Electoral Shock Therapy

Speaker 1 I will be in Australia for the next few weeks, hoping that the cricket can provide the distraction for everyone that it has so successfully provided for me since I was six years old.

Speaker 1 If you want to come to my shows, there is a Bugle Live in Melbourne on the 22nd of December, where I'll be joined by Sammy Shar and Lloyd Langford.

Speaker 1 And I'm doing the Zoltgeist, my stand-up show in Melbourne on the 23rd of December.

Speaker 1 And we've just added a possibly optimistic extra show in Sydney on the 3rd of January. The 2nd of January show is sold out, but please, please, please come on the 3rd.

Speaker 1 My UK tour extension begins at the end of january all details and ticket links at andyzaltzman.co.uk

Speaker 1 the bugle audio newspaper for a visual world

Speaker 1 hello buglers and welcome to issue 4320 of the bugle audio newspaper for a visual and frankly unfathomable world i'm andy zaltzman and this is the official bugle review of the 2024 US presidential election.

Speaker 1 Oh dear. Thank you for listening.
Until next time from me, Andy Zaltzman. Sorry, what's that?

Speaker 1 We have to go a bit longer. We need to show some

Speaker 1 working. Okay, well

Speaker 1 since apparently that was too short for

Speaker 1 Chris's liking,

Speaker 1 well, to fill in the gaps, the aching. No, that's not true.

Speaker 1 The aching doesn't. The harrowingly gouged-out voids, I'm joined by a man who will make it all make sense and offer us a vision of a better future.
NATO Green. Hello, NATO.

Speaker 1 Hard to know how to welcome you to a show like this after just two days. We're recording two days after the election, so what's this?

Speaker 1 I mean, 30, 36 hours after

Speaker 1 it became clear that your 47th president will be the same as your 45th and will quite possibly be the joint 46th worst in American history. So

Speaker 1 how's your week been?

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 it's incredible, Andy. Super great.

Speaker 1 You know, there's some really good news out of California, which is

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 scientists discovered that they can stop dengue fever

Speaker 1 by getting mosquitoes to stop having sex with each other.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 I'm pretty excited about that. I don't know.

Speaker 1 I didn't realize this, but mosquitoes procreate by the male mosquito finding the female mosquito in the air and having sex for a few seconds to a minute. Relatable,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 the scientists discovered that if they make the mosquitoes deaf, then they can't find the female mosquitoes, and then the disease stops. And so now we can just yell at mosquitoes to stop plagues.

Speaker 1 So I'm feeling pretty great about that. Right.
I mean, that is unquestionably quite exciting news. I think the only important thing that's happened in America this week.
Well, that's good.

Speaker 1 That's good. Well, I mean, then that wraps up the show as well.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about the national elections then. I guess it's been, you know, it's...

Speaker 1 Unquestionably been a bit of a disappointing week for anyone who had faith that America would not want to vote for someone who'd incited an insurrection against, let me just check my notes here, America itself.

Speaker 1 That was, you know, they were saddened

Speaker 1 by that failure. Those who thought maybe it would be good if the president was not a convicted criminal, similarly, swing and a miss on that one.

Speaker 1 But like I said, it's one of the great Democratic failures. But I guess the Harris campaign, and she, you know, she took over Fartin, and we've mentioned this before on the bugle about how

Speaker 1 why the Democrats were not planning for someone who wasn't Joe Biden to run in this election from the moment that he won the last one, I will never fully understand beyond the arrogance of

Speaker 1 politics. But her campaign failed to seem to me to fail to stretch much beyond the I'm not an aging white man with an fragile grip on reality.

Speaker 1 And part of the problem with that, as you've hinted at, is that it turned out what America was, an aging white man with absolutely no grip on reality,

Speaker 1 almost an inverse grip on reality. Maybe Biden just didn't go didn't go far enough.
And you know, there's been, yeah, there's

Speaker 1 simplistic ways of looking at things. And clearly, you know, like I say, the Trump vote hasn't really gone up.
It's more that the Democratic vote has

Speaker 1 tanked. But, you know, there's been a lot of articles saying, you know, we have to respect the result.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I guess you have to sort of respect the result, if not the process, but by how it, how it, I don't know, respect is a strange term.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't necessarily show that there are 72 millions that are racist, misogynist, and xenophobic.

Speaker 1 But I guess it does show that there are 72 millions who are prepared to vote for someone who quite proudly is all three of those things.

Speaker 1 And I guess there were some people who saw the kind of person Trump is, found it repulsive and voted for him anyway.

