All Episodes
July 21, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
53:46
BONUS: Michael Tracey, Matt Taibbi, Walter Kirn on the RNC, Trump, and More

This is a special segment from our show SYSTEM UPDATE, recorded by Reporter Michael Tracey with Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi on July 17 during the 2024 RNC in Milwaukee. Listen to America this week, with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn: https://www.racket.news/s/america-this-week - - -  Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community - - -  Follow Glenn: Twitter Instagram - - -  Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
- Okay, so here we are.
World, people, men, women, everybody in between.
Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Matt Taibbi, Walter Kern.
So, guys.
What's up, Michael?
Keep your hands off me.
Last time I saw Michael, he was chugging across the American continent in a car, in an underpowered compact car.
Trucked here in the same underpowered compact car.
It's still working.
Well, do you believe it's not broke?
Don't fix it.
But right.
That was after the George Floyd riot.
Yeah, that was the summer of love.
That was almost exactly four years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was July of 2020 that we were in London.
Just almost exactly four years ago.
Yeah, exactly.
And here we are again.
Divine providence.
So that leads to my first question.
I just spoke to Congressman Mike Collins, not to be confused with Congressman Doug Collins, both of Georgia.
No relation, he informed me.
But Mike Collins, he repeated something that you've heard from a lot of people, which is that they felt that there was divine intervention that saved Trump from the bullet.
I guess I'm not metaphysically inclined or providentially inclined or whatever but I can't say I have the ultimate explanations about the nature of the universe so I'm not going to go out of my way to disprove that assertion because who the hell knows but I just wonder how much is this enhancing or bolstering the mythology around Trump such that people aren't going to care at all about the policy substance of what he does or his record.
It seems like this is turbocharged like the folklore.
around Trump, but I'm just wondering if you guys will pick up on any of that.
This is the Joseph Campbell Convention.
You know, this is a Star Wars origin story or something that's happening here in which, you know, the father is grazed by a bullet.
I already saw a Japanese anime short with Trump as a kind of square-jawed giant person, you know, and he catches the bullet next to his ear.
It's a quick turnaround.
Yeah.
So in the anime world, it wasn't divine intervention.
It was kind of incredible prowess to duck that bullet.
But, you know, in the world of the evangelical Southern Republican, I can't imagine a better proof of their worldview.
You know, we all got to take turns letting people have their wins.
And the Divine Intervention team, I think, should be given a lot of latitude to interpret this.
- Yes, yeah, yeah. - We've already seen online, you know, there's somebody was talking about how Trump, in the moment that he fell, was radically saved.
- Yes. - Right?
And so he was on his knees and was, in that moment. - But Matt, that was an actual prophecy That was a video of a self-described Christian prophet that was made three months ago and it got wide circulation right after the assassination.
That was a guy predicting that something would happen.
It was even more to the favor of the Christian metaphysicians.
But that photo of him between the legs of the Secret Service people with his head to the ground?
So on the flip side of that, though, we were just talking about this on our own show that, you know, the decision to bring Amber Rose out last night definitely raised some eyebrows with the kind of family values crowd.
Matt Walsh had some pretty negative things to say about that.
So, yes, you know, Trump is obviously I don't know.
for the evangelical voter.
But, you know, I don't know.
I think maybe even, you know, the decision to try to widen the tent a little bit, it might mute a little bit of that mythos.
Although after the assassination, I don't know how this can be.
I think he's parlaying the mythos.
There's a saying that you lose political capital unless you use it, and I think that's true of mythological capital too.
So I think after the divine intervention, Trump could afford to bring a little goddess worship into the convention hall.
The figure of Amber Rose was appropriate for, frankly.
So are you saying that according to this prophecy, Trump had been fallen, meaning he had not been saved until just this past Saturday?
Because according to more conventional evangelical perspectives on Trump, as far as I've been aware, is that he was already chosen as this imperfect vessel to effectuate God's will.
Long before July of 2024, right?
So they already kind of saw him as having this redemptive arc.
That he was using to do the will of God in office, or, you know, curtail abortion, that sort of thing.
So, like, what flaws did he have to remediate as of last Saturday, which is what was hastened by the bullet?
Well, Michael, we're being a little unfair to the Old Testament crowd here, because the original imperfect vessel, if you'll remember, was Moses.
The guy who said, why me, man?
I can't even talk to a crowd, you know.
And so the notion that Trump is kind of growing and being challenged, that the many miracles of Trump are still happening, is I think an interfaith sort of idea.
But to the crowd of Christians who I think have just been through the Stormy Daniels trial, he probably has a ways to go in his purification.
I'm not sure about that.
I mean, do you think that evangelicals were really wavering on Trump because of the Stormy Daniels trial?
I got the impression that Trump views evangelicals or Christian conservatives as so rock solid that he doesn't even have to really cater to them anymore.
Like, for example, just saying, I'll leave it to the states for abortion.
We're not going to do any federal prohibitions on abortion.
He said out of the debate with Biden, everybody was obviously fixated on Joe's implosion.
But Trump also said that he had no problem with the male abortion pill going out.
