Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Trump’s Prognosis” with David Frum

Transcript

“Trump’s Prognosis” with David Frum · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get our humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  Who, boy?
• 0:09
  What a week.
• 0:11
  If you're feeling a bit unstable and discombobulated, if you've been consuming a little too much cable news and too much chatter
• 0:18
  around the dinner table about the past few days of events, I hear you. I'm feeling you.
• 0:25
  The dangerous idea that I invite you to consider, in the midst of all that, which might help us lift ourselves above it for a moment
• 0:34
  and not just listen to cable news anchors barking on about ballistics, is that in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump,
• 0:45
  I noticed that we're on a knife edge. In two ways.
• 0:51
  The first is just the contingency of history. I mean, the distance between where we currently are and an America that looks very, very, very different
• 1:02
  is a distance of an inch and a half in ballistics terms.
• 1:07
  Like AR-15s are very powerful. Eight shots were fired. One was close enough to sever his ear. He just had to move a fraction.
• 1:16
  The wind just had to be slightly different. A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon had to just behave slightly differently.
• 1:22
  And the breeze coming from the northeast could have been slightly stronger.
• 1:28
  If his head had exploded like a watermelon, pardon the analogy, but I'm not a favor of AR-15, so that's the blundest way of putting it.
• 1:40
  Where would we be then?
• 1:42
  So no matter how unstable or vulnerable or anxious we might be feeling at the moment about this election,
• 1:52
  just remember that there are a lot of parallel universes in which it's a lot better and a lot of parallel universes in which it's a lot worse.
• 1:59
  And at juncture points, like the Trump attempted assassination, that's a moment where you can viscerally see history splitting into two.
• 2:09
  And you can see all of the other ways that that could have gone.
• 2:14
  And the second thing that's just present for me is a sense of could this event be shot number two in some slowly unfolding gun fights that will become, you know, a problematic time in American history, shall we say.
• 2:36
  Shot number one might have been January 6th, and if you imagine like a ganglion shoot out between between goodies and baddies, if not having been involved in a ganglion shoot out myself, it's mostly informed by like 1970s sitcom versions of it, where there are some baddies hunkered behind a Cadillac and some cops hunkered behind a cop car.
• 2:57
  One of whom was just about to retire the next day. And but if you imagine that like escalating from like the first person shoots one shot and then you know another one scurries around to the back and then another shot is shot and it gradually escalates from being one shot every 12 seconds to a rat attack fire of 50 shots a second.
• 3:17
  Slow that down over the course of years and we've seen this happen time and time again throughout history where things just gradually escalate in slow motion and you know January 6th turns into the attempted assassination of Trump turns into greater hostility on both sides.
• 3:36
  And I mean, I think part of what we all have to do is to take a deep breath, you know, step back, be a little bit philosophical about things, not allow ourselves to get pulled into a partisan melee because that's what gives support to the shots getting faster and hotter.
• 3:53
  I mean, on the question of the contingency of at all, it almost feels like Archduke Franz Ferdinand's limousine taking the wrong turn and therefore giving an opportunity to his assassin and to just randomly shoot him up to the previous assassination attempt had failed there by sparking off World War One, which spark up World War Two, which sparked off the Holocaust, which sparked off the Cold War and on and on and on.
• 4:17
  So yeah, let's first of all, spare a thought for the 50 year old father who was killed while sheltering his family in the crowd.
• 4:30
  Spare a thought also to the family of the 20 year old shooter, you don't know anything at 20, you are also a human being and you also have loved ones.
• 4:42
  The contingency of this moment, the ways it could have gone another way is of course not just applicable when you have a literal near miss a literal situation where a bullet that is fired out of a gun at whatever it is 3000 feet per second goes within an inch of a brain.
• 5:06
  But also just moments that you know could have gone differently because they were close, I mean the 537 votes in Florida in the year 2000 that could have gone to Al Gore and then 911 either may have been caught because you'd have wants in the White House who paid attention to memos like
• 5:26
  Ben Laden determined to strike inside United States, which was literally the title of one of the memos came across George W. Bush's desk in the summer of 2001 or if they didn't catch it and 911 still happened maybe the response would not have been an ambitious plan to remake the Middle East into a democracy and a nation bill for decades.
• 5:45
  Maybe the plan would have been an environmental one since it was Al Gore's number one issue to try to we ourselves off Middle East and oil and say all right guys it's been a nice century us giving you money for that but let's we're going to go our own way now we're going to invest heavily into renewables and you can go back to doing whatever you were doing before we started giving you oil money.
• 6:04
  You know there are so many different ways that history could have gone that it raises this timeless question that fascinates me about whether history is shaped by people or it's shaped by forces I mean it's obviously shaped by both but like where is the needle there like it's hamburger healthy where's the beef and where's the where's the filler you know how much is the great person doing great things or terrible things and how much is just the soil that they're growing out of you know so I mean do the thought experiment about Trump right.
• 6:33
  And again I want to read right thoughts go out to the 50 year old guy who was killed thoughts even go out to the shooter and of course my thoughts go out to Donald Trump I mean he's a human being he doesn't deserve to be put into that situation he has a family and has been repeated at nauseam since the event political violence is it is always wrong and I'll get into that in a second.
• 6:55
  Because I don't think it's as obvious as everybody who claims that it is that political violence should be wrong so let's assume that things have gone worse and that Trump was actually a kill or incapacitated to the extent that he could no longer run.
• 7:13
  So what then happens like in your great man theory of history where you've got forces there are much much deeper and broader than the great man themselves you've got you know frustration with the border you've got resentment towards elites you put a sense of disenfranchisement you've got a hollowing out of the middle class you've got a failure to lift up.
• 7:36
  Industries in places like Apple H era you know that have been sort of left behind by history you've got you've got the opioid epidemic you've got the rise of China you've got globalization you've got growing inequality you've got social media you've got artificial intelligence like into that Sue.
• 7:54
  Trump has this kind of shape shifting really frankly brilliant and quite brave populist emerges out of that in a way that is that I find to be morally not just and pathetic and pandering but is nonetheless you have to give the man credit quite a skewed and quiet.
• 8:13
  I mean he's a man with an incredible political instinct just look at his reaction to the shooting by the way you know the way that you know that Donald Trump's success is not calculated is by noticing how he behaves in moments that he could not have calculated for when fight off light kicks in and all he's doing is responding to instinct and I don't know how many people really to to be fair to give the man credit would have after having been shot in a state of shock instead of getting the hand
• 8:43
  out of there used that as a reason to dredge up your inner strength and just responded like a pit bull dog with a anger in his face that you can see in those photos and in the video punching his fist in the air screaming fight fight for him it's like you're not going to get me down like this is a this is a mission for him even if it's a mission devoid of any principle except when even that mission I find you know
• 9:13
  you got a hand at them and I mean yeah he loses into in in 2020 he comes back for more he's the he's the energizer bunny he's going on and on and on he's not giving up so nonetheless you put that character into this garden right and what kind of treat as it grow into you remove that character that seed and what tree do you get instead what garden do you get instead if Donald Trump had been assassinated I don't think you get a world without Trump is on
• 9:43
  I think it's quite likely that you get a much more dangerous America at least in the short and medium term because what you're not doing is is addressing the causes that are getting rise to it right like you're your the job of a society and of a healthy demos is to try to release pressure valves you know that to try to notice the steam building up inside the pressure cooker and find ways to release that by ultimately addressing the legitimate grievances of the people who
• 10:13
  are pissed off for some reason think about the French election you know think about the Britain the UK election think about the rise of the far right in general you know the times when societies fall apart and things really go to hell is when instead of addressing underlying issues of inequality and disenfranchisement and a sense of you know not being represented and not moving ahead you instead
• 10:38
  try to paper over them and try to tell people that they're idiots and that has been part of the Democratic mistake I think for a long time I mean it had the Democrats not done that in 2016 quite so much then another contingent event that is a sort of fork in the road of history a sliding doors moment just as much as this one feels like is the election of Donald Trump in the first place which brings me to today's conversation David from an I spoke before Donald Trump the attempted assassination of Donald Trump so much of this
• 11:08
  will sound completely tin-eared to today's moment and yet so much of it is so overwhelmingly relevant that we may not have even had the perspicacity to say it if we'd known what was happening because we would have spent an hour swimming around in the soup of Donald Trump's attempted
• 11:25
  assassination which ultimately is not going to be nearly as important to history as the question of who wins the election in November what happens to the Democratic Party what happens to the Republican Party and what happens to the future of America
• 11:36
  democracy which are the issues that David from is touching on with me you probably know from his senior editor at the Atlantic he with the first person inside the George W Bush White House to write an insider's account of George W Bush's presidency he was an extremely important figure in the the 2000s in American politics and subsequently as an analyst and a journalist he is credited with coming up with the with the phrase the axis of evil which George W Bush gave
• 12:06
  to much criticism and and a claim in the first state of the Union after the September 11 terrorist attacks which basically framed this kind of worldview of the Bush administration and you know so from his no stranger to forks in the road to blacks one events I mean he was there for 9 11 he helped shape the America's response to that to some extent and or at least the selling of that response including the Iraq war
• 12:35
  sadly we don't get into a lot of this kind of sliding doors stuff but he does say some really interesting things about how differently we would be understanding the world if random things like Donald Trump winning in 2016 had gone the other way
• 12:54
  like humans are great meaning making machines and so we like to regard the historically contingent scenario that we're currently in to be the one that was always going to happen and therefore we over learn lessons that maybe we don't need to learn like there's an evolutionary benefit to us trying to impute meeting to things to us trying to impute agency to
• 13:16
  you know something rustling in the leaves behind us if we're on the on the african savannah which is one reason why we think that that there's more mystery and mysticism and like a kind of more agency going on in the wonders of the world and they're probably actually is you know in terms of being psychic or tarot cards or astrology or whatever might be
• 13:38
  but at the same time we're not very good at going well you know what I mean someone was going to win the 2016 election and the bullets trajectory was going to go somewhere and you know ask you fran fernand was going to drive down some street but it didn't actually have to be that street and had it not been that street and had he not been shot would the great war still have happened
• 14:04
  I mean it's an interesting question probably something would have happened because of all of those underlying forces that I was just talking about you know you have a scenario into which the great man or the great event or the random moment the inciting incidents can step
• 14:18
  but our job is to notice that there are an infinite number of possible futures and it's within our power to choose which one is likely to unfold it's not within our power to choose the best of all possible futures all we can do is make small decisions that contribute to a great good that points us into the direction of likely a better scenarios right because
• 14:43
  it would obviously have been possible in some way to deescalate and do things differently prior to the holocaust such that Hitler was not not able to get away with killing quite as many Jews and Roma and guys and everyone as he did like there's a there are many many many more universes one would have to imagine in which the holocaust doesn't happen then in which it does and there are probably some in which you know obviously many in which the holocaust happens on a global scale human kind of what itself out
• 15:13
  thanks to nuclear weapons as an aside I think this is this this failure of our hours to appreciate the contingency of the situation that we live in in the accidentalness of history is one of the reasons why we're so cavalier and blase about nuclear weapons because we just happened to live in a world where we got pretty lucky on a number of occasions in the 20th century where we can quite close to things falling apart and they really could have and then they didn't and we all breathe a collective sigh of relief and said oh well see we can sort of manage these things we're pretty good at it
• 15:44
  maybe or maybe not maybe we just happen to live in the world in which you know the bullet grazed the ear of the metaphorical nuclear holocaust instead of being an inch and a half to the right and exploding the person's you know I'm given up that metaphor that's too much for
• 16:03
  exploding the metaphorical brain of be called war and annihilating us all so the question of what happens next right the great man theory versus a more deterministic one you know could 9-11 not have happened could have been responded to differently could I mean forget that's right so 2016 is where I was going with this because David from says something really interesting about this.