Speaker 1 There were people who, you know, whether because of that's their, you know, their, their, their, their politics, their economics, there were those who saw the kind of person Trump is and were prepared to tolerate it.

Speaker 1 And then there were those who saw the kind of person Trump in Trump is and were actively infused by it and basically want to be want to be like him.

Speaker 1 And that's, I guess it's hard to know the the extent to which those 72 million were divided between those different views of Trump. Harris's concession speech

Speaker 1 had this charming word. She tried to argue that in America we have more in common than divides us.

Speaker 1 And I mean, I admire that charmingly naïve view, but history suggests, as does the history of the past week, that that is a wildly inaccurate hype dream.

Speaker 1 But anyway it's nice to cling to these things i mean um if if by more in common you mean things like

Speaker 1 opposable thumbs and

Speaker 1 you know by bipedal locomotion

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 she also said only when it is dark enough can you see the stars um

Speaker 1 again

Speaker 1 uh it's uh it can always get darker it can always just block just keep blotting out those stars it's never

Speaker 1 we've not achieved full darkness darkness yet there's still something to aim for he said also in our nation we owe loyalty not to a president or a party but to the constitution of the united states and loyalty to our conscience and our god now i mean there's quite a bit to unpack here for a start the constitution as 250 year old scraps of paper go it's okay but i think it needs a little bit of updating as do most things that were written two and a half centuries ago.

Speaker 1 Conscience, again, a charmingly retro idea in politics. That went out the window, I think, pretty much with the ancient Greeks.

Speaker 1 And God, whatever God it is, frankly, disastrously out of form right now, Exhibit A, Planet Earth. So.
In my woke America, I'm ready for an all-female reboot of both the Constitution and God.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 to be honest,

Speaker 1 I think that is so long overdue.

Speaker 1 As a fully paid up member of the patriarchy, I think I can acknowledge acknowledge that maybe we need a bit of a break. Things haven't been going too well for us.

Speaker 1 You know, we've had a good run for the last few thousand years, and maybe it's time to take a decade or two off and come back refreshed.

Speaker 1 I've said this so many times, Andy. I couldn't agree with you more.
Like,

Speaker 1 maybe I've even said it on the bugle. I've said it before, and I'll say it again in the words of Nishkumar.

Speaker 1 Giving up patriarchy means not having to do shit. Oh, you want me to give up my privilege and I get to stay home? That's a win all around.

Speaker 1 Nato, I guess, given that you are slightly closer to the center of these things, it's only right for me to ask you to give your take on the nationwide perspective.

Speaker 1 Being an American when Trump is president feels like being Prometheus,

Speaker 1 where as a result of your own hubris, you have been chained to a rock while your liver is eaten for eternity and you have no entertainment but to shit yourself.

Speaker 1 So that's how we're doing.

Speaker 1 Right. Okay.
And I mean, I know some people think Prometheus got off lightly as well.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 Grover Cleveland

Speaker 1 remains the only president to be elected for non-consecutive terms who was not a keen and active sexual assault enthusiast. So I guess that's something for Cleveland fans to

Speaker 1 cling to.

Speaker 1 Can you explain, NATO, how, I mean, Kamala Harris's campaign, it did temporarily turn the snout of Joe Biden's Titanic in a vaguely upward direction, but ultimately that proved to be little more than a dead ship bounce.

Speaker 1 And it is, in terms of the sort of the scale of the Democratic failure to, you know, not just lose again, but to lose so convincingly after all the polls claimed it was such a close rate.

Speaker 1 How can you explain this to an outsider native?

Speaker 1 I've always found American politics

Speaker 1 baffling because I'm human and not from America. And I think both of those things make it hard to understand.
But I mean, how has this gone quite as badly as it has?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 Andy,

Speaker 1 if you'll indulge me, can I take you on a journey?

Speaker 1 Yes, Yes, please.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I want to go from the local to the national.

Speaker 1 So let me walk you through it. And I think

Speaker 1 by the time I get to the national, it will all make perfect sense how we got here. So

Speaker 1 obviously I'm pretty upset about Trump winning and the Republicans staying in the Senate. The best news of the night, frankly, was local races here in San Francisco.

Speaker 1 I've been watching Game of Thrones for the first time with one of my kids.

Speaker 1 And if you're a Game of Thrones enthusiast, San Francisco politics is like Game of Thrones if the only characters were Theon and Hot Pie.

Speaker 1 And the like San Francisco politicians think that they're all

Speaker 1 Littlefinger and Tyrion and Verus.

Speaker 1 And they would be if the characters only did the drinking wine and horrors part without being articulate in any way at all.

Speaker 1 In San Francisco, chaos isn't a ladder so much as an inflatable jacuzzi filled filled with fentanyl urine and protein shakes and a leak in it.

