Meet the Press NOW — August 26

If it's Monday, former President Trump hits the trail and hits Vice President Harris over the Biden administration's Afghanistan withdrawal, as the campaign's clash overrules for the upcoming debate with just 71 days to go, plus a bipartisan task force towards the site of the assassination attempt on former President Trump, and vows to get to the bottom of how a shooter was able to come within inches of killing a former president. And as Gaza's ceasefire talks continue without a breakthrough, Israel and Hezbollah exchange heavy fire in one of the region's most intense escalations yet. But a wider war appears to have been averted for now. And welcome to beat the press now, I'm Aaron Gilchrist in Washington, as the Trump campaign searches for a way to blunt the Harris campaign's momentum.

The former president planning to hit multiple swing states this week, starting in Michigan. This afternoon, he spoke to National Guard members there after laying a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery on the third anniversary of the attack that killed 13 American service members during the Biden administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan. The former president tying Vice President Harris directly to that withdrawal, both on social media and in today's remarks. Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan, set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world.

In a statement today, Vice President Harris marking the anniversary by honoring the 13 service members, calling it a solemn day for the nation. Meanwhile, both campaigns clashing over the upcoming presidential debate as well. The former president suggesting on social media that he might skip the debate, accusing the debate's host network of bias and blasting the Harris campaign for wanting to change the rules and have both candidates microphones on for the entire debate. Here's the former president now and asked about that by NBC's Jake trailer earlier today.

Would you want the microphone for you to end the debate when you're out speaking? We agreed to the same rules. I don't know. It doesn't matter to me.

I'd rather have it probably. You agree with it. As it was last time, in that case, it was muted. I didn't like it the last time, but it worked out fine.

I asked Biden how it worked out. It was fine. And I think it should be the same to trying to get out of it because she doesn't want a debate. She's not a good debater.

She's not a smart person. The Harris campaign really seizing on one particular part of the former president's comments there where he says it doesn't matter if the mics are muted. I think her position is the same as Donald Trump's position on this because he went on to say in that same interaction that he doesn't care. It doesn't matter to him whether or not the mics are hot and frankly that he would prefer if they were hot.

So I think this issue is resolved. A fulsome debate between the two candidates with live microphones where both candidates will be able to lay out their vision for where they want to take this country. And while campaigns debate about the debates, the Trump campaign once again grappling with how to address reproductive rights. If a Democrat slammed both Trump and his running mate JD Vance repeatedly on that issue at last week's convention, former president Trump posted on social media, quote, my administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.

The scams as his running mate made headlines on that issue during an interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press yesterday. Can you commit, Senator, sitting right here with me today that if you and Donald Trump are elected, that you will not impose a federal ban on abortion? I can absolutely commit that. Kristen, Donald Trump has been as clear about that as possible.

I think it'd be very clear if he would not support it. I mean, he said that. Yeah. I mean, if you're not supporting it as the president of the United States, you'll be happy to.

You tell a federal abortion ban. I think he would. He said that explicitly that he would. Let's bring in our NBC News team now.

Shaquille Brewster in Michigan. We're Donald Trump delivered remarks this afternoon. Garrett, hey, joining us here on Seton Washington. Mike Memley has the view from the Harris campaign.

He's posted outside the White House right now. So Shaq, I'll start with you there in Michigan, the former president back in that battleground state. What did we hear from him this afternoon in Michigan? Well, you really saw the former president try to toe that line between doing what he normally does in front of a political crowd where you go and you hear him in front of a rally audience giving that red meat to the base and doing what he tried to do today, which was speak into non-political or nonpartisan group full of service members who many of them were in uniforms.

And you saw him kind of do a little bit of both. There was certainly that red meat in there. He talked about Nancy Pelosi. He gave Governor Tim Walz a new nickname.

So to speak, he brought up Tulsi Gabbard on stage and accepted her full endorsement. Of course, we know that she's always been friendly and talked highly of Donald Trump. But you also saw him kind of sprinkle policy in his remarks. He talked about wanting to create a space national guard, a kind of an expansion on the space force that was adopted as he was president.

He talked about trying to increase spending from NATO countries and promising to always support veterans to legislation more, more legislation, I should say, to provide more support for veterans. So you really tried to, you heard him try to strike a balance where he was supportive of the environment, but still kind of doing what he usually does, which is kind of leaning into that, those more political tones, Aaron. Shaq, I'm curious though, as you were listening to the former president speak and sort of watching the room. I think that's the reaction to some of the former president's comments there as he, as you said, this was a political event, at least from his perspective, I would imagine.

What was the reaction in the room? There was definitely a shift. You saw at the beginning, he even acknowledged that one point that he said, you know, I'm used to speaking to a group that's less toned-down than you are. And so in the beginning, there was definitely a more muted applause, definitely respect for the former president being there.

