Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode Fifty Nine: The Investigation of the Investigators

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Episode Fifty Nine: The Investigation of the Investigators · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number fifty nine of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name
• 0:04
  is John Ziggler. I am your host on today's program. Trump fans are
• 0:08
  rejoicing over the Durham Report on the Russian investigation. But I'll tell you why
• 0:14
  everyone got it wrong on that story. Barack Obama, of all people,
• 0:19
  nails it on our flawed news media environment. And I speak with a former
• 0:24
  Trump super fan turned to Santa supporter six years after he hung up on me
• 0:30
  during an interview. I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a
• 0:35
  digital advertising SEO and EMO marketing specialist that also happens to be a big fan
• 0:41
  of John Ziggler and the Death of journalisten. Do you need help preaching your
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• 1:00
  is the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. If you want to grow your business,
• 1:04
  Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. And hey,
• 1:10
  thanks for sponsoring the show. One of the foundational premises of this podcast,
• 1:15
  The Death of Journalism, is that the bigger the story, the more
• 1:21
  the news media will screw it up. I have found that in almost every
• 1:26
  single big story in my adult lifetime, and I don't think it's coincidental,
• 1:33
  because when a story becomes really large, the incentive structure, which is often
• 1:38
  perverse and getting more and more perverse in our broken media environment, cause things
• 1:46
  to go awry. And I believe that one of the classic examples of this
• 1:52
  phenomenon is the Trump Russia investigation, where everybody, and I mean everybody got
• 2:00
  it wrong or did something that was wrong, or reacted in a way that
• 2:06
  was wrong. Every single person, including by the way, myself to some
• 2:13
  degree, blew it when it came to evaluating what was happening with regard to
• 2:17
  Trump and Russia and the investigation that dominated so much of Trump's presidency. Well,
• 2:27
  the reason why I'm leading off the show talking about this particular topic is
• 2:31
  that the long awaited Durham Report came out a couple of days ago, and
• 2:38
  it ripped the FBI to shreds for bias against Donald Trump in the origins of
• 2:46
  the so called Russia investigation. Now, for some context, here, John
• 2:52
  Durham was hired by Attorney General Bill Barr well Donald Trump was still president,
• 3:00
  basically at Trump's demand. I mean, let's be very clear. You know,
• 3:04
  Bill Barr, who I have been very critical of at times for his
• 3:07
  handling of the Russian investigation. I believe he's one of the many people who
• 3:13
  screwed up here, was tired of dealing with Trump's crap and decided to throw
• 3:19
  Trump a bone by hiring John Durham to basically investigate the investigators when it came
• 3:25
  to Trump Russia. Now, to be clear, you know, Bill Barr
• 3:29
  does seem to believe that the entire investigation was very flawed and that Robert Mueller
• 3:34
  came up with very very little. I believed that Barr purposely and systematically and
• 3:39
  very cynically sabotaged the Mulla report on Donald Trump's behalf. I'll get to that
• 3:46
  again momentarily. But he hires John Durham, and Durham then has the ability
• 3:53
  to take government resources and an extraordinary amount of time when you think about it,
• 3:58
  because this thing should have been for a while ago. It's bizarre that
• 4:01
  it's now being released in May of twenty twenty three. Well, after Trump
• 4:08
  has left office. Remember, of course, you know we're talking about the
• 4:11
  twenty sixteen presidential election. Essentially, the allegation being that somehow Trump and the
• 4:17
  Trump campaign and Russia and Kutin had colluded to help Trump win the election.
• 4:25
  And this report has been hailed by Trump and his cult. Following this is
• 4:30
  hardly a surprise. They have been repeating the mantra that Trump was right.
• 4:36
  Again. They loved saying that, and they now believe that this is a
• 4:42
  narrative that has a lot of credibility to it because it seems like every single
• 4:46
  time in the end, Trump has vindicated Trump was right. He told us
• 4:50
  this all along, He told us this was fake news. He told us
• 4:55
  there was no collusion, and he was right. He told us the FBI
• 4:58
  was against him. And now John Durham is saying that that's what happened.
• 5:02
  They're saying that Trump was robbed of his first term in office, which,
• 5:06
  by the way, I think is a very very dangerous and from Trump's perspective,
• 5:13
  productive narrative when it comes for him running for another term. It's really
• 5:16
  basically an excuse for doing so, and it ables Trump to come up with
• 5:23
  an explanation for why his first term wasn't all that great. I mean,
• 5:27
  after all, the first three years were lost because of this bogus Russian investigation,
• 5:31
  and then the China virus came in in the fourth year to wipe out
• 5:36
  that as well. So you really can't blame Trump for anything that he did
• 5:41
  wrong or the fact that he really didn't accomplish much anything of anything positively during
• 5:46
  his first crack at this. So let's give him a second crack at it.
• 5:49
  Let's give him a second crack at running against Biden, who he already
• 5:53
  lost to, and let's give him a second crack at running the country after
• 5:57
  he had already crapped the bed during OVID. And that's assuming that you give
• 6:01
  him a benefit of the doubt and everything else that happened during his presidency.
• 6:05
  So Trump and has called are ecstatic over the Durham report. And interestingly,
• 6:12
  one of the ways that they are proving that the Durham report is credible and
• 6:16
  devastating to the FBI and devastating to the Russia investigation is that even some liberal
• 6:24
  media members are acknowledging this. And the clip that probably got the most play
• 6:30
  online at least from what I saw, was from CNN's Jake Tapper, and
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  Jake Tapper was clearly right at the front lines when it came to CNN's endless
• 6:40
  obsession with the Trump Russia investigation, which they clearly way, way, way
• 6:46
  overplayed their hands on. And Tapper, although he did, you know,
• 6:53
  give some semblance of restrictor plates on going all out on the vindication here,
• 6:59
  he tries to to put on a few disclaimers in his language. Jake Tapper
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  basically did declare live on CNN that this was vindication for Donald Trump again and
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  as muted away as he possibly could do so. But here's what that sounded
• 7:15
  like on CNN. And it might not have produced everything of what's Republicans hold
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  for, it is regardless, devastating to the FBI, and to a degree,
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  it does exonerate Donald Trump. Now, a couple of things I find
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  interesting about that short clip. Number one is how is it that the Trump
• 7:31
  people holding how all of a sudden believe that CNN and Jake Tapper are the
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  height of credibility. I get the idea that when the opposing team admits defeat,
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  that that in miss bizarro world in which we now live in, that's
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  a pretty good sign that you were right, and so I get that that's
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  the way the game works now. I mean, it's really the only time
• 7:51
  that you ever really get to declare victory as if the other side admits defeat.
• 7:56
  And that's about as close as you're going to get from CNN and Jake
• 8:00
  Tapper again with some muted language there. And I think that what Tapper said
• 8:05
  was largely accurate. Although you know, the bottom line on this is that
• 8:11
  there really wasn't that much new, if anything really new. This was just
• 8:15
  a synopsis put forward in the most pro Trump way possible to end Durham's investigation.
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  There was nothing we learned that was all that new in my mind,
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  there were no real bombshells here. Okay, the FBI screwed up. The
• 8:31
  FBI, speaking of admitting defeat, put out a rather strange almost apology notice
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  in a public statement saying that those elements of the FBI that caused these problems
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  in twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen are no longer really with us, and those
• 8:50
  problems have been fixed. Of Course, you know, when you have new
• 8:54
  leadership, you really have no incentive to protect or defend the old leadership,
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  as of this taping, I'm not seen James Comey, who was the FBI
• 9:01
  director, you know, and it's support to point this out. I mean,
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  Comey was the FBI director during the election of twenty sixteen. He threw
• 9:11
  Hillary Clinton under the bus with the reopening of the email investigation ten days before
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  the election, which it was a catastrophic mistake, which I think was born
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  out of the idea that he thought that Hillary was going to win and therefore
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  he was going to be in a very difficult situation if she won, and
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  that was not revealed before the election, so that it was a major,
• 9:35
  major mistake by Comy that I think you could very much argue handed the election
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  to Trump. Even though he tried to pull it back a couple of days
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  before the election, it was too late by then. He was then rehired,
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  if you will, by Donald Trump, because after all, Trump looked
• 9:52
  at Comy as the guy who helped him win the election. And then,
• 9:58
  of course Comy played critical role in the Trump Russia investigation because he started to
• 10:05
  get very suspicious of the things that he was seeing and experiencing with Donald Trump
• 10:09
  directly with regard to this subject. Well as of this taping, I'm not
• 10:13
  seeing Comy make any statement about the John Durham report again. If he has,
• 10:20
  I haven't seen it. I checked his Twitter feed this morning and there
• 10:24
  was nothing on it about it. Adam Schiff, the Democratic congressman from California
• 10:30
  who's now running for the US Senate, who was at the forefront of the
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  Trump Russian investigation, He's not giving up the ship. Schiff is not giving
• 10:37
  up the ship. He's still maintaining essentially his prior stance on the entire subject.
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  And I actually think he makes a few decent points. And my view
• 10:48
  on what really went down here is that we had a lot of smoke.
• 10:54
  There was a lot of smoke here. Now, the fire aparently did not
• 11:00
  turn out to materialize in the way that a lot of liberals and a lot
• 11:03
  of people in the media were desperately hoping and expecting that it would, But
• 11:09
  that doesn't change the fact that there was really valid reasons for suspicion. I
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  mean, the idea that Trump is blameless here, that he was an innocent
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  victim, and that there was this conspiracy to take him out by making up
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  a Trump Russia connection and investigating something for which there was no basis for an
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  FBI investigation is ludicrous. It is ludicrous. I'm accepting the idea that in
• 11:43
  the end, Trump was innocent of the major allegations and charges against him.
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  I still believe, as Robert Mueller did, that there were very serious issues
• 11:54
  related to obstruction of justice here. But I have long ago accepted, Okay,
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  there was no quote unquote collusion with Russia when it came to the twenty
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  sixteen election. But there's a couple of analogies I'm going to throw at you
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  here. There's you know, when a high school kid gets blamed for something
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  that they didn't do because they're hanging out with the wrong crowd. That doesn't
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  mean that they're blameless. If you don't want to get in trouble, maybe
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  be a little bit more careful, Maybe not hang out with those people.
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  Maybe maybe you don't ask publicly for Russia's help in fighting Hillary Clinton's emails,
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  which Donald Trump did. Maybe you don't do that if you're concerned about being
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  the target of an unfair investigation. There's a reason why you don't do this
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  kind of thing, esposially in the middle of a campaign, esposi not at
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  a public conference. And in case you've forgotten this actually did happen. And
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  guess what it appears, based upon the Mulla report, that Russia followed Donald
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  Trump's advice or counsel or pleadings. Now, just to be clear, I'm
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  going to play the clip here. This is the middle of the towards the
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  end of the twenty sixteen presidential election. Donald Trump is harping about Hillary Clinton's
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  emails at a press conference, and he literally pleads with Russia, Russia,
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  if you're listening, find those missing emails. And while it seemingly has been
• 13:45
  long forgotten except among very liberal circles, here's what that actually sounded like back
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  in twenty sixteen. What do I have to get involved with Puttin? For
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  I have nothing to do with Puttin. I've never spoken to him. I
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  don't know anything about a mother that he will respect me. He doesn't respect
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  to our president. And if it is Russia, which is probably not,
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  nobody knows who it is. But if it is Russia, it's really bad
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  for a different reason because it shows how little respect they have for our country
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  when they would hack into a major party and get everything. But it would
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  be interesting to see. I will tell you this. Russia if you're listening,
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  I hope you're able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.
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  I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if
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  that happens. That'll be next. Yes, sir, Now again, if
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  you're worried about people having suspicions that are not based in reality, maybe you
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  don't do that. Maybe as a nominee of a major political party running for
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  president of the United States, you don't ask a foreign adversary to do you're
• 15:00
  dirty work on your opponent, right, is that too much to ask?
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  And when you do that, then maybe you also should be aware that your
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  son and other people in your campaign had a meeting with a Pootin associate in
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  your building while you were there during that campaign. And oh, by the
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  way, you also and I think this is the heart of the whole matter.
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  And I've said this many times publicly, and it's unbelievable to me that
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  the media is so incompetent that ninety five percent of the American public aren't even
• 15:39
  aware of this topic. But maybe you don't say, Hey, Russia,
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  if you're listening, can you get my opponent's emails? If you have been
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  trying to broker or leverage your Republican nomination status to get a deal with Pooh
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  to put a Trump Tower in Moscow, which is an absolute fact that Donald
• 16:06
  Trump did that and then got his lawyer Michael Cohen to perjure himself to Congress
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  on the timing of that. That deal was still in play until June of
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  twenty sixteen. And the reason why this is significant is in June to twenty
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  sixteen, Trump is the Republican nominee, but he has no expectation that he's
• 16:29
  actually going to win, So he's leveraging that position to show Putin how credible
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  he is, how big a deal he is, and how prestigious it would
• 16:40
  be for him to allow a Trump tower to be built in Moscow. Now,
• 16:44
  Putin didn't go for it, and we're whatever reason Trump decided, I
• 16:47
  don't know. Maybe I'm gonna give Trump some credit here. Maybe he thought
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  I'm pushing this too far. We're heading into the convention to the fall.
