Mark Halperin predicts Trump’s 2024 victory hinges on Democratic vulnerabilities—abortion’s underreported swing potential, Kamala Harris’s weak messaging, and Biden’s cognitive decline, which he says the media ignored until forced. He contrasts Harris’s $1B campaign with Trump’s grassroots ceiling, citing battleground states like Arizona (Trump’s stronghold) and Nevada (Harris’s best shot). Halperin warns of a Democratic mental health crisis if Trump wins or Senate gridlock if Harris does, while exposing media bias, corporate influence, and systemic failures fueling Trump’s appeal among Black and Hispanic voters. The election’s outcome may hinge on governance transitions—and the nation’s stability. [Automatically generated summary]
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Well, I mean, by definition, it's not showing up in the two places you look for.
One is in the horse race.
She's not way ahead in the horse race.
And number two, when we ask people, what's the most important issue to you?
Abortion is well behind.
The economy, inflation, immigration.
But we've seen its electoral power and we know that Donald Trump...
Thinks it's a big issue because he's struggled to neutralize it.
He's not doing that for fun.
He's doing that because he sees the same data that there's a power to this issue that may be beyond the current measurements.
That's number one.
Number two is simply is the gender gap.
Just the reality that women vote more than men.
And again, it connects to abortion, but it's not just about abortion because a lot of women don't like Donald Trump.
That may just power.
Three is her ground game.
The mechanical process.
Her campaign is run.
The chair of her campaign is someone who grew up as a field person.
I don't think that's ever happened in a major presidential campaign before.
And they have way more money.
And President Trump has gone out of his way to demonize early voting.
He's trying to change it now.
But the mechanics of that, if it is in fact close, people say it could be worth three points.
Three points could well be significantly bigger.
And then lastly is the notion that he has a ceiling.
That if the third party vote is very low, and it's much more likely to be low like it was in 20 than high, like it was in 16 from the Libertarians and the Greens and Cornel West, then it may be that he can't get above 47%.
That they simply, we call it Trump fatigue, or January 6th, whatever you want to call it, puts off limits to him some number of voters.
That she may, effectively a two-person race in the seven states, may be able to get to 48, 49, and he can't.
Those four things are what give Democrats hope that they can win.
But in my reporting over the last week, Republicans are not measuring the drapes and picking the cabinet, but pretty close to it.
Not at the level they were at the convention when Joe Biden was still their opponent, but there's extreme confidence that they're going to take the House, take the Senate, take the White House.
Democrats are somewhere between worried and freaking out, and her conduct and her capabilities as a candidate are not reassuring them.
If they were honest about it, they would say, as some of them have started to say, how could we have dumped Joe Biden for someone who has a few advantages over him but has many of the same problems?
And, by the way, some additional problems of their own.
And I think they're recognizing that when you choose a candidate like that, you're taking a bit of a risk.
Well, they're looking at the reality that the race may be back.
Some Trump people told me immediately after she became the nominee, we may be looking at a situation where she's back to where the party's back to where they were when Biden was the nominee before the debate.
Before the debate, he had won Electoral College Path, which was to win the three Great Lakes states and the Nebraska Congressional District.
And that's it.
No one's ever won when they had one Electoral College Path.
It's, you know, margin of error, but not impossible.
But they would have to be all in on that because Biden was not going to win the four Sunbelt battlegrounds.
She's edged back closer to that.
Okay.
She may be able to win them or one or two of them, but it's possible that those are going to be as off limits to her eventually as they were to Biden.
And she's weaker in the Great Lakes states than he is.
So if you look at the private data and where things stand, these races are close.
And if it's within two points, if Trump consistently has a two-point lead or a three-point lead or a four-point lead, does that mean he has to win the state?
It doesn't.
But it's the consistency that has come in the last couple weeks in both parties' data, where she has come down and he has come up a little bit.
That make them worry that she simply hasn't done enough to win.
Her problem is, I say, the P problem of policy.
The undecided voters just don't understand what she's about.
And she has not done, some of them find it insulting how little she's explained what she's about.
And we really don't know.
I've known her a long time.
I've covered her a long time.
I've studied her positions and her public policy engagement.
I don't really know what she stands for.
I don't really know what she'd do as president.
I don't really know what she believes in or why she's running.
And you contrast this with Trump, where even his enemies can tell you right away what he stands for, what he would do in a second term, at least the big picture.
And his problem is personality.
And he's done almost as little to address that issue as she's done to address hers.
And that means...
I'm amazed.
People have said for so long...
No one, so many people in the electorate don't want Trump or Biden.
They want a third choice.
You don't really hear that now, nearly as much, but it's almost as true.
Not as true, because she satisfies a lot of Democrats who are not satisfied with Biden.
But a lot of Democrats and certainly a lot of independents and centrists and moderates, they don't like either of these choices.
And that's part of what Democrats are looking at, because I think in the end, as much as she's not satisfied people's desire for knowledge about her.
They won't vote for Trump.
