We Are Living in a Post-Rational World

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Speaker 11 Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. Charlie Sykes is enjoying a well-deserved early Thanksgiving day, and I'm thrilled to be here in his place.
I'm A.V.

Speaker 11 columnist at the Bulwark, and I'm delighted to be joined by JVL. We've missed him.
We need some JVL content. He was terribly missed at last week's Bulwark Live event.

Speaker 11 So it's really exciting to see you, JBL.

Speaker 11 The only good thing about your last week of your life was that you were, I believe, on a Trump cleanse. And I'm really happy about that for you.

Speaker 9 Oh, yeah. Did anything happen? Does he still exist? Is that a thing still?

Speaker 11 Unfortunately, he does, and he didn't make much news, but we're going to grind through what he's doing.

Speaker 11 I want to open just with a sort of a pre-Thanksgiving level setter that James Comer said on Maria Bartaromo's show that he believes that every American is angry about Joe Biden's corruption.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 11 just thought that would just get us in the right place as we begin. Donald Trump, as we debate all the time, is not in hiding, but is not as visible to the American public as he once was.

Speaker 11 And over on Truth Social, he's been making a lot of videos. And the latest ones are very strange because he's not wearing the makeup and the hairdo looks a little bit different.

Speaker 11 And I don't know what's going on with that. The lighting is weird, but he's not in like, you know, his mango state.
I don't know. Maybe he lost his makeup guy.
Maybe that person got sick.

Speaker 11 Maybe Donald Trump can't do his makeup anymore. I thought it was interesting, but he wants JVL for the debates to stop and the candidates to get out.
So he's very excited.

Speaker 11 The audience should know, in case they've been tuning out, all of the polling remains the same. Nothing has changed.
Joe Biden loses to Trump in every single solitary matchup.

Speaker 11 And Trump is very excited about this. Great polls just released, best ever.
And he cites a Harvard-Harris poll, which is always, always biased to Trump.

Speaker 11 Trump 67 to Sanctimonius 9, Bird Brain Nikki Haley at 8, Ramas Wame at 5, Christie dead in the water, a total loser. And then he says he's up 7 to 10% on crooked Joe Biden.

Speaker 11 And he says the RNC must save money on lowest ever rating debates. Use it against the Democrats to stop the steal.

Speaker 11 Revamp the RNC now. So that's where he is.

Speaker 11 And any of us wanting to hear more about the useless horse race on the Republican side are going to be really sorry because I'm sure the RNC will do his bidding soon and find a way to shut this all down.

Speaker 11 And I know Nikki Haley is having her wonderful surge and she's feeling so good. But we all know JVL the most.

Speaker 11 if we've paid attention to the polling that Donald Trump obviously pretty much has this thing locked up unless something completely crazy happens.

Speaker 11 So JVL and I spent a lot of time looking at the general election matchup and there is something, JVL, that really freaked me out. And I'm going to play it for you.

Speaker 11 Donald Trump is now talking about democracy. So we're going to play this latest clip.

Speaker 12 Nothing about crooked Joe Biden and the anti-Democratic Party has anything to do with defending democracy.

Speaker 12 So if Crooked Joe wants to turn this election into a question of which candidate will defend our democracy and freedom, then I say, bring it on.

Speaker 12 Let's go, Joe, bring it on, because you are a corrupt person. You're the most corrupt president in our history.
And by the way, the most incompetent president in our history.

Speaker 11 The delivery is always good for a giggle, but this kind of freaks me out. What do you think?

Speaker 9 Well, that poll that freaked everyone out like three weeks ago, the New York Times poll of swing voters in the Midwest states, one of the questions buried in there was about corrupt Joe Biden versus corrupt Donald Trump.

Speaker 9 And Trump leads Biden on the corruption stuff. Like people think he's more corrupt than Biden is.

Speaker 9 But like 50, I want to, I'm going by memory here. It was more than a majority.
It was like 51% of those swing state voters said that Biden was corrupt too.

Speaker 9 So all of the hunter stuff has penetrated the groundwater in ways which like, of course, nobody can explain. Like they're just like the laptop, you know, or the files and the court.

Speaker 9 And people are horrible. AB, happy Thanksgiving.
People are terrible. It is interesting to me that Trump has switched from sleepy Joe to crooked Joe

Speaker 9 because he has decided that he needs to, and this is, my God, if the guy who's under 91 felony indictment counts can successfully brand Biden, who has basically been scandalous as a president,

Speaker 9 as crooked,

Speaker 9 and the public buys that. Spoiler, they're going to buy that.
I don't know. Like, I just look at it and I think,

Speaker 9 how is this close?

Speaker 9 How is this close? Why?