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  Maybe maybe I shouldn't be trying to convince Vladimir Putin to put a Trump tower
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  in Moscow. But that was going on, we know, we know into
• 17:03
  June of that year. Well, somehow Michael Cohen, when he testifies before
• 17:07
  Congress, somehow knows to change the story from June to January is when that
• 17:15
  effort ended to put a Trump tower in Moscow. Why is that important,
• 17:19
  Well, because in January of twenty sixteen, the Republican primary process hasn't officially
• 17:26
  begun. So there's plausible deniability that Trump can say, well, as soon
• 17:30
  as I was a real candidate for president, I backed out of any attempt
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  to put a Trump tower in Moscow. But maybe maybe you don't do that
• 17:41
  if you're concerned about being the victim of a witch hunt. Maybe you don't
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  do that. If you're Donald Trump and you know that's the history, maybe
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  you don't hire a campaign manager named Paul Manafort that had so many connections with
• 17:56
  Russian oligarchs that it was basically a huge part of his entire persona for which
• 18:02
  he would have end up getting criminal convictions related to this. A guy who
• 18:07
  went on television during the middle of the campaign, this is before the twenty
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  sixteen Republican National Convention. He's on CBS with Nora O'Donnell. Nora o'donald,
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  this is just the beginnings of what we're gonna be much larger murmurs, especially
• 18:26
  after Trump won. But there was the beginning of the narrative of Hey,
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  what's up with Trump and Russia? It seems like there's an awful lot of
• 18:33
  weirdly, really strange connections here. And Nora O'Donnell asks a legitimate but fairly
• 18:41
  benign question about about the relationship between Trump and Russian oligarchs, and Paul Manaford's
• 18:48
  answer is literally the worst answer you have ever heard on any serious questioning you
• 18:57
  can possibly remember, at least that I can remember, and I have a
• 19:00
  very good memory for these things. This is literally comical, And anyone who
• 19:06
  looked at this with an objective mind had to go, what the hell is
• 19:11
  going on here? Because Paul Manafort cannot answer the question. He mumbles these
• 19:15
  humbles, and he changes his story twice within like six seconds. And here's
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  what that sounded like back in twenty sixteen. So to be clear, mister
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  Trump has no financial relationships with any Russian oligarchs. That's what he said,
• 19:33
  That's what I said. That's obviously what our position is. Every time I
• 19:38
  watched that clip, I laugh one because it's just so bad. But you
• 19:45
  if you're a rational person. You based upon the fact pattern at the time
• 19:51
  and what happened after that, you have to have at least some suspicion and
• 19:57
  the stakes he or almost literally could not be higher. It's not a situation
• 20:03
  where you're investigating. You're potentially investigating something small where okay, you know,
• 20:10
  it doesn't really matter. Maybe maybe we're just imagining things and it doesn't really
• 20:14
  matter. If this is true, this is the president of the United States
• 20:19
  who seems to have deep, deep connections with Russia and Putin, and he's
• 20:26
  asking them for help publicly, and he's got this campaign manager with these super
• 20:30
  shady connections. And by the way, we would later learn that Matta Fort
• 20:34
  was giving these Russian oligarch's political polling data in key states, and we've it's
• 20:41
  an absolute fact that Russia, although in a very small way and I believe
• 20:45
  overblown way, was using social media and troll farms to try to help Trump
• 20:53
  win the twenty sixteen election. That was that determinative. I'm sure it was
• 20:57
  not, Although it was a very close election. There's no evidence that the
• 21:02
  election would have gone the other way if if Russia hadn't done what they did.
• 21:07
  But this is all, this is smoke, that is legitimate smoke over
• 21:12
  a very, very, very serious issue. You almost can't imagine a more
• 21:18
  serious issue than a president of the United States maybe being a Manchurian candidate.
• 21:25
  Now I've never bought into the Manchurian candidate theory, but I understood why people
• 21:32
  of a serious nature at least contemplated it because there was so much smoke,
• 21:37
  and there was so much potential logic to that possibility, and that possibility is
• 21:45
  so dangerous you must go overboard to make sure that it's not true. And
• 21:52
  it seems as if that's what the FBI did. Now, did the FBI
• 21:56
  do that because they had a political bias? I have no problem believing that
• 22:02
  that was the case. None. I mean, that's that's one, it's
• 22:07
  human nature. But two, let's be clear. I mean, it was
• 22:11
  very hard to understand for anybody how Trump won the election, and liberals and
• 22:18
  the media were desperate for an explanation that didn't make them question everything they thought
• 22:26
  about the country. So if they could blame Russia for causing that to somehow
• 22:33
  happen, that this fluke didn't really happen, because you know, America is
• 22:37
  so broken that we could possibly elect Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. No,
• 22:41
  no, no, this was because of some deep, dark conspiracy and for
• 22:48
  because the forces that were beyond our control, and it was it was Russia
• 22:52
  that did this well. I mean no, I never thought there was any
• 22:56
  evidence that that's actually what happened. But I can certainly see in the liberal
• 23:02
  mindset that that becomes a narrative that is very, very attractive. And now
• 23:07
  you start to see every piece of information through that prism, and once that
• 23:14
  narrative gets traction, then everything seems like it's deep and dark and consistent with
• 23:21
  this conspiracy theory. And once people become invested in a particular path investigators.
• 23:27
  I've seen this at all levels, whether it's police or the FBI, whatever
• 23:33
  it is. That is a very very dangerous phenomenon. Once people become invested
• 23:40
  in being right and invested in a path of investigation and they see everything through
• 23:45
  that prism, look out, And that's clearly what happened when it came to
• 23:51
  Russia. But I used one analogy with regard to the you know, the
• 23:55
  high school kid hanging out with the wrong crowd. There might be a better
• 23:57
  analogy for what I think really happened here with regard to Trump and Russia.
• 24:06
  College basketball has in its history had many point fixing scandals, and it feels
• 24:12
  to me like what happened here is that we had a result of an election
• 24:18
  kind of like a weird basketball game where you know, the point spread got
• 24:22
  flipped at the last second under weird circumstances. And so there was an investigation
• 24:30
  into whether or not there was point shaving or the game was fixed. And
• 24:36
  as they look into this, they go, wait a minute, We've got
• 24:40
  evidence that a couple of the players were openly talking about fixing the game,
• 24:45
  and we've got these players associating with people who are known fixers, and the
• 24:53
  result was super weird. I mean, come on, people, use your
• 25:00
  rain. This is something that easily could have happened, maybe probably did happen.
• 25:07
  This needs to be fully investigated. And yet when they look into it,
• 25:11
  bizarrely, while all those things were true, there was no evidence of
• 25:17
  actual fixing. Well that's I think basically what happened here. There was no
• 25:22
  collusion with Russia. However, by the way, this idea of collusion,
• 25:29
  you know, I actually think that Trump is colluding with Vivek Ramaswamy in this
• 25:33
  particular election in the Republican primary process. I think it's very, very obvious.
• 25:38
  And he's doing it much the same way he did with Russia, where
• 25:42
  there's no actual direct communication. No, you know, nothing on paper,
• 25:48
  nothing even you know, man demand eye to eye word for word, there's
• 25:53
  no agreement. They're doing a dance. Trump sees what is doing. He's
• 26:00
  smart enough to figure this out. Vivek knows what Trump wants. That's not
• 26:03
  difficult to figure out. And now, by the way, Corey Lowandowski,
• 26:08
  Trump's old, old, old original campaign manager. Actually it wasn't even this,
• 26:14
  I think it was a second campaign manager. Technically in twenty sixteen,
• 26:17
  he's now running viveke Ramiswami's campaign, and Trump's putting out statements positive towards vveg
• 26:22
  Ramiswammy. Why, because he knows that vveg Ramiswamy is doing his bidding for
• 26:27
  him, that he's on his team, that he's basically a Trumps surrogate,
• 26:32
  a Trump bodyguard, going after the scantists, sucking up oxygen, sucking up
• 26:37
  a few percentage points, getting into the debates, making sure that there's somebody
• 26:41
  on Trump's team should the debates even happen, now is that collusion. No,
• 26:47
  it's a wink wink nod. Not it's a dance. And I think
• 26:51
  that's what probably happened between Trump and Russia was similar. And as far as
• 26:56
  the obstruction of justice is concerned, I will believed that there was obstruction of
• 27:02
  justice if only because of what happened with Michael Cohen. There's no other explanation
• 27:07
  for how Michael Cohen knew to testify to Congress that the Trump Tower Moscow deal
• 27:12
  ended in January of twenty sixteen without Trump having told him. That's the only
• 27:21
  possible explanations now could have come from Trump's lawyers. I guess so, but
• 27:26
  that's still Trump. So I mean, and I realized that Michael Cohen is
• 27:32
  no longer a credible witness. But you have to you have to figure out
• 27:36
  an explanation for how and why Cohen would lie that way. And the only
• 27:41
  explanation is that Trump told him to because it was much better for that deal
• 27:45
  to be over in January twenty sixteen than it was to be over in June
• 27:51
  of twenty sixteen. And it's it's my belief that the Trump Tower situation was
• 27:56
  at the core of all of this that's what Trump wanted, and that's what
• 28:03
  Trump was afraid of. For a large part of this, he was running
• 28:07
  around basically hiding, covering up for the Trump Tower project because even he thought
• 28:15
  that would be scandalous. Now, he later figured out because after he especially
• 28:22
  after he won, that it didn't matter to his fans whether or not he
• 28:26
  was trying to do a Trump tower in Moscow. But at the time it
• 28:30
  was rational to believe that if this got out, that would be very problematic.
• 28:37
  It wasn't until Trump as president and he's now sanctified as a king and
• 28:42
  the head of his cult forever that his followers and supporters aren't going to give
• 28:48
  a damn whether or not he was trying to do a deal with Vladimir Putin
• 28:52
  to do a Trump tower in Moscow while he was the Republican presumptive nominee.
• 28:57
  And so everything kind of flows from that on this whole thing, and everybody
• 29:03
  screwed up, everybody, And I was somebody who bought in a little bit
• 29:10
  more, not into the conclusion situation, but a little bit more into the
• 29:15
  scandalous nature of what was happening, because there was so much smoke and I
• 29:19
  believed this until I interviewed Michael Isikoff. And Michael Liskoff is a very well
• 29:26
  known, respected reporter who wrote a book about the whole Trump Russia affair.
• 29:32
  And I interviewed him, and he convinced me I think for sure that,
• 29:38
  for instance, to Steal dossier was not nearly as credible as the media was
• 29:45
  pretending that it was. Now, the guy who wrote the Steel Dossier until
• 29:49
  this situation, had been very well respected in British intelligence, and there was
• 29:53
  obviously some very salacious information in the Steel dossier. Most famously or infamy lee
• 30:00
  the so called Pea tape, where supposedly Trump was in a Russian hotel and
• 30:07
  there was some Russian prostitutes that you know, got into some urination games that
• 30:14
  were somehow put on video. Now that seemed like some sort of movie and
• 30:18
  always sounded very bullshitty. But I wasn't sure because Trump's denial was so weird.
• 30:26
  I mean, Trump's denial was he knows that wasn't true because he's a
• 30:29
  germophobe. How about I know that's not true because I would never cheat on
• 30:36
  my wife with Russian prostitutes. That would be a much easier answer. But
• 30:41
  no, I'm a germophobe. But Michael Ishikov, among many other things,
• 30:47
  came up with what I think was a much better explanation for that Pea tape
• 30:52
  story, and that is that apparently there were some Russian associates that were with
• 31:00
  Trump in a I think it was Las Vegas, in a Las Vegas strip
• 31:07
  club, where there was some sort of urination element to the presentation. I
• 31:15
  can't even imagine how that would be titillating or attractive. But okay, fine,
• 31:21
  and so here's my Akam's razor explanation for what happens. So these Russians
• 31:27
  they go back to Russia and they create an urban legend about this story because
• 31:34
  it's I mean, if the Trump was there with them, and that somehow
• 31:40
  evolves and morphs into somebody telling Steel about this Pea tape. That makes some
• 31:48
  semblance of sense to me. But Ishikoff was very very much and he might
• 31:53
  be the only guy who got it right at least faster than anybody else did.
• 31:56
  Was very very skeptical of the entire collusion narrative. I did an interview
• 32:01
  with him. We put the interview at I wrote about it for Mediaite,
• 32:06
  and Trump tweeted about it three times, which I think is interesting on a
• 32:12
  number of levels, but I hope gives me some credibility in both in the
• 32:15
  macro as well as the micro, as far as Trump goes, and as
• 32:21
  far as this story in particular, because I have tried to be as objective
• 32:24
  about Trump as I possibly can, despite the fact that I loathe him on
• 32:30
  every possible story, in every possible way, and specifically on this one,
• 32:36
  and so I never bought the collusion situation. But I do believe that there
• 32:43
  were very serious issues related to obstruction of justice that Muller had Trump fairly nailed
• 32:50
  on, but which Bill Barr purposely proactively and very cynically sabotaged with that preemptive
• 32:59
  strike of his short summary of the Muller Report, completely altering the narrative,
• 33:05
  eviscerating whatever momentum incredibility the Muller Report was going to have with regard to potential
• 33:12
  criminal charges or impeachment, and then Muller himself really blew it. In my
• 33:17
  opinion, I don't think Mueller should have even taken the job, because when
• 33:22
  he finally did testify, it was very obvious he was not up to it,
• 33:27
  and liberals had built Mueller into this superman, and I think I nailed
• 33:31
  that one better than anybody, because I kept saying, liberals are putting way,
• 33:37
  way, way too much on the shoulders of Robert Mueller, not just
• 33:42
  because he was an old man at that time, but it's very strange to
• 33:46
  me that they would be trusting, so trusting of a guy who whose bonifiti's
• 33:52
  were largely conservative. But I don't people even remember, but for about a
• 33:55
  year and a half, the entire media narrative was wait for Muller, Mueller's
• 34:00
  gonna finally take Trump out and this, you know, this national mistake will
• 34:04
  be absolved, will be erased. And literally thirty seconds in de Muller's testimony,
• 34:09
  you knew that wasn't going to happen. So I think Muller choked and
• 34:15
  he was in over his head. He's pat way past his prime. Bar
• 34:20
  I think very nefariously sabotaged his old friend and then hires Durham to, uh,
• 34:29
  you know, basically give Trump what he wants. I mean, that's
• 34:31
  what the whole entire Durham report is, and it's going to be effective.
• 34:36
  It is gonna completely forward this narrative of Trump was a victim. Trump is
• 34:42
  always right. Trump has vindicated again Trump was robbed of his first term.
• 34:49
  I mean, you know, these are these are devastating narratives that get the
• 34:52
  Trump fans very excited, and I'm sure is going to continue Trump's seemingly never
• 34:59
  ending momentum when it comes to the Republican primary process. I mean, there's
• 35:06
  to me, it's it's very clear. I mean, it just it's manna
• 35:08
  from heaven once again for Donald Trump. The Durham Report keeps everything going in
• 35:15
  Trump's direction, and the polling. While we don't have any polling yet post
• 35:22
  Durham Report, we do have polling post civil verdict in the aging Carol case
• 35:29
  and the CNN town hall fiasco, and it's a blood bath nationally for Donald
• 35:37
  Trump. He's now over sixty percent in the Morning Console poll. Sixty percent.
