Charles Lyons joins Richard to discuss the first presidential debate of 2016. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
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|---|---|
| We all know who the real winner of last night's debate was. | |
| Evan McMullin. | |
| That's right. | |
| By not being at the debate, he managed to not look shittier than he already does. | |
| He was busy. | |
| He was out courting Meghan McCain. | |
| And you know how many waffles that actually takes. | |
| You know, we all know. | |
| And he racked up the coveted Meghan McCain endorsement. | |
| So it's just like, boom! | |
| This train's going all the way to the White House. | |
| That's right. | |
| Ex-CIA, Wall Street insider, neocon Mormon. | |
| He's going all the way. | |
| Yeah, it's like, Goldman Sachs employee, check. | |
| Is a Mormon. | |
| Check. | |
| Former CIA operative. | |
| Checkmate. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But seriously, I would say this just to give my general impression. | |
| For the first 15 minutes, I was elated. | |
| I thought Trump just totally won, totally took her to town. | |
| The topics are right in his wheelhouse. | |
| I think it's very interesting because she was just reacting to him. | |
| She was wonkishly incoherent. | |
| She was just saying all this stuff. | |
| I didn't even know what her position on any of these things were. | |
| You know, we need free trade, and NAFTA was great, but TPT is not, and NAFTA wasn't great. | |
| I mean, I don't even know what her position was. | |
| And Trump, A, had numbers at his fingertips, but also he was expressing real sympathy for working people. | |
| And, you know, you see it in his language, like, our jobs, our factories. | |
| We need to keep these here. | |
| You know, I thought it was real and great. | |
| So I was elated. | |
| I thought he was totally in control. | |
| And most people, total normie types, people who haven't been following, will maybe just watch the first 15 minutes and then tune out. | |
| Hopefully. | |
| Because I don't think the second, the last two-thirds of the debate went that great for Trump. | |
| Yeah, my thoughts going into the debate were that... | |
| Trump just had to not have any major gaffes, and he would have ultimately came out ahead in the debate. | |
| And I think that's exactly what happened. | |
| The first third of the debate, he was very impassioned. | |
| He definitely tore her apart on trade, which was a big thing. | |
| And yeah, it was like... | |
| She was taking credit for her husband's successes, but then saying, oh, you know, but I had nothing to do with NAFTA. | |
| It was kind of strange. | |
| She can't play both sides. | |
| She can't do that. | |
| No one, I think, is going to allow her to get away with that, that she can claim all the successes of her husband, but none of the failures. | |
| So, Trump looked good in the first third of the debate. | |
| He didn't really have any major gaffes or anything. | |
| The last two-thirds of the debate were relatively uneventful. | |
| Neither of them looked particularly good. | |
| I don't know. | |
| This is my personal feeling that Whenever Hillary Clinton talks, it's like she's really trying to do her best human impression. | |
| Why aren't I up by 50 points right now? | |
| It's just like she speaks in these empty platitudes that we've all heard every politician ever speak in. | |
| And I don't know, I'm personally sick of it. | |
| And so I don't really find it that appealing, but the low-information voter types, who they generally aren't paying attention anyways, they may view that as, oh, she comes off as presidential. | |
| But Trump didn't look un-presidential. | |
| He did look impassioned when he was... | |
| Talking about the trade issue, because he was pretty fired up about that. | |
| But other than that, he was on the defensive a lot. | |
| He was interrupting her a lot. | |
| And then also, he was under attack a lot, particularly on the Iraq. | |
| Whether or not he supported RAC and also the birther issue and the bankruptcies of his business and the taxes and whatnot. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, this is where I thought he went off because I don't think – In this election, I don't think Hillary can really knock out Trump in a debate. | |
| I think actually only Trump can knock himself out. | |
| If he became the Trump parody or he did one of his talking about his dick on stage like he did in... | |
| Like he did previously in a debate. | |
| You know, I think that he can only knock himself out. | |
| She can't knock him out because she is a goddamn horrible candidate. | |
| I mean, I still can't believe that she is the candidate. | |
| I mean, it's like it just shows the triumph of her just indomitable will to power and insider connections and just ruthlessness that she is the candidate. | |
| It's like in 2008. | |
| We had this cool black guy who was apparently anti-war and was a new start and so on and so forth. | |
| And then we just went back. | |
| It's like, the horrible people are gone. | |
| We're going to start new. | |