Speaker 9 And yet there we are. And here's a real question, a real question for you.
I think the RNC can't shut it down

Speaker 9 because they need to have just a process in place in case like the magic camp cheeseburger hits, right? In case he drops dead. Oh, okay.

Speaker 9 They have to have a plausible delegate selection process

Speaker 9 so that, you know, on January 10th, if something awful happens to Trump, they actually have other people running in races and appearing on ballots who can then gather delegates.

Speaker 9 There will be pressure, a lot of pressure on DeSantis to drop out.

Speaker 9 I have always thought that, you know, it's possible he doesn't go to Iowa, right? If it looks like he could finish third in Iowa, then he should pull the plug on that. He should not finish.

Speaker 9 I mean, it may not matter. His political future may be over as it is.
But, you know, he has to think about Casey. Casey's got a political future.

Speaker 9 Might help her if he doesn't finish third in Iowa, actually. But the rest of them, this is the question, right?

Speaker 9 Nikki Haley, on the merits, just as a substantive matter, Nikki has said that the most important thing facing us right now is Ukraine, that this moment requires strong leadership from america in the world that it will impact our strategic competition with china and the the entire global order and that donald trump is untrustworthy on this and she is basically as a matter of policy in 95 alignment with the biden administration When she loses the nomination to Trump, who again, she has also said it's serious that he's been indicted 91 times.

Speaker 9 What will she do? Is she just going to go ahead and, I mean, and the answer is, of course, we know what she's going to do. She's going to endorse Trump, right?

Speaker 9 And at some point, at some point, A, B,

Speaker 9 it's not going to be enough. Like, the rest of this coalition, which has held off Trumpism for like four straight elections at this point, is going to need some help from Republicans.
And I'm sorry.

Speaker 9 And I know we've all just decided, well, the Republicans are a lost cause. You can't ever expect any of them to

Speaker 9 do anything, but gonna have to happen or else we're toast.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 11 So I thought in August that DeSantis should take your advice and he should get out to preserve his future.

Speaker 11 And I don't think Bob Vander Platt's endorsement is going to turbocharge what's going on with what plays Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 11 And I also agreed with you that she will turn around and

Speaker 11 abandon her agreement with Joe Biden on Israel and Taiwan and Ukraine being a unified urgent matter, and that she will endorse Trump. I think about these Republicans all the time.

Speaker 11 This is a good segue into this really upsetting reporting that we all just read about these former administration officials who are now completely appalled.

Speaker 11 Poor John Kelly just went on the record like seven weeks ago after all these years. And he's very upset that he's told the American public all these disgusting and shameful

Speaker 11 and pretty much in my book evil things that Donald Trump says about people in the armed services especially ones who gave their lives and then it didn't do anything to budge the polls John Kelly's very upset now he's speaking out and people like you and I have been begging him for years to do this so

Speaker 11 these Republicans that you're mentioning, that 6% or whatever we need that we needed in 2020, they're telling us now, like, they're not going to vote for Joe Biden.

Speaker 11 I mean, they're just going to sit this out.

Speaker 11 So, this resistance, I think Chris Shays, a former congressman from Connecticut, was quoted as saying this: Christie Todd Whitman, the White House didn't reach out to them, they supported him.

Speaker 11 Obviously, Jeff Flake is happy. He's an ambassador under the Biden administration, but these Republicans that we need to come around.

Speaker 11 Do you have like a unicorn fantasy like I do that somehow next late summer, Chris Christie will be on a stage with John Kelly and all these people and that we might be surprised by the inclusion of some of them?

Speaker 9 I don't know. So Philip Bump did this piece in the post where he talked to a whole bunch of former administration officials and they're all talking not about like stopping Trump in the primary.

Speaker 9 They're talking about keeping Trump out of the White House. These are people who worked for Trump at the highest levels who say that it is dangerous for America for him to attain power again.

Speaker 9 And I

Speaker 9 am told by people who are like, you know, very smart, like our friends Sarah and Tim, that you cannot expect Republicans to simply like go on stage and endorse a Democratic president, like that this is something which simply can't happen.

Speaker 9 That's fantasy politics. That only happens in the West Wing, right?

Speaker 9 In West Wing, Alan Alda's character decides that he'll, you know, he'll break with Republican orthodoxy and endorse Joe Biden or President Bartlett or whatever. And I get that,

Speaker 9 except that like Donald Trump engages in fantasy politics all the time, right?

Speaker 9 It is conservative fantasy that you could have a presidential candidate who says that he is going to politicize the entire executive federal workforce and impose loyalty tests on them.