So it seems like if this was 2016, Trump will be much more Assiduous in demonstrating to the Christian conservatives that they could count on him to do their agenda even if he had a Manhattan liberal casino magnate background.
Whereas 2024, Trump has nothing to prove with them anymore.
So we can kind of stray a little bit off the reservation and yet still be almost guaranteed that the Christian conservatives are going to vote Trump because in part of them this mythological connection that they have with him.
Yeah, again, we were just talking about this too, but in 2016, you know, I remember going out when he had that sort of redemption tour for African American voters.
Do you remember that in August of 2016?
Yeah, he went to, like, black churches and stuff.
It was weirder than that.
He went to, like, all white suburbs and places like the Iowa County Fair, but gave speeches about how he was the best friend of the African-American voter.
And this was a calculation by Steve Bannon, who was running his campaign at the time, that Trump was behind, but that was only because Republicans weren't accepting of him, that he needed to Some Republicans felt he was too, you know, far from their model to, and maybe too much of a racist to vote for.
And so they figured that if they did this little show that they would recapture, some Republicans would feel that they had permission to vote for him again.
And, but the calculus this time around is totally different.
They're not trying just to get, because he was, he had, I think it was something like only 60% of Republicans were solid Trump voters.
heading into November, he had an enormous number of people who were kind of felt negatively about both candidates.
This time around, he doesn't have that problem.
You're right.
And so he's they're aiming in other directions, which is really interesting.
Yeah, I guess a part of why I'm a little bit skeptical that the choice of Vance was the most politically or electorally advantageous pick he could have made.
Now, maybe he picked Vance for reasons beyond campaign success.
That could be the case.
Maybe they're confident in his chance to win, which It's probably justified.
But I maybe I was a bit of a Doug Burgum dead ender because I thought maybe him or somebody akin to him like a Glenn Youngkin or something that would appeal to a more of a center right centrist.
Affluent, suburban type voter who might have reservations about Trump personally, maybe view him as a bit of a chaos agent still.
They swung against him in 2020 in the major states and I felt like there might have been a pick he might have made to appeal or ameliorate that demographic, but he seems to have calculated that that wasn't necessary and has gone with someone who I'm not sure what added benefit Vance gives him in terms of So I totally disagree, but Walter, I'm sure you have thoughts on this.
Do you want to?
appeal among a segment of Republicans, but in terms of expanding beyond Trump's typical range of supporters, maybe I might slightly agree with the conventional pundit wisdom that I'm not sure Vance really assists in that regard.
So I totally disagree, but Walter, I'm sure you have thoughts on this.
Do you want to?
Well, you go first.
Yeah.
So we talked a lot yesterday about there was apparently a pretty intense behind the scenes fight, even into yesterday over who was going to be the VP pick.
And the choice really came down to sort of heavy lobbying by Lindsey Graham, you know, other traditional Republicans so that to have Marco Rubio be the choice.
And And that would have represented kind of the traditional kind of center-right Republican national security state.
I think that would have been nearly fatal to his candidacy because the entire populist idea would be in trouble at that point.
And think about what that would say about Ukraine, for instance, right?
You know, that kind of a choice.
By choosing Vance, you know, it's kind of a double down on this idea that Of a more populist, kind of nationalist concept.
It's the most anti-war choice that he could have made, I think.
I don't know who else he would have chosen that could have expanded.
Maybe it didn't expand his base, but it solidified his image in a way that somebody like Rubio would have put in peril.
But would anybody have not voted for Trump because he picked Rubio?
I know people who are Trump supporters who said they would have bailed.
I feel like they claim that as a threat, but when the rubber hits the road and it's late October, what are they going to do?
You know?
Yeah, but you can say that about Vance too.
When the rubber hits the road, the slight differences that you're talking about.
They're voting for Donald Trump.
And time and time again, they've done analyses of the effect of the vice presidential side of the ticket on people's voting habits.
And it's negligible in every case, almost.
The news today for Trump, that it wasn't electoral but financial, was that Andreessen Horowitz, the giant and sort of top-line California venture capital firm of Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, came out and said they're going to be donating to the Trump campaign or to political action committees that support it in a substantial way.
That was, I think, undercover news today because it was basically a signal, an all-clear signal to Silicon Valley that it's okay to back Donald Trump.
And in fact, the way Silicon Valley works, where everybody's looking for an investment from a place like Anderson Horowitz, you're going to see a lot of, you know, overnight conversions to the Trump things from people who are going to be pitching them on their startup next month.
So, and Vance, I think, was the key in solidifying that new VC West Coast tech coalition.
So it's not necessarily an electoral advantage, but he comes from that world, he's known in that world, he's popular there, and I think he's brought that side over.
They might have come over anyway, but they've done so with alacrity.
Sorry, one more thing quickly.
Glenn obviously published the Daryl Cooper essay.
It was a sort of a big Twitter thread that was expanded into the essay and it was explaining why Trump has such wide appeal and this is why the VP pick was important because for a lot of Trump supporters, It's like a life or death issue with the deep state and all that.
Like if they believe that they're so deep into this idea that there's this all-consuming repressive national security state and that Trump represents some kind of opposition to it.
Which I think is bogus, but I know that they believe this.
