It's Joever! But there's no way to pun 'Kamala Harris' with 'beginning'. There just isn't. So we're probably fucked, as usual. In another News Brief episode, hot on the heels of the last one for some unfathomable reason, Daniel and Jack - both mired in mixed feelings - chat about Biden quitting the 2024 Presidential race, Joe 'cheese pizza' Biden himself, the immediate 'annointing' of Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement on the Dem ticket, the Dems being effective (if cynical) for once, Trump (again), the assassination attempt (again), J.D. "couch and/or dolphin fucker" Vance (again), Project 2025, some of the Right's first attempts to find a line of attack on Harris... All that junk. P.S. Jack only just realised he unwittingly plagiarised the term 'News Brief' from the Citations Needed podcast. Please don't sue. And if you do, sue Daniel. Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups.
The police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.
These are their stories.
Here we talk about the far right, their fellow travelers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
The show is hosted by Daniel Harper and me, Jack Graham.
We're both he-him.
Be aware, we cover difficult, sometimes nasty subject matter, so content warnings always apply.
Okay, and welcome back to I Don't Speak German.
It's another News Brief episode, and shit, they say 24 hours is a long time in politics, and it's been more than 24 hours since we spoke, but it feels like it's been a lot more than 24 hours since the last News Brief episode.
Daniel, how the hell are you out there?
I'm making it.
I'm just been, you know, kind of perusing Twitter more than I have in a while.
But, you know, that's just the nature of any election year, really.
And, you know, this election year, ten times as much.
Because, wow.
You know, the last episode of these we did was for the Trump assassination attempt slash the JD Vance nomination, a VP pick by Trump.
And boy, that feels like last year by the standards of, of what's happened since then.
So things, things, you know, it turns out, it turns out the democratic party can actually get things done when it means, you know, maintaining citrus citrus power base, you know, Well, I think Lenin said there are days when decades happen, and I've been feeling a little bit like that lately with American politics.
Definitely, definitely.
It kind of rhymes, doesn't it?
The last episode, as you say, was the Trump assassination attempt and the naming of J.D.
Vance as the Republican vice presidential candidate.
And I don't know, it feels sort of funny, sort of like Joe Biden's announcement that he wouldn't stand in the election.
And it's only like a hundred days away, isn't it?
Yep.
Followed by Kamala Harris' swift, presumptive nomination.
I mean, she's got all the delegates that she needs now for conference to be named, so she effectively is already the nominee.
I don't know, it feels like it kind of rhymes.
It feels like one is a shadowy reflection of the other, to quote Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Yeah.
I think the whole thing with Biden, you know, I think, I think we got into this in the last episode is like, you know, in the last news brief episode is my feeling was Biden should have resigned or should have like announced he was not going to seek reelection.
Like right after the midterms last year, like early 2023, late 2022, something like that.
It's like, okay, we won the midterms.
We're going okay.
It's downtime.
We're going to do a full, you know, replacement.
Really, even after that debate performance, even after the bad debate performance, my angle was like, look, it's definitely for the best if Biden steps down or if Biden allows someone else to run in his place.
But at this point, it's just too late.
It's just too late.
You should have done it a year ago.
And then they dithered for a month, and Biden announced immediately, literally in the announcement, he endorsed Harris, and Harris just wrapped up the nomination in 36 hours or so to broad acclaim.
So again, the Dems actually managed to pull this off, it looks like, at least for now.
So yeah, it's pretty astonishing.
I've been following American politics and presidential politics for You know, since I was since I was a kid, you know, since I was like 12 years old.
And this is probably the most like substantive, like this feels like the most substantive event of all that time following politics.
It really is remarkable that this turned out the way it did.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I've been following American politics for quite a long time as well.
I mean, as they say, you know, America sneezes, Britain catches cold.
So there's a direct... We have a dog in the fight, albeit maybe not a direct dog, but certainly we have dogs in your fights.
But yeah, it's just so... American politics is just so much more fucking interesting and dramatic than British politics.
You know, so yeah, I've been fascinated with it as well.
I feel like I've been on a real roll of getting shit wrong lately because I was, I mean, I decided in my head that Trump wasn't hit by that bullet because I just didn't buy it.
I've been looking into it, and he clearly was the lucky fucker.
I think we basically agreed when we spoke about this last time that the only thing worse than Biden not quitting would be Biden quitting now.
And what I thought would happen just didn't happen.
I mean, maybe it's just a lifetime of being disappointed.
Well, disappointed isn't the word, because that would imply a certain amount of hope.
Being just shown the sheer determination of the Democrats to lose and never achieve anything of any value.
But yeah, I assumed that if Biden was pressured into stepping down, then the party would I mean, I thought that the big beasts in the party, Pelosi and Schumer and people like that, would try to sidestep Harris.
And I didn't think Biden would endorse her.
And I thought it would turn into a great big sort of bloody catfight, and it would just look like chaos and panic and so on, and just doom them.
But as you say, that's the exact opposite of what they ended up doing.
So, you know, well done, the Democrats, I suppose?
That feels wrong coming out of my mouth somehow.
Is that even grammatical?
You acted like a professional political party for the first time in a long time, but it's not even that long, because if you remember four years ago, when Bernie Sanders looked like he was gonna steamroll, they got their shit together then, too.
We gotta stop Sanders.
That was the key.
You know, Joe Biden was kind of everybody's fourth choice in the 2020 primaries.
And he just kind of became the, well, everybody can, you know, he's the cheese pizza.
It's, you know, if you're, you know, everybody wants different toppings.
And so when nobody can agree, you just get, okay, well, we're just going to have cheese then.
And that cheese pizza ended up being just a little bit old, a little bit stale, a little bit not with it.
And so we get the side of breadsticks instead.
Sorry, this metaphor went ways I didn't intend to.
Certainly don't mean to imply that Kamala Harris is just a side of breadsticks, but she was the add-on we got with Joe Biden, and now she is very possibly going to be the President of the United States in a couple of months.
So that is interesting.
That is very interesting.
