Bill Kristol: Kama-Momentum

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Speaker 6 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I'm here today with our editor Emerita, Emeritus, the cheerful pessimist Bill Crystal. If it's Monday, it's Bill Crystal.

Speaker 6 What's up?

Speaker 1 Move from editor-at-large, which sounds like I'm actually doing any work, to editor emeritus, which is just kind of this output to pasture. But that's okay.
I'm not offended.

Speaker 1 I'm just cheerfully chugging along.

Speaker 6 Nancy Pelosi is Speaker Emerita, and she saved the country in the last

Speaker 6 time. That was more of a Pelosi crystal comparison than an attempt to

Speaker 6 kick you off the side.

Speaker 1 I'm good with that. I'm good with that.

Speaker 6 We have serious business to discuss today. Much happened over the weekend, but we need a little Monday morning amoozebouche.
And so I'd like to play for you a clip that for some reason RFK Jr.

Speaker 6 put out himself on his Twitter feed. Here he is in conversation with Roseanne Barr.

Speaker 10 I wasn't drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea.

Speaker 10 And I said, I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of. I said, let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like he got hit by a bike.

Speaker 6 That's about 20 seconds of a much longer video of RFK trying to preempt a New Yorker story about how he, I guess, put a dead bear cub in Central Park and tried to frame it as a bike accident.

Speaker 6 Thoughts on that, Bill?

Speaker 1 I mean, who hasn't stopped on the highway and put a poor dead bear cub in the back of one van and then had a bike there by accident and decided after a long day of falconing, I think it was, and then going to beat a Luger, kind of the meat theme

Speaker 1 is very big in this RFK video for a big steak dinner. It was too late for him to do whatever he intended to do with a bear cub and he had to get to the airport.

Speaker 1 So he just seeing his buddies just did what you'd have to do in that circumstance, which is drop it in Central Park with a bike to make it look like a bike accident.

Speaker 6 Yeah, a couple extra fun facts I want to share with people. He puts his finger in the bear cub's mouth going to one of the pictures.

Speaker 6 So I think we might have found out where his brain worms came from, though it kind of seems like he might have had the brain worm before this event. So I'm not sure about that.

Speaker 6 I'm not a medical doctor. And the other thing worth noting is that this happened in 2014.

Speaker 6 He's like 60 years old when this happened. This was not like, oh, I was 19 years old.
We were in college. You know, things got a little out of hand.

Speaker 6 He's a seasoned man when he decided to frame a bear cub attack in Central Park.

Speaker 1 You know, 60-year-olds can have fun too, Tim. You know, I know that's hard for you to believe in

Speaker 1 your youth.

Speaker 6 No, I'm going to be having fun when I'm 60. I just hopefully, you know, judgment, fun with judgment, I assumed, is what happens at age 60.

Speaker 1 Not to be pedantic, but I don't know. Are you allowed to just put bear cubs in bikes and race an incredible police resources and stuff?

Speaker 1 you know just

Speaker 6 it seems like that's sort of a problem right yeah he admits later in the video to roseanne that that that he got worried because the police said they were fingerprinting the bike things are not going well for the rfk jr campaign he's down to like two or three percent in the polls and uh you know it was fun while it lasted do you think he gets out and endorses trump i kind of assume that's the case i just don't know that it matters anymore i think it'd help harris in the tiniest of margins if he got out you know if it ends up being a thing where 8 000 votes matter one way or the other it could matter right because you know, the issue was always with RFK is: are the double haters who are traditionally Democrats going to go to him, particularly the low-info traditional Democrats?

Speaker 6 Are they going to go to him just as kind of like a F you to this race with these two old guys? His numbers have totally dissipated now that Harris has come into the race.

Speaker 6 All those people, nearly all of them, have moved to Harris already, a few to Trump. And so if he's at 3%, it only really matters if it's a coin flip.
And it might be a coin flip.

Speaker 6 So maybe it'll matter. Speaking of the polls, you have an exclusive in morning chance this morning from the UMass Amherst.
The top line,

Speaker 6 I would say, rational exuberance seeing the top line of this poll, but you have found some reasons underneath to be a little concerned. So tell us what you found in the latest UMass Amherst poll.

Speaker 1 So I'm cheerful about this poll. So they do polls every now and then.
The UMass Amherst has a pretty sophisticated polling operation out of their political science department, I think.

Speaker 1 And this one's going to be released momentarily, I guess, today. In this respect, they're not that different from everyone else.
They had Trump about four points ahead of Biden in January.

Speaker 1 A little bit better news for Harris than maybe some of the other polls, which are more like plus one now, plus Harris plus three nationally. And this is a sophisticated, serious poll.

Speaker 1 So I see no reason to think that that isn't basically in the ballpark. And it is consistent with other polls showing pretty significant movement to Harris.
I mean, that is the bottom line.

Speaker 1 It's unbelievable. It was only two weeks ago, right, that Biden got out, two weeks plus one day ago that Biden got out.

Speaker 1 And the big question, and we discussed it, was, I often thought she would sumb the relief of Biden being out, but would it dissipate? How big would it be? And would it dissipate?

Speaker 1 And it turns out to be pretty substantial.

Speaker 1 I mean, she needs to carry it forward, but if she's really plus two or three, that's not nothing compared to where Biden was drifting down to what, minus five, I'm going to say, something like that.

Speaker 1 So that's a seven-point move in what had been a totally static race. I mean, that's almost totally static race.
That's really something. And then can she sustain it?