• 35:40
  I mean, that's about as close to game set match as you possibly
• 35:45
  can get, except for the fact that the Santis has not yet officially announced.
• 35:51
  But we are I believe a month away, a month away without dramatic
• 35:58
  change is in the polling from being able to very credibly say that the nominating
• 36:04
  process is over before it really ever begins. Because if there's not a very
• 36:08
  significant change in the polling trajectory in a month, I'm assuming that the Santist
• 36:15
  is going to announce, probably the day after Memorial Day, May thirtieth,
• 36:19
  So you give him another couple of weeks for that to take hold and for
• 36:22
  some polling to come in. If a month from now we don't see a
• 36:28
  major change, then the only thing stopping Trump at that point is physical incapacitation.
• 36:35
  That's it. I mean, I mean he could be indicted two or
• 36:39
  three more times and somehow that happened. In fact, I don't know.
• 36:43
  Frankly, the only thing I think that would change the race now is if
• 36:45
  the Santists got indicted in San Francisco for something related to COVID or transgenderism.
• 36:51
  That would be the only thing that could save the Santis at this point,
• 36:53
  bar some other black Swan event involving Donald Trump's health. But that's how close
• 37:00
  we are. Very very very few people want to accept this reality. I'm
• 37:04
  sorry that I'm breaking it to you, but I've been very consistent in this,
• 37:08
  and now we're down to a month, and a lot could happen in
• 37:12
  a month, but I'm not particularly optimistic at this moment, because if Trump
• 37:17
  still has this kind of anything close to this kind of advantage in a month,
• 37:21
  there ain't going to be debates with Donald Trump in him. And if
• 37:23
  there's no debates with Donald Trump and him, the entire process immediately collapses.
• 37:29
  And while he might be punished a little bit for that, he's going to
• 37:32
  have plenty of lead to be able to buffer him from any negative impacts of
• 37:39
  having skipped the debates. And how you know, the way the conservative media
• 37:43
  works, he'll probably get praised for skipping the debates and you know, not
• 37:49
  demeaning himself and not putting himself at disadvantage because the real foe here, of
• 37:54
  course, is Joe Biden, and Joe Biden isn't going to do any debates,
• 37:58
  so why should Donald Trump have to do any? So you know,
• 38:01
  that's what's happening with the Durham report is just is this very much fitting into
• 38:07
  this entire situation, the sequence of events that seemingly goes in Trump's direction at
• 38:13
  all times, And it's very very frustrating, and you keep thinking, well,
• 38:16
  when's it gonna end? When these things gonna stop playing in Trump's favor?
• 38:22
  And we're running at a time. We're running out a time because if
• 38:25
  it keeps happening for another month, then I personally and I'm sure I'll get
• 38:30
  a lot of heat if and when we get to this point. I'm not
• 38:34
  there yet, but if when we get to that point, I'm sure I'll
• 38:36
  take a lot of heat for it. But I personally, I am very
• 38:39
  comfortable being a month away. I'm happy about it at all, but I'm
• 38:45
  about I'm happy in the sense that in a month I'll be very much willing
• 38:51
  to call this thing if there's not a major change between now and then.
• 38:54
  And I'm just warning everybody that this is the reality. I mean, it's
• 38:59
  better to me. It's always inherently good to know what the truth is.
• 39:01
  It's always inherently good to know that if you're being deluded into things that are
• 39:07
  not true, and that you have reality based If it's pessimism, great,
• 39:14
  I mean, I'd rather have reality based optimism. But at this point it's
• 39:16
  it's reality based pessimism because at least then you know what the situation is and
• 39:22
  you've got to do everything you can to change it while there's still time,
• 39:27
  and that time is basically a month in my view, doesn't mean he has
• 39:30
  to be the Santis has to be leading in a month. It just means
• 39:34
  he's got to get back in the ballgame in a month or else this thing
• 39:37
  really is over. And the Durham situation is emblematic of how everything seems to
• 39:43
  go in Trump's direction and his momentum doing nothing, I mean not doing anything.
• 39:49
  Oh, he's losing civil verdicts and taking a crap on CNN and you
• 39:57
  know, and being the beneficiary of this long awaited but not really new Durham
• 40:02
  report. When it comes to a story, I guess the bottom line to
• 40:07
  me is there's no glory in this for Donald Trump. He made a lot
• 40:13
  of mistakes and by the way, Mueller got convictions, Durham did not because
• 40:20
  of his investigation. But there's no glory here for Trump. He made at
• 40:25
  the very least massive errors in judgment, and he is the reason why the
• 40:30
  country was put through the Trump Russia investigation. Yes, the liberal media and
• 40:36
  Democrats completely totally one hundred and the NBI apparently overplayed their hands because they were
• 40:44
  so horrified by the result of the twenty sixteen election that they needed an explanation.
• 40:47
  And there are many members of the media that should never be listened to
• 40:52
  again because of their coverage of Trump Russia. I mean MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
• 40:58
  I guess you could still call her that. You know, she was the
• 41:00
  worst by far a CNN as a whole was awful on this, and you
• 41:05
  know, CNN's ratings have taken a massive hit in the years since that now
• 41:09
  they don't have Trump to kick around anymore, and covid is over. CNN's
• 41:15
  ratings are are completely in the toilet, and you know MSNBC's aren't great either.
• 41:21
  So the idea that somehow this is a victory for Trump is bizarre.
• 41:24
  But I'm a realist enough to know that that's the world in which we now
• 41:29
  live, So it's a victory. Congratulations, Donald Trump. You didn't collude
• 41:32
  with Russia to win the twenty sixteen election, and the investigation against you was
• 41:37
  was inherently flawed because of political bias. Congratulations. That certainly makes you presidential
• 41:44
  material in twenty twenty four. All right, now, speaking of you know,
• 41:51
  I'm always looking at things from a very concurring position, and I'm also
• 41:53
  very objective about people, even those that I don't like. I found myself
• 41:58
  in a strange situation and preparing for the podcast today of seeing a clip from
• 42:04
  Barack Obama that I really liked. Now, I'm a guy who My second
• 42:09
  documentary film was called Medium Malpractice. How Obama got elected in Pailin was targeted
• 42:15
  very prominent film about the two thousand and eight election, and I really do
• 42:19
  believe that was the moment when we left the gravitational pull of the rational earth,
• 42:22
  when he came to news media in general, and Barack Obama's candidacy was
• 42:27
  emblematic of that. However, I do think Barack Obama is a smart guy,
• 42:31
  and I do think he gets it in a lot of ways. I
• 42:35
  disagree with him politically on virtually everything, but he didn't an interview with Nate
• 42:39
  Burrelson was actually a sports guy in his essence, I think on the CBS
• 42:45
  Morning Show, and you're gonna hear this clip in a second where Burlson is
• 42:51
  talking about things that frighten him about the country basically, and Barack Obama chooses
• 42:58
  as the thing that has him most worried our media environment, and he does
• 43:06
  so using language that I use on a continual basis. In fact, was
• 43:13
  really the foundation of a book I wrote before anyone had really thought of Barack
• 43:19
  Obama as a potential presidential candidate back in two thousand and five, although he
• 43:23
  was known at this point on the national landscape as a US Senator. But
• 43:28
  I wrote a book in two thousand and five when I was a talk show
• 43:30
  host at KFI in Los Angeles called the Death of Free Speech. Well,
• 43:36
  doesn't sound a lot like what you're about to hear, but the subtitle was,
• 43:40
  and the subtitle of the Death of free Speech was how our broken national
• 43:45
  dialogue has killed the truth and divided America. And I had to say,
• 43:52
  you know, I've been vindicated on a lot in my life, although never
• 43:54
  gotten really any credit for it. But I think the most under rated thing
• 44:01
  that I've ever done in the realm of being prescient was that book, especially
• 44:07
  that subtitle, how our broken national dialogue has killed the truth and divided in
• 44:12
  America. This is in two thousand and five. Well, here we are
• 44:15
  in twenty twenty three, in the former President of United States, Barack Obama
• 44:20
  is basically making the exact same argument in a obviously from the liberal perspective,
• 44:25
  but in a way that I think is very very relevant to where we are
• 44:30
  and where we're headed, and why journalism is dead, and why America is
• 44:34
  in fact so splintered in a very very dangerous way. And here's what that
• 44:38
  sounded like on CBS's Morning show. I'm an optimistic man, but I find
• 44:45
  myself falling into this space where I have concern about the country that they will
• 44:50
  inherit right once I'm gone post presidency. What about this country keeps you up
• 44:54
  at night? The thing that I'm most worried about is the degree to which
• 45:05
  we now have a divided conversation, in part because we have a divided media.
• 45:10
  Right so I'm much older than you. Unate you don't look at though.
• 45:16
  That's what I was fishing for. But when I was coming up,
• 45:22
  you read three TV stations and people were getting a similar sense of what is
• 45:28
  true and what isn't, what was real and what was not. Today,
• 45:31
  what I'm most concerned about is the fact that, because of the splintering of
• 45:36
  the media, we almost occupy different realities. If something happens in the past,
• 45:40
  everybody could say, all right, we may disagree on how to solve
• 45:44
  it, but at least we all agree that, yeah, that's an issue.
• 45:46
  Now people will say, well, that didn't happen or I don't believe
• 45:51
  that. And I think the goals of the Obama Foundation and one of the
• 45:55
  goals of my post presidency is how do we return to that common conversation,
• 46:01
  How can we have a common set effects. I obviously very much agree with
• 46:06
  Barack Obama there, and it is a problem though that unlike him, I
• 46:13
  don't see how we get out of it. I don't see what the solution
• 46:16
  is. I don't know how he's going to fix it. In fact,
• 46:20
  he didn't do anything to fix it while he was president for eight years,
• 46:24
  and I don't think he's gonna be able to fix it as a former president.
• 46:30
  There is really no way around this, barring, as I've said before,
• 46:34
  economic catastrophe that eliminates all this clutter on the media landscape and gets us
• 46:42
  back to that world where there are only a few media outlets that can do
• 46:46
  real journalism and feel compelled to do it in incredible and fair fashion because it's
• 46:53
  in their self interest to do so. And I don't even know how that
• 46:57
  would work. But I mean, we are seeing a lot of stress economically
• 47:00
  on media outlets. We're seeing media outlets fail online now on a fairly consistent
• 47:07
  basis. Others are cutting back rather dramatically, but the old media guard is
• 47:15
  kind of fading away. I mean, we're seeing that even with Tucker Carlson
• 47:17
  trying to move from Fox News Channel to Twitter. And this issue of the
• 47:23
  distrust that the American people have for particular news media outlets based upon their political
• 47:30
  ideology is really dramatic. And I talked a lot about this in episode number
• 47:35
  fifty eight with regard to how and why the CNN town hall with Donald Trump
• 47:38
  was a fiasco that occurred because Republicans do not trust CNN, and that happened
• 47:45
  over many, many, many years. And let me tell you, Republicans
• 47:50
  really don't trust CNN. You gov. The Pulling Outlet recently did a survey
• 47:58
  on the trust that America in any particular media outlet based upon their political leanings,
• 48:06
  or their ideology or their party identification. And the disparity between the trust
• 48:13
  that Republicans have in certain media outlets and the trust that Democrats have in certain
• 48:19
  media outlets is extraordinary and way beyond just a preference. It is literally night
• 48:27
  and day, and it's very much in line with what Barack Obama was saying
• 48:32
  in that clip. I displayed among the outlets that have the greatest disparity between
• 48:40
  how much they are trusted on the left and how much they are trusted on
• 48:44
  the right. Well, it's actually pretty logical. It actually makes a lot
• 48:49
  of sense. It's one of the few surveys you'll see where you, at
• 48:52
  least for me, I look at it and I go, Okay, that
• 48:54
  makes sense. That makes sense. That makes sense. Right at the top
• 48:58
  of the list are seeing IN and The New York Times. Those are the
• 49:02
  two outlets about whom there is the greatest disparity in trust level. Liberals have
• 49:09
  extraordinary trust in CNN and The New York Times. Republicans have basically no trust.
• 49:16
  I mean, for CNN, I think it was the worst of any
• 49:20
  major outlet. Republicans have no trust in CNN. Republicans have almost no trust
• 49:24
  in The New York Times. MSNBC has almost as large a disparity. Interestingly,
• 49:30
  I think that MSNBC's disparity was slightly smaller because they're so far left.
• 49:36
  Even some liberals and Democrats don't completely trust MSNBC, so that I found that
• 49:42
  to be interesting. Then there was ABCNBC and CBS, which were almost indistinguishable
• 49:49
  from one another when it came to lack of trust on the Republican side and
• 49:53
  relative trust on the Democratic side. Then there was NPR and PBS and down
• 50:00
  the line, and there were almost no media outlets. In fact, even
• 50:05
  the Weather Channel, the Weather Channel had the smallest disparity, But even the
• 50:10
  Weather Channel had a fairly significant disparity in the trust level among Democrats as opposed
• 50:17
  to Republicans with not surprisingly to me, although some people who I saw comment
• 50:23
  on this online didn't understand it, Democrats have a greater trust level in the
• 50:30
  Weather Channel than Republicans. Now that could be having just to do with trust
• 50:35
  and weather reporting, or I don't know, maybe more Republicans or outdoor people
• 50:40
  or farmers and realized that the weather people get it wrong all the time.
• 50:45
  I don't know. That could be just a general cynicism. But there's also
• 50:49
  the issue of global warming climate change, which the Weather Channel is fully on
• 50:52
  board with because it suits their self interest, and most Republicans are not in
• 50:58
  the vast majority Democrats are. But even the Weather Channel has a pretty significant
• 51:04
  disparity. And this is a very very dangerous situation. It makes us completely
• 51:08
  dysfunctional when you cannot even come to the bottom line on what the truth is.
• 51:15
  You can't even accept what's on you know, I've always used the analogy
• 51:19
  of reading from the same book. We can't even agree on what page we're
• 51:22
  on. We can't agree on what's on the page. I'm not even sure
• 51:25
  we're in the same book anymore in many situations. I mean, when you
• 51:30
  look at what's on MSNBC as opposed to what's on Newsmax or One American News,
• 51:36
  and it's like literally two different planets. And now people can go and
• 51:44
  get whatever flavor of take or quote unquote news they want on any particular story
• 51:51
  to make them feel good or to keep them from feeling bad about themselves.
