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Annika Brockschmidt joins us to discuss recent shifts in American politics, particularly focusing on identity politics. The conversation delves into controversies surrounding race and identity, spotlighting Donald Trump's contentious comments on Kamala Harris's heritage, the Trump campaign's struggles to broaden its coalition, and the GOP's strategies related to Project 2025. We analyze the influence of social media on political mobilization and explore how these dynamics are perceived outside of the United States. The episode concludes with a sense of cautious optimism as they reflect on recent positive developments and public enthusiasm related to the upcoming election.
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And And she was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage.
I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black.
So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black?
She is always identified as a black woman who went to a historically black college.
I respect either one, but she obviously doesn't.
Because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went, she became a black woman.
- Just to be clear, sir, do you believe that she is-- - I think somebody should look into that too when you ask, continue in a very hostile, nasty town. - Hello and welcome nasty town. - Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus and our weekly roundup.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
I am co-hosting today, not with Brad Onishi, who was not able to be here, but with another friend of the show, our friend Anika.
Anika, I'll throw it over to you to introduce yourself.
Yeah, hi!
Thank you so much for having me.
I always love being on.
My name is Annika Brockschmidt.
I'm a journalist.
As you can probably hear from the accent, I am German, so I'm based in Berlin.
And my focus has been right-wing politics, right-wing extremism for a couple of years now.
And I focus specifically on the US right, but also on the European right.
So that's what brought me here today.
Yeah, and we always love having you on for so many reasons, but one is that perspective that it brings.
I should point out, I understand you're actually in Vegas now, right?
Oh, actually, I managed to get out of Vegas in one piece.
Oh, you did?
Good.
I'm now in Tahoe, Lake Tahoe, which is just ridiculously beautiful.
I was prepared for it to look pretty, but it still stunned me.
However, I am in a room now, in a hotel room, that is Freezing, freezing, like refrigerator freezing, because it is quite hot outside.
Yeah, it's, I live like in the American South, I think it's even more pronounced, but I hear from people from other places all the time, they come and they're like, man, you guys pull on the AC, you're not, you're not kidding around.
It's, yeah, I moved from Colorado to Arkansas when I was in high school, and it was the first time it'd be like 102 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and like 65 in somebody's house, and I would just be like Thank you.
And then I walked back outside and feel like I was going to fall asleep or something because, like, the heat would hit me.
So, yeah, I'm glad you got a Vegas experience.
I'm glad you made it out.
I hope what happened in Vegas stays in Vegas and that you have a good time in Tahoe, which is a place I've actually never been and I've always wanted to go.
But, yeah, we're delighted to have you.
Thank you.
I'm happy to be here.
Yeah, so, as you know, as an observer of American politics, as anybody who hasn't, like, lived in a hole in the ground for the last 10 years, but let's just say the last two weeks, crazy things happening in the American political scene and want to touch on some of those.
We're going to have a lot of What I want to do today is I'm going to lead out on a segment about just some of the stuff that happened this week with Trump in particular.
In my view, acting super entitled to support from various people who don't support the Republican Party typically, who had sort of, I think, become very concerned about Biden, were not very enthusiastic.
Harris has entered the race and their enthusiasm has risen again, has risen in a way that doesn't serve the Trump team and seeing how he has responded to that.
And then I think also wanting to look at the serious issues behind that about how identity works in America and American politics.
And people will have heard me talk about it some.
The like four people who've read my book will like know that I talk about it there as well.
But I've got real issues with the critique of so-called identity politics.
And I just want to talk about that and obviously welcome your reflections at any point there.
You are going to then walk us through yet more on Project 2025, the project that Republicans wish would go away but doesn't go away.
Maybe it's kind of gone away, or maybe that's all an illusion, and we've got Vance who's still, you know, the anchor to all of it.
We can't get away without talking about Vance for a week, so I think we'll hear some about Project 2025 and Vance from you.
We have some time after that.
I'd love to just get some quick reflections on your part about how in the world this is playing out from a non-North American perspective.
And then our reasons for hope, and you will be back to beautiful Tahoe for, I hope, the rest of your day.
So yeah, let me just walk us through some of this.
So we know that one of Team Trump's aims since 2016 had been to try to expand the reach of the MAGA message, as really every political campaign wants to do.
And what we want to talk about, what I want to talk about are obvious signs this week that that's not only not working, but that it seems to be going in reverse.
And I want to start with just some really informative polling that came out this week.
So among women, U.S.
women, we all know that 2016-2020 elections are marked by a wide gender gap.
I think that's well known.
Everybody understands that.
We've seen that since Roe v. Wade was overturned, that that just continues to open up and typically play into Democratic hands.
Well, we know that women were much more likely to support Democrats than men, and we know that men were more likely to support the GOP than women.
Well, I think it was this week, it might have been late last week, at some point I came across a New York Times-Siena poll that said that since Harris entered the race, so just what is that?
Yes.
What is time?
Oh wow.
10 days ago or like nine months ago.
Mm-hmm.
It feels like.
Yes.
Like, yeah, we're into like COVID time or something.
Yeah, exactly.
Since she entered the race, the gap appears to have widened.
So Harris holds a 14-point lead among women.
Oh, wow.
That's 55 to 41.
So 14 points, that's the number to hold on to.
Mm-hmm.
Trump holds a 17-point among men, a 17-point lead.
Mm-hmm.
Which creates a net 31-point gap, gender gap, currently polling in the U.S. election.
electorate.
I mean, that's like a third of the electorate in terms of the point spread.
Quinnipiac University poll had the gap at 39 points, not 31.
For some perspective on this in 20, 2016, 20, 2016, in 2016, I'm looking at my notes.
I'm seeing both dates.
The gap was 24 points.
That's, I think, what exit polls show.
In 2020, it was 23 points.
So roughly the same when Hillary Clinton was running versus when Biden ran.
The caveat here is that there are high margins of error.
There's lots of variability.
Other polls have shown a very, very small number.
Some polls have shown even bigger numbers.
But my takeaway from this, and I'll throw it over just for any thoughts that you have, if any of this is remotely surprising, is that if an aim of the GOP was to expand its reach to women voters, and we know that other issues tie in here too, racial, ethnic identity, income, things like this.
But if they wanted to blunt the force of issues like abortion, if they wanted to reach out to women, it doesn't appear that that's happening.
