Way that a citizen has to influence what goes on in the country.
I think this is one of the most important elections of our lifetime.
I know a lot of people say that about every election, but this election is vitally important.
So we have a lot at stake, and I think it's important for everyone, no matter how young, no matter how old, to get out and vote and make your voice heard.
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George Conway back with us, lawyer pundit and president of the Anti-Psychopath Political Action Committee.
I know you're not a pollster, but what's your explanation for Donald Trump erasing Kamala Harris's lead in national polls according to the average of polls that are out there, 538 in real clear politics?
What's going on with this country as we get within six days of Election Day?
Well, I think it goes without saying that it's a very divided country.
I'm not a pollster.
I have to say that what I do know about polling, I was previously married to a pollster for 20 years, is that it cannot, pollsters cannot determine who will show up.
They cannot predict who will show up on Election Day.
And the other thing about polling is that if you call 10,000 people, you're only going to get a handful of responses.
And once you get a sample that is statistically useful, it's not going to be a sample of the population at large, let alone registered voters, let alone likely voters.
And likely voters, the pool of likely voters is really unknowable.
I mean, you can only guess because every year the mix of voters is a little different because some voters are more motivated in some years than others.
Like I think women are going to be highly motivated this year.
So I don't think polls are useful as predictive tools for what's going to happen here.
I think that Kamala Harris is well positioned to win because I think the enthusiasm factor is so much greater on the Democratic side.
It's partly enthusiasm for her, having a fresh face and an inspiring face who looks to the future and is positive and joyful.
And also there's terror, I fear, on behalf of the Democratic base and other people who understand the danger of Donald Trump.
And on the other side, you have, you know, a MAGA base that is devoted to him, but I think there are a lot of Republicans who are completely exhausted by Trump, even if they think that in some ways they would benefit from a Trump presidency from lower marginal tax rates or other issues.
I think they are exhausted by him.
They're exhausted trying to have to defend him to people.
And I think a lot of them, I think there are a lot of hidden Harris voters, but we'll see.
I mean, it's like what Derry Cheater says about baseball.
It's like, it's why they play the game.
You can't know beforehand.
You can look at what's happening on paper and that doesn't tell you how it's going to come out.
Are Democrats, is Kamala Harris going to have to defend this garbage comment by Joe Biden?
The headline in the Washington Times today, Biden labels Trump backers garbage in that Vodo Latino video that we played for viewers earlier.
Yeah, well, I think that's whole story is garbage.
I mean, it's so funny.
The Republicans have spent so much time talking about how inarticulate Joe Biden is, and here he was clearly saying that what he thought was garbage was the racism of Trump and his supporters.
He wasn't saying that the supporters are garbage, but he was saying that the people who were giving those speeches, including that comedian who made a couple of really horrific remarks about Puerto Ricans and made another horrific remark about blacks, that's what he was clearly talking about there.
George Conway, by the way, he's not running for president.
George Conway with us this morning for about the next 40 minutes here on the Washington Journal.
Go ahead and get your calls in.
Phone lines split the way we have split them as we're getting close to election day.
Trump Vance supporters 202-748-8001.
Harris Wall supporters 202-748-8000.
If it's neither for you or if you're still undecided, 202-748-8002.
We were talking before the program about the newspapers we have on the desk here and reading more newspapers.
I wonder, do you think newspapers doing away with presidential endorsements as the Washington Post, the LA Times, and USA Today is doing this cycle, does that matter?
Well, I understand the general argument in the abstract that newspapers, a lot of people say newspapers should not do political endorsements because it calls their news pages into question and people confuse what's opinion and what's news.
And I do think there is merit to that.
I think one of the problems in the way we get information these days about current events is, first of all, people don't read enough newspapers, and local news is dying.
But I think there's a little bit too much intermix between opinions and fact reporting and entertainment.
All these things have kind of melded together to the point where I think a lot of people can't distinguish opinion from fact.
And in violation of that old adage of Senator Moynihan that you're entitled to your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts.
That being said, I think it is extremely unfortunate and disturbing and disturbing is really an understatement that they have chosen these newspapers and newspaper chains,
I guess USA Today, all of Gadette, I guess, and the LA Times and the Washington Post of all places, to decide shortly before the most consequential presidential election since probably 1864 that the choice between someone who is clearly an authoritarian,
who a sociopath, who clearly has already attempted to destroy American democracy for his own ends, and a candidate who is committed to the rule of law.
I mean, leave all other policy issues aside.
The notion that, I mean, if newspapers never made endorsements, which some people believe they shouldn't, this is the time for them to make an exception.
And these three news organizations are going the other way.
And I have to say, you know, it is very reminiscent of what has happened in countries where there have been authoritarian takeovers in the past.
