Voters hide ballots in locked boxes

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello and welcome to the Bugle US Election Results Special 2020.

And here is our instant bugle reaction at 12pm Eastern Time, 5pm UK Time on Wednesday, the 4th of November, 2020.

Hopefully that sums up pretty much everything that's happened over the last 24 hours or so.

Fundamentally, it can't end well.

It can end at best, not completely abominably.

We will delve into this in greater detail.

I'm Andy Zoltzman and I'm really starting to regret not using that magic lamp I bought from a curious antique shop to ask for something a bit more useful than a spare pair of elbows, they just clutter up the fridge, a bacon sandwich, I was hungry after putting the elbows in the fridge, and the power to turn shoes into watermelons, the novelty wears off after about 15 or 20 pairs.

Bearing in mind that I summoned that genie in May 2016, well, apologies to the entire world.

Joining me to jab around in the still twitching yet somehow already rotten entrails of the 2020 American presidential election to try to haruspicise what it all means, to pick the bones from the rancid, half-chewed, twice-regurgitated sardine of despair that was election night.

Firstly, joining us from where it's all kind of happening, the USA, in specifically San Francisco.

It's NATO Green.

Hello, NATO.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

It's really been a hard time to be an American right now.

We're really reeling and grieving, and we just can't stop thinking about the demise of Quibby.

Zing.

Well, take that our other guest from the 51st state of the USA pending approval of our application to join the club we basically fucking founded in the spiritual home of existential confusion, lockdown London.

It's the man who brings American media organizations crashing to the ground with him amongst the rubble.

It's Nish Kumar.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

And you know what?

Et 2, NATO.

Et

two.

Dancing on the grave of Quibi.

All they did, they were a lot like Martin Luther King.

They had a dream.

Only instead of racial equality, their dream was to force people to pay quite a bit of money for short form content.

Very much on the same continuum, very much on the same.

Very much on the same.

But both tragically cut short by circumstances out of their control.

In one case, circumstances out of his control, and in the case of Quibby, circumstances that were very much in their control.

Wasn't one of the major backers of Quibi,

Republican tech billionaire Meg Whitman,

who ran for governor of California several years ago and lost.

I actually,

here's a fun fact about Meg Whitman.

When she was running for governor, because, you know, I'm a protesty kind of guy, we brought a thousand nurses to protest in front of her mansion.

Which leads me to a very important NATO green lesson about social change that I want you all to take with you tonight, which is that it is not difficult to overwhelm small-town police departments.

As always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, in fact, several sections, a section on whatever you are planning to do for the rest of the week, a section on everything else in the world right now, and a guide on how to be an election pollster.

Step one, guess what you think will happen.

Step two, factor in a minimum pigsty contingency.

That's probably, it'll go shitter than you think contingency.

The last T didn't make it into the acronym, but inaccuracy is all part of the world these days.

Step three, factor in another 5% nest contingency.

No, even shittier than that.

Step four, shut up and don't tell anyone your findings.

They're probably wrong.

And step five, take up knitting.

So those sections in the bin, we are recording on Wednesday, the fourth of November, the first day of the rest of time, as it seems so many days are these days.

The day after America attempted to elect its chosen old man to guide its national bobsled through the mountainous seas of the next four years.

And yes, this is the 4th of November, so zero years and one day since yesterday when a record number of numbers were numbered.

And on this day in 1783, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart symphony number 36 was performed for the first time.

36 by coincidence is the percentage votes needed in 36 counties chosen from 36 of the possible counties across the USA in 36 different states that would need to rise or fall by 36 percent or more or less across 36 percent of the national vote for more than 36 percent of pundits to agree what it actually meant.

Top story this week.

Well, there is only one place to start.

As we record, the outcome is still not entirely clear.

If you are Donald Trump's mouth, you have won.

The rest of the universe seems to suggest that Joe Biden is on course for a narrow, painful victory

as we record.

NATO, talk us through your range of emotions and what you've been going through over the last 12, 18 hours.

Oh, Andy, well, so look at my face.