Yeah, I mean, it certainly seems like they have a better shot now.
I mean, the party seems energized.
They've raised a huge amount of money.
It's record money they've raised in mostly small donations, mostly from first-time donors.
They've got thousands upon thousands of new volunteers.
You've got thousands upon thousands of people registering to vote.
You've got the age range of the people volunteering now, and registering is in the right sort of age range for what we want.
It's younger people.
And she plays well with the groups that are undecided and that the Democrats need.
So, you know, and there's already been a poll that has her ahead of Trump.
There's others that have her still, you know, tying or behind.
But she seems to be doing better, you know, polls are polls, but she seems to be doing better in polls.
So things do look a little bit better than they did, you know, this time last week.
It just does look a little bit better.
You know, within the confines of the priority being to keep that fucking fascist raving monster out of the White House so that he can't institute Project 2025 this time round, you know?
Yeah, no, I think that, interestingly, it doesn't... I mean, there's an element of it in which it's just, oh, it's not going to be Joe Biden, and so, like, people are energized again, right?
But there also is an element of, like, people have really warmed to Kamala Harris.
And I think that, like, part of that is, you know, she has more political experience now.
She has a better team around her in 2024 than she had in 2020, where she didn't win a single delegate in the 2020 primaries.
I mean, she dropped out.
I think she dropped out before even voting happened.
I can't remember the exact details of it, but she did not do well in 2020.
And yet she is You know, she's, she's wicked.
She's doing, she's doing, like, you know, regardless of how you feel about her, and we'll get into that, I'm sure, she's a remarkably competent and solid and, you know, likable political candidate.
You know, when she stands up on stage and does a, and gives her speeches, and, you know, when she's, you know, doing her appearances, it's, Yes, this is plausibly presidential material here, and neither Trump or Biden really look like presidential material in 2024, if I'm being honest.
Trump, definitely not so.
Biden is an existing president, but he does not exude that presence, and I think Kamala Harris is managing to do so, and I think that, as much as anything, is what's galvanizing her support right now.
Although I'm sure there's been a lot of stuff behind the scenes as well in terms of getting the donors involved.
It was amazing how so many elected representatives immediately endorsed.
It was like, all right, it's Kamala, it's Kamala, it's Kamala.
We're done.
We don't need to decide.
Whereas I think a lot of the smart prognosticators were definitely thinking that this was going to be a slog-like process, that people were just not going to sign on to this.
I really didn't know what was going to happen, but the fact that people have united behind her is, I think, a positive, at least in terms of if you want to keep Trump out of the White House in 2024 or 2025, I think this is about the best it could have gone, honestly.
Yeah, and really there hasn't been any sort of dithering or fart arsing about things, apart from, like, there were a couple of noises for about five minutes that Joe Manchin, of all people, was thinking about throwing his hat into the ring.
If that was true, then he obviously very quickly realized, nah, not a good idea.
But I think what's probably going on there is, like, right-wing Democrat big donors, you know?
Because there have been some big donors that are not mad keen on Kamala because she's too left-wing for them.
And of course, a lot of the pundits, they wanted, they were doing the sort of, oh no, you must have a big long open process and a big argument about it at convention, because we want that, because that would be interesting to write about.
So it's the only democratic thing to do, you know, all these liberal pundits saying that, and of course, in the process, Just agreeing basically with one of the Republicans' talking points that they've flailed around and chanced upon, which is the idea that this is in some way a sort of undemocratic thing.
Whereas I think, again, I think this is going to be something we're going to be saying a lot, whatever you think about Kamala Harris.
I think there is clearly a reflection here, you know, the sequence of events, what we've seen happen around her candidacy.
It reflects, you know, a certain groundswell of grassroots enthusiasm for her, or at least what people think she is or take her to mean.
Yeah, I mean, right now what she's doing is energizing the Democratic base.
Like, she's taking these, you know, the people who are, like, reliably vote Democrat, who go to conventions, who go to these, you know, events, who are, you know, not just, like, left of center, who are not just, you know, progressive or whatever, people who are really, like, Democrats with a capital D who really consider the party to represent them.
She is fully on board with just serving them the hottest steaks, serving the reddest of meat.
She went out in her first big appearance, her first big speech after Biden revealed he wasn't going to run.
She's very openly talking about abortion and using the word abortion in so many words and pushing for You know, we're going to codify Roe.
I can't remember exactly the word she uses, but she's very much speaking on those issues in a way that Biden really couldn't.
And I think that that's important, not just because of his age and the fact that he's just tired, but Biden, one of the things that made him the nominee in 2020 is that he has always been Mr. Democrat.
He has always been like, I go where the party goes.
I toe the party line.
I am with it, you know, 100% of the way.
I always vote, you know, I am, you know, and that's how he became, you know, such a long running senator, and how he became the vice president, to be honest, is like, he is just, I am Mr. Democrat.
And what that means is, you know, Joe Biden is a pretty conservative Catholic guy, like a lowercase c conservative Catholic guy.
I'm sure he does not like abortion.
I'm sure he does not like it to be legal, but he knows this is the party, this is how we go, this is the thing we're doing.
And so he would support it, but not speak openly about it, not really go for it wholeheartedly.
And I think Kamala is much more willing to, she is a more progressive candidate.
She served as a senator in California.
She's much younger, obviously, and she is pushing a much more 21st century democratic, progressive agenda.
And using those terms and being able to really speak to the younger audiences is something that's important for her.
I will say just to, you know, the other thing about Joe Biden being Mr. Democrat is that after the 2020 election, after he won, he brought in people from, you know, he brought Bernie Sanders and he brought AOC and he brought, you know, some of these people from all parts of the party to, you know, help Determine the governing agenda.
And I think that that's part of the success of his presidency, is that he was able to listen to people who were further to his left.
He didn't go nearly far enough, of course, but a lot of the positive things come from that.
And I hope that Kamala has learned that lesson as well, but is just more willing to speak to, again, the younger generations and people who are the future of the party and not the past of the party.
No, I very much agree.