• 16:27
  I want to elaborate on an advance in a way that I would have elaborated on it had the assassination attempt happened before we spoke.
• 16:34
  11 days before the election in 2016 the director of the FBI as I'm sure you know felt that it was prudent for him to release an announce that he was investigating emails that came to light in the course of an unrelated criminal investigation of Anthony Wiener emails that may have happened.
• 16:56
  They have involved something to do with Hillary Clinton this left Americans wondering what the emails contained who sent them what connection they might have to the investigation that the FBI had closed months previously without recommending criminal charges.
• 17:14
  If that hadn't happened would Hillary Clinton have gotten across the line in just Pennsylvania or Ohio which is all she would have needed or if not Pennsylvania then Ohio Michigan and Wisconsin.
• 17:29
  If the Democrats hadn't nominated someone as clunky a campaigner as Hillary Clinton someone as sort of seemingly wooden and alienating someone is difficult for voters to get behind if indeed they vote they nominated Joe Biden eight years ago when he had all his marbles would he have been a more a stronger candidate against Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.
• 17:56
  All these questions are more than just like sliding doors hypotheticals because to try to answer them helps us understand where to go from here to try to answer them.
• 18:10
  Teases apart the great man slash inciting great incident version of history from the general trends sort of materialist worldview of fatalism or determinism about human history regardless of who does it.
• 18:28
  So if Trump had lost in 2016 then the Republican party and many Republican voters would have said well I guess in hindsight that was stupid we shouldn't do that people don't like that it was kind of obvious that he was going to lose so you know forget about that will go back to the center.
• 18:46
  That would have solved things for a while for how long who would have been the next person to come along and tap the the sense of disenfranchisement that white working class non college educated voters largely at the time fail the Trump coalition has expanded since then especially to include Hispanics and more black people but at the time that was the overwhelming demographic.
• 19:11
  So who else would have tapped that and could they have been actually a Saviour manipulator than Donald Trump you know if it was Tucker Carlson you know when someone I think is equally good as Trump at manipulating people and at articulating a sort of panic to paranoid worldview in a way that resonates with people who are susceptible to panic and paranoia.
• 19:32
  But you know someone who knew the White House better who knew politics better who knew what you had to do to get things done and this is part of the concern of a second Trump term that he is surrounding himself now with people in places like the Heritage Foundation who understand politics they understand policy and there they've got in place the plans that are ready to go that he didn't have in in Trump's first term so.
• 19:57
  All of this is to come to my final point which is the injunction against political violence you know we're supposed to say after moments like this that this is a tragedy and political violence has no place in America this was the first thing that President Biden said this is un-American violence has no place in America this runs contrary to everything we believe in blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
• 20:27
  It's bullshit it absolutely has a place in America if you're talking descriptively political violence and the idea that you can take up arms against rulers or candidates who you don't like has a long history in the United States I mean many would argue that it's foundational to the founding principles of the United States to use violence to overthrow people and leaders who you think are doing the wrong thing.
• 20:53
  I'm not saying that it should be that way I'm saying that descriptively it is that way so if all of this talk this kind of talk about this is not who we are as Americans is a code for the night that I as a non-American I'm not getting for like let us pretend that this is not the way that we are because we should all agree that it is not the way that we ought to be then I'm with you but it would be nice to hear someone say that maybe nice to hear someone on cable news or someone in politics go.
• 21:20
  This is a scourge that has been with us and went with America since day one it's our kind of it's one of our founding sins that we struggle with I can understand that there is a long and somewhat honorable tradition of like the independence of the individual and standing up to.
• 21:38
  Powerful people who they disagree with sometimes even violently you know what is it that Jefferson was claimed to have said about the like the another blood of tyrants needs to be refreshed every few generations to keep the branch of democracy bloody blah or whatever you know from Oklahoma City to many many many you know to January 6th frankly there are many occasions on which there's an American reverence for political violence.
• 22:06
  So I think you need to do better than simply saying it's not who we are I think you need to explain why it shouldn't be who we are so let me give it a brief crack.
• 22:18
  I mentioned that you need a release valve from extremism or rather a release valve from the underlying grievances that can give rise to extremism right you can't just suppress and put a lid on the extremism forever.
• 22:34
  You have to have a way of resolving the underlying issues and letting the pressure cooker out of it.
• 22:40
  One analogy that David from makes in this piece which I think is really interesting and he explains it's there so I won't hear is that America may be about to become a little bit like Italy in the 1970s and look forward to his explanation of what that means.
• 22:54
  But the the the upside of that is that Italy is now a perfectly functioning country and has a quote unquote far right government and it's still doing fine.
• 23:04
  The injunction on political violence is not because it can never have a net positive effect like you know you can game plan out the various futures in which Donald Trump had been successfully assassinated in which you know everyone had sort of seen the impact and our 15 bullet can do.
• 23:23
  By the way these bullets do some incredible incredible things I mean they they do come out of the muzzle three times faster than a nine millimeter millimeter handgun bullet and you can read there's an amazing piece I think was in the Atlantic in 2016 by a radiologist.
• 23:37
  This was in the wake of the was the you value shooting I mean there are so many shootings in America but you know you read some of the accounts of medical practitioners and in this case radiologist who's looking at the X-rays and is quite familiar with gunshot wounds where the gunshot just goes.
• 23:50
  From a handgun goes tracing through you can see a lot like a line it's like someone's drawn a line across the body when you X-ray the side of the body.
• 23:57
  I have 15 bullets total different you know they won't they might not even come close to a bone and the bone will just fracture it will turn into a pack into powder you know they'll go it'll go near the liver and the liver turns into just a lump of jello.
• 24:11
  Because they're going so fast and because of the way that they're designed they can if they touch something they create these ripple effects that go out and just you know they they leave a hole unlike a normal bullet which will just go straight through you they'll leave a hole in in the back of the person.
• 24:26
  It's the size of an orange it's just it's a catastrophe it's like it's a mess.
• 24:33
  You know I don't want to put not horrible thoughts in your head especially this close to bedtime but you know yeah ahead that has had an AR 15 bullet go through you know the edge of its skull is not just like well you know maybe we can.
• 24:50
  Stitch it back up no that's a that's a watermelon drop from a skyscraper so suppose that had happened and everyone had seen it gone out on social media before you know the platforms could delete it.
• 25:05
  Certainly people there would have seen it.
• 25:09
  It's not all clear to me that the America after we get rid of Trump that way is any better than the America beforehand right I mean you can see that there would be at least some kind of low grade civil war massive civil unrest there would be.
• 25:24
  Incredible paranoia there's already conspiracy theories on the right about this you know event having been the deep state trying to kill trying to take out Donald Trump the Biden deep deep state trying to get rid of him and there's conspiracy he was on the left this was staged this is a way of for him to improve his popularity you know maybe it was an inside job.
• 25:47
  And I give any any reason to believe either of those when the most parsimonious explanation by far is that you know a lot of people have a lot of reason to dislike Donald Trump and some of those people want to take violence into their own hands but just to just think about what the conspiracy theorizing would be if it had been successful right.
• 26:10
  And me that least have you know some kind of martial law police you know cities on lockdown you know flaming riots everywhere and what emerges from that what kind of populist emerges from that is hard to say.
• 26:24
  So you have to be at best agnostic about whether or not it would have been a good thing and again I know this sounds kind of cow is like obviously it would be a bad thing to murder a man like I'm taking that as a moral given I'm trying not to do all of the boring throw clearing of like well it would have been.
• 26:39
  I'm trying to understand what the bigger ramifications are because if we're all honest with ourselves we would have to acknowledge that it could sometimes have a net positive effect to kill somebody right.
• 26:59
  If you go in extremist here there's the whole question of like going back and killing you know Adolf Hitler just before the Holocaust if you knew you could do that and you knew that he wouldn't be replaced by a more effective leader that you basically get the Nazis out of power for example in like 1939 you know would you kill someone to do that I mean of course you would you'd be morally insane not to.
• 27:21
  So I can understand the appeal of thinking well you know why not create a better future if it's possible to do so even if you have to break a few eggs along the way here's why not the injunction on political violence is not there because there's never an instance in which political violence could have a positive effect.
• 27:48
  It's there because the moment you give a scaric of credibility to the idea that individuals can take political violence in their own hands you begin unraveling the stability of civilization that we worked pretty bloody hard to erect you open the door to.
• 28:06
  Rwanda and this integration of the former Yugoslavia and societal collapse like we've established quite a sophisticated nuanced balance here it's really unusual you are if you live in a western liberal democracy one of the luckiest people ever to walk the face of this earth statistically speaking your healthier wealthier you live longer you're free from random crime.
• 28:31
  You have a wider range of things to eat you have more creature comforts you have better technology.
• 28:37
  And largely that's come about through free markets and the enlightenment and western liberal democracy and I'm sure you can add a whole bunch of awful things like colonialism or whatever but I think those were tangential to the innovation that's happened over the past few centuries and that the prerequisite for that innovation is a certain amount of stability and a certain amount of.
• 28:58
  Privacy and a certain amount of property law and impartial courts and you know a judiciary that functions independently and.
• 29:07
  Democratic institutions and the separation of powers and freedom of thought and all of that stuff is quite a difficult like quilt to stitch it's a part jigsaw puzzle to put together and we've managed to do it partly through like and partly through our own doing.
• 29:23
  And there are certain fundamental principles that are necessary to uphold to keep that whole thing together to keep that structure in place it's a jenga tower and you can't pull out there are some.
• 29:32
  Pieces that you can sort of mess mess around with at the top which we're messing around with at the moment I think you know sort of norms and things like that and politeness you know we'll trump to this or we'll trump to that and should you prosecute sitting president what's the spring court going to do and abortion this and whatever.
• 29:46
  Limby's rule small pieces at the top of the jenga puzzle but there are big pieces at the bottom of the jenga tower which if you pull them out everything falls apart and one of those is you don't shoot people to get you way you just don't do that.
• 30:00
  It's a little bit like the injunction against terrorism yeah or even torture you might say so you know the terrorist can say on what grounds can you possibly say that I shouldn't blow up a school bus or a shopping center or an airplane.
• 30:14
  When you know the might of the United States has been dropping bombs and killing people all over the world all the time like you know I'm killing far fewer civilians granted it sounds hypocritical it's clumsy but the fact is that once you open the door to saying that individuals should be allowed to kill other individuals to make a political point.
• 30:35
  Everything falls apart everything doesn't necessarily fall apart if militaries get to do military military things overseas like sucks to be overseas but as far as a policy is concerned that is not fundamental to you know the an injunction against using any force ever is not what's important what's important is an injunction on outsourcing the use of force to official systems like police.
