Trump Goes There Because The Polling Encourages It
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman cover the bottomless pit that is the Trump Campaign's disgusting tactic of lying and race baiting. From saying the quiet part out loud "They want the white guy..." to raising the specter of violence against his political enemies, Trump has no other alternative to squeeze out just enough votes to win the race. They also discuss how Democrats are flirting with the notion of not certifying a win if Trump gets more votes. Good Times.
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I'm Jared J. Sexton. I'm here with my friend and co-host Nick Halsman.
Nick, I am cold.
I mean, really?
I'm cold. Huh.
I mean, what is cold?
What is time? What is cold?
What is time? What is cold?
Cold is where the summer finally, finally, finally gives way to the fall.
And I am as happy as can be to be cold.
Although I can't overcome the cold at the moment, which is a very intense feeling, but I really enjoy it.
I'm happy. Give me a number.
What are we talking about here? This morning in the 40s, now it's in the 60s, but it's a change.
It's a welcome change.
I am here to welcome it.
Okay, that's great. All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray.
You could not survive in 60 degree temperatures.
Is that correct? Maybe more.
Before I moved here to LA, I could have.
Okay, well, I'm in a flannel.
I'm in a jacket, which is my natural environment, and we are here to talk about the news and breaking news and current events.
Meanwhile, we would like you to go over to patreon.com slash montcraigpodcast in order to keep the show editorially independent.
Ad-free and growing.
We are gaining a bunch of followers and listeners, and we appreciate you.
But you're going to want to listen to the Weekender Show on Friday.
You're going to want to come to some live shows, some post-event analysis, including election night analysis.
Nick, they need to go over to patreon.com slash my great podcast.
They do. Lots of extra stuff to be part of and the community is so good.
And besides, we know you're listening to the regular free version of that.
So just come on over.
Just come on over.
Okay, everybody.
So we have some really instructive things today, and we have Donald J. Trump to thank for that.
Trump went on Fox News this weekend, Nick, with Maria Bartiromo, and just really, really got wild, leaving it all out there on the field.
There's a ton of stuff here and I want to say before we begin this.
Donald Trump is a criminal and an intuitive fascist.
We've talked about this, but what we're getting ready to listen to, this plethora of nonsense and hatefulness, is really, really instructive, and it is on us as part of our job, Nick, in order to look at this.
So let's jump right in and let's find out if Trump made any news.
I thought it was odd that today President Biden said that he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time in seven weeks or something.
They've been at war for over a year.
And he hasn't spoken with him in seven weeks.
When was the last time you've spoken with Netanyahu?
Like two days ago.
And he came to my house in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, with his wife, was lovely.
But he came to my, to Mar-a-Lago, he came to, I guess he was at the White House, maybe the U.N.
Is there anything you could share with us in terms of that, the Israel-Iran conflict?
What would you do to end the war on Israel?
I could tell you that Bibi has been very strong.
He is not listening to Biden.
It sounds like he stopped sharing information with the U.S. Look, look, look.
Biden is the one that came up with the Afghanistan plan.
Cool. So Nick, what we're learning here is that the former president of the United States of America, and by the way, let me look here, that makes him a private citizen, that he is in near constant contact with the prime minister of Israel in a middle of a war, and that the prime minister of Israel is going around the president of the United States to talk to the former president of the United States and potential next president of the United States of America, and that is a hatch act violation.
And yet we're not talking about it at all. It's not making any headlines. Here we are.
You know, they could just be talking about their golf games.
We don't know what they're talking about necessarily.
They could be talking about their love of Philadelphia and how much both of them are drawn there, particularly as a swing state and a place to launch your career as a war criminal.
You know, don't get me started with, I just for fun was starting to look at like Hillary's lead coming at this point of the race and how we're looking at Kamala's lead right now.
And you know, when you're up by 10, 11, 12 points with only a week or two before the election and you lose it, you know, all those thoughts started getting in my mind about interference in election stuff.
But here we are. There's no question we already know that Netanyahu and Trump have been talking and that there's some sort of coordination going on between what Netanyahu is doing and then widening this war and trying to help Trump with this race.
You know, the longer this goes without any kind of ceasefire, In theory, the better it is for Trump, right?
Just because there's enough people who are upset about it that the incumbent is just a negative for them.
This is, I know we use the word unprecedented so much when it comes to Donald Trump, but this is incredibly unprecedented.
We have seen people vying to be president of the United States.
We've talked about this ad nauseum where Ronald Reagan interfered in foreign politics and ensured that American hostages were going to be kept longer to help his electoral chances.
Same thing happened with Richard Nixon, who used the Vietnam War to his advantage, both of them committing more or less treason.
In this case, we now have, and you and I talked about this, I want to say it was back in, had to have been in November or at least December of 2020.
We talked about the fact that Donald Trump was going to set himself up basically as a president in exile.
And we've now heard in the past week that he's in near constant communication with the Prime Minister of Israel, that he's constantly talking to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, what's happening, Nick, on the outside of this?
The United States government, under the Biden administration, we're now putting U.S. troops over there, operating batteries, to try and take down any sort of strikes on Israel that might take place.
They have given Israel everything that they have asked for and more, more or less fealty with the only sort of derision being that Biden will occasionally tell a reporter, like, I really have bad things to say about this Netanyahu guy.
They have circumvented The government of the United States of America while continuing to use the government of the United States of America while coordinating with the past and possible future president.
It is a wild thing that he admitted.