I mean, I think, you know, I very much don't want to be misunderstood when I say this, because everything is relative.
But I think Biden has been the best US president of my lifetime.
And that is kind of a reflection on just how bad the rest of them were, given that, you know, I mean, there's a one word That everything good you can say about the Biden presidency, the two syllables, Gaza, just erase it.
It's just gone.
Absolutely.
It's gone.
Absolutely.
And this was a point that I wanted to hit last time that we didn't get to hear, and that was my fault because I got the tone of the last episode wrong.
I was too jokey about it, so we didn't get to this.
The thing after the assassination where everybody was just united on this, there's no place for violence in politics thing.
I don't know about you, but to me, that is stomach-churning hypocrisy, while the American government is funding and arming and supporting a literal genocide that is literally underway at the moment.
And the arguments about why you can't just not do that... I mean, obviously, we have to do that.
You can't not do that.
They're all about politics.
They're all about process.
They're all about, you know, the art of the possible and diplomacy and all this stuff.
You know, I mean, aside from the fact that they preside over a system which is just made of structural violence and social murder, But, um, yeah, it, it's true nonetheless that in the, I mean, certainly in the, I mean, he, he, he is, everything's double edged, isn't it?
Because he ended the war in Afghanistan.
In the process, of course, he abandoned loads of people in Afghanistan to the Taliban.
You have women who are now back under Taliban rule.
But he ended the forever war, bringing manufacturing back to America, to an extent anyway.
That's an example of a kind of, you know, that's sort of a productivist, populist capitalism that I don't approve of, but it is a rollback of neoliberalism.
Some of the climate stuff, I mean, the Biden administration has acted on climate in the way that really no previous American administration has on climate reform.
It's nowhere near good enough, and it needed to start 30 years ago, but it's a foot in the door.
So it's really, when I say that Biden's the best president in my lifetime, that's more a depressing thing to me than a happy thing, because it's like, Jesus, really?
This is the best?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Yeah, no.
And I wholeheartedly agree with the political violence stuff.
I mean, I feel like the... I mean, you don't even have to go to, you know, the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
I mean, you could even just speak to, you know, policing and immigration and, you know, there's violence all the time.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
Biden's border policy is savage, racist, atrocious.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I mean, what they mean when they say, you know, there's no place for violence in politics is, well, we are the, you know, we are the dainty kings on top and we get to decide for everybody else, but you can't come after, you don't go after the general in the back, you go after the foot soldiers on the ground, you know, like, you guys kill each other.
We have a mutual respect among kings, you know, and so therefore we don't, you know, we have rules that we abide by.
And then if the rest of you get a little bloodied, that's just the cost of us doing our lofty goals, our lofty ambitions, our lofty high-ended ideals.
That's our right to do so.
And so that's what they mean when there's no place for violence in politics, when politics is about violence.
I mean, I don't want to sound like a libertarian.
I don't want to sound like Chris Cantwell when I say that.
But ultimately, what we're talking about is we're talking about the At least in terms of liberal bourgeois politics, we're talking about the maintenance of borders and the maintenance of a state that has its own ends in mind.
It is not about peacefully coexisting and resolving differences.
It is about the imposition of power and the imposition of violence upon the violations of norms.
That is what it is.
And so, yeah, I mean, to me, it's like I meant to get into it last episode, but it's like, well, that isn't what we're really talking about here.
And so we'll just we'll just ignore that for now.
But yeah, no, I completely agree with you that, you know, going, oh, there's no place for violence from, you know, from Republican politicians.
And, you know, like, you know, it's like, you know.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Like, I agree.
It's 100% agreed on that.
So, yeah.
On that subject, it is remarkable how little impact... I mean, I think we both reacted at the time of the assassination attempt and the serious wounding and death of members of the audience in... Butler?
Was it Butler, Pennsylvania?
Butler, Pennsylvania, yep.
Yeah, we both, I think, reacted when we heard that news with just a, oh, great, great, you just handed it to Trump, or, you know, nearly handed it to Trump.
It is amazing, isn't it, how little impact that has had.
I mean, it's difficult to think of any political candidate, even unpopular political candidates, You know, you put them in that situation, there would be a groundswell of sympathy.
There would be an outpouring of public... People don't give a shit about it happening to Trump, do they?
They just don't fucking care.
I mean, apart from his base, obviously.
Sure, I mean, I watched a bit of his convention speech.
I did not watch the full thing, but I watched the first like 20 minutes or so, and he's talking about...
His experience of the bullet whizzing by his head and being hit in the ear, etc.
It cuts to the crowd, and people are literally sitting and crying about this story.
I get that.
Obviously, we don't want anyone to be shot in the head.
I think we should say that out loud, right?
But at the same time, there's this veneration of the leader.
They would be reacting that way if he was telling a story about his Diet Coke being too warm one day.
That's true, that's true.
No, I think where I was going with that, and I thank you for kind of reminding me, is people have already decided how they feel about Trump.
You know, people are people are already kind of there.
I do wonder if he had been like shot in the gut and been like hospitalized or something, you know, if that, I mean, you know, I think I think it's easy if it's if it's just like the ear.
I think it's a little bit easier to kind of, you know, even though that's an inch from his brain space, you know, I think I think it's a little bit easier to kind of shrug it off a little bit.
Because it's not like, he doesn't seem like he was, like, that visibly injured.
And I think a lot of people just don't believe it was real, which I don't think that's true.
I mean, it's obviously a real event that happened, so.
Oh yeah, sure.
Yeah, I mean, at my most conspiracy theorist about this, I thought, somebody shot at him, and it narrowly missed him, and he got hit by a chip of something from, you know, something that was hit.
That's what I thought happened.
Although, I now acknowledge that I was wrong about that.
He was actually hit by a bullet.
There was some initial reporting that was like, oh, he got hit by like a chunk of the teleprompter, hit him in the, you know, like that was, that was, that was kind of reported early on, but it was never confirmed.
And I think, I think it was demonstrated that the teleprompters were not damaged.
