RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - The Long MAGA

Nov. 27, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:21:25

The Long MAGA

Brad Griffin joins Richard Spencer to discuss the election of 2020, Trumpism without Trump, and the long trajectory of "right-wing populism." 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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	Yeah, honey-baked ham and sweet potatoes and some nice dinner rolls to go with the ham.
	And mustard.
	Some other potatoes.
	We kind of had two potatoes going.
	And it was very good.
	No turkey?
	No turkey.
	You know, I'm not a...
	I mean, I don't know.
	I guess I only would eat turkey on Thanksgiving.
	I'm not a big turkey fan.
	But I kind of prefer a turkey alternative, like ham.
	But yeah, there are a lot of actual turkeys out here.
	It's kind of funny.
	Ham is the reserve for Christmas.
	True, but I guess we're rule breakers.
	I'm in my swing on my front porch here in the Deep South.
	Ah, good.
	I didn't vote for Trump.
	Time for me to, you know, be dox for, you know, not voting for that guy.
	But again, I love all these guys, as I was saying before, where they're like, oh, I'm super critical of Trump, or whatever.
	They're like, oh, I'm third position, or like, I'm alts, whatever.
	And then...
	They viciously attack anyone who doesn't vote for Republicans.
	There were a bunch of people who, at the very last moment, flipped back to Trump.
	That night of the election, when I was drunk, I was like, hey, look, it looks like Trump is doing great.
	I was congratulating them.
	I passed out and woke up the next morning and it all turned around.
	From that point on, they just got angrier and angrier and angrier and angrier that he lost, and a bunch of them unfollowed me because I was making fun of them for losing.
	So they're just highly emotional right now.
	They think Trump's going to still win.
	97% of his voters think he's still going to win.
	There are a couple of things going on here.
	And there's some big picture things that I want to talk about.
	And then there's also some small picture things in the sense of what's happening with the alt-right and so on.
	Maybe we'll...
	Let's do the big picture first.
	I think you and I, we've done a couple of podcasts over the last month or so.
	We both agreed that no matter who won, the other side would say it was illegitimate.
	And they'd just be in search of an argument to claim illegitimacy.
	And so if Trump had won, the Russia narrative would have been revived.
	And maybe some other new narrative would enter out of the woodwork.
	And in fact, the whole Diebold voting machines, I've been hearing that for like 20 years about how...
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's not the first time.
	No, it's not.
	And it's generally a left-wing thing.
	I would hear this about George Bush, and it's like Halliburton's a co-owner of Diebold or whatever.
	I can't even remember.
	Bush stole Ohio in 2004 from John Kerry by hacking the voting machine.
	Right.
	And so this is, the point is that they have a conclusion and they're in search of an argument.
	And you can see this with the, but again, just to be perfectly fair and not seem like I'm some democratic partisan, I think, I actually think we would have seen the exact same hysteria, maybe worse, in fact, if Trump had won.
	So I'm by no means like trying to leave out any...
	Any side that claimed that they're not guilty of this.
	But you can see this in the lawsuits themselves, where they're making...
	And these lawsuits are getting tossed out of court left and right.
	I think all but one of them has been tossed out, unless I'm incorrect.
	But they're in search of evidence.
	They're like, we know that something's going on here.
	So let's go find the evidence now.
	It's not really how it works.
	I mean, maybe if you're a policeman, you can kind of act in that way.
	But you just can't act in that way, or at least, I mean, when you're doing actions.
	I mean, this is, well, it reminds me of a case that I'm involved in where they more or less claimed that, and it's lasted for a while.
	But yeah, both sides are kind of in their own world.
	And the other thing that I was thinking is, I actually watch the YouTube videos of this.
	I mean, I guess you could call him an intelligent academic grifter, but his name's Steve Turley.
	And I've actually, even though I disagree with him on a lot, he actually is an intelligent guy.
	I think he has a PhD from Durham University, just where Ed Dutton went, and so on.
	So he's a smart guy, learned something.
	I kind of disagree with him, so it kind of sharpens my knife, so to speak, to listen to him.
	Nevertheless, he's still on this team, Team Red.
	And I was thinking to myself, as people increasingly watch less mainstream media, and they tune in to Facebook...
	You know, your favorite YouTube personality, Tim Pool, Steve Turley, because Steve Turley gets like a quarter of a million views on every video.
	I mean, he has an audience that's larger than ours, just for what it's worth.
	But yeah, if you tune in only to Steve Turley, Tim Pool, all these characters, if you're, you know, talking to your uncle on your Facebook group and he's giving you conspiracy theories, you are just...
	You might very well think that, like, Trump is winning and that the liberals are running for the hills and they're, you know, pulling their hair out and biting their nails because they know they've been had.
	I mean, the level of, like, narrative, macro-narrative divergence, I don't think it's ever been this strong.
	Especially with people who are online.
	Like, from my understanding, like, normal conservatives are Trump supporters who aren't.
	You know, big into a Facebook group or Twitter or whatever have kind of accepted it more.
	They're like, oh, he lost.
	But like these extremely online types are the ones who cling to this Trump thing.
	Like, oh, he actually won.
	And they think he is winning.
	I mean, it's not even like a theory.
	Like they think that this is all moving forward towards a victory.
	It's just bizarre.
	Did you see that Tucker Carlson lost like half his audience?
	It was that dramatic.
	I mean, he lost like half the audience.
	It's all over Fox.
	Yeah, half the Fox News audience is rebelling right now against Fox because they're all mad.
	Well, they'll go to OWN and they'll go to Newsmax, which is, I didn't even know that was a channel now, but it's not just a web channel.
	It's actually on TV.
	It's still around, apparently.
	Yeah, I mean, I have not paid attention to them for years.
	Anyway, but whatever.
	I mean, they've developed an audience.
	But the other thing, I think Fox News is in a difficult situation because, you know, first off, you have, like, Ailes is out.
	And Murdoch's sons seem to be taking over, and they're different.
	I think they're around the same age as I am.
	They're just kind of of a different era.
	And they also want to be taken seriously in some fashion.
	And they kind of know that they're the Republican wing of this, but they want to be taken seriously.
	And I think they will pump up stuff.
	And Tucker wants to be taken seriously.
	I think he kind of intelligently recognized that.
	You know, uh-oh, the trap door is about to open below us, so we've got to take a step back.
	But they want to be taken seriously, but then also they want to pump up right-wing kind of goofiness when it doesn't really have any consequences.
	So, like, the Fox News was like the Tea Party channel 10 years ago.
	They would cover some rally in Des Moines with 20 people, and they'd be like, this is amazing footage.
	The people are rising up.
	We've got to talk about this.
	They're just rising up right now.
	They were doing the same thing with the anti-lockdown protest.
	Back in, I think, April and May, they were pumping the, look at these demonstrators who are rising up against the tyrannical lockdowns.
	So they tried to do that earlier this year.
	Although this time they're in a, I would say, in a pretty bad spot.
	Like we said, like we both agreed, the main take before the election for six months was no matter who won the election, the other side was there's absolutely no chance the other side was ever going to acknowledge that they legitimately lost.
	And we're in that point.
	If you look back at what we said before the election, maybe we were too quick to assume that they would acknowledge it was over because, you know, Hawley 2024 hasn't launched.
	Tucker 2024 hasn't launched.