And the fact that we're not reading about this and this isn't like the A block on almost every channel tells us how far down the rabbit hole we've slid at this point.
But let's not lose sight of the revelation that he also made that was true, which is that Biden hadn't talked to Netanyahu for two months.
That is really problematic, right?
If we're supposedly, you know, an ally of theirs and we supposedly have any amount of influence and we're in the middle of supplying them to a lot of these armaments to fight this war that they're fighting, how is it possible they wouldn't have checked in at some point in the last two months?
Like, that is also damning and it makes me, you know, concerned, you know, from that standpoint as well.
That wasn't made big enough of a headline either.
No, I completely agree.
And more or less what we're hearing, and let's make it clear, Israel is a client state of the United States of America.
What makes it work? What keeps it like economically and militarily viable is that the United States of America Like supplements whatever they need whether it's defense whether whether it's money and support whatever it is They have figured out that they can do whatever they want in the United States isn't going to say anything In fact, Netanyahu doesn't even have to check in with Joe Biden at this point that has been made clear They can literally do anything that they want and meanwhile,
we're just watching You know images roll in from all over with the destruction and all of the the cruelties and all that The fact that one of America's main client states has figured out that like the government Doesn't even have to be contacted in order to keep this up to run counter of everything that they're saying and that they can go ahead and coordinate with somebody like Donald Trump This is a whole different ballgame and speaking of different ballgames Nick the next revelation from this and
we have covered this Elon Musk back when he did his Twitter X the everything site stream with Donald Trump more or less put in Trump's ear that he wanted to be put in charge of government spending Which was an idea that Trump immediately was like, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you're giving me tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in propaganda support.
That idea has become an official campaign policy of Donald Trump.
And now, on this interview, let's see where he's at with it.
There's a lot of fat in government that you would want to slip down.
Incredible fat. So what agencies would you want to shut down?
Well, let me have you ask another person that, because I'm going to have Elon Musk.
He is dying to do this.
You know, he's a great business guy, actually.
You think of him for science and rockets, and every time I think he's telling me about a new screw that was developed, he's developed a new screw.
Screws are difficult, and it's made out of titanium, and it's so exciting.
But you know what?
He's a great business guy and he's a great cost cutter.
You've seen that. And he said, I could cut costs without affecting anybody.
So he will be in the cabinet. Not in the cabinet.
He doesn't want to be in the cabinet. He just wants to be in charge of cost-cutting, who have a new position, secretary of cost-cutting, okay?
Elon wants to do that.
And we have incredible people.
He's running a big business.
You know, he can't just say, oh, I think I'll go into the cabinet.
You know, other people can. He can't.
But Elon's a little bit different in that sense.
And besides that, I want him to send the rocket up to Mars.
He said... He's made me a promise he'll get to Mars before the end of my administration, which will be long before, hopefully, China or Russia.
I created a space. Nick, before we even dive into the really disturbing aspects of this, can we give the listeners a quick civics lesson?
Is that cool? Please.
If you are a secretary, are you in the president's cabinet?
You are. Oh, okay.
So we know that, having never served as president of the United States of America, correct?
Yep. Okay, so Donald Trump has no understanding at all of what the job of president entails, correct?
Correct. Also, while we're on the subject, Nick, what was it John Kasich said was the offer to be Trump's VP? What was he going to be in charge of?
Oh, just domestic policy.
And? International policy.
Oh, so both jobs of the president of the United States of America are going to be handed to the vice president.
Need I remind people that Donald Trump has absolutely no interest in being president other than coming into hail the chief and all of the the perks of stealing money from the public funds? Yeah, well, you know, he was hanging out with Musk and Musk is like, Oh, because I don't want to have the burden of being any kind of official role either. I want to have no or anything. So but Secretary of whatever cost cutting, it sounds cute. He he, you know, and that's what they're going to do. But like, you know, I, we've seen this movie before. And when
I've seen this happen is like Jerry Kushner comes in to do a lot of the similar things like that.
and what did he end up doing? Bilking the country and using his position to just enrich himself to the tune of billions.
It's not two billion that he got just from the Saudis.
It's got to be multiple orders of that and beyond that, that we don't know about.
We have had many oligarchs in the history of the United States of America, particularly just in terms of history, going back to the industrialization of America. We saw titans of industry who were able to like cement incredible control over our politics and culture and economy. This is once again unprecedented.
The idea that one of the richest people in the country who has now bankrolled a presidential contender and bought a VP slot is going to be given a democratically unaccountable and basically unofficial job in Like, helming over the budget of the United States of America.
And by the way, we're talking about safety funds, regulatory funds, we're talking about relief funds, we're talking about every single social safety net.
And Trump gives the game away, Nick.
He says he's going to cut costs.
He's also going to get us to Mars.
How are those two things related?
Oh, he's going to cut basically everything that's in the government that is going to help anybody except for one individual and one individual only.
And who's that individual, Nick?
Elon Musk. That's Elon Musk.
And you know what occurred to me the other day?
You know what hit me like a lightning bolt?
I was out running and it was one of those moments where a thought popped up and I realized something.
We've seen how people become billionaires.
They take advantage of a system that is set up to redistribute Billions of dollars to them, correct?
And they become an essential part of government functioning, such as rockets and military-industrial creations that maybe work, maybe don't work.
Do you know how you get to be a trillionaire, which we have never had?
I mean, yes, I would like to know.
You take over the government.
That's the secret.
We are into the next step, which is that Elon Musk is basically going to insert himself as a czar with Trump who doesn't care about any of this outside the power and getting away from any legal and political and economic repercussions.