I don't know that it's completely bogus, but it would have been more transparently bogus if he had picked, if he had had Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio in tow for the entire campaign.
He's got Mike Pompeo speaking in primetime at this convention, he's got Nikki Haley here, he's got every hawk under the sun claiming that they're America first or MAGA now, including Lindsey Graham.
Yeah, but who else was Trump sitting next to?
They picked their opposite as his vice president, so you can afford to make the beautiful gestures.
But Lindsey Graham is able to lobby Trump because he has such close access to him in the first place.
He was playing golf with him in New Jersey yesterday morning.
Yeah, but who else was Trump sitting next to?
Tucker Carlson, who hates those people with a passion.
Who came out and gave one of the most revelatory, obscene and frank condemnations of Lindsey I've ever seen come from anyone.
And basically said, hey, yesterday morning, man, you know, you were trying to kill this Vance nomination and now you're, you know, doing a selfie riding in a car with him, you hypocrite.
Here's the basic reason why I'm a bit skeptical and I do roll my eyes a little bit about all this chatter of populist nationalism and that's now been solidified because Trump picked Vance.
Trump and Vance are kind of just nebulous in the same way, I think, in that Vance can easily accommodate himself to whatever the mainstream consensus is within the party.
So he had no issue basically overturning his previous identity as anti-Trump or never Trump and gradually acclimated to the Trump cause, which is not new for a politician, but he did it skillfully.
And I don't know, in 2022, I covered a little bit of Vance running for the Senate in Ohio.
He was never opposed to Ukrainian funding.
He actually said the opposite.
Now, the media portrayed him as in Putin's pocket or all this other nonsense, but he said, I have no multiple quotes.
I reposted them yesterday where he says, no, of course we should send weapons to Ukraine.
So he doesn't have any principle aversion to that stuff.
Dude, the Ukraine war, when he was running for Senate, was not a hot war with Russia.
Yes, it was.
2022.
Yeah, 2021 is right when it started, but... Well, it's gone on for a while.
No, the invasion of Ukraine was February of 2022.
The midterm of 2022 is when Vance got elected.
Right.
Well, I don't think a lot of people would have opposed going into Afghanistan that year.
But six years later, maybe not.
There were a lot of expectations for how things were going to go in Ukraine.
And a couple years later, where they're still throwing $60 billion at a time at the job and getting nowhere.
And do we know who executed or was critical in seeing to it that that $61 billion was passed in April?
It still amazes me that nobody covers this.
Donald Trump!
Talk to Kevin Cramer, Senator from North Dakota, who's here.
I just talked to him again yesterday.
He, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Johnson, and Mark Wayne Mullen were the surrogates for Trump in the Congress to get that Ukraine funding bill passed in April because otherwise the House caucus in particular would have been restive And Trump signaling that he was down with that Ukraine funding made it so that it was politically palatable for Republicans, including Johnson, who are the most responsive to Trump's political influence, to get that passed.
So, I mean, that's in the record.
They can say stuff whenever they want.
Right.
Right.
And you can claim that you have this generalized his generic aversion to foreign policy interventionism or the military-industrial complex.
But I don't know, Trump installed a top Raytheon Lavas as his defense secretary.
Why should I not look at Trump's actual record, like what he's actually done with his power in evaluating the question of whether he is this antagonist toward the deep state, rather than these wish-casting projections of what he might do if the pure, untarnished version of Trump's were ever to emerge?
I hear that, and look, I agree with you.
In some sense, also with the FISA issue, like the Trump support was critical in getting that awful bill passed.
Through MAGA Mike Johnson, as Trump nicknamed him.
Exactly.
You know, Michael, you and I both spent a lot of time on the Russiagate story.
We did.
Right?
And at the very least, what Trump represents is not that, right?
He's not going to be prosecuting himself for a phony conspiracy with Russia.
And if we look at what happened in the winter of 2021 to 2022, With Nord Stream, with all kinds of other things.
Do we think, do we really think that Trump would have ended up in this shooting war place with Russia?
It's a counterfactual, and that's what the Republicans rely on.
It never would have happened, like Trump.
That's what politics relies on.
Politics is about counterfactuality.
It's like, here's what the timeline would be.
Instead of just letting Trump ramble and say it never would have happened if I was there, he says Israel never would have happened.
You know what, Michael?
You know what, Michael?
Here's, I think, the basic difference.
You'd still think it's a policy thing.
Trump doesn't look at politics in terms of policy.
He looks at it in terms of deals and negotiations.
Keeping his options open and striking the deal at the time.
I don't know that, you're right, he has any fundamental hostility to some of these groups that he might, or his supporters might speak against.
But I think what he's telling us is, if I, the master negotiator, were in there, I could drive a deal that these guys aren't getting.
And that's anathema to the usual political way of thinking, where everything's based on policies and announcing yourself and so on.
And Trump's more like, you know, let me get in there.
At the table and do something.
And also, I'm an intimidating guy.
What he's usually saying in those speeches is when Trump's president, our enemies will be intimidated in a way they just haven't been.
Right, but that's sort of like a hero worship thing.
We don't need to know what his policy prescriptions are.
