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Jan. 9, 2024 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
45:41
Can Trump Stay On Colorado Ballot As Iowa Caucuses Loom

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dissect the choices the Supreme Court has after Donald Trump was found guilty of leading an insurrection and thrown off the ballot in Colorado. They discuss a leak to the press that described a meeting between Joe Biden and Barack Obama, wherein the former president wanted specific changes to the Biden campaign that haven't happened yet. For more Muckrake, including access to the Weekender show on Fridays and live tapings, head over to Patreon and become patron of the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muck Rake Podcast.
It's Jared A. Sexton.
Rejoice, everyone.
I'm not on my own.
Nick Halseman is back.
The boys are back in town.
How's it going, buddy?
Oh, I am still jet-lagged, but I am getting better every day.
So who knew that a five-hour time difference and 18 hours of traveling would not be smooth?
It's so miserable.
And we're going to hear more about Nick's trip to Argentina in just a second because it's politically relevant.
Before we do, everybody, we just want to remind everyone, this is a big week for the Montclair podcast.
There is a lot going on.
This is Iowa week.
It's the kickoff of the actual election.
This Wednesday, January 10th at 9 p.m.
Eastern, it's going to be the final GOP primary debate before Iowa.
You know what that means.
We're going to do a live show afterwards.
We're going to analyze it, let you know if this is going to change the contest in Iowa or not.
On top of... Nick's shaking his head.
The narrator's voice, it won't.
There's interesting things afoot, which we will talk about in today's show.
And then, Nick, I am heading to Iowa this weekend.
That's right.
I'm going to be in Iowa from Saturday the 13th through the 15th, the Iowa caucuses.
I'm going to offer everybody an on-the-ground idea of what is going on in Iowa.
I'm going to let you know what the insiders are saying, what these rallies and the experiences are like.
But guess what, Nick?
They gotta go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
You're gonna get tons of exclusive coverage the way the Muckrake Podcast has done for years now.
If you know, you know.
If you don't know, you need to know.
Go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
I cannot wait to receive the correspondence that you're there.
If I hadn't gone to Buenos Aires, I would be with you in a second, but I gotta recover.
We knew the moment you were going out of the country that the chances were unlikely that you were going to head to Iowa.
The good news, Nick, is that there's a winter storm blowing through the plains right now, which means for the third consecutive presidential election, I'm going to go to Iowa and it's going to be cold as shit.
And just absolutely barren wasteland.
I can't wait.
Well, the other good news is that Boeing has grounded the airplanes that seem to be coming apart in the midair.
So that won't be a problem if you need to fly there.
You're going to drive, right?
I'm going to drive.
The great thing about all this is that I saw this right before we started recording.
For those who don't know, a Boeing, like the entire side of the thing came off and almost sucked everybody out.
During inspections today, they found multiple ones that had like loose screws and nuts and bolts.
It's fantastic.
Speaking of travel, I got a text from you while you were in Argentina, and for those who don't know, they've been taken over by a complete and utter madman, Javier Mele.
You actually got within a little bit of distance from good old Javier, is that correct?
I did, I did.
We were at an opening ceremony for the Maccabi Games, which I was coaching in, and he just showed up.
I don't think anyone knew, you know, it was in an arena.
You know, like a 10,000-seat arena, like, you know, any kind of normal basketball thing you go to.
And he shows up, and he's glad-handing, and he's really excited, and he's there, and we're all walking down.
We're doing our, like, you know, the Olympics.
You walk down the middle of the arena, and you wave.
And so he was on the side, like, you know, high-fiving everybody, you know, from whatever contingencies in different countries.
And then he spoke.
He spoke for a few minutes, and he got a very warm reception.
It was a little bit surprising, but then again, You know, I'm sure they were gracious to have him there and wanted to be as, you know, as nice as they can be.
And you know what?
This is a Senate around Israel and Senate around Judaism and, you know, Malay likes the Jews apparently.
I think he's actually working towards converting to some degree towards Judaism.
It's a very strange thing to have to, you know, experience in real time.
I'll hold out judgment on that one until I see further.
Did Malay tell you all that he was inspired to become president because his beloved dead dog told him through spiritual mediums?
Did he mention that?
Well, you know, I had to hold up my phone.
And by the way, we're getting close to like the Star Trek kind of, you know, technology where it will translate in real time.
So somebody had a phone, we were reading it, even though, you know, I was trying to speak Spanish as much as I could.
Uh it started out a little bit weird he sort of spoke in this weird voice and that it was a little bit funny but kind of weird and strange but I gotta tell you um I could I could see the oration skills that he does have and how he could you know get people to rally behind him that he does have some of those good skills as most authoritarians have right there's some version of that um but uh
What's interesting enough is that we were warned about protests throughout the whole time we were there and nothing really materialized and part of it was I spoke to some locals who were all just dead afraid of doing anything because they were so threatening and they're cracking down and we had driven by in the middle of the of the city.