Speaker 1 So we elected a new mayor in San Francisco, and San Francisco politicians elect politicians using a system called ranked choice voting because everyone knows that the main obstacle to people participating in a democracy is that voting isn't complicated enough.

Speaker 1 Under our ranked choice voting, voters rank the candidates in order.

Speaker 1 And if no one gets the outright majority of the first go, the person with the lowest votes is eliminated and their vote is then applied to their second choice.

Speaker 1 And the process continues until someone gets a majority, or the workers at the Department of Elections get sick of counting and just start chucking boxes of ballots in the bay, which is a thing that has occurred.

Speaker 1 So we elected a mayor, we had 15 candidates running, and no one got a majority until the 14th round of ranked choice voting.

Speaker 1 So it was a mandate. And

Speaker 1 we used to do RCV and only be able to rank your top three. And that wasn't complicated enough.
And so now you have to rank all of them.

Speaker 1 But like, why not pick your mayor by, you know, darts or chow stick? It's all equally stupid. So,

Speaker 1 by the way.

Speaker 1 I have to admit when I'm wrong, I've always said that anyone who's on the ballot gets some votes. And this time, that was not the case.

Speaker 1 Of the 15 candidates for mayor, there were two that got no votes,

Speaker 1 including a prank candidate whose platform was to blast the Metallica Symphonic Arrangement at drug users, which is as good an idea as anyone else has had.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 our incumbent mayor is a black woman who ran on a law and order platform and faced a diversity of challengers from a white male millionaire to a white male billionaire.

Speaker 1 And they were both running on a platform of law and order, only more so.

Speaker 1 And my candidate was not any of them. My candidate was a teeny tiny Jewish guy who looks like the picture that AI would make of a Jew if the prompt were Victor Orbin yelling Jew at a computer.

Speaker 1 But he sounds like Gary Cooper in high noon for no reason because he's from Berkeley.

Speaker 1 Anyway, they're still counting the votes, but the guy who won is named Daniel Lurie, who's a billionaire heir to the Levi Strauss fortune of Pants fame.

Speaker 1 His main prior public service was founding a nonprofit that announced a bold initiative to raise $100 million to cut chronic homelessness in half in two years. And that was six years ago.

Speaker 1 And in that time, chronic homelessness has grown. So, as you know, politics is not accomplishing things, but announcing a bold initiative.
And that's what matters.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 his campaign

Speaker 1 massively outsped everyone else with a diverse range of funders from himself to his mom.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 typical Jewish mother, if my mom had billions of dollars, she's sending you mail about how great I am.

Speaker 1 And most campaign mailers,

Speaker 1 do you get a lot of campaign mail in England?

Speaker 1 We mostly can't be asked with it anymore, to be honest. We've just completely given up.

Speaker 1 I wish. I wish I had the option because my mailbox was flooded and people always talk about their endorsements.

Speaker 1 And so, but this guy, the Daniel Lurie, his list of endorsements were like a little bit dodgy.

Speaker 1 It was like, you know, Daniel Lurie endorsed by retired port commissioner Keith Keithenson and former 49er defensive back

Speaker 1 Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott and Ray of Ray's Delicious Sandwiches on Lombard Street and Ben of Ben Folds 5. I was like, who the fk are these people?

Speaker 1 A guy who went to college with Daniel Laurie and thought he made some good points in a class. You know,

Speaker 1 anyway, so

Speaker 1 nationally things are awful,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 California, it is also awful.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so, and what I guess my main takeaway and one of the lessons I want you to learn from the election is that voters are ideologically incoherent.

Speaker 1 For instance, in California, we have an initiative system where we vote on initiatives directly.

Speaker 1 We had 10 on the statewide ballot and just to illustrate the absurdity of California politics and the voters being ideologically incoherent California voters in their wisdom this week voted simultaneously for gay marriage and for literal slavery

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 they as you may know the 13th amendment that ended slavery in america contain contained an exception for people convicted of crimes there was a ballot measure to end prison slavery and the people of california said no we want to keep prisoners enslaved, but if they want to get gay married while doing prison slavery, go right ahead.

Speaker 1 What is an appropriate wedding gift for a gay wedding among prison slaves? So

Speaker 1 that's what the, I'm guessing like a shovel or a catapult or competent legal representation, something. Anyway, so

Speaker 1 at the pulling back out to the national, what's remarkable about the Democrats losing is how dumb the Republicans are. Like Trump ran a bad campaign.
The Republicans are so dumb.

