Overtime - Episode #467: Shrinking GOP, Stormy Setup, Trump Challengers

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

All right.

Now Malcolm Nance is back.

Great.

Okay, Malcolm Nance, how would you suggest the U.S.

retaliate against against Russia and attack?

Oh, we asked you that question.

I did.

Steve Schmidt, since you'll get another one.

I see another one here and there for you.

Don't try not to repeat the question.

I already asked the guest.

Since Trump's performance in Helsinki, have any of your GOP contacts in Congress become more inclined to believe...

Well, let me ask a different question.

These are shitty questions today.

I hear that the Republican Party is shrinking.

That I hear this all the time, that because Trump's numbers within the party are so high, it's because the actual number of Republicans are going down.

And it always makes me want to ask you, how many Steve Schmidts are out there?

How many people in the Republican Party, or who used to be, who are now switching?

I think it's a very significant number, and I think you're going to see college-educated Republican women in these swing districts deliver the blue wave for the Democrats, because I think there are many, many people who have left.

But the future of the National Republican Party looks exactly like the future of the California GOP, which for the first time in history of the two parties in any state, the Republican Party in this state is now a third party.

It's smaller than the decline of state registrations.

When you look at the anathema

that

millennials feel towards the Republican Party, you look at African Americans, brown people, you look at just demographically the country, and you consider that when people imprint on a political party generationally at 18 years age, they remain faithful to that party really for their lifetimes, for decades and decades and decades.

So the Republican Party has a huge, huge, huge problem demographically, and it's going to continue to shrink.

But as it gets shrinker, as it shrinks, it gets smaller, just like the California Republican Party has, it will become crazier.

But to the point that I made earlier about the media stuff, this was also not, I mean, Trump was an accelerant.

He has made the situation worse.

But weirdly, if you look at data over time of party registration, the decline in Republican registration in some ways began much earlier before Trump, and it was a lot about younger voters, specifically young women.

If you look at what millennial men's party identification looks like, you go back to the first time millennials could vote, which I think was the 2000, 2004 era.

Millennial men are just as Republican today as they were then.

But for millennial women, those numbers have fallen to where it's a Democrat plus 50 margin among millennials.

This is a huge problem for the GOP system that the party's not paying attention to.

But that shrinking party gets to what you're saying.

I mean, everything that we see now is about a shrinking group of Americans trying their best to enshrine

power and privilege and prestige.

And

so they know that there will come a day when they won't have the numbers to do it, but if they can lock in as much unchangeable or difficult to change mechanisms, then they will hold on to it for another

generation.

They don't have the numbers to you.

Well, you have to

put the rules.

But that is

the same thing.

But that is why they stole that

Supreme Court seat from Barack Obama.

Right.

Because you're trying to tie in something for a generation.

It's not about numbers.

And if we had mandatory voting, they would not get close to winning office.

If everybody who is a vote, but we don't have mandatory voting.

We have voter suppression.

That's what I'm saying.

It's about rules.

They radically change the rules.

Wherever they get power, they change the rules some more.

And ultimately, the ultimate rules book is the Constitution, and they are taking dead aim at our Constitution.

And Brett Kavanaugh is the Koch-selected candidate.

You look at how he came to be through the Federalist Society,

Leonard Ligio.

Koch was investing seed money as he played in the Federalist Society since the 1970s.

Kavanaugh is their guy.

He was selected by Donald McGahn, who is a Koch person who is

Trump's White House counsel, who did the vetting of these candidates.

This is the Koch candidate for the Supreme Court, and that is a crucial thing that we should be talking about over the next month.

Okay, I was going to ask about Stormy Daniels.

Wait, wait, wait.

Let me finish.

It's serious.

Stormy Daniels got arrested.

Supreme Court Stormy.

You don't find this alarming that we are now arresting private citizens?

It's not that it's Stormy Daniels, but it was a trumped-up charge.

It was a police setup.

It was a police setup.

What do you think happened?

Do you think it came, who gave that order, or was it order not needed to be given?

No, no order needed to be given.

I mean, you know, it's like the fight between the brown shirts and the black shirts under Nazi Germany back then.

You just hint that you want change.

That means rolling up your political enemies.

You roll them up.

Whenever you want to create mayhem, it's like you said, you know, you have Nuremberg and the Hillbilly Nuremberg, and these people will go out and they will affect change themselves.

If that means walking into a newsroom and killing everybody in it, they'll do it.

