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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker are not so subtly indicating a potential run for the White House in 2024, while Ron DeSantis is already amassing a war chest over $100 million. Plus, they dive into the GOP's slow cleaving of Trump out of its political system.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
A reminder, if you are not a patron already and you want full access to this show, and I promise you, this show is going in some directions today, you need to go over to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast.
Again, I'm Jared Yates.
I'm here with Nick Halsman.
How we doing, buddy?
I'm doing well.
I'm doing well.
I was I was awoken up from a bad dream that Hillary Clinton was in.
And it just so happened that some news was breaking, you know, at 430 in the morning in my time, I couldn't go to Yeah, we gotta hop on a boat, an airplane, we gotta head on over across the pond.
Real fast, Nick, we've got exclusive coverage of Boris Johnson resigning as Prime Minister of England.
Nick, will you go to that coverage?
Yes, it's all sped up too, he's like walking to the podium really fast.
People can't see it, he's running around, the police are chasing him.
In 2x speed, absolutely.
They're wearing different hats.
Oh, that's never... Listen, I've been laughing about playing that all day because it helps Nick to look at another superpower in absolute disarray and feel a little bit better about yourself.
Sure.
What's interesting to me is trying to, you know, get the equivalent of what happened, like what would happen here that would match what's going on over there.
Because maybe people didn't hear.
Bojo, which I love that, Bojo.
Have you heard that?
They call them that as far as I can tell.
I've never heard him called Bojo.
That's terrible.
Bojo resigned.
Bojo no go.
In a very defiant way, like he had said he wasn't going to resign.
Hell no.
I think he's an expletive when he said he wasn't going to.
And then, you know, one too many scandals, you know, got him out of there.
So just to get people up to speed on what has happened and why we're getting ready to watch a transfer of power.
And by the way, for anyone who's been trying to keep track of how parliamentary politics works in Great Britain, good luck everyone.
What a terrible messed up system this is.
Boris Johnson has been an absolutely ruinous, awful prime minister.
He's been a blight on the United Kingdom, who's made possible by Brexit, which was just another theater in this situation we're dealing with, where the wealthy are trying to destroy everything that we have.
He is out because on one hand, he disgraced the office by having a bunch of COVID parties and lying about it as these lockdowns were happening.
Then he promoted a guy that he knew had been, like, sexually harassing and bothering women, who then got caught bothering people at a club.
It turns out he knew about it, and eventually his own party, the Conservatives, came to him in mass resignation and basically said, you need to go.
And I wish that we had an English correspondent who could tell us what it's like when a party understands that the embarrassment of a leader needs to go.
The list of things that went wrong, and we can read them, would be in the Trump administration just another day.
One day.
It wouldn't have even phased anybody over here.
Here's the thing.
You know what would have happened?
All of Boris Johnson's scandals would have happened before noon.
And then, by 2.30, a CNN exclusive would come out that Donald Trump wanted to bomb the Rocky Mountains and create new real estate.
Right.
And then we forget about it.
And then we move on to the next day.
So, but the equivalent is sort of like what happened with Nixon, where his own party decided we're not going to go on anymore.
But when you don't have a lot of goodwill behind you, then the little things will quickly get you downhill, which is what he sort of said in his rambling speech that wasn't really prepared.
Actually, can we get a quick quote from that real fast?
One of my favorite political soundbites in a long time.
Let's actually hear from a prime minister resigning.
I know that there will be many people who are relieved.
And perhaps quite a few who will also be disappointed.
And I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world.
But them's the brakes.
Dem's the brakes, Nick.
Dem's the brakes.
I thought that was an American expression.
It's an expression, is what I'll say.
Okay.
Yeah, here's the thing.
The accent he has, From our point of view, he kind of sounds like he's a smart guy, just because he has an English accent, right?
But I have to imagine, if you're English, he sounds as bad as Trump.
He's a clown.
He's an absolute clown.
And by the way, I always thought it was very appropriate that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump were in power at the same time.
I think it was really indicative of the decline of these two nations in their special relationship.
And it's important to point out that like this dysfunction, the way that he handled government, the way Nigel Farage and all of the Brexit people have done and what's happening now in America.