But as his remarks went on, you definitely saw a more clear show of support from the members. You saw many of them, sometimes again, in their uniforms, standing and applauding after Tulsi Gabbard left the stage, many of them standing and giving her that standing ovation. But there was also some very clear signs of disagreement. I did see at the end of his speech, there was one wife of a servicemember who turned her back toward Donald Trump, I followed up with her afterwards.

And she said that was a clear sign of disapproval. She wanted to do so respectfully, but she wanted to convey that she did not support what the former president and his record as he was in office. So it was definitely a mixed crowd in there, but it was definitely also a friendly crowd from the people who went there as a voluntary event. They didn't have to appear there.

So one person told me that, you know, the people who are going to this event, they want to hear from the former president. And that was reflected by the reception that you saw him get. All right. Thank you.

Let's bring in Garrett and Mike now talk a little bit more about what we've been watching today. And I think, Garrett, there's been a lot of focus obviously on the September 10th debate and whether it will actually happen or what it will look like if it happens. What's your sense of where things sit with the Trump campaign? Is this debate going to happen?

I have a reason to think it will still happen. Donald Trump thinks of himself as a master debater. He thinks he knocked Joe Biden out of this presidential race with his own debate skills back in June. And I think he believes, frankly, as does the Harris campaign, that debate format each benefits them more, right?

He thinks Harris is likely to get tripped up by being off-prompter, forced to take any kind of question. He wants this to happen. The last 24 hours is a very traditional Trump working the refs, basically trying to soften up ABC and the moderators, soften up, you know, all of us will be paying attention to it. The idea that he is not being treated fairly, one of his favorite choruses in his political career.

And so if the debate doesn't go well for him, it's not him, it's everything else. I'm curious, you're thinking about the response that he gave to Jake earlier today about preparation for the debate, where he essentially said that he's not preparing for the debate. Is that sort of a typical thing from him? And does that put him in a position where we don't get a whole lot of substance because he hasn't sort of gone through the binders looking at that policy detail?

I mean, Donald Trump and binders in policy detail aren't, or do you typically hear it together in a sentence. That's not how he approaches campaigning. It's not how he approaches the White House. That's for the debates.

What we know about his debate prep is that it's not kind of standing up at elect term doing the formalized process. But he does workshop lines. He does kind of workshop the way that he might be attacked and the way that he might respond. That's why he's involved Matt Gates in the past.

That's why he's involved in Tulsi Gabbard, who had her own back and forth with Kamala Harris, which she was running for president back in 2019 and 2020. So look, I think there is an element of lowering expectations for yourself, which is something that you can do here. You know, if you don't study for the test, then you'd be poorly, nobody's surprised, right? So I think there's a little bit of expectations lowering in the way that he talks about this.

But it's also the way that he's run his entire political career. It's all a riff. It's not a sort of serious process at any stage. Well, Mike, let me turn to you here.

The Harris campaign did, in fact, ask to change the rules here. Do we have an understanding of why that ask has been made? What was good for Biden? That's not good for Harris.

I think it's more a question of what was bad for Biden that the Harris team wanted to remedy here. Because remember, when the Biden campaign dictated the terms for the debates in May, it announced that it was going to have two debates. It wanted the debates not to have an audience, and it wanted to have this mute button for a lack of a better term. And they were successful in getting Trump to agree to all of that.

Well, what happened? Biden is no longer the Democratic nominee because, in part, his poor debate performance. And I think the Biden team in retrospect felt that he might have benefited from maybe not an audience, but certainly from allowing Trump to be Trump, the fact that Trump is much more likely to be talking over his rival, to maybe in trying to spar with his rival off their game. Whether or not Biden or, in this case, Harris is successful at paring that they think in large part that voters rejected, that the more voters here from Trump, the less likely they are to support him, especially the kind of broader audience that is likely to tune in to this debate.

So, it's unclear if we're requesting what the Trump campaign said that they're requesting, to have opening statements, to have the candidates seated rather than standing, but we do know that they are very pleased to hear Donald Trump agree to the latest term that they threw out to have this mute button thrown out of the debate equation because they think it serves their interests going forward. At the same time, Mike, Trump, we know, is on the trail, and the Democratic ticket has been essentially dark for the weekend and obviously today, and since the convention, what's the strategy coming out of the convention, and when will we see the vice president and governor walls again? Yeah, and this is unusual because we're so used to seeing a ticket come out of their convention with a barnstorming tour to try to carry that momentum into the future, and that did not happen. We've seen both the vice president Harris and governor walls, essentially catch their breath after what has been a very intense several weeks, because what we have seen, but we usually would see after a convention we saw largely before the convention.

They did that battleground state tour with one another. They're going to be resuming that later this week. The two will be on a bus tour in Georgia. We'll also then see the two candidates go their separate ways and other battleground states beyond that.

They are really dealing with a number of issues at this point. One is they are taking some time to prepare for their respective debates. We're still waiting for the precise terms of that vice presidential debate to come forward but remember, walls is new to this equation having only been selected a few weeks ago. And also I think they are looking at a situation where they want to continue to develop a plan going forward.

