Ep. 927 dissects the left’s cultural dominance—from NYT’s Thomas Friedman demanding debate censorship to Disney and Oprah monetizing divisive narratives like the 1619 Project—while contrasting it with recent Supreme Court wins protecting religious conscience, like the Little Sisters of the Poor ruling. Henry Olson warns Trump’s 41.5% approval and racial missteps risk a landslide loss, urging disciplined messaging, but doubts he’ll adapt, calling his strategy a gamble that could drag down GOP down-ballot races. The episode frames legal victories as temporary fixes, insisting a cultural counteroffensive is the only path to reclaiming American values. [Automatically generated summary]
Some on the left are expressing concern that Joe Biden might not do well in presidential debates because he's a flaming idiot who's been in a basement for six months and no one's even missed him.
At the New York Times, a former newspaper, Thomas Friedman, Times columnist in charge of getting everything wrong that Paul Krugman somehow forgot to get wrong, wrote a column on Knucklehead Row, also known as the op-ed page, that called on Biden to set conditions on the debates that can't possibly be met so he can wriggle out of this disaster before everyone sees what Democrats are trying to palm off on them as a president.
Friedman, the author of Globalism, How It Will Be Great for Everyone, except the Americans Who Killed Themselves Because Their Jobs Were Taken by Chinese slaves, and okay, maybe also except for the Chinese slaves, which was a New York Times bestseller in the sense that it was purchased by everyone at the New York Times, wrote in his column, quote, Because Trump has shown himself to be the master of all evil by doing many evil things, though what exactly they were slips my mind at the moment, we must set special conditions on any debate with him.
For instance, the cameras must be required to cut away from Biden if he starts drooling or falling asleep.
Also, there should be naps.
Also, every time Trump speaks, the audience should be required to put their fingers in their ears and say la la la very loudly, which is what we do here on Knucklehead Row when someone has an opinion we don't like.
And finally, before he agrees to debates, Biden should insist there will be no debates, because let's face it, the guy's a walking rhododendron at this point, and Trump will massacre him, unquote.
After finishing the op-ed, Friedman said he would return to writing his new book.
Say, whatever happened to globalism, I was really making a bundle off that.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we're back laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
You can follow me on Andrew Clavin YouTube page.
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Otherwise, my goons will come to your house and flatten your tires.
And it's also important because we don't want Knowles to have more subscribers than me.
And if you leave a comment which helps us and it's interesting at all, we will read it on the show.
We have one today from Patrick Dyer, who writes, SJWs say there's no cancel culture.
The Soviets say after Chernobyl, there's no graphite.
You didn't see graphite.
You didn't!
Because it's not there.
That's funny, not funny, because it's almost too real.
Earlier this week, I brought you news that Colin Kaepernick, the second-rate quarterback from the former leave of the San Francisco 49ers, will be pumping his anti-American toxicity into the minds of people through his new film and TV contract with Disney, Disney ESPN.
I also use this to illustrate my point that the rights love affair with value-free capitalism exemplified in its elevation of moral idiots like Ayn Rand, added to its abandonment of the culture in the relentless pursuit of business and politics, was a losing strategy over the long term.
So now there comes news that Oprah Winfrey has just teamed up with Lionsgate, the film studio, and Nicole Hannah-Jones from the New York Times to turn the Times' lying anti-American propaganda project, the 1619 Project, into, quote, a portfolio of films, television programming, and other content across all studio platforms.
This is the same Nicole Hannah Jones who said she was proud her work inspired riots and looting.
She was honored to be called the inspiration for that violence.
So she'll be selling her wares to a broader public than ever through the trusted venue of Oprah Winfrey.
So, isn't this a triumph of capitalism?
I think it is.
How does any of it violate Ayn Rand's philosophy?
Kaepernick and Hannah Jones are making big bank.
They're creating things they believe in.
They're not sitting around in a think tank taking money from a billionaire so they can talk about how great Ayn Rand is.
They're living the Ayn Randian dream.
But don't worry, the right is in the culture too.
I think we're making God Is Not Dead part 17, in which everyone loves Jesus even more than they did in Part 16, and people curse even less and have sex, have no sex for two solid hours of Jesus-y goodness until the entire audience dies of boredom or old age.