He's going to put himself in charge of the United States budget.
And I have to tell you, and we're going to talk more about Musk in a second, unfortunately, for a Do you have faith today?
And we're recording this on Monday, October 14th.
Nick, do you have any faith that there is anybody in our government right now who is going to effectively stand up to that?
No. I mean, well, I mean, talking about if Trump wins or right now?
Yes. Yes. No, I mean, that's the whole thing is they didn't do that when he first won and they didn't clear out the people that they needed that were getting in their way.
And so they will not have any opposition at all to this.
And, you know, the template is Russia.
This is what Russia happened after the fall of the Soviet Union.
They just let these oligarchs come in and just strip everything bare and make billions of dollars across the board that way.
Yeah. Of course, you know, if you talk to Putin long enough, it probably sounds like a good idea or a Trump is at this point.
And it's just, you know, we're going to lose that class of people that truly wanted this to help the country.
That's exactly right.
And I want to say something unequivocally right now, which is...
I have watched the Biden administration with a lot of frustration, and there's a lot of tragedy that has happened around everything from their policy when it comes to Gaza.
I have huge problems with what the Harris campaign has been and what she has promised, and we'll talk more about that.
Nick, this right here is a reason to vote against Donald Trump.
The idea that Elon Musk will be inserted in this position is reason enough to vote against Donald Trump.
And you can live to fight another day and you can pressure the Harris administration if it comes to pass.
But this right here, this is a line in the sand that we cannot cross.
I agree. And unfortunately, he's convinced everybody was going to vote for him that that's what they want.
They want this.
It's... I don't know.
Sometimes I get so despondent, Jared.
I swear to God. I figure I'm like, you know what?
Maybe they're right.
Maybe life will be so much better for everybody if we let the Republicans put in all their unpopular platform.
Maybe they're right. Maybe we've just been wrong this whole time.
Can I point something out about what you're saying right now?
Yeah. We're in an abusive relationship with the Republican Party.
We really are.
We're to the point where it's just like, fine, I don't even have fight anymore.
Just like, fine, give Elon Musk the keys to the budget.
Let him do whatever he wants.
The amount of money, we should sit down sometime soon and figure out how much money Elon Musk could bilk out of the government if he's made into a czar.
And he gets to do this Mars shot thing, which isn't going to happen.
It's incredible. So, next thing instructive.
And by the way, you have to fight against this.
Nick, this is a new feature of the Trump campaign.
It has happened before, but now something has clicked into place and we absolutely need to discuss it.
Let's hear Donald Trump talk about those people who aren't going to vote for him.
How does he feel about those people?
Are you expecting chaos on election day?
No. There's enough from the side that votes for Trump.
But I'm just wondering if these outside agitators will start off on election day.
Let's say you win. I mean, let's remember, you've got 50,000 Chinese nationals in this country in the last couple of years.
You have people on the terrorist watch list, 350 in the last couple of years.
Like you said, 13,000 murderers and 15,000 rapists.
Right. What are you expecting?
Joe Biden said he doesn't think it's going to be a peaceful election day.
Well, he doesn't have any idea what's happening in Rolf Hitler.
He spends most of his day sleeping.
I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and destroying our country.
By the way, totally destroying our country.
The towns, the villages, they're being inundated.
But I don't think they're the problem in terms of Election Day.
I think the bigger problem are the people from within.
We have some very bad people.
We have some sick people, radical left lunatics.
And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen.
Cool. Nick, before we get into the absolute psychotic nature of what he said at the end, can we just have like a little fun and go into our mind palaces?
Are you up for that? I'm always up for that.
Okay. Fox News in the right wing says some of the most like absolutely insane shit all the time.
Can we put a stake in the ground and say that what Bartiromo was predicting right there was that on the first Tuesday in November on election day, That we're going to see Chinese nationals who have invaded the United States of America.
That we're going to see literally tens of thousands of murderers and rapists.
We're going to see terrorists.
What Fox News just intimated to a viewing public who only watches Fox News is that on Election Day, they should expect nothing less than a violent war at the polls.
Is that correct? I'm not exaggerating that, correct?
That's what it sounds like, yeah.
What would that look like?
Can we just imagine?
Can we put ourselves in that mindset right now?
And by the way, by doing so, can we also acknowledge that when that doesn't happen on election day, that this was an absolutely insane thing to say on television?
Right. I mean, I'm just picturing the movie Airplane when they say, assume crash positions.
That's Kind of chaos I'm imagining.
But yeah, it basically would be some version of a civil war you'd see in a, what's the single shooter games called?
The RPG? No. Whatever those games are, you know, where it's like people coming from all directions and it's chaos and bullets and the whole thing.
Like, that's what it's going to feel like.
But it's not, yeah, it will never happen that way.
What's weird is that they're doing it, I guess, to try and scare people to not go to the polls on the election.
That would be a reason to not go to the polls, wouldn't it?
Yeah. Like, you're hanging out in Tempe, Arizona, and you're heading out to vote for your man Donald Trump, and you're, like, having to, like, defend yourself from, like, terrorists and people, like, carrying, like, bamboo ballots, which is what they believed happened last time.
Like, that imagination is undefeated.