	None of that has launched.
	They're all sticking with Trump who insists he won the election.
	And so, in fact, like, so much of the Republican base is just so glued to So absolutely glued to this narrative that things aren't really happening like they normally would, where they have the post-election Civil War Republican Party.
	And so all that's been postponed, I guess.
	And they didn't have that, because we could at least imagine a scenario in which the GOP told Trump no and told him no hard.
	And that's kind of where they were four years ago.
	I mean, remember the GOP, they were just drag kicking and screaming into the Trump movement.
	And they eventually got there by the summer of 2016.
	But it was a difficult situation.
	But now, I mean, the GOP, they put out a tweet endorsing Sidney Powell like five or six days ago now.
	You just can't take that back.
	It's been screenshotted.
	She unleashed the Kraken last night around midnight.
	Has the Kraken been unleashed?
	Yeah.
	In Georgia and Michigan, she unleashed the Kraken last night.
	It was like, oh my God.
	And then there was some kind of...
	Pennsylvania voter fraud hearing, and Trump called into it.
	And Sarovic was like, wow, did you see Pennsylvania happen?
	Wow.
	And none of this is going anywhere, in my view.
	And according to Trump, if the Electoral College votes to, say, Joe Biden's a president, he'll leave.
	Of course, he'll never concede victory.
	But, I mean, that's just his excuse for face-saving and getting out.
	I guess this will go on to what, mid-December?
	Looks like.
	If not January 20th.
	Well, oh yeah.
	When does, do they do that in, oh yeah, it is like December 13th or 15th or something.
	It's something like mid-December.
	Electoral College actually votes.
	Yeah.
	And they're still holding out hope.
	Like there is this so-called nuclear option of, in the words of Darren Beattie, of, you know, convincing the Electoral College voters and so on.
	Yeah, I give that, I think, 1% chance is extremely generous.
	And if they did that, that would cause its own just tremendous problems because you have kind of like, I mean, what is it now?
	Republicans have lost the popular vote seven out of eight last elections?
	It was about four points.
	It's about four points in going out this time.
	Right.
	And so obviously I recognize that the popular vote does not determine the president.
	Of course not.
	But it does.
	I mean, we live in a democratic society.
	This does give legitimacy.
	And you are a little bit tainted if you didn't win the popular vote, even though you are certainly legally president.
	But yeah, I mean...
	Him just staying on, that would also just create huge chaos.
	I don't even know what it would look like.
	What were our pre-election predictions?
	I overestimated Biden, so I thought that Biden would hit Obama-era numbers.
	In the 330s, yeah.
	I think I said 325 or something, but yeah.
	So I was a bit, I mean, I picked the right victor, but I was a bit off.
	I underestimated, it wasn't even so much overestimating Biden, because he did benefit, I mean, Trump is right when he says that, you know, this is a mail-in, you know, flood, you know, and that clearly has been benefit Biden.
	And Trump made it benefit Biden, I should add, because he delegitimized mail-in.
	But, you know, I think I underestimated, I think I was, you know, in my own head a little too much, being just pissed off at Trump.
	The blue wave.
	Richard's official prediction was that it was going to be a blue wave.
	Actually, but, you know, technically it was a blue wave.
	I mean, Biden won by four points, but the thing is, is that the House is so gerrymandered.
	And the Democrats are so concentrated in these cities that, I mean, they have to win by four or five points.
	Hold on.
	In 2018, they won by close to ten.
	They won by nine points if you aggregate all house races.
	Yeah, and so that was larger than any red wave.
	So these, like, 94 in 2010, I mentioned this in my piece on this, and I'm kind of writing a Piece called What the Hell Happened, which is kind of like the next stage of this.
	But yeah, the 94 revolution in the 2010 Tea Party election, I think the Republicans won by like five or six points.
	The 2018 was a wave election, like 100%.
	They won by nine percentage points.
	And I don't think they went down too much.
	So we're just seeing like cascades of blue.
	But again, Republicans spin this as if they won something.
	Yeah, it was actually, I mean, this election was, I mean, when I looked at it, you can see the swing map.
	It was pretty much like static, except in certain key suburban areas and around Miami and the Texas border.
	What stands out about it?
	I mean, it was really a status quo election, except that, you know, the famous defection of...
	The famous defection of his strategy.
	Some white guys.
	Yeah.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah.
	And I, of course, take singular credit for that.
	It would not have happened without me and maybe you.
	No, just kidding.
	It was totally hard, didn't we?
	It was totally hard.
	We have an enormous audience.
	Well, we don't have an invisible audience, but what I'm saying is obviously it's not so much like I just do something and this happens.
	I'm kind of part of the wave as much as I push the wave in my own little small way.
	But I think a lot of people did read and they probably saw a tweet or read an article or saw their friend on Facebook tweeting about Like, the fact that I was voting for Biden.
	I think I had a minute impact.
	It was small, but it was what it was.
	I think you did too.
	Yeah, it was people.
	It was what it was.
	I mean, why else are we engaging in the public square if we're not trying to affect things in the limited way that we can?
	I mean, give me a break.
	Yeah, and the big takeaway of the 2020 election is that literally no one changed their mind except people like Richard Spencer and Brad Griffey.
	Yeah.
	And look at the people who did change their minds.
	So look who were vehemently opposed to Trump in 2016 and then unequivocally, you know, glowingly endorsed him in 2020.
	Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck.
	Well, I mean, if you want to get into it, I mean, that's the story of the election right there.
	Yeah.
	What happened between 2016 and 2020.
	The way he won in 2016 isn't the way he lost in 2020.
	Exactly.
	In 2020, you look at the numbers and what it's...
	Nationally, he won 85% of conservatives.
	He won 94% of Republicans.
	The upper middle class swung towards Trump by 7 or 8 points.
	In his past election.
	In 2020.
	Yeah, in 2020.
	And he did – one of the things I think that was getting – given too much credit was like, oh, it's a new multi-ethnic Republican – it's a new multi-ethnic, multi-racial, working-class Republican Party because Trump did better with minorities this time than he did last time.
	But actually, actually – The big actually there is that because he was seen as a more conservative, normal conservative Republican, he didn't perform as badly with non-whites this time as he did last time.
	So, I mean, he ran as a Republican.
	I mean, that's the story.
	He ran as a conservative.
	He ran as a Republican.
	He lost the Rust Belt while winning more blacks, more Hispanics, more Asians.
	But, I mean, the margins are there.
	It looks like 2012.
	Yeah.
	The map.
	So we're going back to Republican candidates and there is a blue wall.
	That's what it reminds me of.
	And it shows that 2016 was a remarkable maybe aberration or maybe just, you know, Hail Mary victory.
	And I don't even know if he did it consciously.
	I'm generally of the opinion that Trump just stumbles upon these things and maybe...
	Thanks with his gut a bit.
	But the remarkable thing about 2016 was all of these Obama Republicans, basically.
	They voted for Obama.
	Once or twice, even.
	And then they voted for Trump in 2016.
	And that's a remarkable shift.
	Or they were apathetic.
	And these are tens of millions of people.
	And again, they gave him these narrow margins in the Midwest, but they made that Rust Belt strategy.
	Possible.
	Now that Russell's strategy depends upon Florida.
	But that being said, that was the kind of unique thing because Republicans have kind of won Florida before.
	Winning Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, that's the kind of new thing.
