Labor day afternoon with us on this special edition of deadline white house, with just 64 days to go before the election, the sprint to the finish is in full swing today. Vice president kamala harris and governor tim walz are wasting no time flooding the zone with a flurry of campaign events across the battleground states. Using this labor day to make their case to union voters and organized labor. Vice president harris kicked things off in detroit, flanked by michigan governor gretchen whitmer and two of the most powerful voices in organized labor. Shawn fain of the united autoworkers, and randi weingarten of the american federation of teachers. We celebrate unions because unions helped build america, and unions helped build america's middle class. It is true across our nation and it is true here in detroit. For generations, in detroit and across our nation, the brothers and sisters of labor have stood together to righteously demand fair pay, better benefits, and safe working conditions. And let me say, every person in our nation has benefitted from that work. Everywhere i go, i tell people, look, you may not be a union member, you better thank a union member. For the fiveday workweek, you better thank a union member for sick leave, you better thank a union member for paid leave. You better thank a union member for vacation time. Because what we know is when union wages go up, everybody's wages go up. When union workplaces are safer, every workplace is safer. When unions are strong, america is strong. But what we know is as we fight to move our nation forward, donald trump intends to pull us back to the past. But we're not going back. We are not going back. Meanwhile, governor tim walz is taking the very same message to union workers and labor leaders in minnesota and wisconsin today. We'll show you some of his remarks when they happen. And this is just part one, the start of their battleground blitz on this labor day, because at this hour, vice president kamala harris is en route to pittsburgh, where she and president joe biden, a native son of pennsylvania and a staunch supporter of labor unions will join forces on the campaign trail for the first time since president joe biden's history making decision to bow out of the presidential race and endorse his vice president, kamala harris. They will be joined today by pennsylvania's powerhouse governor josh shapiro. We'll bring you those remarks later in the program when they get under way live, but make no mistake, this orchestrated power play for blue collar voters and labor union households, a play that involves calling on some of the most talented and powerful and effective voices in the democratic party, well, it stands in stark contrast to what's happening on the other side. The events of the disgraced twice impeached four times indicted expresident. He has decided to spend his labor day at maralago, and notably as the new york times reports, trump's campaign calendar for, quote, the first half of the week, is not yet clear, end quote. 64 days until the election. Mr. Trump, big talk. That's where we start the day with some of our favorite experts and friends. Former republican congressman, david jolly is here. Also joining us, professor of history at nyu, ruth benghiat is back. With me at the table, professor at princeton university, eddie glaude is here. I start with you because we watched that, just about two minutes from vice president harris' clip together. She is strong and getting stronger. I have always been a fan of her retail political skill set. I thought when she launched her event and political historians will write their own history of her sort of life span as a candidate, but i have always been impressed by her political talents. She gets stronger every day. And i have seen her give this stump speech. It sort of always happens to be when i'm on the air so i get the benefit of getting to watch a lot of her events live. She is just she's just very good at this. She's getting better and better. I think it has a lot to do with what it feels like to be unscripted even though she is. The more she gives the stump speech, the more comfortable she is with what she's saying, she's improvised in and around the hit lines. And you can feel the emotion that she's bringing to the table. So it's really, really wonderful to see a political figure evolve as we have had a chance to witness from 2010 to, i have known her even when she was a. G. In california to now. It's really powerful to witness. You know, and this is, i mean, david jolly, since this campaign started, the harris campaign, she is a campaign within a political phenomenon. I mean, we can cover the polls, as though it's a clinical exercise, but the reason she's up every week is because there's something happening in the country, and you see it in your normal life. And then i think especially i was away last week so i sort of saw it in my regular life. People who don't necessarily watch what i do every day, but i know in my normal life, i'm sure we all have these people in our lives, who are only mildly interested in what we do 24/7, election year, nonelection year, have questions about what's going on. They have heard about this harris/walz ticket. I think when you then zoom in and watch an event, you can see why. There's something happening on this democratic side. That's right, nicolle. Vice president harris finds herself leading a new political movement in the country, and people are doing it because they believe in her. They're doing it because of her message about optimism and looking forward and not going back. They're doing it because they feel confident in a vessel in someone that can beat donald trump that perhaps when they looked at joe biden previously, they couldn't. But i also think they see today's a perfect example, a remarkable contrast between the candidates. I actually love this kind of holiday labor day setup we're looking at between harris and trump. First the optics of donald trump sitting like little richie rich or i guess old richie rich at the golf club in palm beach that he owns, he's sitting there by himself, ringing his bell for diet coke. Vice president harris is out there with raucous crowds of working class voters across the country. The other contrast we seem to often lose in the trump