Well, you know what it really is going to be?
to reference airplane again, it would probably be a lot more like in the beginning when the church of religious consciousness is trying to pin, you know, this little, you know, peacefully pin something on your on your jacket for a donation. That's what it would probably be a lot more like and then they're going to beat the crap out of them like we saw Rex Kramer do. So it is, listen, it's the playbook is out there. It's been pretty clear for a long time. Well, speaking of the playbook, the thing that we need to focus in on, and this has been a new feature within the Trump
campaign and within GOP circles as of the past week, I've been following the rise of this.
It's this phrase, quote, the enemy from within. And since we have a lot of new listeners, I want to get people up to speed on something. This is something I call the right wing conspiracy triangle, right? Like what is behind everything that's going on? It's meant to distract from what capitalism is doing. People like Elon Musk, Nick, what it says is this.
One, you've got people on the outside.
And I'm glad that Baradaromo really, really focused on this.
You've got people on the outside.
You've got the Chinese. You've got foreigners.
And by the way, Nick, you and I both know who else we're talking about.
We're talking about Jewish puppet masters who are taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of liberal democracy.
Those people are out to get America.
The next group are internal traitors, right?
For Donald Trump, it's anybody who criticizes him, anybody who has a D by their name.
Those people help the people on the outside hurt the country.
The third is manipulatable communities.
And by the way, these are always political enemies such as people of color, women, gay, trans people, poor people, you name it.
Those three elements have been used by the right wing since the formation of states.
Since we started having nation states, they've like been using these conspiracy theories.
This is a Stephen Miller fastball special, Nick, and it is starting to grow.
And what people need to understand for people like me who study authoritarianism and how it grows, there are mile markers.
And when you go from, oh, I think these people might be evil to the enemy within, that is your like alarm bell that things are starting to escalate in a different way.
And what Donald Trump is doing right now, and by the way, it's not his idea, you can tell whenever he gets, like, enamored with, like, a slogan that Stephen Miller gives him, which is what's happening— This is ramping up the environment for more and more authoritarian proposals and more and more authoritarian actions.
And let's not ignore why it's more and more and ramping up as we get closer.
Because on October 7th, which would be last Monday, Kamala had a...
This is on 538, which averages everything.
She had a 2.6% or 2.6% lead in the polls, right?
Percent. That's not a bad high-water market.
She's had it higher, but in that recent time, it was 2.8, 2.5, 2.6.
So she was 2.6. She unleashed a blitz on every podcast and Howard Stern and all these different things, right?
Well, what's the result of all those appearances a week later?
It's now at 2.4.
It's going down.
This is encouraging, you know, Stephen Miller.
Continue to do this more and more.
And if you look at it even longer, she had a 3-5 lead.
Now it's like, it's clearly working to some degree.
If we can trust any of these polls, that's the other problem we have here.
But like, I imagine their internal polls are looking at this.
And so it is working, ergo, therefore I should do it.
And that's, I suppose you can't blame them for doing that that way then.
They see an opening is what's happening.
And I want to put this out there.
And Nick, God help us.
I really, really hope that on election night when we do like our election night coverage, I hope that I'm not looking back at this moment as one of the reasons why things would be so horrific.
But I'll tell you a missed opportunity in this.
I saw the Democratic Party and their strategist absolutely ignore the Springfield, Ohio thing.
Like they said, don't talk about it.
Don't get into it. And I understand why they thought that was a good idea because they wanted to seem tough on immigration.
They didn't want to be seen as like standing up for these Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
But by ignoring it and not stepping in and saying this is wrong and you're scapegoating these people and you're fear-mongering, instead of doing that, they ignored it.
They laughed at it. They even told surrogates not to talk about it.
That might have been a missed opportunity that I hope to God didn't change the face of this race, but now looking at the numbers that you're citing and how they are not just tripling down on this, but quadrupling down on it, I have a sickening feeling that this is one of the reasons why we're in the situation we're in right now, and it's given them an opening.
But it draws back to the Israeli stuff, too, because Netanyahu knows full well that they don't want to risk alienating anybody that would vote for them over the Israel situation, so they're going to let him do carte blanche.
It's why, I guess, he hasn't even spoken to Netanyahu in the two months until recently, right?
That is, you know, an unfortunate confluence of events.
This probably wouldn't happen this way if it wasn't in an election year.
Netanyahu probably wouldn't be as cavalier.
And here we are with this as well.
Why they don't hit Trump on immigration and the atrocities they performed at the border with, you know, they had, they were doing medical procedures on women.
They were, they were still, I saw a recent article that up to a thousand kids are not reunited with their parents since then, and probably will never be.
Soberov is doing a documentary on this and guess when that's going to be released, Jared?
December.
They couldn't somehow figure this one out before the election to let us know how brutal and how horrible those policies were.
And they don't say anything about him.
It is insane. And yet Trump gives them the opening every 20 minutes to do this.
And they don't hit him on it, I guess, out of this fear that they don't want to get involved in that conversation.
And it's hurting them without question.
When Harris became the nominee, and this is something I think you and I are going to be talking about in the next few weeks because the Harris campaign right now is an abomination.
It's so bad.
But when she took over as the nominee, we talked about we're going to know whether or not she kept the Biden apparatus or whether she over time brought in the other people.
It is very clear right now that the old guard of the Democratic Party is running this campaign.
And what are they doing? They think that they need to be tougher on the border and immigration than Donald Trump.
That's a losing decision.
You can't turn an election in the direction of your opponent's strength.
You can't do it.
You can't take it away from them.
That has never ever actually worked.
And it has been an absolutely faulty, faulty strategy.
We know that the Biden camp and the Harris camp are at each other's throats.
So that has become a huge thing now, where they maybe not even get the right support they should be getting from the sitting president, right?