And so, and I think it was the fact that they wouldn't release any of the medical reports from the hospital and stuff, but as other people have pointed out, there could be all sorts of reasons for that.
They could have got him in there and done a full health check and discovered that he's got diabetes or a heart murmur or God knows what, you know, Or maybe he just didn't want them to so that he could play it up.
up.
Well, and you know, like there's, there's plenty of like plenty of legal reasons not to release medical records.
And even of, even of like presidential candidates, like I, I get that, you know, I was just having a wing nut half hour.
I would actually be amazed if he doesn't have diabetes, frankly.
And, you know, as someone with diabetes, I don't say that negatively.
I just say, like, you know, given his age and his diet, like, you know, the amount of... I know he drinks Diet Coke, but the amount of, like, Pizza Hut and cheeseburgers and stuff he eats, it's, uh, you know, it would be amazing if his blood sugar was better than mine.
Let's just put it that way.
And apparently one of the things that is raising his heart rate and blood sugar at the moment is Vance regret.
I mean, there's a lot of chatter about that in the media.
Do you think there's anything to that?
I think he was planning, like, he was planning to steamroll Biden, and having Vance in there, and Vance versus Kamala, and if there's hypothetically a vice presidential debate, etc.
Trump is often, like, he picks people based on, like, central casting, you know?
Like, we've said this before.
He's very impulsive and very shallow.
One of the things he didn't like about Steve Bannon, one of the reasons that Steve Bannon didn't last longer in the White House after having helped get him into the White House, was just that Steve Bannon was kind of slovenly and unkempt, and he didn't look the part of a chief advisor.
He didn't clean up and put on a suit.
He was just kind of disheveled.
And Trump is very much that guy.
J.D.
Vance puts on that air of, I am the heir apparent.
I am the person waiting in the wings to take over for your movement.
You know, despite the fact that he was, you know, one of the virulent, you know, never Trumpers in 2016, and, you know, said some very accurate things about Donald Trump, you know, not, not in the way I would have said it, but, you know, very accurate things.
He compared him to opioids, you know, and that's coming from a guy whose whole trademark is that he's from the Appalachians.
Yeah, well, we can definitely talk more about JD Vance in another episode, but no, I think, I think that there is this, like, you put your, you put your, you put your, you know, There's always been this thing of, like, Donald Trump is just kind of a big kid.
He's very impulsive.
He's very, you know, he just goes with, like, the last thing that's been said to him, and he just sort of agrees with it.
And I think he picks J.D.
Vance because J.D.
Vance was the one who, like, most Successfully shoved his nose into his rectum in the in the in the in the weeks and months before he had to pick.
And, you know, he was and that's that's what it took.
But, like, I do think that, like, he's got a little buyer's remorse.
I don't I don't even know that it's I mean, we don't know who is going to pick for.
He hasn't got a great field to choose from, has he?
know that any other pick would be better than Vance, honestly, for Trump, if I were trying to consider it.
I think that the buyer's remorse thing is just like- He hasn't got a great feel to choose from, has he?
No, no, he doesn't.
I mean- I heard from somewhere that he was leaning towards Doug Burgum just because he wanted access to the guy's money, but who knows?
I mean, this kind of goes to bigger picture what we're talking about in this episode is that the Democratic Party has now indicated that in matters of their existence, not in matters of policy, not in matters of actually making things better for the people who vote for them, but in the matter of winning elections, in the matter of picking candidates in 2020 and now in 2024, They have shown a remarkable willingness to be a party and to actually act like a professional political organization.
The Republican Party was completely destroyed by Donald Trump in a lot of ways, in terms of its structural things, because Donald Trump just does whatever Trump wants.
In 2020, they didn't even have a party platform.
Their party platform was whatever Trump says.
They didn't even put out a platform.
In terms of getting things wrong, in 2020, the minute that The minute that Fox News called Pennsylvania for Biden, I thought, okay, this is the end of Donald Trump, because Fox News has gotten off.
The RNC is not going to like he's done, because he doesn't have the institutional support anymore, you know?
I remember the show that we did.
We did an episode about this.
Yeah, I know.
That just, I mean, it just wasn't the case.
I mean, I had greater faith in the evil of the Republican Party than was warranted, apparently.
And the Republicans have no idea what to do without Trump.
I mean, they tried DeSantis, they tried Abbott in Texas, they've tried a whole bunch of these guys.
And, you know, they can't, they can't, they don't have the star power, they don't have the deuce to get through it, to actually, like, get to the main stage.
They just can't compare to Trump.
I mean, I do feel a little bit like Obama was just this phenomenon, right?
And again, regardless of how you feel about his policies, because I feel very badly about many of his policies, but he was a political phenomenon.
He showed up and just like he steamrolled Hillary Clinton in 2008.
That was supposed to be her year to win.
And he just ran right over him and ran right over McCain, too.
McCain was another one who was full on.
He had the support of a whole establishment.
He had years and years of building up his resume to be this and the war hero history, etc.
He was on Parks and Recreation, all this stuff, and chatted with Jon Stewart.
And Obama just crushed him.
And I feel like Trump is that.
For the Republicans.
And I mean, the irony is that, you know, Donald Trump is not like he's not going to live that much longer.
I mean, he's he's 78.
So, I mean, it would be hard for me to imagine if he loses, then he's going to come back again in four years.
I just think he's just I mean, he will just I mean, he's already kind of incoherent and tired, but like he's just going to be like even more so in another four years.
So, I mean, I don't know.
It's just hard to it's hard to know how to how to think of like what the Republican Party does after Trump.
When you try to think about it, you're just juggling different versions of the impossible, aren't you?
He's never going to go away at this point.
If he loses in November, God willing, because if he doesn't, they will start trying to implement that fucking project.
And that's not Trumpism, that's the Republican Party.
That's the Heritage Foundation, to be fair.
But this is kind of what you were saying.
Trump killed the Republican Party.
Trumpism stroke MAGA, whatever you want to call it, it's kind of invaded and taken over the Republican Party in a way that's startlingly like the way fascist parties take over bourgeois governments through, you know, like the cooperation and helping them into power of like conservative elites, etc.