We just need him in there.
That's the way the world used to be ruled before we had Georgetown, you know, schools of foreign policy.
It used to be ruled through intimidation, negotiation, I mean, you also have to look at other things like, you know, I spent a lot of the last two or three years on the digital censorship issue, right?
How the Democrats feel about that?
I mean, they're a thousand percent committed to, you know, a full throttle version of as much control as they can get over the internet, over, you know, media distribution, all those things.
Even integrating that with laws overseas, like the Digital Services Act.
All the Five Eyes countries except for the United States have pretty intense digital censorship laws now.
Is that going to be true under Trump?
You know, maybe.
That's possible.
But we know for an absolute fact that it's trending in a terrible direction in the other way, right?
You're right.
Nobody has to ask Trump questions.
Even if he answered them, you wouldn't believe it, right?
All you can do is make calculated guesses about who's going to be worse on these issues.
And, you know, with something like, for instance, Ukraine and Crimea and all that, there are differences in how different politicians pursue those.
Barack Obama made a very different decision than the Biden administration made, right?
And Trump made a different decision than Obama by sending Ukraine lethal weaponry for the first time.
Right, exactly.
But which was reported exactly the opposite, right?
Yeah, it was reported erroneously, as you and I pointed out at the time.
Right, right.
Yes.
But they didn't invade under him.
But they encroached.
I mean, this idea that the world was just this oasis of peace and tranquility under Trump, I think is a ridiculous talking point.
No, I mean, the bombings?
Yeah, he escalated in Afghanistan!
You know what I do believe him on?
He just recently admitted on a Fox interview, and then in some other interview, that he was never actually going to withdraw from Afghanistan.
He said he was going to maintain a force presence at Bagram Air Base and therefore effectively keep occupying Afghanistan in perpetuity.
Trump dropped a record number of bombs on Afghanistan in 2018.
So 17 years after 9-11.
So I don't know.
I just get frustrated that nobody looks at the record of what he actually did when the guy wielded power.
It's like he's just this mythological figure who just floats in the ether and we just have to hope for things when we have four years worth of data.
Right.
But Michael, what people are voting on, they're looking at A bad choice and another choice where we have a wealth of concrete information, where we know what is happening right now.
Are they going to do Nord Stream under Trump?
I don't see that happening.
He bragged about how he ended Nord Stream by sanctioning it, or he was about to.
Right, but is he going to blow it up?
Who knows?
He wanted to get rid of Nord Stream.
He wanted to cut off the supply of energy.
I don't want it to turn into who can make the best case for Donald Trump.
Peacenik.
As I understand his argument, it's, I'm an intimidating figure.
I have a kind of madman charisma that others respect, and we've had these encroachments, not because I'm a peacenik, but because they're afraid I'll go ape on them.
You know, not do the forever war formula.
And his crown jewel in that respect is killing Soleimani, you know.
Hey, I shut up Iran pretty quickly, didn't I?
With one lethal, swift move that everybody told me was going to cause world war, but instead settled things down.
And I think that's the thing he points to, at least.
But Matt, what did Mike Johnson say when he was asked to explain why he and Trump got the Pfizer renewal in April?
He said, well I'll tell you, he said that Donald Trump and I agreed that we want him to be the one presiding over FISA when it next comes up for renewal in two years.
So what does that indicate to you about his attitude toward the security state at large?
It's not that he has any kind of principled aversion to it, he wants to be the one presiding over it!
Right, and that's one of the arguments that I've made in saying that people need to oppose it.
All of this, Michael, to me it's kind of irrelevant.
I'm not really interested in making a case for or against Donald Trump.
The deal with this election is that the die has been cast in terms of the campaign.
Democrats have essentially forfeited the right to be believed on all these issues, and now what's going to happen is Trump's most likely going to be elected, and then I think what you're going to see People are going to finally, I hope, hold him to all of his various promises about things.
You couldn't do it, really, in the first four years of his presidency because they were piling on so many other things that were wrong that it was very difficult to, in real time, Right, right.
But we never got the chance, you know what I mean?
They didn't want you to criticize Trump on the grounds of, well, he's not living up to his populist promises.
Which is what I tried to do when I was alone, a voice in the wilderness.
Right, right.
But we never got the chance, you know what I mean?
We never got the chance because they launched this bullshit onslaught against him that ate up everything.
And, you know, did put him, I think, in some favorable way in the role of the bullied one.
Yeah, and I'm in an odd position because as Matt knows well, I was one of the very few people with even any media adjacency who was really early covering the flaws and the illogicality of the whole Russiagate thing.
And yet now I now find myself in a position where I'm commonly trying to counter some of this mythology that's built around Trump as this like martyred opponent of the deep state in a way I think just exaggerates the.
The impact of that whole episode?
Now, yes, Trump did have machinations against him by elements of the national security state.
That's not disputable.
But does that therefore make him an existential threat to the CIA or something?
No.
I mean, read this Project 2025 thing.
They just want to do some bureaucratic reorganization so that the security state services better So just to take an example in the censorship realm, the Department of Defense has a new thing called the Office of Narrative Intelligence or something like that.