What's wrong with this picture?
Look outside.
Young people and other buffoons are rioting and attacking the U.S., the cornerstone and protector of world freedom, while our elites cheer them on.
It's not a mystery how that happened.
It's not a mystery.
The academy did it.
The news media did it.
The entertainment media did it.
They poisoned these idiot brains, these idiots' brains, with a constant, constant diet of lies.
And so we know, we know what Oprah and Kaepernick and Disney and Lionsgate and all the people like them will be able to achieve in the next 20 years while we're reading Ayn Rand and talking about how great capitalism is.
We also know that what we're doing now doesn't work over the long term.
When are we going to get the message and change the game?
All right, we've got a new sponsor and a very important sponsor because I know the most important thing that we're doing in this country today is trying to save the Clavin.
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And if you will send me these machines, I will use them.
And they said, okay, well, if this sponsorship goes well and people buy our machines off your show using the Clavin identifier when they order, we'll send you a machine.
So if you want to save the Clavin, you have to buy one of these machines.
Again, some of them at half the price of a Peloton, the EX1, half the price of a Peloton.
You have to get these machines and then they'll send me these machines and I'll be able to use them and stay alive and not die.
Now, I'm not saying if I do die, it'll be your fault.
Protecting Religious Liberty00:13:10
That's just hanging silently in the air between us.
But if you want to save the Clavin, go to echelonfit.com slash Clavin.
That's E-C-H-E-L-O-N fit.com slash clavin.
And of course, you need to know how to spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy clavins.
All right, we've got one of the great election watchers, Henry Olson, coming up later on to talk about the polls and what's going on in the presidential race.
I've started almost every show this week with Don Lemon because I just love him so, so very much.
And, you know, the only place you can see him is here because he can't go to the airport anymore.
But I also think that even though the guy is an idiot, not even though the guy is an idiot, because the guy is an idiot and because he's self-righteous and ignorant, he exemplifies the left.
And here he is exemplifying the left.
This is cut six, okay?
This is cut six.
Here he is talking about Jesus and the founding fathers.
Cut six.
Here's the thing.
Jesus Christ, if you believe in, if that's who you believe in, Jesus Christ, admittedly was not perfect when he was here on this earth.
So why are we deifying the founders of this country?
Many of whom own slaves and in the Constitution, the original one, they didn't want, they put slavery in there, that slavery should be abolished because it was the way the king wanted.
And then the Congress said, no way.
Okay, now it's hard to even know that word salad, what this clown is talking about.
But why do we deify Jesus if he's not perfect?
And you know, Don Lemon, listen, Jesus said, don't call me good.
Nobody is good but the Father in heaven.
Nobody is good but the Father.
So we're not going to say Jesus is perfect.
What we are going to say is he's the incarnate word of God.
What Jesus said is heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will never pass away because he is the word of God as how the word of God looks.
as a human being, okay?
The thing is, the thing that Don Lemon and the left don't understand is we are not deifying the founders.
We are holding up their ideas with reverence because their ideas are true.
We know they're flawed as opposed to whom.
Everyone is flawed.
Everyone commits sins in their time.
Don Lemon probably supports abortion.
That's one day going to be regarded like slavery, just as big an atrocity.
And that day is not that far off because science will show us what we're doing when we kill a child in a woman's body.
So all of us are flawed, but some of us have ideas, bring ideas into the world that free and elevate the rest of us.
Jesus was one of them.
So is Thomas Jefferson.
So is George Washington.
George Washington gave freedom a place to live, namely the United States of America.
And this is the problem that they have, is they purposely, some of them and stupidly, like Don Lemon, confuse human fallibility with the greatness of their ideas.
Now, I want to look at a couple of Supreme Court decisions that came down, because what's happening now is because we are letting the left dominate the culture, we're winning sometimes in court, but we're losing over time.
There were two victories for religious freedom in the Supreme Court yesterday.
They were important victories in a way.
And, you know, we complain about the court because we don't always get what we want.
And we've got that stupid decision from Gorsuch where he basically said that the word sex had no meaning, that the word men and women have no meaning.