• 51:53
  That's why I refer to modern news as therapy. That's what it is.
• 51:59
  It's therapy for a target demographic, and that is not healthy at all,
• 52:05
  very very dangerous for a democratic republic. So, you know, it's not
• 52:07
  the first time Barack Obama I said something like that, but I found it
• 52:12
  particularly interesting and significant that he chose it as the thing that concerns him the
• 52:17
  most in our current culture, and someone who wrote a book with that basically
• 52:22
  is the subtitle back in two thousand and five, I have to agree with
• 52:25
  him one other thing before we get to our interview with Bill Mitchell, the
• 52:30
  former Trump's superfan turn the Santis supporter, I have to play a clip from
• 52:37
  Senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, who obviously was elected despite the fact that he
• 52:44
  was clearly suffering from a stroke, and then after he got elected, he
• 52:47
  took a massive leave of absence with the meat, which the media just pretended
• 52:51
  was perfectly normal and not an indication that we relied to about his physical condition
• 52:57
  during the actual election, which was critical to the control of the US Senate.
• 53:01
  And he's back on the job now, and he was heading a committee
• 53:07
  meeting on banking, and this clip went viral online. It's a little bit
• 53:14
  long, not too long, but it's John Fetterman trying I think, I
• 53:21
  think to ask a question about the situation regarding banking and how dangerous banking collapses
• 53:29
  can be to the overall economy. And I wish you could see this because
• 53:34
  the body language is significant, especially towards the end, because when you hear
• 53:38
  the pauses in this clip, you're about to hear and there are many pauses.
• 53:43
  He keeps kind of shrugging his shoulders and putting his hands up in a
• 53:47
  way that indicates like, of course, right, what's the answer to my
• 53:52
  question? Right? I mean what you're what I'm saying is obvious, right,
• 53:57
  And that's the way I interpreted his bodyline, which accept the words aren't
• 54:01
  matching. He doesn't seem to even understand how much he is incapable of communicating
• 54:10
  his thoughts. And so this is a situation where I think the most dangerous
• 54:19
  part of this is it doesn't seem like he's even fully conscious of his inability
• 54:24
  to communicate. And here is John Fetterman at a Senate committee on banking,
• 54:32
  essentially trying to make a point and or ask a question, although I'm not
• 54:38
  completely sure what he was really doing. Is it staggering? Is it a
• 54:43
  staggering responsive responsibility that the head of a bank could literally could literally crash our
• 54:50
  economy? It's astonishing. That's like if you have, I mean like and
• 54:54
  they also realize is that now they have it's in guaranteed a guaranteed way to
• 55:02
  be saved by no again, by no matter by how you know. So
• 55:08
  it's it's you know, isn't it appropriate that those kinds of this kind of
• 55:14
  control should be more stricter to prevent this kind of thing going or should we
• 55:20
  just go on and start bailing and sailing whoever bank, regardless of how how
• 55:25
  there's their conduct is. You know, I'll give you an example. Uh,
• 55:37
  the Republicans want to give a work requirement for snap, you know,
• 55:40
  for a hungry family has to have these this kind of penalties. Are these
• 55:46
  some kinds of word working required? Shouldn't you have a working requirement after we
• 55:52
  sail your bank billions of your bank because they seem we were preoccupied when then
• 55:58
  snap? Uh, requirements for works for a hundred people, but not about
• 56:04
  protecting the tax papers. You know that will bail no matter whatever does about
• 56:10
  a bank to crash it. Sure, that was on a personal level that
• 56:22
  was sad, and it's worse if you see the clip on a political level.
• 56:29
  That is aggravating and infuriating considering how the news media protected John Fetterman during
• 56:37
  his election, especially when you consider the fact he's going to be in the
• 56:39
  Senate for at least another five and a half years and who knows how long
• 56:45
  beyond that, assuming he's physically remotely capable of doing the job. Although the
• 56:50
  physical capability standard has never been lower. I mean, Diane Feinstein from California
• 56:54
  is being wheelchaired in having no idea where she is, and she's doing essentially
• 56:59
  the same thing that John Fetterman is doing. I think Fetterman's in much better
• 57:02
  shape than Feinstein. But Feinstein at least have said that she's not running for
• 57:07
  reelection, although she should resign now, but since Newsom would pick her successor,
• 57:13
  I guess I'm not that upset by the fact that she's still in the
• 57:15
  position. There's another element from the standpoint of the media that I think is
• 57:21
  really important here, and this gets into Orwellian level gas lighting by the news
• 57:27
  media. When it comes to Fetterman. It's one thing to pretend that this
• 57:30
  is not really an issue, and to make rationalizations and excuses for his physical
• 57:37
  condition and pretend that it's really not that bad and pretend it's going to get
• 57:42
  better. That's bad enough. But there's a Washington Post reporter by the name
• 57:47
  of Jeff Stein who reports on these banking issues, so this is his beat,
• 57:53
  and he tweeted about what Fetterman just said in the following Now you just
• 58:00
  heard it. If you need to go back, go back and listen to
• 58:04
  it again, because what you just heard was incomprehensible and in no way,
• 58:10
  shape or form was able to manifest itself into a cogent point and or question.
• 58:17
  But Jeff Starne of The Washington Post took what you just heard and put
• 58:22
  out the following tweet. Senator John Vetterman, Democrat Pennsylvania to bank executive Greg
• 58:30
  Becker quote, shouldn't you have a working requirement after we bail out your bank?
• 58:38
  Republicans seem to be more preoccupied with snap requirements for hungry people than protecting
• 58:45
  taxpayers that have to bail out these banks. Now that is I wouldn't agree
• 58:53
  with it, but that is a relevant question. That's a cogent question that
• 58:59
  makes Vetterman sound as if he knows what the hell's going on, and he
• 59:01
  was able to make his point and ask his question. However, that is
• 59:07
  not what John Fetterman just said. In the clip that you heard, John
• 59:10
  Fetterman never said anything close to that. That was Jeff Stein taking what he
• 59:17
  thought John Fetterman intended to say, dressing it up and making it sound as
• 59:23
  if this is Fetterman acting exactly as a Democratic senator should That is not journalism.
• 59:32
  That is gasliking gaslighting, that is not just gaslighting, that is George
• 59:38
  Orwell nineteen eighty four stuff. We're just gonna pretend that reality didn't happen,
• 59:45
  and we're gonna dress it up so it can fit our agenda, and we
• 59:51
  can pretend that John Fetterman really isn't someone who is incapable of doing the job
• 59:57
  as a US Senator, and that Ladies in Gentlemen is the death of journalism
• 1:00:01
  right there. Now. They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows, and
• 1:00:06
  our interview on today's podcast, I think is probably going to be a great
• 1:00:09
  example of that. His name is Bill Mitchell, and he is a guy
• 1:00:15
  who was well known during the twenty sixteen presidential election and beyond that as a
• 1:00:21
  basically a Donald Trump's superfan and a political commentator. He's very well known on
• 1:00:25
  Twitter as a huge following on Twitter and social media. And back in twenty
• 1:00:32
  seventeen, I interviewed Bill Mitchell after Donald Trump had been elected and I was
• 1:00:38
  very much still not on the Donald Trump train and he was, and it
• 1:00:43
  did not go well. In fact, it went so poorly that Bill hung
• 1:00:46
  up on me and then blocked me on Twitter. And now here we are
• 1:00:51
  six years later, and hopefully we're about to do a very, very very
• 1:00:55
  different interview because Bill is one of the few big Trump supporters, at least
• 1:01:01
  in the public sphere, who has very dramatically shifted and is now in the
• 1:01:07
  de santist camp. And I want to find all about out, all about
• 1:01:10
  how that happened, why that happened, and where we go from here.
• 1:01:14
  And so, without further ado, Bill Mitchell, Welcome to the Death of
• 1:01:17
  Journalism podcast. Yeah, thank you. You know, you'll have to forgive
• 1:01:22
  me. I don't remember any of that, but you know, I do
• 1:01:24
  a thousand interviews, so it's you know, and I'm not twenty five anymore.
• 1:01:28
  So it may have gone down in the memory hole, but that's okay.
• 1:01:30
  Well, if you google and talk with anybody, well, if you
• 1:01:34
  google John Zigler and Bill Mitchell, it comes up right away because media media.
• 1:01:40
  I did an article about it, and you and I did not get
• 1:01:45
  along particularly well back in twenty seventeen. But so let's let's go back though
• 1:01:50
  to that era, because I think your evolution here is really really important.
• 1:01:55
  So tell us just how league a supporter of Donald Trump you were in twenty
• 1:02:04
  fifteen through whenever you decided to start to support Ron de Santis, give us
• 1:02:10
  a history lesson. I'm Bill Mitchell and his so fort for Donald Trump.
• 1:02:15
  Sure, yeah, I was obviously a huge Trump supporter. Nobody ever heard
• 1:02:17
  of me before twenty fifteen in political circles. I was an executive recruiter for
• 1:02:22
  thirty years. And when Trump came down the escalator, I had not been
• 1:02:27
  a huge Trump fan, you know, of his shows and so on and
• 1:02:29
  so forth. I had had some tangential interest in him and had read his
• 1:02:32
  books and so on and so forth. But when he came down the escalator,
• 1:02:36
  I was inspired by the idea of a business person running for president and
• 1:02:42
  also somebody that had some strength, some fighting them. Because I was so
• 1:02:46
  used to throwing my shoe at the TV set as Republicans would just you know,
• 1:02:51
  fold to any Democrat, and nobody had any fighting in the man.
• 1:02:54
  I thought, well, here's a guy with some fighting him, here's a
• 1:02:55
  guy with some business skills. Let's run this up the flagpole and see what
• 1:03:00
  happens. And so I wanted to have a voice, and nobody'd ever heard
• 1:03:06
  of me in politics. So I thought, well, you know how to
• 1:03:07
  start a Twitter feed, and I have a knack for communications as an English
• 1:03:12
  minor in school, metaphorical language and so on and so forth, and good
• 1:03:15
  at analyzing the polls. And my Twitter feed almost immediately started to explode a
• 1:03:20
  thousand, five thousand, and ten thousand followers, and then all these podcasts
• 1:03:23
  wanted me on because I thought, wait a minute, this guy's got fifty
• 1:03:27
  thousand followers and he comes on my show, everybody's gonna listen, right,
• 1:03:29
  So that's why. That's what happened. And I started making some bold predictions
• 1:03:34
  that I was a guaranteeing Trump was gonna win. And my rationale was that
• 1:03:38
  this was a change election, and in a change election, the change candidate
• 1:03:43
  wins. All the rest is noise, you know, all the rallies,
• 1:03:46
  all stuff that's nice, that's noise. The change candidate's gonna win a change
• 1:03:50
  election. Hillary Clinton was a status quo and Trump was a change candidate,
• 1:03:54
  and therefore I was backing him completely. And I ended up with about six
• 1:03:59
  hundred thousand followers. My Twitter feed on election night did ninety million hits in
• 1:04:03
  one night, and that was because all of these people that had followed me
• 1:04:10
  were at house parties and so on and so forth across the country. And
• 1:04:13
  as Hillary took early leads in Ohio, early leads in Florida, they were
• 1:04:17
  freaking out and they're like, well, let's going to get online and see
• 1:04:19
  what Bill Mitchell sang. And I gave him some comfort that Wait a minute,
• 1:04:23
  you know, I'm hearing from my sources in Ohio the Trump is gonna
• 1:04:26
  win by nine points, which he did, and we're looking at you know,
• 1:04:30
  Broward and all that southern Florida dropped early for Trump, not for Trump,
• 1:04:33
  for Hillary, and that the West Coast and the panhandle of Florda is
• 1:04:39
  gonna come heavy for Trump, and you know, take comfort. So anyway,
• 1:04:42
  got a big, big interface there and we ended up winning, and
• 1:04:46
  so it kind of put me on the map a little more and I stayed
• 1:04:50
  with it this whole time. So that's that's what happened, and how I
• 1:04:56
  became a big Trump fan and kind of came out of nowhere that social media
• 1:05:00
  for you you know, nobody nobody today and a big hero of the mar
• 1:05:01
  right. So but uh, well, yeah, that's what happened. How
• 1:05:04
  much did Trump himself contribute to that? I mean, did he tweet you
• 1:05:12
  a lot? Retweet you or did you Was there interaction with him? Did
• 1:05:15
  he endorse you? As far as being a I never talked to him,
• 1:05:18
  No, But as far as online did he ever? Did he ever help
• 1:05:21
  you get your retweeted me like seventeen times, retreating me seventeen times. But
• 1:05:26
  I don't know, you know, during that time, I don't know how
• 1:05:28
  much Trump was actually himself retreating me or his team was retreating me. But
• 1:05:32
  they retreated me seventeen times, I think retreating me like three times in one
• 1:05:36
  day once. So but that was actually, you know, I actually didn't
• 1:05:42
  like that. That was a kiss of death because you know, typically the
• 1:05:45
  first thing would happened to you before Twitter band you was a Trump would retreat
• 1:05:49
  you, kind of put a target on your back. I was like,
• 1:05:53
  I really wish you wouldn't do that because you know, it's putting a target
• 1:05:56
  on my back. And then Twitter about five months before the twenty twenty election,
• 1:06:00
  they didn't want to repeat of what I had achieved in twenty sixteen,
• 1:06:03
  so they found some you know post I had made about wearing masks, like
• 1:06:08
  a month old post, and they banned me for that for a week.
• 1:06:11
  And then I made some post on a secondary account, was tiny little account,
• 1:06:15
  just let people knew I wasn't dead. And they said, oh,
• 1:06:16
  you violated our rules of posting from a secondary account when you're banned, and
• 1:06:20
  so we're gonna eliminate all six hundred thousand and your followers because you're an evil
• 1:06:25
  person. So and I was gone for about two and a half years.
• 1:06:29
  Yeah, over that, And so what happened when you came back? Well,
• 1:06:31
  when I came back, you know, I announced that I was back,
• 1:06:34
  and I had I had left with about six hundred fifty thousand followers.