• 30:59
  Courts and the military we don't do it ourselves as civilians that's the fundamental principle even if you can point to examples where it would be in isolation prudent to do so you know think of it's a little bit like the job of a defense attorney or something who gets hired by very wealthy criminal gangs to get them off you know the principle of the defense attorney who can sleep at night is not like oh it's a great thing that I'm getting off criminals it's that I am a call in the system and the system is a justice system.
• 31:29
  And the justice in order for the justice system to work everybody has to be has to get a good defense while I'm doing is defending them and the system goes on you might have crimes with that particular moral calculation in isolation but you presumably don't have crimes with the idea of their existing a justice system in which people are able to be defended by whoever they want or can afford to defend them.
• 31:52
  You know another another one I suppose that comes to mind is invading countries you know you hear a lot of the talk about you know from from Putin apologists and you the people even like Elon Musk and take a car some.
• 32:04
  And Russell brand and whoever like well you know I mean you know what about all the bad stuff we've done we expanded NATO you know we put we we pending Putin okay great all of that stuff is taking place away from the Jenga tower like that is taking place on the on the game board of of acceptable behavior of a liberal world order.
• 32:26
  We have a rule that a country doesn't get to invade another country and keep its land right that's just a rule now there may be really valid reasons for doing so or Elon Musk might tweet about how Ukraine was just crushed up some mistake which was a talk Putin talking point that he somehow got that he tweeted out because you know when the USSR when Ukraine was part of USSR in crush show shouldn't have given him as much autonomy as it had and we kind of turn it into becoming this other.
• 32:56
  It's country but it shouldn't really have ever been another country should always remain part of Russia at the end of USSR blah blah blah blah blah you know you can wax lyrical until the cows come home the fact is we have a rule the rule is what's important.
• 33:11
  Not questioning the rule is what's important like us all going okay okay okay I'll grant you all that I'll grant you everything about the legitimacy of Ukraine I'll grant you everything about the historical contingency of it being a different country I'll grant you everything about how threatened Russia feels by the fact that NATO has expanded and still.
• 33:30
  In this world we have a rule it's a big piece at the bottom of the Django Tower you don't roll tanks into a neighboring country to try to just absorb that country into your own like one of the reasons why it's hard to uphold these rules is because we all try to get away with as much fudging of the rules as we possibly can and you know people will point to the Iraq invasion for example well that was illegal that was in contravention of international law there was no security council resolution the United States and you know the UK.
• 34:00
  The UK and Australia and whatever other totes were going along with it should be able to invade Iraq so well if it's what's good for the goose is good for the gandai if the US can do it why can't we do it well yeah I mean the difference here is that the US didn't want to keep Iraq yeah they wanted a friendly regime in Iraq they didn't want to sign in power they were doing their own geos strategic games and they shouldn't have done it and obviously I think a majority of Americans now I think they shouldn't have done it it was a stupid move and indeed the man I'm speaking to in this episode was one of the people they're trying to sell.
• 34:30
  That move and I spoke to him about that in the first time the first instance that we he was on the show so you can go back and listen to both if you if you like this episode which I'm sure you will but the difference with the Iraq war is America was not going to keep Iraq was not going to turn into the 51st state of the United States so there are basic rules that we have to
• 34:50
  not question and one of them is political violence and I think I would like you know you can imagine if there was an Obama in the White House you can imagine him making this point without making the point as clumsily as I am but alluding to it in a way the job I don't have the capacity to do you think back to Obama speech about race
• 35:08
  in the lead up to his election to his first election and you know he there was this recording that came out of a pastor at a church that he used to go to saying you know some anti American things and supposedly anti white things
• 35:23
  and this became a big thing on the right and Obama decided I have to finally you know I have to give this speech about being a black guy in America I have to I have to find a way to do this and without throwing my cast under the bus
• 35:37
  and it's this amazing speech that you should go back and watch where he tries to strut all you know white and black and red and blue and say things are complicated but we should all be able to agree on on certain principles you can imagine him doing that here you can imagine him saying I get the frustration I get the anger and I get the hurt and I get the tradition in these in this country of saying dammit I'm I'm not going to do that.
• 36:07
  I'm fed up and I'm not going to take it anymore and I don't I shouldn't need to and I understand the deranged moral calculus that might come into play where you think that the world is going to be better off if you can achieve your goals and and get rid of the other guy by stepping outside of the game altogether and breaking the rules.
• 36:26
  For a reason like we're Americans for a reason we have to stick together because there's nowhere else to go like we are a country we are a demos let's understand that history is contingent understand that this was an accidental moment but maybe a warning.
• 36:46
  And let's try to heed the warning in some way I spend much of the beginning of this conversation with David from trying to heed the general warning of not running a geriatric probably Parkinson's patient as the democratic candidate.
• 37:03
  And I think it's important for us all to do the things that we think we need to do to lead us towards all of those sliding doors futures they're just a little bit better than the alternatives.
• 37:17
  I hope you well I hope you don't spend too much time on social media and watching the news at the moment it's just it's ultimately not that material I don't think it's that consequential at least if it is consequential and we're not going to know for some time the way in which it's consequential I mean I personally think that it's a political gift to Donald Trump I think his reaction will be iconic photo of him with blood smeared on his face and his fist punching the air and the American flag behind him I mean.
• 37:47
  You know for me this is like a total wipe out against Biden but there are things that can still be done there are things we can still do and as you'll hear me articulate in this interview there are reasons to believe that a Trump loss and the Trump win are not necessarily the easy black and white binary moral bad and good that we might think they are.
• 38:08
  Yeah be gentle with yourself this week I hope you enjoy I should know David Trump talks about us recording this interview sometime in advance of the Republican national convention we had scheduled this because I knew the Republican national convention was this week and I knew that Donald Trump was going to be anointed the candidate and it was only about three days before the shooting right it was like it was he says I you know we don't know what's going to happen and I was sort of thinking in my head when he says what I don't know what's going to happen both time the convention starts out like how much can happen in a few days well.
• 38:38
  Turns out a lot can happen in a few days just to put that in context not like we were talking weeks ago we're talking shortly before the assassination attempt and a few days before the beginning of the convention yeah I hope you well be gentle with yourself enjoy as much as I need the one and only David.
• 38:54
  Oh you know if we're recording I won't.
• 38:59
  I didn't want to put you off okay but just give me the give me the give me the short version so it used to be a hard scrub farming community then it turns into.
• 39:09
  And it's come that it's saying could say can to deep depression because because the farms were not economic in the new era of free or trade after 1988 and then discovered this later existence as wineries more bespoke farming organic farming and then arc out then artist arrived and then it became a place where people who.
• 39:32
  Wanted a quieter life than in the city could come but we've been coming here it was originally settled by refugees from the American revolution oilists and my family has been coming here since 1990 and all my my children this is where all their from memories wow I'd never thought about the loyalist refugees from the United States as being a possible explanation for why I find a greater level of.
• 39:59
  Anglophilia in Canada than I do in Australia.
• 40:04
  Oh it here in Ontario which is the central province.
• 40:09
  This is the defining the motto of the province of Ontario is the Latin tag seek seek for delus which means which is a half of a tag that began faithful she began faithful she.
• 40:22
  Wow and the fake wow because this prop is originally settled by people who.
• 40:28
  Came from upstate New York at which in the American revolution was a civil war as much as anything and they were in New Yorkers who made the choice to follow right and they.
• 40:38
  Candace they could stay under the rule that's of that's fascinating because I've always had a general sense that Australians are more condescending contemptuous and recess resentful towards the United Kingdom and Canadians are but.
• 40:49
  Yeah that would that would probably make sense alright speaking of people fleeing to Canada from the United States that's there's your segue David to November the November elections.
• 41:01
  I am a friend of mine.
• 41:05
  Right on my penpal asked me what happens at Trump wins and what was my advice my personal advice to him and my advice to him was a vibrant grow beard and head to the Seattle.
• 41:17
  I still remain to fight all these recent troubles of the view that by that Trump is likely going to lose.
• 41:25
  And I can take time to explain why I still believe in that but right there's no question that we speak on the eve of the Republican convention we speak after two weeks of intense criticism of President Biden following his dreadful performance at the debate.
• 41:42
  This is a moment of tremendous uncertainty and my view that Trump is going to lose this very much the minority view so why have such optimism.
• 41:54
  So from the time that Donald Trump appeared on the American scene as a serious political candidate in 2015 until today there has never been a poll in which he got more than at best 47% support among Americans.
• 42:08
  He has always been at below 50% through all his presidency there was not a single day when in any credible poll there are a couple of hack pollsters who gave him a higher mark but in the credible pollsters there's not a single day of his presidency where he hit the 50% number.
• 42:24
  And every time the Trump proposition has been put to the voters it's received less than half the vote.
• 42:30
  That's what happened in 2016 when he received three million fewer votes in Hillary Clinton.
• 42:35
  In 2018 his party lost its majority in the House of Representatives.
• 42:39
  In 2020 he got seven million votes fewer than Joe Biden.
• 42:42
  In 2021 his party lost the Senate.
• 42:45
  In 2022 the Trump party had the worst midterm of any out party since the 1930s really.
• 42:54
  And in 2023 again Republicans who are loyal to Trump had lost a lot of state.
• 42:59
  I hate to point out non-comfortable truth David but the fact that he won three million votes more than Hillary Clinton did not mean that he didn't win the fewer than Hillary Clinton did not mean that he didn't take the White House.
• 43:10
  In a parliamentary democracy this would be fine but given the electoral college.
• 43:14
  We're asking two different questions.
• 43:17
  One question was did he legally achieve executive power?
• 43:21
  He did. The second question is how popular is it?
• 43:24
  So that if you want to say why am I confident that he stuck at 46-47%?
• 43:32
  There's just a series of data points going back to 25.
• 43:36
  He stuck at 46.
• 43:37
  Right but I don't think I don't care about.
• 43:39
  I don't care what he could be pulling at 2% and I would still be alarmed if it meant that he could get the enough votes in the electoral college to become president again.
• 43:47
  We're sure for sure but just when you say why so what I thought was the story of 2016, 2020, 2024 was Trump gets 46% of the vote.
• 43:59
  In 2016 the shape of the election means that he could convert his 46% of the vote into a majority of the electoral college.
• 44:08
  In 2020 he could not convert his 40 because it was a more binary choice. Hillary Clinton only got 48, Biden got 51.
• 44:16
  And I expected that what would happen was the anti-Trump vote would consolidate in 2024 as it had consolidated in 2020 and as it did not consolidate in 2016.
• 44:28
  But the reason people are now so alarmed is Biden's poor performance in the debates and other things that have happened since have led people many to fear intelligently that the anti-Trump vote may not consolidate and that Trump could do in 2024 when he did in 2016 which is convert 46% of the vote into an electoral college majority.
• 44:47
  Isn't it relevant where those votes are? Even if you're setting aside the question of consolidating the anti-Trump vote, we're basically talking about four to six states aren't we?
• 44:56
  And whether or not a bunch of soccer mums bothered to get up in the morning and go to the polling place or choose to blow it off.