People don't want to incur the wrath of a vindictive government.
Jeff Bezos argued yesterday in his op-ed that this is a way, a step towards increasing trust in newspapers, saying now, according to the latest Gallup newspapers are below Congress in trust.
Can I use an, I don't want to use the word I want to use on, this is C-SPAN, right?
That's garbage, okay, to use milder word, because he's owned this paper for a long time.
He could have taken this position two years ago, four years ago, six years ago, okay?
And he did not.
And it just so happens that this man has business with the federal government that he doesn't want disturbed, and he has his own employees at his Blue Origin or whatever the name of his meeting with Donald Trump the day this gets into the newspaper.
Okay, he has zero credibility.
Okay, he has zero credibility on this.
And you see it, you see it, essentially what you are seeing.
I mean, it is like Lenin's adage that the capitalists will sell us the rope with which they will hang him.
The same is true of fascists.
And Donald Trump is, you know, definitionally a fascist.
And I hate to say that, and it's something I never thought I would come to that conclusion.
But you look at the pages of history, and there's no question.
And what people are doing, what these corporations are doing, is that they're putting financial interests, momentary financial interests, above the interests of the public.
Well, you buy a newspaper, you're providing a public service that may be for profit, but you have an obligation to provide truthful information and to give truthful guidance to people.
And if you cannot take that heat, you should not own the newspaper.
You should sell that newspaper.
It is absolutely in our range.
But this isn't the only thing that's happening.
I mean, we see something.
There was an incident that didn't get a lot of press because we're in the middle of an intense election season and we see what happened at the Post and at the LA Times.
And now at USA Today, there was a professor of history that I know, Ruth Ben Giat, a very prominent scholar of authoritarianism at NYU, was scheduled to give a lecture at the Naval Academy.
And some MAGA Republican House members and the Heritage Foundation objected.
The speech was going to be about how authoritarians co-opt the military, which is something I think potential officers of the United States Navy should really understand, because I think it's important that military officers understand history and particularly international history.
And the speech was postponed in light of those objections.
I mean, what we are seeing is chilling.
And the fact that we are seeing it now in anticipation of a possible, but I don't think it's going to happen, victory by Donald Trump, should scare the living daylights out of any lights out of anybody who believes in free speech and democracy.
Coming up on 9 a.m. Eastern, no surprise, plenty of calls for you.
Mines are full.
Hope you keep calling in, and we'll start with Cheryl in California on the Harris Walls line.
Go ahead.
Hi, Mr. Conway.
How are you this morning?
Very well, man.
Oh, boy, that's good.
And thank you for C-SPAN for taking my call.
But, you know, what I wanted to point out, you know, because, you know, all through this election cycle, we have heard, you know, Kamala, you know, didn't do this or she was a part of this, blah, blah, blah.
You know, but what I want, you know, you to point out to the American people is how the government works.
Because, you know, Trump inherited An economy from President Obama, okay, that he took credit for.
Half of the stuff that he said he did, he did not do.
Obama did it.
And the other thing, when they talk about what Biden and Harris is not doing, think about the House and the power of the purse, where it belongs.
And see, this is where the American people get caught up in the rhetoric instead of the facts.
So I hope through this segment, you can point out the facts to them.
That's Cheryl in California.
Well, thank you, Cheryl.
And I'm absolutely right.
I mean, I think she makes a number of good points.
I mean, for example, Vice President Harris is simply the vice president.
Vice President doesn't really have any job to do in the Constitution other than to preside on January 6th and to be president of the Senate.
And so it's a difficult job in that sense because if you do too much, people are going to say, well, if you try to do too much, people are going to say, well, you know, she's overstepping because she's just the vice president.
And if you just sit there like a wallflower, then people say you're not doing enough and nobody, you're not going to make anybody happy.
But she's absolutely right.
What, you know, what Donald Trump, you know, where's the money from for the wall?
From Mexico, okay, for example.
One of the advantages that Donald Trump has had in this election is people forgot why they fired him in the first place in 2020.
And there is, I think the caller at the very initial point in her remarks talked about how Kamala Harris is essentially being nitpicked.
Whereas, you know, Donald Trump gets a pin.
Donald Trump can say, I want to, you know, just off the cuff, say, I want to eliminate all federal taxes, which is insane.
And yet, you know, people are worried about what people are saying, well, Kamala Harris was very, very unclear about what her policy on kumquat farming in California was.
It really is just a double standard, which is created by the fact that we've been watching an absolute, frankly, lunatic who absolutely knows virtually nothing about politics, economics, foreign policy, even after all these years.
And he's held to a lower standard because he has brought standards down for himself.
But somehow or another, the standards for everyone else remain the same.