If one person, if a man does something and a woman does something, that you can't distinguish between those two things because that's bigotry, which is crazy.
I mean, it's literally psychopathology.
It's induced psychopathology.
And we had John Roberts supporting that decision and John Roberts supporting some decisions that we really dislike.
But the fact is that we've won some important victories in this last session.
It's been kind of confusing, but we've won some important victories in this last session.
And some of those victories, you have to chalk them up to the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo, who runs the Federalist Society, who has been advising the Trump administration on who to appoint to the Supreme Court.
And that has been a decades-long effort that took time to get these people trained in ideas, trained in originalism, and to get them into the culture.
And that's the way the left works all the time.
And they do it through Hollywood, and they do it through the news media and they do it through the Academy.
And only the Federalist Society has managed to do it through the courts.
And this is what all of us should be doing.
If we have, if any billionaires, if any entrepreneurs are still on our side, they should be working in the arts to spread ideas.
They should be working in the news media to build what's going to be Fox News after Fox News collapses when Rupert Murdoch dies.
Long may he live, but when he dies, we all die.
You know, somebody's going to have to make the new Fox News because Fox News will go south.
You know, all of these things have been neglected.
So we had these two seven to two decisions, and that's important too, because even the liberals signed on, although in a smaller way.
And basically what they said, in one case, the court ruled that religious institutions can fire people for not upholding their religious beliefs if those people are performing religious functions in the institutions.
And that's important, right?
because you don't want to say to a religious institution, oh, you have to hire someone who doesn't believe in anything you believe, even if he's teaching classes in religion, even if he's preaching from the pulpit, you have to do that.
Obviously, you can't do that.
Only the most left-wing justices didn't support that.
And it's Sotamair and RBJ Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
But the other was this suit about the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Now, I have a rule about this.
I have a rule.
If somebody's named the Little Sisters of the Poor, and it's not like Black Lives Matter, it actually means the Little Sisters of the Poor, don't attack the Little Sisters of the Poor.
That's just my private rule in life.
They actually are Little Sisters of the Poor, nuns whose basic job is supporting older people when they are near death.
That's what they do.
Leave them alone, okay?
That's just a basic rule, because you don't want to go to hell and burn for all eternity.
It's not a good look for you, you know?
But Obama, no, had to go after them, had to insist that under Obamacare, the little sisters of the poor had to supply, you know, abortion drugs and birth control drugs in their insurance.
And what the little sisters of the poor said, we're Catholics.
We don't want to be, they happen to be Catholics because they're nuns.
They said, we don't want to be a party to that.
We don't want to be a party to supplying birth control to people.
So here's the important thing you have to understand about this.
This is not in the Obamacare law.
And this is part of the really big problem we have.
In the Obamacare law, it says you have to supply health insurance.
There's a mandate to supply health insurance, but it doesn't say what it is.
And it gives broad authority to the executive branch to just pass a regulation and say, oh, it's this.
So Obama said you have to supply this stuff.
And the Sisters of the Poor said no, and the Supreme Court supported them.
And then Trump said, you don't have to.
You are exempt because of your religious beliefs.
And the states sued.
And now the Supreme Court has supported them again.
So it's a big strike for religious freedom, saying that the little sisters of the poor, while they're tending to dying people, don't have to have the iron boot of the government come and stomp on their beliefs by forcing them to support birth control, which they don't agree with.
Here is Sister Constant Veit, who speaks for them, the first cut of her.
I would like to say to women who don't see things the way we see them, or men as well, that a move in favor of protecting our religious liberty would also be protecting them, because it could easily be themselves someday with a different issue that's very dear to their hearts or very deeply held conviction of theirs that would be under assault.
And so if we can protect religious liberty in this case for us, someday that could apply to them as well.
Okay, now this is what I'm talking about, right?
This is what we believe, that by protecting the little sisters of the poor, we protect everybody's conscience, everybody's right to act on their conscience when they are involved in religious activity, their freedom to worship.
Now listen to what the New York Times has to say about this.
This is their editorial from the editorial board of radicals and racists.