| And now it's like, let's bring back the most horrible woman anyone can imagine. | |
| I mean, I still don't... | |
| She was just a terrible candidate. | |
| So I don't think she can knock Trump out. | |
| I think Trump, even if he just stood there and mouthed off a few talking points, I think he might have lost, but it would not have been a total destruction. | |
| But Trump just didn't help himself enough, and he's just got to think about this stuff, because he talked about himself a little too much, and he was always explaining. | |
| And, you know, when you're explaining, you're losing. | |
| And so, you know, we had this situation, like, with the Iraq War. | |
| You know, he was talking about, like, you know, call Sean Hannity, or, you know, I talked to this guy. | |
| And, you know, look, I've listened to that Howard Stern interview, and I can link to that in the show notes. | |
| I can tell in his voice that Trump did not support the war, and that he was basically just trying to be patriotic. | |
| So, you know... | |
| Howard Stern said, it was in 2002, do you want to go in Iraq? | |
| And he said, I guess so. | |
| It was not a Trumpian answer. | |
| This is going to be huge. | |
| It was, I clearly don't want to do this. | |
| Probably a ton of people were like Trump at the time. | |
| And then clearly, immediately afterward, he was clearly against the war. | |
| I have no doubt that behind the scenes, he was against the war. | |
| But all you have to say is, Listen, I went along with this because I didn't want to rock the boat. | |
| You, Hillary Clinton, voted for it. | |
| You are directly responsible for the war. | |
| You need to own it, not me. | |
| He should have just flipped the script. | |
| Similar thing with the birther thing. | |
| Just stop, change the subject. | |
| You don't need to pat yourself on the back. | |
| For forcing Obama to do the birth certificate thing. | |
| Just be like, this is a very serious issue, and Barack Obama answered my question, and I have dropped it and moved on, and let's talk about the real issues. | |
| He could just handle it with three sentences, but instead he handled it with 30 sentences. | |
| It was just not good. | |
| He didn't kill himself, but it just was not good. | |
| When you're on the defensive, it rarely looks good. | |
| You don't look good when you're being attacked. | |
| And to be fair, the moderator, Leslie Holt, definitely had a lot more questions. | |
| His name is Lester. | |
| Oh, Lester. | |
| Lester. | |
| He directed a lot of questions at Donald Trump in an attempt. | |
| To kind of attack him. | |
| And one of them was the birther thing. | |
| Also, why haven't you released your tax returns? | |
| I think the tax returns thing is a stupid non-issue. | |
| If Donald Trump weren't paying his taxes, he'd be in jail. | |
| You can't get away being a billionaire and not paying your taxes. | |
| Probably because he's not as charitable or he doesn't make as much money as he says. | |
| That's probably the real reason. | |
| It's not that he's doing something illegal and he's trying to hide it. | |
| Or she tried to imply that he's indebted to foreign oligarchs or banks so that he's bought and paid for by, I don't know, Russia. | |
| That's her big boogeyman is the Russians. | |
| But it's like, yeah, businessmen go into debt. | |
| And in this environment, you're actually crazy not to go into debt. | |
| One of the reasons why houses cost what they cost is because no one uses cash. | |
| And that's maybe a very bad thing. | |
| I would probably agree with hard money type people. | |
| It's probably not a good thing that there's this much credit just everywhere. | |
| But that's the reason things cost what they cost. | |
| You know, it's like why health care is so expensive is because there is like all of this insurance and Medicare and so on. | |
| So, you know, we're not like paying out of pocket for anything. | |
| You know, if that were the case, I'm sorry, I'm like, wow, I'm going all libertarian. | |
| Please just stop me. | |
| I thought I got over this stuff. | |
| Yeah, but if you're paying out of pocket for a broken leg, the cost would probably be like $200. | |
| But they would figure out a way to do it really easily and quickly. | |
| But because we have all this insurance and no one sees it and thinks about it, everything's expensive. | |
| So where was I going with this? | |
| If you're a businessman, you're using debt. | |
| You're using a ton of fucking debt. | |
| That's how you make money in real estate is that you buy... | |
| Property with debt, then you rent it to people for cash, and you pay the mortgage on the property with the cash that comes in, and you profit from it. | |
| It's very simple, and this is how real estate people make money. | |
| So yeah, he has $600 million in debt. | |
| He probably has a billion in debt, to be honest. | |
| But yeah, he's a businessman. | |
| This is what he does. | |
| Who gives a shit? | |
| You know, it's like this idea of unpaid bills or whatever. | |
| You know, like, why? | |
| So is he just not paying anyone? | |
| Like, his employees are slaves? | |
| Or they're, like, deluded? | |