It's literally, we have seen the apex of that special relationship in terms of having like political control over their own things.
Britain got there before us.
People don't remember post-World War II, they basically were like, America, take the baton and run with it as long as you make sure we don't default and fall apart economically.
And we have reached the point where that relationship and that experiment has reached its apex.
And now it is just absolutely handed over power to international finance and wealthy people.
And as a result, clowns all the way down.
Clowns.
Yeah.
I mean, I think what you're talking about is the relationship between Trump and Boris Johnson is, well, it's the hair to have both people like with hair like that and Now, no one's going to replace them with hair, so maybe we should feel better about our future because we're not going to have that kind of insanity going on, the clownishness of the cloth.
Well, speaking of hair, and this is probably the best transition that I can do, we need to talk about your boy who has a magnificent head of hair.
And that, of course, is the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom.
Magnificent.
Just really... Magnificent hair.
Absolutely.
Should we talk about him?
We have to.
And the reason we have to talk about him and a couple of other people...
Nick, this new poll came out.
You know, the polling services were going around seeing how people felt about the prospect of Joseph Robinette Biden running for re-election in 2024.
Meanwhile, as we've been talking about on this podcast, one article after another just savaging Biden, the commentariat, the party insiders, they are more or less, I mean, if you think that Boris Johnson's party was asking him to leave, they're not showing up at the White House and asking him, they're sending messages left and right.
This new poll shows that nearly 70% of Americans do not want Joe Biden to run for reelection.
And as a result, as we've been discussing and predicting, there's now a vacuum In terms of the possibility of other people running for office, other people becoming the Democratic or Republican nominee.
And I got to tell you, your boy Gavin is getting after it right now.
I wonder if Biden is somehow like wishing that maybe some Americans will be taken hostage in some other country because, like, it's terrible to say that, but the reference is Jimmy Carter, we can't ignore how this is going to mirror what happened in 79, can we?
I mean, this is very similar in 80 against Reagan, right?
And I got to say, you know, we have talked about why the Biden administration is failing.
It's a philosophy.
It's the way that they approach business.
But I got to tell you, man, if you watch a speech by Biden right now, he's tired.
He's tired.
There's no energy there.
There's no sort of movement.
There's whatever.
This had, and the presidency wears on people.
Absolutely.
Much less the oldest person who's ever been president of the United States of America.
It is wearing on him.
It's taking a massive toll.
And you're exactly right.
The way that this is going, the energy, the feeling of it, it is disastrous.
And it's heading towards disaster.
Here's the thing.
Are you sitting down?
A 45-year-old Biden, we have the same issue.
There's a real possibility.
I think that's true.
I think you're not wrong.
I really feel like, you know, he's not Obama, and he never was.
And by the way, listen, there's a stuttering issue that he has that he's been trying to overcome.
But he is at a point now where his oration skills are not up to what you need as a president, and for whatever reason, age or whatever.
I'm telling you, this is who he is.
This is who he's been.
I don't think it's that much different than he's 80.
And we talked about this when he got elected, before he was sworn in.
And that was this.
Joe Biden, as a political animal, is a reactionary.
He reacts to what is happening at the moment and then moves along with it.
I mean, he has been a reformist Democrat.
He has been a conservative Democrat.
He's been on so many different sides of so many different issues.
I mean, he's one of the people who helped create, of course, the incarceration state.
You name it.
This is not, again, the person who is the right person for the job at the right time.
If I had to put money on it right now, I would say that he doesn't run in 2024.
That's what it's feeling like nowadays.
This pressure that is building up to try and move him out of the seat, it feels like it's growing every single day, which is why we have to talk about this in our main block on this show.
Right.
And I want to disconnect the Carter similarity because there's a lot to talk about with this throughout the whole show.
But remember, his approval ratings were very similar to what Biden was now.
But when the hostages became hostages, it actually gave him that, what do we call that, that bump that you get when, the patriotic bump.
So he actually got a big bump there, which he couldn't ride properly into the primary because, well we'll talk about that, Ted Kennedy gets involved and then really batters him in that.
So, but this is completely different as far as situational because everything is different.
