Good morning. It's Thursday, August 22. I'm Shemetha Basu. This is Apple News Today. On Today's show, looking at herses and Trump's economic plans. How the presidential race might change if RFK Jr. gets out of it, and questions remain about the super yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily. But first, Kamala Harris' running mate Tim Walls took the stage last night at the Democratic National Convention. It's the honor of my life to accept your nomination for Vice President of the United States.
This was the biggest stage of his political life. An opportunity to introduce himself, he played up the down-to-earth personality that the Harris campaign hopes will appeal to voters, and he leaned heavily on his bio as a veteran, a teacher, and a football coach. I haven't given a lot of big speeches like this, but I have given a lot of pep talks. So let me finish with this team. It's the fourth quarter. We're down a field goal, but we're
on offense and we've got the ball. We're driving down the field. And boy, do we have the right team. Tonight, the leader of that team, Kamala Harris, takes the stage to wrap up the week. With me now to talk about what to expect from Harris' speech is my colleague, Gideon Resnick, who is at the DNC. Hey Gideon. Hey, Eshmi Sen. So, this is a historic nomination in so many ways. Harris is the first woman of color to be nominated by a major party. If she wins, of course, she would be the first woman
president. And yet, at the same time, we haven't really seen Harris use a lot of that first of the language, right? The campaign just isn't being so heavy handed about it. Yeah, I think that's right so far. We haven't really heard Harris build her rhetoric and campaign around
this idea of these historic firsts that you're mentioning. One reporter who follows the campaign closely did point out to me that Harris does this kind of in implicit ways sometimes, not into the historic nature of her candidacy by saying she's the daughter of immigrants who met at civil rights protests. Perhaps they think that that is enough to signal to voters,
getting at. But we don't really hear the Hillary Clinton-esque approach of 2016, where often it was so much about her breaking the glass ceiling and being the first woman nominee and trying to become the first woman president. Right, right. The whole I'm with her thing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so I put this identity question to a Kayla Gardner. She is covering the Harris campaign for Bloomberg News. Here's what she told me about all this.
She's not drawing attention to it. And that's something that she's kind of done throughout her career. And she has been a first in so many of the positions that she has taken in public life, but she's not necessarily tried to focus on that. So that has been really something that's been interesting to watch. And yet I talked to voters who are motivated because she's a woman because she's a personal color. And they want to see someone like her
in that position. Now, Kayla also said that she spoke with Selena Lake, a prominent veteran democratic pollster, and Lake told a Kayla that she hears from voters that things feel different than 2016 that perhaps voters are more used to seeing women in positions of power, for example, in a lot of, you know, gubernatorial offices, things of that nature. But Lake is also clear that women are still held to higher standards than male politicians. And it's even higher for black women.
Harris still has this challenge that a lot of female candidates have, which is people have to think that they're both capable of the job. And they also have to like them, or as with men, voters, maybe they don't like the candidate. And some would say this applies to Trump. But they think that they're capable of doing the job. But Harris has really been able to do both those things. People like her, they like her argumentation
style. And they also think in a huge part because she was vice president that she is ready and capable of taking on this job. So Gideon, how will Harris kind of balance all of this tonight, both wanting to tell her story, but not necessarily wanting to lean into these identity issues? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. And we'll have to see how she tries to pull
it off. And, you know, I think broadly speaking, Harris is going to be introducing herself to a lot of voters tonight, even though a lot of people are, you know, familiar with her in other political roles, not exactly in this context where she's been as this presidential candidate for such this short amount of time. On the personal front, I think Harris will likely talk about her mother, you know, someone she often brings up as a big role
model and a source of inspiration. Her mother was a cancer researcher. She's also definitely going to talk about her time as a prosecutor going after people who break the law. That's been a big theme of the week at the convention, particularly given the contrast that Harris campaign wants to draw with former president Trump, who is a convicted felon. A lot of
the personal stories too in the past have been ways to kind of connect to policy. You know, Harris talking about working at McDonald's, for example, as a way to frame policies for working families and things of that nature. One other thing to mention that is kind of an interesting story here throughout the campaign is that we have seen it sort of lean into using her first name, right? We heard crowds at various rallies chanting, Kamala holding
up signs that say Kamala and Politico had a piece on this. It's notable, they say, because, you know, Trump often pronounces her first name incorrectly, but the Harris campaign is kind of leaning into using it at times. And President Obama even nodded to it in his speech at the DNC the other night. I am feeling hopeful because this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is
possible. And what about when it comes to policy? So far, Harris has been pretty light on details. What can we expect to hear from her tonight on that front? Yeah, that is often brought up that Harrison Walls, you know, haven't really done any hard hitting interviews with reporters yet either laying out big policy papers just yet. There was
a speech on the economy and some ideas around that. Look, Harris will talk about the economy, some of the other issues that she's been talking about on the trail, but probably nothing so, so groundbreaking there. One thing, Akala did tell me that has really struck me is that some of the voters that she is talking to at events aren't blaming Harris for the same things that they're upset with the Biden administration about.