Speaker 9 It is fantasy politics that you could have a presidential candidate who says that he's going to build a wall all the way across the southern border and get Mexico to pay for it, it, or that he is going to create vast systems of prison camps to put his political enemies in?

Speaker 9 The Trumpers are doing fantasy politics all day and all night. And it's not like,

Speaker 9 I don't understand why it only goes one way, right? This is what they don't quite get.

Speaker 11 Yes. And the best example of that is just the RNC debates and this idea that there's this other field where they're just going to be there to catch the falling body.
There's no nominating fight.

Speaker 11 There's no contested primary. There's no real race for the nomination.

Speaker 11 And so it's just, but when you watch Ramaswamy and DeSantis and Nikki Haley, I think Chris Christie's doing something else all line up on stage and carry on like this. I mean, that's fantasy politics.

Speaker 9 They barely talk about Trump. Like there's a guy who's at 60% nationally.
And they only talk about him when asked. And I don't understand that because it's like they're not living in reality.

Speaker 9 I'm writing a a little bit about this today. I'll talk it through with you.
There is this way in which

Speaker 9 the inability of the other Republican candidates

Speaker 9 to even properly understand

Speaker 9 like the world that they live in,

Speaker 9 it's like they're the citizens of an authoritarian state. You know, the government controls all the media.
They don't know what's true and what's not true. And so they can't tell what's what.

Speaker 9 And, you know, I don't get it. This thing can only be fixed from the inside is my view.

Speaker 9 I don't think that there's anything that the media or academia or Democrats or independents can do to change the character of the Republican Party.

Speaker 9 The Republican Party is either going to turn its back on Trumpism or simply like, you know, switch to something else, right?

Speaker 9 A new shiny object will come along that they'll like better and they'll just build over top of it, right? They'll never apologize for the Trump thing. They'll just move on to something different.

Speaker 9 But it's hard for it to get fixed from the inside when the people who would be charged with, you know, displacing Trump, when those people can't even understand the world around them in an accurate way.

Speaker 9 And like the DeSantis challenge to Trump is the perfect example of this. Like DeSantis had no idea what he was doing when he got into this race.

Speaker 9 I mean, for the longest time, I didn't believe that he was actually going to declare because I thought he was smart and I thought that he would understand that if he, if he gets into the race, he's going to lose and that this isn't the way it used to be where running coming in second meant that you were starting in the poll position for the next time around.

Speaker 9 That when Republicans challenge Trump, their careers are ended because it's a cult. And DeSantis didn't get that.

Speaker 9 He didn't understand either of those things. And then once he got in, he didn't understand that he would have to actually try to take Trump's voters from him.

Speaker 9 I mean, the whole campaign that he's run has been incomprehensible in any meaningful way. And it's because he simply didn't understand the electorate.
I don't get it.

Speaker 11 Roger Stone has a few words for Ron DeSantis this morning that everyone needs to hear before Thanksgiving. Trump voters will never, all caps, vote for Ron DeSantis under any circumstances.

Speaker 11 And he tells Bob Vanderplatz, you need to be exposed as the grifting whore and total. piece of shit that you are, but he uses POS.
So just wanted to update everyone on that.

Speaker 11 I guess Ron didn't get that memo when he got into the race. Before we move on, couldn't the same be said for Nikki Haley? Like, she does it well, but what is she doing, right?

Speaker 11 We know she's the best political performer in the field. So again, I put Chris Christie, I think he's on a mission that's completely separate.
She's performing so well.

Speaker 11 She won't be outworked. She's so cheerful.
She's so prepared. She's so knowledgeable.
She is ready to finesse these opinions and that opinions that might upset MAGA voters.

Speaker 11 She knows how to spin and bullshit everybody. But what is she doing? Do you think in the end it is possible that he breaks down, even though she would outshine him and picks her for VP?

Speaker 9 No, because he can't trust her.

Speaker 11 Okay. So what is she doing?

Speaker 9 I mean, Nikki's running for corporate board seats, I think. Okay.

Speaker 9 Because she's, again, she's not trying to take voters from Trump. Right.
She's trying to take voters from Chris Christie and take voters from DeSantis and Consolidate. I mean, she's playing for 20%.

Speaker 9 Her best case scenario is like 20, 25%, maybe.

Speaker 9 And if you're not playing to win, then you're doing it for some other reason. And I think it's because her career was at a dead end.
Right.

Speaker 9 You know, like she had washed out of the Trump administration and then she had emerged basically unscathed, but then she flip-flopped on the January 6th thing.

Speaker 9 And she, you know, she got crossways with him, then she got uncrossways with him. And the only way for her to be relevant in Republican politics again was by running for president.
That was it.

Speaker 9 That was the only pathway available.