I'd seen more riot cops congregated on a corner than I think I have video maybe I'll try and post it somewhere but like it was it was insane how like more than anything I've ever seen in America.
And I think that that early show of force sort of dissuaded a lot of people who might have wanted to protest.
And so there just hasn't been a lot of that unrest in the streets.
Yeah, they cracked down pretty hard on that stuff.
Well, thank you for that eyewitness account.
And unfortunately, we have to move from that budding authoritarian country into another one.
That's right, the United States of America.
Nick, this is our first show together in 2024.
And from the moment that this year rang in to right now, literally every eye in the country right now is on Donald Trump.
And for good reason.
I mean, this is a developing, really, really pressing threat that we're having to deal with.
And Nick, we have now been told that the Supreme Court will start hearing the case of whether or not Donald Trump should be kicked off of ballots around the country starting on February 8th.
The request has been that there should be a ruling that should be handed in by Super Tuesday, which is March 5th, which is when Colorado, which is the main state that is being decided here, but it's largely probably going to decide other states as well.
March 5th sounds like it might be the day, Super Tuesday, by the time we might figure out if Donald Trump will be kept off ballots around the country.
You know, I'm interested to see what you think or where you see this whole thing heading.
I look at this, and I told someone this the other day, they said to me, I'm so excited that maybe Trump will be thrown off.
And I said, listen, does he deserve to be thrown off?
Absolutely, he does.
But there's nothing good that can come from any of this.
This is a bad situation, no matter how you look at it.
I mean, you know, there are a few ways to look at this because obviously there are a whole bunch load of states in the United States that doesn't matter if he's on the ballot or not, right?
Because he's losing those states no matter what.
So does that even come into play?
Like Colorado, he's losing Colorado no matter what.
All those electoral college votes are going to Biden.
But, obviously, if it happened in somewhere like Michigan or Arizona or other, you know, toss-up states, that becomes an issue.
I am fascinated that there was an argument to be made about him leading an insurrection that was successful in a legal sense, right?
It went all the way to the Supreme Court and, of course, all seven of the justices were appointed by Democratic governors, which, is it a thing or not?
What do you think, Jared?
I don't know.
Listen, Colorado Supreme Court law is not my specialty.
I'll just go ahead and lay that on the ground.
That is not where my interests have lied.
Fair enough, fair enough.
But, you know, like, listen, you know, they're as political as a lot of what we've been saying.
This is certainly the Supreme Court of America has been.
This is I'm sorry, but this is how the country works now.
Like, basically, you know, whatever state it's going to be, largely things are going to go the way that the political winds are blowing.
Right.
And, you know, and listen, I get the argument, let the people decide.
But we've we've when you let the people decide on some of these things, we've seen that they're they're much more willing to to go against what democracy's principles are.
And that's the weird thing.
And I'm not even sure this is the right part to stick this point in.
But, you know, when you're when you're running for president, you're not in the White House.
You have a built in advantage because you have the guy who's in the office who can make mistakes or is accountable for everything.
And you can just be hanging out, talking shit all day long.
And that helps in the public opinion.
And that's the problem that Biden is not going to be able to necessarily overcome unless they radically figure out what they how they want to run.
Yeah, we have a big story about what's going on within Biden's campaign.
And I actually have some information that I was gleaning from some Democratic strategist audience.
I'll share that in a little bit.
You know, when it comes to states like Colorado, other states where Trump might possibly be thrown off the ballot, you know, he would probably win Colorado in the Republican race.
And Super Tuesday, I mean, if the Supreme Court strikes this down and or, you know, upholds it and strikes him off the ballot, God knows what kind of havoc that's going to like wreak when it comes to the GOP nomination, you know, because we're going to talk more about Nikki Haley in a second.
A lot of the hubbub that started to build up around her and her new rivalry with Donald Trump.
I will say this, Nick, do you know who the last major presidential candidate to be barred from any ballots was?
Oh my goodness.
I think I saw that, but now I forgot.
Tell me who it is.
It would be Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln, who did not appear on ballots in the South.
And won despite it, because the South basically sat out the presidential election that year.
Um, this isn't good.
This isn't a good situation in any way, shape, or form.
Uh, the idea that a major candidate would be barred from the ballot sucks.
Uh, if anybody has ever earned it, it's Donald Trump.
The only other people I could possibly think about, uh, as of right now in the modern era would be Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon because, uh, let me check my notes.
They committed treason in order to win the presidency.
But besides that, it sucks.
Besides that, if he is struck off the ballot, if you think that this is a dangerous environment right now, if you think that we've seen violence and the potential for violence in this country, if the Supreme Court goes ahead and keeps him off the ballot, I don't even know what happens then.
And here's the thing.
I think everybody is kind of looking at this and like, oh, of course the Supreme Court's going to rule in his favor.