In fact, it appears that it's moving backwards.
Your thoughts on that?
Is that interesting?
Is it surprising?
Is it like, well, thanks, polls, for telling us what we already knew?
No, I think it confirms sort of a gut feeling that I think a lot of us have had.
When I was at NatCon two weeks ago, We were sort of talking about the – this is going to sound slightly wooey, but bear with me – we were talking about the energy in the room.
Now, it's not surprising again that, you know, right-wing conferences are a majority male, but there was a specific quality to it.
And I was discussing with some journalist colleagues there, this does not feel like the GOP is even attempting to really broaden their coalition because there was a distinct the vibe was you're somehow you've gotten into a frat party and it's bad it's bad it's sort of slightly insilly
Vibes a lot of guys talking very animately about like breeding and It's just a bad vibe.
It's a bad bad vibe and I think I where you don't want to take a drink anybody My flight response is activated and I should follow it and I And so I think what would really interest me, I don't know if there are any numbers out yet, is how the Vance pick sort of exacerbated that sort of feeling amongst voters, because
The Vance Pig really doesn't bring you any demographic except very online right-wing men, I would say, because the positions that he's taken on divorce, on abortion, on, you know, on workers' rights in some instances, on, you know, basically nearly everything is deeply off-putting to the majority of the country and even to the
majority of voter groups that the GOP might want to appeal to.
And I know that the two major campaign organizers have said in the past, from the Trump campaign, they've said in the past that they're trying to broaden their coalition to appeal specifically also to black and Latino men.
Don't know how that's going, but that in itself already tells you that they're not sort of trying to bridge the gender gap, which I found quite interesting.
There are a lot of terms I can think of to capture that energy, and I don't think any of them are appropriate for the context.
But yeah, it's, it's, yeah, all of that.
I mean, and so, so you mentioned, you know, men of color here.
So let's talk about black voters in particular, as this is sort of front and center this week, as we'll get into the National Association of Black Journalists debacle.
But there was some polling recently, the Angus Reid Institute surveyed and found 67% of black voters intended on voting for Harris.
So just over two thirds.
only 12% said they intended to vote for Trump, and that left 17% who said that they were undecided.
Yeah.
So, you know, almost single digits for Trump.
And before Biden stepped down, we know Democrats were concerned that he was slipping, that he was slipping in support among African-American voters.
And this had been, as you just said, a conscious effort by the Trump administration to aim now specifically to aim at men of color.
And as you say, the more and more data will come out and we'll see, you know, what are the gender lines among black voters?
What are the gender lines among Latinx voters and so forth?
Mm-hmm.
But that was the big issue, a takeaway that again, as you say, is not building a coalition.
Well that brings me to what I think shows that this is really getting to Trump this week, that lack of support by groups that He really thinks he's entitled to their support.
I want folks to hold on to that idea of entitlement.
I'm going to circle back around to that.
It's going to take me a while probably to land the plane, but I'm going to try to come back around to entitlement.
So this week, for example, Jewish Democrats, another group that he and the GOP think that they can have inroads with because of their unwavering support for Israel and everything going on with Israel-Gaza.
We know that many people on all sides of the issue were not happy with Biden and how he was articulating that position.
Um, so Trump, I guess, trying to win over Jewish voters?
This is what he said this week in a radio interview.
He said, "Any Jewish person that voted for Harris or Biden should have their head examined.
If you love Israel, or if you're Jewish, because a lot of Jewish people do not like Israel, if you're Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat, you're a fool, an absolute fool." - Wow. - Yeah.
Warming hearts and minds, winning the hearts and minds of Jewish Americans.
The dual loyalty trope is really That's really going to bring it around, I think.
I'm pretty sure.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, yeah.
And the sense of entitlement.
He's said this before.
Nobody's done more for Jewish people than Trump.
Whatever.
That he's entitled to their vote.
If they don't give him a vote, they've somehow betrayed him.
I feel like all that emotion's there.
Well, it was really on display with his Q&A with the National Association of Black Journalists.
That was something.
Something is the word for it, right?
I mean, I'll admit I wasn't watching it live.
I was still travelling, but my phone kept blowing up with, you know, friends and colleagues sending texts.
And I was like, I thought this was going to go bad, but somehow it went worse, even though my expectations were already sort of in the basement.
Yeah, well, by all accounts, I was the same.
I've since watched clips.
I've read the transcripts and so forth.
But, you know, people describe audible gasps in the audience at things that he said.
So, again, most folks will have heard this.
I'm going to talk about a couple of these things.
So, first of all, he's invited to speak to them.
Many members were opposed to this because of Trump's history of slandering people of color, of making racist comments, of using racist dog whistles.
of attacking women of color in particular, or sort of even to a greater degree and so forth.
It started late, Trump said it was because of their sound stuff.
I read this morning in Axios, a scoop, that apparently it was not just that.
They're saying that the Trump campaign almost closed the whole thing down because they refused to have it fact-checked in real time.
They did not want it fact-checked.
The Trump camp, of course, denies this, but this is what happens.
And it turned contentious from the start, like literally from the moment it started.
It was moderated by ABC News senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott, together with Fox News anchor First question.
reporter, so all African-American women.
And Trump blew up at Scott's first question.
She asked something along the lines of why Biden voters should trust, that was the word that was used, why should they trust Trump, or why should potential voters for Harris now trust Trump, given his past rhetoric about them?
And Trump responds, here's how Trump responds.
- First question, first question. - First question, yeah.
He says, first of all, I don't think I've ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner.
A first question.
You don't even say, hello, how are you?
Are you with ABC?
Because I think they're a fake news network, a terrible network.
And he goes on to describe the question as nasty.
Again, we've heard him use this word, always with women, aimed at women.
People can harken back to him calling, referring to Clinton as a nasty woman in the debate, the misogynistic overtones of this.
And he accused her of asking it, quote, in a hostile manner.
And so it just went on.
And I think there's also went on from there.
Yeah, I think there's also an element to it that really was sort of a red line that you could really follow throughout the whole thing, which is that Especially when he's talking to black women, you can really tell this comes out.
So it's this really gross blend of misogyny and racism that he just, he cannot stop himself, is his feeling that they're not being deferential enough, that they're not being humble enough, they're not being respectful.
I'm just talking in big air quotes here.
Towards him.