Speaker 1 And we don't know that, but there's not much evidence of it ebbing at this point. So that's all very good news.

Speaker 1 And when you get into the polls, questions about issues and characteristics, the striking things are that Trump, it's pretty predictable.

Speaker 1 Harris wins on health care and reproductive rights, and Trump wins on immigration and crime.

Speaker 1 But Trump's margins on immigration and crime are something like 53, 47.

Speaker 1 They're not what they need to be for Trump, I think, to really be clobbering Harris on the issues that are presumably his strongest and on the personal qualities.

Speaker 1 Harris does well on being a nice person and a decent person, but also close to Trump on strength and experience, actually.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I have it right here. It says strength 54, 46 advantage for Trump, patriotism 52, 48.

Speaker 6 And then to the key point that you got to, which is on who voters perceive as more moderate, Harris had a 57 to 43 point advantage. I think that's very noteworthy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and what we discussed a couple of weeks ago,

Speaker 1 I guess Doug Soznick had said this, that the Trump people are going to really try.

Speaker 1 He was very worried that Trump people would really try and have some success in defining Harris as radical, as extreme, based on those clips of her in 2019.

Speaker 1 That doesn't seem to have particularly worked yet. Now, they have another two weeks and they have another two months to keep putting tens and hundreds of millions of dollars behind those clips.

Speaker 1 I think Harris's momentum has just kind of overwhelmed it. It's not that she's been, but she's been pretty good on defense on some of these issues, the border ad and stuff.

Speaker 1 Weirdly, she's had so much momentum, she almost hasn't had to play defense.

Speaker 1 If I put on my gloomy little hat for a second, I sort of worry they shouldn't over, you know, at some point they are going to have to really play aggressive defense, if I could put it that way, on some of these issues and neutralize them.

Speaker 1 I don't think they got away just because they didn't work in the first two weeks. But no, no, it's a good news poll, no question about it.

Speaker 6 Yeah, good counter-punching is going to have to continue to come like they did in the immigration ad. To me,

Speaker 6 it does tie to the serious part of the RFK thing.

Speaker 6 You know, the best case scenario for Harris, I think, in the first two weeks, which has come to pass, is that she just gobbles up all of the young voters and these voters of color, the working class black and brown voters who have been traditionally Democrats that were unhappy.

Speaker 6 A vast majority of them have already coalesced back with Harris. And her number now with black voters is almost at where Biden 2020 was and heading straight back to that number.

Speaker 6 And so that's happened. Meanwhile, in the attributes, you had this kind of group of...

Speaker 6 Can I say probably our people? A lot of the folks that were kind of hold,

Speaker 6 I wasn't holding my nose for Biden, but our people in the biggest sense, like the former Republicans, the Romney Biden Biden voters that were holding their nose for Biden were not happy that he was running again.

Speaker 6 You see now that they are approving in a large part of the candidate. And you're seeing this in the numbers, right? Like where her numbers are improving on things like the economy.

Speaker 6 That's because it's these types of like college-educated voters that were probably going to vote for Biden anyway now seem to fully have her backing as a preferable answer to Trump.

Speaker 6 So you go from there then into the persuasion, right? And I think that's where the big groups are going to be fought over.

Speaker 6 To me, that's just such a much easier task for Democrats now when they don't have to worry so much about the activation side of things, right?

Speaker 6 If you can focus entirely on persuasion, that makes your job a lot easier than having to spend a lot of time making sure that people that are in your core groups are excited.

Speaker 6 Like that part has already, I think, basically been solved. And I'm not sure there's anything that Harris could do to change that at this point.

Speaker 1 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: No, in that respect, having Harris as the nominee as opposed to

Speaker 1 a competitive process or an earlier Biden withdrawal that might have produced a more moderate nominee whom I, at one point, would have, you know, might have preferred.

Speaker 1 In a way, it helps because it's easier for her to soak up all the, as you say, the kind of base voters and almost all of them.

Speaker 1 And then if she can, you know, sort of fix the problems in 2019 and be aggressively moderate, if I can put it that way, on some key issues, you know, maybe she gets the best of both worlds.

Speaker 1 Now, campaigns that should be persuading centrist voters, gettable centrist voters, don't always do that, right? And we have one instance here in real time, which is Donald J. Trump and

Speaker 1 J.D. Vance, who seem to be cheerfully going further into the insanity of their base and not persuading, let's say, Georgians who might like Governor Kemp, which is a pretty large number of Georgians.

Speaker 1 So campaigns can do foolish things, but I hope very much Oparis stays on the path and goes for those voters. And for me, the Shapiro pick as vice president would be very important.

Speaker 6 I want to get to the Kemp thing. We have some audio from Trump's Insane Rally in Georgia.

Speaker 6 If people were enjoying their weekend and not watching that like I was suffering through, we'll play that for you here in a couple of minutes. But let's just do the Harris VP side of things.

Speaker 6 You, as sort of a supplemental point to your newsletter about the good poll, sum things up pretty succinctly.

Speaker 6 We're not tired of winning pick Shapiro as kind of the obvious choice here for the things that we just discussed, right?

Speaker 6 That if Harris has already coalesced the base, she's she's solved the enthusiasm problem, she's closed the enthusiasm gap between her and Trump, now do the pick that will help shore up the middle.

Speaker 6 And you seem to think that it's clearly Shapiro.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, plus the Pennsylvania state-specific strength of Shapiro, the most important state.

Speaker 1 You rarely get sort of a pick that fits, what do we call it, let's say, ideologically, and that fits generationally.