It's unspoken laws and unspoken orders that are given out there.

And as you said, these things are long ball games.

They will change the system to allow these things to be unpunishable.

I think it's politically motivated, but it's part and parcel with ICE agents, for example, in a Concord, New Hampshire bus station, walking down the line, asking people for their papers, please, to show that you're a citizen.

And so in this country, the only appropriate response when someone asks you to show your papers and prove citizenship is to say, go fuck yourself, sir.

Right, right.

Right, right, because this is the United States of America and we don't have to show papers before we get on a bus.

But all of this is alarming.

All of it is radical

and we shouldn't be used to it.

And but we got used to it by the current president demanding to see the papers of the previous one.

You know,

it is him.

It is all him.

It is him signaling and people saying that is fine with me and they are kind of falling in line and doing exactly what he's doing.

Well,

it's all him.

This goes way back to 1964 and the Republican Party deciding to plant its flag in the states of the former Confederacy.

Let me just show you.

And everything else follows from that.

That's right.

It's like in War of the Worlds.

The tripods were underground.

And then they came to the planet and they came out from underground.

But they were always under there.

Look at the first law enforcement organization that endorsed Trump.

Border Patrol and ICE.

They are, you know, I feel sad about this because I love my law enforcement officers.

I train them in countering terrorism and counterterrorism intelligence all the time.

I engage with them, but there is a block of people right now that think that they are the enforcement arm of the Trump administration.

And they are taking these orders literally.

Like you said, New Hampshire bus station, really?

You think that there's going to be illegal immigrants trying to get on a bus up there?

They want to enforce his orders.

And the head of ICE himself came on television and said, until the orders are changed, changed that's going to be the orders.

Locking up kids, no problem.

This is a malfunction that has to be recalibrated.

And when we change, if we change this Congress, we're going to have to change laws to where they're going to have to obey the Constitution, not Donald Trump.

Okay.

I thought we had those laws, but maybe not.

All right.

Last question, briefly.

James asks, who in the prospective field of Democratic candidates do you think would be most likely to beat Donald Trump in 2020?

That was your guide.

The essential skill is going to be somebody who can provoke Trump, have Trump swing at them, and then be smart enough to stand back and not get into a brawl in the middle of the ring, but to cut Trump with humor, to laugh at him.

Right.

He is a narcissistic bully and a buffoon.

And that's.

He should be laughed at.

He should be mocked.

Humor is the most potent weapon.

And that's why Al Franken would have been a great person in the ring.

So isn't it great we got rid of him?

When you stand up there at Robert De Niro, with all respect, and he says, fuck you, Trump, he's playing Trump's game.

He's like Godzilla.

You nuke Godzilla, he just gets stronger.

Right?

You try to out-vial Donald Trump?

Yeah, and also

we're supposed to be the artists and the poets.

That's the best we can do.

Fuck you.

But you didn't name a person.

Well,

I like Seth Moulton, Tim Ryan, the two young congressmen

from Ohio, because I think that there's going to be a lot of energy for new.

And, you know, we talk about that loss of affinity for the Republican Party among women.

I mean, it looks like the commander's meeting from the handmaid's tale when these guys get together

for a Senate hearing.

And so I think that whether it's John Hickenlooper, whether it's Eric Garcetti of this city, it's going to be someone new.

Kamala Harris

out of the progressive wing.

But I will add to that, it is very hard to win the Democratic Democratic primary

and not be from the South.

And you haven't named anybody from the South.

And I think you have to mix into that group people like Mayor Landrieu of New Orleans and people like that because the Democratic primary system swings South so quickly.

This is how Bernie had a problem.

He could have won, but

he did not get into the South quick enough, did not have his message strong enough, did not connect closely enough with those older black women voters.

And you have a, you know, Killer Mike is is a great guy, but old black woman says, killer Mike?

What's a killer Mike?

You know?

So it just doesn't work.

So this idea of like someone from the Midwest or from California, it could work, but it's hard.

But there's going to be at least two credible African-American candidates, and there may be three if Governor Patrick runs.

All right, nobody took me seriously when I asked you to get out of here.

I've got an outsider.

Briefly give me a name.

I'm an outsider.

We're not doing notes.

I just asked for names.

I asked for briefly a name.

We got to go.

Yes, Mel.

Duckworth.

Tammy Duckworth.

Thank you.

A name.

Thank you very much, everybody.

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