Speaker 11 Right. So she's just playing a longer game.
If she finishes second, she's going to be perfectly positioned for whatever she wants to do, right?

Speaker 9 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 11 So it was actually Josh Dossi's reporting in the Washington Post about the former Trump administration's to give him his due credit.

Speaker 11 So what was really not fun to read in there, but of course we knew it is that long-suffering Mike Pence does not plan to come out publicly and be a part of this. Neither does James Mattis, by the way.

Speaker 11 Before we turn to Joe Biden, what are your thoughts on the January 6th tapes?

Speaker 11 I hope no one spends any time on this in our audience without having to just know that if Tucker Carlson could have found something in the freaking mass of tapes, we would have heard about it by now.

Speaker 11 But Speaker Johnson is trying to keep people at bay and has released the J6 tapes to get people really excited. with more conspiracy theories.
What do you think by putting this front and center, JVL?

Speaker 11 Does this help the Democrats?

Speaker 11 I mean, is the jury back in for the average sane swing voter that, like, this is a disaster for Republicans and that they don't want election deniers in positions like Secretary of State and Governor?

Speaker 11 Because we saw that last November in 2022 in the midterms. Is this risky for Republicans, or do you think no?

Speaker 9 I don't think so. I mean, I honestly don't think there's any price left to be paid for them.

Speaker 9 I think it's probably the opposite, right?

Speaker 9 This is a way of just chumming the water for the Republican base and keeping them happy. It's like the Biden corruption thing, right? It doesn't matter that there's no proof or evidence there.

Speaker 9 It's just sort of in the water around you, right? You're swimming through it and it's well, you know, we got 40,000 hours of tapes. Maybe we'll find something, right?

Speaker 9 Mike Lee gets to do his like, here's a guy flashing a badge. The Fibbies did it.
And

Speaker 9 it's all alternate reality, fact-free vibes stuff, like everything is these days, you know, like the economy stuff is. And it's like we're in this post-rational

Speaker 9 world that I don't understand.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 I feel the way I think very old people do sometimes.

Speaker 9 If you're 90 years old, you were born in the 30s, right, in the Great Depression. That was the world you knew and understood.
And then we put a man on the moon.

Speaker 9 And now people have computers in their pockets, and people have tattoos on their faces, and everybody at Starbucks has purple hair and a nose ring.

Speaker 9 You just look at it and you're like, I don't understand this world. This isn't the world I figured out.
And that's kind of how I feel, but I'm not 90.

Speaker 11 And the newsstand at the Philly train station doesn't sell newspapers anymore. I know that I've cited that before, but I keep coming back to it.
It's a little traumatizing.

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Speaker 11 Okay, so I know

Speaker 11 there's something that you and and I are both thankful for,

Speaker 11 which never gets any thanks, and that is the presidency of Joseph Robin F. Biden.

Speaker 11 Today, we have a temporary truce and a hostage deal for which he will get no credit from

Speaker 11 any material part of the electorate, certainly not any part that matters. No.

Speaker 9 Even if the Wall Street Journal is...

Speaker 11 clapping for Admiral Kirby as he gets out there and fights against the disinformation about Palestinian genocide.

Speaker 9 Numbers go down because of this.

Speaker 11 That's so prevalent on our left, and that's punching Joe Biden in the nose over his near-perfect management of this conflict.

Speaker 11 So, as we head into this, and these polls keep coming, JVL, and the response from the White House and the DNC is always to stop bedwetting. And that when Americans tune in,

Speaker 11 they use this word, these two words, when Americans tune in, that these polls will change.

Speaker 11 Now, I completely believe, I don't want to cling with everything, but I believe the results in Sarah Longwell's focus groups that find that Americans refuse to believe that Trump and Biden are the nominees, and that when they accept it in March, they will, a lot of them ultimately stop stomping their feet and they'll probably support Biden.

Speaker 11 That's prevalent enough in the responses that I'm not jumping off building, but I don't know when Democrats and people in the White House tell me what tune-in means with the fact that none of the criminal charges make a difference.

Speaker 11 No Americans keep the four criminal cases distinct in their minds. They haven't learned about them.
They won't. They don't care.

Speaker 11 And so I want to ask you, before I talk to you about the electorate, what the anticipation is by Democratic elites that will happen. Will they be suddenly shocked by Trump?

Speaker 11 Like, what is the tuning in process that they're counting on when Joe Biden is a year older?

Speaker 9 Yeah, did you know how old he is? In fact, A.B., Joe Biden is even older today than he was yesterday. This is a scandal.
I don't know why the liberal media refuses to cover.

Speaker 9 Why won't the New York Times ever write anything about Joe Biden's age? They're heads in the scandal.

Speaker 11 It is a scandal.