• 45:03
  Now that's of course true that Trump get Trump got more votes in the state of California that he got any other half dozen states that he but California is not competitive he will get millions and millions of votes in New York but New York state will not be competitive and then in other states it will be razor's edge.
• 45:22
  But if you ask me why was I so confident that Biden or the Democratic Party would do well 2024 that's why but we've had this we've had a series of shocks we've had this worrying performance by President Biden in the debate and then his party has just turned on itself since then and they're now at a point as you and I speak a little in advance of the time that you'll post the podcast.
• 45:44
  So there may be a lot of events between recording and posting but the Democrats are now in a very awkward position where so many people of such importance have gone in record saying we don't think Biden can do the job.
• 45:58
  That if he stays the Trump ads write themselves they have the New York Times editorial board saying Biden should have they have a Yorker every boy George Clooney every voice of liberal America saying Biden is past it and if Biden somehow endures these things will all become weapons against the Trump campaign yeah I mean does that mean they weren't worth doing.
• 46:28
  My view again here's a little different from most people my own view was I wrote an article for the Atlantic in April arguing that Biden should not do the debate not because at the time I was so worried as I later was but I just thought what we falsely called debates are actually joint media appearances and presidents of the United States should not do joint media appearances with convicted felons that was my view I think that the president should not be on the same stage someone tried to mount a coup d'état against an election he just shouldn't be there.
• 46:58
  And so my opinion if you'd ask me if we talked in April I would say what Biden should do is do a rose garden strategy where he comes up once a week and announces some new treaty some new achievement and then allows his massive war chest just a hammer crumpled negative ads but he should never directly engage with that would have been my advice back in April that advice was not taken and so so here we are he did directly engage with them.
• 47:26
  I'm in a moment of extreme self confidence where he was maybe is not honest with himself about his own state of mind he met Trump and June Trump didn't do so well Trump was pretty crazy in any against any other person Trump would have looked like a maniac but because we were so alarmed by the president seeming detachment from the world of the world.
• 47:47
  I didn't get that actually David my initial take was that I was as alarmed by what I perceived to be Trump's having taken on board his campaigns advice to not be a railing lunatic as I was by Biden's mental deficiencies that it struck me and maybe this was the format of the debate that you know the mics were switched off and that the time the time keepers were strict.
• 48:13
  But if I didn't know anything about politics and I just saw those two guys I would have thought and if I didn't know how much Trump was lying it would seem like Trump was a human being like rather than Trump you know the Trump of Trump stand railing against you know in the first thing of the first Hillary debate where Trump really seemed to ranged stalking around the stage barking at her like dropping weird analogies to QAnon stuff that nobody understood here I thought he's he looked pretty presidential which scared the shit out of me.
• 48:41
  Yeah no he was not you're I think you're quite right that he wasn't and compared to his twenty twenty debate where he just he seemed to be in a very manic face.
• 48:51
  Well Trump also has mental health issues and they they come and go and and that was definitely not one of his more crazy and just going back to the mic was just not true.
• 49:05
  But once you're having to explain to people that something isn't true that's that's a little different than the candidate appearing on stage and punching a baby.
• 49:12
  Yeah right right yeah when you're explaining you're losing as was it Reagan who said that.
• 49:18
  Someone probably.
• 49:22
  On your point about him not about Biden not he shouldn't done the debate because you don't do a debate with a convicted felon the.
• 49:28
  The way that would spin for forty percent of the country would be yeah but the only reason why he's a convicted felon is because there was a case that no one that know successful business person.
• 49:41
  In that position would have been able to survive the scrutiny of the level of scrutiny that the justice department and state justice departments have imposed on Trump is unprecedented and so this is this smells which untie so it's all very convenient to unleash a bunch of investigations against a former president and then when you manage to nail him on some arcane like election campaign hooker sex thing.
• 50:09
  You say well now I'm not going to debate the debate and because he'd be on the pile.
• 50:15
  Well as the merits of the case against the case that I'm which was convicted was not the strongest of the many cases against them and not the most morally shocking of the many cases both criminal civil.
• 50:26
  But there's a common theme in all of the cases which is Trump has a long history of falsifying business records which by the way reputable business people do not do.
• 50:36
  And this is a theme that goes through the New York Times of 2018 in a big story about how the Trump family cheated the IRS out of hundreds of millions of dollars of inheritance taxes and the way they had done that was by generating false invoices.
• 50:50
  His business fraud case where he lied about his net worth had told one story to the government about what his businesses were worth for tax purposes and a different story to the bankers of what his businesses were worth for lending purposes that also all relied on false stock right but isn't that I mean not to excuse it but it strikes me that really if you dug into any billionaire.
• 51:10
  Like yeah of course they've got of course oh my you know my ranch out there is worth such and such when I'm talking to the banker but ho ho ho get me in a private room and where I'm having a port and a cigar and you know maybe it or maybe your accountant is doing things and you're signing a bunch of documents and you're not really paying attention to it.
• 51:27
  If you had a prosecutor go over it with a fine tooth comb and a microscope I think most people's bullshit detector and maybe this is just because most people it's class warfare or something.
• 51:38
  You know I'm not saying that we do it as bad as Trump but I'm saying that that's the narrative that you have to push back against close up I'm going to pull a little rank on this because my my you have no way to know this but my my family is a real estate family here in Canada what we're speaking from.
• 51:53
  And pretty active in condominium development and other things and we don't use false invoices we tell the same story to our bankers as we tell to the government and not because we're such a wonderful wonderful people but because if you don't do that sooner or later you will go to prison.
• 52:12
  The assumption of everyone in the business world is you tell you don't tell you don't keep separate sets of books because whether or not that is you're ever caught for that people who keep separate sets of books are up to criminal activities and sooner or later it's going to get get caught.
• 52:30
  If I the first way I became aware of Trump as a businessman.
• 52:34
  I mean I lived in New York in the early 90s and of course I knew him from spy magazine but Donald Trump came to Toronto in the early 2000s and opened a I mean he didn't open a hotel a bunch of very fly by night operators.
• 52:49
  Build a hotel in downtown Toronto and paid Trump to put his name to it and they then engage in activities that were the scandal of the real estate community in Toronto which is a.
• 52:59
  I think real estate community tend to be pretty close close knit communities that the players all know each other and there can be some people are more fast and loose less fast and loose but the kinds of things he was doing work on her to unprecedented.
• 53:12
  And obviously fraudulent and and of course the project came to a tremendous catastrophe and a lot of small business people who small investors who had no business being in the hotel business which is what this was in the first place and who no one else would try to take money from he took money from cab drivers and nurses and they all lost everything in one of the at a time when this is at a time when basically you you got a chimpanzee put a blindfold on him had him throw darts you could not lose
• 53:42
  money to a lot of you in 2007. But Trump managed to but he didn't lose I mean he because he was just a higher employee of these fly by night operators.
• 53:53
  But many other people who didn't couldn't afford their losing lost so the idea that that I mean the Trump operation as a business has always been foul foul and there are there always been a lot of quite is that when people say how do you get well this looks like a political charge that it came against.
• 54:11
  At last I think the story in and of Trump as a businessman is it looks like something very peculiar happened that prevented him from being prosecuted for the years and years and years and if you're looking for where do we deviate from the norm of law enforcement it wasn't when Trump was finally brought to book for as many frauds it was those years when he wasn't brought to book for as many frauds and again.
• 54:34
  I don't want to make accusations because I don't have information I don't have any proof but it is art.
• 54:40
  Look if you did in New York real estate what Trump did between 1989 and when the end of politics you would be unlikely to escape the attention.
• 54:51
  Well it certainly would have helped our political case if the legal case had been prosecuted prior to 2016 because then there wouldn't be the illusion of political witch hunt why I mean I'm blind as to what you might be pointing to in your speculation there.
• 55:09
  Well unfortunately and I speak here this is one of my Canadian views local prosecutors in the United States are elected.
• 55:21
  I think that's a very bad system but it's the way it is elections cost money.
• 55:27
  If you are going to run for election and reelection for local prosecutorial office you need to get money from people and oftentimes it's not supposed to come with favors attached but oftentimes and I'm not making pointing any fingers at any specific person but oftentimes favors are attached and when you are trying to make sense of strange things that prosecutors do and especially they don't do.
• 55:50
  One of the lines I wrote about Trump and one of my early articles about him back in 2017 was the benefit of power in a modern bureaucratic state is not the ability to persecute the innocent but the ability to protect the guilty.
• 56:08
  And that is sort of a fact of life of a lot of America but when some of the guilty people are protected then go on to actually take the power from themselves.
• 56:19
  That's even before what happened in 2021 in January 6th one of the things that was so alarming about Donald Trump as president was he was someone who had a big interest in perverting the legal system of the United States because his own record was so bad that he was simply indent.
• 56:35
  If we had honest law enforcement he would always feel in danger.
• 56:39
  Electing prosecutors electing judges I'd forgotten about it it's such a bizarre American tick it's extraordinary.
• 56:48
  So the all of these editorials against Biden let's just go back to and close the loop on Biden before we get to Trump and the future of the Republican Party.
• 56:59
  I understand the frustration that people in the Biden administration must feel about all of these people coming out against them at the same time it's fully within their control to do something about that which is for Biden to step down or to announce that he won't be seeking reelection.
• 57:18
  To blame the New York Times and other prominent outlets or Democrats for turning on him because they're giving fodder to Trump strikes me as an inversion of moral responsibility it's like a drunk driver who's speeding along and the passengers in the back seat are saying you should stop driving and he says if you don't stop distracting me we're going to have an accident just let me drive just let me speed drunk.
• 57:43
  You know like you're the one speeding drunk stop speeding drunk it's reckless get out now like you know yes we're shouting we're screaming we're trying to flag down the police cars going by so they'll catch you but don't blame us for that just pull the car over.
• 57:58
  It's an interesting that's a very powerful analogy it's an interesting game theory yeah.
• 58:04
  Of you know it if everyone had pretended that everything was okay Biden might have been able to get away with it but once people stop pretending.
• 58:16
  Then the act of no longer pretending that truck that Biden is okay raises the price and and so there's now kind of a mutual hostage taking our Biden saying I won't go at least at the time you and I are speaking he's saying he won't go.
• 58:29
  And I'll take everybody down with me but it becomes more and more certain that they will go down with it because more and more people are speaking up.
• 58:37
  Has it read I mean into my sense is that it's reached a tipping point that the only prudent game theory move now is for everybody to pile on maximally because enough damage has been done like you can't have you can't cut a baby and maybe in half like you can't pull back and be like well we we brought the editorial but on the other hand.
• 58:57
  Donald Trump is really bad I mean if if I were emperor of the world I would just have everybody with any in of any influence whatsoever screaming from the rooftops really hard and really fast I was so disappointed in the week after the debate that there's still you know yeah they were editorials but the world did not speak with one voice.
• 59:17
  What's happening the week after the debate I imagine I understand is that this discussion is happening inside the house and politicians have come out and say reassuring things in public and they're saying stiff things in private and then Biden seems not to take the message and now the people who are speaking into them private are now speaking increase I say.
• 59:38
  And you and I are speaking half a day apart on them on what is what what what was my morning morning.
• 59:46
  Nance Lucy was on television program the former speaker of the house where she kept insisting that Biden hadn't made up his mind yet and the host kept pressing and saying he's been pretty definitive that he's running.