This is a ticket that was only formed a few weeks ago. This is a nominee that was only put on the ticket just over a month ago. And so this is the kind of window of opportunity here to refine, tune their plan going into the fall. Gary, I want to turn back to Trump here for a second and ask you about what we heard this weekend from Trump advance on the issue of abortion.

This is not a space where the former president has really sort of had a strong voice and spoken vociferously about this particular topic and reproductive rights and reproductive freedom. But we did see the statement on social media. We heard Senator Vance talk about this and the comments he made the question about the press. Is there a strategy change happening around that particular topic as that campaign tries to get closer to some of these swing voters, these independent voters?

I don't think it's a strategy change so much as an effort to wish this issue away. The Trump campaign understands that if come November or the issue on the minds of most voters when they're going into voting is abortion rights, they're probably going to lose. It's not their strongest issue. They'd rather be talking about the economy.

They'd rather be talking about immigration. And so the degree that they can just say it's an issue for the states or everything's going to be fine. I mean the Trump statement about I'll protect reproductive rights, kind of feel like Michael Scott in the office declaring bankruptcy. They're saying it out loud doesn't make it true, but that's kind of what they're trying to do here.

Think as much steam out of this issue as possible and hope that interviewers, voters will change the subject and move on. The Harris campaign is going to do everything they can to prevent them from doing that. Alright, we'll leave it there for now. Much more to come on this.

Obviously over the next weeks and months, Mike, Emily Garrett. Hey, gentlemen, thank you both. Let's turn to Butler, Pennsylvania, now, where the congressional task force investigating the assassination attempt on former President Trump just finished touring the shooting site. The group spoke to reporters a short time ago.

We're going to get answers. The American people have a lot of questions. We have a lot of questions. What we do, what we hope to do here today is to help restore confidence of the American people with their elected officials and their candidates are secure.

And we know there's a lot of Americans sitting at home that don't have that confidence. And I'll tell you, for many of us, it raises more questions than we came here with today because we can see it's not a large place. We can get a sense of the area in just how close these buildings were to that stage where President Trump stood that day. So for all of us, having an opportunity to see and to walk around and experience this was a really critical step in our investigative process.

Now today's visit comes just days after several Secret Service officials were placed on leave and a month after then Director Kimberly Cheetle resigned under bipartisan pressure. NBC News Justice and Intelligence correspondent Kendalaney is joining me now. So Ken, what do we know about what the task force members were able to learn what they did on this visit? It depends on you.

Today wasn't so much about fact finding for these task force members as it was about getting a visceral sense of the scene, looking for themselves at the sight lines and how close the shooter was able to get to where Mr. Trump was speaking and also secondarily sending a public message. They had their first news conference. They showed that they were bipartisan.

They angrily said that no one should be able to get away with trying to assassinate a political figure in this country that's unacceptable. They said they're going to get to the bottom of not only what went wrong but why and who was responsible. So let's talk about that part of this. This investigation started.

What do we know about the investigation? Where does it stay? In terms of what went wrong? We know that several Secret Service agents have been placed on administrative duties, particularly members of the Pittsburgh field office.

And we know a lot of different things that, look, it's sort of obvious in one sense what went wrong here in the sense that there was a rooftop that allowed the shooter to get a clear shot at the former president that was not secured and local police are on video saying that they told the Secret Service to secure it. We also learned that the Secret Service agents guarding Mr. Trump were not told that there was a man with a gun on the roof, even though there was a 42nd time period where the local police had radioed that in. They didn't have the same radio.

There was a huge communication gap there, but the details of why that happened are what this thing is going to get to the bottom of. I want to ask you to switch gears a bit. We understand that special counsel Jack Smith has just taken the next step to what appealing a judge's decision to dismiss the Trump classified documents case, right? What do we learn today?

That's right. The special counsel has just filed an 81-page brief to the 11th Circuit arguing that Judge Cannon was just flat wrong. In fact, they all ran out of synonyms for wrong in this brief. In her reasoning, when she said that it was essentially legal and unconstitutional the way that Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith and that he wasn't confirmed by the Senate, the Justice Department is essentially saying that if her reasoning holds true, all sorts of appointments across the federal government are in question because there are a lot of so-called inferior officers appointed by heads of departments, including acting U.S.

attorneys who carry out prosecutions, they're saying she just fundamentally misread four statutes and a Supreme Court decision and they believe that she's going to be reversed on appeal. So what happens at this point? It goes next level of the court? Yes.

They've actually asked to do oral arguments. So this is going to be a lengthy and protracted process, obviously not going to happen before the election. So Mr. Trump is out of the woods and if he wins, he can order his Justice Department to drop this case.

But if he loses, this appeal process will grind forward and they go all the way to the Supreme Court and then eventually there may be a trial in this case. All right. Alright. Well, coming up, both Israel and Hezbollah claiming victory after launching strikes across southern Lebanon and northern Israel, relied in Jerusalem with the latest on the fears of a wider war and a lack of progress on a ceasefire deal in Gaza.