years is there actually are policies that matter. Donald trump says i'll be the most prounion president you have ever seen while also knifing unions in the back because he doesn't understand the policy. The truth is, republicans of the past could at least articulate their reasoning for what you call right to work laws which don't allow compulsory union membership to get a job. You see higher income, but you see lower wages. Higher executive pay, more payout to shareholders, not to workers. Vice president harris, joe biden, they support the right to organize, which says no, if you're going to participate in a trade economy often, you are going to join a union, and those unions are going to protect your benefits and give you higher wages. You're going to be higher wages. Vice president harris and joe biden have those policy conversations where donald trump doesn't. And the reason it matters. Not just for the opportunities for working class voters that are there with vice president harris, but despite all of the political movement and enthusiasm behind vice president harris, the fundamental foundational strategy today that still will decide this election is the blue wall strategy in pennsylvania, michigan, and wisconsin. Even though we have seen the numbers continue to grow for vice president harris, those states are still up for grabs and without them, the vice president doesn't win the white house. She's putting in the work today. Donald trump is sitting at his golf course. You know, ruth, there's something that's been reoriented. You said something that became sort of a north star for me this summer. We talked about despair as a tool of the autocrat. And i think that harris is the antidote to despair in this moment of a flood of disinformation. If you spend 90 seconds on the social media platform owned by elon musk, i think it's called x now, i still call them tweets. I don't know what you call xs. I don't know what the missives are, but it was awash in despair. I think this harris campaign has reoriented american politics around the idea of humility. I mean, there's humility in the workhorse strategy to campaigning. There's arrogance in what trump is doing down there, sort of gorging on screen time and angrily tweeting things that are not rooted in truth. There's humility in the workhorse nature of this candidacy that she's out there en route from one event to a second event, that walz is fanning out, working for the vote. Asking people to vote for them, presenting a policy difference. I want to play some of the way she contrasts herself to donald trump, this, too, is from detroit. But i'll tell you, i think that there has been a certain backward thinking approach over the last several years. Which is to suggest some folks, them folks, to suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down instead of what we know, the true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up. Who you lift up. That's the measure of the strength of a leader. Let's stop with the nonsense. I just i love how she puts the autocratic message back down where it belongs. It's nonsense. And i'm going to take this fight to him, but let's call it what it is. I love that. It's very moving because one of the reasons people are thronging to the events in record numbers is that we were ready for this. I think that we haven't quite taken the measure of how much we have been affected also psychologically and socially by being assaulted by trump's messages that he doesn't care about americans. Remember in iowa, he said to the caucus attendees, you know, you should come out even though it's very cold and even if you're sick, and if you vote and then you pass away, it will be worth it. Worth it to who? worth it to him. So we were ready for some leadership, real leadership that is based on empowerment of others, that is based on care, and that's what you see with them, harris and walz, out there every day, working hard to connect with others, to have a positive message that together, the togetherness is very important, because the autocrat, it's all about dominating the crowd. The individual in the crowd. And nicolle, we have talked before about how the core of authoritarianism is taking away the rights of many and making the many feel abject and humiliated and giving more empowerment to the few, to the elites, to the billionaires. And the harris/walz formula turns that on its head, and it's really moving to see. And it doesn't work unless people respond to them. And let me play some more of how i think she's connecting. This is vice president harris again in detroit talking about her childhood. Many of you know my parents met while they were active in the civil rights movement. So when i was young, my parents i see some young leaders here today. When i was young, my parents would take me to the meetings. I see our young leaders. And take me to the marches. I was in a stroller. And from a very young age, i learned that when people stand together, when we join voices, knowing that the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us, when we join those voices, we can drive extraordinary change. Which is why i believe in my heart and soul no one should ever be made to fight alone. We are all in this together. We're all in this together. What's amazing when you listen to that, and when you sort of pull that up and lift that up as her message is how much success trump had in making us feel like we were in this fight alone, and we weren't. Even just here, i mean, you and david and i had a lot of these conversations over the last nine years. And ruth is newer to the table, figuratively speaking, but when you hear that message of fighting together, and you lift that up, you realize how far trump traveled in gaslighting us. Right? because that message feels like an epiphany. Trump entered into an environment, nicolle, where folk were working hard, busting their behinds and weren't making ends meet. He entered an environment where a lot of folk felt alienated from whatever washington was doing, so there's a sense in which we want to say trump is all of this stuff, but he was actually exploiting what everyday people were feeling. So what does it mean for vice president harris to step into this environment? and to say no, if we're going to address the conditions