So really this like tone policing of even the first question I think shows a that he's just been doing fluffy interviews for four or five years and is not used to a regular normal interview question anymore outside of let's say Fox News.
And the second is that he, and we know this from him, he really hates being challenged in interviews.
There's a few on-the-record interviews that we've seen where he loses it when he's being directly challenged.
Now he's being directly challenged by black women and he really, he just cannot, he just He just vomited it out.
It was nonstop.
It was like a looped car crash, the whole thing.
Yeah.
And this is an aside.
I don't want to go down this path.
We'll get to it.
But I think this is also why he doesn't want to debate Kamala Harris.
Oh, yes.
You talk about the nightmare scenario.
I was reading this article just today.
I think it was maybe USA Today interviewing, you know, Trump supporters who think he's just gonna, he's gonna own Harris in a debate.
I'm like, not if he responds like this.
If he's already sort of triggered by the fact that he has to be on the stage with a black woman who right now has more political authority than he does and, you know, so on.
Yeah.
So, all right.
I'm gonna set that aside.
That'll be a weekly roundup or multiple ones at some other point.
It goes on to your sense of entitlement that I think you're describing and so many emotions that go into that word entitlement.
He said, for example, and this is white savior complex, this is the entitlement, this is the deferential piece, this is all of it.
He says, I have been the best president for the black population since Abraham Lincoln.
So I look and I'm like, you know, Not Truman, who desegregated the military.
Or Lyndon Johnson, who signs the Civil Rights Act.
Which is what one of the journalists interjects, I think, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, somebody throws that out there.
Not Carter, you know, desegregating private Christian schools.
And just sort of on and on.
I'm not saying there aren't problems with Johnson and Truman and whatever.
Of course.
I'm saying, like, it's a pretty big, like, I'm the best since Lincoln kind of notion that he has there.
So his entitlement's on display, but in case that's not enough, it gets worse.
Like, if you'd have started here and then it had gone back on track and they'd had a Q&A and you know, he could have at least done the thing of pretending that he can sit in a room full of black people and like talk to them like people.
It gets worse.
His most incendiary comments had to do with Harris's race.
And we remember I I did a It's in the Code episode on this.
We talked about this in last week's Roundup, the quote-unquote DEI candidate rhetoric that is coming out about Harris that implies both, I think, her race and her gender.
Yes.
He has a chance to distance himself from that.
And basically, instead, he just reinforces the sentiment.
And so this is what he says, and this is super, super offensive, and everybody's probably heard it.
I think the Harris campaign Had like blocks of this going out within minutes of it coming out.
They clipped it already.
It was a gift to them, honestly.
Yeah, this is what he said.
I laugh because it's awful, not because it's funny.
It's a coping mechanism.
We all have to cope.
Yeah, he says, quote, she was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage.
I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago, until she happened to turn black.
And now she wants to be known as black.
And then in response to the rejoinder that she had always identified in black, that she attended a historically black college and so forth, he said, quote, she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a black person.
And you can really hear the room reacting.
Yeah.
This was the audible gasps part.
When people talk about the audible gasp, people are like, oh my God, did he just actually say that out loud?
I've got to say it's quite a choice campaign strategy wise to go from melting down about your political opponents calling you weird to denying biracial people exist and pivoting to what feels like they're basically just a few days away from starting to measure skulls.
Wild stuff.
Yeah, just bizarre statements.
So here's where I want to get into why it's more than just cringeworthy.
It's obviously, I think, a gift to the Harris campaign.
You take the polling data, about 12% supporting Trump.
I cannot imagine that, I don't know, I just don't think there are lots of African Americans who are like, you know what?
I wasn't on board before, but now I sure am.
So what it does is it highlights the significance of identity and how it works.
I've talked about this again in my episode some, we've talked about it before, but part of what he's doing here, and I think is giving voice to a GOP strategy of the ideology of colorblindness, I love when he says, I didn't know she was black.
I'm reminded of like Stephen Colbert, like when he's pretending to be a crazy conservative and he'll have like, somebody's African American, he'd be like, are you a black man?
I don't see color.
I can't see what color you are.
And of course it's ridiculous.
And then Trump's like, I didn't even know that she was black.
But that's even, and I saw this segment, it's a clip from Fox News and I can't remember who it is.
It's a Fox and Friends clip.
That's the line of defense that they're using for this event.
So what they do is, the way that colorblind ideology works is that you deny that racial or ethnic identity is real, that it's valid, that it's significant, and anytime anybody then appeals to it in some way, that is supposed to be racist.
So if you start talking about, you know, as an Asian American, here's my experience.
Oh, you're being divisive.
And that's exactly what he's saying here.
She was always Indian.
She always claimed to be Indian.
It's the line that conservatives now take to try to sort of claim a kind of moral high ground from John Roberts on down to, you know, we're the ones who are colorblind.
We're the ones who don't see what this is.
And so what they do, of course, is they accuse her of using her identity to try to gain advantage.
And that's exactly what he's saying here.
She was always Indian.
She always claimed to be Indian.
And by the way, her mother...
Her mom is from India.
Her dad is Jamaican.
They're both like immigrated to the U.S.
Yes, you can have Donald Trump more than one dimension of ethnic identity.
And so what it is, is colorblindness and the denial of identity is presented as the real way to be neutral.
And this is exactly what Vance did, right?
When Vance is asked about this down touring the border, he, Vance, who's been accused by former roommate of being a chameleon.
And I think the word chameleon was used.
Basically, it says, yeah, she just takes on whatever identity pleases whatever audience she's at.
So if she's trying to win over black people, suddenly she's black.
And if she's trying to win over, I guess, South Asian Americans or Indian Americans, she's Indian.
There's some real projection going on there.
Yeah, and that's the logic of this, is that she is doing something wrong by emphasizing her identity.
Now, the flip side of this, of course, is she's not the one talking about her identity.
She's not the one appealing to it.
I have not seen a Kamala Harris ad anywhere that's like, hi, I'm Kamala Harris, I'm black, and black people should vote for me because I'm black.
Because that would be stupid.
We've already seen this, we saw it with the DEI thing, that the logic is, If this is a person of color who could appeal to their identity, then that must be why they got this position, not because they earned it and so forth.
So here's what I like, just some thoughts about identity, identity politics, how it works is that first of all, identity is real.
This notion that it's false is or that it's a myth or that nobody, you know, I don't have an identity.