Plus, as the Harris campaign flush with cash heads to battle around Georgia, can they turn momentum and money into votes? You're watching Meet the Press Now. And welcome back as we turn to the Middle East now where the latest round of ceasefire talks has not seen success. At the same time, Israel and Hezbollah seem to have walked back from the brink of a wider regional war after an intense exchange of cross-border fire over the weekend with both sides claiming victory.

And you can see here that massive cloud of smoke in southern Lebanon after Israel launched what it called a preemptive strike to stop a major Hezbollah attack. The IDF says about 100 Israeli fighter jets destroyed thousands of rocket launchers that were aimed at Israel. Soon after, Hezbollah launched an attack of its own as hundreds of rockets and drones targeted military sites inside Israel. Hezbollah's chief said the militant group had delayed its retaliatory response to allow ceasefire negotiations to continue and that for now, their military operations are complete.

As for those ceasefire talks, the latest round of negotiations in Cairo ended without an agreement after Hamas rejected the latest proposal on the table. Despite that, a U.S. official tells NBC News that the talks have been constructive and mediators remain in Cairo trying to close the remaining gaps. Joining me now from Jerusalem, NBC News correspondent Danielle Hemangian.

So Danielle, what's it like on the ground there today? What's the mood in Israel? Is there any sort of a sense of relief, at least for now, that the worst of these retaliatory strikes at least are over? I'd say a short answer is yes.

I mean, it was all over by the time most people woke up yesterday. But they've been gracing for weeks now. So there is a sigh of relief, but also this is a region where people are used to expect the unexpected. It's sort of a strange normal yesterday by noon, whatever gathering restrictions had been announced in the morning, had been lifted.

Ben-Gurion Airport had been reopened within 90 minutes, about 7 a.m., things were sort of back to normal. But as I say, they've been gracing for this for weeks now, ever since the assassination by Israel of Hezbollah commander Fwad Shukwur in Beirut last month. And as you mentioned, Hezbollah's Hassan Nasala, the head of Hezbollah, said yesterday in a televised speech that there was a reason why there was a four-week waiting period. He wanted to one instill fear in Israelis, and he wanted to see how the ceasefire talks would go if there would be progress.

And he said there wasn't progress because Israel kept making last-minute demands. Hezbollah said that it was mission-complete, but this was revenge for the assassination of Fwad Shukwur, that they managed to launch 340 rockets into Israel. They managed to, according to Hezbollah, distract the Iron Dome, which allowed them to launch a drone deeper into Israel and target a specific military site near Tel Aviv that is home to an intelligence unit. Hezbollah claims was linked to that assassination.

So mission-complete, both sides get to claim victory. Hezbollah says this was only phase one, which of course begs the question, what could come next, Aaron? I do want to ask you about the ceasefire talks that have been happening in Egypt over the last four or five days at this point. What are you hearing from people in that region, the countries in that region about these talks?

We know the U.S. has characterized the talks over the last four days as having been constructive. Do people there share that sentiment? Is there a different feeling?

I don't think many get the sense that the other parties are sharing that sense of optimism that the United States are trying to convey. This simply puts the obstacles remain there. Hamas has said that whatever is now on the table, this bridging proposal does not align with what it has agreed to back in early July. And the main sticking points involve two corridors.

Aaron, one is the Ned Zechin corridor, which is a road that runs east to west in Gaza, effectively cutting the strip in half. And if the Israelis maintain their presence there, it would prevent the free movement of Palestinians on Palestinian land because they would want to screen the Palestinians as they travel through the Gaza Strip. The other big issue is the Philadelphia corridor, which is this buffer zone, the strip of land between Egypt and Gaza. Advocates of an Israeli presence there say that it's a lifeline for Hamas.

They use it to smuggle in weapons and fighters. And Israel wants to maintain a presence. Hamas has said they will not agree to a deal that doesn't see the full withdrawal of Israeli forces. All right, Danielle.

I'm Jim for us in Jerusalem tonight. Danielle, thank you. I want to bring in Ambassador Dennis Ross now, former U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East and an NBC news foreign affairs analyst.

Ambassador, thanks for making time for us today. It feels like the administration has been saying it's close to a deal and talks have been constructive for at least several weeks now. Do you think that that is the reality on the ground that there's something constructive happening that could lead to a positive outcome or is it just a matter of trying to strike an optimistic tone that will help to keep the talks alive? Well, the irony is it both can be true.

I do think some of the gaps are narrower than they have been. Danielle said she did identify two of the issues that have been outstanding. I think there's a broader issue, though. It's not clear to me that if you guys have sin-war, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and now the leader politically as well.

It wasn't clear to me that he was particularly interested in a ceasefire ordeal anytime soon, apparently because his position all along has been he hoped that what a mosque did on October 7 would trigger an all-out war against Israel by Hezbollah, by Iran, by the other Iranian proxies. And it did not. It has triggered exchanges, but it didn't trigger what he hoped was an all-out war. You have his Bela.