He appointed three of them.
That's not true.
That's not how any of this actually works.
People need to remember that the establishment Republican Party and also the judicial branch of it that has stolen all of this and packed the court, more or less, They don't really like Donald Trump.
They thought he was an incredibly useful tool.
A lot of these people want to get past him.
A lot of them are really, really excited about finding a more establishment candidate.
We don't know.
We have no idea what the Supreme Court is going to do in this situation, but I can tell you this.
No matter what happens, it's bad.
No matter how this turns out, it's bad.
It's going to be uncomfortable.
It's going to be dangerous.
It sucks.
And I think you're just sort of the state of our political system is bad, bad in general, and like the way this is going to play out going forward is just going to continue to get worse and worse.
And I suppose there was this guardrail at some point about like negative campaigning that you weren't supposed to do for all those years, right?
And once that hen get out of the gate or out of the, what's that, whatever that, you know, the pigs run out of the pen.
Once that is open.
You know, you can go anywhere down the road on that.
Pigs, peacocks, just let them out.
They're not coming back.
They're pulling the road and whatever.
But the point being that there's a progression there now that will only continue to get worse.
We're going to have AI fakes of the candidates saying stuff.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
And that's really sad.
It's really sad when we realize what there were precedents that sort of norms that seem to work better than now.
But yeah, like I always say, authoritarianism ends up taking power democratically, and enough people want it, and then they realize after the fact that it was a big mistake, and then we have to try and undo it, which has been done as well in many countries.
It's taken a little while, but they've been able to extricate themselves.
Sometimes.
The best time to get rid of an authoritarian regime is before it takes power.
That's straight up the truth.
And by the way, speaking of authoritarianism, Nick, there's a video that Trump actually shared over on Truth Social, Gabber, Grabber, whatever the hell it's called at this point.
Nick, we've been telling people for a while that Donald Trump was not just using white evangelicals for his own purposes, but that he was also, and him and the people around him, intentionally pushing the idea that he was a divine agent from God.
This is something that I covered in The Midnight Kingdom.
Man, it's really, it's taken on new connotations.
Everyone should give this a listen. - And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So God gave us Trump.
God said, I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state.
So God made Trump.
I need somebody with arms, strong enough to rustle the deep state, and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.
Somebody to ruffle the feathers.
Tame Cantankerous World Economic Forum.
Come home hungry.
Have to wait until the First Lady is done with lunch with friends.
Then tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon.
And mean it.
So God gave us Trump.
I need somebody who can shape an axe, but wield a sword.
Who had the courage to step foot in North Korea.
Who can make money from the tar of the sand.
Turn liquid to gold.
Who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation, will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon, but then put in another 72 hours.
So God made Trump.
God had to have somebody willing to go into the den of vipers, call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent's.
The poison of vipers is on their lips, and yet stop.
So God made Trump.
God said, I need somebody who will be strong and courageous.
Who will not be afraid or terrified of the wolves when they attack.
A man who cares for the flock.
A shepherd to mankind who won't ever leave nor forsake them.
I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith.
And know the belief of God and country.
Somebody who's willing to drill, bring back manufacturing and American jobs, farm the lands, secure our borders, build our military, fight the system all day, and finish a hard week's work by attending church on Sunday.
And then his oldest son turns and says, Dad, let's make America great again.
Dad, let's build back a country to be the envy of the world again.
So God made Trump.
Yeah, so God made Trump. so God made Trump.
For those who have heard it before, that was a take on the old audio, God made a farmer.
In this case though, God looked down on his creation, decided that he needed a strong, humble, loving, faithful man, and of course he found Donald Trump.
Nick, this is...
This is both one of the dumbest and also one of the most disturbing things that I've seen in a very long time.
They are leaning into really fucked up, disturbing, dangerous territory right now.
Hey, good interstellar music, by the way.
Like, it actually was really well done, I thought, as far as production value, but what is this thing about waiting for the First Lady to eat lunch?
Like, there's some weird keywords going on, right?
And maybe you can decipher what exactly they're trying to say, because it's obviously more religious-focused.
I don't really get it.
Well, no, it's that it's this idea that Donald Trump, who, of course, is this, you know, New York socialite, like elite.
But, you know, he's it's like a farmer who comes home and he finds his wife is having lunch and gabbing on with the ladies.
And he just tells all of them, I love you so much.
Like it's this this fake reality that they have to fit him into, like, which is so funny, Nick.
He's everything.
That they hate and they have to do everything that they possibly can to twist them and contort them into something that's at least approaching acceptable.
I mean, I suppose you have to do a lot of that action and methods to deal with religion itself, right?
There's a lot of weird stuff that you have to kind of accept.
That's not necessarily reality.
I mean, they're going on about him attending church on Sunday.
His oldest son, he doesn't, we call him, you know, by his name, oldest son, which must be another reference to, right, to whatever.