I don't know if it feels that way right now, but he seems kind of...
I would have thought we would see more Biden...
Campaigning for her as well if he could do it.
This is a real mess.
The worst possible scenarios are all coming together and then crossing the streets at the same time.
It's really frustrating to have to deal with this at this kind of moment and letting the Republicans claim that Kamala Harris is the real threat to democracy.
They've taken control of that narrative and there isn't any pushback.
It's crazy. All right, well, let's watch Trump unravel some more.
This is from a recent rally, in case you're wondering if this guy's getting worse or not.
Would you rather have the black president or the white president who got $1.7 billion off the price?
I think they want the white guy right now.
Woo! Okay, that is at the Black Conservative Federation.
Just laying it out there, Nick.
Not even really bothering to hide it anymore.
Nope, nope. He's working on tropes and terrible racist jokes.
And the crowd, it sounded like they were cheering.
I don't know.
I don't know what else to make of that because that's where they're going.
And that will continue to expand that line of rationale without question.
You couldn't believe that they would have ever said anything remotely like that in public.
And here we are. And for the record...
It is so lost in the hubbub and the noise that surrounds Donald Trump.
Literally, I will turn on a rally of his just on a random weekday or weeknight to watch it the next day or whatever.
And like, what he says from moment to moment should be headlines.
It should be the defining question of the moment.
And he has created such a giant tsunami around himself of bullshit and disgusting rhetoric and dangerous rhetoric that at this point, it literally doesn't matter.
It falls through the cracks.
And meanwhile, he is getting worse.
In fact, let's listen now to...
To Donald Trump, like, just absolutely freestyling, talking about Kamala Harris and telling you everything you need to know about what another administration would look like.
Call up the app and they ask, where do we drop the illegals?
And people are on the other side.
And they left that.
She actually created an app, a phone system, where they can call up.
I mean, she's a criminal.
She's a criminal. She really is.
If you think about it.
So now we are...
All right, cool. So now Trump is calling not just Kamala Harris a criminal.
He's also saying that CBS, because they ran an interview with Kamala Harris, that that should be illegal.
Let me go through a list of the other people that he said recently are illegal or criminals.
We're also looking at Google.
We're looking at judges.
We're looking at election workers.
We're also talking about death penalty for immigrants.
We're also talking about National Guard and military-run operations against citizens.
We're also talking about military operations against these gangs that are running houses in Aurora, Colorado.
That was something that came out of this weekend.
Basically at this point, Nick, the entirety of Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign is handing the keys over to Elon Musk, handing him the budget, and also declaring war on the American people.
That's where we are. You forgot CBS. He wants to take their license away, you know, and stifle that.
Now, let's not forget that that app was developed under his administration, A. Sure.
Yep. And then B, that that app has nothing to do with scheduling flights into America from people from out of other countries.
No, it's meetings to go over your immigration status.
Yeah, it was just a way to try and streamline the process so they can get it going, get the appointments done faster.
Yeah. Can you say one more time what presidential administration that was invented under?
The Trump administration.
But Trump doesn't even know what an app is.
He doesn't know how you install it on a phone.
He doesn't know how it works. I mean, he's still thinking that Hillary used bleach on her servers.
But again, he knows that a lot of people don't know this either.
He's capitalizing on a low-information, low-educated population.
At the very least, for all the faults that the founding fathers had, they at least understood that an educated electorate was important.
Yep. And we are at that position where we don't have that, or at least he's tapped into that whole vein, of which existed then, existed throughout their entire history, but just hadn't been connected to the political process like this before.
Yep. And we are watching it come to its full fruition.
And that's what this is about.
And I think one of the reasons I wanted to go over this stuff, Nick, Donald Trump, have you ever read Don DeLillo's White Noise?
Have you ever read that book?
No. Oh, Masterpiece, one of my favorite books.
There is a moment in that book where he talks about the world's most photographed barn and how it's so photographed and it's so seen as the world's most photographed barn that you can't even see the barn for what it is anymore.
You look at it as something else, right?
Like it's an institution.
Donald Trump has become so omnipresent and we know who he is, we know what he says, that we have a tendency, there's a real risk at becoming desensitized to this.
You know what I mean? Like what we are actually watching is a full fascist campaign for the presidency of the United States of America that eclipses What took place in 2016 and in 2020.
Like, it has taken the next step in the evolution.
And by the way, knowing that, Nick, let's find out what former Attorney General under Trump, who we'll talk about, like, remind everybody before we play this clip, what's Bill Barr said about Donald Trump in the last couple of years, Nick?
Oh, and he's called him an idiot.
He's called him unsafe for the White House.
He's been condemning the guy, you know, in a way that you thought, oh, okay, maybe the fever is broken a little bit.
Yeah, let's hear what old Bill Barr is having to say right now.
I'm not happy with the choice.
I think this is a terrible choice for the country, but it is a choice.
At the end of the day, we have to select between two different individuals.
And I've said all along that I think it's my duty to pick the person I think will do the least harm to the country.
And I think that, to me, that's clearly Trump and the Republican administration, which I think is important.
We can't go the whole thing without interrupting him, right?
No, because it's astounding.
I want to hear what he says in a second because I think it's important.
But Nick, I want to remind people.
Bill Barr went on MSNBC and CNN selling his terrible memoir, one damn thing after another, memoirs of an attorney general.
He was clipped on social media.
I'm sure Biden's HQ was just like, look what Bill Barr has to say about Donald Trump, and he knows what's going on, and you need to know.
