something to him, saying “oh it’s still on the table, we’re considering everything.” Clearly part of that is he doesn’t have the fixed lines he won’t cross that many other politicians do have. When he talks about retribution and what a second term will look like, where do you think that line is and what do you think he would truly rule out, if anything?
DG: I have no idea; he clearly feels genuinely wronged, and, on some level, if you thought you were rightly elected president and had it stolen from you, you’d be pretty bitter, so I kind of get that-
Lemur: Does he think that?
DG: I don’t know. A while ago, I tried to get them to give me an interview. I was like, I understand The Atlantic has been very critical, but I also think that President Trump truly believes this. I wanted to talk about him as a “true believer,” and they did not respond to me. I was not surprised, but I thought it was worth a shot. It’s hard to know what he truly believes. Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that he truly believes it. He would be pretty bitter about that. He would think it was a massive crime. A lot of the conversation about “would he or wouldn’t he”— well he already tried this in the first term. He tried to exact retribution. We know he’d have fewer people around him to tell him no, that he would have fewer legal restraints on him. We know he’s been talking about it a lot. Many of the big themes of his 2016 campaign ended up being things he did try to do in office. He tried to build the wall. He did enact tariffs. He tried to negotiate with North Korea. He didn’t succeed at all of them–he didn’t repeal Obamacare, but he did cut taxes–he tried to do all of those things. I don’t see a reason to believe he wouldn’t try to exact some retribution, and I see a lot of ways in which it would be easier for him to do that than it would have been before. So I assume we would see some of that. I don’t know what it would look like, but I see Marco Rubio saying he’ll be too busy doing other things, and there was a tweet in 2016 where Trump said don’t listen to what my aides are quoted saying. I speak for the campaign. I am the person who speaks for myself. I don’t believe it when I see Marco Rubio saying “oh, don’t worry about it.” Trump is saying what he thinks. And he means it. I don’t see any reason to doubt it.
Lemur: In terms of what is coming from his own mouth, he has said “my retribution will be success,” mostly just in a deflecting kind of way, and that he’ll be a “dictator” but just “on Day One.” He’s also tried to distance himself from Project 2025 in the past few days. How much do you think he knows about the specifics of that agenda or agendas like that and how focused do you think he is on getting that kind of staff around him?
DG: I think it’s an interesting question, how closely aware he is of the details of something like that. I don’t know. My hunch based on his previous involvement in detail is probably not a lot. But he clearly cares a lot about personnel. He was so frustrated by dealing with people he felt like weren’t on the team last time. And, look, they’re closely working with all these people in the former administration: Johnny McEntee, who was his head of personnel, is on Project 2025 and you’ve got Russ Vought is working on things like these. Even if Trump is not personally involved in Project 2025, I don’t think it’s credible that he’s not aware of this, or not trying something like this. And what’s useful about this sort of thing for him is that it creates dossiers of people, he can take the product right there off the shelf pretty easily, and take what they like and not what they don’t like. Even if they’re not adopting it wholesale, it gives them something to work with. It fits with everything he said before and will be helpful with him.
Lemur: What do you think about the just-released party platform at the RNC?
DG: It’s pretty short, I’ll say. A 16-page PDF, some of those are a dedication and a preamble and a title page. There’s like 20 bullet points, not a lot there. I don’t think there’s something about marriage being between a man and a woman, the abortion language seems a little bit-
Lemur: So it’s not straight out of Heritage Foundation, Project 2025.
DG: Right, it seems like a little bit of a step down here.
Lemur: Which seems to be a deliberate strategy on their part given that the proximity of extremist ideology, including Project 2025, to the Trump campaign has been pretty well established at this point. I recently read David Brooks’ interview with Steve Bannon, which I thought was quite interesting and alarming along those lines, but even if Bannon doesn’t have a role in the next administration, which he probably wouldn’t or doesn’t want to, there clearly are people who think that this movement—with those kinds of extreme agendas not on that platform—goes beyond Trump. Do you think that his second term would be almost the inverse of his first term, where he was being held in check by these old guard Republicans, do you think he would be able to hold those people—committed to a “second American revolution”—in check in his second term?