	Florida was trending more Republican even in 2018 because DeSantis won there.
	And who else?
	Scott?
	Yeah.
	Oh, Rebecca Scott.
	Yeah, and Ohio ceased to be a swing state, so that's interesting.
	It's now a red state, apparently.
	It's now a red state.
	Go ahead.
	You thought that Trump won more non-white votes because he just went back to being a normal Republican and maybe not such a crypto-white nationalist?
	No, I think it's...
	I think it's more complicated, but go ahead with your interpretation.
	I think that he, because didn't he win, like, more non-whites than even a normal Republican would win?
	I think it's probably because of, quite frankly, because, like, Trump is kind of a character from a rap song or something.
	Like, he has, like, an appeal to, like, blacks in particular that, like, Mitt Romney or someone wouldn't have.
	I think that's...
	Like, he is Donald Trump, and, like, he did the panel.
	Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it.
	He has been in all these rap songs, like music that I've never heard before.
	I've only heard little snippets of it.
	But he is a meme, you could say, like an icon.
	And I think that was part of it.
	I mean, I've heard reports that he literally just paid like a million dollars to these rap stars to get their endorsement.
	Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.
	Which was probably money well spent, to be honest.
	He has an appeal.
	Just being himself, he has an appeal to these people.
	That, like, some normal Republican wouldn't, like...
	Yeah, they're not going to vote for Romney.
	So I think he did well there.
	Now, I think there is a complicated story among Hispanics because if you take a step back, like, the 65-35 break of Hispanics or 60-40, you know, maybe 70-30, that has not changed.
	So it changed in kind of little places.
	So I think in Florida, there's always been a kind of Republican base of, you know, like Cubans who are wildly anti- Socialism and so on.
	I think there's also a kind of aspirational Hispanic in the suburb that was looking towards Trump.
	And I think Trump lost that alt-right edge, you could say, that he had in 2016.
	And it became something different.
	My little pet theory, which I don't know how I or anyone could prove this, but...
	I think there are these wild districts like in South Texas that were just like extreme Trump.
	And my pet theory is that Hispanics really don't like BLM for a number of reasons, including just some of the reasons that people are uncomfortable with African Americans in general.
	But also maybe a little resentment of like...
	Why are we still talking about you guys?
	We're the new minority.
	We're the ones that matter.
	Why are we obsessed with Africans as opposed to Hispanics?
	And I think there was probably a weird thing that went on there where it was like, let's stick it to BLM by voting for Trump.
	And I think that obviously held among many whites as well.
	I'll jump in and try to give you my explanation of it.
	Okay, with blacks, with blacks in particular, I think the exit polls, I mean, maybe he did two to four points better than last time, from what I've seen with the exit polls, but what actually happened is that in 2008 and 2012, Obama was, you know, on the ticket, so the Republicans did worse with blacks in both of those elections.
	And then in 2016 and 2020, blacks kind of migrated back to the George W. Bush 2004, about 10% of the black vote, getting more black women and about six or seven points more over the black male vote.
	But nothing really changed.
	That's really just the fading, in my view, the fading of the Obama effect.
	Maybe the Jared's Platinum Plan.
	I think it had some kind of impact.
	Maybe all these rap stars.
	Maybe marginally alike.
	In places like Chicago, the places that Trump did better than last time were Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia.
	You know the places where all the fraud is supposed to occur.
	Those are literally the places where he did better.
	Trump won 5,000 more votes than Detroit and Joe Biden won 1,000 less votes than Hillary.
	In Detroit, where the fraud occurred.
	Well, you know, they're just covering their tracks by doing that, yeah.
	Just covering their tracks by ringing the election in favor of Trump.
	Right.
	And they decided to allow Republicans to win some congressional races while engaging in fraud, just to kind of, like, throw us off the side.
	Yeah, so in 2020, Trump ran as a more normal Republican and kind of went back to the George W. Bush 2004 level of support with blacks.
	With Asians, I heard he got something like 7% more of the Asian vote.
	And there's a number of things going on there.
	First of all, I think the Vietnamese in California liked the fact that he was so anti-China.
	And then you also got Hindus or Indians.
	He courted the Indian vote heavily.
	a big rally there with Modi.
	So he wants, I think, more of them.
	And then, of course, you know, he's been, you know, just completely anti-Iran, anti-Shiite.
	And the Muslim ban, of course, turned out to be this big joke that really applied only to Iran and, like, North Korea and Venezuela and Cuba.
	And so he won more.
	The Asian vote is kind of complicated.
	There's a lot of, you know, Beefs and resentments going on there.
	And of course, I think a lot of some Asians were just scared off by the, alienated by the, didn't they vote against affirmative action in California?
	Oh yeah.
	Yeah, that was an interesting thing, actually.
	There was a big referendum on affirmative action that was just emphatic.
	And then Hispanics, and then with Hispanics, it's a couple things.
	First of all, with Tijanos, Tijanos.
	Down in South Texas.
	That was like the biggest, if I'm not mistaken, one of the biggest, one of the two biggest shifts.
	Those people down there are, you know, had been there for like 200 years in Texas.
	So they consider themselves, they think of themselves as whites, I guess 56 percenters.
	They think of themselves as natives.
	They think of themselves as rural voters, working class voters.
	And of course, Joe Biden was like, okay, Or the impression in the campaign was that they were going to abolish ICE.
	A lot of those people abolished, opened the border.
	A lot of those people worked for the Border Patrol.
	And fracking was the big issue down there that Trump made an issue of.
	And so, I mean, Trump appealed to those Hispanics.
	I want to say he lost handily amongst Mexican immigrants in places like Dallas.
	Down there, he built Hispanics, his whites and natives and rural voters whose interests would be injured by having Biden as president, persuasively.
	Then, of course, in South Florida, it was Venezuela and socialism and Cuba and socialism, and you got two big expat communities there who were the socialism sucks message.
	Resonated with him.
	And he appealed to them on the basis of nationality, not as like Hispanics.
	And then, of course, just because he was seen as a more normal Republican candidate, and immigration really wasn't part of this election at all.
	It was, I think, 3% of voters said that immigration was the most important issue.
	And because immigration was off the table and Trump was running as a more normal Republican, He won more.
	It's not that he did better with the Hispanic vote.
	It's just he did so much poorly with it the first time.
	And then, of course, the biggest shift of all the most decisive thing that happened, I've written about it endlessly on my blog, is with, you can count white men, independents, moderates, living in the suburbs.
	Making under $100,000 a year, that's where he lost the election.
	Yeah.
	I mean, clearly.
	What do you think of that?
	The 5%.
	I mean, it's where the 5% meme where it's like, look, you know, you can hate on this all you want, but it's actually a real thing.
	You know?
	Like, we're describing reality, and you can hate it.
	And I've heard other people where, like, I mean, I don't want to make this too personal, but it's that genie guy who, you know, again, claims to be a big Trump critic, but, you know, when you look at his actions and not his words, he's clearly a Trump fanatic.
	And I think at one point he literally said, he was like, oh, well, yeah, he did, those numbers are right, but with the 5%, that's all fraud.
	You know, it's just kind of like anything.
	Yeah, it's just like fraud is this like, you know, catch all, you know, argument that you can use.
	I forgot.
	Yeah.
	It's ridiculous.
	I forgot college educated.
