Transcript: Trump’s Angry, Abusive Tirade at Kamala Demands a Response

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 7, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: Trump just unleashed a long, ugly, crazed rant about Kamala Harris. He called her “stupid” and “low IQ,” called her a liar, and said she’s being manipulated by communists and fascists and, in his words, “an enemy within.” As far as I can tell, almost no leading journalists even took notice, which gets at a larger story: Trump regularly attacks Harris with vile, deeply unhinged unapologetically misogynistic rants, and barely anyone reacts anymore. It’s just Trump being Trump. It’s just not news. Trump doesn’t even act as if he needs to win over women anymore, and apparently no one thinks that’s strange. Today we’re talking about all this with writer Susan Milligan, who has written some good recent pieces for The New Republic about how overtly anti-woman the Trump strategy in this election has become. Really great to have you on, Susan.

Susan Milligan: I’m thrilled to be on. Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Trump launched his latest rant about Kamala Harris in an interview with the very pro-Trump commentator, Hugh Hewitt. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): She doesn’t lie in a complicated way because her mind doesn’t work that way. She’s not a smart person. She’s a low IQ individual. And this country can’t have a low IQ person doing this for another four years. We had it for four years with him. We can’t have a low IQ person. She’s a stupid person. We can’t have a stupid person as our president. There will be no fracking in Pennsylvania 100 percent. They’ll keep the electric car mandate, which is the dumbest thing anyone’s ever heard. All of the things that they want to do, but the worst of all that they’re going to keep, we’ll end up in World War III.

Sargent: Not only that, Trump also mocked Harris for supposedly lying about working at McDonald’s. He said Harris is just a front being manipulated by evil forces, meaning she’s an empty vessel, and he said Nancy Pelosi is as crazy as a bedbug. Susan, at this point, the misogyny has become very casual and it’s not even treated as out of the ordinary. I get that nobody wants to dignify this stuff, but isn’t there a danger in letting it become routine?

Milligan: Yes, I think he’s normalized this kind of misogyny. That’s very dangerous because it’s made it okay for people to talk about a presidential candidate, the vice president of United States, a former United States Senator, and state attorney general as though she’s not even a fully formed human being. It then gives license to other kinds of comments and frankly even more aggressive conduct, not just the commentary.

Sargent: It’s really, really distressing. And in that same interview, Trump also went full white nationalist or worse. He said this.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): She has no clue. How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes, and we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.

Sargent: Now that quote about bad genes is getting all the attention, but the casual misogyny slips right through. Note that this 13,000 murders figure he’s using is bullshit. He’s implying she let them all in, but that number actually refers to people who came in across multiple administrations. And here’s what I find so offensive here: He’s saying this makes Harris clueless. So the misogyny is based on something he’s inventing out of nothing. He just makes it true by saying it. The man said it, it’s true. Is this a classic misogynistic tactic? Can you talk about that?

Milligan: Yes, but it’s a melding of the two Frankenstein versions of Trump. One, just making stuff up out of the blue sky, and then two, assigning it to “crazy women and stupid women,” which is ... Do you remember that cartoon, the Lockheads, that used to run in the Sunday comics where the woman was just this crazy, stupid, clueless person who didn’t vacuum the floors correctly or something? He’s really going back to that era. Believe me, there are people in this country who have a real nostalgia, unfortunately, for that era, which is why it works with some voters.

Sargent: That’s really interesting. I want to bear down on that a little. I think he often references suburban housewives. Have you noticed that? This is something I think he did in previous elections as well. I think he’s got a conception of a very particular type of female demographic in mind that he thinks he can get with this kind of talk. Right?