It's headquartered in Mississippi.
Senator Roger Wicker got a bunch of DOD money directed for that, and it's kind of like the Republican answer To the Stanford-based system.
And what they claim they want to do is create a single hub where there's one place in the Pentagon that's overseeing all the kind of narrative control efforts out there.
And the technology was originally designed to be used mostly overseas against terrorists and that sort of thing.
It's now obviously being directed inward.
Shocker.
Right.
And so they claim that, you know, once they come back into power, if they're able to do it, but that they're going to end this encroachment by the security state into domestic affairs and go back to being what they were before, which was, you know, a Death Star-like force around the world that, you know, fixed elections and assassinated people without, but not fixed elections and assassinated people without, but not here, Right?
And so the, I think for a lot of Trump voters, the line is, yes, the CIA, the Pentagon, it's bad.
They do all kinds of terrible things.
But they never crossed the line into meddling with domestic politics in the way that they have in the last eight years.
And the implicit promise of the Trump administration is that he's not going to do that.
Now, I don't know that that will be true.
And if he does do that, if we start seeing Russiagates flipped on, you know, Democratic politicians... Well, he'll say, you know, Joe Biden, he's the Manchurian candidate of China.
Or the mayor of Moscow pays Joe Biden.
Or, I mean, it doesn't seem like he has any...
Principled antipathy toward the idea of kind of ginning up one of these foreign influence scandals.
Can he deploy the power of the state behind it?
Maybe another question.
He happens to be telling the truth in that respect.
Hunter Biden?
- He happens to be telling the truth in that respect.
- Which one? - Hunter Biden? - He ran on the-- - That's not like when he was alleging, but go ahead. - Like for instance, I was at all those, one of the reasons I didn't vote for Trump in 2016, one of the many reasons, was that I was in the crowds when he was doing the lock her up chants, and I thought, maybe he's gonna do that, you know?
That would be insane if he did that.
You know, the President locking up political enemies.
Totally unacceptable, even to imply doing it, right?
But you got into office and didn't try, right?
So, you know, there's some small amount of evidence that I just think he's maybe a little bit more calculating in terms of, you know, how they use the security state.
What's happened in the last eight years has been such a radical departure from the norm I think any step backward from that is going to be acceptable to his voters.
I just don't think there's any good reason to suppose that Joe Biden is a Manchurian candidate of China while he's encircling China militarily, pledging he'll go to war with China over Taiwan.
Is he trying to put Biden in jail for being a Manchurian?
No, he's not.
He's not.
I'm just saying that he, you know, he obviously dabbles in these ridiculous, you know, theories.
Have you studied the Hunter Biden laptop?
Yeah.
Should I prove that Joe Biden's a Manchurian candidate in China?
So Hunter Biden's saying, you know, I'm sitting here, you know, we've got, we've got the head of Chinese intelligence on board for this and that.
Um, I'm doing this couple billion dollar deal.
Uh, and so on.
Well, certainly that would have been reflected at all in the Biden administration's policy towards China.
It's more hawkish than Trump's.
So what are they getting for their money if they're paying him to be a Manchurian candidate?
So you're saying he's corrupt but he's not helping his master?
The way that Biden has wielded power in terms of policy toward China does not give any indication that he's a Manchurian candidate.
I don't think.
Well, the Manchurian candidate, just to refresh your pop culture memory, is someone who doesn't emerge until the last minute.
They have perfect cover, but they make their move at the opportune moment.
But I am going to say that the charge that there have been untoward dealings between the Biden family and the Chinese business and political elite is not something that Trump made up.
I would love to go back to a world where I get to criticize the president for being over aggressive militarily abroad, you know, for not living up to his campaign promises, you know, to, I don't know, traditional forms of corruption, maybe like of a financial sort.
But that wasn't what we dealt with in the last eight years.
We dealt with sort of a fundamental assault on how Reality was constructed.
You know, there was unprecedented types of digital propaganda were, you know, spread in the population.
And, you know, the use of the law enforcement apparatus in the courts to go after political enemies, this whole lawfare movement, you know, which is not a fake thing.
It's a real thing.
There were mass lawsuits.
The Project 65 thing, which is going after anybody who I mean, listen, here's the difference between the two things that we're talking about.
To me, laid bare.
in the sixth amendment i mean all the amendments were under under remember when they raided michael cohen's office and basically eliminated i think we might have i mean listen here's the difference between the two things that we're talking about to me laid bare uh trump called uh you know trump me called joe biden a manchurian candidate and used some rhetoric and Maybe there's some half-assed congressional probes.
But when they called Trump the Moscow candidate...
They got a full-scale investigation that gripped America every night with Robert Mueller and a big budget and, you know, bogus convictions and bogus trials.
The head of the CIA promising indictments by the ides of March.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so, you know, one may be overheated rhetoric against Joe Biden, but the other was a full-scale operation that You kind of poisoned the country and poisoned journalism.
I agree with that.
I mean, I shouldn't be misconstrued as drawing like a perfect equivalence between these things, which I'm not doing.
I mean, I'm I probably I covered more in depth than most people, like the unprecedented nature of those security state machinations against.