	I forgot college educated there.
	So if you, so if you, so if you tick in, if you tick in every Richard Spencer box, what you got white male, you got independent, you got independent voter, you got moderate.
	Is it not being a liberal or a conservative?
	You got college educated.
	I was just following my ethnic group, basically.
	Extremely turned on by Trumpism.
	Right.
	And, you know, I've identified, like, you know, I've gone through all the, I did a previous podcast with Robert Stark, and I got on all the pew topology surveys.
	And, like, I explained exactly where all these people were in the electorate, and it was, like, right in the dead center.
	In fact, I think on the pre-election podcast I did with you, I was like, you know, I think that, you know, Trump's going to lose because I'm kind of in the dead center of where things are, and that's exactly what happened.
	He appealed, what happened was, is that in the 2016 election, and this is true across the...
	You can see it in exit polls in both things.
	He won in the – Trump's base in the 2016 election was amongst white independents, more moderates.
	When he was elected, he was seen as an extremely moderate Republican, and that is on economics and foreign policy and issues like that.
	He was explicitly – in a book, he came out in favor of health care for all.
	And he wasn't quite as explicit in the campaign, but he indicated as much.
	He was going to save all these jobs and rig the system on our behalf.
	And again, the conservatives actually did campaigning for him because from the summer of 2015 up until the summer of 2016 when they all turned, or a lot of them did at least, one of their key...
	critiques was that he's a big liberal.
	Wasn't even Malkin saying that?
	I'm kind of curious.
	I don't follow her.
	I wouldn't be surprised if she were doing the same thing.
	Right.
	And he was pro-Cruz.
	And we can talk about the Fuentes phenomenon as well and talk about it objectively and not bitterly at all.
	But yeah, it was like, I think even Malkin was anti-Trump at that point.
	I'll have to go check on this.
	But a lot of the people who became Trump fans later on were against him.
	And they would bring up things like his use of eminent domain in building real estate ventures in the 90s or something.
	It was just so...
	It wasn't tangential to any real issue, but a lot of it was, like, he's a liberal.
	He's a socialist.
	He's a Democrat.
	He supported Democrats.
	He's friends with Hillary.
	That was a lot of their messaging.
	And to the degree that that got out and reached beyond their little echo chambers, it helped Trump unquestionably.
	Yeah, so, like, you've got to remember, in the end of the 2016 election, he was going after banks and everything down in West Palm Beach.
	All the conservatives had turned against him and were attacking him.
	And I'm telling you, the reason Trump was elected president in 2016 is because he appealed to white men who are independent voters who make under $100,000 a year who are moderates and who are not conservatives.
	That's the reason.
	Do you think that same Trump 2016, do you think that'll be the strategy going forward for like a...
	Neo-Trumpists, like your Josh Hawley types and stuff?
	Because I think they're going to run more Trumpist, Trumpian candidates like Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton.
	Do you think they'll go back to talking about immigration?
	What do you think that'll look like in 2024?
	Because Trumpism isn't going anywhere.
	I'll let Hunter take this first.
	It's a good question, and I have something to say, too, but I'll let you go first.
	Well, I mean, like we said in the previous podcast, the GOP prefer to lose for like 100, for the most part, for 100 years, you know, for the last 100 years, rather than like change their position on, moderate their position on economics to appeal to white people who are more in the center of the electorate.
	They prefer to lose throughout like the whole The whole era.
	Now, will Trumpism go away?
	Absolutely not.
	In some form, it's going to, at least rhetorically, I mean, that's what we saw when we found out when we elected Trump, it was mainly a rhetorical strategy.
	So the rhetoric will, there will be Trumpian rhetoric, but the question is, is any of these people actually going to implement some kind of serious policy?
	Whether it's Hawley or Rubio or either one, I don't know.
	Trumpism, in some form, was too successful for them to get rid of.
	Marco Rubio 15.0 has already come out and is trying to at least talk like Trumpian conservatives.
	Yeah, let me go on this.
	Okay, first off, I did a cursory Google search, and I struck gold.
	This is Hollywood Reporter.
	So this is a very mainstream magazine that, like, breaks stories on movies or whatever.
	So, Michelle Malkin, the conservative, so this is from 2015, the conservative blogger called Trump out during a Fox segment in 2011, saying that he built his entire empire in defiance of core Tea Party principles.
	It's time for those conservatives who have been flirting with Donald Trump to get serious themselves.
	I think actually...
	Didn't Nick Fuentes say the exact same line?
	He probably got it from her.
	Following Trump's official bid for presidency on June 16th, Malkin tweeted, getting emails from conservatives welcoming Ronald McDonald chump would be refreshing to see more conservatives telling him to fuck off.
	That's Michelle Malkin, 2015.
	Yeah, now...
	Go ahead.
	Change.
	What happened?
	She changed?
	He changed?
	Maybe a little bit of both?
	She recognized the reality of his popularity?
	I'm sure that's the case.
	I think he did change.
	Go ahead quick, and then I'll roll on this.
	Yeah, like, you know, I've spent, you know, in the last few weeks since Trump lost, I've been doing these extreme deep dives looking at, like, what the right actually is.
	And where people are and where we are in relation to it.
	The reason we've always, I mean, you think about it, 20 years of having the GOP in power, from our perspective, especially after the wreckage of Trump, it's just been an absolute catastrophe.
	George W. Bush was a catastrophe.
	John McCain would have been a catastrophe.
	Mitt Romney would have been a catastrophe.
	Trump was a catastrophe.
	And the reason we feel like that is because we are more in the middle.
	This is one of the most interesting things I found out, that the stratum of the electorate that's in the center, I looked at the peace surveys and going all the way back to the 80s, it was disaffected, disaffected, disaffected, embittered, hard-pressed skeptics, and then finally, market-skeptic Republicans, right?
	What these people were, you know, they think the economic system is rigged.
	They're far more moderate.
	I mean, something like 95% of them believe that.
	Their issues are immigration and foreign policy.
	Not as much as the social conservative types, but still.
	So what happened in 2016 was, you can see this reflected in the Pew surveys, is that group came into the Republican Party.
	The group that we're in.
	Now, the core conservative types, they're like 12-13% of the population, but they're 20% of the people who are politically engaged.
	The social conservatives are kind of a distinct group.
	They're more downscale.
	They're like 7% of the adult population and about 7% of the politically engaged.
	Then there's another group called like New-era enterprisers.
	And what these people are is they're moderates, but they're like libertarians.
	They're cultural libertarians.
	It was basically the alt-white.
	That was another group that came in to the GOP.
	And they're like 12% of the population.
	And then the hard-pressed skeptics are about 12, the nationalists and populist types, who were out in the center 20, 30 years ago, but as the Republican base shrank, shrank, shrank, Yeah.
	That's what happened.
	I don't think they want to lose.
	I just think that they're not willing to actually pursue this.
	And then also demographics are changing.
	In terms of where the GOP is going to go, I don't quite know whom exactly they're going to elect.
	I mean, I'm sure Mike Pence will actually be in this.
	And he kind of checks certain boxes.
	He's both old and new.
	He's been loyal to Trump.
	Probably in a better way than Nikki Haley or whatever, who have a lot of hate from the MAGA crowd.
	There is the Tucker thing, although he might have blown it by just being like...
	Reasonable and down-to-earth on Sidney Powell.