Speaker 9 Okay.

Speaker 11 So what is tuning in?

Speaker 9 So I think this is born of their experience during the Obama administration, I think. And if you'll recall, polling for Obama was very, very bad at this point in 2011.

Speaker 9 And in that case, it was that the recovery was too slow.

Speaker 9 And if you look back, this is one of the things that a lot of democratic policy types, economist types, one of the lessons they overlearned from the Great Recession was that they were too stingy with stimulus and that that was why the recovery took, you know, several, we were essentially in like a six-year-long recovery, seven year long recovery.

Speaker 9 And that was part of the thinking that went behind the American Rescue Plan. And, you know, now, of course, people say, well, actually, they overspent, they spent too much.

Speaker 9 That then contributed to inflation. But this is why Obama's poll numbers were pretty bad.
And by most of the metrics, people thought that Obama should lose re-election.

Speaker 9 We didn't have a Republican nominee yet, but just, again, just going from like the economic modeling and what people were saying.

Speaker 9 And then once people tuned in and Obama was able to make the case, and he did it in a pretty good way.

Speaker 9 I don't know if you remember the Democratic National Convention that year, Bill Clinton gave this absolute barn burner speech on the next to last day, which was like a 90-minute masterclass in politics about how the Biden administration had fixed the economy and et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 9 And they were able to wind up with a comfortable victory. you know, a smaller victory than they had in their initial election, which is, again, sort of historically anomalous.

Speaker 9 Normally, when presidents win re-election, they actually expand their coalition. So you're always either growing or shrinking.
It's hard to shrink your coalition just enough to still hang on to win.

Speaker 9 Obama did that. It looks like Biden will have to do that, although I don't know.

Speaker 9 I mean, it's entirely possible he could wind up with the same five-point margin and then lose because, you know, electoral college shifts keep happening. So I don't know about the wake-up part.

Speaker 9 Here's the thing. I am constantly getting in fights with my colleagues over this, and I think they misunderstand me.
So I'm going to try to... Do you mind me filibustering here for 30 seconds?

Speaker 11 No, I want to hear this.

Speaker 9 Okay.

Speaker 9 When I say that people's views of the economy are misaligned, I am not saying that the economy is perfect and everything is great, and you people out there ought to be grateful for what Joe Biden has let you have.

Speaker 9 That's not what I'm saying. The economy is a mixed bag.
as it always is. It is very hard for working families, as it always is.

Speaker 9 It is very hard for people on fixed incomes in their retirement years, as it always is.

Speaker 9 It is hard for people starting out in their professional lives, as it often is. You know, it is hard to buy a first home, always.

Speaker 9 What I am saying is that when you look at the data and then you match it up against the consumer sentiments as measured in like, you know, a whole vast number of surveys, the misalignment is catastrophic.

Speaker 9 Basically, the consumer attitudes today today are the same as they were in the worst moments of the Great Recession, late 2008, early 2009.

Speaker 9 There is no way to match this up. And I don't understand it.
It is irrational. It is definitionally irrational.
And either this irrationality is going to continue or it will stop.

Speaker 9 And if it stops, then Joe Biden will be re-elected. And if it continues, then he won't be.

Speaker 11 I agree because the gap has never been wider between the economic reality and the perception, as you said, since polling began.

Speaker 11 Every outlook from the voters of Joe Biden's entire presidency is all on prices and perception.

Speaker 11 Polls showing that Americans think we've lost jobs when we have clearly gained more in less than three years than the last three Republican administrations combined.

Speaker 11 And then there's other things, record small business creation, rising consumer confidence, lowering inflation, wages catching up, all the things that you have written about extensively.

Speaker 11 It makes no sense that they feel that we are in the crapper.

Speaker 11 And part of the problem with this tune-in concept for me is that Americans have no idea what he has done with the CHIPS Act for Semiconductor Manufacturing, the PACT Act for Veterans Healthcare, the Infrastructure Act.

Speaker 11 The IRA, the inflation reduction, was partisan, was not bipartisan, but the $35 insulin and a massive, massive climate endeavor that brings new manufacturing, and you've written about all this, to red areas, to people, non-college workers are going to get great salaries at new plants in tight labor markets in red areas.

Speaker 11 These people who didn't vote for Biden and they won't vote for him again.

Speaker 11 But as these projects come online, JVL, do you have any hope that Americans will see this in their community, you know, kind of midnight, late next summer, and say, this is actually

Speaker 11 happening to my friends and family and neighbors, or me.

Speaker 11 And this is really great. Government is doing something effective and revitalizing my community, an area left behind by globalization.
This is so exciting.

Speaker 11 When the administration talks about tuning in, they're going to run commercials about this.