This is what Hezbollah said yesterday. We had been waiting because we were waiting to see if there was going to be a ceasefire and then it didn't happen so we did this. But that's not what sin-war wants. He wants an all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel.

And what he saw is that that's not going to be the case. So if he was deciding he wouldn't do a ceasefire deal because he thought it might preempt what his Bela or Iran would do, now after seeing what his Bela did yesterday and the Nasser Ali explanation, he may well understand that he's not going to see in all-out wars. If that's why he was holding back, this might give him an additional reason to think about doing a deal. By the way, one of the reasons I say there's a little bit of both, one of the things that Hamas had not been doing, Hamas had not been revealing the names of the hostages who could be released.

Now, one of the things that's emerging from the talks is that they have provided information on that. So we know they've made that move. We know the Israelis have made a move not to end the presence on the Philadelphia border, but to significantly thin it out and to reduce it to one small area of the Philadelphia border. So neither one of these moves are sufficient to do the deal, but each of these moves indicate that there has been some change in what was an approach to negotiation.

So I answered the question that's kind of a diplomatic answer. I should say both to an either-word question. But do you get the sense at this point that there is, at worst, panic at best urgency among U.S. officials and leaders in that region, that this current deal, the bridging proposal that's on the table, that what we have right now is the last best option, and they've got a sort of fast track or speed up trying to get that across the finish line?

Here, I wish I could be more optimistic. I do think that what the, I think the Biden administration for very good reasons, and some of the people on this, who are negotiating on the Israeli side, I think they do have a sense of urgency. It's not clear that others do, including it's not clear to me that Prime Minister Netanyahu has a sense of urgency about this. I think the Biden administration has a sense of urgency because they, A, they're concerned about regional escalation of the conflict.

Maybe that fear is not quite as acute as it was until yesterday, although I don't think that the threat of a broader war has gone away. But I also think that there is a concern that they don't know how much longer that those hostages remain alive, how much longer are they going to be able to stay alive? It's certainly not. You can't claim total victory.

Prime Minister Netanyahu talks about total victory, it's pretty hard to claim total victory. If the hostages who are there don't come back alive, and all we know already the numbers have, who remain alive are substantially less than they were, and we know even a week ago the IDF recovered six of the hostages who had been killed after they were in captivity, not weren't killed at the time of October 7th. I don't see on similar side or necessarily Prime Minister Netanyahu on the other side the same sense of urgency that maybe the administration feels. All right.

Ambassador Dense Ross, we appreciate your time and your perspective on this. Thank you. You're coming up next, the Pennsylvania Prize and how to win it. I'll talk to a Democratic congressman from the key presidential battleground as both campaigns chart a path to the White House through Pennsylvania.

You're watching me The Press Now. And welcome back. The balloons have dropped. The confetti is all cleaned up.

And the biggest question now facing the Harris walls campaign is how to keep that wind at their backs after last week's convention in Chicago with 70 days until the election in a political environment that has been everything but predictable. Joining me now is Pennsylvania Democratic congressman Brendan Boyle. Congressman, thank you for making time today. Obviously, the convention ended on Thursday.

A lot of enthusiasm for Democrats there, certainly some momentum on the Democratic side here. We've even heard the Trump campaign repeatedly reportedly say that believes that Vice President Harris is going to get a convention bump in the polls in the days to come. How do they keep that momentum going? Would you have wanted to see some rallies to sort of keep the foot on the gas this past weekend coming into this week?

Well, it's great to be with you. And you're exactly right. It was just a spectacular convention, maybe the best Democratic convention since 1992. This race is in a dramatically different place now than where it was just five weeks ago.

And I've never seen a Democratic party more unified, which will really help us in an election which I believe, and I'm a little bit biased as a proud Pennsylvania, but I believe this election will come down to my state more than any other. And we know from 2016 and 2020, the margin we're talking about is 1% or less. Now, I think Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have been doing an outstanding job on the campaign trail. They've been far more active than the Trump campaign.

I think they've held five times more rallies than Donald Trump over those last five weeks, were certainly since Tim Walz was picked as the VP. And I wouldn't be surprised if you saw that sort of pace. Keep up with the exception, of course, for time off from the trail to prepare for the debates if and when they happen. So you talked about Pennsylvania being potentially the deciding factor in this race.

We know that President Biden had a bit of an advantage because of his long ties to that state. How does Vice President Harris win Pennsylvania in particular? Yeah, I wish that I could give you one easy answer, but that's part of the challenge of winning a state like Pennsylvania where urban, suburban, and rural. You don't have the luxury of just focusing on one slice of the electorate.

You have to pay attention to African American and Hispanic voters in Philadelphia, also a large swath of working class voters that are white, black, Hispanic, and Asian, especially in the northeastern part of the city, some 400,000 people. And then you go seven hours to the opposite end of the state in northwestern PA. You have Erie, one of only two counties in Pennsylvania, which actually flipped. It had voted narrowly for Trump in 2016, a voter for Biden in 2020.