I just think I would I would be I would love to have a conventionally shitty president, you know, as opposed to this other thing that is just it's impossible even to figure out what it is.
That's going on now.
And that's where I am.
Trump not living up to his word.
Trump lying about being an anti-war candidate.
He might just be slightly less aggressive in terms of starting crazy wars that actually lead us to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.
I think his line has sort of been, I have a big, beautiful military with the Space Force and everything, but I'm going to use it less because it's big, beautiful, and scary.
That's just Ronald Reagan, though.
I mean, that's nothing new.
Yeah, but Ronald Reagan is, believe it, I mean, and I say this as someone who just couldn't stand him growing up, but Ronald Reagan is a big step up from where we are right now.
I mean, I think we're in this place where institutionally, where there are so many crazy things going on.
I personally would be glad for a step back from that. - I guess part of my frustration, and we'll wrap up soon, is just that I wish more journalists were inclined to be genuinely impartial toward the two major party candidates, in the sense that have reasoned criticism of both, in the sense that have reasoned criticism of both, don't have a partisan-rooting interest
I'm not accusing you guys of having that, obviously, but I just feel like there's, you know, when we abolish journalistic objectivity, I initially was kind of in favor of that because it had this, like, stuffy ideology where you had to, like, pretend that you had no opinions on anything, right?
And that became untenable with the advent of social media.
But I don't know, part of me wishes there were more commercially journalists who just legitimately did hate and oppose everyone.
So that they wouldn't feel like they had to have this fidelity to... Well that's me, Michael!
But you know what?
You are identifying the problem in some ways.
If you were less than enthusiastic about this culture war, you were accused of being pro-Trump.
I got it every day.
Yeah, I know.
Same here.
And just because I'm willing to entertain arguments on both sides of the question in terms of Donald Trump, only in this era does that look like some kind of endorsement.
Yeah, exactly.
How about on the Democrats?
I came here from D.C.
and I was covering the Senate Democrats' crisis meeting.
They met right off Capitol Hill in the Senate Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee office.
I think that's the correct acronym.
SDSCC or something.
Who knows?
And I am not exaggerating the slightest.
I was watching the Democratic senators exit the building and then either walk into their office or walk toward the Capitol.
They looked like they saw a ghost.
Sheldon Whitehouse, he looked just in despair.
Chris Murphy, he almost couldn't talk.
He was just mumbling, he looked depressed.
Mark Warner just scuttled out of there and they looked dour, genuinely.
And I've never seen anything quite like it.
So, I don't know, are we now in a I kind of had doubted that the odds of a Biden withdrawal were as high as some of the conventional wisdom suggested, because a lot of the Democratic elites or insiders or pundits, they eventually wanted that to happen, so they were trying to materialize it, because they thought that was their only shot at beating Trump.
Right.
So that gave a little bit of an exaggerated impression of how high the odds were.
But still, they were higher than you would expect for an incumbent president, obviously.
In a vacuum, they were really high.
And Biden's collapsed before that.
Oh, oh, right.
But now it seems like that's just been zapped by the assassination attempts and and Biden's collapsed before that.
No, I mean, the attempt to remove him or the attempt to force him to withdraw has been zapped or collapsed or frozen.
Oh, right.
Yes.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
So now it seems like there's very few, very little chance of it.
And they might move up the Democratic roll call vote that's customarily supposed to be at the convention.
But now they're going to do it virtually.
Yeah, July 21st.
But I think they were planning that a while ago.
They were.
In response to some electoral technicality.
I hadn't finalized it yet.
So one thing I heard last night here was if the Democrats are going to burn a candidate, if they feel like they're going to lose to Trump, why don't they just burn the one who's burning out anyway?
And I think that's crazy because they could still win the election easily, I think.
They could.
But not with Biden?
Not.
It would be very difficult with Biden, you know.
But Biden, you know, the big campaign story in 2020 that was overlooked for a long time was how stubborn his support was.
Not by Michael.
Michael was, you know...
I'm never going to argue with him for too long or too vociferously, because I remember when he was the only voice who said, you know, this Biden thing's going to work.
And he looked at the numbers and he looked at the kind of support he had, and he properly predicted the results of the election against a lot of people who were doing a lot of skitzy, neurotic and... Including the Democratic primaries.
Yes, exactly.
Because you remember, Biden was one of the only major candidate who really didn't have a vocal social media support base.
Bernie obviously did, even Warren to some extent.
The Kamala people have one.
But Biden, you know, Biden's most core supporters would be like, you know, religious elderly black people in the South who are not, you know, lighting Twitter on fire.
So it kind of gave a skewed picture of Biden's formidability, I felt.
And you know, I'm not saying Biden is formidable now, but he does have a track record of that being.
And there are a lot of people who are just never going to vote anything but Democratic.
And that's it's a it's a very high number of people.
So there there's still very much in it.
I think the.
The problem is they have no vision and they're completely packed.
There's a total paralysis.
That's probably what you're witnessing at that event is they have no idea what move to make now.
They've exhausted all the things that they think are legitimate moves.
And the only thing they can do now is the thing they should have done eight years ago, which is think, well, how can we make a better pitch to ordinary people about what our vision is for the future?