I'm just an American, which, by the way, is an identity.
How we are identified by others and how we identify ourselves Impacts how we're treated.
It impacts what we believe.
It impacts how we act.
And I tell students this all the time, because students are sometimes, you know, resistant to this idea.
I say, if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't have the kind of rarities those people show.
We would not be able to say, you know, if I know all this demographic stuff about you, there's an X percent chance that I know where you're leaning in the election, or I know what sports team you follow, or I know what you think about tax policy, or whatever.
Identity is real.
That's the first point.
So critics of so-called identity politics, I'm like, it's a real thing.
The second one, and this is my big sort of theory point, if I get wonky for a few minutes here, is that identity is fundamental to all politics.
Yes.
The idea that you could have a politics that's not about identity is a fiction.
Because identification is about categorizing.
And politics is about categorizing people.
Politics is about resource distribution.
Who gets taxed?
Who gets money?
Who has rights?
Who has access to voting?
What kinds of people have health?
All of those kinds of questions require that we categorize people and we define them in certain ways to see who qualifies, who doesn't.
If we're talking about anti-discrimination laws in the U.S., Who is part of a group with protected status and who is not?
When is discrimination legal and when is it not?
Those are all questions of identity.
So that's politics.
So anytime I hear anybody right, left, like radical Marxists over to the far right who were like, I hate identity politics.
I'm like, sorry, like politics is about identity.
It's just part of what it is.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
The third one is, yeah go ahead, if you want to jump in.
I think what's really interesting is, and I've noticed this particularly because I think this is something that's also sort of arrived in the German discourse, so you can correct me if this is different in the US, if it plays out differently, but the
You usually get the, oh, you're doing identity politics, that claim from the right, right, that identity politics is generally coded as this is something that the left does, the left, whoever that might be.
And this really shows that I think, or it betrays that they believe, that the right believes, That what they're doing, that's not identity politics.
That's normal.
That's the norm.
And therefore it's neutral, you know?
And so that really tells you something about what they think the sort of net standard is and who politics should be for.
And that then is not identity politics.
It's just regular politics.
And I think that's a really telling point about this whole thing.
It's exactly right.
The old school semiologist in me would say it's the marked term.
One is just politics.
It's just the way things are.
And that's exactly right.
That's one of those other points is that what this implies is that there is an identity group that passes itself off as not being identitarian.
Yes.
And it castigates our best.
In America right now, on the right, it's predominantly rich white men.
And we can add all the other qualifiers.
They're cisgender, they're hetero, et cetera, et cetera.
Christian, but that's the norm.
And so they will look at communities of color.
They will look at the queer community.
They will look at whatever group they want and say, oh, they're appealing to identity, they're being divisive.
The other point, though, about that so-called identity politics is every salient political identity, by which I mean we can all identify lots of different ways.
I'm going to see Metallica tonight.
I'm super excited.
I guess I could, you know, turn that into a really divisive political... Sure.
Nope.
As far as I know, I don't know if there's strong demographic stuff about Metallica fans and how they vote.
Maybe there is.
I don't know.
The point is, it's not a super politically salient identity.
We know that race is.
We know gender is.
We know that sexuality is.
In every case, those groups did not band together and say, you know what, we're going to form an identity.
Their identity was thrust upon them through histories of marginalization and exclusion.
You didn't have a history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation and anti-black racism in America.
There would not be a quote-unquote African-American community.
It wouldn't stand out as an axis around which identity forms.
If you didn't have a history of not allowing women to vote, or not allowing women to have property rights, or not giving women rights over their own bodies, and you didn't have the ongoing abortion things, we wouldn't be talking about a quote-unquote women's vote or something like that.
on and on and on with every list.
So in every case, the groups that are decried and seek to be further marginalized because they appeal to identity, have the identities they do because it was thrust upon them by a dominant group that denied that it itself was serving particular interests, particular aims, and so forth.
And that's what we have.
It's exactly the parallel that you're describing in Germany.
I think a lot of places have exported this from the identity politics discourse in the US.
So that's what you have.
And that's where, for me, remember I said I was going to land the plane on entitlement?
Here it comes.
It's coming in.
This is where entitlement comes because that group that has been able to pass itself off as, hey, you know, we're just Americans voting.
I don't know about this identity.
We don't have hyphenated names or identities here.
Because they've always experienced that privilege.
They have always gotten those political resources.
They have always gotten those social resources.
Their identity has always served them well.
They have always been entitled to that.
And so now, when there are identity groups standing forward saying, nope, hey, we've got a place here too, and we deserve rights, and we deserve protections, and we deserve a voice, and we deserve representation, the same as anybody else, They feel entitled.
That entitlement is threatened.
The naturalness of that entitlement, that this is just the natural order of things that, you know, rich white men get to tell everybody else what to do and what to think and people should be deferential to them.
So when a billionaire gets up in front of a group of the, you know, North American Association or National Association of North American DNA, National Association of Black Journalists, stands up and yep, he deserves deference for no reason other than that he is a rich white man And he's in a room full of people of color.
I think a lot of people see through that.
I think a lot of people see what that is.
I think it's not helping the GOP.
No, and his campaign saw it too, because they basically pulled him from stage after, I think, an hour?
That's right.
Yeah, they pulled him.
Yeah?
Because it was just, it was... Again, we both thought it was going to be bad.
Nobody thought, oh, Donald Trump is going into a room full of black people being interviewed by black journalists and this is going to go well.
But it was it was a car crash even on Donald Trump's racism and misogyny standards.
And I think in sort of in him not being able to to to control himself even just to appeal to black voters for a second, for a single second, because as you said, it started right from the beginning.
We're really seeing, I think also, one, how rattled he is by Harris's candidacy, because I imagine that this event was booked while it was still Biden who was running.
I cannot imagine the Trump campaign thinking this is a good idea when Kamala Harris is running for president.
And the second point is that we also see The effect of what I would say is of all of these politicians and talking heads, not just because how badly Donald Trump did in this catastrophic performance, but by how deranged the reaction to Harris's candidacy has been on the right, you know, throughout.
The stuff they're saying out loud is just truly, truly mind-boggling.
But I think it's also an effect of all of these politicians on the right just only going on, you know, on the Fox, on news mags, on YouTube shows run by radical right-wingers.
Remember Claremont Lincoln fellow Jack Murphy who said feminists need rape, who interviewed J.D.