This is what America's face looks like right now.

For the podcast listening audience,

I have not.

That's most of this show, to be fair.

Everyone but the four of us here right now.

Everyone in America looks like this right now.

I look like a dog shit that had had a shit and then was rolled in shit, if you know what I mean.

I actually, I may not be able to get

through this episode because I may have to go run and have stress-related diarrhea.

How stressed am I?

This is,

I am so anxious that last night I had a stress dream about pulling an all-nighter writing jokes for the bugle with Beto O'Rourke.

We were in his office in the Congress building, and I was trying to write the jokes, and he was skateboarding around me, and I was getting angry with him.

Focus, Mike Talk.

And

it's like, it's just, and like everyone has been trying to remind you to go vote and to get out the vote, like every app, every celebrity, every news program, every website.

I got a notification reminding me to vote from a phone app that lets you order an in-home massage.

massage.

And so, and it was sort of like, well, you can't have Swedish-style social democracy, but would you like a Swedish massage to ease the tension?

So,

and now it's like it seems close.

And I mean,

it shouldn't be close.

I mean, like, that's the most upsetting part: it's even close at all.

It's like a significant section of the electorate looked at all of the carnage and death and suffering and stupidity and goes, you know, what's not to like.

Nish, I I know you're up late

following it here.

We're basically, I think everyone, you know, all buglers, you're listening to this show and you've stayed listening to this show over the years.

You've probably been through an emotional cement mixer over the last day or few days or weeks, months or four years or since 1776 when America started to go irretrievably in the wrong direction as a nation.

How is it for you, Nish, election night?

Well, first of all, it's a pleasure to be here broadcasting in the perineum between the ball sack of the vote and the anus of the official announcement of the result.

So it's a real honour to be right in the American elections Gooch.

And it was...

Listen, as election nights go,

for me,

I was watching it at home drinking wine, which is a marked improvement on the 2019 British election, the evening of which I had a screaming row with Boris Johnson's father about whether women in Burkhaus should be able to become fighter pilots.

So from that perspective, from that perspective,

it was a huge upgrade, absolutely enormous upgrade from my perspective.

But

it was a tense old...

I mean, it's hard to boil down one's emotions at a time like this.

I have no idea how NATO is even...

It's heroic to me that he's even upright and speaking currently.

But from an outsider's perspective, what I will say is this.

I'll say this for the guy who murdered everybody.

He did very well considering he murdered everybody.

This is

a real interesting,

surprising piece of information.

And right now, not content with sort of murdering everybody, he's now

insisting that the count be stopped.

Just as it looks like

Joe Biden is on his way to winning Wisconsin,

Nevada, and Michigan, which are kind of three big states that he needs to get over the 270 line at the moment.

And Trump is in the process of declaring those mail-in ballots completely null and void.

He's said that he's going to go to the Supreme Court.

Interestingly, just as a side note from the election, earlier this morning, the US Embassy in the Cote d'Ivoire issued a statement, a firm statement to the government of the Cote d'Ivoire

about the election that's happening in that country,

calling on the government to show a commitment to the democratic process and the rule of law and urging all parties, groups and individuals to engage in inclusive dialogue.

Now, I've got to say, given what is currently happening right now in America, that is like someone telling you off for farting in a lift as liquid shit dribbles out of the bottom of their trouser leg.

It is an astonishing state of play that's going on.

And the questions that have to be asked now is, first of all, who the f ⁇ has f ⁇ ing won?

That's got to be the first question.

And once we establish, if, as it looks like it's going to be, Joe Biden, the first question that has to be asked is, what Donald Trump has increased the number of voters that voted for him in four years of his presidency, four years of anarchy, chaos, tax breaks handed out to his golf pals, and then culminating in a catastrophic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that has resulted in, you know, it looks like it's going to result in at least a quarter of a million Americans dying.

And what's astonishing about some of the New York Times exit polls, the statistics make for sort of semi-nauseating reading.

White women in America, according to the New York Times exit polls, have voted 55%, have voted for Trump versus 43% to Joe Biden.