• 59:58
  So no well look we will all respect the president's decision when he makes it but he hasn't made it yet.
• 1:00:03
  She might as well be wearing construction gear as she builds the off ramps for him that he could take yeah.
• 1:00:12
  So so we're in that in that and oh sorry finish that thought.
• 1:00:22
  And then the question of what does the off ramp look like because the.
• 1:00:27
  Normally you would say well the the the normal move that you would say so the president steps down and the vice president either inherits the nomination.
• 1:00:38
  At the convention and runs in November or even conceivably the president resigns.
• 1:00:43
  And and allows the vice president to run with all the advantages of incumbents which are which are very real.
• 1:00:50
  But a lot of Democrats are unhappy with the idea of come on Harris the vice president is leader to and so now they're trying to execute the very and I this is one of the reasons I was skeptical of this project is the movement they want to the maneuver they want to execute is so complicated where Biden leaves Harris somehow does not become the nominee somebody.
• 1:01:08
  And then they have to go on to the right to have something else about whom opinions differ somehow steps in in a way that doesn't create acrimony and blood bath and mutual recrimination in a party by the way which plays identity politics in a very aggressive way.
• 1:01:23
  will be elbowing each other, is that there will be accusations of racism, racism, sexism,
• 1:01:28
  homophobia, ableism, and heightism.
• 1:01:35
  And it will get really nasty.
• 1:01:37
  And there isn't a lot of time for renewal and recovery and-
• 1:01:41
  I mean, we say there isn't a lot of time because the American political process moves so
• 1:01:45
  intimately and campaigns are so long, but in a country like Canada or Australia or any
• 1:01:50
  other parliamentary democracy, you call an election and four weeks later, they just did it
• 1:01:54
  in France, they did it in the UK, you call an election, you quickly go to the polls,
• 1:01:59
  you figure it out.
• 1:02:00
  In Australia, we've ousted a prime minister three months before an election and put in
• 1:02:04
  another leader and then they roll on.
• 1:02:06
  Like there's nothing, it would be unprecedented for Joe Biden to step down, to resign today
• 1:02:11
  and have a president Harris, that would be wild, but there's nothing unusual about a vice
• 1:02:16
  president not getting the nomination at the next term.
• 1:02:21
  I just want to put in a small caveat here, it's often said by people parliamentary systems
• 1:02:25
  that American elections are longer, but it's not true that in every democracy, the next
• 1:02:31
  election begins the day after the last one ends.
• 1:02:36
  It's just in parliamentary systems, because of the rules about campaign spending, there's
• 1:02:39
  a writ period where the election is open and there's a pre-writ period where the election
• 1:02:45
  is, it's going on, I mean, there is not a day in any democracy where the parliamentary
• 1:02:52
  of presidential or people are not moving and angling and preparing for the next.
• 1:02:56
  Fair point on the battle between the two parties, but I think what strikes not Americans
• 1:03:02
  about the American political system is the interminable process of selecting the candidate
• 1:03:06
  within the party, which seemed to take a year.
• 1:03:11
  When people start throwing their hat in the ring before the New Hampshire primary, that's
• 1:03:15
  a long time before an election, and you're right, that's happening informally in some
• 1:03:21
  way in parliamentary systems, because, of course, people are watching the opposition leader
• 1:03:25
  to see what they're polling is like, but you don't have this clown car cavalcade of people
• 1:03:29
  getting up and debating to try to figure out who the opposition leader is going to be.
• 1:03:34
  You do not have to be pedantic with this, but you do, and I always say, right now in Australia,
• 1:03:43
  if I would say who's going to be prime minister in 20 years, a politically knowledgeable person
• 1:03:49
  could produce a list of 40 people that it's likely to be one of, and that their people
• 1:03:55
  are already active in one of the other political parties, they've won their first race, they're
• 1:03:58
  preparing to, they're active in campus politics.
• 1:04:03
  Very seldom that people come out of nowhere, Barack Obama was a much more unlikely president
• 1:04:10
  than most of the last prime ministers of Canada, but we also have this, the party is here,
• 1:04:19
  it's a vast continental country, and you're building coalitions all the time, and the Democratic
• 1:04:24
  party, especially as a coalition party, so you're having to do these negotiations, and
• 1:04:31
  we didn't have until quite recent, the parties weren't even really fully national until
• 1:04:36
  a long time, and one of the data points out, everyone's heard the phrase, the Republican
• 1:04:42
  National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, these are the central organizing,
• 1:04:47
  the Democratic National Committee didn't own a building until after the Second World War,
• 1:04:51
  the Republican National Committee didn't own a building until after the First World War,
• 1:04:54
  because these were not permanent institutions, these were places where people met, the power
• 1:04:59
  was in the States, and every four years the state parties would get together and come
• 1:05:05
  to a kind of treaty about how the power would be allocated and find somebody who was acceptable
• 1:05:10
  to enough different groups in this vast continental nation, and this is the process that now,
• 1:05:17
  if Biden does step down, Democrats have to do at blinding speed, and the other ratio is,
• 1:05:25
  in a parliamentary system, there is continuous vetting, people run for the parliament, they
• 1:05:31
  rise through cabinet, everyone in the political system knows their strengths and weaknesses,
• 1:05:36
  but there are a lot of capacity for surprises in the American system, and with the presidency
• 1:05:42
  it's very dangerous to be surprised, so a Sarah Palin in 2008 can emerge, and she seems
• 1:05:47
  like a plausible person, and she has a story to tell that she was, you know, hockey
• 1:05:52
  mom, and her politics becomes a reformist governor of Alaska, or that's how it's presented,
• 1:05:56
  and the idea that she was a vindictive, paranoid person, only a handful of people, and often
• 1:06:03
  Alaska knew that, and as governor of Alaska, it's not such a problem that you're vindictive
• 1:06:07
  and paranoid, but as president of the United States with nuclear weapons, it will be good.
• 1:06:11
  I mean, the other problem is the fact that primaries are democratic, so the vetting process
• 1:06:16
  is across people who, by definition, don't know you personally, whereas in a parliamentary
• 1:06:20
  system, the vetting process is conducted by people who actually, you know, they're down
• 1:06:25
  the hall from you, it's your colleagues in Australian politics, I mean, different parliamentary
• 1:06:30
  systems do it a bit differently, depending on who can vote for the leader of the party,
• 1:06:33
  but certainly, you know, in Australia, it's impossible to be a psychopath and be elevated
• 1:06:39
  or an ignoramus and be elevated to the top of the party, unless you're wildly charismatic
• 1:06:44
  or something, because the people who are putting you there are not people who are just
• 1:06:48
  watching a debate and then going out to a town hall to engage in a caucus or a primary,
• 1:06:53
  they're your fellow party members, I mean, so yeah.
• 1:06:58
  And this takes, and not to be disrespectful of the majesty and might of the House of
• 1:07:05
  Australia.
• 1:07:06
  If you put an absolute dukeless in there for two or three years, the rest of the
• 1:07:12
  time.
• 1:07:13
  That many times, David.
• 1:07:14
  Yeah.
• 1:07:15
  And the rest of the planet, you know, it was all right, but you wouldn't do this into
• 1:07:19
  this office.
• 1:07:21
  You know, there are many seemingly miraculous moments in the history of the presidency,
• 1:07:28
  but maybe the most astonishing is the story of Harry Truman.
• 1:07:32
  And this is a way to think about what's happening right now.
• 1:07:35
  So President Roosevelt, of course, Franklin Roosevelt runs for four, and unprecedented
• 1:07:38
  four times.
• 1:07:41
  And he gets ready to run for the unprecedented third term in November of 1940.
• 1:07:45
  That's when the election will be.
• 1:07:47
  There's other presidents who, this is Grant, had thought about it, Woodrow Wilson before
• 1:07:51
  he was spelled by a stroke and thought about it.
• 1:07:53
  But well, he people thought about it, nobody had ever done it.
• 1:07:56
  Franklin Roosevelt actually did it, and it was quite shocking and disturbing, but it was
• 1:08:00
  on the eve of the most terrible war in human history.
• 1:08:03
  And he, in order to justify his third term, he reconstituted his administration, and
• 1:08:07
  he recruited very prominent Republicans, as Secretary of the War, the Managed Charge
• 1:08:13
  of the Army, Secretary of the Navy.
• 1:08:16
  And he picked Republican as his vice president, named Henry Wallace, who's father and served
• 1:08:20
  in the cabinet, so the Republican presidents of the 1920s.
• 1:08:24
  And while it was a famous name on the American prairies, very involved with American agriculture,
• 1:08:27
  and so he had this bipartisan look, my vice president as a Republican, the people were
• 1:08:32
  going to be running the war that were obviously on our way into our country of Republicans.
• 1:08:35
  So I've reconstituted my administration.
• 1:08:38
  The problem is the man he's chosen as his vice president turns out to be a nut.
• 1:08:42
  I mean, a spiritualist, a crank, and an apologist for Soviet Communism.
• 1:08:47
  And as we approached the election of 1944, where Roosevelt is obviously dying, important
• 1:08:54
  people in the Democratic Party said, you have to get rid of Henry Wallace.
• 1:08:57
  He's a crackpot.
• 1:08:58
  And not only is he a crackpot, but he's a crackpot who is a former Republican.
• 1:09:02
  So he may favor Republicans in the distribution of patronage.
• 1:09:06
  So you have to get rid of him.
• 1:09:09
  And maybe six, maybe eight men, and they are men, put the pressure on Roosevelt, that
• 1:09:15
  you have to get rid of Henry Wallace at the Chicago Convention of 1944, and Roosevelt
• 1:09:19
  is a little reluctant, but he agrees, and he says, okay, okay, I hear your point.
• 1:09:23
  He is a former Republican, and he's kind of a crackpot, and he's very soft on the Soviet
• 1:09:27
  Union.
• 1:09:28
  So we need to replace him.
• 1:09:29
  I like amanding Jimmy Burns, who's governor of South Carolina.
• 1:09:34
  And the six or eight men in the committee say, we have two problems with Jimmy Burns.
• 1:09:38
  The lesser in the greater.
• 1:09:40
  The lesser problem is that Jimmy Burns is an extreme segregationist, and our party at
• 1:09:44
  beginning to depend more and more heavily on votes of black voters in the city, so the
• 1:09:47
  north, so we can't have a segregationist.
• 1:09:49
  The greater problem is Jimmy Burns was born Irish, raised to Catholic, and left the church
• 1:09:55
  to marry a divorced woman.
• 1:09:57
  And our Irish voters are, they're happy to vote for a Protestant who was born a Protestant,
• 1:10:02
  but they are not happy to vote for someone who started his Catholic and left the church
• 1:10:05
  to become a Protestant in order to marry a divorced woman, abspossed to say, oh, Jimmy
• 1:10:09
  Burns, we like Harry Truman.
• 1:10:13
  And Roosevelt said, I don't know, I don't like Harry Truman, because he ran this, he ran
• 1:10:17
  as a senator, he ran these committees that embarrassed me.
• 1:10:19
  I don't like him, and the six to eight men said, we like him.
• 1:10:23
  And they got, and the result is the Berlin airlift, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the whole structure
• 1:10:29
  of the list of work piece.
