Donald Trump’s chaotic 2016 campaign—marked by Paul Manafort’s contradictory claims, shifting transgender bathroom stances, and vague Obamacare replacements—exposes Fox News’ cozy alignment with his "bully" persona. Cruz’s delegate wins (67 without primaries) and Kasich’s alliance reveal a desperate GOP backlash, while Indiana’s primary looms amid unreliable polling. Analysts like Henry Olson argue demographics over momentum favor Trump’s moderates vs. Cruz’s evangelicals, yet Manafort’s spin masks Trump’s policy void. The host mocks Clinton’s stamina, Sanders’ "Marxist" policies (misattributed to Groucho Marx), and frames the election as a circus—Cruz as scholar, Kasich as corpse, Trump as schoolyard thug—before pivoting to Monte Cristo as escapism. [Automatically generated summary]
Donald Trump's top political aide, Paul Manafort, says Trump has been playing a role up till now and will soon change the way he behaves.
But Donald Trump's top political aide, Paul Manafort, says that isn't true.
Fox News commentator Sean Hannity says he agrees with Manafort.
Trump himself, meanwhile, says he'll begin to behave in a more presidential manner from now on.
But Trump himself says he'll continue to act exactly as he's been acting all along.
Fox's Hannity says he thinks that's exactly the right tack to take.
Commenting on the news of the day, Trump went on to say that he felt North Carolina should not stop transgender men or women or whatever they are from using the bathrooms of whatever the other sort of person is.
But Trump went on to say that the state should prevent that from happening.
Sean Hannity says he finds the Trump position very convincing and will start wearing a dress to work from now on.
On healthcare, Donald Trump says he favors government paying for health insurance for those who don't have it, but says the government shouldn't be involved.
Hannity says he feels that Trump has finally solved this thorny issue.
Trump adds that he's going to replace Obamacare with, quote, something great, unquote.
And Hannity says he believes that something great would be great and that great somethings are much better than ungreat somethings that aren't great.
As a result of Hannity's recent statements, some people are beginning to believe that Trump news has become a mouthpiece for the Fox campaign, or vice versa.
The formerly conservative Fox is now aligned with the far more liberal Trump, whereas the conservative Trump has become as liberal as Fox.
The Foxy Trump Fox trumpery has caused confusion over whether Fox is Trump or Trump is Tox or Frumpety Tox Foxy Trux Pump.
Hannity strongly disagrees with this and recently told reporters, quote, I have not, not, not acted as an echo, echo, echo, chamber, chamber, chamber for Donald, Donald, Donald, Trump, Trump, Trump.
Unquote.
Delegates Deal Drama00:15:56
Quote, quote.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right.
So now we've lost all our friends.
We're alienating everybody.
We enter the second week of potentially eternal darkness as the Trump campaign goes into Pennsylvania, all the other East Coast states where I guess they're going to clean up, that polls look really good for Trump.
But there's so much political maneuvering over the weekends, so many strategy moves and all that, that really we're just going to have to talk it through because, you know, the funny thing about eternal darkness or going through this period of darkness is that even though you were warned,
those of you who are listening to the Andrew Clavin show and want to live in truth instead of illusion, and were warned that we're entering this period of eternal darkness when everybody's going to start to think like, oh, Trump has got this sewn up and we've got to get on the Trump train and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Even though you know that, all the same psychological things happen to you.
It doesn't matter whether you are alert to the fact that you're entering darkness and all these psychological tricks are going to take place in your mind.
They still happen.
They still happen.
You still start to think, oh, Trump has got this sewn up.
Maybe Trump's not as bad as we thought he was.
Maybe, you know, maybe democracy was overrated having a republic.
It was nice, but come on, we can do without it.
We'll have the Trumpocracy.
It's going to be great.
So what we're going to do today is we're going to clarify what's going on because I've been listening to the commentators commentate and they're not really, you know, I'm not saying that things are going to be great.
I'm not saying Trump isn't going to win.
I don't know what's going to happen.
Nobody knows what's going to happen.
It's been a very hard election to call.
But things are not the way they're being reported.
Just for instance, we're coming off this huge win for Trump in New York.
And it really was a huge win for Trump in New York.
And it was huge, not just because he won 89 delegates, but also because he got about 5% more of the vote than the poll showed he was going to get.
So he outperformed.
Now, he got, as I say, 89, I think, was the final count of the delegates of the 95.
There wasn't a primary this weekend, but here's something I'll bet you probably, I'll bet you're hearing this for the first time.