• 1:06:39
  When I came back, I had about four hundred and fifty thousand, fo
• 1:06:41
  hundred forty thousand followers, So you know, I just assumed a lot of
• 1:06:44
  this people had dropped out of Twitter. I'm no longer there, but I
• 1:06:47
  was grateful to let me back because they didn't have to. And that was
• 1:06:51
  very nice to Elon Musk to do that. And I had been bouncing around
• 1:06:55
  for various platforms, you know, Gab and get Her and all these different
• 1:06:59
  ones, but I just wasn't the same as Twitter, and uh so I
• 1:07:03
  came back to Twitter, and I had decided at that point that my plan
• 1:07:11
  a see my Plan A, Plan B, Plan C sort of guy,
• 1:07:14
  I don't put all magazine one basket. Typically, So my Plan A was
• 1:07:18
  a Trump to Santis ticket because to me, it checked all the boxes.
• 1:07:25
  Bill, Before we get into the Santis, I want to go back just
• 1:07:27
  a second. I like to build the foundation here. Sure, as we
• 1:07:31
  move along, what did you think as a Trump super fan of the Trump
• 1:07:36
  presidency? Did it? Did it meet your expectations at the time, you
• 1:07:42
  had obviously huge expectations. You say, no, it did not. No,
• 1:07:46
  it did not, because you know, I was basing a lot of
• 1:07:48
  my expectations on, for instance, the idea that he would hire the best.
• 1:07:53
  Well, that was based upon The Apprentice, right, Well, you
• 1:07:55
  know we forget that was a TV show, Okay, But Trump did not
• 1:07:59
  hire the best. He gave us Ray, he gave us he gave us
• 1:08:02
  Millie, he gave us Fouci, he gave us these terrible people. And
• 1:08:08
  it also became clear to me. I also knew that Trump had a big
• 1:08:11
  ego, but I didn't realize how easily he could be controlled by that,
• 1:08:15
  and his enemies learned how to control him. And I think that Trump went
• 1:08:18
  into the presidency and said wait, a minute. I'm the new kid on
• 1:08:20
  the block. I want to show all these establishment guys, I'm willing to
• 1:08:24
  play ball, and I think that just by my strength of personality, I
• 1:08:28
  can win them over. He didn't realize that in government, these people can
• 1:08:31
  be quite evil and they're quite dedicated, and they will infiltrate you and then
• 1:08:35
  destroy you from within. And we saw a lot of that. I just
• 1:08:41
  had, you know, King Kucinelli on the show the other day and he
• 1:08:44
  had worked for Trump, and he said he was amazed how Trump kept hiring
• 1:08:47
  these deep state establishment people in his administration and these people hated him, and
• 1:08:53
  he's like, why are the hiring these people? I don't understand. So
• 1:08:56
  that's one of the things that was very disappointing for me. I think that
• 1:08:59
  Trump is a great vision guy. He's a great CEO personality. You know,
• 1:09:03
  in the corporate world, the CEO is the vision person. The president
• 1:09:06
  handles the day to day operations. It's so different. So Trump is a
• 1:09:11
  great CEO, but he's not a great president. Has a great day to
• 1:09:14
  day operations guy. I don't think it. I don't think it interests him.
• 1:09:16
  I think he's a savant deal making and the making the big speech,
• 1:09:20
  making the presentation make America Great Again, all the imagery and so on and
• 1:09:25
  so forth. But as far as the day to day operations of hiring a
• 1:09:28
  good team and you know, doing the footwork up front, implementing, and
• 1:09:31
  then following up afterwards. I don't think he's a savant at that. I
• 1:09:34
  think that bores him, and he tends to pass those things off, and
• 1:09:38
  unfortunately pass those things off to people who did not have his best interest at
• 1:09:42
  heart. So he had a pretty successful presidency for the first three years,
• 1:09:45
  and then of course, you know, COVID was a bit of a disaster.
• 1:09:48
  A bit of a disaster. I'm willing to go farther than you are
• 1:09:53
  on that. But before we get into COVID. So what I'm hearing,
• 1:09:57
  Bill is what you're really saying is that people like me who said that Trump
• 1:10:01
  is an egomaniac who was not prepared for this job, nor is he is
• 1:10:08
  he well suited psychologically for this job? We're correct? Am I hearing that
• 1:10:14
  correctly? No, you're not hearing that correctly at all. You gotta understand
• 1:10:17
  that this, you know, we're not evaluating Trump in a vacuum here,
• 1:10:21
  we're evaluating Trump versus Hillary. You know, Trump on his worst day is
• 1:10:26
  a thousand times better than Hillary on her best day. So I was never
• 1:10:30
  a Trump worshiper. I wasn't part of the Trump cult. I believed in
• 1:10:38
  MAGA make America great again. And if I wanted to have MAGA, if
• 1:10:41
  I want to have America first, I had limited choices. I had Trump
• 1:10:45
  or Trump. So the reason why I got SOBA so far behind Trump,
• 1:10:49
  and because I was willing to overlook some of the things that I saw his
• 1:10:53
  potential character flaws in him, was I had no other choice. I had
• 1:10:58
  no other way to get there, And so that's why I backed him completely.
• 1:11:01
  And it's say, you know, Trump isn't a perfect guy. He's
• 1:11:03
  got some ego problem and so on and so forth. But still his of
• 1:11:06
  the first three years of his presidency for the average American were wildly successful.
• 1:11:12
  You know, you don't have to be perfect to be president. You just
• 1:11:14
  have have great ideas and have enough to get them implemented. In most cases
• 1:11:18
  he did. But the reason why I'm backing off him now is because now
• 1:11:23
  I have a better plan. A My analysis for my reality is this.
• 1:11:29
  Imagine that you're on a island stranded, and all the risk is coconuts.
• 1:11:33
  Will you learned to love coconuts? But then if a chest of prime rib
• 1:11:38
  washes up, all of a sudden, coconuts don't look so good anymore.
• 1:11:41
  And That's where I'm at right now. So so Trump is the coconut that
• 1:11:45
  you had to eat because the al Trump is the coconuts, because because the
• 1:11:49
  alternative, I guess was sand. Hillary was the sand and it was sand,
• 1:11:55
  right right. Trump is the coconut. And then all of a sudden
• 1:11:59
  this now, is it rob prime meat that is washed up on shore?
• 1:12:02
  Or is it cooked Rob? Don't you? You know why Trump calls him
• 1:12:08
  Rob? Don't you because some article came out months and months ago where they
• 1:12:12
  accidentally called him Rob to san Us. That's it, and that's why he
• 1:12:15
  calls him Rob. Not because it doesn't have any other meaning. It's just,
• 1:12:19
  you know, Trump just likes to poke fun of people. Okay,
• 1:12:21
  So look I have I know you will never agree with this, but I
• 1:12:27
  have been outspoken that the costs of the Trump presidency far far outweighed the benefits
• 1:12:34
  for our side, if for no other reason than the following two things.
• 1:12:43
  If Trump had not been president and Hillary had been. We don't lose the
• 1:12:47
  twenty eighteen midterms, and and from a senatorial and House perspective, we do
• 1:12:55
  far better in the twenty twenty and twenty twenty two elections. You agree with
• 1:13:00
  that, right, I mean from a from a political stand we don't agree
• 1:13:03
  with You don't think we lost that hold on. You don't think we lost
• 1:13:08
  in twenty eighteen because Trump was president. Well he may, we may have.
• 1:13:14
  But here's the thing is that you know it's twenty twenty hindsight, and
• 1:13:18
  you know if you have a it's not twenty twenty hindsight bill, People like
• 1:13:21
  me said this was going to happen, that Trump was so toxic that we
• 1:13:27
  would lose in future elections because of that. And it's so it's not twenty
• 1:13:31
  twenty hindsight. Everyone knew it's not. It's not that. It's not that
• 1:13:34
  simplicit because you're making you're making here's your premise, your premises if Trump was
• 1:13:39
  not president, we would have won in two thousand and eighteen. You can't
• 1:13:42
  prove that, oh yeah, that you're making. You're making, Yes,
• 1:13:45
  I can. You know you know why I could have? You know why
• 1:13:46
  I can prove that. Here's why I can prove that, because we have
• 1:13:50
  the twenty ten election. The twenty ten election that was right after Barack Obama
• 1:13:56
  wins in two thousand and eight, where it was a massive victory for Republicans,
• 1:14:00
  would have been repeated in twenty eighteen or close to it if Hillary Clinton
• 1:14:04
  had been president. But then the second thing that is, maybe you will
• 1:14:10
  agree with this, I don't know, but but to me, the only
• 1:14:15
  thing that will really matter when it's all said and done about the Trump presidency
• 1:14:20
  was the reaction to COVID. The reaction to COVID dwarfs everything else that happened
• 1:14:27
  in his four years. And it's not even close. If Hillary had been
• 1:14:31
  president, Bill, you know the left very very well. The left would
• 1:14:35
  have reacted completely differently to COVID if Hillary was president because they would have seen
• 1:14:43
  everything through the prism of her reelection campaign. And there's not a chance in
• 1:14:47
  hell, Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo shut down the world if she's running for
• 1:14:57
  reelection. There's not a chance in the world it happens. So our response
• 1:15:01
  to COVID is not nearly as devastating to our entire structure of America. Especially
• 1:15:08
  to our kids, which I have two. If Hillary is president, do
• 1:15:13
  you at least see where I'm coming from on that? Now I see where
• 1:15:15
  you're coming from on that. But but you're guessing, no, I'm not.
• 1:15:18
  Do you have do you have? I mean, let me ask you,
• 1:15:20
  Let me ask you. Let me ask you this. Do you have
• 1:15:24
  a functioning time machine where you can go back in time change these events and
• 1:15:27
  you know exactly what the results would be. I don't see. This is
• 1:15:30
  why I look forward and I don't focus on the past, because I don't
• 1:15:33
  have a time machine to go back and fix the errors of the past.
• 1:15:36
  All I can do is look forward and try to learn from our mistakes and
• 1:15:42
  try to do better in the future. And if somebody needs to be punished,
• 1:15:45
  if somebody needs to go to jail for the past, I would like
• 1:15:47
  to see that happen. Now, you know, we just had this DRM
• 1:15:50
  report, Camp come out said the FBI was guilty as sin. The whole
• 1:15:54
  thing was a political scam. Nobody's getting in trouble theres nobody's getting a parking
• 1:15:58
  ticket for this. So that's what so frustrating for us on the right is
• 1:16:00
  the two tiered justice system. But you know, I don't want to go
• 1:16:04
  and relitigate what happened in the past and say, Okay, well if this
• 1:16:10
  had happened, then this would you don't You literally do not know because these
• 1:16:14
  are complex environments. You know, the butterfly effect, you know, butterfly
• 1:16:17
  beats his wings. Here has because a hurricane ten thousand miles away six months
• 1:16:21
  from now, So you just don't know what exactly would happened. But I'm
• 1:16:26
  looking to the future and who's the best leader for America. Who's the best
• 1:16:31
  leader for the America First movement going into the future. Who's got the best
• 1:16:36
  skill sets, not who gives a fanciest speech and all that stuff, but
• 1:16:40
  who's got the best skill sets going forward, who's the least toxic, who's
• 1:16:45
  the best candidate? And so that's why I've gone the direction that I've gone.
• 1:16:46
  But as far as you know, if you're if you want me to
• 1:16:48
  admit that that Trump was a huge misake, it's just not going to happen.
• 1:16:53
  I'm just not going to do that because he was the right guy at
• 1:16:56
  the time and that election, we had him or we had Hillary. We
• 1:16:59
  had no other choice. He did a very good job for a couple of
• 1:17:01
  years on a number of things, he failed on other things. And now
• 1:17:04
  I'm looking at this next election coming forward. I've got a better choice,
• 1:17:09
  I believe, and that's why I've shifted my allegiances. Okay, so let's
• 1:17:13
  talk about the future then, since you want to talk about the future.
• 1:17:15
  So you are this Trump super fan and you decide, at what point do
• 1:17:20
  you decide? You know what, even though Trump is running for reelection,
• 1:17:25
  I am not going to support him. I am instead going to support Ron
• 1:17:29
  De Santis. How why and when did that happen? Well, my fan
• 1:17:33
  a was Trump on the top of the ticket. DeSantis is the VP.
• 1:17:39
  Saw I saw a sort of an obi Wana Luke sort of thing where De
• 1:17:43
  Santa could come in and run the back office for Trump, you know,
• 1:17:45
  because DeSantis is much more of a you know, facts and figures sort of
• 1:17:50
  guy. He's much more than mechanic. You know. Trump is like the
• 1:17:53
  car salesman. DeSantis is like the mechanic. He can make the thing work.
• 1:17:57
  He could keep Trump and making all the mistakes in the back office.
• 1:18:00
  Because you really did you really not not to interrupt your bill, but did
• 1:18:02
  you really believe that two alpha males could possibly be on the same ticket.
• 1:18:08
  Trump does not. Trump does not have the capability of accept that was your
• 1:18:14
  hope. The idea said to me, that syndicates that you don't really understand
• 1:18:16
  Donald Trump very well. There's no possible way that Donald Trump would allow someone
• 1:18:23
  with bigger balls than he has to be his vice presidential nominee. That's just
• 1:18:28
  not within capability. That's the case. Apparently that's the case. But that
• 1:18:32
  doesn't mean I wasn't going to advocate for it. Okay, this was this
• 1:18:35
  was what I advocated for initially. And then you know, do Sansky takeover
• 1:18:40
  in twenty twenty eight and then run and then so we have you have twelve
• 1:18:44
  straight years of so what convenced you? What convinced you that that was not
• 1:18:48
  gonna I'm curious what when did you finally realize that that delusion wasn't going to
• 1:18:53
  happen? When Trump started lying about the Santas Okay, all right, when
• 1:18:57
  so started calling to Santas, or when Trump tweeted it one o'clock in the
• 1:19:00
  morning or posted at one o'clock in the morning that the Santis was a runner
• 1:19:03
  and a globalist. I announced on my Twitter feed. That's it. I'm
• 1:19:05
  done. I can't. I cannot lend my brand to lying about America's number
• 1:19:14
  one governor and about a great man because this is probably a false statement by
• 1:19:19
  President Trump, and I'm not gonna lend my brand to that. So I'm
• 1:19:24
  going to risk my reputation in the marketplace as being a big Trump guy.