That's also a large working class community, largely white. And then finally, you have a lot of suburban areas, especially suburban Philadelphia, but also the suburbs of Pittsburgh and South Central PA, where you increasingly have here to four Republican-leaning college educated voters who are now voting Democratic and big numbers, bigger numbers than ever before. The reality is, it won't just come down to one group that I just mentioned because the margins are so close. And people are asking, well, what is she going to do, right?

I was in Pittsburgh when the vice president visited Beaver County in Allegheny County a couple of weekends ago. There are a lot of people who don't know if a Harris administration would be a continuation of President Biden's policies with a younger president, or if there would be a real change in trajectory there. If a voter asks you how a Harris administration would be different from a Biden administration, what do you tell them? Well, to your question, would you be more of the same or different?

My answer is yes. The fact is that every vice president may have similarities to the president who they served, but also is their own person. We saw that with Joe Biden. He had different policies in some areas relative to Barack Obama.

We saw it way back in the late 1980s, George Herbert Walker Bush was similar to Ronald Reagan, but different in key ways. I would say that the campaign that's able to win this election will be the one who talks about what the platform is for voters and their families for the next four years, not the previous four years. That's what this election is about. And time and time again, Bill Clinton had it right at the convention.

Donald Trump, in addition to the lies, he talks about the eyes. It's just, I, I, me, me, me, me. Because with Harris and Walls, they really are talking about a people-first agenda to make costs lower, to keep this economic recovery going, and ensure that we continue a soft landing. Something that so far we've been able to do coming out of COVID, literally better than any other country on earth.

I do have to ask you how much of a tie to President Biden does vice president Harris keep as she goes forward with this campaign. Obviously, in most of her prepared remarks over the last couple of weeks, she has offered some praise of President Biden and talked about a record that they worked on together. There's a couple point at which, given the fact that the party was okay to jettison President Biden from the ticket here, there's a couple point at which President Biden needs to not be a part of the conversation, at least the conversation that is initiated by Vice President Harris on the trail. Well, first, let's just be clear, this was the president's decision.

He did something he didn't have to do. He had won the primary, some 87% of the delegates to the DNC, where I was in Chicago just a few days ago, were pledged to Joe Biden. He made a remarkable decision to do something that hadn't been done since at least 1968, though I would argue actually had never been done, because even in 1968, Lyndon Johnson hadn't won the primary. In fact, that was looking fairly dicey for him.

And Joe Biden's case, he had won it. But he selflessly decided to step aside, because he believed we would be a more unified party if Kamala Harris moved forward. It was an incredibly courageous decision. And I think he gets a lot of credit.

We're not just Democrats, but frankly, all Americans for that great example of leadership. In terms of the next, what is it, 70 days or so, people understand that ultimately this race is about the two people at the top of the ticket. Kamala Harris for 30 plus years of experience in and out of public service, her agenda for what she wants to do for families, especially working in middle class families versus Donald Trump, who is literally just running for himself and to keep himself out of prison. I do want to quickly ask you before I let you go, a policy question.

Back in 2019, Vice President Harris said that she wanted to ban fracking. She was a backer of Medicare for all. Now her campaign says she does not support those ideas. Do you want to hear about why she changed her position on those issues?

Do voters need to hear the why when it comes to these sorts of changes? I mean, I think we would need an hour of show to detail all the times that Donald Trump has split-flopped hell, even in the same day, just look at his record on abortion. In terms of fracking specifically, I think there's been some confusion in the national media when it comes to this issue. Fracking is a big deal.

In the western third of Pennsylvania, candidly is not really a big issue in the other two thirds of the state. I have a policy and that is if someone is evolving on an issue and they're coming to the position that I hold, I say thank you very much. So I happen to share the same position that Kamala Harris says, I think overall, while not perfect, fracking has been a net positive for our state. Understanding though, we are still in this evolution to finally move toward a completely carbon free future, which we really need to get to over the next 20 years.

All right, we run out of time. So we'll leave it there. Congressman Brendan Boyle, we appreciate your time today. Thank you.

Thank you. How many JD Vance appears to leave the door open for family separations as part of Trump's mass deportation plan? Those comments and more, the panel's next. You're watching me press now.

And welcome back. In the race of the White House, former President Trump has vowed to make mass deportation a key part of his second administration, but the campaign has been vague on how a Trump administration would conduct those deportations or what impact they would have. Here's Trump's running mate, Senator JD Vance being pressed on that issue on me the press yesterday. Will families be separated under your mass deportation policy?

I think that families are currently being separated and you're certainly going to have to deport some people in this country. I think you start with the most violent criminals in our country. Those people need to be deported. That's where you focus federal resources.

I think you, of course, have a number of children who are currently living with drug cartel members, not actually their families. We need to, of course, find their families and get back their families. Joining me now on set, Benji Sarlon, Washington Bureau Chief for Semaphore, actually at the end, former communications director for Vice President Harris and Danielle Pletka, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the NBC News contributor. A lot to talk about over from what the weekend brought us.

