Washington Week with The Atlantic

It's fair to say that no recent election in America has ever felt this close and everything matters these days.

We're going to talk about our, our current state of play.

We're only about 11 days out.

And we're going to talk about the importance of the state of Pennsylvania.

We're also going to talk about Donald Trump and the rhetoric around his candidacy.

We're going to talk to -- if we get a little time, we're going to talk about, you know, some developing news apparently an Israeli strike on Iran retaliation for the previous Iranian strike on Israel, but that is just a breaking story and we're going to try to talk about that a little bit if we get more information.

But joining me to talk about all of this is Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new book, Autocracy, Inc., the Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Dan Balz is the chief correspondent at the Washington Post.

Dana Bash is CNN's Chief political correspondent and the anchor of Inside Politics, she's also the author of a new book, America's Deadliest Election, the Cautionary Tale of the Most Violent Election in American history, and Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of On the Housing Crisis, Land, Development, Democracy.

Thank you all for joining me.

Dan, this would have been a great moment for you to just launch a new book, I think, because we're all -- I got a big stack.

DAN BALZ, Chief Correspondent, The Washington Post: Yes, I feel that's -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I got a big stack.

DANA BASH, Anchor And Chief Political Correspondent, CNN: Who's the one who's going to talk about your big scoop?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I got a -- we're not talking about that.

I'm focused on you.

You're the thing that -- well, somehow it will come up.

DANA BASH: We'll bring it up.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I imagine it will come up.

Let me start by playing a very brief clip of Kamala Harris this week.

Let's listen to this.

ANDERSON COOPER, Anchor, CNN: Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?

KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. Vice President, Democratic Presidential Nominee: Yes, I do.

Yes, I do.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Anne, I want to read something that you just wrote recently, quote, when he, Trump, suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support.

By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships, but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.

So, you're a scholar, among other things, of Soviet communism and authoritarianism generally.

What is fascism?

ANNE APPLEBAUM, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: So, fascism was a movement that was created in the 1930s and it has -- it's hard to define because it's really -- it's more about emotion over reason.

It's about creating a leader who says that he embodies the will of the people and that his will is stronger than the rule of law and stronger than the Constitution.

It's a movement typically - - typically fascist leaders or leaders who use fascist tactics will divide the nation into the real people and the outsiders, immigrants, you know, foreigners, traitors, and seek to create a kind of cult of hatred against them in order to build up the sensibility of the majority.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

And you've argued that Donald Trump uses fascist language to describe America?

Is that a fair characterization?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Well, he uses -- there's some particular words that he's used that have never appeared before in U.S. politics, at least not in mainstream presidential politics.

I mean, sometimes during wars, people come up with dehumanizing names for their enemy.

But using the language, he was talking about immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation.

I mean, this is -- you can find it in Hitler's speeches.

And that was -- when I wrote that article, that's all I did, was look for those quotations, you know, or he talks about vermin.

He talks about, you know, the radical left who are vermin, you know.

And this is language that is -- that comes from the 1930s.

Actually it wasn't only Hitler who used it.

Mussolini used it.

Stalin used it.

East German Stasi used it.

And it's part of that kind of politics.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let me just pressure test something that you said with Dan, who is a veteran political correspondent.

I'm not trying to imply anything about the number of years you've been doing it, but it's more than a dozen.

DAN BALZ: More than a dozen.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: More than a dozen.

You've covered a lot of races, local, state, and national.

Is it fair to say that the language that we see deployed by Donald Trump is language that we really haven't heard in the modern era, in American politics?

Your memory goes back further than your time in journalism, obviously.

DAN BALZ: Yes, without question.

I don't think - - I mean, we have never had a candidate for president, or a president of the United States who has talked the way Donald Trump talks.

And the remarkable thing is the more he has talked in that way, the more he has developed a loyal readership.

I mean, one other aspect of fascism is the degree to which it comes from beneath the leader as well as from the leader.

