Day the fed makes a long awaited move, slashing Interest Rates for the first time since 2020. Plus, the woman who may be the democrats best weapon in the fight for abortion rights. As the 11th Hour gets underway on this wednesday night. Good evening once again. I am Stephanie Ruhle and we are now just 48 days away from election day. Are you ready for this . That is less than seven weeks. You might have a Doctors Appointment scheduled after the election at this Point And Today americans got really good news about the economy. The fed decided to vote big with its first cut to Interest Rates since 2020. That means in the middle of an election where many americans say the economy is the top issue, mortgages and Credit Card bills are about to get more affordable. It is another top issue for americans, emigration. She talked about that when she spoke to the Congressional Black Caucus today. We must also reform our broken immigration system. And protect our dreamers. And understand we can do both, create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border is secure. We can do both and we must do both. Donald trump and his extremist allies will keep trying to pull us backward. We all remember what they did to tear families apart and now they have pledged to carry out the largest deportation, Mass Deportation in american history. Imagine what that would look like and what that would be . New polls out today show that the race is still very tight in the swing states, the ones that count, with harris holding small leads to fall within the margin of error. Meanwhile today more than 100 former national security officials who served in republicans administrations plus former congressional republicans signed a letter endorsing Vice President harris and calling Donald Trump, quote, unfit to serve. Her opponent spent the Day Campaigning in an unusual state for a republican nominee at this point in the campaign, New York. Earlier both talked about the feds decision to cut Interest Rates as well. They judge the economy has very bad to cut it by that much, assuming theyre not just playing politics. The economy would be very bad or they are playing politics, but it was a big cut. Its not going to help families a lot. Its better than nothing. The fed is going to give them a little relief in the midst of an election. Nothing compared to a disaster that Kamala Harris policies have caused in this country. Days after an apparent second Assassination Attempt on Donald Trump, false rumors spread online that explosives were found in a coronary trump rally. Police said there is no truth to those stories and one of the people who spread the lie is a Donald Trump super Supporter And Owner of twitter, elon musk. With that lets get smarter with the help of our leadoff panel. Peter baker is here, chief white House Correspondent for the New York times. And Dave Weigle is here, national political reporter for semaphore. Lets start with you. I want to talk about the politics of this interestRate Cut. What does it mean for this election and i want to remind our audience as Donald Trump and j. D. Vance say this cut was political, the fed chair is Jay Powell, who has been in that position since the Trump Administration and was appointed then. Unless you are a political figure, as you rightly say, he is a trump appointee. Obviously in a Campaign Year it is going to raise questions. I think what it says is that the fed believes it has basically beaten inflation. That it is time to loosen up money and get the economy going well to provide funding for businesses that want to expand and make sure unemployment does not begin to rise with the tight money supply. What that means for the election is hard to say. History shows that peoples opinions about the economy are not really related to numbers and not really related to facts. They are related to what they see in their own lives and it is so late in the system, so late in the cycle, it is hard to imagine peoples views changing as a result of this, but it suggests that the economy at this point with low inflation, low unemployment, relatively high stock markets, wages going up, is in relatively good shape. That doesnt mean there arent problems and one thing that it may do is address the cause of housing, which is cramping a lot of young people who cant afford to buy places to live. This may help make things easier, but it wont change things in the next 58 days. Except of Course Mortgage rates are already going down. Affordable housing is a huge issue. The Rate Cut is going to help with mortgages. How does the Harris Campaign see this Rate Cut . The economy though peter mentioned lots of positive things is a very difficult needle to thread. Certainly a difficult needle to thread and that is why we have seen Vice President harris when she was initially putting out policy proposals. She made Housing Part of that talking about the fact she wanted to help people with down payment, giving 50,000 for down payments to firsttime buyers, but also saying she wanted to work on getting corporate landlords to not be able to raise rent in the way she believes they have been raised unfairly. There is this push to explain to the american people what a Harris Administration would do for them. The other thing that i think peter really had on his a vibe when it comes to the way people see the economy. I am always interested in hearing how people see their middleclass experience, because you have people that are waitresses and listening closely when former President Trump is saying he wants to pass a policy where overtime would not be taxed, even though the details are vague and it is not clear how to do that. You also have someone like Vice President harris going after people who want to own homes and are renting apartments and feeling the squeeze. So there is this race to see who is winning on the economy. The polls show over and over again that americans still trust former President Trump on the economy, but some of that is that he is seen because of the Reality Tv Show and his name being on buildings. He is seen as a wealthy man that can deal with the economy. Vice president harris as she continues to message on this, she is trying to bite into that and chip away at that and away that will help undecided voters begin to trust them more. Selling bibles and sneakers and now a Crypto Exchange and of course hes got his own stock from his company that does virtually nothing. Dave, these Battleground State polls are really tight. Any chance this Rate Cut could move things . It does fit into the Harris Campaigns overall narrative, which is things have improved. They need to improve more. People need to have prices lowered in a tangible way. People need to see the effects of this. Not just the Trump Campaign, really a chorus of conservative surrogates have complained about the Rate Cut. They are complaining because it will be beneficial to democrats and some of the ways Donald Trump has been combating this. The record of 2017 to 2019, not 2020. He also has been making promises that have not cost him in any way. He did it again in New York tonight, talking about capping Credit Card fees. He talked about a series of Tax Cuts. Universal ivf paid for by the government. He keeps promising things that would decrease cost for americans who get tips and their wages and democrats have struggled to compete because they are not hold on, dave. Hold