Speaker 1 And that also really appreciably increases your chance to win by far the most important swing state.

Speaker 1 To have that, all those those things at once, it just seems to be kind of crazy not to go ahead with that.

Speaker 6 I obviously agree. I have a newsletter that will be out by the time this podcast posts, and it addresses

Speaker 6 this question of Shapiro and divisiveness.

Speaker 6 I think that the most legitimate case against Shapiro that I've heard, I mean, there are some people who just have legitimate ideological concerns and would rather the Democratic Party move to the left.

Speaker 6 That's a legitimate concern, but we're here talking politics right now, not ideology.

Speaker 6 So on the the political side, the most legitimate criticism of Shapiro that I've heard is when the vibes are this good, when the energy is this high for Harris, why risk it?

Speaker 6 Why mess with it by bringing something that's going to be divisive, that there are going to be elements of the left that don't like because of his position on vouchers or because of his comments about the pro-Palestinian protesters on campus or some of his past views.

Speaker 6 Some of these are kind of ridiculous, like people criticizing him for something he wrote in college.

Speaker 6 But there might be this divisiveness that will arise based on kind of the Israel-Palestine issue and some of his other more moderate positions. And like, why do that? Why mess with a good thing?

Speaker 6 And why not just go with somebody that's not going to cause this internal divisiveness? And my response to that in the newsletter is basically, I just don't believe that that's like going to happen.

Speaker 6 I think that it's a misunderstanding of what has united the Democrats around Harris. I think that Harris's performance has been a big part of it.

Speaker 6 Harris being a woman has been a big part of it, that there's something to kind of get excited about, a generational shift as well. And the top of the ticket is what matters for that.

Speaker 6 And the vast, vast majority of people who are not listening to this podcast or obsessing over politics on Twitter just are not going to change whether or not they're excited about this based on who the VP pick is.

Speaker 6 I don't really believe that. I think that, you know, that Beyonce gave Harris 4 million over the weekend.
Charlie XCX Kamala Brat Summer. Megan Bee Stallion was performing in Georgia.

Speaker 6 Are any of those people going to stop their outreach for Harris because this is the VP picks college essay? Like, no, I just, I think that it's too online.

Speaker 6 And I think that the Shapiro pick, in the end, if she has it, has very little impact on the vibe side of things.

Speaker 6 I think he helps with a small percentage of maybe pro-Israel or whatever, pro-strong on national defense, foreign policy, conservatives that want, they're looking for an excuse.

Speaker 6 That's not a ton of voters. I don't want to pretend like it is, but it's some.

Speaker 6 He helps with some people in Pennsylvania who've come to judge him and know him and accept him, as demonstrated by his poll numbers there, 61% approval rating.

Speaker 6 And maybe he costs some voters in Dearborn or on campus at Ann Arbor. And like net net, it's probably a help in Pennsylvania.
Maybe not in the other states.

Speaker 6 And all of the other candidates on the table are kind of net net neutral.

Speaker 6 So after that long, that long intro, Bill, my main takeaway is: like, I just don't think this is as important as everybody thinks it is. I think the vibes are going to continue to be good.

Speaker 6 And I think that Shapiro is a small net advantage in a key state. And, like, that's what it comes down to.

Speaker 1 The only thing I'd add, I'd be a little stronger, maybe, is I think he's just a more talented politician than the others.

Speaker 1 I mean, again, we don't have that much data, but we have his actual rating in Pennsylvania and his actual performance in 2022 compared to the others. The others are all good politicians.

Speaker 1 They've won races and

Speaker 1 two cases in red states and in other cases in more liberal states. But I think Buddha, Judge, and Shapiro are just the best politicians, the most talented politicians of them.
And that could matter.

Speaker 1 We don't know. It often doesn't matter.
You go through September, October, there's one VP debate. Maybe it's a neutral, it's a draw, and everyone forgets about them.

Speaker 1 I think that's the more likely outcome. But the talent could matter a little bit.
I'll just, you know, tell us one brief autobiographical sort of moment on this.

Speaker 1 Before you were born in 1980, I was a young conservative and a Reagan supporter, but I really loved Jack Kemp.

Speaker 1 I came to Reagan kind of through through Kemp, as a lot of people, some people my age did, if you were sort of into politics, and Kemp was the forward-looking, optimistic Republican, et cetera, but also quite hawkish on foreign policy, pro-human rights, and democracy.

Speaker 1 And there was talk in 1980 that Reagan could pick Kempus as running mate generational and other things. And instead, he took George H.W.

Speaker 1 Bush and be defeated in the primary, and who was, we all thought, a boring establishment, not a politician.

Speaker 1 And in his case, unlike Shapiro, not a very successful politician in terms of elective office. And there was some diminution of enthusiasm.
I mean, not like for a week, not for two months.

Speaker 1 By October, we were all back. So we got, it's got to be Reagan.
We can't have Carter, you know, and Reagan, the Reagan Revolution. We got back into it.
I want to get to the Bush thing.

Speaker 6 Just actually, let's just pause right there for one second because this is basically a summation of what I wrote today, which is, yeah, for a week or two, there will be a handful of super engaged political nerds who wish it was Walls, or if it's the other way, wish it was Shapiro, who are unhappy, who send some tweets.