You can map the process of the Nazis being adopted into the democratic governmental system onto the way in which MAGA got into and took over the Republican Party.
But the thing is, that can't happen unless it's already in there.
Trumpism and everything that has sort of come to fruition through Trumpism, like the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation and that whole sort of complex of dark money and all this stuff, It's happened because Trumpism is just the expression of what the Republican Party is on a deep level.
It's not an alien invading organism that's attached itself and taken over.
It just is that on a deep level.
And it's erupted from the inside and taken it over.
It's the id of the Republican base, is what it is.
It's the rampaging hulk to Mitch McConnell's Bruce Banner, is kind of the way you might think of it.
And that it's the same organism.
What's fascinating is that if you look at what Trump did in his first term, You know, he did a bunch of shit to aggrandize himself and to enrich himself.
He did a bunch of stuff that he liked.
He went after his personal enemies with animosity, but ultimately he governed very much like he just let the Republican heads just kind of decide what the overall policy was going to be, you know?
The big thing, the major thing, the absolutely terrifying thing about the first Trump presidency is that he got three Supreme Court nominations.
The Heritage Foundation gave him a list of 20 guys, or 20 people, and he picked three of them off that list.
He said, I'm just going to pick three, I'm just going to pick off that list.
That's my list of people I'm picking from for the Supreme Court.
And that's pretty much how they govern together, how the system held itself together for four years.
The Republican Party, the party heads, are pushing for their agenda, their standard agenda, and then Trump is just making it happen using his star power, frankly.
And then he goes off on the side and does a whole bunch of corruption shit.
There was a really great podcast.
The Trump Inc.
And it was like one of these like NPRs, I forget the exact, I think it was NPR produced.
And they started like from the beginning of the Trump presidency and ran until like the last kind of the last day before he left office.
Just going through all the like business, all the ways in which the Trump businesses were entwined in the Trump presidency and the government.
And some of these are minor examples, and some of them are very large examples.
But Trump was definitely going through and enriching himself through the entire time, often in petty ways.
They had to, like, the Secret Service had to stay at one of his hotels and pay him the privilege for, you know, $1,000 a night hotel room, and so he's making a few grand off of hotel rooms for his security team.
I mean, yeah, that's corruption, but of all the things you could do as President of the United States to enrich yourself, that just seems, it's just the most petty, small-minded, you know.
Petty, yeah.
That's Trump, because Trump is a lot of things.
He is a fascist, not an intellectual or an ideological fascist, just a kind of an emotional, instinctive fascist.
Basically, he's one of the stormtroopers that somehow got put in charge of the party because Hitler fell over one day and cracked his skull open.
But he is a fascist.
He has that politics.
He's a rapist, and a racist, and a misogynist, and a bigot, and all these things, and an authoritarian, and power-mad, and da-da-da-da-da.
But what he is on the most fundamental level is a petty spiv.
He's a crook.
What he is on the most basic level of what Trump is, he is just a petty crook, and he's not even very good at that.
And that guy was given the most powerful job on the planet for four years.
Yeah, and possibly for another four.
And this is kind of where I land on, what would another four years of Trump look like?
It will look like he will go after all the people who prosecuted him and who persecuted him in his mind, all the people who, all the judges, all the lawyers, everybody who went after him.
Shut down all the legal cases against him.
Well, all that stuff gets shut down the second he's elected.
Honestly, I think at this point, it's too late.
It's done.
There's no way anything is going to impact him.
He will never serve a day behind bars for anything that he has done.
If you wanted that to happen, you had to start four years ago.
I'm sorry.
But like he's going to go after all those people.
He's going to go after all the media that didn't like him.
He's going to go after, you know, he's going to with with a righteous fury, like he has a righteous fury towards those people who have been putting him through the ringer for the last year.
But, you know, in terms of his governing style, like, yeah, he's going to turn that back over to.
The people in charge, the people at the Heritage Foundation.
And so, that's where a lot of the real fear of like, you know, because in 2020 he didn't have, or in 2016 he didn't have an apparatus to help him govern.
He didn't have people that he could put into these positions.
In the way that, like, in 2024, 2025, he definitely will.
They have learned, they have built an organization to do that.
So in 2020, in 2016, they gave him, you know, we're going to take over the Supreme Court.
Like, that's the job in the next four years.
The next four years of Trump, if he gets elected again, it's going to be the whole government's going to look like our Supreme Court does now.
And that's terrifying, because the Supreme Court is about as bad as it's been in 150 years.
I mean, you could say the Dred Scott Court was worse, but that's saying something, right?
That's what a future Trump presidency is going to look like, which is why it's really important to beat him using the electoral methods that we have available.
And so yeah, Kamala Harris instead of Joe Biden, This feels like a breath of fresh air.
Yeah.
It does look a little bit more hopeful that, you know, America won't turn fully into effectively a fascist dictatorship run by Leonard Leo and Clarence Thomas and people like that.
At least not this year, you know, maybe four years' time.
Because whoever the next Republican president is, they will be trying to institute Project 2025, even if it's Nikki Haley or Chris Christie or, you know, the most moderate fucking Republican you can think of.
And I know the people I just named aren't moderates.
Take the most moderate imaginable Republican president.
The structure of the movement will be trying to do the same thing again, from Bono to Trump.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I mean, even like George W. Bush.
George W. Bush, he was the kind of dummy cowboy who kind of came out there.
And the structure of the presidency, just like the people around him, created all these awful, awful policies.
I'm not defending George W. Bush.
Despicable man.
I would argue the worst president of my lifetime.
I think W was worse than Trump.
People are going to yell at me about that, but I think W was worse than Trump.
He's certainly got a bigger body count.
I mean, Trump's body count was high enough, but yeah, I think W's is higher.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and with like much less, I mean, I don't want to say less justification because not that Trump had justification, but like, it's, I think a, some people are too young to really remember how bad W was.
And I think there's, there's a sense of which, you know, once he's out of office and he's just like the old man, you know, the old grandpa painting in his, in his Texas cabin or whatever.