Vance?
Anyway, we'll come back to Vance later.
I think one of the reasons why their reactions are so utterly deranged in their reaction to Harris' candidacy, and why they're seemingly so unable to fathom how this looks from outside of their own bubble, is that they have truly lost all sense of reality outside of their own right-wing bubble.
As a and this is my last point point on this, just because, you know, in the past, I've brought some media criticism and because I think it's important that, you know, I'm a member of the media.
But I think we also need to critically look at what, you know, members of our profession are doing and how they're reporting.
And I have two.
I brought you two examples on how this whole A Trump thing was reported on, and I have a headline from the Washington Post.
And this is a good example, and a particularly egregious example, of how not to report on this.
Harris faces a pivotal moment as Trump questions her identity.
That's quite the frame.
It's an issue for Harris.
This isn't about Harris.
It is.
It's a true sort of, you know, New York Times pitchbot moment.
And just to counter it, here's a good example from how you should do your job as a journalist.
In this instance, from Mother Jones, white man tells black journalists his black opponent is not black.
So that's just to close it out on my end.
Yeah.
No, I think that's perfect.
And so now highlighting all of that, I feel like the GOP lives in this weird dual reality where you have Speaker of the House saying, we need to not attack gender and race and Trump attacking gender and race.
And floating in the wings is this thing called Project 2025.
We've talked about more than a little.
Trump saying, you know, a few weeks ago or a couple of weeks ago, whatever it was, I don't know what it is.
It's extreme.
It's got nothing to do with us and so forth.
Meanwhile, J.D.
Vance is hip deep in it.
And then Trump goes here and basically says, you know, hi, here's a bunch of stuff that would fit really well with, you know, Project 2025.
I know you've been doing a lot of look, as you say, at Project 2025, things related to that.
Vance, the head of Project 2025, stepping down this week.
Walk us through some of that and let's shift to that, if it's a shift.
I don't even know if it counts as a shift, going from this to Project 2025.
Yeah, walk us through what was going on this week and your reflections on that.
So as you just said, Trump and his team have sort of been desperately trying to distance themselves from Project 2025, not because their policies don't align with it, not because they have a different policy agenda, but because the people at Heritage wrote it down, uploaded 900 pages of PDF onto the Internet, and people have read it, and it is immensely unpopular.
There's been a lot of... Politically radioactive.
It's become that kind of thing.
And I think that's one, yes, because there's been a lot of mainstream reporting on it.
But and this is just a theory because I haven't seen any data to support it.
So let me know what you think.
But I think a second reason and maybe even the more important reason why this has Basically gone so viral is because there's been a lot of people, just like ordinary citizens, doing stuff on TikTok, on Instagram, doing reels about Project 2025.
Yes, there's also been progressive institutions and think tanks doing the work on this, and the Harris campaign of course, but For the first time, that's what it felt like to me, really.
There was this like groundswell of stuff on social media about this by sort of regular accounts, which meant that it really broke through.
And, you know, there's been a lot of stuff of, you know, where people get their news from, what really catches their attention.
And I think Project 2025 really Broke through in a way that was incredibly bad for the Trump campaign So, you know, I think I think yeah, I think that just real quick.
I think that social media inside is really good I think again, we don't know how some of these things fit together yet these pieces the project 2025 stuff was happening before Kamala Harris sort of came on the scene, but we also know that all the social media stuff, the Gen Z involvement, the let's just call it a form of communication that resonates more with younger voters, younger Americans has really taken off.
And I think that that's a big piece of it is a mobilization among a couple of, you know, I know that I actually use social media, Social media doesn't just line up with generations, but it involves a much broader segment.
I think energizes a segment of the population, communicates this 900 page document in these bite-sized things.
It's like, it really says this.
Here's where it says this in a way that is generating buzz with a broader segment of the population and a segment of the population that Biden was just never going to communicate with in that way.
And that I don't think the Trump administration Hmm.
is very geared up to communicate with as well.
I think that that's another piece of it as well.
So I think you're onto something real there.
And so, you know, a couple of weeks ago, Trump denied knowing what Project 2025 is, while at the same time also claiming that some of the stuff and the thing he didn't know was really bad and had nothing to do with him, even though, you know, he'd praised Heritage's efforts to come up with it in the past.
And even there are hundreds of former Trump staffers, etc.
As people have reported, we've talked about, yeah.
Yeah, and anyway, that all didn't seem to work.
There was even more press coverage on the whole thing.
So what do you do in this instance if you're Heritage or the Trump campaign, you desperately need to shift the spotlight away from this thing, not because you don't like it anymore, but because it hurts you in the polls.
So you need a fall guy.
That's my theory.
A scapegoat so you can point at him and say, see, he's gone.
It's done.
Stop being hysterical.
And so it was announced on July 30th that Paul Danz, director of Project 2025, was stepping down.
And he's reportedly also leaving the Heritage Foundation.
Danz, by the way, was speaking just, I think it was two weeks ago at NatCon, where he gave this bizarre little intro, where he said that he'd originally been asked by Chris DeMuth to maybe talk about masculinity, and was really excited about that, and was going to talk about his sporting and was really excited about that, and was going to talk
But that, unfortunately, he now had to talk about Project 2025, and the little speech he gave there was essentially like, yeah, you know, there's a lot of hollabaloo, a lot of reporting, a lot of people being freaked out, and yes, we have a booth of Project 2025 by the people from Heritage we have a booth of Project 2025 by the people from Heritage in the hallway outside, and, you know, we just, yeah, it's real, and we're doing it, and we're going to
He was one of many people throughout the whole conference who referenced it.
You know, also former Trump advisers in the White House, who will likely be back again, referencing it.
It was being referenced while somebody was talking about the Comstock Act.
You know, it was very clear that, yes, this is bad PR for us, but, you know, we just got to get through it.
And so the Trump campaign, He's now, of course, very eager to frame Dan stepping down as a victory for themselves, sort of like, oh, this proves that we really don't have anything to do with it, and they're out of line.
So senior campaign advisers—I'm not sure how to pronounce his name.
I'm sorry if I'm going to butcher it.
Chris LeCivita and Susie Wiles put out the following statement.
I'm just going to read it for you.
Quote, President Trump's campaign has been very clear for over a year That Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way.
Reports of Project 2025's demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign.
It will not end well for you." End quote.