• 1:10:31
  And if you get to the, was that the hand of God at work at that, but right now the hand
• 1:10:36
  of God's easier?
• 1:10:37
  Yeah, I mean, look, I take a point that I often have American friends who are more conspiratorially
• 1:10:42
  minded saying that, oh, you know, the problem is that the parties are too powerful, and
• 1:10:46
  there are these backroom deals and the people's voices aren't being heard, the people aren't
• 1:10:49
  being respected.
• 1:10:50
  There are these elite cabals who are controlling everything.
• 1:10:53
  And I'm like, actually, I mean, the problem, as far as I see it, one of the major problems
• 1:10:57
  with American politics is that the parties have no power.
• 1:10:59
  So there is not a party structure like there is in a parliamentary democracy where the
• 1:11:04
  party members can go, no, we're getting rid of, I mean, literally three months before
• 1:11:08
  an election.
• 1:11:09
  No, the prime minister is now fired.
• 1:11:11
  Here's your new prime minister.
• 1:11:12
  We'll take that to the people.
• 1:11:13
  There's no mechanism by which that can happen in the United States.
• 1:11:15
  So let's just map out the possibilities of if Biden were to announce that he wasn't
• 1:11:21
  going to run, right?
• 1:11:22
  So, yeah, obviously, Kamala would claim that she has a, you know, a reason to be the nominee.
• 1:11:28
  Everyone's throwing around the other names that we've all heard a million times, Gavin
• 1:11:31
  Newsome, Gresham Whitmer, I don't know, Cory Booker, you're throwing whoever you want.
• 1:11:37
  Why can't you just go to a convention?
• 1:11:39
  It's big, it's messy, it's mean.
• 1:11:42
  You come out the other side of it and there is somebody, partly wounded, but also partly
• 1:11:49
  kind of interesting and like it can open a, it's morning in America, like I am the generic
• 1:11:55
  candidate who's not Donald Trump window.
• 1:11:58
  Do you find that too, Pollyanna?
• 1:12:02
  I find it very scary.
• 1:12:03
  So in the days when we did have powerful conventions, though the conventions are important till the
• 1:12:11
  late 1960s and the conventions really picked people until the middle 1960s.
• 1:12:19
  In those days, you would have a lot of, who, what, what, what was a convention?
• 1:12:24
  So the delegates to a convention were people who got there by virtue of their positions
• 1:12:29
  in local parties.
• 1:12:30
  They were county, county chairs, they were, they were people who were active in the party
• 1:12:35
  all year round and they often were people who were very interested in patronage.
• 1:12:40
  So it was really, really important to them to win because what they cared about a lot
• 1:12:44
  was the paving contract in Chattanooga, Tennessee and they wanted to make sure that they were
• 1:12:49
  nominating somebody who would win the election, strengthen the tickets and make sure that
• 1:12:53
  they brought in a Republican or Democrat president, governor, senator so that they could
• 1:12:58
  dispense the paving contract the way they wanted to.
• 1:13:00
  They were in it for very practical reasons and they need very practical choices.
• 1:13:05
  The delegates at this convention, they're 4,000 or so who will be at the Democratic
• 1:13:09
  convention are political amateurs.
• 1:13:13
  They're in politics because it's interesting because they like it because they find it
• 1:13:16
  meaningful.
• 1:13:17
  They are typical many of them will be from unions.
• 1:13:20
  They are not people who are thinking about the paving contract.
• 1:13:22
  Who are they, by the way, David?
• 1:13:24
  Who are they?
• 1:13:25
  So some of them from unions, how do you get it, how do you get to be a delegate and how
• 1:13:29
  do you get selected?
• 1:13:31
  So it's a sweet gig.
• 1:13:36
  So the way it's been since like 1972 until maybe this convention is the state party pays
• 1:13:43
  to send you to a national convention.
• 1:13:45
  You go there, you're wind, you're dying and all these lobby groups and if they throw
• 1:13:50
  parties, you're taking them on yachts and sorry, just to clarify, when you say the state
• 1:13:56
  party, does that mean a political, does that mean, does that have anything to do?
• 1:14:00
  With the governor or the representatives or senators of that state or is that an administrative
• 1:14:08
  office?
• 1:14:09
  Yeah, I'm back up, so Joe Biden runs for renomination.
• 1:14:18
  So there's a Biden slate of delegates in North Carolina.
• 1:14:21
  I forget how many people come from North Carolina, but there were three people in North
• 1:14:26
  Carolina.
• 1:14:27
  No, a total population of North Carolina, I'm joking.
• 1:14:31
  I think that I'm guessing is there 4,000 total delegates, so I'm guessing I say 20, 30
• 1:14:35
  from North Carolina.
• 1:14:36
  So it's understood those people have very, at the actual convention, their job is to say
• 1:14:41
  yay, Biden, and by law and by contract, they're not, they're not, they're the make a decision.
• 1:14:48
  So how are they selected?
• 1:14:49
  It's a favor, it's a perk and many of them, but probably I'm guessing a large report
• 1:14:55
  portion of them will come from unions, especially teachers unions.
• 1:14:58
  Some of them will be various kinds of state party officials, and then the Democratic or
• 1:15:02
  Republican party of North Carolina will pay for their airfare and their hotel and send
• 1:15:07
  them to the convention.
• 1:15:09
  At the convention, the National Restaurant Association will have a party and they will be invited.
• 1:15:13
  And the National Brewery Association will have to charter a boat and they will be invited.
• 1:15:19
  And it will, and there will be shows and singers and then they will hear speeches and people
• 1:15:23
  will make much.
• 1:15:24
  I'm sorry, David.
• 1:15:25
  Where is the application form for me to apply for this position?
• 1:15:29
  Can you send me a link?
• 1:15:30
  It's a year.
• 1:15:31
  It's a reward for years of good service to the party, but the person is here for psychic
• 1:15:38
  rewards and where this is dangerous is that person's predecessor of 1952 was there for
• 1:15:44
  material rewards.
• 1:15:46
  The person of 2024 is there for psychic rewards.
• 1:15:49
  And the result is that that means is when we have a battle at the convention between
• 1:15:54
  a black woman and a gay man and white conservatives that is, they're not going to be thinking
• 1:16:01
  as, their predecessor of 1952 were thinking, I don't care who you are, Lou Purple, what,
• 1:16:07
  you know, I am interested in that paving contract.
• 1:16:10
  And I am looking for the person who is going to give me my best hope of delivering.
• 1:16:14
  I'm not looking, I'm not here for self-actualization, I'm not here for self-realization, I'm
• 1:16:18
  here for business, and I'm going to make a business-like decision.
• 1:16:22
  And so conventions often converged on the most electable choices.
• 1:16:27
  I worry that if you do this today with the delegate list of today, they will say they're
• 1:16:32
  thinking about electability, but there will be recriminations and identity politics.
• 1:16:36
  The Democratic Party, which is unstable grouping anyway, could break down.
• 1:16:40
  David, I don't quite follow.
• 1:16:41
  Why would a system of patronage necessarily yield an electable candidate any better than
• 1:16:46
  a system of immaterial rewards would, in both cases, you're picking someone because
• 1:16:51
  of some transaction that they can do for you, which may not correlate to their electability?
• 1:16:58
  Because if you're there for material rewards, rewards are very concerned with electability.
• 1:17:02
  Because if-
• 1:17:03
  Oh, because they have to be elected, I don't know to give you the thing.
• 1:17:06
  Yeah.
• 1:17:07
  You're not going to make a point.
• 1:17:09
  You're not going to say-
• 1:17:10
  I say.
• 1:17:11
  I say, look, I'm Catholic, but I'm only taking a Catholic.
• 1:17:15
  And I won't accept a Protestant.
• 1:17:18
  But what I meant was, there could be a candidate who promises to shower a lot of things
• 1:17:22
  on a lot of people who is not electable and a more electable candidate who's more ashamed
• 1:17:26
  in what he can offer.
• 1:17:30
  The promises, in the olden days, the promises were not usually delivered by the person.
• 1:17:34
  The precedent didn't get you the Paving Contract.
• 1:17:39
  There's a famous story about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, where someone's running for the
• 1:17:43
  state assembly in New York.
• 1:17:49
  And he mad at the party because the party's not putting enough effort into a state assembly
• 1:17:52
  race.
• 1:17:53
  And he goes to the party bosses.
• 1:17:54
  You're not spending anything.
• 1:17:55
  You're not sending any vote of the chairs.
• 1:17:56
  You're not doing anything for me.
• 1:17:58
  And the boss asked him, I've never been down at the foot of Wall Street when the Staten
• 1:18:03
  Island ferry comes in.
• 1:18:04
  And you know, if you look at the ferry, behind the ferry, there are these orange peels
• 1:18:09
  and pieces of litter and garbage and shit following the wake of the Staten Island ferry.
• 1:18:14
  Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the Staten Island ferry and you are the one.
• 1:18:21
  Okay, that's nice.
• 1:18:22
  Then the final question about this would be, if it sounds like you're suggesting that
• 1:18:25
  if you removed identitarian politics from the equation, like you've proposed that there
• 1:18:31
  are two motivating functions that would occur to delegates, that you have the old function
• 1:18:37
  of a kind of a patrician material incentive.
• 1:18:42
  And you have the new one of this kind of lofty whining and dining, you know, shitting
• 1:18:47
  in green bunch of people who are chasing some ineffable sense of their own worth.
• 1:18:52
  Isn't there also, and maybe I'm naive, a sense that we have to win this election.
• 1:19:00
  And you know, it may actually be that the woman of color is not the best person to win
• 1:19:04
  the election and the straight white male is.
• 1:19:10
  It might be, look, I'm not going to pretend to have the answer of this in my back pocket.
• 1:19:15
  I know that the reason that Biden is president in Hillary Clinton wasn't because he ran
• 1:19:21
  much better among men than Hillary Clinton did.
• 1:19:24
  He ran better than any Democrat since Bill Clinton among men.
• 1:19:27
  And not that he got a majority of men, but he just narrowed the gap dramatically against
• 1:19:32
  what it had been in 2016.
• 1:19:35
  Also, I think what I worry about is, I don't know who the best candidate is.
• 1:19:40
  I really don't.
• 1:19:41
  But what I worry about is that when the Democrats make that choice, they will not be thinking
• 1:19:45
  about really who is the best candidate.
• 1:19:47
  They'll be thinking about their particular.
• 1:19:49
  Sure.
• 1:19:50
  Does it matter though, David, who is the best candidate?
• 1:19:51
  I mean, the United Kingdom just voted for a block of cheese on a stick in the form of
• 1:19:56
  Kierstama.
• 1:19:57
  You need a generic Democrat who can just be a face, who can talk and hold a thought for
• 1:20:04
  more than 10 seconds, which the current president can't.
• 1:20:07
  Kierstama was a great candidate.
• 1:20:08
  Kierstama said, my predecessor built a bomb that blew the labor party, Ray Britain, to
• 1:20:15
  pieces.
• 1:20:16
  And my job here is to disentangle that bomb.
• 1:20:20
  So I am going to fly to Estonia and put on a military jacket and stand there, be photographed
• 1:20:25
  to say, I don't hate the troops the way my predecessor did.