Speaker 1 And they won the, this is only the second time that Republicans won the popular vote in 25 years. Republicans won the Senate.
House results still up in the air. Democracy's over in America.

Speaker 1 The American people weighed the options and chose a rapist, bigot liar.

Speaker 1 And they ran a bad campaign.

Speaker 1 It feels bad to lose, but it feels especially bad to lose to the dumbest people. And to illustrate what I mean, I was talking to somebody in my extended family who said this to me.

Speaker 1 She said, recently I was hit by a car and I have permanent brain damage. Anyway, I would like to vote for Robert F.
Kennedy.

Speaker 1 So that's what's happening in America.

Speaker 1 Have you covered Mark Robinson on the Bugle, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina? We did do a little bit on him, but do please refresh our memories. Okay,

Speaker 1 this is bugle gold, Andy.

Speaker 1 Mark Robinson was a black Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina. He was the Republican candidate for governor and lost handily

Speaker 1 in a state that Trump won

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 maybe a month, six weeks ago, a story came out

Speaker 1 that he had been going on porn sites and in the discussion section had self-identified as a black Nazi who wanted to end slavery so that he could have slaves.

Speaker 1 I'm gonna say that if there are black Nazis,

Speaker 1 maybe there should be limits to DEI.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 and and the weirdest part of the story to me, oh, and that he like he was

Speaker 1 pushing transphobic legislation, but into transgender porn. The weirdest part of the story to me wasn't just that he said all those things, but he said them in a discussion section of a porn site.

Speaker 1 Now, I don't know how you relate to porn,

Speaker 1 but typically,

Speaker 1 on the rare occasion that I've enjoyed some pornography, I don't

Speaker 1 finish pleasuring myself and then immediately think, I need to take to the comments to have it out about the constitutional amendments.

Speaker 1 So they were so dumb. Like there was a moment, there's a video of Trump giving a speech where he's going on and on about how packed his rallies are and how there's no empty seats.

Speaker 1 And in the video, the cameraman pans to the crowd

Speaker 1 and shows just like row after row after row of empty seats. Like, and I love this idea of the media fact-checking politicians in real time.

Speaker 1 not say anything just how great would it be if like you watch the evening news and a politician says um

Speaker 1 you know i'm we're we're delivering results for the for the american people and then there's just a caption that says the f ⁇ they are you know or something I think that'd be a great a great innovation in the news

Speaker 1 Elon Musk jumped in to support the Trump campaign, bringing millions of dollars and his tech genius to cutting-edge campaign methods.

Speaker 1 For instance, he tweeted on election day, I just tried this myself and Google still shows you where to vote for Harris, but not for Trump. And it felt like a hidden camera bit.

Speaker 1 Like, what Elon Musk doesn't know is that Google is showing him where to vote in Harris County, Texas, which is an actual place.

Speaker 1 And then he ran the canvassing operation for Trump, and there's like lawsuits about it already because they hired people without telling them who they were working for and where they were going, flew them to Michigan, drove them back around in the back of a U-Haul van with no windows, and then threatened them if they didn't produce results.

Speaker 1 Uh, oh my god, tech disrupting political campaigning with the bold new innovation of human trafficking. Who would have thought of that?

Speaker 1 That's kind of old school, isn't it? You'd have thought we'd have, you know, tech would have found a way of doing that far more efficiently. Who needs volunteers when entrapment is right there?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 that was pretty much the British approach to

Speaker 1 two world wars, I think, to make sure we had a good thing.

Speaker 1 So then the question arises:

Speaker 1 how did the Democrats fumble the bag? And by the way, if you need to stop me

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 get in, I could shut up.

Speaker 1 Chris can fix all this in post.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's a mess. But this is my emotional state.

Speaker 1 Fair enough.

Speaker 1 So why did the Democrats lose?

Speaker 1 Well, there was a lot of polling data that suggested that a majority of voters not just democrats wanted an end to military aid in israel uh and the muslim politician of the swing states was bigger than the margin of victory so uh it was critical especially in michigan to which had a has a huge muslim population to uh to wit hold on to muslim voters uh and instead the democrats settled on a message to muslims of we don't care if your family is slaughtered vote for us or there will be even worse slaughtering you ungrateful assholes

Speaker 1 And it turns out that wasn't the winning message they hoped it would be. I see.
Okay.

Speaker 1 But you just never know in politics until you try these things, do you? Yeah, you really got to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

Speaker 1 I don't know if they like focus grouped it at some point, or it just felt like a first draft.

Speaker 1 So let's have a look now at what went wrong for the Democrats. Hang on,

Speaker 1 how long have we got on this?

Speaker 1 We got like 1,040 years

Speaker 1 left on the recording time.