DG: Why would he? Would he want to? I think the universe of things that Trump cares about is relatively narrow. Trump cares a lot about himself, Trump cares a lot about immigration, Trump cares a lot about trade policy. He cares about tax policy at some level. And I think after that a lot of this stuff just doesn’t matter to him that much. You saw that the old guard did push him around a bit on some of the issues, but I think a lot of that was because he didn’t have strong views on it or didn’t care that much, and so he wouldn’t fight about it in the way that, say, a President Paul Ryan would have. I think that probably applies on a lot of these things. Trump is thinking: “does this hurt me? You’re giving me more power? Is it popular?” If it’s endangering his popularity or hurting him with the base, that’s the thing that scares him, but otherwise I’m not sure it matters that much.
Lemur: Yeah, but I’m not sure how popular those views are, even with his base-
DG: It’s easy to imagine overreaching, because a lot of second-term presidents do this. That might happen and if that’s the case, he would push back. But I’m not sure he would feel, off the bat, that much of a need to restrain these people. I think it’s sort of symbiotic for them and for him: everybody wins.
Lemur: I agree that the list of things Trump cares about is very short. One thing is definitely the spotlight or attention. Do you think that will factor into his VP pick, probably between Rubio or Vance or maybe Doug Burgum? We know Trump was a little bit peeved by Ron DeSantis when he had his moment in the sun where everyone thought he was “Trump-lite” but more electable and he would be the nominee. Obviously that wouldn’t happen but JD Vance has very much cast himself in that image, whereas Rubio and Burgum obviously haven’t. What do you think are the most important factors for him in that decision?
DG: I think you are right about Vance. He seems like a really interesting politician, and that’s probably a problem. My sense of Trump’s ego is that he would be reluctant to do something that would draw that much attention from himself. The media storm around Vance–people would lose it writing about him, and being excited about him, and that would drive Trump crazy. Vance is unproven at a national level but he has so much upside as a politician and is ambitious enough that, if I were Trump, I would feel a little threatened by him. Burgum is at the end of his career, more or less. Rubio, I used to think he had the touch, but it doesn’t like he has it anymore, which seems more like Trump’s thing. So I would be surprised by Vance on that level. If you think about Mike Pence, who looked the part, but not threatening, and the one time he stepped on his own, Trump remains furious about it and continues to go after him on it. So I don’t think he wants someone who thinks for himself too much.
Lemur: And the main reason he chose Pence was electoral, to shore up the evangelical base. But if he had been thinking in those terms this time around, would he have chosen Nikki Haley?
DG: I think Haley is also a bit of a loose cannon for him. If I were him, I would be skeptical of her. She’s too much of her own person. I have doubted he would pick a woman from the beginning, partly for the central casting reason. Right, Pence was a choice for an electoral reason, but mostly it feels like Trump avoids those obvious but small electoral plays. There’s so much catering to the base instead of catering to moderate or centrist voters, which mostly hasn’t worked for him, but he won in 2016. He doesn’t always go for those things even when the math seems obvious to a conventional politician.
Lemur: I guess the same is true of his hand-picked 2022 Senate candidates, who generally fared fairly poorly.
DG: Yeah.
Lemur: One more Trump question. This has been driving me crazy, or at least I find it very interesting. There are a lot of prominent business leaders like Jamie Dimon who have fed comments into the media about “oh, it was better under Trump,” no wars, inflation was not as bad. And Stephen Schwarzman, for Israel reasons has backed him. What is that calculation? Because, yes, he had the tax cuts, but if you look at his tariffs and at Steve Bannon for example, that current of Trump support is very economically populist and antagonistic to Wall Street.
DG: It’s interesting too because Dimon is pretty centrist, and is generally considered a Democrat or seems to be a Democratic voter. I think there’s a mix of things. There are business reasons, this sense that Trump is a rich guy who is pursuing policies that are good for the rich; even if there are also populist ones, they’re not going to hurt us, we’re in good shape. It’s going to be deregulatory. Tariffs might be bad for manufacturing and that might hurt parts of the economy but we in finance are going to be fine on that. I think business leaders in particular suffer from a little bit of amnesia about a lot of things and they are forgetting what the Trump administration was like and how chaotic the environment was. I also think they’re hedging—appropriately enough—in that they think Trump is going to win, and they don’t want to alienate him. And if Trump loses, [their comments] are not going to change the policy a Democratic administration would pursue toward them, so it’s a little bit of a no-loss, cover-your-bases situation for them. But if you distance yourself from Trump he might retaliate against you.
I also think there’s a general wokeism backlash in high finance. Part of that is the Israel stuff. But I think it’s a broader thing and they’re weirded out by that. It’s a sort of temperamental conservatism. It’s a place where they see “Make America Great Again” and they’re like “yes, I would like to make America great again, I don’t like the way some things are going in the culture.”