Milligan: Yes, and he’s wrong because he’s turned off suburban women so much with the abortion talk and appointing those three Supreme Court justices. Let’s not even get into the fact that they all basically lied when they went before the United States Senate and said that they thought that Roe was settled law. But he has an idea in his head of the “suburban housewife.” I don’t know whether it comes from the women he’s dated or married or sees on TV, but he doesn’t really know who those women are anymore. I don’t know if you’ve seen this meme that was going around for a while. It was a cartoon, and on one side it had this woman who had four children and was holding one baby, and she had this sort of beatific look on her face, and it said something like, a complete and fulfilled woman, and on the other side it had this woman in a camisole with her wine and her sex toy and her student debt, and it said, victim of feminism.

And I’m thinking, OK, when they talk about the childless cat ladies, they think it’s an insult, but what they don’t understand is a lot of us would still rather be the woman on the right that they think is this tragic case. It might’ve been an insult that cut to the quick back in the ’60s or something when you didn’t want to be the childless cat lady who didn’t have a husband and didn’t have children. Now we’re like, Yeah, cool.

Sargent: I want to bring in the gender gap here. This is something you’ve written about. A couple of recent national polls: Marist had Harris leading Trump by 58 to 40 among women; NBC News had her up 58 to 37. Those are big numbers. I’m really struck by the fact, as we discussed earlier, that Trump doesn’t seem to feel any need to appeal to female voters at all at this point. He keeps saying he will protect women, that he will be their protector, and that seems to be the sum total of his appeal to women. What do you make of that, and what do you make of this gender gap?

Milligan: Well, again, he has this really antiquated idea of what women want and [thinks] that what women want is to catch the big prize of the man so he can protect her from all the scary things in the world. He doesn’t understand that, first of all, he’s the scary thing in the world, and secondly, that women aren’t looking for men to protect them in this old-fashioned way that he seems to think. That’s just a creation in his own brain. I do think he’s living in another era, and sees himself as a Rat Pack character still. That world doesn’t exist anymore. That’s not what women want anymore, particularly not suburban women. And the gender gap is stunning. There’s been a gender gap, I think, since ... 1980 that there’s been a gender gap. I’ll have to look at my wonderful Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. Little plug there for them, they’re terrific. But this is enormous. And why it doesn’t alarm him is beyond me because women vote more than men and women are about 52 percent of the vote. You take that gender gap and then you add in that factor of the 4 percent difference, 48 percent to 52 percent, and those are not good numbers for him. By the way, the numbers and turnout are even bigger in Georgia. I want to say that Georgia women are something like 56 percent of the vote or maybe even more than that. So he’s got to be worried about it, and I don’t know why he’s not.

Sargent: I want to get to that in a second, but first I want to play some audio of Kamala Harris, who just responded to Trump’s general line about being women’s protectors. Listen to this.

Kamala Harris (audio voiceover): He who, when he was president, hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade. And they did just as he intended. And there are now 20 states with Trump abortion bans, including bans that make no exception for rape or incest, which we just discussed, which means that you’re telling a survivor of a crime of a violation to their body they don’t have a right to make a decision about what happens to their body next.

Sargent: I mean, this is turf that’s very favorable to Harris. She’s able to talk directly to women and really emotionally connect with them in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in another candidate. I’ve been wondering, is there a possibility that we’re underestimating the political energy among female voters right now?

Milligan: I’ve long thought that. The same thing happened in 2022. There was this idea that a couple of months after Dobbs, that while women were in a big tizzy about it, then they saw a pretty frock in the window when it’s really expensive and they plumb forgot about Dobbs. No, they didn’t. I just want to say in general, not just when it comes to reproductive rights, but ... Just a little pro tip here, never underestimate how pissed off women can get and how long we can stay that way, because we can. They’re still really pissed off about this, and it’s been worse than I think a lot of us imagined it would be. All the years that people were saying, Well, women will die from illegal abortions or women will die. And I thought, Well, maybe they won’t. They already are. Women are already dying from not getting the care they need because doctors are afraid to do DNCs because they’re afraid they’re going to get sued or put in jail. Yeah, I think [we’re] way underestimating the role that women are going to play in this election. I think it’s going to be the biggest single factor with all the talk about all the other groups that they’re losing or gaining. It’s going to be women this year. And interestingly, not female candidates, but female voters. There are going to be fewer women in the House, I think, after this year’s elections, but I think women voters will be the power.