• 1:20:28
  And I'm going to go to, remember at State Ceremonies and put on a poppy to say, which Jeremy
• 1:20:33
  Corbin would never do.
• 1:20:34
  And I'm going to wear a necktie when I pay respects at the Senate House.
• 1:20:39
  And I'm going to go to the Jewish community and say, I am not for people who want to
• 1:20:42
  vote.
• 1:20:43
  These are pretty low bars, David, like visit the troops, put on a tie and don't be an
• 1:20:46
  anti-Semite.
• 1:20:47
  I mean, the man is not a charismatic man.
• 1:20:48
  He is coming up.
• 1:20:50
  At times 30, you go through the list, and the challenge here is not that these are
• 1:20:57
  so difficult, but it's also, you have to say, you have to live in truth about your party's
• 1:21:02
  problems.
• 1:21:04
  And that's the thing that parties find very difficult to do.
• 1:21:06
  Why did we lose the last election?
• 1:21:08
  Parties do not like to tell themselves the truth about why they lost the last election.
• 1:21:13
  And so good leaders in the Kierstama position are people who are willing to face unwelcome
• 1:21:18
  facts.
• 1:21:19
  And facts, maybe the facts are not so unwelcome to Kierstama personally, but they are able
• 1:21:24
  to persuade a party, many of these facts are unwelcome, but important parts of the labor
• 1:21:28
  party.
• 1:21:29
  And then Kierstama did something very brilliant and very ruthless, which is the Jeremy
• 1:21:33
  Corbin left said to him, you know, for every vote you gain at the center, you're going
• 1:21:39
  to lose a vote on the left.
• 1:21:41
  And indeed, he got 34% of the vote, the left was right.
• 1:21:44
  Kierstama said, I'm going to build a voting model that tests whether a vote on the left
• 1:21:49
  is worth as much as a vote on the center, because the way our political voting says more,
• 1:21:53
  the United Kingdom has its own version of the electoral college, that the votes I'm picking
• 1:21:58
  up are going to translate into more seats than the votes I shed.
• 1:22:03
  And so he got this very low percentage of the vote, 34, and this extraordinary percentage
• 1:22:08
  of the seats.
• 1:22:10
  And I don't think that happened by that.
• 1:22:11
  Right.
• 1:22:12
  I'm not saying he wasn't a good political strategist.
• 1:22:13
  I'm saying that the conservatives were so unpopular that you could have run anyone
• 1:22:17
  in a suit who was passable and they would have beaten Rishi Surnak.
• 1:22:23
  Um, they ran Jeremy Corbin twice, um, these parties often make very unhealthy self-destructive
• 1:22:29
  decisions.
• 1:22:30
  Um, so we're just to clarify what he's saying, you're saying I, I'm saying generic bland
• 1:22:35
  suit with a block of cheese stuck on its head, beats, uh, an unpopular candidate.
• 1:22:43
  You seem to be saying, uh, you can't even trust parties just to nominate a suit with a block
• 1:22:48
  of cheese on its head because sometimes they make mistakes and, and nominate people like
• 1:22:52
  Jeremy Corbin, who I would say is, is much worse than a block of cheese on a stick, like
• 1:22:57
  because he's toxic and an alienating in many ways.
• 1:23:01
  And great strategist of war, um, Juan Closwoods has his observation of a war that applies
• 1:23:05
  to politics.
• 1:23:06
  Everything in the war is very simple, but the simple things are very hard.
• 1:23:10
  Um, and, uh, right now, if, if Nikki Haley were the Republican nominee right now, the
• 1:23:15
  Republicans would be cruising toward an historic victory.
• 1:23:18
  Um, and probably if somebody else of the Joe Biden, uh, were the Democratic nominee,
• 1:23:23
  um, someone, Kierstarm or like someone broadly acceptable, uh, the Democrats would be
• 1:23:29
  thinking because the economy is fantastic in the United States and the record of the administration,
• 1:23:33
  they have many positive things to, to tell about their story and their running needs.
• 1:23:37
  This, this Trump figure has never gotten more than 46, 47% of the vote, um, but why can't
• 1:23:42
  parties do that?
• 1:23:43
  Because although it's simple, it's hard.
• 1:23:45
  And, uh, I've shown a lot of time in the company of politicians and I remember the work
• 1:23:50
  they do, I really respect it.
• 1:23:52
  People make all kinds of comments about the block of cheese.
• 1:23:55
  It's really hard.
• 1:23:56
  Just to be average at it is really hard to be good at it is fantastically difficult.
• 1:24:02
  And then, and there's a reason why the people are more than good at it.
• 1:24:05
  We build statues of them because the work is so important and it's so, so difficult.
• 1:24:09
  And we all think, um, we all think we know better.
• 1:24:15
  But we, that's only because we, there are so many aspects of the problem that we don't
• 1:24:19
  see.
• 1:24:20
  We, we, the people, I mean, people, when people come up and say, I have the strategy
• 1:24:24
  that is going to win.
• 1:24:25
  I have the speech the president should say it's because they are thinking of the electorate
• 1:24:28
  as being made up of people who are like them.
• 1:24:30
  They write what they would like to hear and they don't understand the job of the politician
• 1:24:34
  politician.
• 1:24:35
  What do politicians do for 11?
• 1:24:36
  In my opinion, what a politician is is a specialist in the gaining of democratic consent.
• 1:24:42
  And that means working with millions of people who are very different from each other may
• 1:24:47
  not like each other, but at a minimum of certainly very different interests and building
• 1:24:51
  some kind of workable system that can generate a functional, either plurality or majority,
• 1:24:59
  where people say, okay, this is good enough for me.
• 1:25:00
  And that is really, I mean, to clarify, when I talk about a block of cheese on a stick,
• 1:25:04
  I'm not saying that that's what politicians are.
• 1:25:06
  I'm saying that when you have an unpopular candidate, that's all the politician needs
• 1:25:10
  to be in order to defeat the unpopular candidate.
• 1:25:13
  And when I sound like I know better than the system, I, that's not because I think
• 1:25:18
  that I could work better inside the system or that I would know how I could get people
• 1:25:22
  to govern better.
• 1:25:23
  It's, I'm articulating what I think is a common understanding that there is something broken
• 1:25:27
  about the way that the system is working that is not selecting for the best people.
• 1:25:32
  There's something about the presidential selection process that isn't selecting for the characteristics
• 1:25:38
  that I think is necessarily going to favor the best president.
• 1:25:42
  Yes, it's really hard.
• 1:25:44
  So structure the system in such, I mean, it might as not a personal attack.
• 1:25:48
  It's a structural attack.
• 1:25:49
  It's like, why is the system such that we find ourselves in a situation where we have
• 1:25:54
  a crazed, populist criminal running against a man who can't hold a train of thought for
• 1:25:59
  more than 10 or 15 seconds?
• 1:26:02
  Like what out of 350 million people?
• 1:26:06
  And well, why, why, why did Trump win the nomination in 2016?
• 1:26:11
  The United States had this horrific economic crisis in 2008.
• 1:26:19
  At the same time as it was emerging from a war that was frustrating and disordered
• 1:26:25
  pair of war, that Afghanistan and Iraq that were frustrating and disappointing and where
• 1:26:28
  people felt they had not been given honest explanations of why the country was going to
• 1:26:32
  warn the first place.
• 1:26:34
  And the Republican Party that had been in power through both these frustrating wars and
• 1:26:40
  through this economic crisis lost and then moved to the right.
• 1:26:46
  John McCain was the nominee in 2008 and he was a reformer of various kinds.
• 1:26:49
  Then the party went through the 2010 poll, Ryan moment with this, they moved to the right
• 1:26:54
  and they prepared to nominate George Jeb Bush, the brother of George W. Bush.
• 1:26:58
  So you have a party whose members are signaling what we want is less immigration, more healthcare
• 1:27:04
  and no more bushes.
• 1:27:05
  And the party said, right, we're radicalizing what we're going to give you is more immigration,
• 1:27:09
  less healthcare and one more Bush.
• 1:27:12
  And everyone who could write a check in the Republican Party said, that sounds like a
• 1:27:16
  good plan.
• 1:27:18
  And Donald Trump had the audacity and the vision to say, they want less immigration, more
• 1:27:24
  healthcare and no more bushes, I'm going to be that guy.
• 1:27:27
  So how come no one else saw that?
• 1:27:30
  Well, other people saw, they just couldn't execute because you had to get the checks written,
• 1:27:33
  you had to go through and you had to go through my asthma of conventional ideas.
• 1:27:38
  Why was Joe Biden the nominee in 2020?
• 1:27:42
  Because through a lead American opinion had moved sharply to the left since 2014, the
• 1:27:50
  great awokeening, as it's sometimes called, you often talked about that.
• 1:27:53
  And then we went through the events of the summer of 2020 and a lot of people in the Democratic
• 1:27:59
  World Commissions House that what the country needed was more immigration, fewer police,
• 1:28:05
  more racial preferences.
• 1:28:07
  Biden was the one guy who, I mean, he sort of signed up for that program, he was obviously
• 1:28:11
  the laggard and he obviously didn't fully internalize it and didn't really mean it.
• 1:28:17
  He was going along with it, but he was doing the least, he was the guy who was moving
• 1:28:21
  slowest and least enthusiastically down this road.
• 1:28:25
  And so the voters in the Democratic Party said, okay, that he's someone who looks like
• 1:28:31
  the American majority and not like the most fanatical elements of our party.
• 1:28:35
  These are difficult things to do and credit to the people will do them.
• 1:28:39
  And again, it's all these things there and even when people make mistakes and obviously
• 1:28:46
  seemingly obvious mistakes, it's easy for us to remark them, but actually to be in the
• 1:28:50
  arena and try to pull the levers and move the hazards and to get the craft of state to
• 1:28:56
  move in this other direction.
• 1:28:58
  No, I get it.
• 1:28:59
  I mean, yeah, that's why I make the distinction between criticizing people and criticizing
• 1:29:02
  the way that the systems are set up are the kinds of virtues that they're selecting for.
• 1:29:07
  I mean, even just look at a presidential debate and ask yourself, you know, obviously there's
• 1:29:11
  something a debate is not selecting for characteristics that are necessarily most needed when something
• 1:29:18
  blows up in the Baltic Sea in the middle of the night and you want, you know, the person
• 1:29:23
  to be a wise sage who can figure out what to do next.
• 1:29:28
  You said parties need to learn from the mistake of their last election loss.
• 1:29:35
  What's the lesson for the Democrats from the Clinton election loss in 2016 that they
• 1:29:40
  might be able to use today?
• 1:29:44
  They have not the lesson from the Clinton election loss was the power of the immigration
• 1:29:48
  issue, but they didn't want to learn that lesson because that violated too many parties
• 1:29:53
  of boost. And so they responded by doing a lot of other things, everything other than,
• 1:30:01
  and this is one of the reasons I saw it so much trouble in 2024.
• 1:30:07
  They said, right, Trump is about trade, which he really was, he talked about that too,
• 1:30:12
  but not that was not the powerful issue for him.
• 1:30:15
  And so the Biden administration followed Trump on trade.
• 1:30:19
  They followed Trump on other kinds of issues, but they did not follow him at all on immigration.