Only days after surprising the nation by striking down a strict anti-abortion law in Louisiana, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts reminded Americans once again that it is no friend to reproductive rights or to the vast majority of women who will use some form of birth control in their lifetime.
In Decision Wednesday, the justices dealt another blow to the birth control mandate under the Affordable Care Act in the wake of a 7-2 ruling.
Between 70,000 and 126,000 women would immediately lose access to no-cost contraceptive services because not only do the Little Sisters of the Poor not want to pay for it, they're actually going to stand up in what they call the thin black line and prevent you.
If you try to go in and buy a contraceptive with your own money that you earned by working, they will beat you to death.
That's what the Little Sisters of the Poor do.
Obviously, I have to say, I'm obviously joking because I know some of you are going, really?
Little Sisters of the Prophet, they don't sound like they'll beat me to death, but in case there are any leftists listening.
But the thing is, the thing is, they're not restricting access.
They're not restricting access.
They're saying they don't want to pay for it.
And here is the other thing.
Here's another line.
The Little Sisters of the Poor is an order of Catholic nuns who are religiously opposed to birth control.
And then it says in parenthesis, many conservatives wrongly conflate some methods of birth control with abortion.
That's not what the Catholics believe.
That is not what Catholics believe.
Catholics are against birth control because they believe that sex should always be in the service of its purposes, its teleology, which is creating life, right?
And so what one side is saying is we want to protect everybody's conscience.
Live your life.
Live your life according to your conscience insofar as it does not hurt other people.
And what the New York Times is saying, no, Our conscience is your conscience.
The state's conscience is your conscience.
You don't even need a conscience.
You don't need a conscience.
The state will supply your conscience.
And you know, you get this on the dissent, too, from Ginsburg and Sotomayara.
They say, for the first time, the court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree.
And remember, Sonia Sotomayer was the same person who on the abortion case who was talking about church and state, the need to separate church and state.
And remember, that's a ratchet that only goes in one direction.
The ratchet only, when they talk about the separation of church and state, it only goes in the direction of protecting state power from the church.
Now, again, this is not in the law.
It's not in the law.
It's a regulation.
It's a regulation imposed without, there was no vote for it.
In fact, in fact, remember, they won in the House with no votes to spare.
They passed, they shoved Obamacare down our throats with no votes to spare and no Republican votes.
And the only reason they could do that is they said, we will not impose on religious rights.
That's why.
That was one of the deals they made.
But it didn't matter because the law says, oh, you can just decide what this means.
You can just decide what this means.
This is why I believe what we should be working to do is limit what regulations can do.
And Clarence Thomas talked about that a little bit in his decision.
We should limit what you can do by regulation.
Your laws should be eight pages long and we shouldn't understand what's in them and there shouldn't be regulations.
They should be laws that we can oppose.
So this is like, we have to understand this is tolerance versus intolerance.
This is freedom versus slavery.
It's the same with those people who were protesting, those leftists who were protesting that they weren't being given free speech because of cancel culture.
They didn't understand that they were talking to leftists who don't believe in free speech.
These people don't believe in God and they mean to stop you from believing in God as well.
So far, the Supreme Court stopped them, but they won't be able to stop them forever.
All right, let us stop for just a moment ourselves and talk about Ring.
This is a time, especially when you want to be safe.
You want to be able to look outside your house from within your house and see what's going on out there.
You want to be able to keep a close eye on deliveries that come to your door and make sure people aren't walking away with them.
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That's why I like it, because you don't have to get out of bed to see what's going on.
You can look at your phone.
Supporting Candidate: Keeping Biden Safe00:09:30
If anybody is at the door, you can talk to them right through your phone.
And that's wherever you are.
If you're not even at home, you can do that.
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Just go to ring.com/slash clavin.
That's ring.com/slash clavin.
And anyone comes to your door, you immediately say to him, How do you spell Clavin?
It's like, You are too smart to be acting this dumb.
It's a shibboleth.
You would know what that is if you read the Bible.
It's a code word that you have to know before you're let in.
So I was not, I was joking, but I was not joking about the fact that they are trying to do everything they can to keep Joe Biden from having to debate Donald Trump.
And it raises the question in my mind: if you're supporting a candidate and you're afraid to have him debate, should you be supporting that candidate at all?