| Like, you know, no. | |
| Like, he's clearly, you can't have a business and not pay people. | |
| I mean, it's just, this is just insane. | |
| So, I don't know. | |
| I thought all of that was totally stupid. | |
| He should have just talked about it for two sentences and just moved on. | |
| And, like, this is one thing that typical Normie politicians are good at is changing the subject. | |
| You know, they'll answer something for a question and be like, ah, this is what, you know, Ted Cruz would have done that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, you know, Trump's not as much of a polished politician. | |
| One thing that I thought... | |
| It looks terrible. | |
| It was at the very end the whole talk about the stamina thing, and then Hillary Clinton made a joke about standing in front of Congress during a congressional hearing for 11 hours, and that is to prove her stamina. | |
| And I'm just thinking to myself, no one thinks what you did is cute or funny. | |
| And in fact, that's like one of the big negatives is that you're quite possibly one of the most openly corrupt people running for president of the United States. | |
| And you're making jokes about how you beat the system. | |
| You got off the hook because you're this huge political insider. | |
| I don't know if she thinks her little jokes playing down her scandals are cute or funny, but I don't think they are cute or funny at all. | |
| And I'm sure lots of normal people... | |
| Don't think it's cute or funny either. | |
| No, I totally agree. | |
| I survived a congressional inquest. | |
| It's like, yeah, okay. | |
| In jail. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah, that was bad. | |
| It's funny, these subliminal aspects of the campaign, or excuse me, of the debate. | |
| One of my favorites was... | |
| You know, because Trump was basically being Nixonian. | |
| He was setting up this, I'm the law and order candidate, which is basically a proxy for race. | |
| We all know that. | |
| The left is willing to admit it. | |
| Conservatives will be like, oh, no. | |
| But, you know, he basically was setting this up. | |
| He's like, I'm the law and order candidate. | |
| And he actually showed, and probably some genuine sympathy for blacks who are living in these neighborhoods. | |
| And he was like, you know, they're out there getting shot. | |
| You know, Chicago is a war zone. | |
| It's like a third world country, he said at another point. | |
| I thought that stuff was really good, really totally implicit. | |
| Yeah, well, it was a pinch of DR3, Dems Are Real Racist, when he's like, they've been voting Democrat in this city for almost 100 years, and they just keep doing it and getting shot up over there because of what you guys are doing over there. | |
| We think it's goofy and ridiculous, but the cucks eat that shit up. | |
| They love DR3. | |
| They think that gives them some type of moral high ground. | |
| It's like Mayor Daley just has a Gatling gun. | |
| He's just mowing down. | |
| You know? | |
| In fact, he's, like, probably... | |
| The, like, democratic machine is probably, like, the only thing keeping that city from descending into, like, a fourth world country is that you actually are, like, employing all these people in the city government. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Yeah. | |
| They're not, like, full-blown anarcho-capitalists or else it'd be, like, Somalia. | |
| Right. | |
| But anyway, so at the same time, it was subliminal implicit when he says it's like a third-fold country or whatever. | |
| And then Hillary takes the tactic of like, you know, you're insulting my people. | |
| And so she was like, Donald Trump doesn't see the vibrancy. | |
| And he goes, ugh. | |
| I thought that. | |
| I mean, maybe I'm... | |
| I hope that gets replayed. | |
| Maybe I'm overestimating it, but I hope that gets replayed because that is like a subliminal message towards white America that I think they will receive and just be like, you know, Hillary, what the fuck are you talking about? | |
| You could see Trump through a few eye rolls. | |
| Vibrancy. | |
| Ugh. | |
| I thought it was kind of like... | |
| Just talking about subliminal messaging. | |
| Also, what in the hell was Hillary wearing? | |
| It was like a flaming red pantsuit. | |
| Wasn't that kind of strange? | |
| Was that televisual? | |
| Maybe it made her feel empowered when Megyn Kelly got herself that butch-dike haircut so she could go up against the Donald in a debate. | |
| I don't know. | |
| She has a pretty stupid-looking wardrobe, generally speaking. | |
| She has all these pantsuits that make her look like Chairman Mao. | |
| It's kind of for Kim Jong-il or something. | |
| They're pretty terrible. | |
| It was like half Chairman Mao or Bond villain, but then the color scheme was just... | |
| Bizarre. | |
| Yeah, I don't understand. | |
| And it was red, which is kind of interesting. | |
| I don't know if that... | |
| It's funny how we call them red states when red has been the color of the left for many generations. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Maybe I'm reading too much into it. | |