• 1:30:25
  And that has been, I think, one of the puzzles of the Biden administration is the economic
• 1:30:30
  record has really been solid.
• 1:30:32
  We have now the tightest labor market at least since the late 1960s, arguably since World War
• 1:30:37
  II. You would think that would lead to the re-election of the press, but it's not because
• 1:30:43
  the tight labor market joined to weak enforcement of the border has led to a huge influx of
• 1:30:48
  immigrants. I don't want to denigrate these people, or they're behaving in a way that
• 1:30:54
  from each and every one of the points, their points of view makes total sense.
• 1:30:57
  And in fact, it's often very heroic. They're seeking a better life.
• 1:31:00
  The American job market has blaring as masters of the world. We're hiring. We're hiring.
• 1:31:05
  We're hiring. You get here. You can have three jobs that we are hiring and the border zone.
• 1:31:11
  So people come. They'll complain. We do the same in their shoes.
• 1:31:15
  But the effect of each of those individual decisions to come means millions of people
• 1:31:20
  are coming. And people have not only a sense of too rabid social change, but also a sense
• 1:31:24
  of the society's not in control. The borders open. People feel unsafe. They feel threatened.
• 1:31:29
  They feel like the authorities aren't in trouble.
• 1:31:30
  I mean, I was still living in New York in 2016. And my recollection of the problems on
• 1:31:37
  the democratic side are not that people were talking a lot about immigration. I mean, obviously
• 1:31:43
  I understand what you're saying in the sense that Trump broke that taboo and offered an alternative.
• 1:31:48
  And that's a positive reason. That's a positive explanation for Trump's win.
• 1:31:52
  But if we're looking for a negative explanation of Clinton's loss, then I would throw into
• 1:31:57
  the mix the sort of lazy selection of a not particularly popular candidate on grounds
• 1:32:05
  of seniority, even though that candidate couldn't really articulate in a Bill Clintonian
• 1:32:11
  or Obama-esque way, the stakes of the election and the aspirations of the American people,
• 1:32:17
  a candidate who seemed wooden and a little bit detached and lost. And I fear that that
• 1:32:23
  same mistake is being made now on the democratic side.
• 1:32:27
  Well, a lot of people think that if the Democrats had picked Joe Biden in 2016, who was also
• 1:32:35
  defied by seniority, who also was kind of wooden, they would probably have...
• 1:32:38
  Yeah, I'd agree with that. He wasn't quite as wooden and quite as seniors and quite
• 1:32:43
  as inevitable and quite as smog as Clinton seemed to that year.
• 1:32:48
  Well, let me go into one of the problems. One of the reasons I, as I say, I remain to
• 1:32:51
  this day a registered Republican, I spent my life in the Republican Party. One of the
• 1:32:55
  ways that I, one of the things I remark about the Democrats and one of the things I'm
• 1:32:59
  rid of at the convention is they're not determined enough about gaining an exercising
• 1:33:03
  power. So if you ask many Democrats, why did Hillary Clinton lose when Joe Biden won
• 1:33:09
  it? Well, it's obvious. She's a woman. And you lose two or three points for being
• 1:33:13
  older. You believe that? You lose two or three points, you know what I mean?
• 1:33:18
  Yeah. I don't know. I think it would depend on the first person. Anyway, yeah, Karen.
• 1:33:23
  Well, that's it. You believe, we just said that. My hypothetical Democrat. You said you
• 1:33:27
  lose two or three points for being older. So why did you nominate a woman? Well, because
• 1:33:31
  what we wanted to do was we thought we could scold people into voting for the way. If you
• 1:33:36
  know there's a discount for certain features, if you were a ruthless organization about
• 1:33:42
  gaining an exercise, look, I don't approve of these attitudes toward women. I don't endorse
• 1:33:47
  them. I don't share them. But I recognize that some millions of crucial voters who I
• 1:33:51
  need do share them. And therefore, I'm going to accommodate that in my political thinking.
• 1:33:57
  I mean, if you discover that more people like hamburgers than like seafood and you're
• 1:34:03
  trying to build a chain of fast food restaurants, you want to be the biggest fast food company
• 1:34:08
  in the world. You sell hamburgers, not seafood. Even if you personally are a pesky.
• 1:34:12
  Right. But then you would just never get a female president. You, you would, you, you
• 1:34:19
  might get one along the way, but what you would do is you would, you would think my job
• 1:34:23
  here as a gainer and exercise or power is not to improve society. My job is to gain an
• 1:34:28
  exercise power in order to use that power to a long way improve society, of course. But first,
• 1:34:34
  we have to win the election. And that's one of the reasons I worry so much about this hypothetical
• 1:34:39
  open democratic convention. I worry that people say things like, well, look, we have data that
• 1:34:44
  shows the candidate X or candidate Y is at a disadvantage. Can you internalize that into your
• 1:34:50
  thinking and not use that as an excuse to scold voters for not making better choices? The voters
• 1:34:55
  are, the voters are the voters. And they are going to behave in all kinds of irrational ways. And
• 1:35:01
  especially at this juncture, faced with the alternative that almost Trump is offering and someone
• 1:35:05
  wants to wreck the American Constitution, overthrow elections by fraud and by violence. You need to
• 1:35:13
  be very clearied about what you're doing and make decisions in a very unsanitary way. Not the
• 1:35:18
  decision you make for an electorate or not like you. Sorry, we just had a broken connection. I
• 1:35:26
  didn't mean to interrupt. I heard someone say that if you were focused exclusively on
• 1:35:30
  electability, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney as they candidate. Because Democrats
• 1:35:36
  would vote for him, right? And Republicans would vote for him. There's no way Donald Trump can
• 1:35:40
  beat Mitt Romney if Mitt Romney is the Democratic candidate for president. So sick that new
• 1:35:46
  private spoken. I think one of the lessons. Remember that Mitt Romney and Donald Trump are, I
• 1:35:53
  think, exactly the same age lesson as we should all be Mormons or at least. Exactly.
• 1:35:58
  So assuming that Joe Biden doesn't step down, then what did you make of his, I mean,
• 1:36:09
  look, I hear so many apologists saying everyone has a bad night at a debate. It's understandable.
• 1:36:15
  Obama lost the first debate against Mitt Romney. Trump lost the first debate against Hillary
• 1:36:21
  Clinton. These things happen. But I think it's important why you lose the debate. I mean,
• 1:36:27
  if you lose the debate because you had a poor performance, that's one thing. But if you lose the
• 1:36:31
  debate because the top of your head pops off and a gremlin comes out and says, I am actually in
• 1:36:36
  control of this candidate and I will only get worse and worse as time goes by. In other words,
• 1:36:41
  if you reveal something that seems to be disqualifying about yourself. And I think that's
• 1:36:48
  what happened. And so now I'm curious about your optimism still about Trump losing when people,
• 1:36:56
  I mean, can the campaign even show this man in public? Do they have to just lock him up
• 1:37:02
  for the rest of the campaign? You make a very powerful point. Look, incumbent presidents
• 1:37:07
  historically always do badly in debates and especially the first debate.
• 1:37:11
  Gerald Ford did badly when he was the incumbent, did badly against Jimmy Carter,
• 1:37:15
  Jimmy Carter, badly against Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan, and 84 had two debates. The first
• 1:37:20
  was ethically terrible. George W. Bush, who was just 58 in 2004, did so badly in this first debate
• 1:37:27
  that smart people made ads suggesting that he had succumbed to pre-senile dementia.
• 1:37:34
  Barack Obama, one of the great speakers of our time, he fled. And why is that? So the president's busy.
• 1:37:41
  The president finds the whole thing kind. He's the president. He's been surrounded by accolades.
• 1:37:45
  He finds the whole process kind of demeaning and not with his time. He also thinks,
• 1:37:52
  he no one understands the problems that he's faced and how hard he's worked and all the things he's
• 1:37:57
  done. And he gets a little impatient and testing. And he won't prepare. And he just won't.
• 1:38:02
  Even if he thinks he's making time, he never makes enough time. And the staff has become
• 1:38:07
  very deferential to him over four years. And so no one will tell him that you're doing a bad
• 1:38:12
  job in debate. And so there's a pattern. But that's not what happened with Joe Biden. I mean,
• 1:38:17
  obviously we are saying here. And the answer to it was to say, look, quite elderly candidates
• 1:38:24
  can win reelection. I point off into the example of the German election of 1959,
• 1:38:29
  where Conrad Addenauer, who was the great hero who built Democratic West Germany, he was 81
• 1:38:35
  when he ran for reelection in 1959. And he couldn't speak very well at that point either.
• 1:38:41
  And they just kept him on TV. He was very new in Germany. They kept him off TV. He didn't do a
• 1:38:45
  lot of appearances. And they just stressed, look, it's been 10 years. Does everyone like the results?
• 1:38:50
  Everyone likes the results. The country was like, rubble when he took over. And now you're buying
• 1:38:55
  motor scooters and buying cars and going beginning to prepare for vacations in Italy. And the Christian
• 1:39:00
  Democrats, his party ran an election on the slogan, kind of experimentate. No experiments.
• 1:39:06
  And he won the biggest majority in West German Democratic history, German Democratic history.
• 1:39:12
  So I think the campaign you would have run is not to let Biden debate. It's just to make him a
• 1:39:17
  benign, a vinculate presence. Lots of negative ads on Trump. Lots of ads about what has been
• 1:39:21
  accomplished. But now that now the gates open now, because now the only now everyone is saying
• 1:39:26
  you have to compensate for your inability to think fast on your feet by doing a lot of events
• 1:39:30
  where you think fast. I mean, is it even just thinking fast on your feet? It strikes me that
• 1:39:35
  the Conrad Addenauer 81 year old, there's nothing wrong with having an 81 year old president.
• 1:39:42
  This has not bothered me up until I saw the turning wheels of his mind on that debate stage,
• 1:39:49
  because if an 81 year old is a sage, it's fine if a president just sits up there in his castle
• 1:39:56
  in the White House. And everyone else runs the government, but they come to him like a sage,
• 1:40:02
  and they say, here's this problem. And he goes, OK, well, you're going to want to talk to the
• 1:40:06
  undersecretary of fisheries and get the ambassador to Estonia on the phone, because this might impact
• 1:40:13
  the price of herring. And the Estonians are going to be pissed, because this guy has been around
• 1:40:18
  since the Declaration of Independence was signed. And he and George Washington hammered this
• 1:40:24
  shit out together. Then that's fine if he's sort of slow and thoughtful. We didn't see slow and
• 1:40:29
  thoughtful. We saw extremely confused over a prolonged period of time. And this isn't a job where
• 1:40:35
  you get to choose your good days and bad days. And he has known he's never had a sense of humor
• 1:40:43
  and now when Ronald Reagan ran for election 1984, he opened his opening speech, the way declared
• 1:40:50
  his capacity, he said, I commit, despite my age, and I intend to campaign in all 13 states.
• 1:40:55
  Right. Yeah. So I want to go and end on Trump and the Republic and say just once still on Biden,
• 1:41:08
  I'm still somewhat confused. You think that if Biden doesn't do any more public appearances.
• 1:41:20
  No, I think it more only does order to hear the rest of this conversation go to uncomfortable
• 1:41:24
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