Speaker 11 I don't know if these disaffected young people are going to give a crap about a TV commercial or if they'll ever see it. But do you believe that the green shoots will be seen or felt?

Speaker 9 I mean, they should be,

Speaker 9 but somehow I have a hard time believing they will be.

Speaker 9 Think about early on in the American Rescue Plan, one of the big parts of it, the parts that I was excited about the most was the child tax credit, which was the kind of, because I've written a lot about demographics, the kind of like super populist, pro-natalist, like help working families thing that makes a real difference in people's lives.

Speaker 9 The kind of thing that like every Mitt Romney, Mike Lee type Republican, once upon a time, like five minutes ago, was super into. Biden passes it and they all, they all demagogue it and whatnot.

Speaker 9 This is thing that like is giving actual real help to every parent in America almost.

Speaker 9 There's a little bit of means testing at the top and it goes down, but in a way that like just straight dollars into your bank account every month.

Speaker 9 It goes away because the Republicans refuse to reauthorize it. And the Republicans never pay any price for that.
No price.

Speaker 9 There is not a single person in America who voted against a Republican congressman because, like, crap, they took away this money that was coming into my bank account every month.

Speaker 9 And if they won't do that, then, like, I don't know, like, they're going to see an ad about the CHIPS Act and decide that they're going to vote for Joe Biden because he passed the CHIPS Act.

Speaker 9 I don't know. How does that work?

Speaker 11 I just need to throw some of this out there that a recent Yahoo News and YouGov asked respondents, have you heard in the media much over the last few years?

Speaker 11 And this this was the response. Over enabling Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, 23% had heard.
Congress passing infrastructure investments in 2021, 20%.

Speaker 11 Congress passing climate and clean energy investments in 2022, 18%.

Speaker 11 Congress passing a gun safety law in 2022, 14%.

Speaker 11 That's why less than a quarter of Americans, 24%, think Biden has accomplished a lot as president.

Speaker 11 So when you talk to young people, and I know you don't have 22-year-olds in your house, but when you inform these people in their 20s about the climate effort, they think it's really great.

Speaker 11 They just didn't know about it. So I think that on the margins, if there's some way to break through in targeted ways, when people find out about it, they actually like the policies.

Speaker 11 So just wanted to throw that out there.

Speaker 9 Yeah, but is anybody voting on policies? Right. Or are they just voting on vibes, right? I mean, look, I mean, Trump's entire 2020 reelection effort was policy-free.
Yeah. And he almost won.

Speaker 9 There were no policies.

Speaker 9 In my darker moments, when I'm like extra special dark, I joke that Joe Biden is both like the most successful liberal president and the most successful conservative president since Reagan.

Speaker 9 And just in terms of passing stuff and doing like foreign policy hawkish stuff in the world that conservatives find really important and then liberals find really important.

Speaker 9 And it turns out that nobody cares about any of that stuff.

Speaker 9 It turns out nobody cares about the centrism. Nobody cares about the bipartisan stuff.
Nobody cares about legislative accomplishment or handling foreign policy crises well.

Speaker 9 They just care about the vibes, maybe.

Speaker 9 And if that's the case, then like,

Speaker 9 I don't know, we're screwed.

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Speaker 11 Okay, final question. Is the electorate changing out from under Joe Biden and you and me?

Speaker 11 So Phil Bump did write at the Washington Post about younger voters recently and he said they're increasingly registering as independents. They don't give a crap about party.

Speaker 11 They are not loyal to any institutions. They don't join unions or the military.

Speaker 11 They don't marry and they don't go to church in large enough numbers the way that we did as we grew from young voters into middle-aged voters.

Speaker 11 And so this manifests as a decline in any way attachment to either party.

Speaker 11 But even though there are kind of leanings of our younger voters towards Democrats, they just look so dishenheartened with the process that they might just tune it out and not show up at all.

Speaker 11 So that's the fear.

Speaker 11 I am concerned that Republicans in these pollings have an advantage also on every single issue, that support for the border wall now is majority support in a Quinnic Piak poll, and that Americans believe that between crime and immigration and the economy, they have to re-elect Trump.

Speaker 11 So that is policy-based.

Speaker 11 Immigration much more of a vulnerability for Joe Biden than it was. So maybe

Speaker 11 non-college whites and Latinos and young people are just moving more to the right. What's your thought on that? On substance?

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, I don't know that they have any idea what they're saying they're for.

Speaker 11 You know what? It's a terrible thing to admit it out loud, but this is my view as well.

Speaker 9 Yeah, but the polls show that

Speaker 9 people think that Donald Trump would do a better job handling the war in Israel right now. I don't understand how that's possible.