These people have no moral compass whatsoever.
They will do whatever it takes to sell whatever they need to sell in order to move from here to here to make money.
But also the most important thing when everything comes to pass is money and power.
And this man, Bill Barr, is almost as disgusting as anybody you're going to find.
But we can't forget that this guy's role in the government was as chief law enforcement officer.
This is the guy in charge of making sure the Constitution is followed.
And having already recognized what he had done, even for the insurrection, he is going to back this guy as if somebody else is more dangerous than Trump is.
And speaking of which, he also wants an ethnostate.
So he's hiding behind some sort of righteousness there of being some sort of religious person, too.
It's like... All those things are complete and defined odds of what the Constitution says.
Let's finish this because I think there's a choice thing that people need to hear here.
I think getting control over the border, stopping the lawlessness in our cities, building up the strength of the United States in an ever more dangerous world, stop the avalanche of regulation that is strangling business and our technological superiority.
These are critical things that have to be done, and I think that we'll get them done under a Trump administration.
At the same time, I think the Biden administration is, in fact, the greater threat to democracy.
I think they have a totalitarian temper.
They have bought into the progressive movement, and they're trying to squelch opposition and freedom of speech.
Okay, Nick, stop this.
I can't do it. Can you help me, please?
Listen, I know Bill Barr is completely full of shit and doesn't mean anything he's saying.
Can you try and tell me, even for a second, take it at face value, what is the totalitarian nature of the Biden administration?
One of the most passive presidential administrations that we have really seen.
What is the totalitarian nature?
Take me there.
What is it?
He's talking about wokeness.
He thinks that like this sort of woke mind virus that will infect you, like he will become gay, I think is what he's worried about.
Yeah, more or less.
You got to go on to YouTube or hopefully if you want to listen to this or go on, you got to look at the picture of the free stream we have right now of Bill Barr's face.
You're a writer.
We need to describe his face to the people listening because everything is wrapped up in that and how sad he is as a person and as his entire Charlie Brown energy after missing the football.
But it is just...
It's depressing to see how much they want to manipulate these situations in the name of some sort of fake, idealistic, quasi-religious, whatever vision of the future that they have.
I don't know what to make of it, but it makes me feel like I want to just give up.
I don't think you need to give up.
I believe the word is moribund.
This is a person who, by the way, has no joy in them whatsoever.
You can't do this stuff if you have any sort of joy or ethics or principles.
But I also want to say the thing that keeps becoming like more and more Pressingly clear is that what they actually care about is that they don't just want everything Nick They want to get rid of any apparatus for people to say that it's wrong That's what that that's what people like Bill Barr are interested in Like you'll notice what he says like he doesn't want to stifle business and regulation or whatever
Meanwhile, it's all been cut just to absolute hell. They want to have everything and they don't want you to complain about it And if you complain about it, it's the tyranny of the majority which by the way for the record our founding fathers We're also terrified of even as they wanted to be paternalistic and benevolent and you know, they thought they were helping people
They were terribly afraid that the majority would speak against them, and that's all that Bill Barr is doing here, and shame on everybody who platformed him and allowed him to sell his book as if he was being honest about it.
And he also reveals, like, you know, he is, as the chief law enforcement officer in the country, like, he shouldn't necessarily be commenting on policy, and he had done that in the administration while he was there, while Trump was in office as well, which tells you this guy's a political person.
He doesn't care about what the law really says, and he's demonstrated over and over again.
You have to remember, he went on CNN before the election, because after the election, we have all sorts of tape of him saying, this is bullshit, I'm quitting because you're trying to do an insurrection and you don't know what you're talking about.
Well, before that, he went on Wolf Blitzer and said, of course ballots are corrupt.
It's a matter of logic, right?
That mail-in ballots can be completely corrupted by the voters.
And so I try to come up with the Latin phrase for it because it's like, I can imagine it, therefore it happened.
And ergo, so if so, ergo, QED, whatever that is.
I'm trying to get lawyers to tell me how you'd say that.
But that's what the magical thinking is, right?
If I can imagine it, because I was going with my wife yesterday, going through what would it have taken for the mail-in ballots?
How would you have actually processed this fake ballot thing that they've been thinking is going to be happening?
It's like, I have to find out your name and your address.
Go in there.
Say I was you. Hope that you don't show up later to actually vote.
And then go to every other...
And I can't go back to the same precinct because that's a pretty big risk that they're going to recognize me.
Oh, you're already somebody else. So you're talking about ping-ponging across different districts across hundreds of miles of the state to try and fake votes on the magnitude of, what, 10,000 or 20,000 to shift an election.
That's what they think is happening.
And Bill Barr knows that's bullshit.
That's the thing.
He knows that that didn't happen.
He has said in so many words, he told Trump back in 2020 that that didn't happen.
He also looked around, he saw Trump absolutely surrounded by the most conspiracy theory addled freaks of our generation.
And he said, these people should not be near the president and this president shouldn't be near power.
Meanwhile, he went on Fox News and said, let's put that back.
Let's run it back, see what happens.
Nick, speaking of CNN, which platformed Bill Barr, unfortunately, I want people to hear this.
This is an incredible panel discussion.
And before we get going, I just want to identify who you're getting ready to hear.
It starts with Representative Ro Khanna, who is one of the leaders of the Progressive Caucus in the House, also holds a major leadership campaign position in the Harris campaign.
You're then going to hear Kara Swisher, who is a tech journalist who has done more harm than good in almost every single way.