Right?
I mean, in other words, if you think your candidate is such a houseplant that he can't debate Donald Trump, who after all, Donald Trump is not the greatest debater on earth.
You know, he's okay, he's aggressive and he's tough, but he's not like an absolute buzzsaw that you can't get through, except for the fact that Joe Biden is a piece of furniture at this point.
And, you know, I don't want to overemphasize this because I think that Biden can be kind of fluffed up and gotten into a debate and he can get out of it.
And all he has to do is put one English sentence together, and you know, the press is going to be reeling with delight and relief at how wonderful he's done.
But let me just read to you from Knucklehead Row Thomas Friedman's op-ed, a little bit of this.
He says, I worry about Joe Biden.
This is like another one of these things where they say the quiet part out loud.
I worry about Joe Biden debating Donald Trump.
He should do it only under two conditions.
Otherwise, he's giving Trump unfair advantages, like consciousness, like sentience.
First, Biden should declare.
This is again Thomas Friedman talking.
He says, Biden should declare that he will take part in a debate only if Trump releases his tax returns for 2016 through 2018.
Biden has already done so, and they are on his website, Trump Must Too.
No more gifting Trump something he can attack while hiding his own questionable finances.
And second, Biden should insist that a real-time fact-checking team approved by both candidates be hired by the non-partisan commission on presidential debates.
And that's 10 minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the debate.
This team report on any misleading statements, phony numbers, or outright lies either candidate had uttered that way.
No one in that massive television audience can go away easily misled.
Unbelievable.
Now, just to be fair, let's see what Joe Biden has to say about this.
This is cut four.
Lonnie knows I believe this every fiber of my being.
We're posed.
What I propose is it can be done.
I think we're in a position to really make it happen.
And my team and your team are already working closely together to light up the path forward here.
Critical laws like the PRO Act to strengthen collective bargaining.
I'm politics like prevailing and look.
I guess I'm getting taking too much time.
You think that has anything to do with why they don't want Joe Biden to debate?
Now wait.
Now wait.
Let's give the other side the ado.
James Carville, who is a smart, canny, you know, completely unscrupulous political operator.
He knows this is not a good look for Biden.
So he's pretending it isn't true.
Of course, Biden wants to debate Trump.
Trump is a doofus don't.
All right, Biden debated Elizabeth Warren.
Bernie Sanders, who's the most on-message politician I've seen in my life.
Corey Booker, Amy Klobuchaw.
I saw him the night before, the night, right before South Carolina.
He did very well.
He should debate him without condition anywhere that he wants to.
Joe Biden trumps Donald Trump in any debate.
And what he needs to do is be sure to get a picture side by side so they can see how fit and how trim Vice President Biden is and what a slave that Trump is.
Well, he should.
You know, that's the way, that is the way the Democrats should be talking.
They should be talking as if they have a good product to sell instead of fearfully.
I mean, so Carville is being shrewd there.
And again, you know, it is true.
Biden can show up on any given day and put a sentence together and stumble through a debate.
You know, he can do that.
He still has the power to do that.
He has deteriorated even from those days when he was talking to Bernie Sanders.
He's going downhill and certainly being locked away like a plant in his basement is not going to help.
But that obviously is the way to go.
And Trump should be careful, I think, not to overemphasize the fact that Biden is basically a wooden cigar store Indian at this point.
But the important thing here, the important thing here is they've got to get this guy over the top.
They've got to drag this guy over the finish line because he is the mask of their radicalism.
Anytime, and they're just barely being able to tamp down their left side.
I mean, anytime Biden made a speech to the National Education Association, right?
This is the teachers' union, where he promised them access to the White House and promised them that no black child will be educated under his administration.
Well, what he actually said was that he's not going to give a penny of federal money to any charter school.
So don't you worry if you're hiring people who can't do a good job and don't worry, they're not going to get fired.
We know the unions will protect them.
We know your unions will protect the idiots who go into these schools and do a terrible, terrible job while rich kids go to private schools and do well.
We're not going to let those blacks rise up out of those neighborhoods through education.
So don't you worry, teachers, you corrupt teachers union.