Speaker 1 The press wanted Trump.

Speaker 1 The press likes the spectacle.

Speaker 1 You saw this in the Washington Post not making an endorsement for the first time. They were really inexplicably hard on Kamala Harris on policy details.

Speaker 1 And then they would like both sides the policy arguments. For example,

Speaker 1 there would be these multiple news articles I saw that were like, let's look at the Trump and Harris housing policies. To lower housing costs, Harris wants to build a million homes.

Speaker 1 Trump wants to deport a million people. Let's have economists weigh in.
You know, she thinks she can lower housing costs by increasing supply of new homes,

Speaker 1 affordable to middle-class people. He thinks he can lower housing costs by decreasing demand by moving immigrants living in homes into detention facilities.
Economists weigh in. And no one was like,

Speaker 1 These immigrants are not like starting all-cash bidding wars to run up the price of the McManchin in the suburbs with the wraparound deck that you've been yearning for.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the press wanted Trump.

Speaker 1 The Democrats put all this energy into looking for the like the elusive, mythical Republican crossover voter. They don't exist.

Speaker 1 They get these Republican elites to endorse them, but Republican voters just vote for Republicans. It never works.
Like they were really pushing that Liz Cheney was supporting Harris. Now,

Speaker 1 no one likes Liz Cheney.

Speaker 1 She was a congressperson from Wyoming, the least populated state in America. No one is there.

Speaker 1 Liz Cheney doesn't deliver Republican votes. She doesn't even deliver all of the Cheneys.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so the,

Speaker 1 and there was like, and the campaign ads, I just felt like were not... like I didn't relate to the, there were so many campaigns that I and I didn't relate to them.

Speaker 1 Like the campaigns always had like sparks, like in a factory or a welding situation, and then it was a field, and some like hard-working salt-of-the-earth American, a healthcare worker.

Speaker 1 And I, I just, I yearn for an ad that is targeted for me. You know what I mean? Just like a middle-aged dad in pajamas sitting in a comfy chair, staring vaguely into space.

Speaker 1 It's just like, vote for us, so you get some quiet, you know.

Speaker 1 So, and here, here's my genuine, genuine, my sincere and perhaps not funny analysis when it comes right down to it, is

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 America, that Trump represents a fascist threat. And historically, the left fights fascism.
Centrist liberals on their own do not fight fascism. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like before America entered World War II to help stop fascism, American communists and anarchists were going to Spain to fight fascism in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Speaker 1 Then a few years in a Pearl Harbor later, America was like, okay, fine, we'll help fight fascism. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Centrist liberals try to stop fascism by like crossing their arms and going humph.

Speaker 1 And centrist liberals. Does that not always work? It doesn't always work, Andy.

Speaker 1 Centrist liberals try to stop fascism by posting memes that say love trumps hate, when it definitely does not, if hate is heavily armed and love is just reading poetry.

Speaker 1 But centrist liberals hate the left and have like worked so hard to crush the left.

Speaker 1 And now there's no, like, you know, they went out of their way to crush Bernie Sanders, the AOC, Corey Bush, that wing of the party to attack people

Speaker 1 who were marching for Palestine, to attack people who were marching for Black Lives Matter. And that's what they got.
But, Andy, I have some good news. Okay.

Speaker 1 Are you ready for the silver lining? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
It'd be very big and very silver.

Speaker 1 Here's the good news.

Speaker 1 We actually have a few examples of good news.

Speaker 1 Good news. Trump won fair and square.
No coup. We were convinced that it would be close and Trump would

Speaker 1 try to overthrow a government, do another January 6th, get the Supreme Court to hand it to him. We'd be in for months of upheaval and political violence and instability.
It's not happening.

Speaker 1 I mean, except for the, you know, there were multiple polling stations in Georgia that were closed for hours because of Russian bomb threats.

Speaker 1 But except for that, we're spared three months of uncertainty because we know that Trump won fair and square. So that's

Speaker 1 has even has even Trump accepted the result? Because, you know, it was clearly a result that was not predicted by pollsters, which suggests that, you know, maybe,

Speaker 1 I mean, you'd have thought as someone who is so, so highly tuned to electoral irregularity that he would have been absolutely up in arms about this.

Speaker 1 But he, but he's obviously learned and accepted the result result with relative dignity this time. So I guess that's progress.

Speaker 1 I mean, dignity doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sense, Kenny, when it comes to Trump. But

Speaker 1 I did say relative. I did say relative.

Speaker 1 Relative to what, I wonder. But

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 yeah, I mean, Trump's, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's a fair election if I win and an unfair election if I lose. That's, that's Trump's worldview.
So, but there's more good news.