• 1:19:28
  I lost about forty fifty thousand followers over this, and I'm gonna get one
• 1:19:31
  percent on the De Santis training. That's where I stay. When you say
• 1:19:35
  you've lost forty to fifty thousand followers on Twitter because of your support of the
• 1:19:42
  Santis and your your abandoning, I guess as how they would look at it,
• 1:19:45
  your abandoning of your Trump support. Did that happen right like overnight,
• 1:19:49
  within a week? What was the what was the reaction? Like, I
• 1:19:53
  mean, give me a sense of the reaction of the Trump supporter or cultist
• 1:19:59
  as I would refer to them, to your flip from Trump to De Santis,
• 1:20:02
  as in comparison to what you expected it would be, that's what I
• 1:20:06
  expect you to be, you know, I mean it was sort of a
• 1:20:10
  little bit of a shock and dismay. You know, they loved the word
• 1:20:14
  to call me a TDS Trump arrangement syndrome. You know, I prefer it
• 1:20:16
  as Trump reality syndrome. But they called me Trump arrangingent, cyner of blahaha
• 1:20:20
  or Trader. Listen, guys, It's like, guys, I am not,
• 1:20:26
  you know, a Trump sycophant. I am not a member of the
• 1:20:29
  Trump called. I am dedicated to America. And in my mind, if
• 1:20:34
  Governor de Santis feels that he would be a better president of the United States,
• 1:20:39
  he owes it to America to run, He owes it to America to
• 1:20:42
  run, and that we should have these two men get in, get on
• 1:20:45
  the field, Okay, get in the ring, have it out, have
• 1:20:48
  the battle of ideas, and see who rises to the top. And so
• 1:20:54
  that's what I was behind, and I was like, DeSantis is my plan
• 1:20:58
  A. At this point, De Santis moved from my Plan B, it's
• 1:21:00
  my plan A because I realized that Trump de Santis could not be together because
• 1:21:03
  Trump was going toxic. Trump was going to reinforce all of the negative stereotypes
• 1:21:09
  the Left is put forward about him and go super toxic on the Santis.
• 1:21:14
  And therefore I decided to I just made the goal. I decided to bax
• 1:21:18
  it In at Santas And I know a lot of people feel the same way
• 1:21:21
  that I do. A lot of former Trump supporters. You know, we'll
• 1:21:25
  see, we'll see how many they really are. But you've used the word
• 1:21:28
  cult a couple times in this conversation. I've used it, right, Um,
• 1:21:31
  Right? Did you always realize that that Trump supporters were largely a cult
• 1:21:38
  or was this something that you came to this realization on with regard to cult,
• 1:21:42
  Well, Trump, I didn't. I never said that the Trump supporters
• 1:21:44
  were largely a cult. There was a segment of Trump supporters that are cult
• 1:21:48
  like, and you've got to understand the mindset. You know, when Trump
• 1:21:53
  first came out, there was the monster Ville. These were people that had
• 1:21:56
  not been involved in politics before and they finally got involved in hats because they
• 1:22:00
  were inspired by Trump and because he was tough and standing up to the Democrats
• 1:22:03
  and support So he said, I am your voice. This is one of
• 1:22:08
  the things he said, I'm your voice. So in essence, what Trump
• 1:22:11
  was saying was I had become your political self actualization. Now, if you
• 1:22:16
  cut your teeth, your political teeth on Trump. He's the first guy,
• 1:22:19
  his guy that brought you to the dance, and he was your political self
• 1:22:23
  actualization. You are ego involved with him to the point it's gonna be very
• 1:22:27
  difficult for you to ever pivot away from him, because you would have to
• 1:22:30
  admit to yourself that you had had horrible judgment in the past, or you
• 1:22:35
  had been wrong about something so cool to your being. It's like somebody staying
• 1:22:40
  in an abusive relationship. You know, yes, this person treats me badly,
• 1:22:43
  but I can't admit for the last twenty years we were a mistake.
• 1:22:45
  Therefore I'm staying with him. Well, these people are going to be the
• 1:22:47
  ones that are going to see no wrong in Trump. They're not gonna be
• 1:22:51
  able to see that he's admit that he's lying here. They're going to go
• 1:22:55
  after anybody who questions him as being some sort of crazy person or TDS or
• 1:23:02
  these sort of things. And so I understand where they're coming from. And
• 1:23:06
  now they're also I believe all are trump bots, which are thousands and thousands
• 1:23:12
  of these bot accounts that are controlled by just a few people. Because they
• 1:23:14
  all say the same things. They jump into your feed, they never respond
• 1:23:17
  to your question, They're always just saying these blatant statements, they're posting meetings
• 1:23:21
  on and so forth. There are those out there too, But you know,
• 1:23:25
  you can be a Trump supporter and love the guy without being a Trump
• 1:23:29
  cultist. I understand. I believe that there are three levels of Trump supporters.
• 1:23:34
  There's the Trump cult, there's Trump Cult light, and then there's got
• 1:23:42
  people who like Trump, aren't thrilled with him, but they would prefer him
• 1:23:46
  over anything else that they've seen. Would you would you agree with that assessment?
• 1:23:50
  Well, you know, a new poll came out recently that thought was
• 1:23:53
  very good. It said that amongst the GOP electorate, two complete sold for
• 1:23:59
  Trump. In the Trump camp no matter what it is, we're on the
• 1:24:04
  fence one way or the other, and twenty seven percent we're like, I'll
• 1:24:08
  never vote for Trump ever. So to me, this is the santus Is
• 1:24:12
  opportunity because you have that big group in the middle. Now, these people
• 1:24:15
  in the middle, when they're called by a polster, they say, yea,
• 1:24:16
  I'll vote for Trump because they don't know enough about the santus yet.
• 1:24:19
  But they are not hardcore. They're like spring ice. Like spring ice on
• 1:24:24
  a pond. It might look frozen, but it's not very thick. And
• 1:24:27
  my reasoning is that Trump support right now, but these poles were so far
• 1:24:30
  ahead there is not there's no intensity in this number. This could easily be
• 1:24:34
  broken if De Sants goes out there and proves himself and Trump has made the
• 1:24:38
  mistake of lowering expectations on the Santus so much that Desands can have a redemption
• 1:24:44
  arc here and become the hero of the story. I will agree with the
• 1:24:46
  last thing you said. I think the only good thing that has happened in
• 1:24:50
  the last couple of months as Trump has gone out to a huge national lead
• 1:24:57
  is that now Trump is going to lose the expectations game, and and now
• 1:25:03
  he's clearly the favorite, and DeSantis is clearly the big underdog, and what
• 1:25:10
  comes up must come down, And if it in fact does come down and
• 1:25:14
  De Santis surges, it creates a narrative of oh here, you know Trump
• 1:25:19
  is collapsing right right that that is the only positive element of what has happened
• 1:25:28
  over the last couple of months. But Bill, you know you and I
• 1:25:31
  have disagreed before about the political prospects of a Republican candidate or a Republican primary
• 1:25:38
  race. And I am clearly in the camp of someone who completely agrees with
• 1:25:44
  you. I respect you being one of the very few prominent people to ditch
• 1:25:47
  Trump to publicly support De Santis. We had Steve Cortez on our podcast couple
• 1:25:55
  episodes ago, and I was, you know, I was very much in
• 1:25:58
  communication with him during his transition from Trump to the Santis. I consider you,
• 1:26:04
  know, your roads to be similar, but I think significantly different.
• 1:26:09
  But I am not in the camp of people who think that the Santis is
• 1:26:14
  anywhere close to being the favorite, or someone who really even has what I
• 1:26:18
  would call a good chance to be the nominee. I don't see the scenario.
• 1:26:25
  I don't see the path barring your massive black swan events. So clearly
• 1:26:30
  you do see the path. Tell me what tell me, Tell me what
• 1:26:34
  the path is for De Santis to beat Trump in a way bill in a
• 1:26:40
  way that still allows the general election to be a viable possibility, because obviously
• 1:26:47
  a long slog to the convention is going to be so divisive, especially with
• 1:26:54
  Trump, you know, being a monkey throwing feces at the same this every
• 1:27:00
  opportunity that how in the world could to sandus survive that end defeat an incumbent
• 1:27:08
  president. So give me that path convinced me I'm wrong that there is no
• 1:27:14
  hope here for all this turning out. Well tell me first version. Yeah,
• 1:27:18
  I'll get that to you. First of all, De Santus is not
• 1:27:21
  announced yet, and I believe that's going to happen soon, and when it
• 1:27:26
  does, a lot of things going to change. Because I know a lot
• 1:27:29
  of people, a lot of influencers, former Trump influencer. I talked to
• 1:27:31
  him every day. They're just waiting for DeSantis to announce, and they're gonna
• 1:27:34
  come out and they're gonna go back to Santis. You know, Trump was
• 1:27:38
  touting those early endorsements. Do you realize that only two governors in the entire
• 1:27:41
  country have endorsed Trump at this point. I mean that means everybody else is
• 1:27:45
  keeping their powder dry. What are they waiting for the way for De Santis
• 1:27:47
  to announce. DeSantis just picked up thirty seven endorsements in Iowa. He just
• 1:27:53
  picked up the endorsement of the president of the Iowa Senate. He just picked
• 1:27:57
  up the endorsement of the House majority leader in Iowa. He just attacked De
• 1:28:02
  Santis for a six week abortion ban, forgetting the fact that Kim rentals An
• 1:28:05
  Iowa. The governor of Iowa just passed and signed a six week abortion ban
• 1:28:11
  in Iowa. Iowas an evangelical state. Trump is in trouble with the evangelicals.
• 1:28:16
  He attacked them for causing the mid terms metro and loss because their stand
• 1:28:21
  on abortion. Always attacked them on abortion again. The Santis has got momentum
• 1:28:27
  in Iowa. Okay, let me let me stop you. Let me let
• 1:28:30
  me stop you there, let me stop you there. In the last episode
• 1:28:33
  of this podcast, I made the same argument that Iowa has got to be
• 1:28:36
  the place where the Santist draws blood. He has to win Iowa and then
• 1:28:40
  it can be done because Iowa is a unique situation. I don't like the
• 1:28:44
  caucus because I think the caucus helps a cult and Trump has a cult.
• 1:28:49
  But Trump did not do well there in twenty sixteen. He didn't even do
• 1:28:53
  that well in twenty twenty against no opposition. I think the people of Iowa
• 1:28:58
  take this process very very serious. I am being as optimistic as possible.
• 1:29:02
  I'm willing to buy in the Santists pulls. The upset in Iowa still doesn't
• 1:29:09
  get in the nomination anywhere close to it. It doesn't even comes along close
• 1:29:13
  to winning. And in fact, historically, historically Iowa, the winner in
• 1:29:17
  Iowa has not won the Republican nomination whenever it has been contested, right,
• 1:29:24
  So, so historically the person who wins the seapack strapole never wins the nomination
• 1:29:28
  either. So okay, well that's that's I'm not sure that's a particularly good
• 1:29:31
  analogy. But I mean, so I realize that the Santists must win Iowa
• 1:29:38
  to keep this from getting out of hand, because you know, if if
• 1:29:42
  Trump wins Iowa New Hampshire, it's over. I mean, you agree with
• 1:29:45
  that, right, If if Trump wins Iowa and New Hampshire, this thing
• 1:29:47
  is over. Correct, you agree with that? Night, I don't agree
• 1:29:50
  with that. I don't think anything until it's over. Well, what you
• 1:29:54
  know, listen, listen. If I had the ability to predict the future
• 1:29:58
  as you seem to do, I wouldn't be wasting my time in politics.
• 1:30:00
  I'd be buying lottery tickets. Okay, I mean, we're gonna wait and
• 1:30:03
  see what happens. But here's what I think. I think if I had
• 1:30:08
  to prognosticate this, de Santus will win Iowa. This removes the veneer of
• 1:30:13
  invincibility for Trump. That's a major break domper Trump. Then he goes in
• 1:30:17
  New Hampshire. I just interviewed the House majority leader for New Hampshire on my
• 1:30:21
  show. He's just picked up fifty one endorsements from the legislature in New Hampshire.
• 1:30:27
  I would not be surprised if the governor of New Hampshire, who hates
• 1:30:29
  Trump, comes out endorses of Santus. He can pick up New Hampshire too.
• 1:30:33
  Then he moves into South Carolina. South Carolina is gonna be Trump's firewall.
• 1:30:36
  Also by till we get there. If all these other secondary candidates are
• 1:30:41
  getting two, three four percent in these races, they're not gonna want to
• 1:30:45
  keep doing that because it makes them look bad, unviable for the future.
• 1:30:48
  So by the time we get to South Carolina we could be down to a
• 1:30:50
  two man race. This whole dynamic completely changes, and the momentum is all
• 1:30:57
  in De Santus's favor. So I definitely see their path for De sand Us
• 1:31:00
  to take this thing to me. When you when you're this far along and
• 1:31:03
  Trump is supposedly the leader and he's only got twenty four percent core support,
• 1:31:08
  you know, here's the thing, twenty four percent corpse support of the GOP.
• 1:31:12
  GP's only about twenty five percent of the electric now, DNC twenty five
• 1:31:15
  percent, independence fifty percent. So if you did twenty four percent times twenty
• 1:31:18
  five percent, only six percent of the electric now is core Trump supporters of
• 1:31:23
  the nation. Now, you're compel. You're completely misinterpreting that CBS poll um
• 1:31:28
  the the way I interpret that pole where it says twenty seven percent are basically
• 1:31:34
  never Trump Republicans. Right, you know what that means to me? Seventy
• 1:31:39
  three percent are very likely to vote for Donald Trump because if you were,
• 1:31:44
  if you're not in the never Trump category, Now, how are you ever
• 1:31:47
  going to be in the never Trump you're spinning it. No, No,
• 1:31:54
  I'm not spinning it. I'm telling you that seventy three percent, seventy three
• 1:31:57
  percent are very likely to end up voting for Donald Trump. That's not that's
• 1:32:00
  not what the poll says. Twenty four percent are sold on Trump and forty
• 1:32:06
  nine percent are undecided. Now you're taking undecided and you're saying they're very likely
• 1:32:11
  Trump because if they because you're hold on, Because Bill, if you hold
• 1:32:15
  on, think about this, clearly, if you were somebody who was unlikely
• 1:32:20
  to vote for Trump. You would have no problem telling a poster that you
• 1:32:26
  would not saying they're unlikely to find they might, they might vote for Trump.