Sargent: Well, on that score, you made a really interesting observation in one of your pieces, recently, that reproductive rights ballot initiatives will be on the ballot in a lot of states and that this could also very well motivate more women to vote. In fact, we’ve seen some reports of a jump in registration rates among women. Can you talk about how Trump’s constant attacks on Harris’s intelligence could dovetail with that issue set to create a new set of circumstances on the ground?

Milligan: First of all, women don’t like to be told they’re stupid. I don’t know why that needs to be explained to any candidate. No one likes to be told they’re stupid, particularly women don’t like to be told they’re stupid at a time when a woman is poised to possibly be the first president of United States. That doesn’t work, on the one hand. But yeah, there are abortion referendums on the ballot in Florida, Arizona. There’s one in New York, which could actually matter when it comes to some of those house races that they need to look out for. But Arizona, in particular, and Nevada are going to be the ones. And possibly, frankly, Florida. Florida is a state to watch. I’m not going to say it’s a battleground state in the presidential race right now, but definitely the senate race is one to watch and some interesting things could happen there.

Sargent: I want to point out for listeners that Arizona and Nevada are also really critical pieces in this election. Trump’s got a slight lead in Arizona. Harris has got a slight lead in Nevada. But Harris is basically putting the Sun Belt states in play. If she can win Arizona, which is a real possibility with Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake doing so poorly there, then that opens up more paths to an electoral college victory for Harris outside of the three blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These referenda could actually matter in a big way in the electoral college picture.

Milligan: I absolutely think that. As you pointed out, some of the down ticket races, they could do it as well. I don’t think somebody walks into a voting booth and votes for Ruben Gallego and for Trump. I find that really hard to believe, or Jacky Rosen and Trump. The abortion referenda are going to bring out voters who are otherwise disgusted with politics and the presidential race because they see how very real this is. They might not think their elected officials change things, but they know for sure that abortion laws change their lives.

Sargent: Can I ask, I’m starting to feel like Democrats are really reluctant, and maybe Harris is as well, to essentially call out Trump as a sexual predator. Look, if he’s going to go around saying that he’s women’s protector, it’s an easy layup to point out that he treats them as these little playthings that he can just grab whenever he wants to, because when you’re a star, they let you do it. Do you think Democrats should be going a little harder at that, given what we’re talking about here, which is the need to really boost that margin among women to win this thing?

Milligan: I do. I think the abortion argument is a stronger one. The problem with the sexual predator [one] is that there are men who will say, It’s just another case of a woman getting mad because she had a bad date and she wants the man to pay for it or something like that. Also, Harris has done that in some of her speeches, saying, I’ve prosecuted sexual predators, so I know what I’m doing. The reproductive rights thing, because it’s so real and it’s so personal. We’re seeing the effects of it already. This isn’t just hypothetical anymore.

Sargent: It’s a very powerful issue for a lot of people. I acknowledge what you said there, which is that Harris has gone after him on this stuff. Some Democrats have. I feel like it’s tapered off a little bit. I wonder whether they’re losing their nerve a little.

Milligan: I do too. Maybe they thought that it wasn’t resonating with the people that they needed it to reach. The reproductive rights stuff is probably the most powerful thing to get because it’s not just women, it’s men too. Men who are married to or involved with women.

Sargent: We had James Carville on the show—folks should go check that out if you haven’t—and he made the point that he thinks a sleeper demographic in this election is college educated white men. [They] tend to lean Republican, maybe not so much anymore, maybe not anymore really, but they’re really a swing constituency. Carville’s theory was that these men are seeing what’s happening to their daughters and their wives and their female loved ones in a new light because of Dobbs and because of all these horrible stories we’re seeing across the country. He thinks that could be potentially a sleeper demographic for Democrats because of that.