That will not end well for you.
That's the part I was like, oh my goodness.
Because Dan, nothing says my revenge plan is not real, but you'll rue the day you were born if you cross me because we are coming for you.
Anyway, so, Lecivita had previously stated and started to claim that people involved with the project would not be welcome in the next Trump administration, something that I, for one, find extremely hard to believe, because, again, at NatCon, clearly, amongst all of these people in the Trump orbit, former White House advisors, White House staffers, it was very clear, oh, yeah, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, this is just, you know,
They just noticed it because we uploaded the whole 900-page thing onto the Internet, so maybe we shouldn't have done that, but we're still going to go ahead with it.
And anyway, the president of Heritage, Kevin Roberts, you know, the revolution will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be, Guy.
On the other hand, put out this statement.
Again, quote.
Under Paul Dan's leadership, Project 2025 has completed exactly what it set out to do, bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, returning it to the people.
This tool was built for any future administration to use, When we began Project 2025 in April 2022, we set a timeline for the project to conclude its policy drafting after the two party conventions this year, and we are sticking to that timeline.
Paul, who built the project from scratch and bravely led this endeavor over the past two years, will be departing the team and moving up to the front, where the fight remains.
We're extremely grateful for his and everyone's work on Project 2025.
Project 2025 will continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels, federal, state and local.
I look forward to leading this team to continued success.
So not exactly a sign that Project 2025 is truly shutting down.
Rather, this is an advantageous moment for us to have one of our top guys step down because we're also kind of done with it and you now just need to follow it and we'll continue to build A staffing apparatus.
He's thrown around numbers like 20,000 to 50,000 possible employees that have been vetted rigorously for being on the Trump ideological agenda.
So, You know, this is what it looks like to me.
The press around Project 2025 has been terrible for the Trump campaign.
But now that Harris has replaced Biden, and she's really on message about this as well, combined with this sort of social media groundswell, that's even worse for them.
And since the document was already finished, Dan stepping down was seen as an easy solution to their PR problem.
Let me know what you think.
I think you're right.
I think all of that makes sense.
I'll go into probably where you're headed, right?
Why it doesn't work as a PR solution.
That statement would say that it should not be associated with the president in any way.
So you've got J.D.
Dance.
Like, that's the piece.
You've got this guy who I keep saying is hip deep in this, who, you know, you can walk us through it.
We've mentioned it.
He's writing the foreword to the book of the Heritage Foundation.
You know, the head of the Heritage Foundation writes a book and he's got the foreword and talking about how behind all this he is and so forth.
So, yeah, you've got the, as you say, the PR, the low-hanging PR aim here is to, the guy who's not really that necessary anymore, we can just have him step down, wash our hands of it and so forth.
Except, in my view, as long as Vance is on the ticket, if I'm the Democrats, I'm like, hey, Project 2025 right there.
There he is.
Or if Trump in a debate, this is why Trump doesn't want to debate.
Like, I don't know anything about Project 2025.
God, you and your running mate not talk?
Because he knows a lot about it.
Like, he like wrote a forward to a book from the guy that like is in charge of it.
And yeah, so you're right.
That's the aim.
But as long as Vance is there, there's no way it's going to work.
And Trump has no response to this, because when he was asked at the NABJ, his response was, well, the VP is not important.
After weeks of telling him how important the VP is, he's like, people don't vote for the VP.
Nobody cares.
Nobody cares about him.
Just just get on with it.
Yeah.
So, yeah, we we once again, unfortunately, have to talk about J.D.
Vance because he he's Dan, he's really been on a sort of book recommendation role because he not only endorsed basically, not basically, he endorsed Jack Posobiec's book, Unhumans, where said Right-wing extremist advocates that the right should use the tactics of Bucklin, Mao, Franco, Pinochet and McCarthy against the left.
I'm not kidding.
But Vance also has been really, you know, feeling his book recommendations, which is a bit of a problem for the Trump team, because again, it shows that they're lying about Project 2025.
So Kevin Roberts has written a book Now, originally, and this is already showing you that the troubles began early, it was supposed to be called Dawn's Early Light, you know, to be expected, with the subtitle Burning Down Washington to Save America, and it was supposed to have a match on the cover.
Now, just as a personal note, this would have been great for me, and I've been thinking about using it on my book tour, because my book on the history of the GOP and how it was taken over by extremists is called The Arsonists.
So thank you, Kevin Roberts, for making my point for me.
Anyway, now because of the bad press, they've changed the subtitle from Burning Down Washington to Save America, which is a bit on the nose, especially if you keep talking about revolutions maybe remaining bloodless, into Taking Back Washington to Save America and the match is gone.
And, you know, it sounds less violent on the face of it.
So the whole thing is basically Project 2025 in book form, albeit shorter.
And the New Republic, I think two, no, three days ago now, published the foreword.
So the book comes out later this year.
So nobody's seen it yet.
You can read the dust cover.
That's what really tells you what's in it already.
But Vance So writes the foreword for this thing, and in it, he really portrays how close Kevin Roberts and he really are.
And this sounds like they're not only buddies, but that they share the same vision for America, which, again, comes as no surprise given that Vance has previously, you know, shared a stage with Roberts and Dineen and is in this whole post, quote-unquote, post-liberal orbit.
And I got the forward up here and let me just read you some excerpts and you can tell me if this sounds like a guy who, like Trump, has nothing to do with Project 2025.
So he says about Roberts, as he draws parallels to the way that they were brought up, quote, he grew up in a poor family in a corner of the country, largely ignored by America's elites.
So he's, you know, doing his affiliation cosplay here again.
Like me, he's a Catholic, but unlike me, he was born into it.
His grandparents played an outsized role in life, just as mine did.
And now he works far from where he grew up, just a few steps from my office in Washington, D.C.
He's the president of one of Washington's most influential think tanks, and I'm a U.S.
senator.
So, you know, the American dream.
Quote, now he has written the book you hold in your hands, which explores many of the themes I focused on in my own work.
Yet he does so profoundly with a readable style that makes accessible its real intellectual rigor.
Never before has a figure with Roberts's depth and stature within the American right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism.
The Hedges Foundation isn't some random outpost on Capitol Hill.
It is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Reagan to Trump.
Yet it is heritage's power and influence that makes it easy to avoid risks.
Roberts could collect a nice salary, write decent books and tell donors what they want to hear.