Cruz, there was no primary this weekend, but in Maine, the Republican Party held a state convention, and Cruz won 19 of the 20 delegates in Maine.
There were also delegates to be had in Minnesota.
Cruz got nine of them.
He got all nine of them, I think.
He got three in South Carolina, and he got 36 of the delegates of 37 delegates in Utah.
So Lindsay, you'll add those up for me, please.
All right.
Let's put this together.
So that's, it's 19 of 20 in Maine.
He got nine delegates in Minnesota, three in South Carolina, and 37 delegates in Utah.
So I'm getting 19 and nine is 28, three is 31, and then 36.
He got 67 delegates over the weekend, and no primary at all.
So Cruz is still working this.
He is still working this, trying to stop Trump from getting the majority.
And Trump is complaining and crying.
It's all unfair.
This situation's rigged.
If I'm not winning, you know, by the way, Trump has gotten a lot more delegates than he has votes.
He's gotten a bigger percentage of the delegates than he's gotten of the votes, but he's not complaining about that.
So now, Cruz and Kasich and John Kasich have made a deal.
I'll read it from the Wall Street Journal.
In an unprecedented last-ditch effort to stop Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, his two remaining rivals announced Sunday night they are divvying up the coming primary states to try to block the New York businessman's path to the GOP nomination.
Top officials from the Ted Cruz and John Kasich campaigns announced the alliance in a pair of statements late Sunday night.
The deal will keep Mr. Kasich, the Ohio governor, on the sidelines for Indiana's May 3rd primary, while Mr. Cruz, the Texas senator, won't compete in contests in Oregon on May 17th and New Mexico on June 7th.
So in other words, they're pulling out of the places that they don't think they're going to get any delegates at all, and they're leaving it to their competitor to stop Trump.
Because the thing about Trump, of course, is if he had only been up against Cruz all this time, he would not be looking anywhere near as good as he's looking, and it's entirely possible that Cruz would even be ahead if it had been a head-to-head race.
You don't hear Cruz complaining about that.
There's nothing, you know, there's nothing he can do.
There's no reason.
Kasich at this point is like, remember that movie Weekend at Bernie's, where they have a corpse and they can't get rid of the corpse and have to keep carrying it around pretending it's alive?
That is now John Kasich.
John Kasich is now like this corpse who goes from place to place and people vote for him and they prop him up and then they carry him to the next state and more people vote for him.
And now there was word over the weekend that he's interviewing vice presidents, you know?
Like, so am I. I'm interviewing vice presidents.
I sit around and interview them in my imagination.
So they come in, they shepherd in the vice presidential candidate, and they prop John Kasich, this dead body up in his chair.
And Kasich sits there and they kind of move his hands every now and again in that funny chopping motion he has.
Anyway, so Cruz and Kasich, Cruz has now teamed up with Bernie, the corpse of John Kasich.
And a statement from the Trump campaign early Monday said, and you can almost guess this quote, it is sad that two grown politicians have to collude against one person, one innocent little person who's only, he's only been a politician for 10 months in order to try and stop that person from getting the Republican nomination.
The deal will also likely add fuel to Mr. Trump's long-running argument that the presidential contest is rigged against him.
Mr. Trump has for weeks claimed the GOP nominating rules are fixed to benefit other candidates.
How's it rigged?
This is a piece of strategy.
You know, it's as if Trump feels that when he's losing, somehow it's supposed to be like just a straight out-and-out race.
They're just going to run to the finish, as opposed to being politics.
This is almost the definition of politics, is that you strategize, you make alliances, you know, you pull things up.
You know, you know, one of the, just to get to the good news for a minute, one of the great things that happened over the weekend is Game of Thrones came back on, you know.
And, you know, just to give you the recap on the first issue of the new season of Game of Thrones, all the people you like best die, and the world, only wicked women thrive.
No, wait, that's the election.
I'm sorry, that was the election.
The difference on Game of Thrones is all the people you like die.
Only wicked women are left, and then the good-looking women take their shirts off.
That's how you can tell the difference between the election and Game of Thrones.
So it's not rigged at all.
So now you get the commentators.
So Mark Halperin, very good political reporter, political commentator, is on the Joe Scarborough show, and they're discussing this move, which, by the way, Trump immediately tweets out saying, desperation, this is just desperation.
Here's Halperin and Scarborough talking about.
It's not mathematically too late, but this, you know, the headline there called this a shock deal.
Others have called it a deal of desperation.