Oh, it's all biblical.
Yeah, the oldest son, the, yeah.
I mean, the other problem here is it's not enough to just to lionize this man and canonize him, but it's also to cast the other side as vipers and as satan and as you know that that's what's really kind of concerning because there's so many just decent people on the other side as well that they would probably respect their lives and yet now they're just vilified and it's here we are.
Nick do you because for me as someone who's raised up in the extreme evangelical cult like I've felt this for a very long time I've seen it coming this was why I told everybody what was coming Nick, do you feel the temperature turning up?
Do you feel it like just like really, really starting to inch its way up?
Well, it's a little bit reminiscent of 2016 when we were already kind of, um, I was not excited about the potential for what Trump was going to do to Hillary and what he's going to say about Hillary.
And you can kind of already see the bubbling early on.
Uh, and it got, it got as bad as we thought it was going to be.
And yes, so this is that same kind of feeling maybe even more where They have to go scorched earth because there's so much against them, against Trump, the mountain of evidence in terms of the lawsuits he has against him.
Remember, he's not any more popular now than he was in 2020, right?
But they got to figure out if they can tap into, are there any more voters out there in that evangelical world and other people who haven't been activated before in the political process?
Can they scrape together a few more with this kind of garbage?
There's some weird stuff happening.
I wrote this to a friend of the pod, Chauncey DeVega.
He's got a column coming out in Salon.
There's a weird thing that's happening, Nick.
One, we know that evangelicalism in this country is shrinking because it's become so extreme that people don't want anything to do with it.
But one thing that has happened is that Trump's devoted followers, first of all, the evangelicals, they're not just cult.
They're culted.
You know, they are culted out of their minds.
We have entered into what I called earlier, which is sort of the death cult part of this, where they're ready for whatever.
It is taking people that I would call culturally Christian, people who like, you know, they, like my family, some of them are like, you know, they don't go, they didn't go to church in the past.
They go to church now.
But in the past, you know, they were like, yeah, I'm born again.
I believe in Jesus or whatever.
And it's like doubling them down.
It's making them become more radical in order to support Trump and keep moving along those lines.
And you're right.
He hasn't necessarily gained popularity.
It's that he's kept a large swath of that popularity, and that popularity has deepened.
And by the way, that is despite him saying incredible dumb shit.
Yeah, like such as?
I love studying the – if you take a look, I mean the words.
I don't know what it is.
The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible, was so horrible, but so fascinating.
It was, I don't know, it was just different.
I just find it, I'm so attracted to seeing it.
So many mistakes were made.
See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you.
I think you could have negotiated that.
All the people died.
So many people died.
You know, that was the disaster.
If you got hit by a bullet in the leg, You were essentially going to die or lose the leg.
That's why you had so many people, no legs, no arms.
If you got hit in the arm or the leg, it meant you were up because the infection gangrene.
It was just such a, you know, sort of a horrible time.
But that's, I was thinking to myself, because I was reading something and I said, this is something that could have been negotiated.
You know, it was just for all those people to die and they died viciously.
That was a vicious, vicious, God, Nick.
It's like listening to a lawnmower try and start.
Listening to this asshole try and work something up in his addled brain.
That was a tough one for our country.
But I think it's, you know, Abraham Lincoln.
Of course, if you negotiated it, you probably wouldn't even know who Abraham Lincoln was. - There you go. - According to God, Nick, it's like listening to a lawnmower try and start, listening to this asshole try and work something up in his addled brain.
And the thing is, he's a divine agent.
He's the perfect healer and leader.
He's so full of shit and he just has no idea what he's talking about all the time.
It's incredible to actually listen to him.
I think he knows what he's talking about because think about what he's trying to say there, right?
He's trying to say if they would have negotiated.
So what would a negotiation have looked like between the North and the South that would have ended the war, right?
What do you think that would be?
Well, there are a couple of answers here, and Nick, I assume in Argentina you heard Nikki Haley just completely, like, step all over her shit in being asked what caused the Civil War, and she basically talked about economic freedom.
I covered that while you were gone.
This is what sets him apart.
Like, this shit, like, he just says this without even a second thought.
The negotiation is the continuation of slavery into the 20th century.
Absolutely.
That's what, you know, that's because obviously if the South was willing to go, to die, to secede and, you know, have their slavery, they weren't going to negotiate out of that.
They were, that would have to have been the thing that would have solved that.
Nick, the only things that that could possibly mean, and one of the things I really enjoy with these idiots is to actually break down what they're saying and tell people like what it is they're trying to argue.
There's only a couple of things you could argue here.
One is that the South would sell the government their slaves.
Right?
And basically, you know, give up slavery willingly.
They would not have done that.
It was their culture.
It was their entire economy.
On top of that, they weren't going to go ahead and jump into bed with industrialism.
That wasn't going to happen.
That wasn't at the heart of anything.