Whitsett, North Carolina, Mark on the Trump Vance Line.
You're on with George Conway.
Yeah, I'm a little bit disturbed about the double standards you're applying on what you're saying.
For example, you dismissed Joe Biden's comments about calling all of Trump's supporters garbage, and that's what he said.
He did not say that, caller.
He did not.
He did not.
He said that the racism, the comment, the disgusting comments about Hispanics were objectionable.
I read the quote too, sir.
You're just wrong.
And I know you want to believe that's what he said.
But by the way, he's not running for president.
The other guy is.
Mark, did you want to respond?
To call Trump, to call Trump a fascist, calling his supporters fascist.
I'm not a fascist.
I'm a freedom-loving Republican.
And for you to say that Trump supporters are fascist is just wrong.
I didn't say Trump supporters are fascist.
I think they may be supporting a fascist.
Okay, I was a Republican from 1980 to 2018.
Okay?
I don't want to see a Republican Party led by a fascist, but he is a fascist.
He cannot help but be a fascist.
His personality disorders make him a fascist.
He does not care about anyone else.
He does not care about the rule of law.
He does not care about justice.
He does not care about right and wrong.
He's a criminal.
He's a convicted criminal, 34 counts.
He stands charged with many other counts on which I really don't think he has much of a defense.
He's an adjudicated sexual abuser found by a New York City jury, that included, frankly, people north of the city who were probably Republicans, unanimously found him liable for inserting his hand in a physical assault, inserting his fingers in a woman's vagina, which the judge called rape.
He is, by any colloquial standard, a rapist.
He is a bad man.
And why all of you out there seem to want to excuse him and pretend that reality is something other than what it is and what you want it to be is the problem.
And I don't say that you're garbage because of that.
I think you need to look in the mirror someday and start thinking about, is this man the man you want your children or your grandchildren to emulate?
On the garbage comment, the transcript sent by the White House has it as possessive and not plural.
The statement, the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters' apostrophe S. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it's un-American.
It's totally contrary to everything we've done, everything that we've been.
Some debate over there since yesterday about whether it was plural or possessive, just to the caller's point of what he said.
Yeah, and I, you know, as a conservative lawyer, I am a textualist and you have to, part of the ruling way you examine a text is you look at the entire sentence.
Okay?
And the entire sentence makes it makes sense that there is a possessive there.
When we speak, we do not say apostrophe.
Although Donald Trump has shown that he doesn't know what an apostrophe is, by the way.
If Donald Trump wins, what does that mean for you?
And if Donald Trump loses on Tuesday, what does that mean for you?
Well, it doesn't really matter what it means to me.
I think what it means to the country is scary if he wins.
Personally, I'm probably going to do the same thing either way.
It was never my intention to be on television, not even here, although I enjoy it very much sitting here and being a political advocate.
And I think I'm going to write a book.
I intend to write a book.
I want to write a book to talk about the interplay between Trump's psychological, deep-seated psychological disorders and the public, how it is that somebody so manifestly unfit can gain the confidence of large segments of the public.
This is something we've seen in other countries that have lost their democracy.
And, you know, I think it's really a description about how Donald Trump represents the worst in us and brings out the worst in us.
And it's going to be a bit of an academic book because I've done a lot of reading and I really want to do more reading about what political psychologists and historians have written about authoritarianism and what psychiatrists and psychologists have written about malignant narcissism.
And I want to try to connect it all and then I want to draw lessons for the future for both America and the world.
Because one of the things we believed and I believed and fooled myself into believing is it couldn't happen here.
And it almost happened here.
It could yet happen here.
We're going to find out in a few days.
I'm hopeful that it will not happen here, the destruction of our democracy.
But somehow we have, as the Republican nominee for president, a man who led an insurrection against the United States and who tried to overturn the results of an election he lost,
which is something, you know, if you had ever, I never, ever thought that that would be something I could, that was even within the realm of possibility in the United States of America, yet by 2020, even before the election of 2020, you know, it began to dawn on my dense head that, wow, this is the guy who could and would do that.
And he still would do that.
Jimbo, Bakersfield, California, on that line for undecided or neither.
Go ahead.
Good morning, George.
Hi.
Anyone willing to face this angry mob here on Washington Journal earns my respect.
And sir, you have earned it, man.
This is an angry mob you're dealing with.
Anyway, whenever you speak, I always listen because you always help educate me.
And I hope your daughter follows in your footsteps, not your wife's.
Okay, but anyway, here's a really important question I wanted to ask you, and it's been bothering me.
I keep thinking that Trump will declare victory early on election night, irrespective of the tally.
And I think he's just going to go headstrong into it.
And I think we're dealing with a collection of people who there is no preponderance of evidence that would ever change their mind on any of this.