Milligan: There was an Institute of Politics poll a few months ago that had a rather large percentage of 18 to 29 year old men who said that a state’s laws on reproductive rights would influence whether they would locate there, which means a lot. Those are years that people are moving around for jobs and so forth. Something that these Republican governors have to think about is: If you’re a company, would you locate in a state where you’re not going to be able to attract good talent? Forget about just not being able to get an abortion. You might not be able to get basic OB-GYN care because there won’t be any in the state.

Sargent: Yeah, and that’s a very powerful issue for a certain type of educated white men. I also think it’s a potentially powerful issue for blue-collar white women, right? I do think that when Harris really bears down on doctors and patients, how it’s just putting them through hell, these Trump abortion bans that she puts it, she’s really going for those independent women, the moderate women, the noncollege white women. They’re gettable, maybe not in big numbers, but on the margins, right?

Milligan: Absolutely, and margins are going to be what matters this fall. We’re talking about a thousand votes, in seven states.

Sargent: Yeah, we really are. To go back to what you said earlier, which is, why does Trump think that he doesn’t have to appeal to women? Look, he’s doing really well with young men and that’s a problem. A new Suffolk poll I want to talk about here found that Trump is leading Harris by lopsided margins among Latino men ages 18 to 34 in Arizona and Nevada. That’s preventing Harris from getting quite to where she needs to be among Latinos. So clearly there’s a strategy here to some degree, right? With Trump, he’s really going for the young men with all this misogynistic talk, isn’t he?

Milligan: It’s funny, when I see some of the polling, the top line argument on some of the networks is “why is she losing Latinos?” She’s not because they’re not voting as Latinos, they’re voting as men, and because she’s hanging on to female Latinas and Black women as well. There’s just something that appeals to them. He’s sort of macho. He’s swaggering. They imagine that they’ll make more money if he’s president. That’s a problem. Again, there’s this tendency to think that Latinos vote as Latinos and Black people vote as Blacks and women vote as women and white guys get to just be the control group or something. But in this case, gender is having more of an influence there than ethnicity.

Sargent: You raised a critical point there, which is that in these same Suffolk polls of Arizona and Nevada, Harris actually got into the high 50s with Latinos. That’s overall. That’s not where she needs to be, she’s got to get to at least 60, but that’s doable. She’s close. The reason she’s in the high 50s and getting close to where she needs to be with Latinos, despite losing young Latino men by such large margins, is the women. The younger Latino women are really, really going for Harris in huge numbers. The reproductive rights stuff is key factor there. What do you think?

Milligan: No, I do. Again, with an abortion referendum on the ballot in Nevada, I think that could help a lot. A lot of stuff, we don’t know; for example, voter registration and turnout in a lot of these states. I don’t think that Taylor Swift’s endorsement is going to make people say, The woman who’s saying I’m never ever getting back together with you endorsed Kamala, therefore I’m going to vote for her. But I do think that she has gotten a lot of young women to register to vote and make some feel empowered and will probably increase turnout for us. There’s some things that we can’t when we that we don’t see in the polling. We don’t really see motivation and we don’t see some of these new voter registration numbers.

Sargent: I do agree that that’s going to be a big factor. I want to remind everyone as well that there was a time earlier in the summer when Trump advisors and allies were publicly saying that Trump needed to dial back the personal attacks on Harris. You notice how we don’t hear that anymore? Trump is not only going to traffic and slime all the way to the end, he’s won this argument with his party that this is how they’re going to do politics from now on by treating women like shit.