There's nothing we can use from the past anymore, I feel like, to predict or use as a model.
So, but the point being that Biden could very well turn it around and get into the 50s in an approval rating at some point between now and 2023, right?
Or 2020, whatever.
He could, but part of this is, and by the way, we're going to focus on two Democrats today.
both of them are governors.
And we've been talking about this, we've been discussing it, dissecting it, power has moved from the federal level down to the state level.
Being governor of a state, you are an executive, right?
You don't have to reign in Congress.
Like you have a legislature, obviously, but as that power starts to trickle down to the state level, I mean, my God, Nick, governors have had moments where it's like governor, governor, governor, governor as president, right?
We currently have a former senator.
The guy before him was an absolute asshole, buffoon, reality TV embarrassment.
The guy before him was a senator.
And then you had a governor, right?
And then before that, you had a governor.
You have these moments.
And right now, because the power is trickling down, Like, this is a time where people want to look to people who have quote-unquote results.
And as a result, governors start looking pretty appealing to people.
Yeah, I mean, and they're slowly figuring out.
I think in the past, governors didn't really have much of a national presence.
No one would know.
Maybe you know the governor of New York, you know, because, you know, Cuomo would be bombastic and out there.
But, you know, you don't know who's the governor of Oklahoma, right?
Well, do you know when that changed?
- When? - With the advent of television, and particularly broadcast national conventions.
Because one of the things that would happen is every time you have that big national convention, you give people the slots to speak.
Of course, that's where Obama's star rose.
- Yeah, right. - 'Cause he came out at the convention, gave an amazing speech.
But all of a sudden, you start having governors get on stage, and you start looking for the next stars.
And all of the, whether it's congresspeople, senators, you name it, they're part of a larger body, Like, they get wins, right?
But it's not as easy to say, I did this, I did this, I did that.
Governors all of a sudden could stand up and do that, and all of a sudden you have someone like a Bill Clinton.
And a Bill Clinton who gave one of the most disastrous speeches in the history of national conventions, but kept making his name there.
Like, a young, charismatic governor.
Or, you know, I mean, Jimmy Carter's the same way.
Jimmy Carter, speaking of, built his way up from the governorship in order to do this.
But that is where people are going to start looking now.
And for sure, as a governor, you're basically the president of your state.
And you look very presidential and your office looks presidential.
You already get the background in those shots to feel that way.
So, you know, it makes sense.
People can feel more comfortable Knowing that a guy was a, generally from a bigger state.
That's why I think Bill Clinton had to overcome this notion of this tiny little state of Arkansas.
What did you ever do there?
So your economy is tiny.
And he, you know, that's how good of a candidate he ended up being that he could overcome that.
But it helped because the Democratic Party started saying, and we talked about this with Lillie Geisler, The Democratic Party started saying, guess what?
We're going to start appealing to the South and we're going to start appealing to Republicans and Reaganism and that type of stuff.
And by the way, it didn't hurt that he was sitting there in Walmart land.
Like, it doesn't hurt that as Walmart starts becoming the defining corporation kind of of America at the moment, that this is the person who has that in their backyard.
So it was able to sort of tout that.
Now, I will say this, your governor, Gavin Newsom, What he did over the 4th of July, I don't know if people know this, one of the most aggressive tactics that I have seen in, I don't know when, I really don't know how to compare this to other things.
Do you want to tell the people about this?
Yeah, I mean he created an ad where he basically wanted to entice people in Florida to come over to California because it's much more, had much more freedom involved.
The governor of California created an ad Specifically talking to the people of Florida.
And let's listen to a quick little thing of this.
It's Independence Day, so let's talk about what's going on in America.
Freedom?
It's under attack in your state.
Your Republican leaders?
They're banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors.
I urge all of you living in Florida to join the fight, or join us in California, where we still believe in freedom.
Freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate, and the freedom to love.
Don't let them take your freedom.
Okay.
Literally, the governor of California sent an ad to Florida that said, your governor, and by the way, you can't see this because it's a podcast, shows Ron DeSantis, says your rights are under attack.
The Republicans are doing this.
Let's join together against them or move to California.
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