| He was wearing a blue tie, which is kind of interesting. | |
| Maybe it was like, I've got a blue heart. | |
| Well, blue, I believe, is a very disarming color. | |
| They say if you go to a job interview, you should wear a blue or yellow tie. | |
| Really? | |
| Because it's disarming? | |
| I'm curious about it. | |
| Yeah, whereas if you wear something red, you're viewed as more fiery or independent or something like that. | |
| I shouldn't have worn that red pantsuit to my job interview at National Review. | |
| That was a big mistake. | |
| That's interesting. | |
| People must know this stuff. | |
| When you think about McDonald's or Wendy's or Burger King, it's all red and yellow. | |
| It's exciting you. | |
| It's making you hungry. | |
| But it seems like that's something you wouldn't wear in her position. | |
| Her, no. | |
| She would probably be better if she... | |
| Wore a gray suit and just went with the whole soulless, empty politician look, because that's generally what people think about her anyways. | |
| Maybe that's why she wore red, so people think that there's actually something to her. | |
| Well, I know, but at the same time, people find her very annoying and grating and shrill. | |
| I would say if you asked a hundred people to describe Hillary Clinton, the word shrill would probably be the most repeated word. | |
| So it's funny that we're dwelling on this. | |
| It seems I would have worn, like, white or... | |
| I don't know. | |
| But, again, I'm not a consultant. | |
| Well, speaking of... | |
| Make her a victim. | |
| We'll get off the clothing, but riff off what you said about her being shrill. | |
| This made her look good last night, was that she wasn't shrill. | |
| She could have easily, I don't know, Donald Trump could have got under her skin and she could have started literally shrieking and coming off like nails on a chalkboard. | |
| She really was... | |
| Both candidates were composed. | |
| Donald Trump didn't come off as a crazy person or even an asshole, even though he was interrupting her. | |
| The points he was making to make interruptions, I felt, were good. | |
| So she didn't look like a shrill, shrieking banshee, and he didn't look like a maniacal asshole during the debate, so they both kind of looked good in that regard. | |
| Yeah, I think... | |
| I think that is true. | |
| She did not die on stage, but then she also didn't... | |
| She did keep her composure. | |
| She had a number of there-he-goes-again statements, which were probably... | |
| Yeah, I think that's probably the right... | |
| From her perspective, that's probably the right... | |
| Also, that's another good point. | |
| She didn't die. | |
| She didn't get into a coughing fit. | |
| She didn't faint. | |
| She didn't cough up a furball or a ball of phlegm or anything. | |
| She was probably very heavily medicated and they put her up there and she didn't look like she was unhealthy. | |
| She actually looked better in this debate than generally speaking how she looks, which is... | |
| Ugly and old. | |
| Yeah, definitely. | |
| Yes. | |
| Her hair was an unmovable object. | |
| It's funny that I'm paying attention to these things, but I think these things are probably more important than any kind of wonkish aspects. | |
| That's probably true. | |
| The Hoi Poli don't actually care about policy. | |
| They just want to know that someone's sticking up for them. | |
| And they kind of respond to things. | |
| I mean, most famously, there was the Nixon-Kennedy debate, although there is research that that was overrated. | |
| You know, people who listened to the debate on radio claimed that Nixon won, and then people who watched it on television claimed that Kennedy won, although that has been challenged just because, you know, different types of people have televisions in 1960 than listen to radio. | |
| You know, a lot of farmers are listening to it on radio. | |
| They're more likely to be right-wing, so on. | |
| Nevertheless, it really is those little things that change debates. | |
| I think it was in 2000 where they had this weird standing up debate, kind of town hall with George W. Bush and Al Gore. | |
| And Al Gore kind of stood up and walked up to Bush and Bush gave him this kind of funny nod. | |
| That might have tipped the scales much more than anything either of those men said. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, that's ultimately true, is that people aren't going to necessarily remember anything that's said unless it was something ridiculous or like a gaffe. | |
| There were no gaffes on either candidate's part. | |
| Generally speaking, people are going to talk or remember, like, how did this event make me feel about either candidate? | |
| Trump won on that section because his goal was ultimately to not come off as crazy or a loose cannon. | |
| He has to be presidential now, and he did not look like a crazy loose cannon. | |
| So he definitely won some points in the hearts and minds of American people last night. | |
| Because he was composed. | |
| So, I mean, that's good on him. | |
