Former President Donald Trump has made a point of making frequent media appearances to be a counterbalance to Vice President Kamala Harris’s attempt to run President Joe Biden’s successful 2020 basement campaign. His interviews and press conferences haven’t always been on hostile territory up until this week, but he has been more adventurous than Harris, whose recent media blitz involved visiting the friendly confines of The View and sitting down with Howard Stern.
Both candidates, possibly sensing the need to do something to shake up their respective campaigns if they want to put any daylight between each other, decided to change their tactics this week. Trump sat down with the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg in what turned out to be a testy exchange that pressed the former president on economic issues.
Harris declined to sit down for a similar talk, an inauspicious sign for Democrats who want to convince voters they are better prepared than Trump to handle a slowly recovering economy, but did venture into the heart of the opposition on Wednesday evening. The vice president sat down with Special Report anchor Bret Baier for her most combative interview yet.
She came ready to spar with Baier, using the crosstalk to spin her most famous line from 2019 forward, telling him, “You have to let me finish,” as the two discussed how she and Biden have addressed immigration.
On that topic, Harris was careful to point out the strained history of illegal immigration reaching back to the Trump years and before.
“We’ve had a broken immigration system, transcending, by the way, Donald Trump’s administration, even before,” she said. “Let’s all be honest about that. I have no pride in saying that this is a perfect immigration system. I’ve been clear.”
She dodged taking responsibility for the historic surge in illegal crossings that have taken place under her and Biden’s leadership. And she tried to come up with a better answer to what she would do differently than Biden than she provided to The View. Her answer was fuzzy but showed she might have noticed the problems with tying herself to a historically unpopular president she will already be linked to for the rest of her career.
“Let me be very clear: My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” she said. “I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresher, new ideas. I represent a new generation of leadership.”
Trump stretched himself as well on Wednesday. He sat down with Spanish-language giant Univision in Florida for a town hall focused on expanding his footprint with Latino voters — a diverse bloc of voters who have tended to coalesce around supporting Democrats but are viewed as persuadable as various groups within the coalition have started moving toward the GOP.
The Univision town hall was meant to help Trump shore up support with an eminently gettable bloc, as well as build up confidence he can handle the country’s illegal immigration problem. Trump is generally viewed as more capable of handling the economy and immigration than Harris. After talking about economic policy with Bloomberg earlier in the week, the next logical step was to address his immigration plans with voters who are both affected by his policies and are passionate about the issue.
Trump avoided talking about mass deportations, something that has begun to grow in popularity, though it isn’t sparking massive popular interest.
Rather than returning to incendiary statements about “bad genes” and immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, the former president tried to tout the security his administration enforced at the border and the effect the flood of illegal immigration has had on job security for citizens and people who have come in legally.
The sit-down with voters didn’t test Trump in the same way a head-to-head matchup with one of Fox’s toughest journalists tempered Harris. However, the forum did offer Trump an opportunity to create deeper inroads with voters, while his opponent might have simply shown her plan to go on offense was, as Democrats fear, too little and too late.
Click here to read more about Harris’s interview and Trump’s town hall.
Biden’s billions
The president has failed once, but he’s tried again and again and again to push through massive student loan cancellations he promised on the campaign trail and has struggled to deliver for almost four years.
On Thursday, with 19 days left until Election Day, Biden announced another attempt to transfer more than $4.7 billion in student debt to taxpayers. This time, the president is focusing on roughly 60,000 people who have taken out loans and enrolled in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, White House Reporter Haisten Willis wrote.
“For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments, and only 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness before Vice President Kamala Harris and I took office,” Biden said in a prepared statement. “Now over 1 million public service workers have gotten the relief they are entitled to under the law.”
The PSLF program allows borrowers who are employed by a government or not-for-profit organization to become eligible to have their loan balances forgiven after making payments for 10 years.
Biden is touting the latest round of cancellations as a way to help teachers, firefighters, and nurses crawl their way out of debt.
Appealing to sympathetic characters might help grease the skids on Biden’s latest plan, as his previous programs were criticized as primarily helping high-earning people who took on debt to attend graduate school.
“Student loans have been a major point of focus for Biden during his time in the White House,” Haisten wrote. “He has announced plans and programs that would cost more than $1 trillion combined, only to see much of it clawed back by courts ruling he can’t make such moves without Congress.”
Republicans are expected to keep up the same attacks on Biden’s latest plan as his previous ones. When he was still running for reelection, the forgiveness plans were blasted as a way to “buy votes.”
“Over 60% of Americans don’t have a college degree, but Joe Biden wants hardworking taxpayers to foot higher education bills for the elite few,” the Republican National Committee said earlier this year. “In Biden’s desperate attempt to use your money to buy votes, American families are left behind.”
Click here to read more about Biden’s latest attempt to cancel billions in loans.
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For your radar
Biden is leaving Washington, D.C., for Berlin, Germany.
Harris will be in La Crosse and Green Bay, Wisconsin, for campaign events before holding a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Trump is speaking at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York at 7:30 p.m.
Nevada Senate candidates Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and GOP challenger Sam Brown will debate.