Speaker 1 Uh, the Republican Party's policies will kill their own voters.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 like when Robert F.

Speaker 1 Kennedy takes over public health and allows disease outbreaks in the water supply and ends vaccines and they shoot each other up and disaster funding is cut and people drown in floods and storms and fires, who doesn't get some schadenfreude from a good old-fashioned comeuppance?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 that's some good news. Well, that's quite, it's also, that sounds quite biblical.
And obviously, we saw how important

Speaker 1 the Christian right vote was. And maybe that actually could play quite well with them a bit of kind of Bible nostalgia.
I mean, this is one of the inexplicable things for me, NATO.

Speaker 1 How America's Christian right can so wholeheartedly vote for one of the all-time top ten least Christian people in history. And if he'd been running for office in 0 AD,

Speaker 1 in the U.S. presidential election that year, and my history doesn't go about that far, he would probably have praised King Herod for his highly effective anti-firstborn child policies.

Speaker 1 If he'd been running in 32 AD, he'd have been railing against woke Jesus, the fake Messiah. And yet, the American Christian right

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 just unquestioningly on his side.

Speaker 1 I know you're not technically a Christian.

Speaker 1 And I don't know if you're as bad a Christian as I am a Jew, given that you are a Jew.

Speaker 1 And I don't know how, I mean, how lapsed I got, was it on Nish accused saying that I was so lapsed that I was basically Muslim on

Speaker 1 the show earlier in the week.

Speaker 1 But this, this is, you know, one of the inexplicabilities of American politics to an outsider is that

Speaker 1 how the Christian right seems to support the least Christian candidate almost every time.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, I mean, obviously,

Speaker 1 I am a Jew, I'm not a Christian, but I know a decent amount about Christians because, Andy, you got to keep an eye on them. They're shifting.

Speaker 1 You got to keep an eye on the people who might try to kill you at any moment. And

Speaker 1 the thing about the Christian right is

Speaker 1 they are voting for, like, they win either way. They get either,

Speaker 1 you know, extreme Christian values imposed on America or they get to usher in the rapture.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 1 like they're not, they're, they're engaged, like, you know what I mean? I, like, I'm, I participate in politics because I want things to work.

Speaker 1 Actually, can I, I just want to offer like one tiny, tiny sliver of like personal pride, which is that there is a, there is a ballot measure in San Francisco that passed.

Speaker 1 It's, it's a, it's a tiny issue that I was involved in putting on the ballot and developing. And it just fixes like a small loophole to give

Speaker 1 public government nurses a slightly better pension plan.

Speaker 1 And it passed. So I worked on something.
We got it through.

Speaker 1 Are you not worried that this is just, you know,

Speaker 1 the small acorn and from which, you know, within what, 40 or 50 years, California will be overrun by billionaire ex-nurses just rampaging uncontrolledly around

Speaker 1 your state?

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, you know,

Speaker 1 there is a slippery slope because

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 nurses getting slightly better pensions and then

Speaker 1 because of

Speaker 1 their ability to vote

Speaker 1 and then having expectations that they not be treated like shit in every other way.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you got to put that back in the bottle. So,

Speaker 1 but I have more good news.

Speaker 1 Trump will die in office.

Speaker 1 So he's like, we thought Ronald Reagan was sundowning in office. And then there was this like Republican anti-Trump campaign ad

Speaker 1 that had Reagan's words juxtaposed with Trump's words. And it was horrifying.

Speaker 1 Next to Trump, Reagan, like we made fun of him for being stupid and inarticulate at the time, but next to Trump, Reagan

Speaker 1 sounded like Oscar Wilde talking to Slimer from the Ghostbusters.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there's a Yiddish folktale that I had in a children's book when I was a kid called It Could Always Be Worse.

Speaker 1 And it's like,

Speaker 1 Trump is a... rapist, kleptocrat, anti-democratic bigot.

Speaker 1 Wait, there's more. Also, cognitive decline.
So, and then the last bit of good news, Andy, is that yesterday I got a call from the urologist, and

Speaker 1 I might have cancer. So, I have to go get a prostate biopsy.
And if I have to drop everything to focus on chemo, that's great news for me.

Speaker 1 If I can't pay attention to the news,

Speaker 1 in case I have cancer, that's something I'm looking forward to. Right.
Well, I mean, we find positives in the strangest places, NATO and that's a pretty pretty strange place so

Speaker 1 I'm getting notes from people in Cuba being like do you are you okay Cuba where there's no food or electricity right now

Speaker 1 people are writing sending me notes being like are you okay do you need to get out

Speaker 1 in terms of the international reaction well there was this piece in the guardian um in which they talked to americans living in uh in britain and one woman quoted and it said how could the country go in this direction of hatred and division and lies?