Benji, I'll start with what we just heard from JD Vance here on the immigration plan. What do you make of what we heard yesterday on the press? I was actually struck by the language you used to describe how they would approach quote, unquote, mass deportation and that it actually sounded a lot like the approach from the Obama and Biden administrations, which is they always argued that you should prioritize resources towards criminals and which means shifting them away from, for example, someone who's just pulling down a job, raising a family, not raising any obvious trouble. So right off the bat, I found that just a little surprising, usually Republicans make the argument that no, you have to go further to convince people not to stay here, that even if they're just laying low, they still could be targeted.

So do you think it's just an instance of JD Vance doing sort of a little bit of the detail, a little bit of the moderating that we wouldn't see from Donald Trump on a topic like this and what you just heard? Certainly seeing a lot of instances, especially on policy where JD Vance gets asked about Trump and they're sort of a, what he meant to say was, or what I interpreted it as. This was a big, Mike Pence job too. So I think this is any running made, it's their job.

So Danny, this issue of immigration has been something that the Trump campaign has been really out front on, right? At least they're talking about it. Is that the right perspective? At this point?

Does that something they continue to run with and take the lead on or does it come up where that becomes risky? No, I think it's not risky for the simple reason that they're looking at the polls. They know that the American people, a lot of them not here on the, among our coastal elites, but are really angry about the number of people that have flown across the border, the number of people who are now swarming into town's New York, Chicago, all around, all around the United States, living in hotels, driving up inflation, and in some cases being involved with crime. But I mean, eventually you said it right.

In fact, America has always had a mass deportation policy. We don't call it that because those are ugly words, but the reality is we deported and Barack Obama deported tens, hundreds of thousands of people. This is what they're talking about. Details, eh, not so much.

So actually, what do you think? I mean, if you look at what we just heard from JD Vance and I was in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago with the Vice President, where people there told me, well, this is just not a topic they should touch, they can't touch, because the Republicans, Democrats, right, and the Vice President, because Republicans have owned it. When you hear a response like that from JD Vance, is there something there for the Harris campaign to sort of grasp onto and try to run with or message around? Absolutely.

It's inhumane. It's un-American. And for him to continue to use words like illegal aliens, I think, is something that the Democrats could latch on because it really drives this point that Republicans could actually care less about people. You know, Donald Trump separated over 5,500 families from their children.

There's still 1,000 plus kids that are homeless without their own families. So Democrats are going to continue, what I'm struck by is the Vice President is leaning into this issue. She's not backing off of it. If you recall her rally in Georgia, where the second topic that she raised was on border, the border issue, how we've decreased the number of border crossings, they're 40% lower than they were even under Donald Trump.

So she's going to continue to lean into this issue and really, you know, I would say, correct the record, because absent that, it keeps being filled up by misinformation by Republicans. She did talk about it when she was out West in Arizona and Nevada. Let's talk about this debate that is or isn't going to happen on September 10th. Mind you, what's your expectation, despite all the noise?

Does the debate happen? Yeah, I mean, this always seems to happen in any debate negotiation involving Donald Trump. Obviously, there's disputes sometimes between campaigns, even besides, you know, the Trump era. But it's interesting what it's focused on, which is this issue of microphones in which the Trump campaign seems to want him muted while Harris is speaking, which is a reversal of 2020, when he and the campaign were upset that the network started muting him in response to his first debate in which he constantly was interrupting Joe Biden.

So I think it says a lot about the politics of that, of who they see as gaining from Trump potentially speaking over or having an outburst while Kamala Harris is speaking. So, Ashley, is that the strategy? Is there something here that says, you know what? Open the mics up and let the chips fall where they may, Trump will put his foot in his mouth.

I mean, literally, a strategy has been let Trump be Trump and let American people see Trump because when they see him, they're reminded of why they don't like him. So many Americans are over the Trump show. This is why he's stalling out in the polls, why he doesn't have a growth path for it. But I will say this though, there's the reason why Donald Trump is running scared is because there's nothing that would be more bruising to his ego than to lose to a woman.

And what I do know about Kamala Harris is she suffers no fools. Second to that, second to that, second to that, second to that, she, sorry, yeah, she suffers no fools. So when she's not making the mistakes that Democrats typically make, she's not going to pull any punches about his record and she's going to stand by her own record. I think that's what's going to set this thing apart and what's going to make it incredibly great television.

What's your read on this? I mean, does Trump participate or not participate? Does he stand to lose something one way or the other? Let me say something else first.

I'm a Republican and I care about people saying things like Republicans don't care about people is something like saying Republicans are deplorable and that wasn't a winning strategy. I've said that about Republicans. I said that about these two guys. You said Republicans.

I wouldn't say that about Republicans. Let me say that about Republicans. Let me say that about Republicans. People, aliens.

That's my point. I don't know what Donald Trump thinks he's doing. He needs to debate Kamala Harris because that woman needs to speak out about her policy. She needs to speak without a teleprompter.