Speaker 6 But like by the time we get to Chicago or by the time Reagan got to the convention, were any of those people like, I'm not going because of George H.W. Bush is too squishy? Like, no,

Speaker 6 that's just not how this stuff works.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there were a couple of sort of freakish types who ended up not supporting Reagan as they were like for Howard Phillips or all these characters from the past who were, you know,

Speaker 1 whose Reagan was too nice on immigration. And anyway, so there wasn't much of that.
But, you know, and Reagan went big and it wouldn't have mattered.

Speaker 1 Having said that, there was a moment there where John Anderson was running as a third-party candidate. He was a respected, moderate Republican.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 The dynamic could have been a little different if he had not picked Bush. I would say if he had picked Camp and then made a mistake, then Reagan launches his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Speaker 1 Didn't he do that? Which had been a site of terrible killing of the civil rights workers. And I don't know that he meant to do it there.
And I think they got... sort of a pass on that.

Speaker 1 But if he didn't have the kind of moderates okay with the campaign, I think you're right that it probably doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 but I think there's some risk of giving another opportunity, I'll put it this way, to the Trump campaign to say, look at this.

Speaker 1 He took this liberal governor of Minnesota, the state where all these riots happened in 2020, and where Kamala Harris had this bail plan, or I don't know what she really has it, but she promoted this bail plan

Speaker 1 to let out various criminals. And I don't know, could that catch on? Probably doesn't make much difference, but could it stop her momentum some? Yes.
Whereas I think Shapiro is just a win-win.

Speaker 1 So I do think it's maybe a little more important in the moment, even though ultimately the election probably is what it is.

Speaker 6 Aaron Powell, Jr.: I just want to be bundling clear about what I'm arguing here, which is not that the VP pick could not matter at all. Like it could.

Speaker 6 Certainly, Shapiro could make a difference in Pennsylvania. Certainly, there could be some protests against him on campus and Michigan that create problems.

Speaker 6 And if this election ends up being a coin flip, everything will matter.

Speaker 6 My point is just to dismiss the core arguments that you hear from people online to try to be a wet blanket on Shapiro is that the Shapiro pick will create this divisiveness within the Democratic Party and that people will be unhappy and that the vibes will no longer be good.

Speaker 6 And it's just like, nah, like that's just not it. Like the vibes in Chicago are going to be immaculate, no matter who she picks.
And there's some other considerations at play with the VP.

Speaker 6 But that actual mainstream Democratic voters, the Democratic celebrities, the Democratic influence on TikTok, the people that are donating five bucks, like they're all going to be there.

Speaker 6 They're They're going to be there for whoever she picks because they're excited about her and the contrast with Donald Trump.

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Speaker 6 Speaking of the vibes being bad, Donald Trump is in Georgia this weekend. And what a split screen.
Credit to the Harris campaign.

Speaker 6 I don't know if this was intentional, but they put out Republicans for Harris, the coalition with our friend Adam Kinziger and Olivia Troy and Joe Walsh, a bunch of people who've been on this podcast, who officially endorsed Republicans for Harris.

Speaker 6 They put out this press release announcing it the day after Trump just loses his mind at a rally in Georgia on the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and his wife.

Speaker 6 And so I think that was a smart strategic move. But before I get your take on it, let's listen to Trump.
He attacked Kemp four separate times during this rally. So here's just one of the clips.

Speaker 11 But I got him by doing massive rallies. I really worked hard.
He's the most disloyal guy I think I've ever seen.

Speaker 11 But think of the wife. wife.
We can never repay you for what you've done, sir.

Speaker 11 We could have never won. And now she said two weeks ago that

Speaker 11 I will not endorse him because she hasn't earned my endorsement. I haven't earned her endorsement.
I have nothing to do with her. Somewhere he went bad.
And you know what?

Speaker 11 Your numbers in Georgia are very average. Your crime numbers, your economic numbers, all of your numbers, you're very average.

Speaker 11 You can do a lot better, and you'll do a lot better with a better governor.

Speaker 6 Bill?

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 he got reelected very easily in 2022 after Trump had lost the state in 2020 and caused them to lose both Senate races.

Speaker 1 And January 5th, 2021, he crushed the candidate Trump put up against him in the primary by what, 50 points or something like that? So that's among Republicans, right?

Speaker 1 That was not getting a lot of Democratic votes. So it's all kind of amazing.

Speaker 1 You go into a state, you have to win, or it'd be very, very convenient for you to win with a popular Republican governor, and you attack the Republican governor and his wife just for, you know, and his wife kind of in a gross way with a gross tone.

Speaker 6 Just when you think about this sort of stuff, you think about in the Republicans for Harris context.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 6 Does that nudge a couple of those Georgia people to just go ahead and sign up? I think that there's an electoral problem with this.

Speaker 6 I mean, just as a strategic point, how stupid is it you're in Georgia? You have Marjorie Taylor Greene speaking.

Speaker 6 We're talking about how Harris is like, should you go for Shapiro or someone slightly more moderate like Bashir? Or, you know what I mean? You're having this VP context.

Speaker 6 Trump is saying, no, the conservative governor who's popular is not welcome here. And his wife, I find disgusting, right? Like I'm going to personally attack the wife.

Speaker 6 Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the insane conspiracy theorist, is speaking.

Speaker 6 at the event, like sending this complete message that you're not interested in the Georgia suburbs, red dog voters that are going to be so important in that state.

Speaker 6 You have the Lieutenant Governor Jeff Duncan that was already included on this Republicans for Harris rollout. You know, there are a bunch of local Georgia Republicans who are in the Duncan-Kemp mold.

Speaker 6 Does like Trump just being an asshole to Marty Kemp nudge a couple of them? I don't think that's crazy to think.