under which we live, we have to do it together, we can't outsource our responsibility, and then what she does so brilliantly, she pulls the narrative of ellis island through her parents, then she takes the mid20th century revolution of the 1960s and gives it to us, not as a moment of alienation, not as a moment when big government put their thumb on the scale, but a moment where democracy expanded for all of us, for women, for black folk, for lgbtq folk. It's this extraordinary rhetorical move to capture what's underneath. There's something, i was thinking about the comments you made with ruth, to ruth about despair being the kind of language or the material, the money of the despot, or the autocrat. I was thinking about detocqueville, and thee talks about the strang melancholy that defines this place. And that melancholy is the gap between who we say we are and who we actually are. And so, politicians can come in repeatedly and exploit that melancholy. Donald trump did it in his own unique way, but it's in the soil here. And until he faced kamala harris, he had the ability to sort of cloak our politics in it. There is some spell that she has broken. I think so. Because you know, she represents possibility. Right? so we have already that hope thing. That hope thing. But this is who we can be if we decide to. She doesn't have to announce she's a woman of color, she doesn't have to announce she's a black candidate. Been there, done that, with hillary clinton and obama. Every time she walks into a room, that's all already ignited. And so now the question is, will she give it content? and she's beginning to do that. She's flooding. Flooding us with content, if we care to sort of, i think, take it. That's why we'll continue to dive into her speech. I want to show all of you more of what she had to say. Again, we're waiting on governor walz's event. We'll show you what he had to say and we're in this wonderful time slot, she's landing in pittsburgh. As soon as her pennsylvania event gets under way, we'll show you all of that live as it happens. No one is going anywhere. There's so much more to talk about. Still ahead for us, following the very public rebukes of donald trump's visit to arlington national cemetery from the u. S. Army. They never do that but they have done that. That's how bad he is. We'll look closely at the expresident's longtime contempt for the american military and the men and women in it with someone who saw it firsthand as he grew up in his home. Donald trump's nephew, fred trump, will join us once again on set with what he wrote in his book on that topic, and later in the broadcast, as we mentioned, president joe biden will make his first joint campaign appearance with his vice president since stepping away from the ticket. We'll bring that to you and much more when deadline white house continues after a quick break. Don't go anywhere. For a limited time, subway just dropped the price of every footlong in the app to $6. 99. Wait, subway did what?! $6. 99 footlongs? yep! says right here. $6. 99 for any footlong. Get this deal in the subway app now before it's too late. We realize some home maintenance jobs aren't worth the risk. That's when we call leaffilter to protect our gutters. Leaffilter's patented filter technology keeps debris out of your gutters for good, guaranteed. Call 833 leaffilter or visit leaffilter. Com for a limited time, subway just dropped the price of every footlong in the app to $6. 99. 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(♪♪) look, if your most famous line is, you're fired, you sure as hell don't understand workers, right? the words, i want our next president to say to workers whomever she might be, is i got your back. This guy just doesn't get you or your life at all. I don't think he could tell us what the difference is between a flathead and a philips head screwdriver, you know what i'm saying if you think he's ever swung a hammer or used a power tool in his life? oh, hell no. You think he's ever scanned a coupon at the store to save money as he's checking out? you think he ever sat down with a number of family bills knowing he could only afford to pay some of them? he's never struggled. He doesn't know what the average person's life is like in this country. We're back. David jolly, what the harris campaign and all of the sort of political luminaries who make up the democratic bench right now have done for the first time since 2016 is turn trump the narrative about trump's story against him. I remember folks covering trump in the primaries in '15 and '16 when his helicopter landed in iowa and it was a novelty. People at the state fair were so enamored with trump's wealth. They have turned those things into a liability. There's a whole body of fantastic reporting that has helped arm these luminaries and politicians with the goods. But i think he is, and i don't know that he knows this, where have no idea what his state of awareness is about his political vulnerabilities but what he has bedeprived of, in part with the lawsuits in new york, finding that his whole business was a fraud, but these politicians have also turned this into being out of touch and turned it into a political liability. Nicolle, this is exactly right. I don't think this part, this narrative of the campaign is fully develops. This is where i think we could see the greatest expansion of vice president harris' strength. Voters, people, everyone understands the difference between humility and arrogance. They understand the difference between hard work and cheating. And there is an interesting opportunity here for the vice president that she has to be careful with, tiptoe through it a little bit myself, but the contrast with a former president whose most famous words were i alone can fix it. I alone can fix it. You need donald trump. He's the only person who can fix it. With a vice president who is surrounded by, you can't even call it a democratic bench because they're all leaders in their own right, but start with tim walz, gretchen whitmer, josh shapiro, roy cooper, raphael warnock, mark kelly, go down the list of people that today's democratic party offers the country as a buoy to vice president harris. The reason you have to be careful is, in the words of your former boss, the soft bigotry of low expect