| Though the negatives for Trump were that he was constantly on the defensive, and that in part had to do with the moderators questioning about things like birtherism and stuff. | |
| I don't know how people will perceive. | |
| He did interrupt her a lot, actually. | |
| How people will think if they'll view that as being rude or if his interruptions were warranted or not. | |
| So it could be bad, potentially, all the interruptions. | |
| But definitely looking like you're on the defensive at times is not a good thing. | |
| Though he had a very strong showing. | |
| At the point when they were talking about trade, he was very aggressive and pushed Clinton on the issue, and she looked kind of like a dumb, foolish politician who didn't really have much to say. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I think Trump... | |
| She did. | |
| She looked like a smart, foolish politician who was just... | |
| You know, talking in a wonky manner. | |
| I would say that Trump did seem a bit incoherent when he was talking about nuclear policy and NATO. | |
| I think in a way, I think that explains something important about what's happening on the right. | |
| I mean, the alt-right really is disrupting business as usual. | |
| It's disrupting the right. | |
| And one of the outcomes of that is that we don't, like, we haven't given it. | |
| I mean, the Heritage Foundation and the AEI and all these horrible places, you know, they've been producing content. | |
| And, you know, writing legislation for decades. | |
| And so there's this, you know, they've created a certain policy hegemony, a way of thinking. | |
| And we haven't. | |
| We've done very little of that, actually. | |
| Although we've done, you know, a lot of cultural work and critique, and I know that's very important. | |
| But we haven't done that because we've been, you know, alienated from politics for so long. | |
| And so I think in a way, like, he doesn't have, you know, the alt-right foreign policy to look at. | |
| And so, you know, I guess to a degree that's on us, to a degree that's on him, to a larger degree, it's on him. | |
| But, you know, again, some of the NATO things he was saying, I wish he would have just actually stuck to his guns. | |
| I guess perhaps someone is telling him that you can't say that NATO is outmoded. | |
| But NATO is clearly outmoded. | |
| NATO is not about fighting terrorism. | |
| I mean, it's about confronting the Soviet Union. | |
| You know, it's completely outmoded. | |
| I thought Trump's instincts were right on for the beginning about that. | |
| I don't know how anyone can be that offended by his views on nuclear weapons. | |
| What he's doing when talking about nuclear weapons is he's being honest. | |
| He's like, you know, if someone used a nuclear weapon against the United States, we're going to nuke them. | |
| People just don't want to talk about that's how a nuclear weapon works. | |
| That's what it's designed for. | |
| This is just the honest way of talking about it, that if a person uses nuclear weapons, you're going to nuke the shit out of them, and then it's pretty… Right. | |
| So... | |
| But that's why we have nuclear weapons, to prevent these massive, large-scale wars because of mutually assured destruction. | |
| He's just being honest about it, and I think everyone understands that. | |
| But she just wants to be like, oh, he's a crazy person. | |
| Listen to how he talks. | |
| He's going to nuke somebody. | |
| Right. | |
| And the other thing about it is that other countries are going to eventually have nuclear weapons. | |
| That is basically an inevitability. | |
| Advanced countries are going to get their hands on this stuff. | |
| Especially as American hegemony declines, we are going to be less likely to prevent foreign powers from getting nuclear weapons. | |
| And in fact... | |
| Lots of people that we potentially really don't like could get nuclear weapons. | |
| So what then? | |
| We can't be the world police forever, and that's something Donald Trump said. | |
| We can't be the world police. | |
| And it's so obvious that the American global empire is in decline, and you aren't going to be able to stop, say, Iran, from getting a nuclear weapon at some point in the future, they're going to get one if they want to get one. | |
| What are you going to do about it? | |
| It's an advanced country. | |
| That's the other image of the Middle East. | |
| Iran is one of the more civilized parts of that. | |
| You know, downtown Tehran is fairly European, culturally speaking. | |
| And yeah, eventually they are going to have a nuclear weapon and we're going to have to live with this terrible reality. | |
| And yeah, it just seems like Trump is just a lot more down to earth about that. | |
| I think there is something worth talking about here, and that is that... | |
| A lot of conservatives will say this, and I think they're correct, and that is that Trump is actually a response to American decline, imperial decline. | |
| Just the talk about NATO, I mean, people like Victoria Nuland and Hillary Clinton, and probably less so Barack Obama, but definitely Hillary Clinton, they want American imperial... | |