And I think what we've seen in the creation of Trumpism is a country in which there are followers who accept this as a way to talk about other people and a way to talk about the state of the country.

So, you're absolutely right, we've never seen anything like this.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I have to ask you, and the rest of the panel as well, to what degree are you surprised by this phenomenon?

DAN BALZ: Well, I think, I would say -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Given your experience in watching American politics, and understanding where the guardrails traditionally have been.

DAN BALZ: Well, I think, at an early point, we were quite surprised, and today I don't think people are surprised what comes out of his mouth at rallies and other things.

I think the question is, does it have an effect on an election?

At this point, you know, we're 11 days away.

And one of the things I sense when you talk to voters is that there are many voters who hear this, recognize it as kind of outside the norm, but nonetheless are prepared to support him for other reasons, which have to do with their sense of who's going to be better for them.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Dana?

DANA BASH: And the thing to keep in mind, just strategically, as we are getting closer and closer to Election Day, is that even though this is an example and a manifestation of what we have seen and heard from Donald Trump in various times for nine years, it is definitely stronger, it's more strident, it's, frankly, more disgusting in a lot of ways, and it is intentional.

Because what the Trump campaign is trying to do isn't necessarily persuade those swing voters, the few who exist still, which the Harris campaign is trying to do.

They are trying to find low propensity voters who are interested in this kind of rhetoric, who are sort of animated by this kind of rhetoric and this kind of point of view, but have always been really disconnected to politics and to voting, to try to find them and say, see, he's your guy, get off the couch and come vote for him.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: And I think that there's also like a level to which we've kind of forgotten that 2016 was not as remarkable in the rhetoric that Trump was using.

I mean, look back at the speeches and the kind of things that he was saying, they weren't good.

But there's a level to which it's really escalated, the kinds of comments that Vance was making about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

I mean, I think there's -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It did start in 2015 by warning about Mexican rapists.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Totally.

But I just think that there's an escalation.

Totally, I think there's an escalation to what he's actually been talking about this time.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

DAN BALZ: Yes.

I think it's amped up considerably.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to note that Mitch McConnell, the Senate, and Mike Johnson, speaker of the House.

They've just condemned Kamala Harris for her allegedly extreme rhetoric.

They said in a statement, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States has only fanned the flames beneath -- it's a little bit overwritten, if you ask me -- has only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus.

Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over.

DANA BASH: I missed the statement that they made about Trump calling America a garbage can.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, there's the garbage can rhetoric.

Wait, remind us because that just came today, I think.

DANA BASH: He said that in his latest attempt to be even more sort of control on his rhetoric, he said that what is happening with illegal immigration, undocumented immigrants are making America like a garbage can.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

And your point is that we didn't hear that kind of language, generally speaking, in 2016.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: I just think it's gotten amped.

I mean, like when I think about what's happening even here with Republicans defending this sort of rhetoric and kind of trying to turn it on Harris, there's a level of strategy that's going on here, right?

They've realized that, especially after the assassination attempts, if they can make it seem like on both candidates' parts, there are rhetorical flourishes that are being used that are raising the temperature, then they don't have to worry about having to compete on that when it comes to Election Day.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Dan, among other things, you watch Mitch McConnell closely, watched him for a long time.

Does this strike you as odd that McConnell, who we know, doesn't like -- DAN BALZ: Who loathes Donald Trump.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Loathes, if you want to go with loathes, we'll go with loathes Donald Trump.

Why is he engaging in this kind of at least what I'm hearing from the panel, is a kind of gaslighting of the public, accusing Vice President Harris of engaging in extreme rhetoric?

DAN BALZ: Well, I think there are two things to know about Senator McConnell.

One is that he deeply dislikes Donald Trump.

And the second is that he is completely protective of the Republican Party, as he would like to see it, and completely focused on doing as well as they could possibly do in the Senate races.

And so this is a way to bind himself to the broader party, not to offend the Trump wing of it, to try to get the party moving in that direction so that on Election Day, you know, they end up with a majority.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to just note for the record that he's not a young, newbie politician on his way up.