But Roberts believes doing the same old thing could lead to the ruin of our nation.
If you've read a lot of conservative books or think you have a good sense of the conservative movement, I suspect the pages that follow will be surprising, even jarring, which is, you know, saying something.
So he goes on to say, Robert sees conservatism that's focused, quote unquote, on the family.
And now this is where it gets interesting again.
Quote, in this, he borrows from the old American right that recognized correctly, in my view, that cultural Norman attitudes matter.
We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids.
We should teach them that marriage isn't just a contract, but a sacred and to the extent possible, lifelong Union.
In these pages, Kevin is trying to figure out how we preserve as much of what worked in his own life while correcting what didn't.
To do that, we need more than a politics that simply removes the bad policies of the past.
We need to rebuild.
We need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don't like.
And then, you know, he goes into this elaborate garden metaphor that I'm going to spare you.
We're basically says to bring the garden back to health.
It is not enough to undo the mistakes of the past.
The garden needs to not just stop adding a terrible solution.
It needs to be recultivated.
The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems.
We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach.
And this is where he closes out, and I think what really sums this up, and what probably means that somebody in the Trump PR department had a really, really bad morning when this broke, is Banz writes, quote, as Kevin Roberts writes, it's fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine.
Weird image, by the way, but anyway.
But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, this is, I think, maybe borrowed from Chris DeMuth, or Chris DeMuth borrowed from J.D. Vance, not sure, but there was a lot of talk of wolves in the last couple of weeks.
Anyway, when you hear the wolves, you've got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.
And here he ends quoting Roberts, and this is in his own words, in Vance's, "We are now all realizing that it's time "to circle the wagons and load the muskets." In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.
So I read this as a sort of intellectually worded call to revolution.
Yep.
That's what this is.
Just in book form with a different cover.
So all of this is to say that I think you're completely spot on when you say as long as JD Vance is on the ticket, All of this crap, sorry, that, you know, is coming from the Trump campaign, all of this sort of grandstanding about, oh, now we've shown you because this guy is, you know, basically retiring, stepping down.
We're done with it.
It has nothing to do with us.
It's bullshit.
It's bullshit.
They're buddies.
Kevin Roberts and J.D.
Vance are buddies.
And even if Vance wasn't on the ticket anymore, again, all of the former Trump staffers, all of the high-ranking advisers, they're all in there.
Stephen Miller.
Stephen Miller, who was, you know, salivating at the possibility of his mass deportation fantasies.
being implemented come November should Trump win.
He's made ads for Project 2020.
He's on video advertising for this thing.
That was my bit on J.D. Vance because apparently we just can't stop talking about him because he keeps doing and saying incredibly unhinged stuff.
Yeah.
So a couple of thoughts about this.
And then I'd love to hear your reflections on how this is playing out other places.
Number one is the shock of this is a selling point.
Like, so it's not as if it's like, no, no, no.
They said this inarticulately or what?
Nope.
It's positioned as we've talked about the faux intellectualism of this.
But when he says even jarring, shocking, that's the value of it.
This is not a secondary piece.
The other piece is, you know, metaphors matter.
The violence metaphors, the revolution metaphors.
And I can't get over what I view as the whitewashing of the circle the wagons metaphor.
Like, everybody knows in every racist depiction of, you know, Americans moving out west into the quote-unquote promised land or whatever, it's not the wolves attacking the wagons, it's the Native Americans.
And like, So this metaphor, that just, that even sticks with me.
It's maybe not the central thing, but this language is circling the wagons because of the wolves.
I'm like, no, it's the people of color that you're taking stuff from that were the perceived threat.
So yeah, the metaphors matter.
The violence matters.
The rhetoric matters.
And I've said this a lot of times when people are like, well, it's just a metaphor.
You're taking it.
Well, okay.
So why that metaphor?
If it's just a metaphor, you could have picked some other one if they're all the same.
Why the ones about loading muskets and circling wagons and let alone taking the statements that have been made outside the book about the revolution will be bloodless if the left allows it to be and so forth.
So, crazy stuff.
We'll never get away from Vance, it feels like.
All of these kinds of things.
We don't have much time, but just briefly... Yeah, when non-North Americans see this and watch this and have seen what's unfolded the last couple weeks... What?
I don't know.
What does it seem like?
What does it feel like as somebody who has, I think, one foot firmly in... I guess you'd have to have lots of feet.
You're firmly in lots of different contexts.
Yeah, give us a little bit, for just a couple minutes here, on how you think it plays out outside of our own context.
I think that basically ever since Biden announced that he was stepping down from the nomination, there has, just like in the US, there's been a real sense of relief, but also I would say disbelief, but in a positive way, if that makes sense.
Because I think amongst, and I can only talk from the way that I perceive this, amongst most mainstream European press outlets, I would say Maybe even more than within the media landscape of the US, many in Europe felt, who are political commentators, political journalists, felt a real sense of resignation before, that felt that this race was already basically decided.
And I think this pessimism had started months earlier, maybe even a bit too early, but you know, there was a real sense of doom and gloom, which maybe, which I think was justified, because, you know, we saw that Biden's path to victory was getting narrower and narrower.
But in a way, that led to at least what I would say, when it comes to German foreign politics, a slight but noticeable shift in behavior from sort of foreign policy officials, a slight but noticeable shift in behavior from sort of foreign policy officials, because up until maybe like a year, year and a
The modus operandi was very much, it's never going to be Trump again, sort of stop panicking.
When Olaf Scholz, German Chancellor, was asked, I think even a couple of months ago, what if it's going to be Trump?
He said something along the lines of, well, it's not going to be.
So basically, why do we need to have a plan?
Because it's not going to happen, which is a wild take about foreign policy, if you ask me.
But So I think there was a real, it forced some, at least, German foreign policy officials to sort of grapple with the possibility of a Trump presidency, what that would mean and the catastrophic effects that would have, not just on the US, but on Europe as well.
You know, we've talked about NATO in this podcast multiple times, that's just one, talked about the tariffs, all of the economic policy, all of that.
Ukraine, But I would say that's why the feeling of relief has been so overwhelming.
And the fact that we're cheering a possible tie in the polls, I think, really shows you how bad it felt before.
But I think I was worried before that there was going to be a lot of press coverage from German media outlets, from European media outlets, sort of being like, ooh, but can a black woman win?