If Trump wins Indiana or wins it big, it's over.
And that's been true for a while.
And this is really about Indiana.
This is about one step at a time.
Having made the deal, if Cruz can't beat Trump in Indiana, it's over by the way.
Everybody's been saying is Trump is winning by 30, 40 points in New York and sweeping all these.
Forget about that, Indiana.
Forget about that, Indiana.
Indiana's going to be his waterloop.
Two polls out this week, and Trump's up in Indiana.
But with Kasichow, there's a chance Cruz could beat him there now.
Now, very important to notice this about the polls, and I'm sure the polls from Indiana had to do with why Cruz decided to make this deal with Kasich.
I'm sure he's looking at those polls and he's not happy.
But you should know that the laws in Indiana about taking polls are very strict.
You're not allowed to make robocalls.
You're not allowed to make, you know, you're not allowed to have those horrible calls that come over with the recorded information.
So it's expensive to take polls in Indiana.
And that means they get a smaller sample of people.
And it also means they're just a lot less accurate.
So we don't really know what's going on in Indiana.
57 delegates at stake.
Very, very important to Cruz because now that's when he gets out of this horrible, he's kind of in this vortex of East Coast states.
Also, we also should point out, by the way, that in Pennsylvania, the voting doesn't distribute most of the delegates.
Most of the delegates.
Pennsylvania is the only real state with a lot of delegates at stake this tomorrow are the primaries.
But those delegates stay free.
They stay unbound and can go to the convention and vote for anyone they want.
And as we know, Cruz has been very good at rounding up those delegates because Trump is so horrible that a lot of them don't want to vote for him and because Cruz just has this really good ground game.
All right.
So the thing that you shouldn't listen to at all are the ideas that one of these primaries affects the other.
Henry Olson, one of the best observers of elections there is.
He's at the National Review.
He's going to come on the show next week.
He points out that a lot of the votes, the results we're seeing, are simply a result of the demographics of the state.
His theory is that there are four, basically he breaks up the Republican Party into four camps, and that those camps have already distributed their votes pretty much decisively for one candidate or another.
And the differences you're seeing in the states are who's voting where, who lives where.
So here writing the National Review, as Henry Olson repeat after me, there is no such thing as momentum.
Careful reading of exit poll data show that candidates reach a relatively fixed share of the vote in each of the party's major factions quite early in the race.
Almost all of the variations we see are due to three factors: demographic and ideological differences in the GOP electorates of different states, candidate departures from the race.
Obviously, if somebody drops out, then those votes have to go somewhere else, and whether a candidate is in his home state.
New York was always going to be difficult for Cruz because its electorate is both less conservative and less evangelical than most other states, adding the fact that Trump is a New York native and Cruz was always fighting uphill.
The media will probably trumpet the Donald's win in New York as a game changer, a momentum shifter, and you have certainly seen that, and you certainly get the feeling.
I mean, they were Scarborough.
It's over.
Now the polls and this and that.
Don't believe them, says Olson.
It is simply the latest example of what we have known from the early days of the race.
Donald Trump is the preferred candidate of the moderate, less evangelical Republican.
Since the states that vote on April 26th, that's tomorrow, also have large numbers of moderate, non-evangelical Republicans.
We should expect large Trump wins in those states as well.
And nothing about the margin of Trump's win will have any effect at all on those races or on the outcomes in the more Cruz-friendly states, which will vote in May.
So all he's saying is that the populations of these states don't suddenly change because of the results of the primaries.
Still the same people.
Okay.
So meanwhile, Trump is also strategizing.
Trump has also totally taken a turn.
His campaign is changing in subtle ways and in dramatic ways.
His guy, I guess, who's now his campaign, his top campaign aide is this new guy, Manafort.
And Manafort is the ultimate insider.
He has worked for everybody he has been around.
He goes, and he's now going to the GOP establishment, and he's saying, this Trump that you see, you know, this guy who gets up and insults people, calls people names, talks about, you know, the size of his package, all this stuff.
That guy, he's not the real guy.
That's just for the people.
That's just for the people.
Wait till you see the new Trump is going to have the real presidential Eisenhower-like, you know, Lincoln-like Trump who is just waiting in the wings.
It's just like, you know, this Trump that you're seeing is a cocoon, and out from this cocoon is going to burst this new Abraham Lincoln Winston Churchill Trump.
So this is what he said in this closed-door meeting, and of course, it got taped.
So here is Chris Wallace on Fox having Manafort in and confronting him with this secret meeting he had.