I mean, you would think that someone in the twilight of his career might warn against the person he obviously in private has said is doing damage to not only the Republican brand, but to the country itself.

DAN BALZ: Well, and there's a new book by Mike Tackett in which he basically says all of these things about Trump.

But in a moment like this, he reverts to, I'm a leader of the Republican Party and I'm going to do that.

DANA BASH: And can I just quickly underscore what Dan just said?

Mitch McConnell does not like Donald Trump.

But Mitch McConnell is also trying to be strategic in which he always is every election year and trying to do whatever he can to help get as many Republican Senate seats.

Usually in the Trump era, that has backfired.

But it is an example of the larger narrative of the Republican Party, that these Republican leaders do not like Donald Trump, but they're still saying things like this, because they see him as a means to getting other things that they want politically.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Anne, if you were going to -- ANNE APPLEBAUM: No.

I was just going to say that it's also -- I mean, this is a known strategy to, you know, immediately, as soon as Donald Trump says something -- I mean, this wasn't what The Wall Street Journal did a few days ago.

As soon as he says something outrageous, then the next reaction is to say, but Harris is just as outrageous, or she's also evil or Biden is evil.

You know, they need to make it - - it's kind of both sidesism, but it's also, you know, you need to make the other side just as bad.

And that's a way of -- it's also a way of explaining it to yourself.

So, we're going to vote for Donald Trump, even though he says he likes Hitler's generals.

How do we explain that, this is how we do it, because the other side is evil, and that's what it is.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's just kind of -- that's just politics, what we're describing, right, opportunistic politics, that they're going to try to stick onto Harris the things that -- the negative things, the ostensibly negative things that Trump does.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: But it's also important to note that, like, on policy, they won a ton.

The Supreme Court, when you think about abortion, I mean, sticking by Trump, despite the fact that they have distaste for how he engages in politics, has gotten them a ton of things on taxes and on policy that they hold really near and dear.

So, I think it makes a lot of sense from their perspective to continue doing so.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to switch slightly topics.

I want to play a, a brief clip of Donald Trump talking about January 6th.

DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: But that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions, it's like hundreds of thousands.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, Dana, you've written a book, an excellent book, America's Deadliest Election.

I'm holding it up so people can see it at home.

The least I can do, it's the least we can do, is get good books out there.

So, it's a book about American political violence, a particular example of American political violence, perhaps the, one of the worst.

But you've studied this very subject for a while.

And based on your study of history in this current moment, where do you put -- how do you assess the conditions now for wider political violence in the coming days, weeks, and months?

Give us like a temperature check.

DANA BASH: Well, I mean, not to be Debbie Downer here, but the conditions are ripe for bad things to happen.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: This hasn't been Smores and a beach blanket bingo so far.

DANA BASH: It hasn't, but that's true.

In 1872 and then in 1876, which this book is about, it was real violence and it was racially-based violence.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Give us 30-second -- DANA BASH: The 30-second is it was reconstruction after the Civil War, and the Southern Democrats were trying to find a way to keep their society the way it was.

They didn't have slaves anymore, but they didn't want blacks to have equality.

So, they realized they could do it at the ballot box because men, black men had the ability to vote.

And so they started to disenfranchise them, and in many cases, actually, there was violence and murder.

And it erupted in total chaos in Louisiana.

And there were brutal massacres, there was blood on the street, there was insurrection.

And so it has happened before and they couldn't figure out who won.

This is a governor's race back then.

Back then there was actual fraud.

Now, there are, I think, mere allegations of widespread fraud without proof of it.

But it doesn't change the fact that if people are ginned up by the leaders who are supposed to be trying to keep the calm and trying to appeal to the notion of peaceful transition of power, people can easily get ginned up.

And that is what happened then, and we saw what happened on January 6th, 2021.

It was not a day of peace.

Nobody with eyes or ears thinks that it was a day of peace.