Lemur: I see that. And, again, step one of that thought process is clearly that they think he’s going to win.
DG: Yeah [Laughter]
Lemur: Now looking at the electoral map, part of what seems to be so interesting about this year is that there’s so much frenzy and chaos in the presidential race that people seem to be talking a lot less than they otherwise would about down-the-ballot elections, even Senate races or the House. So a few questions: do you think it’s just those six battleground states [Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia] or do you think that now a state like Virginia is in play for Republicans? Do you think there will be anything surprising at the margins?
DG: I mean, I think if Virginia is in play, then the election is over. I can’t imagine a situation in which Republicans win Virginia but are losing Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada. I feel like every year at some point you start to get these “is the map expanding” kinds of conversations or narratives and it’s always really hard to tell how much of that is smoke one campaign is creating or if it’s a real thing. If I were Democrats, I’d be worried about those polls in Virginia, but it’s a situation where, if you’ve got to worry about that-
Lemur: –you’ve got bigger problems.
DG: Yeah. I mean something I’m curious about is these polls that show all these Democratic Senators up on Biden, because ticket-splitting is so rare today and the size of these splits is huge. And I find it hard to believe that’s going to hold. I have to believe that’s going to close, probably in both directions, probably the numbers will get lower for the Democratic Senators and they’ll get higher for Biden (or maybe it won’t be Biden). But I can’t imagine we’re going to get 10, 12 point splits in any of these states. It would be really interesting if it were. That would be huge development, but I’m skeptical.
Lemur: Yeah, that seems unlikely to me as well. Although I guess we do have a couple, they’re very much rarities, but say in Kentucky where people love a Democratic governor [Andy Beshear] but vote Republican for everything else.
DG: Yeah, I could see Sherrod Brown outperforming Biden by a lot, but enough to win? It’d have to be close for that. If Biden loses by a lot, he’s not going to beat him by 12 points. I could see Tester winning maybe. It’s not like Montana is going to be particularly contested. But Nevada is one where I’m like, how wide is that split really going to end up being?”
I had an interesting conversation with a Republican strategist in North Carolina about the governor’s race. He worked for someone who ran and lost against Mark Robinson in the gubernatorial primary, so he has a little bit of rooting interest here. But he was like, “Democratic and Republican registration in the state are both down, Independents are the largest registration by far, those unaffiliated voters really feel that that independence is part of their political identity. So they’re going to go in the voting booth and vote for Trump and Josh Stein and they’re going to feel good about themselves for splitting that vote. They’re going to think, this proves I am who I say I am, I don’t vote by party line. I can see that happening in the governor’s races, people are more likely to be afraid of a governor being wild, because it affects them directly, but I don’t think that’s as much the case in a Senate race, where people, whether they understand it or not, are kind of voting for a Congress rather than a particular person most of the time.
Lemur: I’m glad you brought up North Carolina, because I did want to make sure we talked about it. How could a ticket-splitting state with so many Independents plausibly get such a fringe GOP candidate [North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson] as its governor? How does that make sense?
DG: He’s really interesting! [Laughter] He’s a really compelling speaker. I think Republicans underestimated him a little bit and saw him as someone they could use to get a lot of excitement and grassroots attention, but it got out of their hands, they realized they didn’t have the control over him they thought they did. And by then he had the nomination basically locked up. It’s an interesting question, there was a sense for a while that this guy can’t win, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true, especially if Trump wins by a fair amount. Polls remain close. He’s far more extreme than any other gubernatorial candidate in recent memory. I mean, primaries are weird, in the same way we ended up with two extremely unpopular presidential candidates, it’s kind of a fluke that he won, but it might get him to the governor’s mansion anyway.
Lemur: Yeah, it’s not exactly a great year for advocates of the primary system, is it? There has been a lot of noise about Biden losing the Black vote, even Black interest in Trump. Would Mark Robinson get a meaningful percentage of the black vote?
DG: Great question. I don’t think so, but maybe. I think his views are just too weird–
Lemur: About Black Panther [Laughter]
DG: Yeah, I think there’s a certain kind of Black Republican that could win some of those people, and a Black man in particular who held views more conservative than their voting record, but I don’t see Robinson winning a lot of that, because he’s so outspoken on these things in ways that I think turn people off. It’s hard to win the Black vote while attacking the Civil Rights movement.