You met with members of the Republican National Committee in Florida this week to try to reassure them about Donald Trump, but in your effort, it raised some new concerns.
It was supposed to be a closed-door meeting, but of course somebody taped it.
Here's a clip.
The part he's been playing is evolving.
It's the part that you've been expecting, but he wasn't ready for it because he had to first beat the first stage.
You'll start to see more depth of a person, the real person.
We'll see you in a different way.
Playing a part, see the real person.
Trump has been campaigning for 10 months now, and we haven't seen the real man.
What that clip was related to was a question that was asked talking about the settings that he was going to be in.
On the campaign setting, you're seeing the real Donald Trump in campaign mode talking to people who believe in his candidacy.
I was dealing with members of the Republican National Committee who have a different role from an organizational standpoint, and they wanted to know about things like, is he going to be giving speeches on policies?
Is he going to be involved in settings that are not rally-oriented?
And that was the context I was talking about.
We were evolving the campaign, not the candidate, and the settings were going to start changing.
Forgive me, it does seem a little bit like spin because, I mean, in the words, the part that he has been playing, you'll start to see more depth of the person, the real person.
You're not talking about rallies versus some other setup.
I was talking about rallies versus other.
That's what you said.
Well, in the context of that room, that's what I said, and that's what was understood.
All right, you got that, right?
So, in other words, Monafort was lying about Trump lying.
But it's all going to be fine.
You know, the kind of interesting thing about this, when you think about it, is one of the reasons this incredible breach has opened in the Republican Party is because the base has felt betrayed.
They have not just felt betrayed.
When I say the base, I mean really people like me who are genuine conservatives who want the Republican Party to stand up against government overreach.
We want them to dial back the spending.
We want them to dial back the taxing.
We want them to dial back the regulations, which is like just a secret tax that you don't even see.
I mean, regulations are one of the most boring topics you can talk about in politics, but one of the most important because that's the one where you come into your business and they say you've got to make the bathrooms available to girls or dogs or whatever, and where they tell you, literally, they say to you, you've got to have the light switch here instead of here because some bureaucrat decided that was less of a fire hazard.
That is a tax.
I mean, that is something that slows businesses down.
And if you go up to Silicon Valley, for instance, where they have this explosion of innovation, suddenly, slowly, slowly, the regulations come in and the innovation stops.
And when, you know, that was what Ronald Reagan said, the government will regulate something until it stops moving and then they'll tax it to death, basically.
So one of the reasons this breach is open to the Republican Party is we feel that the Republicans have betrayed the base.
When the base was worried about Obamacare, who'd they nominate?
Who do we get?
Mitt Romney, the guy who virtually invented Obamacare in Massachusetts.
When the base is worried about open borders, who do they put up as their big candidate?
Jeb Bush, the guy who thinks open borders are great.
And I'm not even commenting on whether these guys were good candidates or whether they had good ideas or whether they would have made good presidents.
That's not the point.
It was a slap in the face to the base.
Crooked Hillary Imitation00:09:31
But the funny thing about Trump is Trump has been a Democrat and has sided with Democrats all his life.
He was against Ronald Reagan.
He testified against the Reagan tax cuts.
He said Reagan had a lot of problems in his administration.
He's always been a friend of Hillary, friend of Bill.
He's always been that guy.
When you listen to him talk before his handlers get to him and edit him, he always has big government instincts.
But, but he has the voice of a thug.
He is essentially a rhino in thugs' clothing.
It really is wonderful what you can do with illusion, with seeming a certain way.
And so he has reached the base.
In some ways, the GOP establishment should love Trump because he's doing all the things, all the kind of rhino things they love, but he's doing it in the voice of the base.
It's an amazing thing.
So here's Monafort saying to the GOP establishment that Trump is going to change.
And here's Trump on the campaign trail doing the same thing he's always done, the same bullying, the same name-calling, with one big difference, though.
He's now shifting, pivoting to turn against Hillary.
So here he is doing his Hillary Clinton imitation.
You know, being presidential is easy.
Much easier than what I have to do.
Here I have to rant and rave.
I have to keep you people going.
Otherwise, you're going to fall asleep on me, right?
If I was presidential, first of all, I'd have a teleprompter.
Did you ever see crooked Hillary Clinton?
She walks it.
Good afternoon, Bridgeboard.
How are you?
This is crooked Hillary Clinton, then people start yawning, leaving.
The whole thing is a disaster.
I mean, you've got to love it, right?
I mean, this is the thing.