on, dave. Can i interrupt you . They are not struggling to compete. Donald trump is offering a new goodie and a new Tax Cut every day and is yet to articulate how any of it is going to get paid and while people may want to look at Donald Trumps term precovid, saying the economy is strong, the deficit ballooned under Donald Trump. More than President Biden. I know Debt And Deficit are things people dont pay attention to anymore, but they will when they are truly out of hand. It is amazing that Donald Trump is offering these things. Yesterday he said im going to cut your Car Insurance by 50 . How . He doesnt regulate that. We wont make Car Insurance run by the government. It is run by the states, not the federal government. They are not competing with Donald Trump line. I like your post about that yesterday. A nice twist to put truth on that website. That is what it means. It is not like their waking up and agonizing. It is one party in power sing their tangible things we could do to change and others are not like this. Mitt romney was not proposing a different idea every day that hasnt been tested. That is the contrast. Maybe they are changing too late for some people. Contrasted with ideas that are coming so Fast And Furious and not coming with a plan for congress. Saying the same thing, gosh, i guess that is on the table. None of them have a plan to get it through the House Or Senate or even reconciliation. That is what i mean. It is not a problem for democrats. It is how do you compete against a candidate that keeps proposing random ideas that sound great with no way to pay for them. Look, the fed cut rates because we have beaten inflation. A very traditional message. Our policies have worked after a long time of striving. Look how your rate will go down. Perhaps voters can think back to junior high, Student Council elections. The person who offered no school on friday, getting rid of the cafeteria for fast food, they are not actually telling the truth. Peter, on top of Todays Letter endorsing harris that was signed by more than 100 former republican officials, more than a dozen former reagan staffers also endorsed her. Reagan, once in the republican party there was no higher throne one could sit on. I want to know what republican if elected officials youve talked to, what do they say . They dismiss people like that as republicans in name only. People who left the party. Since trump came on the scene a lot of establishment republicans, people who devoted their lives to the republican party have left the party or at the very least of broken with trump. They do not see in him the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. They see someone with the opposite approach. Trump is antifreetrade. Antialliances. Antioptimism. All of those things are things associated with Ronald Reagan and not associated so much with trump. You do see a lot of republicans breaking away. Dick cheney is the most prominent one. Will it make a difference with voters . Who knows. The republican party is trying to figure out its identity and people who used to be stalwarts are no longer welcome. Donald trump is trying to shut down democrats who are calling him a threat to democracy by trying to link that statement to the second apparent Assassination Attempt on his life, but he is doing this while he has amping up his own attacks on his opponents. What is the harris teams take . How are they going to handle this now that he is complaining about their rhetoric, but he is only amping up his . The Harris Campaign has not said much about this effort by republicans to paint them as the ones that need to tone down their rhetoric. I have been talking to a number of democratic operatives familiar with the Harris Campaign, talking to the campaign and they tell me that this is something they feel like is not going to stick. They feel like republicans are really playing a game here and they really dont have a leg to stand on, because all you have to do is roll the tape, including after the July 21Assassination Attempt, to find videos of Donald Trump using inflammatory language, including interviews where they say they should not call me a threat to democracy. In one of those interviews he says that President Biden and Vice President harris, they are the real threat. So he is condemning the language while echoing the same language. How complicated is this for democrats . When they dont come out swinging, when they dont fight back people accuse them of bringing a spoon to a knife fight. They dont swing at everything and if you have listened to the Vice President , she doesnt talk about trump as a threat to democracy in the same ways as biden. She talks about defending freedom. She brought up the debate and his actions. It has been much more specific. If you look at the way republicans have been highlighting the way democrats talk about trump. Go back and read the memos. Sometimes they are saying what a democrat said about trump after january 6, saying he should be removed from office. Oh, that might be a violent piece of rhetoric that influenced the shooter. There is nothing but a lot of Dust And Heat being thrown up to get democrats to stop talking about this and the most important thing is a lot of people thought after the first Assassination Attempt in butler that i would change the trajectory of the campaign and have a lasting impact on voters. The evidence we have seen so far as it is more like the attacks on Gerald Ford in 1975. He survived, but they did not radically transform the way the campaign was run or the way people thought about Gerald Ford. They have not transformed the way people thought about Donald Trump. From two months ago i hear republicans using a lot of Talking Points that got very stale very quickly in the summer and i think are more stale now. Thank you both for being here. Peter, im not letting you leave just yet, because we need to talk about the developing news in lebanon. For a second day the company was hit with a wave of deadly explosions from electronic devices. My Colleague Raf Sanchez has all those details. Reporter Tonight A Second Wave of explosions tearing through lebanon. Yesterday it was pagers belonging to Hezbollah Members. Today it is walkietalkies detonating simultaneously according to lebanese state media. This blast at a Funeral Today for a Hezbollah Member killed in yesterdays bombings. The lebanese army blowing up one walkietalkie in a controlled explosion outside a hospital in beirut. The iranian backed militants unable to stop what u. S. Officials tell Nbc News is a vast israeli covert operation, targeting personnel and the communications network. Lebanons Health Ministry says at least 14 people were killed in todays blast, on top of 12 killed yesterday. Two of them, children. And hospital struggling with an influx of more than 3000 injured people. Doctors involved in treating the wounded in the Pager Attack said they saw many injuries to the face when people were looking directly at the device, as well as a side when it was clipped to a belt or a pocket. Israeli agents planted tiny explosives inside the pagers, which detonated after receiving messages that appeared to be from hezbollah leadership. Israel refused to say if it were involved, but to make the Defense Minister says the war is moving to a new phase. With troops shifting from gaza to the fight against hezbollah on the lebanon border. As israel vows to make it