	There is obviously, like, Josh Hawley is wildly ambitious, as is Tom Cotton.
	I could see it.
	I could see something else happening.
	Trump himself?
	Yeah, Trump himself.
	Or some other kind of wild thing happening.
	Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, though.
	This is what I would say.
	A lot of people would say, like, can you imagine MAGA without Trump?
	And I actually can.
	Because a lot of people say, we've got to support Trump all the way because MAGA doesn't exist without Trump.
	He's the one who's the real fighter.
	He's the one who doesn't.
	Well, what MAGA became, like, what MAGA meant to me...
	A personality cult.
	Yeah.
	It is a personality cult, but it's actually bigger than that.
	I actually kind of push back on people who say this.
	So what MAGA meant to me...
	In the beginning.
	Yeah.
	What MAGA meant to me in 2016 was...
	We have this, it's like we're actually bringing nationalism onto the political scene.
	Now, my own critiques of nationalism, populism aside, I obviously recognized it for what it was, and it was part of that era, that Brexit era, where you saw a lot of interesting things happening around the world, where there was a lot of angst, and there were a lot of kind of chickens running around with their heads cut off, to be honest.
	There was a lot of the yellow vest era, the kind of flailing around.
	Or Don Salvini, these people too.
	Exactly, yeah.
	And Orban Salvini, or Orban at least, is a little bit different, but he's part of that trend.
	He's the original one.
	I won't get into a nitpick about this, but I'm agreeing with you, basically.
	Yeah, but there were a lot of chickens with their heads cut off, running around, flailing this way and that.
	They were reacting to the problem, but not really reacting in a way that could solve it.
	I mean, that's at least my critique.
	But MAGA-ism, what MAGA became, and it happened slowly and it kind of shifted there slowly, is something that's actually been a part of the GOP for a long time.
	You know, it is now the Tea Party.
	It resembles the Tea Party in a whole host of ways.
	And it is more libertarian and more kind of abstract.
	Like, they're talking about free and fair elections and voter fraud.
	Talking about real issues, kind of like the Tea Party, like before Barack Obama was even inaugurated, and before he had raised taxes of any sort, they're somehow obsessed with taxes.
	And they'll sometimes even start to sound like anarchists when you listen to them.
	It's all a kind of...
	And Donald Trump's big rallies had a lot to do with this.
	I mean, it's this big, goofy, tent revival of...
	Of republicanism and libertarianism and with some kind of Christian elements thrown in.
	But those don't actually kind of dominate.
	I think, if anything, it's a kind of ersatz religion based around the Republican Party and the flag and the Constitution and so on.
	And that is there.
	That's been there for my entire adult life.
	At least 10 years.
	Yeah, and so at least 10 years, but I would say longer.
	We can do it.
	Yeah, it's gonna remain.
	Like, there's going to be MAGA without Trump.
	And I actually think, so this is where I kind of disagree with a lot of people.
	Obviously, it's a friendly disagreement.
	I might very well be wrong.
	But yeah, when they say, like, there's no MAGA without Trump, I'm like, no, MAGA has preexisted.
	Like, all of those.
	You know, things were like the Republican candidate would go to a NASCAR rally and there'd just be this big, you know, booming applause and flags everywhere, maybe some Confederate ones too.
	Meaningless theatrics, meaningless theatrics.
	Yeah, just kind of bullshit about abstract issues like religious freedom, voter integrity.
	Yeah, the phenomenon you're describing here is right-wing populism, correct?
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, if we think of different groups of the right, you've got the core conservatives who are the, you know, the Paul Ryan types.
	Those people who were never really, you know, comfortable.
	The core conservatives being the Republicans.
	No, no, no, no.
	No, no, you're wrong.
	Sorry to interject.
	This is another trend in this right-wing populism, which I'm criticizing, is that people come in and then they get spit out the other end.
	Paul Ryan was a Tea Party hero.
	And he spit out the other end.
	Donald Trump was a Tea Party victim, as we've just proven.
	And he becomes their hero.
	They churn through candidates.
	Yeah, so, okay.
	Yeah.
	It's a weird phenomenon, but it is stable and it keeps lasting.
	And you can even see this, like, sorry to, I'll let you talk in this one second.
	I remember going to CPAC in 2008 when it looked like, excuse me, John McCain was going to win the election.
	And there was a Tea Party revolt against him where they would talk about immigration to some degree, which, you know, I'm obviously a...
	Tremendously sympathetic with.
	But then it was also like, you worked with liberals to do campaign finance reform or whatever.
	You're a closet liberal.
	It was this kind of rhetoric.
	And it's been there.
	That's the stable thing.
	MAGA is the stable thing.
	And Trump and individual candidates are the things that get interchanged.
	This is my analysis of it.
	So MAGA is just like the latest iteration of...
	Something that had already existed before Trump.
	Well, you've got to think, even back then, he was connecting with those people.
	He got into politics being the chief in this latest round, being the birther-in-chief.
	He connected with all the right-wing conspiracy crowds with the whole birther thing when Obama was president.
	So the way I think about it, you can think of five different groups.
	Let's start off with an easy one.
	The social conservatives, the First Things crowd, the tradcasts, the evangelicals, the social conservatives, the people who care tremendously about homosexuality, abortion, and so forth.
	You can think of those people as one group, the religious right.
	And it's been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
	I think it's down to like 8% or maybe something like that, the Republican base, as a stratum of it, distinct stratum of it.
	Then there's the, then there's the, um, the, the true cons, the, my principles crowd who, who, who, who kind of like sneer at the rock rib, who would kind of sneer, sneer at the Alex Jones types.
	Yeah.
	Then, then there's the right wing populace.
	And these are people like, uh, Alex Jones being the most famous, but going back to 2010 with Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, it was Beck and it was Alex Jones.
	This is kind of like a libertarian-ish backlash, a mix of libertarianism, backlash politics, zaniness, the kind of people who liked Sarah Palin.
	We haven't brought her up in 2008.
	Nick Fuentes appeals to these people.
	Andrew Anglin appeals to people.
	All the people who thought COVID-19 was a hoax, number one.
	That's one thing that distinguishes them.
	Who thought that Obama was born in Kenya would be another example.
	And who were absolutely convinced that the election was stolen from Detroit in places like Philadelphia and Detroit where he did better.
	Then last time, who don't even bother to look at, like, what the actual votes say, right?
	Yeah.
	So there's that crowd.
	And then beyond them, let's see, who else?
	Oh, you have the alt-white.
	I would stress real quick, that is, it's an emotion and not necessarily issues.
	So they have a ton of issues like birth certificate or maybe moon landing conspiracy.
	But they'll sometimes sound like libertarians.
	For a while there, they sounded like, you know, socialist and you can It's not really intellectual.
	It's like a thing that's emotional.
	Primarily a white thing and a kind of middle and lower middle class white thing.
	Even that, it kind of isn't quite what it is.
	Like, it's this American right-wing populist gut feeling.
	And again, just to reiterate, I think that's not going away.
	No, no, it's not going away.
	No, of course not.
	The possession of the GOP as well.
	Yeah, so all the people who are absolutely satisfied with, you know, base tweets and being represented by Diamond and Silk, and he thought, oh, well, you know, Trump's got the platinum plan.
	He's going to, you know, the madman, as the meme says, the madman, he's going to own the libs.