And they just don't, they haven't had one.
Their whole thing has been running against Trump's negatives.
And it hasn't worked.
That has backfired completely.
So, you know, maybe they'll reemerge with a new idea.
Yeah, the threat to our democracy line.
I saw some story today.
They're eager to return to it.
Boy, you know, like a dog to its vomit.
That's not going to work.
The Thursday night theme at the Republican convention is a new golden age for America.
So Trump's going to go.
We talked about Reagan tonight.
Trump's going to go Reagan-esque.
The shining city on the hill.
The sort of tech-assisted, AI-driven, maybe Peter Thiel and Elon Musk-powered future of America.
Yeah, we have a Lockheed Martin ad.
but it's top one.
- Yeah, it's true.
Yeah, we have like a Lockheed Martin ad.
- Yeah, yeah.
So what do they have to counter that?
Carbon credits?
Green New Deal?
Democracy's going to end in 10 minutes.
He's flipped a script on him.
He's not going to be the dystopian candidate after the Golden Age speech.
The real inspiring slogan should be, we said democracy was going to end last time, and it didn't, but we promise this time it's really going to end.
So you guys are into speech.
This is the last little thing because you jogged my memory.
Something I wanted to bring up.
I'm into unfettered free speech.
It's like the best thing about the American system of government, First Amendment, etc.
But now you have people in the aftermath of this assassination, they're saying, you know, look, Joe Biden once said we have to put Donald Trump in the bullseye.
Meaning change the conversation away from his poor debate performance and redirect the focus onto Trump.
You have people saying, oh, we've got to dial down the rhetoric, we have to turn down the temperature, right?
And I don't know, this seems like she speaks— The Democrats are the ones who are saying that.
No, the Republicans are saying it about the Democratic rhetoric toward Trump, because they're saying that the overheated Democratic rhetoric about Trump could have inspired the assassination.
Right, right.
And here's what I object to.
So I think all the overblown Democratic rhetoric about Trump is substantively incorrect, right?
And I've been saying that since 2015.
But I also think people are allowed to have alarmist, hysterical... Yeah, I read that article.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Perceptions of political figures and not be accused of being complicit in assassination attempts that they had no operational role in.
So how do you think about that speech dynamic?
Because I'm a little bit wary of how... I'm not in favor of suppressing that speech.
I don't think that they should be algorithmically dialing down Anybody who says something like, you know, Trump is Hitler and he needs to be stopped at all costs.
You know, this is the stochastic terrorism argument.
Keith Olbermann has, you know, had a big thing about how, oh, look at all the people who are suddenly discovering stochastic terrorism.
You know, I did the Twitter file story.
One of the first things that we found was that they had to construct an entirely new argument for what incitement was in order to get Trump bounced from the platform because he hadn't technically violated enough of their internal rules.
So they essentially created a stochastic terrorism argument saying that in the aggregate, looking at the totality of everything that he said, it could constitute inciting people to violence and this is why we have to take him off Twitter.
And, you know, I think that was wrong.
I think it would be wrong to say, you know, you can't let people say that he's an existential threat to the universe and needs to be stopped.
But, you know, people should be allowed to say that, but as you say, I think it was basically incorrect, and it is unhealthy.
I'm not for it.
I just don't think we should outlaw it.
Michael, one of the reasons why you need free speech is so that people can be the demonic assholes that they are, and everybody can see them and then hold them responsible for it later.
You know, nobody's saying Well, maybe some are.
We should have prior restraint on this kind of speech.
But I think some people are saying, you know, hey, look at this.
You were telling us that when I told the Proud Boys to stand by or stand down or whatever, I was, you know, asking for a revolutionary force to back me up.
You're the ones who made there were good people on both sides into a soundbite and so on.
You're the people who say I caused January 6th.
You know, through some rhetorical encouragement.
And now you're turning around and you're saying, by us calling you Hitler and us calling you a threat to democracy, and that doesn't have any consequences.
I mean, it's more as though the Republicans are turning the thing back on the Right, so maybe it's not a matter of allowing or disallowing the speech.
I'm not suggesting that anybody's seriously proposing to legally prohibit the speech.
But how about the ascription of responsibility?
Like, it's somebody who says that Trump is a threat to democracy, or he's an existential threat, or, you know, you choose your similar phrase, which I, again, don't agree with.
Right.
Do they bear moral or ethical or political responsibility for some guy whose motive we don't even fully understand?
No.
So I wrote a piece that was very critical of all the things that have been said in the last, you know, eight years.
But my feeling on that is that part of the strategy with Trump was to dehumanize him and then couple it with things like, you know, searching his attorney's office or illegal surveillance, spying on his campaign.
There was this dual argument that was going on.
He's not quite a real full person.
He's not legitimately the president.
So we don't have to worry about rights as much.
Like nobody thought about it's Trump.
It's an extreme situation.
We need to think differently about this.
So I saw all that rhetoric as being tied to kind of a power grab and therefore very dangerous, right?
It's not about he's responsible for, you know, what the motives of this person.
We don't know anything about what motivated that shooting or even what happened really.