So that's not a possibility.
The idea that they could have continued to have slavery going forward.
The reason why the South seceded is because they lost their political advantage.
They weren't going to win any more elections.
I bring you back to the point of Abraham Lincoln was able to become president without the South even having him on the ballot.
That's what changed.
Because the beginning of the country was set up to give the South that much power and leverage, and they lost it.
So there was no such thing as that.
But yeah, he's just telling his supporters, yeah, we could have gotten away with this without the Civil War.
Right, I mean, the South would have been like, well, we won't import any more slaves.
We'll just rely on whoever we have and then them making more slaves.
Cool, chattel slavery.
It's wonderful.
Yeah, that would have been like, you know, and by the way, something about that argument, like I can picture people now saying, yeah, that would have been fine.
You know, we won't import them anymore from Africa, but we'll just have whoever's here.
That uh you know that it just frustrates me because it's it I could see it resonating with a lot of that electorate and um I don't know how we got here I don't know how and by the way I don't know if we ever if we're if we got here I think we've already always been here right and it's taken someone like Trump to sort of plug you know plug them into the wall and get the electricity going So if I'm not incorrect, and every now and then the years get hazy, I am pretty sure that the U.S.
outlawed the importation of slaves.
It was the early 19th century, and then it like moved towards the chattel slave system.
There was nothing to do.
You're like, this is absolute horseshit, but it's the fantasy that Trump spins.
Did I forget that then?
Is that right?
If I'm not incorrect, it was 1806, 1807.
Yeah, and then it moved into a chattel slavery system.
But like, yeah, you couldn't just, like, negotiate your way out of this.
None of this has any relationship with reality.
And meanwhile, Nick, this is the larger story here.
Trump is still on pace to not just win the nomination but walk away from it.
We need to talk about, like, how Iowa looks before I head in there and before we have the caucuses a week from today.
We're recording this on the 8th.
The numbers out of Iowa, still staggering.
Trump, 50%.
That's right.
Half of the possible GOP electorate in Iowa is expected to caucus for Donald Trump.
DeSantis has 18%, Nikki Haley 16%.
He's far and away the top candidate here.
He's going to probably tiptoe out of Iowa without hardly breaking a sweat.
And he's going to go in New Hampshire, which, by the way, might be a little bit closer.
We'll see.
But I can't believe that it's forming up like this.
I can't believe that the establishment Republican Party can't get their shit together in order to try and push forward here.
I think it's the Frankenstein's monster.
I think they don't have any control over this anymore and as a result they have to now back him because they can't afford to lose their positions and their advantage or their votes with the constituency as well.
Again, the cat's out of the bag, and it's never going back in.
That's the worry about this, is like, how would the Republican Party after Trump even ever get back to normalcy?
I don't know how we do that.
Now, the only maybe encouraging thing is that, you know, Trump 2.0, Ron DeSantis, failed miserably, right?
It did not work out at all.
And we were worried about this a while ago, that somebody like him would, you know, take the mantle and then, you know, keep going with it.
So there's something there, right, that does this die with Trump when Trump is no longer with us?
Yeah, that's the question, is where does this whole thing go?
By the way, for people who haven't been aware of this, and it's been circulating for a while now, Ron DeSantis, it sounds like, might very well drop out the night of the Iowa caucuses, or possibly the next day.
He just didn't have it.
We've talked about it.
I can't wait personally to see him in person.
It's almost like you're wanting to warm your hands by the dumpster fire.
You just want to see how hot it actually is or how disgusting and slimy it is.
Trump is going to get through this.
I don't think he's going to be a problem.
We've talked a lot, Nick.
This is one of the things we've covered.
Trump and the people around him, the new right, these crypto-fascists, basically they create a story for anything that they need to control.
And everybody's just like, yeah, fine, we'll go with that story.
The Nikki Haley threat is already being addressed.
Trump is calling her a globalist, which for those at home who aren't following, that means that she's part of the New World Order, part of the Deep State, and yeah, that's right, part of the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.
Vivek Ramaswamy and the people around him, Nick, this has been fun.
The conspiracy theory that's growing around is that Vivek and others need to continue supporting Trump and giving people alternatives because, that's right Nick, Nikki Haley and the people around her and the people who support her, including the globalists, they want to assassinate Donald Trump.
They want to get rid of him.
So they need to be very careful because otherwise Nikki Haley and the deep state might assassinate Donald Trump.
That's going to be your Republican GOP primary.
That's going to be one of the main storylines.
Last time, it was Ted Cruz's dad helped assassinate John F. Kennedy, and his wife is ugly.
Oh, and Marco Rubio probably has a small penis.
This year, it's that Nikki Haley is part of an international Jewish conspiracy to assassinate Donald Trump.
Oh, absolutely.
Remember, Tucker's the one who's also fueling that whole thing as well by driving all sorts of reasons.