	The people who are satisfied with tweets, owning the libs, whose minds are sunk in conspiracy theories, who are not really intellectual, Those people are the right-wing populists.
	Then you've got, of course, the alt-light crowd, which are moderates, but they're different from us.
	They're cultural libertarians, right?
	Basically, you think of them degenerates for capitalism.
	That's how I think of them.
	Or as they're seen in the Pew survey called the New Era Enterprisers.
	People like Sarnovich, right?
	And then beyond them, you've got the And then beyond them, you've got the nationalists, the populists, the old labor crowd that's concentrated in the Rust Belt, the hard-pressed skeptics.
	And mixed in with them, you've got most of the ethnocentric whites.
	And so those people tend to be socially conservative, economically populist.
	And they're a different type of moderate.
	So those are the five groups I think of.
	And it'd be interesting, and my theory of the election is that that last group I mentioned shifted back towards the Democrats, and that's what cost Trump the election.
	Just like, because that was the group that, I mean, they were all saying, all the headlines before the election was, you know, this group's the future of the GOP.
	And Trump won that group, but he, you know, alienated them, because those people were actually, were never really interested in his personality cult.
	He always had.
	A lower approval rating with him, and they always had a more negative view of the GOP, and they were interested mainly in...
	They didn't really care so much about Trump the man.
	They were into, you know, what's he going to actually do for us?
	Yeah.
	And he didn't deliver, so that's my view.
	And let me take this a step further, and I'll talk about Fuentes.
	So, first off, look, I've never been a fan of Fuentes, okay?
	But I'm going to try to actually move beyond any personal, you know, antagonism or something, because that's not really helpful.
	You know, I mean, everyone knows that it's not a big deal anyway.
	But I'll praise him here.
	So Fuentes, you know, he's jumped on the bandwagon.
	And I don't necessarily say that as a criticism.
	Like, sometimes...
	A bandwagon is going full speed ahead and you jump on it.
	And he has made himself into a bit of a, you know, public figure.
	And he's kind of jumped in front of a crowd and almost...
	Let people believe that the crowd was there for him.
	I saw you tweeting about Andrew Englund saying things like, well, you know, I learned the lessons from Charlottesville, and then I decided that we needed to do this.
	And then look at what I did in Washington last weekend.
	It's like, look, man, you did not do that.
	And if you had a negative...
	You know, contribution to that if you had any at all.
	But regardless, he does kind of, he's riding a wave.
	And like a surfer, you wait for the wave and then you jump on it.
	You can't just surf under your own accord.
	So I don't even say this as a criticism.
	In fact, he just is doing what he's doing.
	Now, it's not my mission because I am only interested in changing.
	This viewpoint and changing metapolitics in a new direction.
	I'm not even interested really in about one issue, like let's kick out the illegals or something.
	I want to get in the brains of people of all strata, actually, and start changing their outlook.
	That is what I do, and therefore I'm not going to go and wave a flag and be like, oh, you know, China sucks, you know, Trump number one, blah, blah, blah.
	That's just stupid.
	The bottom line here is that's not the stratum of the electorate where you're at.
	That's not my people, so to speak.
	But also all these people claiming, like, oh, your ego's too big.
	And obviously I've never denied that I don't have a big ego, but it's like, your ego's too big.
	If my ego were so out of control, I would be still surfing this wave.
	Like, I know how egotists act.
	You know, I'm speaking as one.
	Like, I would jump on this wave and not criticize Trump and wave the flag or whatever.
	Like, that's the way to blow up my ego.
	Yeah, are you seriously going to do the Andrew Englund thing, which would be to grab the American flag and, well, he's not actually going to do anything in the streets.
	We've never seen him.
	Are you going to grab the American flag and go out there and start screaming about...
	Jade Helm and how COVID is a hoax and the election was stolen from Trump.
	No, I'm not going to do it because I have self-respect.
	You're not going to do that.
	But Fuentes is a Cruz Republican, and so therefore it makes a lot more sense.
	And so I'm not actually here to criticize him.
	I'm here to praise him.
	Again, I am not a fan.
	Believe me.
	Don't misunderstand me.
	But he has some balls.
	I mean, you know, whatever.
	He has some balls and he's acquired an audience and he has blown himself up in a way.
	And it is what it is.
	He's also said things that are pretty dramatic.
	Now, whether he's serious about these...
	We don't know.
	Because, you know, one thing I've noticed about that whole AMNAC crowd is that they just flip.
	Every three months, they're on a new thing.
	You know, they were pro-yang at one point.
	So they say, like, we're going to destroy the GOP.
	We're going to vote Democrat, maybe, or stay at home, even in the Georgia election in January.
	I doubt that, too.
	But he's at least saying it, and that actually makes him a bit dangerous.
	Generally speaking, runoff elections don't bring out a lot of turnout and the incumbent has the advantage.
	But maybe not this time.
	The eyes of the world are on Georgia.
	And so, I don't know.
	I bet the GOP, they hear some of these soundbites that he and the Ammonet crowd have put forward.
	And they're like, well, we are definitely not allowing them into CPAC.
	These people are fucking with us, and they don't like that.
	But the only thing that I would say, and...
	I pride myself in at least trying to see a couple moves ahead and try to stand up on a ladder and try to see the whole view and not have my head to the ground and only see two feet in front of me.
	They are going all in on Trump.
	So they will attack the GOP to the extent that the GOP is not a Trump I think that's actually a misunderstanding of the dynamic,
	which is that MAGA-ism, like right-wing populism, remains, and it's here to stay, but Trump's not.
	You're kind of getting yourself out there on a gangplank, and they might push you off.
	I mean, there's absolutely no substance at all to right-wing populism.
	It's all, like, theatrics and backlashes that go nowhere and, you know, people grifting off that whole scene.
	I'm going to be a little bit more negative.
	Okay.
	Yeah, yeah, because I think you've been more fair and balanced.
	And what I look at, when I see Fuentes and the Goyper crowd, what I see is Nick just setting up his own sideshow carnival act, just like Alex Jones, right?
	I mean, there's obviously a huge audience.
	There's obviously a huge audience for people who believe that, you know, what was it before Trump came along?
	It was Jade Helm, right?
	And Jay Helm was one of the things that Alex Jones was ranting about for, I forgot, but it was one of the most famous things he did.
	There was a network of underground tunnels underneath Walmarts in the Southwest, and Obama was going to round up patriots in FEMA camps and place them underneath the Walmarts.
	It was something absolutely insane going on.
	Which ironically inspired the motion picture Us.
	So it actually, yeah.
	No, I have not even heard that one.
	So, yeah, so, I mean, Fuentes, what Fuentes is doing, I mean, when you consider who Fuentes is, who his audience is, what he's trying to do, it's actually smart.
	There's a huge audience for people who believe in all this, you know, empty nonsense, right?
	I mean, you can make a good living gripping off those people.
	Look at Alex Jones.
	Alex Jones has done it.
	is nothing but a performance artist and an entertainer.
	And he has no ambitions to be anything more.
	He's just there.
	He's the head clown of the circus.
	And Fuentes is going to be his sidekick in the Trump sideshow, in my view.
	And hey, but you know what we really found out about this election that we haven't?
	One of the points I made on my blog, one of the things that we really found out about this election is that voters actually, Actually, didn't care about the optics of all these people like Andrew Anglin and Fuentes and the Goypers and Alex Jones.