We're on your side.
But at one point, he said to them, compromise is not a dirty word.
This is what he said.
He says, it's how our government was designed to work.
I've done it my whole life.
No one's ever doubted my words.
And I've been able to bring Democrats and Republicans together in the United States Congress to pass big things to deal with big issues.
So immediately the left just jumped on this, you know, and they just started saying leftist Elizabeth Warren, a lot of people just started saying, you know, no, no, no, you can't compromise with evil.
There's no compromising with evil.
You know, the Republicans are evil.
You can't compromise with them.
So believe me, this is the pressure that's going to put on.
And take a look at him.
Take a look at him.
Is he going to stand up for it?
Remember this, too.
Biden is there because the black voters, the black Democrat voters put him there.
Remember, he was going in.
He was getting beaten up by Bernie Sanders.
And in South Carolina, James Clyburton, black whip in the House, said, we've got to support Joe Biden.
And the black voters showed up for Joe Biden.
And they showed up for Joe Biden because they know those left-wing policies aren't helping them.
And they're not so much into the class war.
They're into the race thing.
The race thing is what they've been selling for a long time.
And so the class war isn't doing it for them, even though Bernie is probably closer to right.
And here's the thing about blacks.
Blacks, like everybody else, they know the truth.
They can tell the difference, most of them, from reality and fantasy.
The other day, I think it was yesterday, Tucker Carlson played a cut from Don, whom he calls Don Lamon.
And Don is being featured on the show a lot, but this is a good cut, from 2013.
And Don Lemon was playing Bill O'Reilly, Bill O'Reilly saying blacks have to be responsible for themselves and agreeing with Bill O'Reilly.
And this is what he said.
Five things that you should think about doing.
Here's number five.
Pull up your pants.
Number four now is the N-word.
Now, number three, respect where you live.
Start small by not dropping trash, littering in your own communities.
I've lived in several predominantly white neighborhoods in my life.
I rarely, if ever, witness people littering.
I live in Harlem.
Now, it's an historically black neighborhood.
Every single day I see adults and children dropping their trash on the ground when a garbage can is just feet away.
Just being honest here.
Number two, finish school.
You want to break the cycle of poverty?
Stop telling kids are acting white because they go to school or they speak proper English.
Over the course of a career, a college grad will make nearly a million dollars more than a high school graduate.
That's a lot of money.
And number one, and probably the most important, just because you can have a baby, it doesn't mean you should.
So that was Don Lemon in 2013 when he still hoped that Barack Obama's policies might work before Barack Obama maybe realized that everything he did turned to crap and started to emphasize the racial, started to sell the racial divide narrative in order to cover up his failures.
So the thing is, the thing is, it's not like people don't know the truth.
It's not like people don't know the truth.
It's not the majority.
I don't think it's the majority out there rioting.
They have problems with the police.
I think a lot of those problems have to do with the criminality in the black underclass, the high crime in the black underclass.
But I'm always in favor of making sure the police are using their powers properly.
Raycon Earbuds Performance00:03:29
I'm always in favor of doing that.
I think all good cops are in favor of doing that.
But the thing is, they know.
So this thing about taking care of the culture, making sure a new generation grows up who don't know, a new generation of blacks growing up alienated from the mainstream American culture.
That's their project.
That's their project.
They've got to make sure.
It was only 2013 when Don Lemon was saying that.
That's their project.
It is our project to speak to the same people and to speak in the language of the people, the language of men.
Remember what St. Paul said.
He said, I will be like anybody.
I will be all things to all people if it spreads the message of the gospel.
We have to be the same way.
We have to be all things to all people to spread the message of freedom because it's not about us.
It's not about what we think.
It's not about our opinions.
It is about these great ideas that have set America free and have kept the world free.
All right.
Let's talk about Raycon.
You know I love them because I use them all the time, the Raycon earbuds.
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Strategic Blunders Cost Trump Re-Election00:11:17
Henry Olson will be with us and explain it all to us in just a moment.
All right.
I always like talking to Henry Olson.
He is just a cool, calm, objective observer of the presidential race and of all political races.
He really knows how to read the polls and to read, to sniff the air.