But I do think it was incredibly dangerous rhetoric and it was dangerous because it shifted people's ideas about what is and is an appropriate use of government power. - You know, nobody actually believes in stochastic terrorism, by the way, because if they did believe nobody actually believes in stochastic terrorism, by the way, because if they did believe it, they wouldn't let half the movies Okay.
It's a cuzzle to beat your enemy with when you feel aggrieved, and then one to put down, and one to never apply to Hollywood.
Um, and so let's put that all aside.
But all speech in a political arena has a political value and a political risk.
And one of the risks of going overboard with the demonization of your enemy Is that you will lose credibility, that you will overplay your hand, and that something will happen to garner sympathy for that character such that you will have a boomerang effect after having made them out to be the worst thing in the world.
And that's, you know, I think that the real consequences for the Democrats of their, you know, threat to democracy, extremist, he's a dictator, the new autocracy, the would-be Hitler, is that My joke is between the people who don't believe Trump's Hitler and the people who wish he were, that's a majority.
And I think the Democrats have kind of lost their credibility on this.
And those people who are actually autocratic and Caesarists and wish Trump would get up there and fire the entire federal government and take control himself, you know, They miscalculated.
They spat their wad.
My thing has always been, from the very beginning, there ought to be a rational critique of Trump, which is exceedingly rare.
Right.
But that is not served by this constant hysteria, hyperbole, fascism, Nazi.
And why wouldn't they allow that?
Right, because it counterveils the narrative that Trump actually did govern on a policy level in a rather Conventional way.
But why since the beginning of the first Trump administration were normal politics suspended?
That's a deep... There was some kind of epistemic rupture in 2016 that we still don't fully comprehend.
Yeah, and that's been the key.
There should have been a rational critique of Trump, but they couldn't do it because the entire premise of what they did do with Trump is that This was this, you know, hyper evil epic figure who's in the pocket of a foreign government and a rapist and all these other things.
And a criminal who needs to be locked up forever.
The Democrats fell prey to a conspiracy theory that grew out of control.
And then what did Trump do in kind, at least on a governing level?
And he still brags about that he was the toughest president ever on Russia.
Tore up a number of treaties.
We don't have to go down the list.
Massive sanctions.
Armoring Ukraine.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Massive military spending.
And where's the rational critique of that among Democrats?
Non-existent, right?
Why does nobody know that he helped orchestrate the Ukraine funding in April with Johnson and Cramer?
Or the Pfizer thing.
Right.
Because Democrats have no substantive, rational critique of that.
Because if they actually did criticize it, they would realize that that's pretty in keeping with what they're also advocating at the moment.
And you'd constantly be telling your partisan side that the other side is existentially dangerously different than you, right?
So anything that bridges the perceived gap Between the two sides, that undermines their whole reason for existence.
You know, one of the funniest things Trump's said in the last... He says a lot of funny things in the last few months is, you know, if you'd just left me alone to have a normal presidency, I would have been out of your hair by now.
It's true.
It's true.
If they hadn't done the thing... I remember interviewing a politician who got in a lot of trouble, and he said, look... Bob Menendez?
He just got convicted today.
No, it was somebody else, but he said, look, I did the things, what can I say?
If they had just gone on and treated Trump like any other president, and gone after all of his actual policy action... Treated him like Jeb Bush or something, you know?
Right, exactly, and beat the crap out of him for every single thing that he actually did, as opposed to this mythic thing that they were trying to create.
But as I said, the danger with the mythic thing was it didn't even have anything to do with Trump.
It was about a whole new way of governing, about the relationship of the government to the public, all of that stuff.
And that just needs to go, right?
And if we can just get back to, you know, judging presidents by their behavior and by their actual policy, I think that's a win.
Yeah.
All right, guys.
Well, let's leave it there.
We are on day, what is it, two of the Republican Convention.
Ten seconds, anything to look to?
Isn't Nikki Haley speaking tonight, or are you curious about anything?
Rubio's tonight, Laura Trump, right?
Vivek.
I want to see Vivek.
You know, he's a brother of J.D.
Vance.
They are both Ohioans.
I think their wives are friends, and so on.
And they're the two movement candidates who I think the people who really want I'm sort of interested in how she'll handle it.
Not that I'm in support of her program or anything.
She's a Southerner.
She'll handle it with perfect manners.
Boringly, but yeah.
fraternity between the two of them.
Nikki Haley, I don't care about.
I'm sort of interested in how she'll handle it.
Not that I'm like in support of her program.
Right.
She's a southern.
She'll handle it with perfect.
That's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Boringly, but yeah, exactly.
All right.
So your guys' podcast remind us of the name and where people America This Week, we're at Racket.News, and we're going to be live streaming tonight and probably twice a day for the rest of the convention.
Twice a day?
Wow, that's a lot of streaming.
You guys really are going to be podcasted out.
You're going to have to hibernate for a little while.
Yeah, well, there's a lot to talk about.
That is true.
Yeah, we barely scratched the surface.
Yeah, we didn't even talk about the assassination.
A little bit.
Yeah, a little bit.
All right, thanks for tuning in.
Export Selection