Speaker 9 There are no facts and evidence to suggest that Donald Trump would be handling this better. Biden is, again, just one of the most successful foreign policy exhibitions in recent American history.

Speaker 9 And yet, Biden is like underwater on it. And I don't understand it.
I don't get it. I had a conversation with somebody I love who was a Trump voter over the last few days.

Speaker 9 And she was telling me, and this is a, you know, I don't know exactly where she gets her news and information, but I suspect it's like from like her little sewing circle.

Speaker 9 And I mean, she believes there is absolutely no way that Joe Biden will be the nominee. And that the big rumor, as she told me, was that Michelle Obama was going to run.

Speaker 9 She was going to have Gavin Newsom as her VP. And then as soon as she was elected, she would resign so that Gavin Newsom could be president.
That was the big rumor about what was going to happen.

Speaker 9 I just look at it. I'm like, okay.

Speaker 9 Like, if this is what people out in the world think, I don't understand it. I don't get it.
But here we are. Yeah.

Speaker 9 This is the worst show ever.

Speaker 9 I know.

Speaker 9 Happy Thanksgiving, people. We're all going to die.

Speaker 11 Increasingly, it is clear that you and I should never do anything together, which is a shame. JVL, I'm thankful for you and I want to turn to one of your loved ones.

Speaker 11 If you just want to tell the audience where you've been and heading into Thanksgiving, just a few words about your family and about Jack, if you'd like.

Speaker 9 Sure. As much as you have patience for it.
So we moved up to

Speaker 9 officially New York City, but in reality, Jersey, a year and a half ago. to be close to my in-laws, Jack and Peg.

Speaker 9 They're lovely, wonderful people, and I love them, but they have also been deeply integrated in my kids' lives for, you know, since, since day one, and they're getting older, and Jack had been fighting cancer for a long time.

Speaker 9 And once the pandemic made it so that, like, basically, I was working remotely all the time anyway, we just decided, let's go get as close to them as we could.

Speaker 9 And the answer is we got like two miles away from them. So it's a, you know, less than a five-minute drive.

Speaker 9 We, and we just see them literally every day, you know, and the payoff to not have to plan to see the grandparents is immense. Like they call you and say, We're having trouble with the remote control.

Speaker 9 And instead of trying to talk them through it over FaceTime, you just say, Yeah, I'll be over. You know, you just, you, you just pop over, right?

Speaker 9 You know, you're somebody, one of the kids has a tough day of school. Uh, she just goes over and sits and has a cup of tea at the kitchen table with her grandmother for 20 minutes.

Speaker 9 It doesn't have to be a, you know, well, we're going to go over for a visit, right?

Speaker 9 And we got like a decade's worth of time with the grandparents in over the course of like 18 months. So Jack, you know, he was in decline and had been in hospice and he passed away a week ago.

Speaker 9 Yeah, a week ago. And it's very sad and it's, you know, there's a lot of grieving and, you know, especially hard for his wife and my wife and my kids.
I am in the strange position of

Speaker 9 almost entirely only being able to see the joy in it, which is so weird and off-brand for me, because he had just a very beautiful and good death, right?

Speaker 9 This is so he, up until the final week, really,

Speaker 9 he had been slowing down quite a bit. And, you know, there were things he couldn't do, but he was mostly able to do what he wanted to.
He was always fully together mentally.

Speaker 9 In the final week, things got really hard, but he was never in any pain. And, you know, in his final days,

Speaker 9 around the clock, he was surrounded by his wife, his children, and his grandchildren.

Speaker 9 When he passed away at like one in the morning, he had, you know, two of his grandchildren sitting vigil with him at his bedside. And like, what more can any of us hope for? Right?

Speaker 9 There are bad deaths and there are good deaths. And he had a very good and beautiful death.

Speaker 9 And this is a guy who, I don't want to get like too deep into the weeds, but who had never had any religious belief until about a year ago and

Speaker 9 came home to the Catholic Church. And at his funeral mass the other day, you know, I was a pallbearer, something I've never done before.

Speaker 9 And walking into a church and down the aisle carrying a casket is a very strange view of the church. Like it's,

Speaker 9 it did a number on me. It was very weird.
But this church was packed, packed with people whose, you know, whose lives he had touched or, you know, because he was a teacher and a coach.

Speaker 9 And so there were people who were there for him. There were people who were there for his kids, you know, or his wife's friends, and then friends of his grandchildren.

Speaker 9 So like, you know, one of my oldest kids' best friends volunteered to be an altar server for Jack's funeral mass. As I sat there, you know, with this very beautiful service, I thought,

Speaker 9 this is as good as it gets. Right.