Milligan: Yes, we’re seeing that even from some Republican members of the Senate and the House, people that you would not have expected to speak that way before, making insulting comments about Harris, repeating lies, suggesting that people in North Carolina aren’t getting any assistance from FEMA and it’s Harris’s fault. I would not have expected that from them even four years ago, never mind before 2016. But the thing with Trump is that that worked for him in 2016, and he keeps reverting back to what worked in 2016 because let’s remember, he hasn’t really won an election since then. There was a big pushback even in 2017 in the offyear elections. In 2020, obviously, 2022, the only win they had was Glenn Youngkin, big win in Virginia, and that was, frankly, because Terry McAuliffe was not the strongest candidate. But the senate races, the senate candidates that Trump has backed have lost. So he keeps reverting back to the thing that worked for him in 2016. I just don’t think that that’s what people are looking for now. One of those things is having huge rallies, not doing a lot of groundwork there, and insulting people, but I think it’s gotten old.

Sargent: Yeah. And people forget, I call this 2016 brain, this tendency to treat the 2016 election as the only touchstone for judging what’s going on in politics right now. Trump has been president since 2016, right? He won and then he had four years in office as president. That wasn’t the case in 2016. People didn’t know him very well. They just thought he was a showman and that a lot of this stuff was tongue-in-cheek, that he was just trolling Hillary or whatever. People see it very differently now, and with Dobbs, they’re seeing the actual consequences of his form of politics. This idea that he can duplicate 2016’s strategy seems bizarre to me. I wouldn’t say that he can’t win. I think it’s very close. It’s a toss-up basically, but that is not helping him.

Milligan: No, it’s not. In 2016, a lot of people voted for him because they were tired of politics as usual. They looked at this man that they thought wrongly was a very successful businessman, that he cut through the bullshit, that he would get things done. Plus, Hillary was not the most popular person, right? So that wasn’t helping either. That’s why he got elected. Four years later, Joe Biden beats him, not because he’s a big inspirational guy, and not because he’s the future of the Democratic Party or America, but because people were just tired of just listening to that onslaught of insults and misinformation and narcissistic comments from Trump for four years. They basically wanted to turn on the TV and be bored by the president of the United States. They missed those days when you could just not pay attention to it.

What I think Harris has going for her, and she has some disadvantages, not the least of which are that there are people who, no matter what they say, will never vote for a woman or a person of color for president. They just won’t. They’re not going to tell the pollsters that, but they won’t. They’ll say it’s immigration or something or the economy, which by the way is going very well. But what she has going for her is this much-derided joy campaign, because I do think that people are basically tired of being in a bad mood. They’re tired of being worried about Covid. They’re tired of fighting with their neighbors. They’re tired of having tension at the Thanksgiving table. They just want to dial things back. She has that going for her because it’s such a contrast with Trump. But I agree with you, it’ll be very close race.

Sargent: Yeah, I really agree on the the joy stuff. I mean, people mock that, and I understand why they mock that. It does seem like the joy has been tempered now that this thing has really settled into a grueling hand-to-hand combat. But basically, she’s offering the country the opportunity to move beyond Trump and MAGA and all the hate and rage and division that that entailed.

Milligan: Yeah, I think that people are hungry for that, I really do. Except for the hardcore people who support Trump. And look, even ... there’s a reason they’re leaving his rallies before they’re over, and that’s what he can’t understand. He used to be able to show up to a rally an hour and a half late in 2016, and people would be standing in line to see him and they’d wait until the end, and they were just enthralled by him. Even they are just a little tired of it, or they have their limits anyway.

Sargent: Well, that’s why I love when Harris needles him on the crowd size. It really gets him exactly where it hurts, so to speak. Susan Milligan, thank you so much for coming on with us today.

Milligan: Thank you. I was thrilled to be on.

Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some new content up at tnr.com: Michael Tomasky looking at how the media is finally waking up to the story of Trump’s mental unfitness for the presidency, and Parker Molloy looking at the right’s lies about the hurricane and how they’re a preview of the chaos to come. Check out the latest episode of Above Average Intelligence on the DSR network, which features national security reporter Sasha Ingber to discuss today’s foreign policy challenges, her path into journalism, and the pressures of covering conflict zones. We’ll see you all tomorrow.