Speaker 1 No, I think totally. And I mean, I was just thinking as you spoke, I haven't really focused on this.
So Trump, the assassination attempt was July 13th, I think, right?

Speaker 1 Right before the Republican Convention. Until that point.

Speaker 6 July 13th of 2024?

Speaker 6 Was that just last month? Three weeks ago.

Speaker 1 Less than a month ago.

Speaker 6 Got us.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 until that point, the Trump campaign had done a very good job, and Trump had done a pretty good job of being disciplined Not Trump.

Speaker 6 On the massive Trump curve.

Speaker 1 He'd been

Speaker 1 relatively calm. He was running ahead of Biden.
We didn't know about Harris at that point. So he was ahead in the race.

Speaker 1 If you think about the three weeks since then, you've got to think about Harris's extremely good two weeks. But think about it.

Speaker 1 But Trump also, Trump, the pick of Vance, the convention speech, the way in which he and Vance have both campaigned, sort of doubling down basically on the worst aspects of their own record and characters, I would say, for these three weeks.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's rare in politics that you get the combination, right?

Speaker 1 Trump fans doing as badly as they could do, I'm almost going to say, and Harris doing as well as she could do in the same timeframe and in a time frame when everyone's paying attention because everything has been shaken up and you've had an assassination attempt, a convention, a withdrawal, and a new candidate.

Speaker 1 And now we're going to have a VP tomorrow. Historians will look at these three or four weeks and say, whoa, that's a very unusual moment of, you know, whatever.

Speaker 6 For sure. No, a MAGA account that I follow, like not one of our former crusty Republican types, like a pro-Trump MAGA account that I follow posted this the other day.
I thought it was very telling.

Speaker 6 And this was in a criticism of Trump strategists. Like, so the motivation here is to go after Lasavita and Wiles and say that they've messed this up.

Speaker 6 But it's a picture of the Trump post-assassination attempt, bloody ear, fist in the air, and then a picture of the polls going inverted in the three weeks since then.

Speaker 6 With just the comment of like the last three weeks of campaign choices by the Trump campaign has been the biggest self-own

Speaker 6 in potentially, you know, his political life.

Speaker 6 I wouldn't say that because I would say, you know, January 6th, many of his other bad, but like just as a, just looking at it from the MAGA perspective of we want to win,

Speaker 6 just like a disastrous strategic three weeks for him.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 6 you know, it's still a close race, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 But well, that's the same. Yeah.
I mean, Harris should be, if JVL were here, he would say Harris should be ahead by 15 points. And that's probably true, but that's not quite the country we live in.

Speaker 6 Same event. I got in some trouble this weekend on the internet.
Bill, I don't know if you saw this because

Speaker 6 I criticized this comment from J.D. Vance, and the MAGA people are really, really pissed at me.

Speaker 6 So let's listen to JD first, and then we'll let you kind of be the judge of whether I was in the right here or whether libs of TikTok and Wokeness and Donald Trump Jr. are in the right.

Speaker 6 We'll let you kind of be the determining factor here. Let's listen to JD Vance.

Speaker 12 Remember, eight years ago, Donald Trump had everything. Fame, fortune, family, friends.

Speaker 13 He gave up the easy life so that we could get our country back.

Speaker 12 He traded everything he had for unjust persecution, for slander and scorn from the fake news, all for this country, for you and me.

Speaker 13 They couldn't beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him.
They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison.

Speaker 13 They even tried to kill him.

Speaker 6 They even tried to kill him. I sent out that this was a pernicious, disgusting lie, and that J.D.
Vance should stop saying that. They even tried to kill him.

Speaker 6 The Trump defenders then said that I'm like a conspiracy theorist or something and saying that that's true. They did try to kill him.
What say you? Did they try to kill Donald Trump?

Speaker 1 No, of course not. Didn't Vance say that that night? He was one of the first to get out there.

Speaker 1 And I think some of us, some people thought at the time, gee, that's fans so unbelievably irresponsible before you know anything to say that this is the left.

Speaker 1 He said the Biden campaign had helped cause this because of their overheated rhetoric against Trump. And we all said that's so irresponsible.

Speaker 1 And then for about 24 hours, everyone thought, that's going to hurt him in the vice presidential pick because, you know, why would Trump want to pick someone who said something so manifestly irresponsible and dangerous, I would almost say, really.

Speaker 1 Yeah, dangerous. And of course, Trump picked him, and now Bats has decided to just keep on saying it.
Something I saw over the weekend too, that Trump also has decided to try to play the assassinate.

Speaker 1 He didn't get enough benefit out of the assassination or death, and he's sort of playing the assassination card again. Did he see? Am I making that up? I think I saw something.

Speaker 6 No, no, no. He's kind of

Speaker 6 starting to lean back into it. He said at the convention that this was going to be the last time that he talked to about it.

Speaker 6 And he's been bringing it back up in his speeches on Truth Social.

Speaker 6 The day, though, is like it's extremely. They didn't.
Thomas Crook, he he tried to kill him.

Speaker 6 One troubled young man who I guess apparently looked to see where those events were for lots of different people.

Speaker 6 Like, who knows what is in this young man's mind, but he, with an AR and with bullets that he was able to buy underage, tried to kill him. Like, that's what happened.
And JD is clearly like trying to

Speaker 6 rile up and radicalize the audience and make it seem like it was part of some plot. It's just so irresponsible.