And sort of talking it down from the get-go.
And while there have been some truly revolting pieces put out by mainly sort of conservative press outlets that sort of take their cues from the Fox and Friends of the world.
There's really been again I'm not used to feeling slightly optimistic.
So this is strange to me.
There was a headline somewhere in the States this week that said Democrats are feeling something that they're not used to.
Optimism or something like that.
Yeah.
And so for someone, you know, I obviously don't have as much riding on this election as, you know, people who live in the U.S.
and who would feel the horrific consequences of a Trump presidency sort of ride on.
This is a pretty scary election for Europeans as well.
So again, this weird thing, dare we call it, Again, optimism.
It's strange.
Again, I feel like in my line of work, that's usually not a feeling in the last couple of years that you're used to.
So I'm working through the feeling, but it's nice-ish.
So this is new.
And again, of course, it's a long time.
2nd of August is the date today, which is, again, wild, because I feel like the last two weeks of news alone We've had at least like two years worth of news within two weeks.
So, in a way, I feel like every journalist, every political journalist, every commentator, like you and Brad, every scholar who, you know, works in American politics or looks at the right wing, would probably tell you that the last two weeks have aged them, but also made them feel a tiny bit better.
And I think that's a nice... Again, I'm not used to talking like this, but it's, you know...
Yeah, I work with, you know, people working through religious trauma stuff.
And one of the things I often say to clients is there's sort of two stages.
One is like figuring out what you feel.
And then trying to figure out how you feel about what you feel.
And I feel like that that's where we are.
It's like, wait, what is this?
This weird feeling?
This is... Is this good?
Is it good?
Is this bad?
Do I need to go see a doctor?
What do I do?
Do we need to keep a check?
What is what is this?
But it's it's different.
And I I like it.
So far.
I don't want to be, you know, because I'm, again, I think just by trade of my job, I am a pessimist at heart, but even I can't deny that, you know, just watching videos of Kamala Harris rallies, and I don't know whether this is just, you know, my own perception or whether, I don't know, I figured out my sound system better.
I don't know.
But the sense of relief and of excitement, again, be that excitement about Harris as a candidate or excitement because it's not Biden and because what felt like this campaign careening of a cliff has been diverted for the moment, the relief feels palpable in the crowds as well.
Yeah.
Well, thank you for that.
Yeah, I think all of those, it feels very, very sort of similar.
On that theme of optimism, we try to end with our reason for hope.
Do you have a reason for hope this week or is that it?
I think last week I was like, this whole thing is kind of my reason for hope.
But anything stand out to you as particularly hopeful?
Well, I think this is sort of the overriding Feeling is that there's something moving.
I think specifically with you've mentioned the sort of Gen Z and I think maybe even Gen Alpha sort of activation on social media.
You know, I think a lot of reporting on social media can often be insufferable being like, oh, this is this new world of the Internet.
The kids are doing things, but the kids aren't doing things.
The kids are doing things.
And this time, I think it is actually justified.
So, you know, we don't know how long it's going to hold.
We don't know if it's going to go the way of Doug Brandon.
But, you know, for now, there is a real sort of upswing.
And this especially gives me hope because we've read so many polls about young voters being sort of disaffected, being resigned to politics, feeling it's much more of the same.
And, And so that gives me hope.
And I have a second, slightly frivolous reason for hope, which it's not really meant seriously, but I do kind of mean it seriously, to be honest.
Do you know a comedian named Alison Reese?
I do.
Yes.
And so my reason for hope is that this is now her world.
So she does an amazing Kamala Harris impression.
This is now Ellen Reese's world.
We all live in it.
She's been doing amazing spoofs, but she's also basically campaigning for Kamala Harris.
And I think this is really, really all pointing towards SNL having to hire her.
And just for my own personal feeling when I scroll through my TikTok feed and I scroll through my Instagram feed and I see more Alison Reeve stuff coming up and it makes me feel giddy.
It makes me feel excited.
And so that's my not so important reason for hope.
But that feels really important to me personally.
Good, I think personal reasons are good.
I'm going to pick one.
It feels sort of tawdry to talk about money, but we're inside the 100-day window to the election, which is like in dog years.
It's a long time in election time, but it's also only 100 days.
But I came across this, that Harris' campaign brought in $310 million in July.
That is wild.
The Trump campaign, which is a huge number, the Trump campaign over the same period, $137 million, less than half as much.
That's after the assassination attempt?
Yeah.
That's after the GOP convention.
These are things that are going to give Trump a big, I guess a Trump bump.
So, again, unfortunately, in American politics, money matters.
Money is an indicator of a lot of things.
It's an indicator of enthusiasm.
It's an indicator of literal buy-in.
It's an indicator of being able to get your message out.
And so I continue to be hopeful about the energy we're seeing in this.
And just strategically, it's also super important because I don't know about you, but I had been really worried when we saw reports, you know, before Biden stepped down, that Democrats had spent really heavily in swing states on TV ads and they hadn't moved the polls and the Trump campaign had barely started spending.
So there was a real fear that the Biden campaign, when it was still the Biden campaign, was going to be outspent in swing states where Trump was already leading.
So this, again, like it feels sort of grim to talk about money, but money, unfortunately, is pivotal in politics.
So this, again, has, I think, is a really good reason for hope because it means that this thing that we worried about, that money becoming an issue, for the moment, that seems to be alleviated.
Yeah, yeah.
So, very hopeful.
Thank you, Annika, for joining us.
I want to thank everybody for listening, everybody who supports us in so many different ways.
The folks who, just as I always say, just suffer through the ads.
That's a form of support.
The people who reach out to us.
Feedback, comments, ideas, pushback, whatever it is, that is a form of support as well.
And certainly our subscribers.
If you are not a subscriber and you would consider doing that, as we say, you buy your cup of coffee, it pays for a subscription, we'd invite you to do so.
And all of you who are subscribers, thank you.
But in the meantime, Annika, thank you so much for taking time away from Tahoe for a few minutes in your cold room to meet with us today.
Oh, this is like therapy for me.
This is this was this was really, really nice.
You know, I got to walk through my feelings.
I got to process the news with you.
So this was really was my pleasure.
Yeah, we got we all learn how to process optimism.
Hopefully that stays with us.
So thank you so much.
Thank you for listening.
I will be back next week with It's In The Code, another weekly roundup.