Say what you will about white women in America, and over half of them will still vote for you to be president.

It's quite an astonishing result.

Josh Hawley, who's a senator from Missouri, a Republican senator, has claimed that the Republican Party is the party of the working class now.

Now, again, worth digging into some of these exit polls because for households earning under 50,000, Biden actually

has carried most of their support.

57% of the voters who declared for the New York Times exit poll, who have households that earn under 50K, 57% of them voted for Biden.

56% of households between $50,000 and $99,999, they also declared for Biden.

And the key demographic that declared, that came out for Donald Trump are households that earn over $100,000 a year.

Now, that is a very generous interpretation of the party of the working class.

But then I guess, is it ever possible to know ourselves?

I read an interview a couple of months ago with Joseph Fritzel for reasons that I don't wish to go into now.

Joseph Fritzel, for those of you who might not remember, was an Austrian man who built a dungeon where he trapped his daughter and sexually abused her and fathered children with her.

Joseph Fritzel, a few years ago, was interviewed by a journalist and Fritzel said this, I am not the monster that I am portrayed as in the media.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is it's impossible to really know ourselves.

I'm not comparing the Republican Party to Joseph Fritzel, but I'm just putting that out there.

I was following the

odds overnight,

the bookmakers' odds, which began began with Trump as about a sort of two to one outsider, he then became a sort of hot favourite, seven to two on at one stage, at which point I think I drank half a bottle of Marsala wine in five minutes, which is unrelenting because I don't generally drink a lot.

And that seemed to do the trick.

Then the Biden come back.

Were you attempting to cook a tiramisu?

I was not, no, only the...

tiramisu of my churning stomach.

And then the Biden comeback.

It's a kind of weird thing, thing, isn't it, following an election like that?

Because it sort of feels like a comeback.

It's not that any strategic decisions have been made.

It's just different

forms of counting.

And this whole issue with the Trump speech.

And I mean, it followed Joe Biden's speech to a load of people sitting in cars, which is, I think, would have gone down as one of the weirdest election night speeches ever.

And

as he spoke fairly uninspirationally in a classical Biden way to the half-hearted honking of horns.

Followed by Donald Trump delivering what I believe is one of the low points of the last, I don't know, two and a half thousand years of democracy since those crazy ancient Greeks thought, hey, we've got an idea for how to run things better, and found themselves in 100 minutes surrounded by businessmen smoking cigars, lobbyists, and privately owned news outlets with varying glints in their eyes.

And he said that the Democrats were trying to steal

the election.

He also tweeted votes cannot be cast after the polls, capital P-O-L-E-S, are closed.

And

that does sound like a message that might have come direct from Moscow.

And

it was one of the most, it was kind of genuinely chilling standing in front of the, you know, the array of the array of flags and, you know, a moment of kind of pure, unadulterated, demagoguic propaganda.

And I think of all the things we expected to happen on this election night, right up there for me would have been

someone at some point on the TV coverage saying that the founding fathers were spinning in their graves and this duly happened after this speech by Trump I was watching the CNN coverage only he didn't say they were spinning in their graves he said they would be rolling in their graves which suggests that even the founding fathers have been ground down by four years of Trump and no longer have the energy to spin in their they can just roll over in resignation and just tuck up and say, Oh, please make kind of hit the snooze alarm buttons and I'll make it stop.

I can't spin.

And I'm dizzy.

I am so dizzy after the last four years.

One of the problems that has happened to American politics is how people use stats.

And we have this guy, Nate Silver,

who's like analyzes polling data

and also sports data.

So imagine Andy Zaltzman with the stats with with worse hair and no puns.

I think you've insulted both me and Nate Silver there.

And so,

but he's like, he's sort of relentlessly smug and

self-assured.

I'm talking about Nate and not Andy at this point.

In his prognostications, but he formulates everything in terms of probability so that he's never wrong.

He said, well, I said there was a 10% chance of that, and lo and behold, we're in the,

we predicted it.