Why wouldn't they kill him?
Why wouldn't you?
Yeah, I think he looks at, you know, the Democrats.
To me, I'd much rather have this conspiracy that Nikki Haley's behind the assassination of Tim versus the Democrats or the Deep State, because that seems... Well, we're all the same, Nick.
I mean, it's the same thing.
Yeah, I guess.
I just feel like it would inspire more violence if it was the deep state or like the Democrats or something.
But even still, it's insane.
And that's what I said.
There's there is a graph and you plot it going to the left to right and it continues to move in a direction inexorably.
So, of course, that's going to be what's going to be what we have to deal with in this election cycle.
And then four years from now, I shudder to think what we'll be dealing with then.
But, you know, it won't be democracy.
It won't resemble anything we So, before we get to the other side of the coin and we talk about the Biden campaign and some really, I don't want to oversell this, pretty incredible developments that have been happening.
How are you feeling heading into Iowa before I head out there into the frozen tundra and see what happens myself?
What would you say right now are you expecting?
I mean, it's the smell of inevitability, right?
We're simply going to, they're going to play out the string.
It's like when you're down big in the football and you still got to do the snaps and take a knee and let the clock run.
That, that to me is what it's going to be like.
I suspect you're going to see a lot of sort of low energy there, knowing that like, you know, Trump is just going to take the whole thing.
Now, the Trump energy will obviously be high.
I'm actually curious if you're, if you're nearby DeSantis, can you tell me if he blinks vertically or not?
I would like to know.
I think I'm going to hear an engine whirring that makes him, you know, blink.
I want to remind people, Nick, that that that smell of certainty that you're talking about or inevitability.
2016.
Trump barely came in second in Iowa.
Ted Cruz took it with 27%.
Trump had 24.
Marco Rubio had 23.
Like, Trump very easily could have come in third in Iowa in 2016.
He's probably, my guess, if I had to put a number on it right now, I would say that Donald Trump wins Iowa with 47, 46% of the vote.
I mean, I could be wrong.
Maybe it's over 50%.
That's a wild swing.
That is a big, big change to take place over eight years.
I mean, I'm looking at today's average over on that one website that we don't always talk about, but he's at 61.8%.
They have him at 60?
If I'm reading this correctly, it's 61.8, DeSantis 12.1, Haley 11.2, and Ramaswamy 4.8.
I think that's astronomically high.
The numbers I've been seeing have him closer to 50, but if anybody's even talking about him at 60, that's... Yeah, so I bet you it's within the range of the 47 to 52 in that area.
Yeah, I mean, and he'll just be 30 points higher than anybody else.
Whew, that is a lot.
I'm looking forward to getting out there.
Man, there's nothing like the Iowa Caucus.
It is such a weird, weird place, and you get a real sense of what's going on there.
On the other side... Quickly, like when you're there, it's like you're in the gymnasium hanging out with other people just chatting, right?
Well, at the caucus, that's more or less how this thing works.
And the rallies kind of work the exact same.
A lot of the time, these rallies and talks and meetings, they try and sort of recreate the feeling of it in order to get people sort of actively trying to convince each other.
There's hardly anything better to get a real temperature on what a race is going to be than Iowa.
The actual caucus, in my mind, I picture just like musical chairs.
It is wild.
Well, I think we're both confident saying that President Joe Biden will win the Democratic contest in Iowa when it's held.
But there are some strange things brewing, Nick.
Some leaks have come out over the past couple of days.
That former President Barack Obama in the last couple of months has been pressuring Joe Biden to change his campaign going into 2024.
He is apparently, and this is from a lot of leaks, he has quote expressed concern about Trump and also the Biden campaign.
What he has said Is that too much of the campaign is being held within the White House, which I'll talk about a little bit here in a minute, what that means and why he's probably right on that on that front.
He has suggested a shakeup, a reordering of things.
But Nick, as we talk about very often on this show, these stories don't just show up in the press out of nowhere.
Like they don't just happen on the wire and end up in the Times or the Post.
The fact that we're now hearing that Barack Obama has serious concerns about Joe Biden's re-election chances and wants it to change, I think is something that we need to take a look at.
Well, I mean, certainly no one, no incumbent has ever had this low polling numbers ever.
Again, we're in a different time that you really can't compare to any other time in our political history.
So what does that mean?
However, in a normal circumstance, yes, you would take a lot of your very competent people in your administration, place them out of the White House in charge of the re-election campaign.
So their hands, their feet on the ground, they're ready to make, you know, nimble decisions.
They haven't done that.
Nope.
There's only a one or two reasons why you wouldn't take your smartest people who are there to something to jump out of there.
You want to want to jump on the Mac and answer for there's a whole lot of reasons.
So what you just says exactly right, you know, there is such a difference between governing.
And campaigning.
They are like two completely different things.