He's a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, and has a terrific podcast called The Horse Race, which I have been listening to religiously.
It is just terrific.
Henry, have I got you?
You there?
I am.
Always great to have you on.
Thank you very much for coming on.
So how bad are the polls for Donald Trump?
They're terrible.
He is, I mean, let's just recap some of the numbers.
He's at 41.5% job approval rating.
That's probably the lowest a president has been at this stage running for re-election since George H.W. Bush in 92.
He's, depending on the poll, generally between 6 and 12 points behind, over eight points behind in the Real Clear Politics average.
And we know that people who are undecided tend to break against the incumbent because if you're not for somebody by this time, you're against them.
So you just look and you say, this is a president who would have to break 60 years of history to be able to come back and win reelection.
When you say that, just so I'm clear, you're saying at this time, from this time to the election, you would be breaking 60 years of history to turn it around?
Actually, over 70.
We're talking about Harry Truman, the last time a candidate for reelection, or in Truman's case, for election, but he had served because he succeeded to the presidency upon the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
It's been since 1948 that somebody who has been behind by this much in the polls at this late a time was able to turn it around and win re-election.
So, you know, I was listening to your excellent podcast, really enjoying your podcast, The Horse Race, and you had Selena Vito on, and she was talking about, you know, the fact that some people won't even tell their families that they're voting for Donald Trump and that Trump voters are less likely to answer the phone and less likely to talk to pollsters.
You don't feel that way.
You feel the polls, it's not about the polls being dishonest.
It's about the polls being inefficient.
You don't feel that the polls are off that much.
Not that much.
I do think that there is a small bias against Trump.
In 2018, the Real Clear Politics average had Trump at 44%, his job approval rating.
The exit poll showed him at 45.
So if Trump were down by six, I'd say, yeah, maybe he's really down by five, or maybe he's really down by four.
But whatever error exists in the poll does not account for the magnitude of the hole that he would have to climb out of to be able to win reelection.
One of the things about Trump is that in many ways, despite his maybe personal flaws and his strange eccentric personal style, let's call it, aside from that, in some ways, he was the incarnation of the candidate you kept telling the Republicans they had to come up with, that by essentially attacking entitlements, that the Republican Party was moving away from the Reagan position, which actually supported a safety net for people in distress from the government.
And basically, Trump said, I'm not going to mess with your entitlements.
And he kind of spoke to the working man, as you had suggested the GOP had to do.
What do you think he's done wrong?
What's gone wrong?
Is it just the Chinese flu and the disasters?
Is it more than that?
Well, you got to remember that this is a guy who hasn't been over 50% job approval rating for a single day in his presidency.
There's no president in recorded polling history who can say that.
So that style, that personality you talk about is a huge, huge problem for him.
He did not grow into the office stylistically.
So that's problem number one.
He still, I think, could easily have won re-election.
Not easily, but had a very good chance to win re-election, but for his bungled responses to the coronavirus and especially to the murder of George Floyd.
With respect to the coronavirus, virtually every leader in the world has seen an increase in approval.
Trump saw a decrease.
And then with respect to Floyd, what America wanted was somebody who displayed empathy but strength.
And instead, he was wildly flailing about displaying either irresoluteness or a sense of strength that was inappropriate for the moment.
And he declined even further.
And it's very difficult to see how he changes his thoughts enough to erase four years of a negative impression among key groups of Americans.
Yeah, that's a pretty grim picture.
And it's, you know, as always, you're a very cool observer.
You're not saying things with a partisan point of view.
You never have.
So do you feel that there's any problem with the sense when he came up the first time and he took everybody by surprise, he shocked everybody except you.
You were the only person who actually saw that there was a possibility that he could win.
But he was surrounded at that time because nobody would work with him.
He was surrounded at that time by really eccentric people like Steve Bannon would be the guy, the first guy who pops into my mind, very eccentric people who sort of said, no, there is a road for Donald Trump to go forward.
Now it seems to me he's surrounded by these consultants that don't seem to really know what they're doing, these Washington insiders.
Do you think that he needs a new team or do you think it's just the fact that he's out of control?
It's really him, that this is a guy who takes advice from people, but really is his own political consultant.