Hillary Clinton, if you watch some of the interviews with Hillary, it's like, where did you get those shoes?
You know, that's like the piercing questions.
On NBC News, it's like, how much do you love your daughter?
You know, those are the kinds of questions they ask her.
You know, the common wisdom in the polls show that Trump will be a disaster as a candidate in the general election.
He's going to be wiped off the face of the earth.
And he's going to take the down ballot candidates with him.
We'll lose the Senate.
We'll lose the House.
That is also the common wisdom about Cruz, that Cruz is far too conservative for the general population.
I have to be honest.
I mean, it's very hard to be honest when you're talking about politics.
Let me tell you this.
This is really true.
It's very hard to be honest when you're talking about politics.
I am seriously concerned about Donald Trump as a potential president of the United States.
I think he has fascist instincts.
I think he's a big government Democrat.
I think he's a bully.
I think he's a thug.
I think he'll make us look bad in the international sphere and all this.
And it's very hard for me to say anything positive about him.
And I really have a lot of respect for Cruz.
I mean, I've listened to all the comments about he's a liar, you can't trust him and all that.
I just haven't seen that.
I haven't heard any proof.
I haven't seen any examples of Cruz really being anything other than the constitutional conservative he says he is, which is all that matters to me.
I don't really care whether he cheats on his wife or not.
I'm sorry.
I should, maybe, maybe I should.
I certainly would care if I knew him personally, but I don't know him personally.
I just don't care.
I just don't care.
He is a constitutional conservative.
I think he would govern as a constitutional conservative.
That's what matters.
It's really hard for me, as it is for every commentator, to speak against my own political interests.
And it's one of the things I try to do here every day.
Every time I come in, I always try to tell you exactly what I think.
I think that there's no possible way to tell what will happen in a Trump-Clinton election.
I don't think the polls mean a damn thing.
I don't think Hillary has ever seen the like of Donald Trump coming at her.
And this comment that Trump makes that she would not want to run against him, you know, I think there's a lot to that.
I mean, here's Trump on the phone talking to Jesse Waters, the kind of new comical guy.
Because if you're a Fox anchor of any sort, your only job is to interview Donald Trump now.
That's all they do on Fox News.
It's like, here's somebody else interviewing Donald Trump.
It's like now, instead of saying, oh, gee, they have somebody interesting on the Megan Kelly show, it's like, oh, Megan Kelly's interviewing Donald Trump.
So it's like you get to see different people, what they would be like if they interviewed Donald Trump.
So here's Jesse Waters talking to him on the phone.
But look, she's got a strategy, and the only thing she's got going is the woman card.
Without the woman card, she's got nothing going.
And she's going to play it to the hilt.
And I'm going to be talking about things.
And, you know, one of the things I talk about is we call her Crooked Hillary because she's a crooked person.
I mean, she's always been a crooked person.
Did it take you a long time to brand her Crooked Hillary?
No, the name came to me.
You know, the name comes to me about different people.
I like branding people if they're correct.
I mean, some you can brand.
I've done a good job of branding some of my opponents and what we just did.
But I will tell you, you know, the word crooked Hillary is 100% correct.
And you look at Whitewater, you go back to Whitewater, look at what's happening with the emails, and so many different things.
You look at the Foundation, what's going on there, where they get millions of dollars to make a speech, and then all of a sudden things get done for countries and other things, very much to the detriment of the United States.
I mean, she is a person who's got many, many flaws.
She's a woman, but yet women don't like her, which is really sort of interesting.
I mean, she is a woman, but she's not liked by women.
So, this is what Donald Trump thinks about.
He doesn't know anything about the abortion issue, doesn't know anything about international relations, doesn't know what he, you know, he wants healthcare to be paid for the government, but he doesn't want the government to pay for the government paying for health care.
He has no idea what he's talking about.
Things are going to be great.
Everything's going to be great.
But this is what he thinks about.
Yes, I worked a long time, and then it suddenly came to me.
Crooked Hillary.
Crooked Hillary.
This is what the guy thinks about.
Cruz, who's off in Indiana, by the way.
He's completely ceded Pennsylvania and the rest of the East.
He's off in Indiana.
Cruz, kind of at one point, because Cruz has a good sense of humor, he kind of pulls the same stunt.
He's talking about the fact that Trump is in favor of transgenders.
At one point, Trump was in favor of transgenders using different bathrooms and then changes his mind and all this.
And Cruz hits him with this.
So let me make things real soon.
Ian Donald Trump dresses up as Hillary Clinton.