But I would be worried about if I were Josh Stein would not be the Black vote defecting to Mark Robinson but just the Black vote not coming out, and I think that’s true for Biden too. Could Trump do better with Black voters than in 2020? Yeah. But where Biden is really in trouble is if Black voters just don’t turn out, and that’s the issue.
Lemur: And do you think that’s a fairly plausible scenario?
DG: I mean, who knows how accurate the polls are, but looking at the polls, I think that’s a possibility. There’s an enthusiasm gap, people don’t see a lot of benefit. It’s like the others, it’s like “you want me to vote for one of these guys? Why?”
Lemur: And do you think if Trump had thought he could have gotten a really significant proportion of the black vote, he might have selected Tim Scott as VP, or again is that just not how he thinks?
DG: I don’t know. It’s not totally clear to me why Scott’s name has faded. It’s not clear to me that Scott has a lot of appeal among Black voters either. I think Scott had a lot of appeal among conservatives who like him and are also like “Look, I’m not racist, the Democrats are always calling me racist, but I like this guy, I voted for him,” and so there’s an appeal there.
Lemur: Well, his name certainly didn’t fade for lack of his own enthusiasm.
DG: [Laughter] That may have been a problem too. That may be something Trump doesn’t like. You can’t be too excited about it.
Lemur: Last question. What do you think is the most importance race–congressional or gubernatorial–that no one’s really watching or talking about? Or collection of kind of area of the country type races?
DG: Maybe state Supreme Court races. Some of these state Supreme Courts have become really politicized and places for huge changes in policy, like the US Supreme Court. You’ve got a lot of shifts going on there, a lot of battles fought there. These races are not well-understood by voters, and they don’t get a lot of attention. Some of them are nominally nonpartisan but not actually nonpartisan and so you have a ton of money flowing in and people don’t know how to vote or they’re just voting the straight ticket. Especially as abortion is becoming a major state-level issue in terms of the direct effect on voters’ lives probably the state Supreme Court races in general are the ones that can have the most impact that aren’t getting a lot of attention.
Lemur: Thank you very much for talking to The Lemur.
Follow-up questions (July 28)
Lemur: Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race around 2 pm on Sunday July 21. By 10 pm on Monday Kamala Harris had secured the support of a majority of delegates, effectively giving her the nomination. What do you make of how quickly Kamala Harris sewed up the Democratic nomination? What does that say about Democrats’ thinking at this point in the election?
DG: I think the main takeaway from Harris’s quick consolidation is that Democrats are, more than anything else, focused on wanting to beat Trump. That’s what carried Biden to victory in the primary four years ago and it’s why Democrats were eager to push him out now. We have no real precedents to draw on to know what would be better for the party, but I think the quick rush to Harris reflects the same sort of small-c conservatism that the paramount focus on beating Trump represents.
Lemur: Will Harris elevate abortion to be the principal issue of her campaign? How can she succeed at pinning that to Trump?
DG: I’m sure we’ll see Harris put a lot of focus on abortion, and in fact already have. (And she’s been doing that for years as VP). She’s a more natural messenger for that than Biden, both because she’s a woman and because she’s not a devout Catholic; he’s always seemed sincere but a little awkward talking about it. One senses that he was more made for Bill Clinton’s “safe-legal-rare” moment than the post-Dobbs one.
Lemur: How much do you think Harris’ presence at the top of the ticket will change the minds of voters who would have split their ticket with Trump and a Democratic Senator or Governor, (such as in Ohio, North Carolina, or Montana?
DG: This will be interesting. I think I said when we spoke that I was skeptical we’d see the splits that we have in polls, but insofar as they were real, I think she’ll probably close up some of that gap in states like Michigan. Montana and Ohio are harder to say. Biden is deeply unpopular there now, but he was at one time more palatable to a lot of voters in them than Harris.
Lemur: The Trump campaign seemed unprepared for Harris’s ascension to the top of the ticket and so far has deployed rhetoric and tactics against her that feel a lot weaker than their narrative on Biden. JD Vance acknowledged that suddenly having to face Harris was a “sucker punch” to the campaign. Do you think Trump, Vance, and the campaign will eventually be able to pivot effectively in order to keep riding the high of the RNC?
DG: Trump’s biggest strength and biggest weakness is his inability to pivot. He’s been the same since 2015, so I’m skeptical of any change. I think that does make him a little clumsy at times, but people have a really strong sense of who he is, for better or worse, so it kind of doesn’t matter. He does seem to be a little ruffled at the moment, and obviously if you’re Harris you’d rather Trump be off balance than on, but I assume he’ll continue to be Trump.