Oh my God.
Oh, that's just like, and that's, that's another one of those things of like, oh, we're all friends at the top level.
You know, we're all, you know, we all, we oppose each other in public, but ultimately we are, we're all of the same team.
We're all the same class, you know?
The ruling class definitely believe in the theory of class.
They know it's true.
They do, they do.
Yeah, no, I mean, Sonia Sotomayor, best or second best justice we have on the court.
I mean, I think Ketanji Brown-Jackson, arguably a better justice, but personal friends with Antonin Scalia up until the day he died.
They were buddies, they were warm to each other, they were friendly.
We can like what these people say in public, and we can like what they do on their papers, and we can approve of them and vote for them, etc., etc.
But ultimately, they're all on the same team, you know, and they know it.
We've talked a little bit about how Donald Trump governed.
I mean, I think the point you just made was brilliant because I think, again, you can map it directly on, because these things so often rhyme, you can map Trump getting to basically just loot the government and use his position to make money for four years in return for Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society getting their three justices.
You can map that directly onto W, who was allowed to just be the president for, well, it was eight years.
It was eight years, yeah.
And in return, the neoconservatives got the war that they desperately wanted.
And Obama in government.
I mean, one of the things that this whole thing around Kamala, it's very reminiscent of like Obama's, you were talking about Obama's, you know, just destroying Hillary Clinton in the primaries and getting the nomination.
It's very reminiscent of that again.
It's a similar sort of tidal wave of Democrat activist, grassroots enthusiasm for a candidate who kind of looks incredibly progressive, you know, certainly compared to what they've had before.
What do you think, I mean, assuming she wins, which, you know, God willing, because whatever you think of her, she's better than American fascism now.
Assuming she wins, what will a Kamala Harris presidency look like?
What will it be like?
I mean, I hate to say kind of a con... I mean, well, okay.
A, I don't know.
Nobody knows.
I mean, I'm not an expert on Kamala Harris as a person or as a candidate.
I have not made it my duty to follow her that closely.
So, you know, brain of salt and all that.
There is a part of me that thinks you're going to see, you know, it's going to be like Biden, but more.
I think there's going to be a reticence to kind of rock the boat too hard on that stuff.
I think she will certainly be a better speaker and certainly kind of a better advocate in public for, you know, sort of democratic priorities and that sort of thing.
But do I think that like the bloodshed in Gaza is going to be reduced significantly?
No.
You know, she's made some slightly progressive noises about it.
She stayed away from Netanyahu's address to Congress, Daniel.
Well... So, problem solved!
Sorry, I thought you were going to a slightly different place there, but yes, no, you... Yeah, it's a very performative thing of, like, not showing up to the damn thing, but, like, it's still, like, very much, you know, we stand with Israel 100%, and as, you know, I think even today or yesterday we released a statement about, like, Protesters in New York City, you know, pro-Palestine protesters and, you know, violence and all that sort of thing.
And it's just like, you're not like... The imperial presidency just, it creates war.
It just does that.
Again, the joke I always make about Joe Biden is like, he puts softer pillows in the cages where the kids are being kept.
Like, I think the metaphor would be, you know... Pretty much literally true.
It's not even a joke.
It's almost literally true.
Yeah, I know.
You know, and I think Kamala in the various, like, it'll be, it'll be a kinder, gentler genocide.
It'll be, you know, there'll be more hand wringing and a softer, a softer voice.
And this is something that we had to do or et cetera, et cetera.
But I don't think the policy is going to fundamentally change.
And, you know, I think domestically, And this is where I really don't like shitting people's cereal on this, right?
Like, this is not a fun place to be.
Like, people are really excited about Kamala Harris right now, and there's a lot of, even in places, and I'm not gonna name names or anything like that, but even in places that you would expect to have a little bit more There's a lot of history on this, a little bit more perspective.
There's a lot of, like, well, hey, you know, Kamala wasn't really a cop.
I mean, she was a prosecutor, but, like, she was a progressive prosecutor, and, you know, yeah, she, like, put a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch of people who were convicted of drug offenses when she was in there, but most of them didn't serve any jail time, and so, like, I mean, come on, what are we saying here?
I mean, like, yes, she's not the absolute, like, she's not, like, Goebbels, all right?
I get that, no.
You know?
We don't actually have to, like, whitewash her record.
She did do some good stuff.
She tried some sex offenders and some bank stuff, and yeah, okay.
Well, I mean, one of the things it's like is the SESTA-FOSTA thing.
I don't know how much you know about this, but this is a... effectively... God, I'm gonna get the details of this wrong and I apologize to my sex worker friends for everything, you know what I mean?
That's a bad...
Online sex worker legislation?
Yeah, it basically makes it impossible in many cases for sex workers to advertise safely, and it makes it impossible to vet clients and that sort of thing in some complicated ways.
And it was known that this was going to happen, and Kamala Harris is one of the fundamental, top person, one of the top people who really set that in motion, and so she gets a lot of credit for that.
I do not like Kamala Harris.
I'm going to be honest here.
I think she is an appealing candidate right now.
And I think that a lot of the things I don't like about her, I don't like the fact that she was a prosecutor.
I don't like the fact that she did a lot of this shit.
That's going to play very positively.
And a lot of the stuff that those capital D Democrats I was talking about is, yeah, you send the cop after the felon, felon Don, and the cop is going to get rid of him.
Rhetorically, that is good.
It's very savvy marketing.
It's just like, okay, great.
I'm happy.
I'll get on board.
If it means that she wins and we don't have another four years of Trump, okay, I'm willing to take that.
I will accept that.
But at the same time, I really hope that leftists and progressives and people Who might be listening to my voice are not have your fun enjoy cameras victory hypothetical victory I do hope she wins but don't take your eyes off of like the material reality of the world that we're living in and of her record and that's and I think that's as important as anything is.
You know, we have to, you know, we just have to keep that in mind.
We're allowed to be excited that Joe Biden is not going to doom us to either a loss or four more years of Joe Biden.