She needs to speak to the American people. And while we know that he may jibber to use a mean word a little bit, we have no idea how she's going to do because she flamed out last time before Iowa. She's got no votes from the Democratic constituency. And so again, we need to see them both.

He is missignaling and mismanaging this and we were psychologizing this out in the Green Hill. But I don't understand it. I've been wondering if part of the strategy being deployed here by the Harris campaign as we talk about interviews and the like, is there's greater value in getting out, having these touch points and sitting down with a trained journalist and being able to go out and have these conversations and these exchanges and getting a room full of people, is there a strategy around that that they think might be a greater value than doing a more formal traditional media interview? Well, let me just say this.

The vice president hasn't, she hasn't shrunk from doing any interviews. I mean, she's doing interviews when she travels around the country, local interviews. She's doing stand-up reporters outside of her plane. She's already agreed to do an interview by the end of the month and I think they're going to follow through on that.

She's not running from the cameras at all, but I think you're absolutely right. She has prioritized listening to the American people. And that's the difference between the Republican ticket, Trump's ticket and the ticket that we're seeing right now. What I think makes the vice president, the right leader for this moment, is that she actually sees people.

She's actually listening to people. She's actually meeting them where they are. She's not standing on a stage, bloviating hatred and sexism and all these other isms. I mean, she's not doing that.

She's leaning into listening to people and addressing their concerns. It's one thing that you don't see from the other side. So I think all of this is over-height. She's definitely going to sit down and do an interview and it's not strong from doing any since I've known.

Benji, I'll give you the last word on this. How does this need to play out in terms of having that face-to-face grilling? If you don't do it, things just get pent up. There's a lot of questions that don't get answered.

They can get more traction with the other campaign, but obviously they've been coasting off a pretty good first month. But eventually she'll have to answer. One question, for example, that she never has given an explanation for her. Why are her positions now so much more moderate than they were the last time she run for president?

These are things that are on airwaves and swing states all over from the Trump campaign from Trump super PACs. At some point she's going to have to sit down and go over with them with a reporter if she wants to rebut them. For the benefit of the swing state voters who want to hear that sort of thing in large numbers, I appreciate that. Benji, Ashley, Danny, thank you all.

Thank you. Silicon more than a dozen Republican-led states now suing the Biden administration over a program that would make it easier for an estimated half million undocumented immigrants to apply for legal status. That story is coming up next. You're watching, eat the press now.

Welcome back. A coalition of more than a dozen red states led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit on Friday to try to halt a new Biden administration program that would provide pathway to legal status for immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally and are now married to a U.S. citizen.

The program, which began accepting applications a week ago, would allow certain undocumented spouses to apply for parole and play status, protecting them from deportation and allowing them to apply for work permits, green cards and eventually citizenship. With me now as NBC News correspondent David Noriega, David, what are these Republican states arguing in their legal challenge here and how are undocumented spouses responding? Yeah, Aaron, so the main argument from Texas and these other Republican states who are also acting, by the way, with America First Legal, the group founded by Stephen Miller, the former architect of Donald Trump's immigration policies, is that this program will be harmful to states like Texas and the United States in general. This is part of a larger argument than undocumented people are a drain on state resources and that a program like this will incentivize future unauthorized migration.

Now, the undocumented immigrants who have applied for this program, along with their spouses, U.S. citizens' spouses, who have moved to intervene in this case, are trying to defend the program alongside the federal government. And they argue that, by definition, the people that this program applies to our people who are contributing to American society. They've lived in the United States for more than 10 years.

That's a requirement for the program. They are married to U.S. citizens. Many of them have U.S.

citizens and children. They have jobs. They're embedded in their communities. That is their argument.

I spoke to one of these immigrants who was moving to intervene in the case. His name is Fode Toure. He is from Sierra Leone. He was brought to the U.S.

as a child when his family escaped the civil war in that country. He works as a prosecutor for the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office. And I asked him both what he thought about how this program might affect his life and also what he makes of that argument that the program might be harmful to the U.S. Here's what he had to say.

This will change the trajectory of my life. It will truly be an answer to prayer for me. It will give my family stability. It will give me security.

It will allow me to look at my son in the eye and say, I'm here to stay. This notion that the GOP likes to base itself as the power of your family, family roots will your target in family. Your target in your ribbon, families are part. Texas and these other states are asking the judge, a Republican, a Trump appointed judge in East Texas to stop the program immediately to halt it with an injunction.

These families and the federal government are going to try and prevent that from happening so that the government can continue processing applications for parole in place. Alright, we'll be watching to see what happens next year. David Norega, thank you. And we are back with more Meet the Press Now tomorrow.

The news continues with Christine Romans in for Hallie Jackson right now. He was a young Marine. She didn't care about convention. They made a life together.

Then one night, the Marine died. And then the death investigation took a wild, unexpected, and utterly bizarre turn. I'm Josh Maguet, and this is Trace of Suspicion, an all-new podcast from Digline. Listen to all episodes of Trace of Suspicion Now, wherever you get your podcasts.