| You know, increase. | |
| I mean, they want to push NATO closer and closer to Russia's borders. | |
| They might very well want a regime change in Russia itself. | |
| And I think, you know, they want more debt. | |
| You know, this was another thing that he mentioned that Hillary said, like, he's talked about writing down America's debt. | |
| And it's like, oh, you know, heavens to Betsy. | |
| That you write down a massive debt that you can't pay. | |
| I mean, that's like the most reasonable thing you can do. | |
| But anyway, they want to keep expanding it. | |
| They want to sell people more debt, get them, you know, it's like a junkie, like get these people gooped up on American bonds. | |
| And then they want to, you know, push NATO into Russia, maybe regime change in Russia. | |
| I think Trump is kind of a symptom of this other reality, which is that it just... | |
| By just the nature of the world, America is declining in power. | |
| He even mentioned that during the debate, and he was being criticized for it. | |
| When he was saying, he's like, Germany is getting a free ride, or South Korea is getting a free ride, Japan, these people need to pay their fair share. | |
| We provide them this great service, and they're getting it for free. | |
| They need to pay us. | |
| Japan needs to pay us. | |
| Germany needs to pay us, or else we're going to take our troops out. | |
| And that is what a lot of people feel is reasonable. | |
| Like, yeah, this American military, global military empire, it costs too much money. | |
| These people are taking advantage of us. | |
| But also it is because, you know, we are an empire that is declining. | |
| If you would have said, you know, 30 years ago, like, you know, the South Koreans need to start paying their fair share, people would not have been comfortable with that. | |
| Now, you know, the Cold War is over, and our enemies, though the neocons and neoliberals, I guess, they want to keep Russia as the enemy so they can have a second Cold War, it seems. | |
| Donald Trump has a more realistic view, or definitely a viewpoint that a lot of Americans hold, that we can't do this anymore. | |
| This country is going bankrupt. | |
| We need to start taking care of ourselves. | |
| And what was perhaps a luxury at one time that we could have this global military empire? | |
| Well, it's not anymore. | |
| And in fact, in some ways, it's a liability, especially after 9-11. | |
| I mean, I came out of the Ron Paul movement. | |
| That was like the big thing. | |
| The reason that these countries hate us, particularly why 9-11 happened, one of the reasons they said it was because we had military bases in Saudi Arabia. | |
| It's a liability now. | |
| And what do we get by protecting Japan? | |
| Like, oh, we're almost on the verge of war with North Korea or China or Russia because we have military troops in the Asian theater. | |
| That seems like it's more of a liability than it's… Yeah, I mean, it is a kind of contradiction where, you know, the Japanese, you know, I mean, much less so now. | |
| I mean, Japan is definitely a society in decline. | |
| Actually, when I was there, it was remarkable just how old. | |
| You're basically subsidizing a country that is beating you in trade, to use Trump-like terms. | |
| And yeah, just stop doing that. | |
| Japan is going to have to deal with its own geopolitical situation. | |
| It's going to have to make some kind of arrangement with China, who's obviously this big... | |
| You know, big boy over there. | |
| And it might very well not be to their liking, but, you know, that's how life goes. | |
| I mean, it's just, you know, I don't know. | |
| I mean, it's just, but I think it is interesting to think about this. | |
| That's this, you know, deep contradiction at the heart of Make America Great Again, is that at some level, it's a symptom of American imperial decline. | |
| It is. | |
| It is. | |
| That's why Donald Trump exists. | |
| Yeah. | |
| One of the reasons, yeah, is because everyone feels that this is an empire in decline, and we're losing on trade, Richard. | |
| We're losing on the foreign policy. | |
| We're losing at our borders. | |
| We need to make America great again, and that's what a lot of people feel, and it's true. | |
| The demographic changes this country is going through, the national debt situation, the fact that our foreign policy has been just highly disruptive and not really provided any benefit to us. | |
| It has provided benefit to certain other people, but it's a foreign policy that is not good for us. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I'm really sick of the Poles just doing everything on Poland's behalf in terms of foreign policy. | |
| Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Poles. | |
| And we've just got to stop using our military might on behalf of this Catholic people. | |
| Yeah, the Poles. | |
| The greedy Pollocks. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it's got to end. | |
| I mean, the PQ, I mean, if you're not right on the PQ, I'm going to fucking purge you from this movement. | |
| Let's leave it at that. | |