He's shooting this is a girl's race.
And it's just going to haunt you at night.
Donald in a bright little pantsuit.
So there's Cruz kidding around, but you just know that Cruz would rather be talking about the Constitution.
He doesn't mind making a little joke.
But that's Trump's whole thing.
Trump's never read the Constitution.
He thinks the Constitution is a walk you take around Trump Tower in the morning to get your blood flowing.
He doesn't know about the Constitution.
What he is thinking about is how to attack people.
And they always say in a democracy, you get the leader you deserve.
The only reason Trump, when you look at Trump, you think like, yeah, I want to see that, is because that's what we all want to say to Hillary Clinton.
We're so tired.
We're so stifled by this media fawning on her.
By the way, let's take a look at what Hillary Clinton is doing.
Show Hillary Clinton's most recent speech.
I also need your help to let me get a drink of water.
I have been talking nonstop for weeks now.
So forgive me.
Well, I stick a lozenge in my mouth here.
So the woman's dying.
The woman who's like, we have John Casey, who's just a dead guy propped up in a chair.
Hillary Clinton was the front run of the Democrats.
Like, I'm going to guess to the presidency and then die.
And then Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders is on, and he's asked about a tax on soda, which he doesn't like because it comes up, you know, so working people will end up paying the tax on soda.
And so he's asked, well, what about a tax on cigarettes?
This is what Bernie Sanders is thinking about.
Cigarettes are causing cancer, obviously, and a dozen other diseases.
And, you know, there is almost a question as to why it remains a legal product in this country.
See, they say that Sanders is a Marxist.
This is absolutely true, because here's Marx on the same thing.
These are the laws of my administration.
No one's allowed to smoke or tell a lady joke and whistling is forbidden.
We will not allow the telegraphy so.
Bernie's Vision00:03:17
There will be gold.
If chewing gum is chewed, the tumor is pursued.
And in the husky hidden, if we choose to troop to be pursued, if any form of pleasure is exhibited, report to me and it will be prohibited.
I'll put my foot down, so shall it be.
This is the land of the free.
So you see, when they say Sanders is a Marxist, they just had the wrong marks.
We thought it was Carl, but it was actually Groucho.
All right, so we got, listen, tomorrow is a big day.
A lot of primaries tomorrow.
So we got a little bit into the political high weeds.
But let's just sum up what we know now.
A constitutional scholar is teaming up with a dead body to stop a schoolyard bully from attacking a dying woman while Bernie Sanders is considering banning cigarettes.
So the country's in the very best of hands.
The country's in the very best of hands.
The best of hands.
The best of hands.
The treasury says the national debt is climbing to the sky.
And government expenditures have never been so high.
It makes a feller get a gleam of pride within his eye to see how our economy expands.
The country's in the very best of hands.
All right, still clowning around in the heart of darkness on the Andrew Clavin Show.
Time for stuff I like.
We're doing some classics this week.
I've just decided, you know, I keep away from the classics because I always feel if you wanted to read classics, you don't really need me to tell you.
I try to find hidden entertainments and things.
But there are some of the classics, they're long.
That's why people don't read them.
They're long.
Our attention span is now down to about a minute and a half.
And the classics tend to be, you know, people didn't have television then, so they just wrote these long novels.
But I'm just going to tell you the most entertaining, massive classic books.
And here is the first, The Count of Monte Cristo.
The Count of Monte Cristo, I think, in paperback is 1,400 pages long.
It is 1,400 pages long.
I think I read the last 400 pages of it in one day.
It's that entertaining.
It is one of the most entertaining novels ever written by Alexander Dumas.
It's about a young man, Edmund Dantes.
I mean, this is a classic tale, as classic as Robin Hood or The Three Musketeers, also by Dumas.
I mean, talk about, this is what they had before.
They had superheroes.
And it's about this guy, Edmund Dantes, who is framed as a revolutionary in France.
He's unfairly thrown into prison, absolutely forgotten about by everybody.
And the story goes from being a spectacular adventure, you know, swords and, you know, daring escapes and all this stuff, and then becomes this wildly weird and entertaining story about revenge, which is really also a kind of meditation on forgiveness and the role of man and the role of God.
But every single page is so entertaining.
Don't watch the movie.
Read the book, The Count of Monte Cristo.
All right, we had to talk about politics all day today.
Hopefully we'll get in some cultural stuff tomorrow while the primaries begin and before the information comes in.
Whatever it is, it's going to be absolutely hilarious.