Like, I'm very happy about that.
And I'm happy that Kamala is electorally succeeding right now, and she's doing well in the polls.
We don't know what's going to happen in November.
Certainly, you know, right now there's a new shininess that she gets to, you know, bask in, but we just don't know what's going to happen in November.
You likened her to breadsticks earlier.
What do you make of this coconuts thing that everybody's going on about?
Oh, God.
I mean, it's one of those things where, like... I thought coconuts was taken.
I thought that was Tulsi.
Yeah, Coconut Mommy, I think, is what, like, the Nazis were calling her for a while.
Yeah, because coconuts are indigenous to Hawaii.
Well, they're found in Hawaii, but not... They're not... I know coconuts are broader than Hawaii.
Don't believe me.
Yeah, I mean, apparently... And again, I just don't follow... I haven't followed Kamala Harris, like, that closely.
Apparently, she had like a viral clip in which she said something like, you know, well, I didn't fall out of a coconut tree, you know, which was meant to be like, you know, that's like a saying that her mom used to say, like, when she was a kid.
And, you know, she was like, recounting a larger anecdote, but then it gets chopped down to like coconut tree.
If you watch the full clip, it's actually kind of cool.
The point she's making is kind of like, everybody has a context.
Everybody exists in the context of generations before and the history that went before them.
For somebody like her, it's kind of deep.
I like it.
I have to admit.
No, no, no, no.
Yeah.
I mean, she says, she says a lot of cool things.
I just want her to enact those things and not enacts the terrible things.
That's a, you know, like, you know, it's, it's the way I feel about Obama is like, yeah, he said, that's Daniel Harper's politics.
Can we have good things and not bad things?
Yeah, no, I know.
I know.
It's, I know it's a horribly sophisticated rubric that I'm putting on here, you know, but like, uh, no, no.
I think we're wrapping up, but I did want to, you know, just one more point I wanted to make, and this is just relative to the announcement and to the timing, is that Joe Biden got COVID right before, like, he had COVID when this announcement was made, I believe.
Yes.
And it would not surprise me.
I've had COVID once.
I am much younger than Joe Biden.
COVID knocked me out for two weeks, and it would not surprise me that getting COVID—I think he's had it before—getting it again after the debate performance.
It wouldn't surprise me if that was part of the impetus of the decision, because every indication we're getting, at least from the reporting that's happened—and who knows how accurate this is and what's being fed to people and what's real—but Reporting that we've seen is that this was kind of a last minute decision that like he he didn't tell Harris until like Saturday and then he announced it Sunday and he announced to his office like, you know, he read the statement to them one minute before he posted it on Twitter or it was posted on Twitter for him.
So.
COVID did one good thing in this world, you know?
He got sick and he was like, oh, fuck this.
That's one of all the terrible things that have happened because of COVID.
If Joe Biden getting it and just going like, all right, fuck it.
I can't do this anymore.
All right.
COVID won.
Okay.
One point for COVID.
I'm with you.
You heard it here first, folks.
Daniel Harper.
I like COVID-19.
COVID-19 is good.
COVID-19 is good.
That's exactly.
Somebody clip that, please.
And put it on my tombstone.
No.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.
That was a bit of reporting, and I didn't see anybody really putting two and two together on that one in quite the same way.
And, I mean, you know, who knows?
Maybe I'm wrong.
I mean, this is all pure speculation, but... No, that sounds pretty convincing to me, coupled with, like, I mean, he was just sequentially stabbed in the back by everybody.
Pelosi stabbed him in the back, Schumer stabbed him in the back, you know?
His position was just made untenable.
Well, and this is the fascinating thing, is that, like, he was standing tall on this.
He did not want to leave, and he believed, I am the only person who can beat Trump.
And I think that there's this disgustedness to him, where, you know, I think that that's honestly his most appealing quality, is this kind of like, you know, he doesn't back down.
He does have a, you know, a ramrod spine when he wants to, and he will get tough with people.
He gets tough with his own voters.
I mean, you know, we saw that in the 2020 primaries, in which he's, you know, like, Offering to offering a push-up contest against some guy or whatever.
I mean, it's like it's it's remarkable.
I think that all of that really just I think those things were not the thing that made him change.
I think I did see some reporting that the donors like we're not behind.
They were really not supporting him and they were not going to give him the money.
Yeah.
But then again, I also saw, and this is before the Kamala kind of anointment, that Kamala was also kind of not in the good graces of these people.
And it's as simple as not taking meetings with them, and just not kissing their feet and not kissing their asses in the same way that other democratic... Hey, stop it.
Stop it.
You're making me like him more.
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, and so, like, it wouldn't surprise me if one of the reasons that he stepped down was that as well.
I mean, it's not just COVID, obviously.
It's probably, like, a whole slew of things, but I do wonder how much was going on behind the scenes of, like, Kamala going in that last day of being like, all right, look, I know.
I will work with you, you know, and just, and kind of like, uh, kissing the ring a little bit in order to like, because that, that, that, you know, that bum rush of people supporting her did not come out of nowhere.
That, that, that had a, that had a, you know, and I don't think you had to be like a conspiracy theorist to believe that, yeah, there was something going on behind the scenes because there's no way the Democrats got that much shit in order in, you know, 24 hours without a bunch of, or there were some calls behind the scenes.
I promise you.
Yeah, I'm sure that's true, but I also do get a feeling of the movement being ahead of the leadership here.
Again, Gaza, but with all credit to Biden, the great thing he did was that he immediately and completely unreservedly endorsed her.
Like a couple of seconds after he quits, he says, it's Kamala.
It's in the letter, in the letter that he posted on Twitter.
He endorses Kamala in the last line.
It's like, I'm gone, Kamala's my pick, go.
And so, there was no doubt at all.
I didn't think he'd do that, but he did do it.
It was the right thing to do.
And I think the party membership and the grassroots were just instantly there.
And I do get this sense of Pelosi and Schumer and the other rather cynical big beasts kind of going, oh, yeah, no, I'm on board, yeah, yeah, Kamala, yeah, yeah, Kamala.