But because of all this, there's been all this available

polling data, what it meant is that as the returns were coming in, like everyone in the country was, you know, doing this bizarre, like forensic analysis.

The people would say, you know, people who had never been to Wisconsin at all were like, well, based on the trend line of the early returns from Sheboygan County, Wisconsin,

and knowing that they have 11 black people in that county and they haven't counted the votes yet from that precinct, we can reasonably predict that if this trend line continues, at some point we're still f ⁇ ing.

So

it was like, people,

what are you doing?

This is not helpful.

And it's just, it feels like the end of democracy.

Like I was, I mean, you know, you were talking about the Cote d'Ivoire,

and I was a kid in the Reagan era, and there was a claim that America was a democracy and a beacon to the world against totalitarianism.

And it was bullshit at the time, but we pretended.

And by we, I mean white people.

And

like, if you asked refugees from war-torn countries why they sought political asylum in the United States, they weren't coming here for the separation of powers.

They wanted to not be mass murdered for political reasons.

And they got here and found a land of freedom and opportunity where they would only be mass murdered due to lax gun laws and inadequate mental health services.

And that's freedom.

I also really admire and am extremely frustrated by the American commitment to ballot secrecy, which I think means that it's, I think it might be, they might be unable to ask you at an exit poll how you voted, right?

I think that there's something that they're constitutionally forbidden from doing that.

Whereas with Britain, we have an exit poll where basically people just stand outside and say, who did you vote for?

And the exit polls in the last few elections have been pretty accurate.

But it does make for some very compelling television on CNN when you see people going, a lot of the exit polls are showing that people really prefer chocolate ice cream.

I think people really

people

were really into the first season of Westworld but felt it dropped away badly from the second season.

And you're like, that is very interesting.

It's a fuck all use to me at three in the morning when I'm trying to work out if a quasi-fascist game show host has continued access to the biggest military arsenal in human history.

But it did make for a kind of an ungripping night.

I mean, it was churning through the possible scenarios.

It was like following a test match, a five-day cricket match, you know, with all the arcane rules, the confusing numbers.

But the difference being that the prospect of defeat would entail having to watch your least favourite player, the opposition captain, vaunt his cheaty victory on the news every day for the next four years, change the rules of all future games and cast a pall of darkness over the entire planet.

So, I I mean, it's sort of like a test message, but a bit different in terms of the implications, really.

And Andy, can I ask you?

Because

I know

nothing at all about cricket.

So, is cricket like the American electoral system in that the main way to win is by cheating?

Well, no, I don't think it's the main way to win, but it has been proven to be a way to win.

So, yeah, it's not.

The vote counts that are still open, places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania,

and the issue of

the votes, the postal votes and the absentee votes being counted at this sort of late stage and it taking possibly days,

which the Republicans have now been complaining about.

That's one of Trump's things.

Well, we can't count these votes now because I'm winning, essentially, was his argument.

But it was essentially Republican legislators in those states that prevented...

the election officials from counting ballots early as they were in other states.

NATO, I'm going to ask you, why would they do that, other than being in league with Beelzebub, obviously, which is a pretty persuasive reason, I suppose,

why would they do that?

Well,

because

they're assholes and

in for a penny, in for a pound.

Like, once you've decided that you're...

I mean,

I think this is something important to understand about the relationship between people's ideology and their partisan preference, which is that, you know, voters

are not like, they're not rational optimizers.

It's not like people tally up their views and say, this is the politicians, I support all of Donald Trump's non-existent policies,

and so I support Donald Trump.

It's sort of like I'm a Republican, and therefore I support whatever the Republican Party says.

So if Donald Trump

was struck by lightning and then tomorrow morning declared for socialism, every Republican would then declare for socialism.

And that because that's how political identity works.

The latest is that, so

historically,

you keep counting

ballots that were post-marked by Election Day.

That's the rule.

So

those are all the

valid ballots cast.

And so you have to keep counting all the ballots that were post-marked by Election Day.

However,

there was this whole thing about the Postal Service trying to suppress the vote.

And so now there's a hearing today because the Post Office forgot to

deliver the ballots.