• 1:32:30
  They might vot Trump, they might vote for to Sandus, they're on
• 1:32:31
  the fence. But here's the thing. If Trump is a one known entity,
• 1:32:36
  known candidate, and if at this point you know everything there is to
• 1:32:41
  know about Trump and you're not committed to him, it means that you are
• 1:32:45
  an undecided voter who is likely to go with the challenger if the challenger can
• 1:32:49
  establish you they're a viable candidate. And that's where the SANDUS opportunity says.
• 1:32:55
  So Trump's support a mile wide and an each entry deep, it's spring ice
• 1:33:00
  in the pond. I'll tell you what. It could break down very very
• 1:33:02
  fast. And if you curs that that image of invincibility in Iowa and New
• 1:33:10
  Hampshire, all of a sudden, the entire Trump campaign falls apart. I
• 1:33:14
  agree about the the invincibility issue. That is absolutely critical, and you and
• 1:33:18
  I see ey'd eye on that. That's why you must win Iowa. I
• 1:33:25
  get that. I would highly recommend winning Iowa and New Hampshire. And I
• 1:33:29
  can say this, I would highly recommend that, right, Yes, okay,
• 1:33:31
  so I'm glad we someone agree on that. But um, but bill
• 1:33:35
  Um, let me outline a different scenario for you, Okay, because and
• 1:33:41
  why these early polls matter. That a lot of people into De Santa's camp
• 1:33:45
  have been crucifying me for being, you know, mister pat simistic, because
• 1:33:49
  I'm saying, guys, I think we are a month away. I said
• 1:33:54
  this earlier in this episode. I think we are a month away. That
• 1:33:58
  if a couple of weeks after the Santis announces and we are still within anything
• 1:34:02
  close to the current polling environment, it's basically over. Because you know,
• 1:34:09
  Trump is not going to do those debates. He will make the argument Joe
• 1:34:14
  Biden isn't doing debates. Debates are stupid to put your your candidate through.
• 1:34:18
  I am going to actually do our party a favor by avoiding these debates.
• 1:34:25
  Are these events are a joke, They're rigged against me. Why would I
• 1:34:29
  put myself in front of liberal questioning. I need to prepare to beat Joe
• 1:34:32
  Biden, and these debates are an exercise that hurts the cause of beating Joe
• 1:34:38
  Biden. And the conservative media will largely buy that his cult following will by
• 1:34:45
  that there will be no price to pay. If they have the debates without
• 1:34:48
  Trump, the Santis will have his hands tied behind his back because he will
• 1:34:54
  be attacked by everybody on that stage. He will look small without Trump there,
• 1:34:59
  and he won't even be able to go after Trump because it will be
• 1:35:01
  seen by the conservative elites in the media and in the Trump supporters as inappropriate
• 1:35:10
  and wrong and cowardly for him to go after Donald Trump when Trump isn't even
• 1:35:14
  there. So it's a completely Do you really think that, I mean,
• 1:35:17
  yeah, I Trump. You really think that if Trump does not show for
• 1:35:20
  the debate, and if Santis goes after Trump because Trump was too afraid to
• 1:35:25
  show up for the debate, he will be the bad guys woman, the
• 1:35:30
  bad guy Santis will be. I could not disagree with you more, Bill
• 1:35:34
  bill Well. I am what in the last seven years, in the way
• 1:35:40
  that the conservative media has treated Trump and the way his supporters have rallied around
• 1:35:45
  him, would give you any indication that I am wrong? They no matter
• 1:35:49
  what he puts out there, they take his narrative, and his narrative will
• 1:35:56
  be I am doing a favor for the Republican already by avoiding these I'm not
• 1:36:01
  buying. I'm not buying your premise. Let me ask you a question.
• 1:36:03
  What Trump did skip a debate in twenty sixteen cycle? What happened right after
• 1:36:08
  he did that? What was one thing that he won the nomination? He
• 1:36:11
  won the nomination, He won the nomination, He won the nomination, he
• 1:36:15
  won New Hampshire. He lost, He skipped a debate, and he lost
• 1:36:20
  Iowa. And he came out and he said, when they asked him,
• 1:36:23
  why do you think he lost Iowa? He said, probably because I skipped
• 1:36:26
  the debate his own words, Do you do realize Bill, that we now
• 1:36:30
  have Donald Trump as a completely different human being. He won the twenty sixteen
• 1:36:35
  nomination. After that, he defeated the wicked witch of the West, Hillary
• 1:36:40
  Clinton. He was president for four years, which his supporters think was wildly
• 1:36:45
  successful. And they just discount COVID as not being his fault somehow, And
• 1:36:49
  it was actually part of the effort to sabotage him. And so he's he
• 1:36:54
  is superman now. He wasn't superman in Iowa in twenty sixteen. It is
• 1:37:00
  a completely different world now. And I guess the part the most is most
• 1:37:03
  frustrated. Trump has lost half of Trump has lost half of support since twenty
• 1:37:06
  two What are you talking about. I'm talking Trump got ninety four percent.
• 1:37:10
  Trump had got Listen to me. If it's like Trump got of the GOP
• 1:37:15
  vote in twenty twenty, Right now he's running at about average, about fifty
• 1:37:17
  two percent in the RCP average, he has lost half of his support half
• 1:37:23
  of the people who voted twenty twenty. That is completely accurate. I got
• 1:37:27
  did you happen to see the Morning Did you happen to see the Morning consult
• 1:37:30
  Paul? This morning? Bill's sixty I'd be shocked at sixty one, I
• 1:37:34
  sent Bill. I'd be shocked of Morning Consultant, Emerson College, and uh,
• 1:37:40
  what's the other name? McCloughlin. I was probably all these guys are
• 1:37:43
  earned on the Trump Hey, well, I got no proof of that.
• 1:37:45
  I know who that McLoughlin is. But these others, I would not be
• 1:37:46
  surprised. Their numbers are so out of whack. It's completely preposterous. And
• 1:37:49
  let's let's talk about polling. It's like, okay, argument were get relying
• 1:37:54
  upon poles. Let's look at two poles. ABC poll just came out said
• 1:37:58
  Trump is beating Biden by seven points. A few days later, if Social
• 1:38:01
  Waters comes out says Biden is beating Trump by six points, that's a thirteen
• 1:38:05
  point swing. These poles are complete bullets, they're complete imaginations. They're propaganda.
• 1:38:13
  You don't have two poles come out from two legitimate polsters within days of
• 1:38:15
  each other with a thirteen point difference. Here. Here's just probably nobody is
• 1:38:20
  going to evaluate a Polster in November of twenty twenty four for a pole they
• 1:38:25
  put out in May of two and twenty three. It's just propaganda at this
• 1:38:30
  point. Okay, I don't think it's propaganda, but I understand where you're
• 1:38:32
  coming from on the fact that there's no accountability and there could be assistency.
• 1:38:38
  I get that. But here's the part that bothers me most about the overly
• 1:38:43
  optimistic to Stanta speed. They completely discount I don't know if you are or
• 1:38:46
  not. You can respond whatever y you want. Obviously, they do not
• 1:38:51
  accept the premise, which is my bedrock foundational belief in all this. They
• 1:38:58
  the past means nothing in this race because we've never had a former president out
• 1:39:06
  of office running in a modern primary who has a cult and a media empire
• 1:39:14
  on his side, deeply invested in his success with so that's never happened before.
• 1:39:19
  The idea that somehow he's going to evaporate like Jeb Bush in twenty sixteen
• 1:39:26
  is preposterous. I mean, it's ridiculous. Who does the who's the media
• 1:39:30
  empire that's back No. Trump just just posted the other day that Fox News
• 1:39:34
  is a complete waste of time. They're horrible, they're against him. So
• 1:39:36
  and so which media empire is it that's back in Trump? Breitbart dot Com,
• 1:39:43
  Newsmax, one, American News, Um, all of talk radio uh,
• 1:39:49
  Sean Hannity or Ingram Uh, They're all sorts of massive media in Twitter
• 1:39:59
  influencer with huge accounts. We're very much on the Trump train. I mean,
• 1:40:03
  the idea, the idea that somehow Trump is just going to fade away
• 1:40:09
  here once the santist comes into the race and starts attacking him when there's not
• 1:40:12
  even likely to be real debates, is a fantasy to me. And look,
• 1:40:17
  no one would be happier Bill, nobody on the planet would be happier
• 1:40:21
  than me to be wrong about this. And part of the reason why I'm
• 1:40:25
  having you on is to try to convince me that you're right, because I
• 1:40:28
  want to believe that you are correct. But it's to me, it's absurd.
• 1:40:33
  It's obscene that people aren't understanding what the last seven years have taught us
• 1:40:40
  about how the Republican Party and the conservative media are going to react and respond
• 1:40:45
  to Trump in any particular situation. My gosh, he just got indicted and
• 1:40:50
  his poll numbers rose significantly, and the same things probably gonna happen because of
• 1:40:55
  his the bogus civil lawsuit. You gotta get it, you know. The
• 1:41:00
  thing was that you gotta diet for a which one I believe the Democrats did
• 1:41:03
  that to bolster Trump because they know they don't have a case there and they're
• 1:41:09
  just they realized that they're going to create a martyr of Trump. You know,
• 1:41:12
  the left wants Trump to be the nominee because he's great for ratings and
• 1:41:15
  he's gonna lose in the general election. Okay, so yeah, because he
• 1:41:19
  can't carry independent voters. Bill, we agree on that. But when was
• 1:41:24
  the last time the entire media industrial complex uh took a stance and didn't get
• 1:41:30
  what they wanted. I mean, the left wing media wants Trump. Hillary
• 1:41:36
  was Hillary hat was given a Hillary was given a ninety eight percent chance of
• 1:41:41
  winning by the New York Times the night before the election, ninety eight percent
• 1:41:45
  chance. You didn't the time, Bill, No, no, I know
• 1:41:50
  the media is wrong all the time. You didn't let me finish. And
• 1:41:54
  at least in twenty sixteen, you had the right wing media backing Trump,
• 1:41:59
  the left wing backing Hillary, and an upset happened. Here you have a
• 1:42:03
  situation where the left wing media wants Trump to be the nominee for the reasons
• 1:42:06
  you just stated, and the right wing media wants Trump to be the nominee
• 1:42:13
  because they are Their customer base is largely Trump cult members. And then there's
• 1:42:18
  another element of this Bill, and let's this is the ultimate The ultimate goal
• 1:42:23
  here is right to get the santis elected president. I'm telling you that because
• 1:42:29
  what a Santist presidency would mean to every element of the media, specifically with
• 1:42:35
  regard to COVID accountability. They are going to be so deeply invested in making
• 1:42:41
  sure the Santist does not win that there is they are. They're going to
• 1:42:45
  be thrilled to have Trump be the nominee. And and that is a unique
• 1:42:51
  situation. And the deck is uniquely stacked against the Santists. So I'll give
• 1:42:58
  you another opportunity. Tell me why I'm wrong, or tell me how descends
• 1:43:01
  overcomes that obvious reality. Well, here's the thing, and this is the
• 1:43:05
  beauty of the situation right now in my mind, in my opinion, based
• 1:43:09
  on the people I talk to, Desands is very close to announcing. I
• 1:43:13
  would guess it's before the end of the month. I've talked to a number
• 1:43:15
  four sources that think it's going to be as soon as Monday, because he
• 1:43:17
  doesn't want to announce on a holiday weekend. Uh. You know, rumors
• 1:43:21
  are that some people have been moving into different locations and so on and so
• 1:43:25
  forth. He needs to announce if that's happening based upon the law. So
• 1:43:29
  some people I've talked to think I said it's they think it's going to be
• 1:43:33
  as early as Monday. When that happens, then we're going to see some
• 1:43:36
  different dynamics come into play here and we will find out. You know,
• 1:43:42
  we're getting close to the time for them to play the game. You know,
• 1:43:44
  it's it's been preseason so far. You know, sometimes the teams that
• 1:43:48
  do very well in preseason don't do very well in the season. I think
• 1:43:51
  what what team was that? I can't think of the team, but they
• 1:43:54
  are the Raiders. I think we're like three and one or four. We're
• 1:43:57
  knowing the preseason. They got cream during the Raiders season, so you know
• 1:44:00
  we've been in preseason. This is you know, Trump didn't even announce until
• 1:44:03
  the middle of June his first time out. So once this andis announces,
• 1:44:08
  once he's a sure thing, once he's real, once he takes off the
• 1:44:11
  gloves and he stops row up a doping Trump, like Pierce more Morgan has
• 1:44:15
  just said in an article that he's been doing. Then I think a lot
• 1:44:17
  of these dynamics are going to change. But we'll find out. We're close
• 1:44:21
  to knowing. We don't have to guess anymore, you know. And I
• 1:44:25
  Yeah, if we're a month into this thing and De Santis is still pulling
• 1:44:29
  forty points behind Trump, I would be shocked, and that would not be
• 1:44:31
  good for De Santis. I'm not saying that's a deal killer. That is
• 1:44:34
  not the result that we are looking for. So I'm hoping that we see
• 1:44:39
  a major that we see a major turnaround out there. But then again,
• 1:44:42
  I don't trust these posters. Most of these posters are leftists. Okay,
• 1:44:45
  a lot of these posters I believe are on the Trump payroll, because you
• 1:44:49
  know, let me put it this way. If you got a poster on
• 1:44:53
  the Trump payroll McLoughlin, and you have these two other posters, Morning Consult
• 1:44:57
  and Emerson, and they're getting the same exact numbers of mcglo, I'm just
• 1:45:00
  assuming they're probably on the train Trump paid roll because you know, typically you
• 1:45:03
  don't get many poles this early in the cycle, and yet we're having four
• 1:45:06
  or five polls a week. Who's paying for all these? Not DeSantis?
• 1:45:12
  Well, so we'll see. We'll see what I get that you don't I
• 1:45:15
  do. I will tell me finish with Let me finish with this thought.
• 1:45:17
  Let me finish with this thought real quickly, as you ask you know,
• 1:45:20
  why am I so positive? Why am I so optimistic? What is the
• 1:45:24
  downside of me being so positive and optimistic? I'm positive optimistic. I'm going
• 1:45:30
  to take all the necessary steps to make that positive, optimistic outcome of reality.