One last thing then.
He said, he said, Carambo like.
Yeah.
One more thing.
They've been flailing around trying to find something to attack her with.
I mean, we mentioned the rather pathetic, oh, it's undemocratic, the Democrats have done a coup, Biden was elected in the primaries, they can't do this, we're going to sue them thing.
That's obviously not going to pan out.
And obviously there's been an avalanche, a tidal wave, a pyroclastic flow just covering everybody in the Pompeii that is the United States with racism and sexism, albeit in mostly dog whistle form, D-E-A, pick, and stuff like that.
Obviously, down to like, I can't remember the guy's name, but some prominent Christian nationalist just made a speech or a statement or something where he says, oh, she's the spirit of Jezebel, which is not just sexist, but it's also incredibly racist.
If I can find the article I read, I'll put it in the show notes about the racist background to that thing, the Jezebel thing.
It's been rather amusing, I have to admit, watching them run around like Jesse Waters and Sean Hannity and all those fuckers, running around like headless chickens, trying to find something.
And the best they seem to have come up with so far is she's got an annoying laugh, which I don't think is true, and she wants to ban plastic straws, which, fucking hey, good, good, ban plastic straws.
I'm sure they'll come up with something better.
What do you think they'll come up with?
Aside from the obvious, which is just an avalanche of racism and sexism.
I mean, it doesn't have to be true for them to, like, use it.
I think that really what they're going to do is they're going to, like, you know, in the same way that they did, like, Joe Biden is just, like, he's just, you know, he's a criminal.
He's both a criminal mastermind and, like, an old man who, like, can barely, you know, speak.
I think that the big thing with Kamala is that she's not serious, that she's not.
But I think that's what kind of the laughing Kamala thing is supposed to be.
They're going to take every, you know, memed thing from the last four years of her, you know, kind of looking like she's on, like, some pretty good upper And that's just going to play in perpetuity for the next four years if she wins.
She hasn't got her own biological children as well.
That's another thing they've been on about.
Yeah, that's the big thing.
I think even JD Vance was on that one, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, because he's basically just a Fox News host who's been elevated above his station.
He's a Fox News host, i.e.
vice presidential candidate.
It's the same group of people at this point.
In 2024, yeah.
No, I think it's going to be like, she's not serious.
She's an airhead.
That's the sort of thing that they're going to try.
Again, we've kind of touched on this, but Trump just has a certain ceiling.
And I think that this is what the assassination attempt kind of told us, is that you're right.
He didn't get a huge bump.
He didn't get 60, 70% approval rating because people are sick of him.
People know exactly who he is.
And you're either on his side or you're not at this point.
I think there are people who will hold their nose and vote for him because they don't like Kamala Harris or whatever, but I think that the reality is that they're just going to have to... They can't make her seem less serious than Donald Trump, because Donald Trump, for everything bad that we've said about Joe Biden, for everything that we've said negative about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, he could never get a coherent sentence out.
He doesn't even make sense when he talks half the time.
I believe it was a British reporter.
It might have been somewhere in Central Europe.
But there was a reporter who, during the final days of Trump's presidency, had come in to just be a correspondent, following Trump around.
You know, the paper actually, like, he actually transcribed exactly what Donald Trump said, and not what reporters wished he had said, or thought he said, you know?
And so when you get all the ums and ahs, and you get all the, you know, the circumlocutions, and you get all the stuff going nowhere, and then you put that on paper, he is, like, incoherent.
And it's not like, like, I do that sort of thing, too.
I do malapropisms, I do all sorts of stuff.
I am fully aware that I am not, like... I'll do.
But I am able to get coherent points across and I am able to speak in a way that other people can understand me without you having to read between the lines and think what you wish I'd said.
Donald Trump is just not capable of doing that.
He goes off in his own, unless he is very tightly scripted, he goes off into la-la land on a regular basis.
Yeah.
I mean, people say, what does he do?
Because he basically has two modes.
He has just deranged blithering.
What he has is bits.
He's like a stand-up comic.
He goes from place to place and he just does the same bits or routines over and over again.
He's got the weightlifting routine, he's got the shark and the battery routine, and he's just got these same bits that he does over and over again.
It's like if you Google Bill Hicks and you find the first four videos of Bill Hicks routines on YouTube.
You'll hear the same routines over and over again, because he goes from one place to another, to another, to another, and he does the same three or four, five, six routines.
Trump does that.
All his speeches are just this series of routines.
To be fair, political speeches are very... That's how you write political speeches.
Having that mode is completely normal for a presidential candidate, just to be clear.
But we are talking about routines and not actual stuff about policy or ideas or Or history or anything like that.
We're talking about stories, basically funny stories or funny situations or things that he thinks are funny.
Anyway, he has that mode and then he has whinging.
That's all.
That's the rest of it.
The rest of it is just whining as whining about the media and whining about the politicians and whining about the court cases.
He's just a whiny complaining old baby.
That's all he is.
And that's not gonna, you know, his base, like the whining, because it involves him saying mean things about the people they hate.
But that's not gonna that nobody's going to be inspired by that.
It's boring.
It's pathetic.
No, absolutely.
I agree completely.
All we can say is he won in 2016.
He lost in 2020.
Biden was going to be it was going to be a toss up.
And I thought after the assassination attempt, I think, okay, it's his to lose now.
It's not his to lose now.
I think that Kamala has certainly taken a lot of the wind out of his sails, and I consider this a very good thing.
I think it's very good.
A distant chink of daylight, which is a rarity.
I'll take it.
Yes.
No, absolutely.
Well, that was our second news brief in a short period of time, listeners.
Thanks for tuning in to listen, and we will be back with you as soon as we can be with another one of these, frankly, because give it a couple of days, there'll be another 17 dramatic news stories to talk about.
But maybe one of these days, something a bit more substantial than just us man facting our way through the news of the day.
But this is all we can give you at the moment.
So take it or leave it.
And if you're listening to this now at the end, presumably you took it.
So good.
Good for you.
Well done.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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