	But what they really cared about is they didn't want to be governed by retards, right?
	Cranks.
	That's why college-educated voters turned against Trump and sunk him in the election because, I mean, being governed by a moron.
	And is something that is intolerable?
	It kind of is.
	I mean, I'll just, you know, because I am like, you know, I have a lot in common with a wealthy college educated or indeed graduate level educated, you know, liberal in the suburbs.
	I have a lot in common with them.
	I kind of know how they think.
	And yeah, it is intolerable.
	You want something like...
	You know, and you see a lot of these picks by Joe Biden and they're like, you know, graduate of the Kennedy School of Government and, you know, Stanford alum or whatever.
	And, you know, they have this like 30-year diplomatic career.
	And that's what you're kind of looking for.
	You're looking for the triumph of the resume.
	I mean, for better and for worse, I'm not saying that that's...
	The best thing, but you at least don't, like, have that contempt for someone, like, you know, the guy in charge of the EPA is, like, pro, you know, fracking in Yellowstone National Park or whatever.
	You don't have that level of just, like, contempt and hatred.
	You have a kind of like, well, you know, he's really smart, you know.
	It is what it is.
	What else were we going to cover?
	What about our predictions?
	Okay, well, the blue waves didn't happen.
	Okay, violence hasn't happened yet, but we're still kind of in this limbo phase.
	Violence hasn't happened.
	It has not been increasing.
	I think that's actually quite surprising.
	I think we all thought that that was about to occur.
	To pop off, yeah.
	But maybe that has something to do with the weather, but at the very least, it has not occurred.
	But let's hold off on having a definitive view on this, because if Trump does something totally wacky, you might see something.
	The conservative media wound it down, too.
	I remember right after the election...
	You had, like, Tucker and Don Jr. being like, we own all the guns.
	Like, there's gonna be blood flowing through the streets or whatever.
	And now it's kind of been slowly wound.
	Like, the Patriot types with their AR-15s aren't, like...
	It isn't, like, right after the election.
	Because, I don't know, for a while there, I thought, like, there's gonna be some...
	I thought, like, Trump supporters are gonna...
	We'll be clashing with Antifa and there's going to be people rounded up.
	But the conservative media has wound it down a little bit.
	You saw with Tucker, he did have all these bold statements about, we own the gun, so we'll win the Civil War.
	And I disagree with that contention, but I'll table that for now.
	But then I remember there was another show three days later who was like, let's remember what we love about America.
	Oak trees in Vermont.
	Palm trees in California.
	Big forest in the Midwest.
	Like, it was this, like, weird, like, like, poetic, like, we love America.
	But it was all, like, calming.
	It was, it was like, it was like one of those videos with, like, like, you know, some Bach in the background of, like.
	Like a babbling brook.
	You just calm down and just eventually fall asleep.
	Close your eyes and go to your happy place.
	That was basically what he was doing.
	Maybe we should actually praise him for that.
	Because he might have prevented some lunatic from...
	What about our new president-elect?
	Any comments on the Biden cabinet on the student loan issue, which seems to be coming up?
	I actually did a podcast with Ed on the student loan issue that I need to edit and publish.
	So I'll be putting that out.
	I mean, look, I have to say, I mean, we talked about it like in a really macro view and how we can actually reform education.
	But I would just say this.
	I mean, this...
	Forgiving $30,000 of student loan debt or maybe all of it, I mean, you know, they're floating issues.
	They're doing trial balloons, so we don't know what they're going to do.
	And it's probably going to be less than what people are hoping for.
	But, I mean, I do just support it in a basic level of, you know, this is a wicked system.
	But keep in mind that forgiving that debt isn't going to change the problem.
	It's going to arguably make it kind of worse.
	I think it is kind of like, if he did that, I think it would be a brilliant move politically, and I would generally back it.
	But I would actually be one of the ones saying, we need to reform higher education drastically.
	We are actually overproducing, quote, elites, unquote, right now.
	And that actually isn't leading to problems.
	And beyond that, we're just screwing people over.
	Like, you know, these 25-year-old baristas with, you know, $80,000 in student loan debt.
	Like, that's just unethical.
	According to Scott Greer, you know, everyone who's got student loan debt is, you know, a doctor or, you know, a lawyer.
	What, an AWFL?
	Oh, yes.
	It's everyone whom he just resents.
	Yeah, and he's like, look at the amount of debt.
	It's like most people have debt go to graduate school, and it's like, dude, I mean, this is conservative populism right here.
	Most student loan debt is actually non-degreed debt, is an interesting set.
	So it's a lot of people who went to two years, or like a year of a master's degree, and they don't even have a degree.
	It's really tragic.
	Yeah, it's...
	Yeah, it's like talking about slavery and being like, look at the planners.
	The planners own most of the slaves when the average slave owner has something like two or three slaves.
	That's what the conservatives are doing to kind of like murk up the issue by saying, hey, people who own the most debt, you know, they're doctors and lawyers and people go to grad school and stuff like that.
	Right, and so wealth transfer from plumbers to baristas is the mean.
	Yeah, I know, but if you did like a $50,000 student loan forgiveness like the Warren was talking about, Elizabeth Warren, that would, half to what, three-fourths of people who were in debt would be out of it?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and why wouldn't you do that, right?
	Oh, I think it's great.
	The GOP ran on the platinum plan.
	I mean, no wonder they lost, right?
	They were planning on spending close to a trillion dollars on giving money to blacks and Hispanics.
	And then the Democrats come in and they say, we're going to effectively give money to millennial and Gen X whites.
	And of course, the conservatives are mad.
	You know, it's just ridiculous.
	It's just simply ridiculous, like, how they think about these things.
	The other thing, I think that Obamacare is not an ideal system, but, like, it actually helped, it reduced medical bankruptcies.
	And, like, I don't know what to say.
	It's like they're so hopped up on the, like...
	The Democrats are the black party.
	The Democrats are the blue-haired SJW party.
	They're not able to see what is the reality in front of them.
	The GOP is the platinum plan party.
	They're literally the reparations party.
	Whereas the Democrats are literally the let's give white people a break party by saving them 50 grand.
	Right, right.
	If me and you were GOP consultants, we'd be like, hey, we've got an incredible strategy that will help the GOP win the White House.
	And it's really this simple.
	This is all you've got to do.
	You've got to move to the center on economics and foreign policy in order to make it more attractive to non-conservative white people who can't afford to be Republicans.
	And that way, you can win states like Minnesota.
	And Maine and New Hampshire.
	But you don't want to do that, right?
	They won't do it.
	And let me say this as well.
	So how could Trump have actually had a successful presidency?
	And he was having one.
	If COVID had not come around, Trump could have won re-election.
	That's real.
	But let's go back and look at early mistakes that were made early on.
	Well, okay.
	Now, an egotist...
	Yeah, to go back to 2016 and 2017.
	Now, an egotist maniac like myself would just tell Trump, well, you should just appoint me as your advisor, and then we would have done better.
	But putting fantasies like that aside, what could he have done instead of what he did very early on that would have put him on a much better footing with this radical center that you're talking about?
	Now, obviously, a lot of those were appointments in 2016 that you were talking about back in the day.
	But, you know, I think he made some really bad errors early on that kind of got him into this polarization and right-wing populism track.