And so there's potentially,

let me see here, a f ton, I think is the technical term, of outstanding ballots that were not delivered.

I'm looking at a chart now by the Postal Service.

So

that's frightening.

There were a couple of outside of the presidential election, there were a couple of, I guess, positive news stories coming out of other races.

Corey Bush was elected to Missouri's first congressional district.

This is the first black congresswoman in the history of Missouri, and she also played a big part in the Ferguson Black Lives Matter protest.

America has also elected its first trans state senator.

So there are some positive stories.

However, there are also some even worse stories than Donald Trump's success,

particularly, I mean, particularly given we now have our first QAnon-supporting Congress person.

So, Marjorie Trinidad.

Democracy has to represent the people, Mish.

And these QAnon conspiracy theorists have been

too long without representation.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has won a seat in the House, and she is a supporter of the conspiracy theory QAnon, A conspiracy theory that suggests that there is a cabal of powerful paedophiles that are running America.

Not the cabal of powerful paedophiles that we all know about, not them.

A different ones.

Not the ones who went to a place that locals literally referred to as Pedo Island.

Not them, amazingly.

They're not the ones that

QAdon is interested in.

And the thing that I am fascinated by is what does Marjorie Taylor Greene do once she gets to Congress and discovers that there are no paedophiles?

I mean, the thing is, we're used to politicians not delivering on their promises, but those things tend to be, I'm going to cut your taxes and increase public spending.

Not I'm going to fight and destroy a cabal of powerful paedophiles.

Also, somebody who has got into politics to fight and destroy a powerful cabal of paedophiles is going to be very bored when most of their duties involve having to vote on an appropriations bill for for agriculture subsidy.

But I think maybe though, Nish, this is, you're looking at this the wrong way.

What it suggests is that

plenty of Americans want there to be a cabal of Satanists and Peter Pauls covertly running the world.

And actually, would that not be more reassuring?

At least there would be a discernible philosophy behind behind what they're trying to do, you know, a worship of Satan.

There was definitely some good news in the election.

There was actually quite a bit of good news in the election.

In addition to what Nish mentioned, we legalized weed in several states.

We defeated an abortion ban in Colorado.

We decriminalized other drugs in the state of Oregon.

We expanded voting rights for formerly incarcerated people in California.

There's a whole bunch of other good news that happened.

The other detail that I just wanted to share with you, it may have escaped your attention, gentlemen, across the pond, but the state of North Dakota just elected a dead guy.

I saw this.

This was a real.

It's just a logical step from the presidential election, essentially, isn't it?

A Republican David Andahl just got elected

to the North Dakota State House of Representatives, who had died in October

because

you might think that voters didn't know that he was dead, but I think it was probably a resounding mandate for his policy platform of being dead.

Well, again, you know, it's the time for change, NATO.

We've tried a live politicians, and it's not been working very well for us.

So, you know, we need, you need to, when things are not succeeding, you need to have the courage to vote for change.

I'm going to say

Herman Kaine ran for president in the wrong year.

I want to know if you have

any thoughts about the fact that Trump had a rally in Arizona with Nigel Farage.

Um well, um, you know, I don't I don't like to c compare national political cancers against each other.

Um I'm not sure that's necessarily fair.

They come from

different systems.

Um but yeah, I mean

it it's uh

it's hard it's hard hard to it's hard to talk about Nigel Farage, I think, for for for for people of mind and niche's political persuasions.

My favourite Nigel Farage moment came at a test match at Lourdes, a cricket match at Lourdes, in 2016, so shortly after the Brexit vote, England were playing Pakistan.

And in the Pakistan team was a player called Mohammad Amir, who'd just come back from a five-year ban for match fixing, for cheating for which he'd been jailed and banned from international, banned from all cricket for five years.

And he was playing his first game since this cheating scandal.

And there was a lot of talk about how the crowd would react to this cheat returning to the game.

As it was, there was some mild booing,

and otherwise, people thought, well, he's had quite a stiff punishment.

He was only a young lad at the time, and gave him a reasonable reaction.