This is a panel on CNN, and the question here is, why is Elon Musk doing what Elon Musk does?
And I think we're going to gain a pretty big education right here.
This kind of rhetoric that makes politicians something less than what they are, which is human beings.
I appreciate you saying that, Scott.
I think where the Democrats started to lose Elon was actually personal.
We should have celebrated his contributions to electric vehicles, even though he was against unionization and stood up to unions.
We should have said, look, Starlink, great product.
up that that needs to be the fact that he's had th success of private people I think a lot of it was t and he felt offended.
He does get a lot of attention. I mean, I'm genuinely curious.
I mean, was there something, do you think, that Democrats did?
What was the thing? I got a call from him about it.
When he wasn't invited to that EV summit.
He should have been invited. I called the White House.
I never call the White House.
I'm like, why didn't you invite him?
He's very angry. And in fact, I had an interview with Pete Buttigieg at the time, who also was a little bit glib about it.
And I was like, he's critically important in this sector.
I think the union thing was the big deal of why they didn't invite him.
And they should have. He deserved that credit.
And then people were tweeting out about his private flights and taking a private plane.
I'm sorry, I don't think Democrats get blamed for that.
No, no, I'm just saying that, look, and I think he should stay off Twitter.
I certainly think he shouldn't be making jokes about the vice president.
But I think with the Democrats, remember, he was a supporter of Obama.
Bill Clinton, Obama, had this.
And we are the party that is John F. Kennedy, that is about innovation, that is about entrepreneurship.
They didn't initially give him a tax return.
We should be celebrating that part of it.
There's a weird... Nick, I have a lot to say about this, but I cede the floor to you while I try and let my anger simmer a little bit.
Yeah. I mean, I have to imagine the union thing was part of it because not inviting him to the EV summit doesn't make a lot of sense considering his position in the electric vehicle market, but I also have to imagine they're not excited about legitimizing Musk since he's in a position to help Russia in this war versus Ukraine, which he's already done and already kind of gone out of his way to sort of side with them, among a lot of other things.
So I kind of get it, right?
I kind of get why that was.
But we know, you know, why he's really shifted anyway.
It's because he was going to be MeToo'd.
So that's even before all of this happened, which is what we called on our show when it first happened.
So I don't think any of this is really inaccurate.
I think that they're kind of, you know, trying to shove a square hole into a round peg or whatever that expression is.
Oh, poor billionaire.
He didn't get invited to the party.
Oh, no. Oh, the official richest man in the world didn't get invited to the party.
He got his feelings hurt, man.
He got his feelings hurt.
That's why he had to lean into white replacement theory and embrace the protocols of the elders of Scion.
It's because he didn't treat him nice.
He didn't tell him thank you.
The strongest individuals in the world who should just Absolutely determine the future.
Like, what horseshit is this?
What horseshit is this?
Either they are the strongest and the brightest and the most dynamic people in the world, or they're babies.
The idea...
And by the way, Kana, going on here, who holds a leadership position in the Harris campaign...
I want to point this out.
Elon Musk has claimed that Kamala Harris is an existential threat to the future of the United States of America.
He has claimed that she is a criminal.
She's involved in massive, massive conspiracies.
And the fact that this suck-ass gets on TV and says, well, you know, I think we should have celebrated him.
And yeah, he's anti-union, but that right there, if you're talking about a theme of this episode, this is an educational episode.
And if you want to understand what's wrong with the Democratic Party, exhibit A right here.
You are supposed to have the backs of unions.
And if you're saying we should have thrown unions under the bus because this guy deserved to still be underneath our tent and you're not even going to talk about his racism, his anti-Semitism, his conspiracy theory, or the fact that he is actively trying to throw the election to an opponent, this right here is the Democratic Party in a nutshell.
And it infuriates me.
Absolutely. And by the way, that's the best point you made.
It was also that by him buying X, there is very few other explanations for why he did that.
What his most motivations are, at least now, is to help Trump win this election so he can then become this whatever he wants to be, the secretary of whatever.
And make more money.
Like, that's completely what this is always about, from what I can tell.
And so, of course, he shouldn't, you know, he wouldn't be invited in to have that legitimacy by the White House.
But, you know, really great impression, by the way.
It's incredible.
And by the way, Kana, who is a representative of your state, California, the tech fascist have your representatives by the short hairs.
Yeah. I think?
They are going to try and bring him back and everything that he has done, Nick, and it's replacement theory.
It's anti-Semitism. It's calling for only strong alpha males who I assume get all wet in their pants about not getting invited to parties.
Those are the only people who should be allowed to vote.
Anti-trans rhetoric.
When's the last time, for the record, you have heard Harris or anybody in the Harris campaign stand up for gay or trans people?
When? I don't know.
Yeah, I don't either, because I haven't heard it in forever.
And the entire point is that they are still playing footsie with this tech fascist underneath the table.
This thing, this needs to be put in a time capsule, is what it needs to be done.
By the way... Speaking of Democrats who are not caught by the short hairs, Nick, we do need to finish up by talking about this report in Axios.
Andrew Solynder published a story called, Some Top Dems Won't Commit to Certifying a Trump Win, which was presented to everybody as the idea that Democrats are now engaging in election-denying.
But it turns out that a group of Democratic representatives...
We cannot go ahead and commit to this because, as Jamie Raskin says, they don't know that this is going to be a free and fair, honest election.
They said that they don't know that Donald Trump isn't going to try and rig the election the same way he tried to do in 2020.