The Biden campaign back in 2020, I'm not going to sit here and tell you it set the world on fire, but as we've talked about on this show, they've not done a good job of communicating.
That is not their strength whatsoever.
And in all of this, this explains, Nick, why we had, I want to say three months of Bidenomics.
Why we were, you know, while everybody was just satisfied with the economy, why we were continually told, it's good, it's good, look at all these things we've done, but we're not going to highlight this.
I think part of it is that they don't really want to move those people out there to the campaign because they need them in the White House.
They're constantly in crisis.
And by crisis, I don't mean that there's big scandals.
I mean, it's everything from the Ukraine war to what's happening with Israel and Gaza.
They have no idea how to talk about any of this shit.
And so as a result, they don't really want to move people out there.
And on top of that, this is a newsflash.
Joe Biden is kind of a control freak.
And he probably wants his campaign to be under the same roof as him.
That's how he's always been, and anybody who's ever worked with him knows that.
He likes to get his hands dirty with this stuff.
But it doesn't work.
That doesn't, like, that's one of the reasons why this is not Nick, I almost said it's not an inspiring campaign.
That, like, uninspiring doesn't even begin to cut it.
There's nothing happening with this thing.
They have to set up shop some way, some shape or form somewhere else.
Right, I agree.
And by the way, they kicked off the campaign basically with a speech where he has a chance to show that, you know, he's got energy and he's gonna be able to, you know, make his points.
You know, they framed everything about Trump, and I think the bigger battle they're going to have, though, is all the perceptions of the normal stuff, too, that they've got to deal with in terms of the economy, right?
It's too easy to lie about the numbers in the economy and make it seem like it's going terribly, no matter what you say, even though the stock market's going great, unemployment's going great, the inflation... Time out, time out, Nick.
Google just got ready to lay off 30,000 people due to AI programs, so let's hold it on those job numbers.
Ah, OK, fair enough.
But that's not related to whether the economy is good or bad.
They're just trying to, you know... Well, the economy sucks.
We disagree on that front.
The economy just straight up sucks.
But that's neither here nor there.
Well, it depends on how you want, like if you, if we use the bellwether nor, you know, uh, normal, uh, criteria, it's, it's, everyone always uses those things.
I just said, you'd say it was good.
Right.
But no one necessarily feels that.
I will say though, that maybe it does feel like the, uh, uh, um, inflation has gone down a little bit.
Like I feel like at the supermarket, it might be, I've seen a little bit of, uh, it says the guy who just got back from Argentina, where you have to take like a wheelbarrow.
You know how much money you can get out of an ATM in the US dollars in Argentina?
Oh man, I can't even wait to hear.
It's like $35 is the most you can, because obviously they're so afraid of a run and everyone taking all the money out.
But it was like, it's a, it's a 900 something to one.
It's crazy how much, you know, how, how different it is there.
Uh, but our, our economy, I'm sorry, our economy just straight up sucks.
And the, the, those metrics that you were talking about, it's always about how well people are being exploited.
That's the main point here.
The AI like layoff that's coming, not just for Google, but elsewhere is going to be something.
I don't know when it's going to hit.
I don't know how it's going to hit.
But one of the things that happens in the tech sector, they're a little bit like sheep, right?
Like one of them gets spooked.
They all get spooked and they all start going in a certain direction.
I mean, if you told me right now that by the middle of the year, we've watched, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand people laid off because of AI technology.
I'd be shocked.
If you told me it was over a million, I would also, I would maybe be more shocked, but not that shocked.
You know, like, we have no idea what's going to happen on that front.
There is nothing that the Biden White House right now has been able to hang its hat on in terms of what it's been able to do, even though it's basically, I always say this, it's the old Disney cartoon where, where Goofy has to stretch out and hold the wings of the plane together.
There's not a lot that they've been able to communicate.
And that Barack Obama is worried about this.
And I checked in with some Democratic strategists I know, I, you know who's really worried about their legacy, Nick?
Barack Obama.
Barack Obama is as worried about how history sees him as any individual that we have ever seen as President of the United States of America.
That is like one of his chief concerns.
He does not want to see his former vice president, which is considered part of his presidential tree, to be a one-time president who loses to Donald Trump.
On top of that, you might remember, Nick, he didn't want Joe Biden to run for the presidency.
He handpicked Hillary Clinton in 2016, back when Joe Biden was ready to go ahead and succeed him.
He doesn't want this to fall apart.
And what has he told them, Nick?
He's told them to basically replace their entire campaign staff with, ding ding ding, his old campaign staff.
And that is what he has advised.
And I don't know if Biden's going to take him up on it.
I think Biden is very independent when it comes to Barack Obama, but they need to do something.
They need to do something and that's something right now is just to focus on Trump.
Their whole campaign probably is going to be trying to just make sure that everyone understands the differences and then hitting Trump on all of his issues.
I don't know.