And that is both part of his genius and it is part of his problem, that he has from day one been the sort of person who has been doubling down on a base strategy rather than trying to expand his appeal.
And that is not the way to win reelection.
And then to have tripled down on a base-only strategy in the coronavirus and the Floyd situations has only magnified his problems.
So the phone rings in your house at midnight and you pick it up and it is Donald Trump asking you to come and help him with his campaign, aside from pretending that you're someone else and that you don't speak English.
What would your advice be?
I mean, is there advice that this guy could get that he might take that would help him?
Well, you just, the qualifier is crucial.
I could give him advice, but I don't think he'd take it, which is it's been he has been doing better and will do better among Latinos than he did in 2016.
This is one of the underreported stories so far of the campaign.
But he is destroying himself with college-educated whites with his anger, with his divisiveness, with his inability to demonstrate some racial sensitivity.
And what I tell him is, look, that's got to change.
It's got to change today.
And that means you've got to be disciplined for five months or four months, depending how much, you know, it's four months now.
So yeah, I could give him the advice.
If you'd give me his Twitter handle, I could change the Twitter thing.
But very, what I would say is that he might take, I doubt it, but he might take is run all of your tweets through somebody else first and give them authority to tell you no.
Two, only give scripted appearances from here on in.
Have big rallies, but none of this off-the-cuff stuff.
And three, start to deal with the racial problems in the country in a way that acknowledges that there are legitimate concerns more than acknowledges your desire to point the legitimate problems that Democrats who govern cities and states have had.
You start to do those three things over a two or three month period and maybe have some self-revelatory interviews that say, yeah, you know, I needed to grow into the office more than I thought.
It's late, but I'm doing it now.
Hell, you're 11 points or eight points behind.
You might as well take some gambles.
Wow.
All right.
So what about the Senate and the House?
Is he going to take the Senate down with him, do you think?
The Senate and the House have been correlated with the presidential returns for increasingly a number of years, and it's especially the case in the Trump administration.
If Trump loses the popular vote by only four, four and a half points, which would probably be a loss in the Electoral College, I think the Republicans can hold the Senate on that.
Right now, if the election were held today, Republicans would lose between seven and nine seats in the Senate and would lose seats in the House.
He has to recover significantly from where he is now for Republicans not to be wiped out in the Senate and lose ground in the House.
If he does, then the party can live to have an effective opposition to President Biden.
My last question about this is about Biden.
Does he not matter?
I mean, he seems to be such a houseplant at this point.
He seems to be really incapable of running the country in any actual way.
Does that just not matter?
It's just people don't care.
People don't care unless it is shown that he is really incompetent.
And the fact is he is a placeholder for not Trump.
The Democratic Party is a placeholder for not Trump's Republican Party.
And as long as they don't stand for anything, as long as they don't have sharp flavors, that should be enough, assuming that Trump doesn't undergo the 19th hour metamorphosis that I would propose if he called me at midnight.
So, you know, the thing is that whenever the cameras are on bright, Biden does well enough to make people think that he can do the job.
And that's not something Republicans necessarily believe, but you're not the people who are the swing voters.
The people who are the swing voters see somebody who can stumble, but they want to believe he's okay.
And I watched him in the one-on-one debate with Bernie Sanders.
And this may not have been a guy who was the sharpest bulb in his classroom, but he did not commit a significant error over two hours of standing ramrods straight in spotlight.
And that's what he needs to break down in moments like that for the swing voter to begin to have serious doubts about it.
Biden Under Bright Lights00:01:52
Henry, it's always great talking to you.
You do a great job.
Henry Olson, your podcast is The Horse Race, which is terrific.
I'm listening to it all the time.
Thanks so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Andrew.
Well, that's a depressing way to end the week, but always the truth will set you free and the truth is always better.
I am going to take a long Clavenless weekend because it's my birthday on Monday, so I'm moving my next week's Monday show to Friday.
So basically, you're doomed.
If that interview wasn't depressing enough, that should be enough.
This should be enough to really just send you curling up into the fetal position in the corner.
The Clavenless weekend now begins.
Survivors will gather here on Tuesday for the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Clayton.
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