I have to say, the members of the House who are saying this, they're on the right track.
You cannot go ahead and concede that you're going to let this election go forward if they try and steal the election like they did in 2020 or use new means that they possibly could have come up with in the meantime.
I mean, they might as well, you know, Kamala Harris is in control of the ballot counting, whatever, if they want to, you know, clearly, well, I mean, here's the thing.
I can't say that clearly nothing happened to the people involved in the 2020 stuff because they're being prosecuted and that's going to be severe.
But you might as well, I guess, fight a little bit of fire with fire.
I mean, just to go back to your earlier point, it sounds like the moral of the story would be that they just have to stand up for themselves.
Once and for all, just believe in what you believe in and make those points strongly against what the other side represents.
Rather than kowtowing to the tech bros and the people that you're afraid of offending in case you might lose a couple of votes.
Yeah.
And by the way, this is just like media both sides.
Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election.
They had, I don't know, Nick, seven or eight different schemes.
I might even be underestimating that.
You cannot simply say, because we are the party of decorum and we are the party of institutions, that we will go ahead and go along with it if he manages to get a slate of alternative electors in front of the Electoral College.
You can't do that.
And by the way, you can't go in front of a camera like Al Gore and say, While I do not agree with the Supreme, that's a terrible Al Gore.
I am so sorry that I just let that go.
That was really bad. No one's going to hold you.
He let that election get stolen.
And if the Democrats stand by as like a brand new evolution of like election stealing tactics come to fruition, they deserve what they get.
You know what I mean? Like, they really do, whether it's being prosecuted or hounded or thrown in jail or whatever.
You have to actually treat this the way that it is, which is, we're committed to a free and fair election.
If Donald Trump wins a free and fair election, we will certify it, we will go forward.
But you cannot concede in advance, especially with what happened back in 2020.
Right. I mean, that makes sense.
You know, I do feel like, I really, really hate to say it, but it does, I kind of feel like it's inevitable at this point what the outcome is going to be.
Wow! Okay, so wait, we're making news here.
You feel right now like Trump's going to win this thing.
I do. And so if he wins this thing, what do you think that they, I mean...
Gosh, would they try and contest those results and do alternative electors?
I don't think they would, right?
No, good God, no.
The Democrats aren't going to get alternative electors.
Well, to win, you know, a Democrat has to have over a four-point national lead, right?
The four-point is the threshold. That's what Biden had to win by a bunch of electoral votes, right?
That was in 2020. I'll tell you right now, I've heard rumors.
The Democratic Party has not been releasing internal polls recently.
At least not at the level of the meetings that I've been in, which is completely different than what happened before the convention and immediately after the convention.
Those internal polls have been a lot more restricted.
I don't think the trajectory of this race is good right now.
I really don't.
I think it's going in the wrong direction.
I think all the signs are there that it's going in the wrong direction.
And quite frankly, I said this back after the VP debate The time to make a course correction is now.
And actually, the time to make a course correction was weeks ago and months ago.
And they haven't done it.
Here we are. We're at the middle of October.
Like, if you're going to do something, you need to do it.
And it needs to happen now.
And our news cycles are so aggressive and they change so much.
You could see something change.
But I think people need to recognize that, like, things are getting very, very serious.
And things are getting very, like, the window is narrowing.
I think the only thing you can do now is to increase the amount of votes that are going to be cast.
That's it. You're not changing.
You can't add another platform to the thing.
You're going to have to figure out a way to get more people to come out because if it's anywhere near 2016, then Kamala Harris loses.
You know what the answer is, right, Nick?
No. It's a joint rally appearance with Dick Cheney.
You gotta get out in front of the cameras with good old Dick Cheney.
That's what's gonna do it, my man.
Can you imagine what it was like in the first campaign meeting after they figured out that the Dick Cheney endorsement didn't do anything besides possibly hurt them?
Like, what that must have felt like to look at those numbers.
Well, then why do you think that would help if he appeared at a rally?
I was joking. I was being sarcastic.
Oh, you didn't use the sarcastic fonts.
So I was totally like, oh, okay, good.
Well, I'm glad that was sarcastic.
You know, usually I get it.
Usually I hear it. No, no.
Like right now, and by the way, if she does a joint appearance with Dick Cheney in the next couple of weeks, Nick, I'm done.
I won't do this podcast anymore.
That will be it. Because here's the thing.
It's like, okay, you want on the margins try and cleave off a few more like moderate Republicans.
Okay, that's probably not going to do it.
What really is going to do it is getting them more of the voters you already have.
Yeah. They come out and vote.
And that's what we have, you know, like if it's calling, if it's knocking on doors, I have friends are in Pennsylvania right now doing it, which by the way, Pennsylvania looks somewhat positive right now for her to win it.
Now it sounds like, you know, Michigan and Wisconsin are kind of underwater for her.
And if she doesn't get all three of those, then it's absolutely done, and it's still not even guaranteed if she gets all three of those.
It's not. And it's, you know, Michigan, we talked about this.
We talked about this from the moment that Israel started going into Gaza, that Michigan was going to be a trouble spot.
And it doesn't help that she's turned into corporate Kamala at this point, and that's basically all that she's talking about.
There are ways to turn this thing around, but the time is running out.
And speaking of time running out, Nick, we've run out on this episode.
We will be back with The Weekender on Friday.
A reminder, go to patreon.com slash Mark Craig Podcast so you can listen to The Weekender, support the show, keep us editorially independent, ad-free.
In the meantime, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