• 1:45:34
  If I'm pessimistic, then that takes the edge off of my efforts.
• 1:45:39
  That does nobody any good. So I'm approaching this thing as if de Santis
• 1:45:43
  is a lock. De Santus is gonna win. There's nothing that can be
• 1:45:45
  done that can stop this freight train that's coming. Because what's the downside of
• 1:45:49
  that? There is no downside? Well, here's the downspositives of that.
• 1:45:53
  Well, here's where I disagree with you. First of all, I disagree
• 1:45:56
  with your preseason analogy. I think we're in the middle of the third quarter.
• 1:46:00
  And you gotta be kidding me. Trump didn't even announce at with the
• 1:46:02
  sixteenth of June the two thousand. How can this be the middle of the
• 1:46:05
  third quarter. This is because this is preseason right now. Okay, Well,
• 1:46:09
  I wish I wish this was preseason. It's not. It's we're in
• 1:46:12
  the middle of the third quarter. As far as especially because of the unique
• 1:46:15
  dynamics of Trump being a former president and the nature of his support um.
• 1:46:20
  But as far as optimism versus pessimism, Um, if you have kids in
• 1:46:26
  a building and you see smoke coming from the building, um, you know,
• 1:46:32
  would it be better to be optimistic that that smoke means nothing and uh
• 1:46:38
  and just lead the kids in the building? Or or would it or would
• 1:46:41
  it you're not seeing smoke being being forty three points down nationally. It's not
• 1:46:45
  Smokeville. It's not smoke. That's not smoke. Being forty three points down
• 1:46:50
  nationally after after having been dead even with Trump you months ago, that's not
• 1:46:55
  a smoke. You're you're a political guy. You're a political guy. You
• 1:46:58
  should know the national polls for a primary or meaningless because primaries are stake elections
• 1:47:04
  and each one affects the next one. You should know that. How can
• 1:47:08
  you not know that? Nationalists of people. I'm so aware, Bill,
• 1:47:13
  I'm so aware of that that I'm I'm understanding that in this situation, that's
• 1:47:17
  not the way it's gonna be. Because we've never had a former president with
• 1:47:21
  a cult and a media empire and a billions of dollars on his side.
• 1:47:27
  That's never been before. Billions of dollars. Where's the billions? Where's billions
• 1:47:30
  of This is Jeff plush, This is this is this is not relax for
• 1:47:38
  just a second. Trump's Trump's fundraising is a nimica. Best until the Bragg
• 1:47:43
  indictment, Trump had, his fundraising was a disaster. Never back down.
• 1:47:47
  He does a super practice. That's never. He doesn't need any money.
• 1:47:50
  What the hell are you talking about? You think he doesn't got any money
• 1:47:54
  on his own campaign. It's all he has to do is go back on
• 1:47:56
  Twitter. He's got ninety million followers he can communicate with on his phone.
• 1:48:00
  What does he need money for him? Plus, he's supposedly of multi billionaire
• 1:48:04
  spent he spent a billionaire. Clearly you're not clear on some things. Trump
• 1:48:10
  is a billionaire, but he's asset rich in cash poor. I'm more aware
• 1:48:15
  of that than you realize. Bill. I'm okay. I don't think he's
• 1:48:18
  a real billionaires, do you know? Okay, here's the thing. In
• 1:48:21
  twenty twenty, Trump spent over a billion dollars on his campaign. Do you
• 1:48:26
  know how much of his own money he put into his campaign in twenty twenty
• 1:48:28
  do you know? I'm sure it was very small? What eight millions?
• 1:48:31
  Eight million? Trump does not Trump right now is not even paying his own
• 1:48:34
  legal bills. He's using superPAC money to pay his legal bills. He's cheap.
• 1:48:40
  He's not aware of that. Bill. That's not my point. My
• 1:48:43
  point. My point is that we live in a different world now, and
• 1:48:46
  that because Trump is such a celebrity and gets get so much free media that
• 1:48:50
  he can run a very inexpensive political campaign now Iowa. He's vulnerable in Iowa
• 1:48:57
  because you need to spend money for organization there, and DeSantis apparently we'll have
• 1:49:01
  that kind of money. So I'm still fairly optimistic about Iowa. But in
• 1:49:05
  the long haul, and let let's finish on this point, Bill, because
• 1:49:08
  this, to me is maybe where your expertise is the most important. As
• 1:49:13
  someone who has lived and been a leader in the Trump cult and has now
• 1:49:17
  transitioned to being part of the tam team. De Santis, let's I'm gonna
• 1:49:23
  take your scenario right. I'm going to be the optimist. So DeSantis wins
• 1:49:28
  in Iowa, and he you know, comes in a close second. I
• 1:49:31
  think is maybe the best he could do. In New Hampshire. The rest
• 1:49:34
  of Thempshire going away, well, good luck with that, um, and
• 1:49:40
  then uh, you know, the rest of the field, I'm the rest
• 1:49:43
  of the field fades away and it's Mattawa Mono. And it all comes really
• 1:49:48
  down to Super Tuesday and the Florida Primary and Florida voters, for some reason,
• 1:49:54
  and I'm very concerned about this and happen for months, decide that they're
• 1:49:58
  going to essue the temptation of having their cake and eat it in it two
• 1:50:00
  while having Trump as their president and DeSantis as their governor, and Desantist comes
• 1:50:05
  back because he's losing right now in Florida, and he wins the Florida primary
• 1:50:10
  according according to a pole. Yeah, he's losing it if we're according to
• 1:50:13
  a poll that I don't believe. Okay, fine, I mean he's giving
• 1:50:16
  it. He seemed to just accept these polls as when I'm giving you that
• 1:50:20
  you have two poles coming out that are complete opposites. At the same time,
• 1:50:25
  they're not gospel, They're just there their fictions. I'm giving you your
• 1:50:29
  scenario. So but I would you know, I would hope, I would
• 1:50:32
  hope that you would acknowledge that there is no scenario where the Santist wins Iowa,
• 1:50:40
  New Hampshire and South Carolina and Trump says, well, you got me.
• 1:50:44
  I'm I'm giving up, I'm withdrawing, and I'm endorsing Ron de Santis
• 1:50:47
  the president and let's all unify to beat Joe Biden. You would agree that
• 1:50:51
  that is not a scenario that is in the rational I don't agree with you
• 1:50:56
  at all, because here's here's the idea, here's the thing, here's the
• 1:50:58
  thing. Trump's orders online, some of those that are more of the cultial's
• 1:51:02
  type, they say, oh, well, you know, if Trump is
• 1:51:03
  the nominee, we're gonna stay home and not vote. Well, of course
• 1:51:06
  that's preposterous, because what will happen is that it looks like DeSantis is going
• 1:51:11
  to win, Trump will end up endorsing him because Trump wants to have skin
• 1:51:18
  in the game once this is over with, and he wants to be able
• 1:51:21
  to say that DeSantis could not have won the general election if I had not
• 1:51:25
  endorsed him for the presidency. And so he says, I, just like
• 1:51:29
  he said, I gave him Florida, I gave him the presidency, and
• 1:51:31
  therefore I need to seat at his table as his right hand man, as
• 1:51:34
  his obi wan instructing him, giving advices on its sofa. Because Trump wants
• 1:51:39
  to stay an important player in the game. Trump is not going to just
• 1:51:43
  crawl away with his tail between his legs. But he's also not going to
• 1:51:46
  face a humiliating defeat. So yeah, I mean, this could go all
• 1:51:50
  the way to the convention. It could be over very quickly. But I
• 1:51:54
  think that most of the other candidates are going to back out because they don't
• 1:51:57
  want you know, if these other candidates are coming in at you know,
• 1:52:00
  two or three percent, nobody wants to face that. In twenty sixteen,
• 1:52:03
  you know, Rubio and Crews were still you know, they were still coming
• 1:52:06
  into you know, twenty twenty five percent and these these races, and Trump
• 1:52:11
  won with the plurality the vote. Uh not with the majority of the vote.
• 1:52:14
  So they hung in there. But this is not going to be the
• 1:52:16
  scenario that they have here. You got Trump into Santis and everybody else.
• 1:52:20
  Well, I'm a little concerned that v Vague Ramaswami has absolutely no incentive to
• 1:52:26
  get out of the race, and that Trump wants him in the race,
• 1:52:29
  and that he says a lot of things that appeal to Republican voters, and
• 1:52:33
  you know, he's Indians, so he adds a little color into the mix.
• 1:52:38
  And the media like one or two percent in the polls. Now,
• 1:52:42
  well, now sometimes he's up to five or six. And you know,
• 1:52:45
  if if I can see Pence not wanting to be humiliated, I can see
• 1:52:48
  uh you know, um, you know, Nicky Haley not wanting to be
• 1:52:53
  humiliated and getting out before South Carolina, where if she didn't, you know,
• 1:52:58
  have a good number there that would be very much humiliating. But I
• 1:53:01
  don't think they're all going to get out for quite a while, especially in
• 1:53:05
  this modern media age. But let me just go back to the court.
• 1:53:10
  I want to go back to the core appointment. Bill. Okay, So
• 1:53:13
  you just said something extraordinary with regard to your analysis of Trump's incentive structure,
• 1:53:18
  the idea that you think that Trump would want to endorse the Santists wholeheartedly because
• 1:53:27
  he wants to be able to take credit for a De Santist victory more a
• 1:53:32
  whole on a second, you know Donald Trump's mentality to me, Donald Trump's
• 1:53:39
  mentality is far more benefited by the idea of sabotaging De Santists, so that
• 1:53:46
  for all time Trump can say, see, I told you so, you
• 1:53:53
  should have gone with me, your morons. And if we had drawn with
• 1:53:56
  me, we wouldn't want to do that. Up would have to have to
• 1:54:00
  uh destroy America and give us another four years of Biden and Trump. You
• 1:54:04
  know, Trumps, You really think Donald Trump cares about America, South,
• 1:54:13
  Bill, No, Donald Trump cares about America. Donald cares about America.
• 1:54:17
  He's got some personality falls and so on and so forth, and we knew
• 1:54:19
  that about him. He's he's kind of a narcissist obviously, but you know,
• 1:54:24
  I think he loves America. He cares about America, and he would
• 1:54:27
  not torpedo the GOP ticket in order just to just to say, yeah,
• 1:54:32
  well, you know, if you elected me and go down as a guy
• 1:54:35
  that gave us four more years of Biden and become an absolute gad fly in
• 1:54:40
  the Republican Party. So here's what I think is gonna happen, because I
• 1:54:43
  know we're out of time here, There's what I think it's gonna happen is
• 1:54:45
  uh, De Santus is gonna win Iowa. He's gonna roll out in New
• 1:54:49
  Hampshire. South Carolina's gonna be a battle. That's a that's an open primary
• 1:54:53
  state. You never know what's gonna happen to those well Democrats voteing mischief.
• 1:54:57
  We'll see, but South Carolina will be Trump's firewall like was Biden's firewall.
• 1:55:01
  And then if Trump can win South Carolina, which may be difficult because South
• 1:55:05
  Carolina is very evangelical, We'll see what happens from there. But I think
• 1:55:10
  that this is going to go very very well for De Santis. You know,
• 1:55:13
  he just picked up fifty one endorsements in New Hampshire. He just picked
• 1:55:15
  up thirty seven endorsements in Iowa. Things are picking up the steam for him.
• 1:55:19
  He's gonna have a lot of money. His Superpack Never Back Down raised
• 1:55:24
  thirty million dollars in one month in March. So there's a lot of a
• 1:55:29
  lot of energy going on. But we'll see. This is why we play
• 1:55:30
  the game, right, That is why we play the game. Bill,
• 1:55:32
  And you know, I think either man could be a competent president, but
• 1:55:35
  my preference is a santas well. Bill. Nobody would be happier on the
• 1:55:40
  planet Earth for you to be right and for your scenario right actually happen.
• 1:55:46
  If that occurs, I will be the first person to give you all the
• 1:55:51
  credit and hosannas on Twitter and on this podcast. However, if it doesn't
• 1:55:57
  happen, I hope you'll come back and explain why you were wrong and I
• 1:56:00
  was right. But regardless can do it if if none of these things happen.
• 1:56:04
  If none thing has happened, we can do a post mortem on this
• 1:56:06
  once we have actual information or not just guesses, because right now it's just
• 1:56:11
  well, regardless whether you come back I'm glad that this interview went a lot
• 1:56:15
  better than the one. I don't even remember the last one. You have
• 1:56:18
  to forgive me so so. So we're making progress. So that's that's a
• 1:56:23
  good sign for the national dialogue. That John is a good debate. I
• 1:56:27
  like a good debate. It's a good side for the national dialog. You
• 1:56:30
  always have people that agree with you all the time. You know, well,
• 1:56:31
  I agree with that, and and it's a good sign for the national
• 1:56:34
  dialogue that the two of us can have a conversation about this for an hour
• 1:56:39
  and we were now on the same side. Let me ask you a question.
• 1:56:42
  You love America, don't you. You love America, don't you?
• 1:56:45
  Yeah, see, I love America too. We both want to get to
• 1:56:47
  Grandma's house. We just have different routes on how to get there. Well,
• 1:56:49
  we'll figure it out. Well, I hope you're right. Although living
• 1:56:54
  in California, I sometimes wonder if I actually still do live in in America
• 1:56:58
  or not. That's part of the pro California. I love to. California's
• 1:57:00
  got great weather. I mean, the taxes are hind the people are crazy,
• 1:57:01
  but it's got great weather. Though, Bill, where can people find
• 1:57:06
  you Bill on Twitter at mitchell Bii, and also my website is your Voice,
• 1:57:14
  All one Word, Your Voice dot news anyws. All right, Bill
• 1:57:17
  Mitchell, a former Trump's superfan turned supporter of Ron De Santis. Thanks so
• 1:57:23
  much for your time. That'll do it for this episode of the Death of
• 1:57:26
  Journalism. Please remember to subscribe, rate, review, and share this podcast
• 1:57:30
  with others. If you're share it on social media, attack me. I'll
• 1:57:31
  be happy to share your post as well. Until next time, my name
• 1:57:34
  is John Ziegler. This is the Death of journalism. Thanks for listening.