Speaker 1 And I think there's quite a simple answer to that.

Speaker 1 And that is that because America and particularly the people who vote in America are human beings and we are very, very good at hatred, division and lies.

Speaker 1 We are, I think, out of all the species in the world, comfortably the best at all three of those things. And hatred and division, quite a strong brand in America, historically,

Speaker 1 as

Speaker 1 the mid-19th century would testify quite vociferously. And lies, you know, always popular, and lies generally, truth generally, is somewhere between inconvenient, annoying, and depressing.

Speaker 1 So, you know, we cling to lies

Speaker 1 in whatever form they come. Andy, I really can't believe you.
Are you trying to say that if there's a school of herring swimming in the ocean, there's not one herring being like

Speaker 1 to another herring,

Speaker 1 I think if you suck my dick, it'll be magic.

Speaker 1 No, but I think there probably are herring who would sell out the shoal to a nearby shark if it earned them enough money. So maybe we're not so different.

Speaker 1 Congratulations flooded into Trump from around the world, from well, a mixture of leaders and country, some who love the fact that Trump will be back and some who on pragmatic grounds have to pretend to love

Speaker 1 the fact that he'll be back. Lots of people saying, we look forward to working with him, to which the subject is, oh, f ⁇ ing shit, not again.

Speaker 1 But Belarus's president, Lukashenko, was pretty chuffed.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 Viktor Orban, you mentioned earlier on, the Hungarian so-called hardman. Can we start using weak man instead of hard man for these things? I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 Reportedly, one of the first national leaders to congratulate Trump referred to his victory as the biggest comeback in American political history.

Speaker 1 I would hope to add so far, I'm still holding out that this could finally be the spur that sees Abraham Lincoln finally reincarnate himself, get his shit together, and sort America out again.

Speaker 1 And so, was it actually a comeback? It didn't feel like Trump had ever been away. Do you not have to go away

Speaker 1 to have a comeback? And basically, he's almost been running American politics the whole time.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, American people are much like infants in that they struggle with object permanence.

Speaker 1 Benjamin Netanyahu, who described it as history's greatest comeback,

Speaker 1 which, you know, bearing in mind where he lives and the alleged story of Jesus age Christ, that's, I mean, I guess that's not really his shtick, but big claim.

Speaker 1 His security minister, Itamar Ben-Givir, just said, yes, God bless Trump,

Speaker 1 which, again, you know,

Speaker 1 That would seem an old thing for God to do, given that Trump goes pretty much 10 for 10 on commandments ignored on an hour-by-hour basis.

Speaker 1 China issued a spokesperson for the People's Republic of China's Foreign Ministry

Speaker 1 expressed China's desire to maintain China-U.S. bilateral relations with quotes, mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and cooperation for win-win.

Speaker 1 Now, those were words that would not have grasped Trump's attention. until right at the end there.
Mutual respect does not compute.

Speaker 1 Peaceful coexistence, where's the fun in either peace or coexistence as a general principle? And cooperation, what does that word even mean? For win-win there.

Speaker 1 That is the language that he may understand.

Speaker 1 The Philippines president, Bong Bong Marcos, yes, son of that Marcos, the notorious despot, bit of a theme emerging here,

Speaker 1 said President Trump is on and the American people have triumphed. I congratulate them on their victory in an exercise that showed the world the strength of American values.

Speaker 1 And I'm not sure that you can necessarily infer the strength of American values from what we've seen over the past,

Speaker 1 well, year of the campaign. And Keir Starmer, our own

Speaker 1 de facto Trump.

Speaker 1 He's in very different pods. Keir Starmer, our Prime Minister, said that we would continue to stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of our shared values of freedom, democracy.
and enterprise.

Speaker 1 And as he said this, I think I heard actual laughter from a World War Cemetery when he said that.

Speaker 1 I know it's a little way away across the channel in France, but I definitely heard what was a ghostly mass giggle and the shades of the slain muttering, that is priceless. So

Speaker 1 there we go. That's the roundup of the international reaction.

Speaker 1 In terms of, just quickly, NATO, in terms of

Speaker 1 what

Speaker 1 the Trump second term in office will bring, One of his most eye-catching promises was to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, which means that the 21st of January is going to be absolutely unmissable television.

Speaker 1 Do you think

Speaker 1 he's got the game to achieve that, end a war in a day?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah.