	And he could have at least plausibly transcended it.
	So, in 2016, granted the Republicans kind of...
	Came to terms with Trump.
	But they came to terms with him quite reluctantly.
	And the Speaker of the House at the time, Paul Ryan, was clearly undermining him and had not really come to terms with him.
	So Trump was in a position where maybe this wouldn't have worked.
	But he could have done this.
	He could have reached out to Chuck and Nancy and pursued major infrastructure spending.
	That would have done light rail across the country, new metro systems in major metropolitan areas, getting the highway system up to snuff, and do the wall as part of this big infrastructure package that the liberals wanted.
	I think the so-called Muslim ban was just, you know, it was pretty ridiculous.
	He could have, you know, we're keeping out Muslims from North Korea and, you know, and we're like literally at war with Iran and we're not allowed to immigrate.
	It's like, okay, I get it.
	He also, the healthcare policy, that maybe didn't hurt him, but it hurt him in the midterms.
	I mean, the number one issue of liberal, of Democrat voters was healthcare in 2018, according to polls.
	Now take that with a grain of salt.
	But done a Medicare for All or some kind of national healthcare proposal that wasn't this incoherent mess plus Paul Ryan talking points.
	So the healthcare thing, it removed the mandate from Obamacare.
	It was almost entirely negative.
	It didn't offer anything in return.
	It wasn't actually a free market solution, but it had free market rhetoric attached to it.
	It was the worst of all possible worlds, in fact.
	So he could have done some things very early on that would have changed the direction.
	And he could have attempted to, and I know how difficult this is, but he could have attempted to transcend populism or polarization as opposed to just buying into it.
	And if he's working with Chuck and Nancy on a healthcare and infrastructure bill, I think they're probably a little bit less likely to impeach him.
	And he could have gotten immigration, which he did actually pursue.
	I mean, I'm not a fan of the RAISE Act, putting that aside.
	He could have done something if he had reached out to them in that way.
	And instead, he reached back in to the Tea Party.
	He reached back in to polarization.
	He reached back into the GOP and tax cuts for billionaires.
	And it just doesn't work.
	You're going to end up like Mitt Romney if you do that.
	And at least you can try something that is high difficulty, but also high reward.
	And that is to transcend populism and win over for life the radical center.
	Yeah, so it was that first year.
	Let me give you an example.
	The first year that killed him with his image, when the first year he was in office, And actually, we found out that actually, Trump isn't this new kind of Republican that we thought he was in the campaign.
	Actually, he's doing Paul Ryan's tax cuts.
	Actually, he's doing this goofy health care reform thing.
	If you look at his poll numbers, and if you go back and you look at the poll numbers of Trump throughout his whole presidency, there were really three points in his presidency where he really started to drop.
	The first was, of course, the first six, seven months of the healthcare.
	When healthcare was front and center in 2017, that was wildly unpopular.
	And if you look at 2017 and his poll numbers, his poll numbers improved after Charlottesville.
	I mean, everybody says Charlottesville was this huge thing that just completely destroyed, changed everything.
	No one cared at all about Charlottesville.
	Most people didn't even probably even notice.
	Charlottesville even happened.
	But his poll numbers got worse.
	The more and more he was attached to Paul Ryan and Paul Ryan's health care bill.
	In 2017, his poll numbers got worse and worse.
	And then they improved after Charlottesville and into September 2017.
	And then when they started doing the tax cuts, his disapproval rating started going back up.
	And then the third thing that killed him was COVID and the reopening and how he handled that in 2020.
	That and the riots.
	The riots are one thing.
	COVID, I was joking about this with a friend of mine just yesterday.
	He could have bungled COVID on a policy level and gotten away with it because it's a novel virus.
	We don't know how to react.
	I think actually people are willing to grant a lot to...
	Policymakers on COVID because we don't quite know what we're doing.
	And like doing a lockdown early and then kind of slowly opening it up gradually, but then still suffering like a second wave.
	He could have gotten away with that.
	Totally.
	The thing with COVID was the rhetoric.
	It was like all people wanted was a grandfatherly figure to give them a hug.
	Or they wanted someone to be like...
	Wearing a mask and being like, this is a serious thing.
	We're going to use all government to defeat it.
	The problem is he did sound those notes on occasion, but more often he sounded the conspiracy theory notes of, like, this is a Democrat hoax, it doesn't exist, or it's nothing.
	You can beat it just like I did, you know, with, like, literally the best healthcare in the world.
	It's the China virus.
	It's the China virus.
	It's just everything struck.
	He went Alex Jones on all of these things.
	All he had to do was change his rhetoric.
	That's all he had to do.
	He could have bungled the actual policy because it's difficult.
	No one has a right answer.
	He just couldn't help himself.
	Here's how bad his 2020 campaign was, right?
	In 2020, he did something that was actually populist and that was actually of substance, right?
	In that when he signed, I think, was it the CARES Act, the big stimulus thing in, was it March or April?
	He suspended student loan repayments and interest on student loan debt.
	And people actually got checks for interest on student loan debt from the government in addition to the stimulus he did, right?
	Well, I mean, throughout the whole campaign, do you ever remember Trump taking credit for suspending?
	No, that's interesting.
	never mentioned no no no no one time did trump take actual credit for suspending student loan payments for not like what six seven eight nine months not one time he ran on the platinum plan though he ran on the platinum plan he's like i've actually suspended student loan payments i'm not even it's too controversial with conservatives to even talk about it but i'm going to like speak endlessly about the platinum plan it's And criminal justice reform.
	Yeah, and criminal justice reform.
	It's something that only a conservative would have been stupid enough to, a conservative consultant would have.
	Yeah.
	You know, only something dumb enough.
	Don't mention that.
	That's really unpopular.
	Don't mention the fact that you suspended student loan payments, right?
	Like, literally, like, a third of the population, like, radically hates student loan debt in the banks.
	And you're like, you know, like, easy, like, just gimme.
	I mean, don't they understand, okay, well, it's 2020, so that means that there's going to be more millennial voters.
	And less silent generation voters, especially with COVID killing them all off.
	Killing them, yes.
	And of course, you know, the millennials are so broke and have, like, are so much in debt and are so angry that, you know, they're supporting candidates like Bernie Sanders because they're so financially stressed, right?
	Well, let's do nothing to address their concerns.
	Let's let Joe Biden run on forgiving their student loan debt.
	Let's play into silent generation resentment of the millennials.
	And then let's congratulate ourselves on our true conservative principles after we lost the election.
	And then after we lose the election, we'll learn after we lose the election because literally college-educated white voters, many of them millennials, who are in the lower-income brackets.
	Because their burden was student loan debt, voted against us and cost us Georgia and Pennsylvania.
	Learned nothing at all from that experience and doubled down on the same stupidity, which is what they're doing now.
	It's actually all these rich, wealthy people who have student loan debt.
	That's what you're saying.
	Well, let's do this.
	Let's put a bookmark in this conversation.
	This is a great conversation.
	And I like the fact that we got really, you know, kind of like technical.
	And, you know, sometimes on my podcast, we're a little too up in the air.
	I think sometimes it's good to get down on the ground and like look at how we could have done this.
	But yeah, this is fantastic stuff.
	I would, yeah, we should get back on this, because obviously this is like the election that will never end.
	We'll just be in this weird zone for another three months, probably.

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