Nigel Farage walked down the stairs at the side of the mound stand at Lourdes that afternoon and got resoundingly booed by the entire crowd.

So

that was my favourite Farage moment.

We were prepared to forgive a proven criminal cheat playing cricket, but Farage got exactly what he deserved verbally.

Just to touch on

all the things that you would have thought would lead to a heavy defeat for Trump,

including threatening not to respect the result of the election.

And to be fair, for once, a politician was as good as his word and came out claiming this was a fraud rather than just basic vote counting.

And it clearly scored well with voters.

I guess it is quite attractive as a proposition.

Support me.

If our team wins, we win.

If our team loses, we can pretend we won.

So there's no outright lose situation.

It's quite a good

sales technique.

Mismanaging the pandemic obviously worked pretty well for him.

And, you know, as the prospect of defeat grows for Trump, he might possibly be wondering, did he mismanage it enough?

I mean, approaching a quarter of a million deaths was impressive given the head start and the resources at America's disposal.

But could, you know, 500,000, even a million deaths have made him look like even more of a k that is clearly the main pillar of his

strange electability?

I don't know.

I mean, I don't, who knows how this is going to play out.

I have maintained from the beginning of his presidency that the thing that I cannot visualize is the thing that has to happen in order for him to not be president in this election, which is he has to say, I concede the presidency to Joe Biden.

He has to do that weird thing where he has to like call Joe Biden.

Then he has to do the weird, you know, walk, the Nixon walk, as I believe it's officially known, where he has to stand in front of the helicopter and wave the peace sign in the air or whatever he chooses to do.

I just can't visualize him going through the mechanics of that process that it would require for him to...

I've maintained from the beginning that this does not end with him getting in the helicopter.

This ends with him going full King Kong with whichever one of the Melanias is closest to hand in his grubby fist stood on top of the White House as a phalanx of Wright Brothers biplanes flies along

towards 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I just don't think this can't,

why would this end normally, given how it began and middled?

The fantasy that kept me going through the day yesterday, not that one.

not the other one was

was very similar to what to what Nish was saying about Nigel Farage, which is

just visualizing the video of Trump realizing that he was going to lose

and

wanting a live stream of wherever he was at that moment, of him shouting at people and people rushing to bring him

ground beef tostadas and

hamburgers cooked well done

for him to ease his pains, him throwing his phone across the room and then rushing to pick it up, him realizing that what has indeed happened today, which is that Twitter has blocked most of his tweets for spreading disinformation.

That never happened to Grover Cleveland, to be fair.

Grover Cleveland was really more of a Snapchat guy.

Yeah.

I mean, we still don't know exactly what's going to happen.

The one thing we can rule out is any satisfactory outcome because those are completely off the table.

A convincing Biden win would have been satisfactory, a repudiation of the repudiatory politics of country that have defined the Trump or Stiltskin years.

A humiliating Trump defeat so this political career could end with him defined as a loser.

That's been a nurturingly sweet pipe dream that we can now conside to history.

A convincing Trump victory, that would have at least meant that we could accept that humanity, democracy, and America have basically failed as social experiments, if I may exaggerate very slightly, and just get on with watching sport or TikTok videos of Terrapins dancing to Beethoven for the rest of our lives.

But this sort of hinterland of

disputed

results, if Biden wins, we've got the spectre of a provocatively embittered,

putrescently aggrieved Trump hanging over the transition period and indeed, you know, the next four years until whatever acolyte or scion of his fetid loin seeks the right to try and become the next Trump president.

It's hard to be optimistic, NATO, even if it does look like the worst, worst case scenario might not happen now.

You know,

where we are now,

so as you all know,

as regular listeners to the Bugle know,

I am in the middle of things.

I am on the front lines.

I am involved.

And I did my share of get out the vote activities.

I did a bunch of phone banking and text banking to turn out the vote.

One highlight, by the way, I was doing text banking and someone replied to me, suck my dick.

And then I replied to them, I'm sorry that's not on the ballot, but you can try to write it in, me sucking your dick,

and see how that goes.