They just simply don't want four more years of Trump.
And she's turned to that message in the last 24 hours the way Biden did.
Now, I don't know if she'll stick with it, but she's now emphasizing this notion of we can't go back to somebody this unstable and this unattractive in terms of personality.
You just sit in a room with your pollsters and your policy guys and, like, pick three topics and stake out positions that contrast with your opponents.
A lot of the questions about things she's doing and not doing are mysteries, even to a lot of Democrats, even some people close to her.
You've named one, but why is she doing one event a day?
Most days.
Why isn't she flying to three battleground states in a day?
When people ask me why I think she's more likely to lose than not, her great weakness is she is indecisive.
She doesn't like to make hard decisions.
And coming up with policy choices is difficult.
If you think of everyone who's been elected president since H.W. Bush, so Clinton onward, they've all put at the center of their campaigns a set of policy proposals and kind of an ethos of things that start with this sentence.
What my party's gotten wrong is X, right?
They've seized on some things that they really believe their party's out of step with the country and wrong on the substance.
So Bill Clinton, 92, supported the death penalty, right to work, NAFTA.
and welfare reform.
And he would say, my party's wrong on these things, right?
It's obvious for the rest of what they did.
Not only has she not said that, I'm not sure she believes that.
I'm not sure that she thinks the party's out of step with the country on anything.
And when you see government-funded operations for illegal immigrants who want to change their sexual identity, no way would Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, no way would they have said, no way would Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, Because there's not strong public support for that.
No, just the opposite.
So we say, why can't she come up with a platform?
Any position she takes is going to be...
She's criticized if she moves to the center by the left.
And even on the left, even if she takes something further to the left, as she has some of the things she's come up with, new government spending programs and tax programs, they're still subject to be criticized.
And that, you know, she's stolen a lot of Trump's ideas, which, you know, Trump people don't like, but I guess it's smart if the other side's got a smart idea, and you can claim it, do.
But in terms of original ideas, it's just not been her thing.
And again, I think part of it is she doesn't like to go onto terrain where people might shoot at her from the left or the right, or both.
Well, it's gotten a little bit frayed of late because there are people who say he doesn't want her to win.
I think he does want her to win.
There are people who say he only wants her to win without disrespecting him, even though he has said privately to her and the teams have said to each other, she needs to do what she needs to do to win.
You know, I saw his mental decline in 2017. I did, too.
You know, I saw him do a public event for a book in 2017, and I said, after the event, thank goodness he's off the public stage.
So I think the things he's done of late that the press cast is hurting her, I just think he's doing because he's not super sharp.
And the staff is, as they have when he was still the nominee, being deferential to him.
There is a, again, just recently, in the last 10 days or so, there have been a number of things, like he went out in the briefing room right when she was starting her event.
No one's really explained how that happened.
It's hard to coordinate.
Between the West Wing, Wilmington, and the Vice President's Office.
Those are three entities, busy people doing other things besides coordinating.
So I think they've dropped some stitches.
I think they're determined to stop dropping stitches the rest of the way.
So I'd say impressionistically, because I haven't talked to them all, but impressionistically, about 80% of them are just, we got to look forward.
The election's coming up.
Trump must lose.
We have to do everything we can to help.
20% say, how could we possibly have replaced?
We all said the only Democrat who could lose to Donald Trump was Joe Biden.
How could we have possibly played a role in replacing him with apparently the only other person who could lose to Donald Trump?
Now, Joe Biden and I and Kamala Harris would say these other Democrats would be struggling as much or maybe more than she would, even though they wouldn't have been as burdened with the Biden-Harris record.
So what they're saying is, this is the best we could do.
This is better than Biden.
The pollsters and the public polls are saying she can still win it.
Let's put our heads down and win.
But there will be a lot of soul-searching about how they possibly could have placed her in this role without the benefits of actually beating Donald Trump.
I reported it against my instincts because I did not believe Joe Biden would give the nomination up.
First of all, it's embarrassing and, you know, it's staying on his legacy as much as they built it up as great for his legacy.
But also he believed that she would become the nominee in all likelihood and that she could not be Donald Trump and that if somehow she didn't become the nominee.
He didn't think Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or any of these other people could beat Trump.
Particularly Republicans said, the party can't be that irrational.
They can't say, we're going to continue along with a guy who 70% of the Democrats say shouldn't be the nominee.
But, he didn't have to give it up.
I can't obviously say exactly how I broke it, but it started with a tip about the vetting of vice presidential prospects by her.
And one of the stories that hasn't been written yet, I'll tease it out here and hopefully someday somebody will give me a big enough book contract I can write it, is she started maneuvering for the nomination well before the Sunday morning when he called her and said he was not going to run.
And part of that was vetting of potential running mates, which her team knew that couldn't wait.
That had to get underway.
That's something, you know, normally takes months.
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I mean, that's more than vying for the job.
I mean, that is measuring curtains.
Oh, yeah.