| Well, we're going to wrap it up. | |
| Like, who do you think won, and what do... | |
| Going forward, we can wrap it up that way, not on the Polish questions. | |
| I think Trump won on points, just to go back to what I said before, in the sense that Hillary can't really win. | |
| Trump can only lose. | |
| Because Hillary at the end of the day is just toxic and awful. | |
| And the only way that she can win is if Trump knocks himself out by doing something really terrible. | |
| I don't think Trump did that. | |
| And I think he totally won the first 15 to 30 minutes. | |
| So I think it was... | |
| Probably good, and maybe it was just good in the sense that he got the first one out of the way, and he can learn from it and get better. | |
| So I think he won on points, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed at the end of the night. | |
| I was really psyched at the beginning, but after the debate, I went up and poured a glass of whiskey and was kind of like... | |
| That's my impression. | |
| A lot of people wanted him to give her the Jeb Bush treatment and totally be TFO-er. | |
| I don't think we're going to see that because that's part of his... | |
| People think he looks like a maniac. | |
| But ultimately, at the end of the night, Clinton did... | |
| She didn't do anything to make herself look good or bad, per se. | |
| She didn't really change her perception in the minds of voters, I don't think. | |
| Whereas Donald Trump, where he may not have performed the best that he could in the debate, ultimately he came away looking a lot better. | |
| He accomplished the one thing he needed to accomplish and that was to look presidential, look like the guy that... | |
| could be running the country instead of like you know this kind of crazy asshole figure even though we love the crazy asshole part of him you know your president can't be just this crazy ridiculous person they have to have some at least show us that you can compose yourself I think, in that regard, Trump will walk away from this debate. | |
| Looking better than he did, and thus, by that virtue alone, he wins, even though his performance was not as good as it could have been. | |
| And in some ways, you could even say that maybe even Clinton won the debate, because she wasn't on the defensive, the moderator wasn't attacking her, but he looked better. | |
| He accomplished his mission. | |
| Hillary Clinton didn't accomplish anything. | |
| She didn't look better. | |
| She didn't look worse. | |
| She looked the same. | |
| I think everyone's on the same page. | |
| I think this is what happened. | |
| It's hard to disaggregate causes. | |
| We're in this good upward momentum swing for Trump. | |
| I don't know what's going to happen. | |
| Even if it does turn around, that doesn't necessarily mean that the debate did it. | |
| It could be another factor in these things. | |
| But I think we're in a general upward momentum swing, and I don't think the debate is going to reverse that at all. | |
| That's my gut feeling. | |
| Yeah, I think that as well. | |
| His mission was to look less scary. | |
| And he did it. | |
| And so he can still continue to ride this wave of momentum that has been slowly but surely pushing him over top. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And we've got to... | |
| I think also he can learn. | |
| I mean, again, it's like... | |
| Mitt Romney won 59% of the white vote. | |
| We've had four years of demographic change. | |
| The way to win the presidency is to get even more of that. | |
| I don't know what it is, but he's got to hit 62% of the white vote. | |
| It's got to be big. | |
| I think he just needs to think about what he was doing right last night. | |
| When he was showing genuine Yeah, and that trade spat was probably the best part of the entire debate. | |
| And Trump, by virtue of holding the positions that he holds, One, yeah, he did seem more compassionate towards the American working class. | |
| And two, no one gives a shit about free trade except economists. | |
| Middle class and lower class Americans are not, you know, they don't give a shit about free trade. | |
| No. | |
| It's just libertarians and economists. | |
| And so he won over the hearts and minds of working class people with that little piece. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I agree. | |
| I think that's what he's got to double down on. | |
| And just cut out the... | |
| Maybe this is good. | |
| We've already talked about the birther thing. | |
| And so if it comes up again, ditto the tax returns. | |
| If it comes up again, he should be like, we've already covered this. | |
| This is what I care about. | |
| Just change the subject. | |
| Just do it. | |
| Don't answer the question. | |
| Someone told me this. | |
| I rarely do this because I don't... | |
| Think of myself as a politician. | |
| It's like, answer the question you want to have been asked. | |
| Don't necessarily answer the one that was asked. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's the way a politician does it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| All right. | |
| Bookmark. |