Because that's what democracy is.

It's about compromise, isn't it?

So,

but, you know, this scenario of

the early returns looking good for Trump and then Trump declaring victory before all the votes were counted, that there is a word for it, which is coup d'état,

or as we say in Spanish, golpe de estado, which it literally translates as punching the state,

which is how it feels right now.

And

so

there were a lot of people on the American left, like

you know, thousands and thousands who've been preparing for this moment, unions that have been talking about having a general strike to shut down the country in the event that Trump tries to refuse to count every vote or refuse to concede defeat and recognize the results.

And I have to say, as, you know, I wish that it was a more resounding repudiation, but the scenario of Trump losing and then mass protest having to force him to office is pretty fucking exciting to me.

I am.

We've seen it happen all over the world in countries, Chile, Thailand, Iraq,

you know, there's all these countries where they're right now in Poland, where millions of people take to the streets and they are able to drive an illegitimate and unpopular regime from power.

And the key detail, the key thing that you have to remember to win these moments tactically is it's not just about mobilizing and protesting, but it's about specifically not going home.

And at a man of my age, that's difficult because I have reached the age where I have to pee more regularly.

And so at some point, I have to figure out how to find a loo.

But,

you know, then

this is what you need to do: is when you set up your overthrow the government Facebook event,

usually like you'll have a Facebook event where it's like the rally goes from noon to two, and then we're going to go get a burrito and then go home and watch Netflix.

But if you want to overthrow the government, you need to have no end time.

So,

you know,

that it needs to be the rally starts at noon

on Thursday and then continues until Trump is perp walking in the handcuffs directly into Guantanamo.

And

that's the fucking plan right now.

And buglers, I want you to know that you have a part to play.

You have a historic destiny that only you can deliver in this moment, which is

we are, as we speak, people like me are all over the United States figuring out ways to have strategic disruption, what they call nonviolent resistance, civil resistance,

targeted non-cooperation, to shut down key choke points in the economy, to force an economic crisis so that Trump leaves.

And Trump has a golf course in Scotland.

And

if Andy and Nish and Mark and Tiff and the other members of the UK-based, what you might call the Bugle expanded cinematic universe, went to Scotland, occupied the Trump golf course in Scotland for a live tape, masks on, socially distant, live taping bugle episode to shut down the Trump golf course and do a pun run until the regime falls.

I think that could do the trick.

Well, I'm up for that, certainly.

It would be my honor to express solidarity for our siblings in America by taking a dump in a sand trap.

And I'm not saying that because that's something I've thought about doing before, and this is a convenient excuse for it, though.

Trump, one of the tweets he put out was that how his lead in these states that are counting a lot of postal votes had magically disappeared.

Very much like your fingers.

Very much like your fingers magically appear when you're teaching your infant child to fucking count.

I mean, it's a slight misunderstanding between magic and basic procedure, which I imagine must have made for some disappointing children's parties in the Trump family for his

disappointing children.

Ta-da!

The rabbit has magically disappeared.

Well, no, it's magically disappeared into the mouth of that dog.

It's a really fascinating exercise in watching someone who's never had to struggle for anything in their entire life be confronted with the reality of what happens when you lose something.

Like, it's almost as if Trump can't psychologically conceive of a situation in which things have gone badly for him.

Largely because, like, the only things that have ever gone badly for him have ended up going extremely well for him.

His, like, bankruptcy was just a creative piece of accounting.

You know, so he's never really experienced the tang of failure.

And, like, normally all that results in is an adult having a tantrum.

But when that adult commands the most well-funded military in the world, it gets slightly spicier.

I think, um, as I reflect on last night, it made me realize the number of things that I fundamentally do not understand.

These include America,

Americans, the people.

I mean, do I want to understand them?

I'm not sure.

The American political system, how Americans use the American political system, humans in general, how the f did we make it this far as a species?

Christianity, I don't fully understand, certainly the Mike Pence version of Christianity.

I don't know in that Trump speech that he gave last night.