Speaker 1 They is really just the classic device, I think,

Speaker 1 of the totally irresponsible demagogue and conspiracy theorist, actually, right?

Speaker 1 But if you push him, what's the they? Well, who knows?

Speaker 1 I mean, I've been sort of struck, and I don't quite follow these MAGA accounts as much as you do, but when I occasionally stumble across one, I've been struck how much stuff there is about how it was kind of a plot in the Secret Service.

Speaker 1 It can't be an accident that the Secret Service didn't see the guy on the roof.

Speaker 1 And there's even something kind of totally crazy about how CNN doesn't usually take Trump rallies, but they took this one because they want, I mean, I can't even follow it, but I don't think it's very followable because it's not reasonable or certainly not true, but

Speaker 1 I'm sort of struck

Speaker 1 why I'm struck at this date, but the conspiracy theorizing goes very deep in Trump circles and not just on the extremes.

Speaker 1 I think that's what Vance, I mean, Vance is the VP nominee, and there he is, right?

Speaker 6 On stage. Yeah, no, it's the dangerous part of this.
It's just so important.

Speaker 6 It's like, even if, and I think it's more, but even if only 1%, even if only 0.1% of the people listening take that seriously and are like, no, they tried to kill him.

Speaker 6 And, you know, Trump's like, I am your retribution, right? It just doesn't take very far to imagine somebody that is unstable being radicalized by this type of rhetoric.

Speaker 6 And responsible politicians in both parties for our entire lives would have tried to tamp down something like this and did, you know, in the case of Reagan and Ford and the Kennedys, right?

Speaker 6 Like they did try to tamp down this stuff. You did not see this type of rhetoric.
You know, Ted Kennedy, whole career, wasn't out there saying, the conservatives tried to kill my brother.

Speaker 6 You know, like it was unthinkable, you know?

Speaker 1 It is.

Speaker 1 And I was just thinking as you spoke, I mean, even Pat Buchanan, who I did not like, do not like, fought against in the 90s and et cetera, is a demagogue in my view and very, has very dangerous views for the country and so forth.

Speaker 1 But even he, he wouldn't do that. You know what I mean? I mean, he's a very bad in many ways in terms of his whipping up people against immigration and his nativism and all that.

Speaker 1 But he wouldn't do that kind of next step of they tried to do this. I mean, that's, you have to go pretty far into conspiracy swamps to get to that.

Speaker 1 And, you know, that is kind of a John Birch society level, I would say. And there's J.
D. Vance, as you say, from the stage.
I guess where they kind of prepared remarks, it seemed like.

Speaker 6 Yeah, no, no, that was his intro. That was his intro to Trump.
That was not just like him riffing. That was, because he did a long intro speech.

Speaker 6 One of my other favorite lines from that was when he's talking about the days, Obama said that we cling to our guns and our religion. Hillary called us deplorables.

Speaker 6 I kind of want to intervene there and say, no, actually, Hillary didn't call us deplorables. He's having trouble with his pronouns in these speeches.
She didn't call us deplorables.

Speaker 6 She called them deplorables. JD was on Hillary's side back in 2016.
You weren't part of the deplorable. You might be now, but you weren't the deplorable then.

Speaker 6 But yeah, no, and so then he, then he leaves the stage. comes back out and does like that, what we played, that like 45 second intro, you know, to bring Donald Trump up onto the stage.

Speaker 6 Yeah, no, it's it is on the teleprompter. It was not a riff.

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Speaker 6 One other weird JD Vance thing while we're doing weird JD Vance things. You've done some interviews with Peter Thiel in the past.

Speaker 6 I think that this is important to just not ignore how radicalized these folks are.

Speaker 6 Now that Teal has his chosen VP candidate on the ticket, now that Trump has clearly pivoted that if he gets back in, it will be more towards the Teal kind of worldview.

Speaker 6 Here's audio that people are sharing this weekend of Thiel in an interview at George Mason recently.

Speaker 6 I don't think we're ever in a cyclical world, but there are certainly certain parallels in the U.S.

Speaker 14 in the 2020s to Germany in the 1920s, where, you know,

Speaker 14 liberalism is exhausted. One suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted.
And

Speaker 10 that

Speaker 14 we have to ask some questions very far outside the open window.

Speaker 6 Huh. Is Peter Thiel Hitler really a comparison? What is happening? It's like Germany is in the 1920s.
Democracy is exhausted, whatever that means. I don't know what democracy means.

Speaker 6 It's a complex term. And so we need to think about some things outside the box.
It's just a very dark place that these guys have gotten.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, well, we need to ask questions.

Speaker 1 Don't we always make fun of that as the classic dodge of people who don't want to quite take responsibility for what they're saying? I mean, yeah, but you're right.

Speaker 1 It's not as if we're talking about a hypothetical situation where, let's just say, liberalism is maybe a little exhausted and democracy is stumbling, and we don't quite know what we have to think more broadly about possible futures.

Speaker 1 That's one thing to say. And then you could be going to a possible future that maybe you and I wouldn't like, but that is still within the bounds of decency and the rule of law, and so to speak.

Speaker 1 We know what the future for Germany was, right? So, why do you bring that up as your example?

Speaker 1 It's usually brought up the other way as the example of how horrible everything can go when you walk away from liberal democracy. Right.
I knew Peter. I haven't seen him in a whole bunch of years.

Speaker 1 I was actually reading groups with him and stuff. He's a very smart guy.

Speaker 1 And unfortunately, it's a good example that you can be very intelligent and very intellectual, and it doesn't save you from the temptation of very irresponsible extremism.