Speaker 9 The sadness is that, of course, everybody wishes they could have more time with somebody, right? You know, you always, well, if we only could have had 10 more years and totally understood.

Speaker 9 But in everything else, Jack had it great. My kids so blessed to have had that time with him that they will never forget, right?

Speaker 9 And to then to be able to even be a part of his death and like, you know, we didn't like try to hide it away or make it antiseptic. We were like all sort of in it with him together.
I don't know.

Speaker 9 I just, I felt incredibly thankful for the whole thing and I thought it was beautiful. And I hope this doesn't make me sound like a ghoul or anything like that.

Speaker 11 For me, like grief was really overwhelmed by all the gratitude and happiness i love that because i think for anyone who has been through a good death as i have

Speaker 11 you realize afterwards what a gift it is because it helps counter your grief and so anyone listening who hasn't been should know that a good death can really really heal you and energize you and bring you into touch not only with the preciousness of life, but with the power of people being close and staying close and being realistic and facing the bedside and having the bed in the middle of the living room and everyone come and face it.

Speaker 11 In the end, it's the most healing thing. And it's the most important thing for

Speaker 11 our path forward, how your kids will now live their life, having known that, having seen it, how they will appreciate their grandmother and the years they have left with her and every level.

Speaker 11 It is so powerful. And so I'm so appreciative that you shared it.

Speaker 11 And I could sit here and take up too much time reading the sparkling, beautiful obit that your wife wrote about her dad, which is filled with so many incredible details.

Speaker 11 But he did have an amazing life. He had an amazing life.

Speaker 9 So I will send you the eulogy she did for him. And

Speaker 9 it was amazing. This is, this is a little unfair.
So my wife is a professional speechwriter, and

Speaker 9 having her do a eulogy for like a normal person is the equivalent of like bringing an NBA player to your pickup basketball game with your buddies. Right.
Like, it's just not right, right?

Speaker 9 You're like, wait a minute, hold on. Why is that guy throwing down 360 dunks? And like, it's, you know, it's a, it's a tight six minutes and yet it has like very large themes in it and an arc.

Speaker 9 And then she like delivered it like a professional too. I'll send it to you.
You'll, you'll really like it, maybe.

Speaker 11 I'm so glad she has that gift and that she could share it with all those people.

Speaker 11 I mean, you know what it's like sitting and having someone be able to capture a person in a really moving, compelling, powerful eulogy, and then being able to sort of survive standing up and giving it is, it helps all of those hundreds of people.

Speaker 11 And it stays with you for, it stays with you forever.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it was amazing. She was a rock star.

Speaker 11 I want to remind people that if you are grieving during the holidays, you know, do what you can to be around people who make you laugh.

Speaker 11 And remember that their life is precious and that the time we have here, the people who leave us, you know, want us to spend it in the best way possible.

Speaker 11 And I am thankful for you, JVL, and the Bulwark community and the Bulwark team. Just in a couple months, you guys have given me hope when I've really not

Speaker 11 had a lot. It's very, it's very awesome.
And I'm obviously grateful for my family. And I want to throw it to you.
Give me some gratitude.

Speaker 9 Yeah, all the same.

Speaker 9 I guess somebody somewhere in Bulwark land had said that, uh, that Jack had died.

Speaker 9 I, I really have been just off the grid for two weeks because in my inbox are hundreds of emails from Bulwark readers sending their condolences.

Speaker 9 And people sent me one of our very good friends, hi there, Holly, sent me a piece of art that she made for me. And we were just so touched by all of this.
And

Speaker 9 I understand,

Speaker 9 you know, I lost one of my aunts on 9-11. I understand like hitting the Thanksgiving holidays with a lot of of grief.
Gratitude can be an act of will, right?

Speaker 9 I mean, sometimes it flows naturally and sometimes you've got to just like grit your teeth and make, I'm going to be grateful for the things I have.

Speaker 9 And this is, you know, depending on where you are in life, this may be a moment where you have to grit your teeth and make gratitude an act of will, but it will help if you do.

Speaker 9 I am convinced that gratitude is the

Speaker 9 absolute king of all the virtues. Yes.
So I am grateful to you, A.B. I'm so happy we get to work together.

Speaker 11 Yes, me too.

Speaker 9 Yeah. And for all you guys who listen and read us and watch us and email us and support us and our friends to us, I'm grateful for you guys too.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Speaker 11 Happy Thanksgiving. That's a perfect way to end.
JVL, thank you so much. We missed you so much.
Have the best Thanksgiving that you can. Hug that mother-in-law for all of us.

Speaker 11 And Charlie will be back in the chair on Monday. Everyone, tune in then.
Thank you.

Speaker 10 The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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