I talked to one voter who used this word cognitive dissidents that he said that he was specifically concerned about Biden and his policy towards Gaza. He was not going to vote for Biden. And yet he says that he's open to voting for Harris because he just gives her the benefit of the doubt. He thinks that she could handle the issue differently, even though she was
Biden's governing partner. It's really remarkable how voters are sort of separating her and sort of going to November with this idea that, you know, maybe things will be different with Harris. Hmm. Akala Gardner speaking to my colleague, Gideon Resnick. Gideon, thanks so much. Thank you. Let's turn now to what both of the candidates are saying about the economy. As Gideon mentioned,
we'll surely hear Kamala Harris talk about it in tonight's speech. Last week, she outlined her plans to reign in price gouging with a focus on grocery prices. My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules. And we will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead. Meanwhile, her opponent, Donald Trump, is focusing his economic plan around new tariffs on imports.
We're going to have 10 to 20 percent tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years. We're going to charge them 10 to 20 percent to come in and take advantage of our country because that's what they've been doing for nothing. To take our jobs, we're going to charge them and bring back millions and millions of jobs by doing so and billions and billions of dollars. I did that with China. There are a lot of details we don't know about what they would actually do in office, but
economists are skeptical of both plans. Let's start with Trump and tariffs. As the Wall Street Journal explains, tariffs don't technically work the way Trump is describing them. China or Germany or Brazil or whatever countries don't actually get charged. American importers pay them. And typically, that results in higher prices for us, the consumers. That's why so many economists worry about blanket Trump tariffs causing inflation.
Now that's not to say tariffs always drive prices up. Targeted tariffs can be an effective way to punish a country that's not playing fair. Also, there's nothing inherently Trumpy about that kind of policy. He slapped tariffs on China in 2018 and the Biden administration kept most of them in place. Economists are critical of Harris's plan
too, which a lot of people say is akin to government mandated price controls. Now, Harris and some progressive economists like former labor secretary Robert Reich say the goal is to reign in corporate greed. Here's Reich speaking to NBC. Some big corporations have the kind of power they have over prices. They control prices. When you have more competition, when you get rid of monopolies, you actually enforce companies to do what capitalism is supposed to force them to do. And that is complete.
But more conservative economists like the folks at the Cato Institute tell Fox Business that food prices are affected by so many things. Whether geopolitics, the supply chain, and they say there isn't good evidence that price gouging is at the heart of the high prices a lot of us still see on grocery shelves. Food companies also push back, saying the
costs of labor and raw materials have soared because of inflation. We'll see what other details we get tonight from Harris, but concern from economists about both of these ideas is a reminder that politicians and presidents alone can't overrule the laws of supply and demand, and that buzzwords like greed and tariffs should be met with a dose of skepticism. Before we let you go, here are some other stories being featured in the Apple News app.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is reportedly planning to end his presidential campaign and endorse Trump. Kennedy himself hasn't publicly confirmed it, but he did schedule an event in Arizona tomorrow when Trump is also holding a rally in the state. It's not clear how much Kennedy ending his campaign could affect the race. NBC looks at the mixed picture from polling. There's evidence that Republicans like Kennedy more than Democrats do, and some data
shows more Kennedy voters likely to pick Trump over Harris. But recent polling in battleground states has Kennedy drawing equally from potential Trump and Harris supporters. In other news, more passengers remains have been recovered from the wreck of a wealthy British tech entrepreneur's yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily. Mike Lynch intended the
voyage as a celebration. He'd recently been acquitted of federal fraud charges in the U.S. and Lynch's co-defendant also acquitted was killed in a car accident just days before the yacht sank. The recovery operation has taken days. It's been complicated because divers have to work at challenging deaths and are only able to stay underwater for about 12 minutes at a time. Investigators are looking into how exactly the super yacht sank.
In legal news, a new development in an unusual case in Texas where a woman was sentenced to five years in prison for voting. Crystal Mason tried to cast a provisional ballot in 2016. At the time she was essentially out on probation for a federal tax felony. Texas bars people with felony convictions from voting until their sentences are over. Voting rights
groups were outraged at the length of her sentence. They pointed out Mason is black and her sentence was far more severe than white defendants got in election-related cases. A lower court threw out Mason's conviction in 2022, but the local DA appealed. And now, the highest criminal court in Texas says it'll consider her case again. And finally, the world's oldest person has died at the age of 117. Maria Branias was born
in America and lived in Spain. She survived both the COVID-19 pandemic and the 1918 flu pandemic. Her family said she recently sensed her time was ending and she promised to meet death, quote, with a smile feeling free and satisfied. Branias once said her longevity was a mix of genetics, luck, staying connected to nature, and avoiding toxic people. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already
listening in the news app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next. The New Yorker looks at the story of a pastor in Kenya who led his congregation into the woods and how hundreds of them were later found dead. If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.