It seems to make rational sense that that's what you would want to do, because he'll argue, yeah, they don't want to hear about me and the economy, they're not going to listen to me anyway, so let's go to the meat and potato stuff.
But it's tough.
I have to admit, even though he's an incumbent, but his polling is so low, he's so unpopular in that sense.
That it's a real challenge, right?
It's going to be a real challenge for even the smartest of smartest people to figure out exactly how to thread this needle.
And that's how sad it is that it's going to be a threaded needle, right?
If Biden wins, it's going to be pretty damn close, wouldn't you say?
I couldn't agree more.
I told the strategist today when I talked to him preparing for the show, I said, here's how you campaign.
Have Biden come out and say, let me be a bridge.
Let me, let me be the bridge to the next generation.
That's my job.
Get us through this moment.
We'll move over here.
But that's the whole point.
They don't have a story.
They don't have any sort of an appeal that is actually, because Trump sucks, man.
I'm sorry, but Trump, like all he's got is this authoritarian dictator shit.
He doesn't have anything else to offer anybody, any solutions, any actual understanding of anything.
Obama has pushed David Plouffe.
And I want to say this.
David Plouffe is a neoliberal corporate shill.
I think he has embarrassed himself shilling for Uber, he's shilled for Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, you name it.
He was part of the acronym movement to go after Donald Trump back in 2020.
It was eh.
But I'll say this, Nick.
You know what he's good at?
He's good at going ahead and pushing public relations stories.
And I'll tell you who needs some PR right now, that's Joe Biden.
So if you want to get all of these people together, you want to come up and sell Joe Biden like a new flavor of Pepsi, for fuck's sake, do it.
But figure out a way to do it that will inspire people and get us past this terrible, terrible moment.
I guess, but this is not going to be like the Blues Brothers where they get the band back together, you know?
No.
You're not going to go visit the diner and get Macintyre Murphy to throw out his... The Johns aren't leaving their podcast microphone.
Yeah, and so I don't think that Plouffe wants to do it.
I don't know if he'll take a job if they want him to come do it anyway, right?
That's the other issue.
Well, I mean, it depends how many of these corporate donors want to make sure that Biden stays in.
I mean, listen, Axelrod would jump on this in a heartbeat.
I mean, what's he doing?
He's keeping a seat warm at CNN, you know?
And he has a podcast that I think five people, including his family, listen to.
Like, I don't know.
Something needs to shift here.
But the fact that this took place, Nick, a couple of months ago, I want people to have a little bit of media literacy.
This was just leaked a couple of days ago to the major papers, right?
And the major websites.
This meeting happened a couple of months ago.
It just got leaked to the papers.
I'll tell you why that happened.
It's because Biden hasn't taken Obama up on any of his suggestions yet.
And Obama knows how to apply pressure.
He probably made a movie deal in the morning.
And then, you know, immediately, like, told somebody to leak this shit.
They're putting pressure on Biden to try and change this, uh, this campaign.
I don't know if he's going to do it.
And quite frankly, Biden has an independent streak when it comes to Obama.
I think he's still pissed off about what happened in 2016, but something needs to change and something needs to change fast.
We don't need to talk about Donald Trump all the time.
We need something else given to us.
That is true.
And speaking of leaks, I think it's important to understand that leaks haven't really been happening.
You know, Obama's administration was really renowned for not having a lot of leaks, especially when you compare it to, like, what happened with Trump, which is every day.
The only leaks that we've gotten from the Biden crew is this, and that's that Kamala Harris is the problem.
They love that shit.
They are more than happy to leak that every time that they get a chance.
And by the way, she has not been seen.
Our Vice President is as absent from the public eye as our Defense Secretary.
Like, that is the only leak that we get in any of this.
And by the way, Nick, I want to point out, it's not cool that our Defense Secretary disappeared for two weeks while having a major medical episode that no one knew about.
I agree.
I agree.
It's certainly problematic, but it was also impressive.
I want to say it was impressive that it didn't leak, right?
How they kept that quiet that long is really amazing to me.
Well, I mean, when you're facing down the barrel of a potential World War III, maybe you don't want people knowing your Defense Secretary is incapacitated.
Yeah, okay, fine.
That's not a bad reason to keep everyone quiet.
I don't like it.
I don't want it to be true, but I assume that's a primary motivator.
All right, everybody.
That's going to bring us to the end of this episode.
When you hear us again, we're going to be inching up toward the Iowa caucus.
We're going to have the Wednesday night GOP debate.
Again, that airs at 9 p.m.
Eastern, and we will be live with our reactions and analysis immediately afterward.
Again, I'm going to Iowa.
I'll be there from Saturday all the way through the caucuses on Monday.
All you gotta do, go to patreon.com slash monkeric podcast in order to get those very exclusive shows and analysis.
In the meantime, Nick, it's so good to have you back.
You can find him.
Nick, can you hear me?
That's me.
You can find me at jystex.
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