Speaker 1 Some of the greatest artists and thinkers in Europe in the 20s and 30s went down that path. And I don't know that Peter's quite like them, but he's a very intelligent guy.
And

Speaker 1 unfortunately, the intelligence is now in the service of really a dark view of the world, I'm afraid.

Speaker 6 Sometimes

Speaker 6 you're too intelligent for your own good. Like you feel like you need to come up with some outside of the Overton window, outside-of-the-box solution.

Speaker 6 When it's like, this is the thing that just flummoeses me about this whole thing, like Peter Thiel is living

Speaker 6 the top 0.00000001%

Speaker 6 most blessed life of anyone in the history of the world. He can do whatever he wants.

Speaker 6 He's married to a man. He's been able to adopt kids and also have pool parties with shirtless young people that get to come over because he's rich and he has a fancy house.

Speaker 6 He has houses on different continents. He's got a place in New Zealand.

Speaker 6 What are these guys talking about? That democracy is exhausted? The premise is also just silly.

Speaker 1 He's living in a country which is which his personal

Speaker 1 fact that he's gay, I'll say this to you. You'll understand the spirit in which I say this, which is he's benefited from liberalism in the last 50 years, right?

Speaker 1 He couldn't be having as happy a life as he had lived in the America of 15 years ago, and he couldn't be having as happy a life, I mean, goes without saying, if you lived in the post-Weimar, post-decadent liberal democratic Germany, which was not friendly to people like Peter Thiel, among many, many other groups.

Speaker 1 It was horrible, horribly unfriendly to.

Speaker 1 So what? He just gets to assume that he gets a kind of fascism or dictatorship that's friendly to his particular minority

Speaker 1 characteristics. I don't think that's very...
I mean, obviously, it's not prudent. In a certain way, it's almost not serious, right?

Speaker 6 It is not serious. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 6 If it wasn't for Donald Trump, democracy is working fine in America. It's not as if there's some huge, it's not the same with Polis when you're in Colorado.

Speaker 6 I'm driving around with Jared Polis, went to a couple events before our event. And it's like, the notion that democracy is

Speaker 6 on the wane in Colorado, and there's this huge crackup happening, is like insane if you're driving around the car with Jared polis like he's we're going to a gay pride event he's calling the republican legislators on the phone they're doing bipartisan work

Speaker 1 people in denver can go skiing and be happy and be merry like it's like fine it's not like weimar germany like in this country right now if you just have responsible people in charge and weimar germany it wasn't like weimar germany if i can put it this way i mean it gets sort of a bum wrap i think the term weimar republic was used first used by hitler and speaking of hitler in 29 I don't think that, I mean, that was not what they called themselves, so to speak, in the 20s.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 they were staggering a law, staggering unfair.

Speaker 1 They were doing their best to make democracy work in a country that hadn't been very friendly to it and that had lost a terrible war, which they mostly initiated, but they had reparations, so they had huge burdens on them.

Speaker 1 Then there's the Great Depression, which they get clobbered by like everyone else does, but they don't have the resilience.

Speaker 1 The responsible attitude towards that is what could have been done to strengthen the democracy and what could we have done incidentally to help them?

Speaker 1 There were things we didn't do in 1929, 30, 31, forgiving reparations payments that would have actually might have staved off the horrible future they had for them.

Speaker 1 But Peter Thiel's attitude is to sort of relish the weaknesses or failures of German democracy in the 20s and early 30s, even leaving aside sort of your other point, which is also correct, that we're not like that.

Speaker 6 No, sure. It wasn't like what you have thinking in your imagination, too.
That's a fair, it's a fair correction of what I was trying to say, right?

Speaker 6 Like it wasn't, it wasn't even like Weimar Germany was like a apocalyptic hellscape either, right?

Speaker 1 Right. But the responsible thing to say is, well, how do we strengthen democracies in certain ways? And he's not interested.
And that's what's most striking. He's just not interested in that.

Speaker 1 There are people who are not where we are, I'd say, who probably in good faith, sort of, are sort of, I'm for strengthening liberalism and democracy.

Speaker 1 And that's why I'm a little more open to some of what Trump is saying.

Speaker 1 I don't take that in good faith usually, but I can sort of see how people got suckered a little in that direction, or at least they can be vaguely suckered in, let's say, a DeSantis or Tim Scott or something direction, right?

Speaker 1 But that is not where Thial is. And really, it's not where it's certainly not where J.D.
Vance is.

Speaker 1 Trump doesn't have any really settled views, but he's certainly willing to more than go along with that, to really encourage that kind of wild irresponsibility, not even like medium-level irresponsibility.

Speaker 6 And that's why I think it's important to talk about it and important to play these codes for people because J.D. and Thial, it's just way out of step with folks.

Speaker 6 I think there's a category of person who's just not engaged with what is happening in as obsessive a way as some of us.

Speaker 6 It relates relates really to the VP conversation, like, doesn't realize just how weird and extreme. That's where the weird thing works, how weird and extreme these folks' views are.

Speaker 6 You know, if you stopped into a random dinner party, a random barbecue, a random fish fry anywhere in this country, and were like, hey, here's what the VP candidate and his intellectuals are saying.

Speaker 6 They think that we're on the cusp of Nazi Germany. Like most sane people would look at that and say, okay, I think that everybody's got to take a breath.