Speaker 1 And not only that, Trump is also proposing to, on day one, do mass deportations

Speaker 1 at the biggest... deportation operation in history on the same day.
That seems like a level of multitasking that may strain his abilities. Right.

Speaker 1 So is it possible that what that will involve then is him just dropping 10 million

Speaker 1 people he's kicking out of the United States into the Ukraine to just cause administrative mayhem and end the war that way? Is that essentially what you're saying will happen?

Speaker 1 No, I mean, knowing how Trump operates, which is mostly through lying, lying, I think the way that Trump will will

Speaker 1 attempt to end the war in the Ukraine

Speaker 1 in 24 hours will be by announcing that he has already ended the war in the Ukraine without any regard for what is actually happening in the Ukraine. Right.

Speaker 1 He's just hoping that if he tells everybody that the war is over, that it'll take them long enough to figure out that that is in fact not the case.

Speaker 1 he'll get away with it.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go.

Speaker 1 It's happened.

Speaker 1 I mean, despite the efforts of the bugle, I know last time we had to take some responsibility for Trump being elected

Speaker 1 because we were on hiatus for the vast majority of the 2016 campaign.

Speaker 1 This week, you know, this time we've, you know,

Speaker 1 we've tried our best.

Speaker 1 It turns out out that a british-based uh podcast that has

Speaker 1 um regular american guests on cannot swing the result of an election and that's you know disappointing that the power of satire has once again come up against the cold hard fist of reality and that is a battle that it uh never ever wins um so we will have uh full exclusive coverage of uh the next four years of america uh tearing itself limb from limb metaphorically and quite possibly literally uh as well nato uh i look forward to hearing hearing you uh you describe that for us over the next uh over the next four years and um well for those listening on the podcast uh you want to see if you're watching this you might have seen well i've i've launched the twenty twenty eight presidential campaign green gondolman nato green josh gondelman the dream ticket uh i have not asked nato or josh uh about this but i'm launching it now because i think that's got to have a decent chance of winning nato you prepared to take take that mantle upon yourself, that heavy responsibility.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 what does America need more than not one but two bald Jews in the White House?

Speaker 1 Well, is America ready for a bald Jewish president? That remains the glass ceiling yet. to be smashed.

Speaker 1 NATO, thank you very much for coming on the show at what I know must be a very difficult time.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry I wasn't in better spirits, Andy.

Speaker 1 I thought you were in remarkably good spirits, all things being relative. I mean, again, the word relative doing some heavy lifting.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 for the

Speaker 1 buglers listening at home, when Andy asked me about this, I said, would it be okay if I just did scream crying for the entire show?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the fact that what you have received is not that, even if the jokes are, let's say, a bit bleak and not funny,

Speaker 1 I feel like I came out ahead.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go.

Speaker 1 Anyway, to all buglers who voted for Trump,

Speaker 1 congratulations. I'm guessing there aren't that many of you.

Speaker 1 For those of you who voted against Trump, and I assume all of you did, whether you're American or not, I hope that you found a way, as encouraged by us on the bugle, to do your bit and try and help America out.

Speaker 1 But commiserations.

Speaker 1 Enjoy the next two and a bit months, I guess.

Speaker 1 And then we will see what unfurls over the following four years. We'll be back in a week or so's time to fill you in on everything else that's been happening in the universe.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, do come and see my tour show, which began last weekend. Tickets and

Speaker 1 information on the dates and venues at andyzoltzman.co.uk. NATO, anything to plug? Uh, sure.
I have a couple of albums out.

Speaker 1 The NATO Green Party and the Whiteness album that you can get wherever you buy albums. Bandcamp gets me the most coin, so please do that if you can.

Speaker 1 Follow me on Instagram, MrNATO Green.

Speaker 1 If this comes out by Friday the 8th, on Friday night, I will be in the

Speaker 1 Sacramento area doing a show with my old friend W. Kamal Bell at the Mondavi Center at UC Davis.

Speaker 1 And if there are any

Speaker 1 buglers outside of the United States with job offers for an

Speaker 1 accommodation comedian/slash writer/slash union organizer and his wife, a nurse practitioner/slash/medical anthropologist, so that we can go into exile.

Speaker 1 Please let me know.

Speaker 1 No, that's an unusual plug, but I think that's the first time we've

Speaker 1 had that. So

Speaker 1 do let us know. Yeah, or if anyone just wants to

Speaker 1 have a helicopter at the ready to fly me to safety,

Speaker 1 if anyone wants to deed me some sort of like humble countryside villa in rural Spain to which I can escape,

Speaker 1 I'm ready. Receiving offers.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Nato. Thanks for listening, buglers.
Until next week, goodbye.