I don't know if Pence was there thinking, what would Jesus do?

And so maybe fair enough, because Jesus, of course, did famously pretend not to be dead, even though all the evidence suggested that he was definitely dead.

He then delayed the results for days, never admitted being dead, and it led to unending squabbles going on for generations about whether or not he did, in fact, die.

So, in fact, that does kind of sit quite well with the Trump-Pence way of reacting to this election.

Optimism, I don't understand optimism because that seems to me the path to guaranteed disappointment.

And I cocoon myself in an assumption and this is more so after the last few years of democracy which haven't gone particularly well for people on my various teams so even now I see Trump's what now he's coming to seven to two while we've been what we've been recording

yes I'm not I'm not counting those chickens I'm looking at those chickens saying what are you deceitful f ⁇ ing planning the third millennium I don't understand that especially given the second millennium that appears that we've not entirely learned any lessons from that I don't really understand logic, sense, statistics, and Florida.

Absolutely no fing idea.

Florida is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a Hawaiian shirt.

Attempting to understand Florida could finally drive you off the edge, Andy.

Right.

Yeah,

I think it's probably best that I leave that for

another year.

So So let's just quickly look ahead to what's going to unfold over the next few days.

This is another one of those bugles that might be totally obsolete by the time anyone listens to it.

I guess for the things that we know definitely won't happen, it's easier to rule these things out, is everyone will relax, Trump will shut up, America will reach out in American parlance and also in American parlance, heal.

The Republicans will remember what the fk they're supposed to be,

or everyone will sit down calmly at the end of all this and think, what lessons can we all learn from that?

That will not, none of those will happen.

Where are we going to be in a week's time, NATO?

Do you think?

General strike, bro.

You think that every week.

Well,

here in

London, we're going into a four-week

lockdown, Nish, which I'm sure you're very, very excited about.

Very excited about the lockdown.

Very excited about lockdown, too.

It was a very exciting announcement.

I didn't think that when they trained newsreaders, one of the most essential pieces of training a newsreader could receive in 2020 was fill in for time while the government shits itself because the lockdown announcement was delayed by a couple of hours at the last minute.

And then Boris Johnson came out and said things that were incredibly serious and dull whilst looking like an absolute cartoon.

Like the whole, the announcement was like watching Fozzy Bear give a TED talk about hospital administration.

It's, you know, we're having a second lockdown to perfect our test and trace system, which I don't even know what that is.

Like, our test and trace app is the least successful app of this year.

And I say that as someone who did a show on Quibi.

That's how bad things are.

Well, lockdown three is happening in Washington, D.C., with Trump barricading himself into the White House with an 8,000-foot fence.

Full King Kong.

I mean, that...

That was, that was, I mean, he's criticised a lot for being very short-termist, not really thinking much beyond the next news cycle.

But this 8,000-foot fence, Nate, I mean, it keeps keeps people out, it keeps him in,

it's both an attacking and defensive maneuver.

It's going to be quite hard to extract him, is it, before

we try to release him back into the wild?

Yeah,

so like here,

as an uncomedic plug, the group that I'm following is called Choose Democracy.

And

if American-based buglers

should contact Choose Democracy to get trained about how to non-violently overthrow the government, which is what we're about.

In the scale of grand historical tasks, overthrowing the government is not that hard.

I mean, it's hard, but

it's not hard like me losing another 10 pounds is hard.

Nish, Nato, thank you very much

for joining me on what certainly at about 2 a.m.

UK time, I thought was going to be probably the most gloomy bugle in history.

And there have been quite a lot over our 13 years where it's been hard to see the sunlight.

So, well, we will see exactly the level of darkness that is enveloping America in next week's show.

Until then, buglers, goodbye.

We'll be back next week with a full show and some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

We've slightly overrun this week, so we'll hold them back.

There's been enough lies this week already.

But I don't like that.

It's not a good time to add to that if you want to join the bugle voluntary subscription scheme go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button to make a regular or one-off donation to keep this show free flourishing and independent until next time goodbye

Hi, Buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please, come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.