Speaker 6 Concerns, though, about what could happen that could allow demagogues to work would be a market crash between now and the election. We've had a market sell-off over the past

Speaker 6 two days, Friday and now today. Joe Weisenthal, who's good on this, I'll put a link to his thread in the show notes here.
10 thoughts on today's big market sell-off. He's really good on these topics.

Speaker 6 The main thing that he writes that overlaps with the political world is that Powell is out of step with kind of where things are in the decision to

Speaker 6 basically signal that there weren't going to be rate cuts this year year during the last during the last meeting.

Speaker 6 So I don't know if you have any thoughts on Powell or rate cuts or the stock market sell-off and how that might intersect with what's happened in the election.

Speaker 1 I just have a couple of quick votes. I think he will cut rates now and maybe should do so in a more urgent way.

Speaker 1 They never want to look panicked at the Fed, but maybe it's worth it if the markets are panicked to unpanic them by showing a little more flexibility and speed and moving to cut rates than he has shown.

Speaker 1 So that would, I think, be good.

Speaker 1 It's hard to tell if there's just a big market sell-off, a little drama,

Speaker 1 and then it stabilizes again. It's still up a lot in the Biden years, obviously.

Speaker 1 But the other point I'd make is it does probably mean that Harris should focus a little more on her economic message, but not, I'd say, particularly defending the Biden years, which, you know, she has to do that as well.

Speaker 1 But Trump has proposed literally the economic program that would turn a stock market sell-off and maybe even a mild recession into possibly a much deeper recession or depression, based, again, if we can go back to the 30s on the actual economic policies then, which is tariffs, which would lead to retaliatory tariffs, which really would do damage to the economy.

Speaker 1 And Vance Kavarilli said the other day, it's not worth losing one manufacturing job just so a million people can buy cheaper knockoff toasters. Well, leave aside toasters for a minute.

Speaker 1 That's literally an insane statement. I mean, Americans can save a lot of money on buying imported goods, keeps inflation down, incidentally.

Speaker 1 And we export a ton of goods, and that's good for the American economy.

Speaker 1 And I think making that point in a more general sense, but then really going after the tariffs, was that you can put a number on.

Speaker 1 If you have a 10% tariff on X, defer to the economist on this, but basically the price of these things is going to go up 10%.

Speaker 1 There are an awful lot of things Americans buy that are partly foreign labor, or some of them are just imported. And that will be damaging to the economy.

Speaker 1 So I think getting a more aggressive economic message focused on Trump's totally crazy kind of protectionist message would be a good idea.

Speaker 6 All right. I want to close with this because it's cute and uplifting.

Speaker 6 You posted an old interview you did with Joe Lieberman before he passed where he was reflecting on his VP choice and being a Jewish vice presidential nominee.

Speaker 6 Let's listen to your discussion with Lieberman.

Speaker 15 I'll tell you a quick story. We had a lovely dinner, the Gore family and my family, and Al Gore said at that dinner, he said, I want you to know that I decided

Speaker 15 two weeks ago that I wanted you to be my running mate, but I really thought it would be irresponsible for me to try to talk to some other people about whether they thought America was ready for a Jewish vice president,

Speaker 15 the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency. So I always wondered whether Al did a poll.
I think if I were him, I would have done a poll, but he said he called

Speaker 15 a number of friends and he said to me, I called a number of my Jewish friends and I called a number of my Christian friends. And here was what I found.

Speaker 15 Most of the Jews were extremely anxious and uncertain about the reaction to your nomination. He said, every Christian friend I called said there'd be no problem.

Speaker 15 So then with a little bit of gore humor, which people don't remember sometimes, he said, so since I know that there are so many millions more Christians in America than Jews, I decided I could choose Jews.

Speaker 6 Bill, I love this, A, because it's cute of Jen Lieberman, but B, because I've had this experience over the last three weeks where my aunt, who's black, was really worried about Kamala.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and has now come around. I got a text from her the other day.
It's like, okay, she's good. She's good.
I was just nervous. People are going to be doing her.

Speaker 6 My husband is nervous about Kamala picking Pete because we gave very attuned to that. Several Jewish people in my life, very concerned about Shabirau.

Speaker 6 It's like the Lieberman, the gore experience is very in line with kind of what we're seeing now. There's something about human nature.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and people should have, I mean, Lieberman took the lesson from this. He says later in the interview, his faith in America, he felt, was justified.
And his wife

Speaker 1 had also spoke with this very movingly as a Holocaust survivor,

Speaker 1 child of Holocaust survivors, I should say. So I think we should have more faith in America sometimes.
And I probably should need to take that lesson myself since I occasionally get

Speaker 1 slightly more worried than I should be about things, I suppose.

Speaker 6 Believe in America. That's a flashback from a campaign that lost but was well-intentioned in 2012.
Let's believe in America. Bill Crystal, appreciate you.
We'll be seeing you next Monday.

Speaker 6 We'll have a VP selection by then. I'll be back tomorrow with Congressman Adam Schiff, and maybe it'll be a doubleheader, too.
We'll see. See y'all then.
Peace.

Speaker 6 There's a bear inside your stomach. A cup's

Speaker 6 Another show.

Speaker 6 We'll play charades up in the Chelsea. Drink champagne, although you shouldn't be.
We'll be blind and dumb until we fall asleep

Speaker 6 None of our friends will come when they dodge our calls And they have for quite a while now It's not a shock, you don't seem to mind

Speaker 6 And I just can't see how we're to

Speaker 6 We're not all

Speaker 6 Just to hold

Speaker 6 Just to

Speaker 6 hold

Speaker 6 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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