You're vetting your VP candidate when you're the VP? Yeah.
But because she knew, as my sources said, that he was strongly considering getting out and more than strongly considering.
There was a period of at least a week and maybe more where amongst a very small circle of people, the default was he's getting out.
And it's just a matter of when and how.
You'll recall he got COVID and that kind of delayed things a little bit.
Was that actually COVID? I don't know of any reason to believe it wasn't.
I know there's lots of speculation about it, but I think it was.
So on one track, you have him sort of starting to realize he needs to.
And then you have the Pelosi track.
And the Pelosi track is part of why I was able to report what I was able to report.
Because she was determined to get him out.
And she saw that Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and the donors were not doing enough to get him out.
And so she felt she had no choice but to get him out.
But again, not reported yet.
She didn't want to be Kamala Harris.
She wanted Shapiro to run, the governor of Pennsylvania.
So she intended there to be a two-step process.
And I'm not sure, because I don't know this from her and I would take it only from her, I'm not sure if she knew the outcome, whether she still would have been for it.
Well, lots of people talked about it publicly, right?
There were people like James Carville and trying to think of the other prominent people who talked about it.
There's others who wanted basically either in the run-up to the convention or at the convention, like one proposal was that Obama and Bill Clinton would pick six people and that those six people could run for the nomination by giving speeches and having the delegates vote.
And they didn't rule out Kamala Harris, but the clear kind of Gestalt of it was, this is the way to stop Kamala Harris.
The delegates were Biden-Harris delegates.
She's the incumbent vice president.
She's a black woman of color.
And the campaign money could only transfer to her.
So those are pretty big advantages, particularly this question of the delegates, right?
They're Biden-Harris delegates.
Were they going to vote for somebody else in a competitive contest?
So the assumption was, even if you couldn't get her to stand down, and they knew they probably couldn't get her to stand down, who's going to run against that?
Who's going to run against somebody with all of those advantages?
And so, I think what some people don't take sufficiently into account is the clock was ticking.
If they'd had a year to figure this out, maybe things would have gone differently.
But they didn't have much time.
And the minute she made it clear to people she was going forward, and he asked these other people, will you run against her?
None of them wanted to.
None of them wanted to.
So it wasn't a matter of I thought Gretchen Whitmer wanted to.
Well, first of all, my sense of the people who get talked about the half dozen, none of them are in a John Edwards, Barack Obama, George W. Bush school of, I must be president.
And of course, Bush was relatively ambivalent.
But he's like, yes, that's something I want.
I think if you look at the six of them, not only are they ambivalent about running, let alone running against an incumbent vice president.
I'm not sure if you offered them the presidency, any of them would take it like that.
And some people think I'm naive about that.
There are politicians who are ambitious who think about the White House.
But just from knowing them and the people around them, I don't think you could say about any of them, automatic, here are the keys to 1600. I don't know that they would take it.
And I say that without hoping I don't sound naive.
They're politicians who have aspirations.
But they're all...
They're all relatively young.
Some of them have younger kids.
They recognize the downsides of how it changes your life forever.
And none of them are, again, in the classic Bill Clinton, like, I'm at Georgetown plotting how to get to the White House.
He speaks to a dead congresswoman and his press secretary says he spoke to her because she was top of mind because he was going to be meeting with her family.
That's not forgetting somebody's name.
That is a loss of acuity.
Which would disqualify him from being a museum docent.
So that cover-up goes because some affection for Biden, the bullying of his staff, but primarily because of the desire to make sure Donald Trump doesn't win.
And then when there becomes no choice but to say we've got to get rid of him now because he's a threat to the republic because Trump could beat him.
They turn against him.
They never acknowledge their participation as co-conspirators in a seven-year-long cover-up.
And then the same people get to cover the new candidate and Trump.
It's staggering to me.
Like, after weapons of mass destruction, there was some soul-searching.
After the Mueller investigation, there was some, not more than 5%, but some acknowledgement that That perhaps the coverage was a little bit off.
There's been zero, as I see it, zero soul-searching acknowledgement.
We wrote story after story about how Trump misspeaks to and, well, Biden, you know, there are days when he's good.
And there are days, still to this day, there are days when he's fine.
I do know that when I would talk to White House reporters privately for major news organizations, they would acknowledge Biden's acuity decline was substantial.
They saw it.
They just were in newsrooms where it was impermissible to say it.
By the way, for people who don't follow this stuff, you know, people who are watching this, I mean, I should just say the obvious, which is you are not just part of the news business, but really at the center of the political news business for, you know, many decades.
But I'll give you an example of the lack of accountability.
Not only have they not acknowledged their own role, What about the role of the people around the president, who to this day say he didn't decide not to run because he had to acknowledge that his loss of mental acuity made it unlikely he could beat Trump.
They continue to say he didn't think he could win or he was going to divide the Democratic Party.
The story of how they protected him.
There's been some piercing of that with foreign leaders saying, you know, anonymously that Biden had this problem or that problem.
You had the Wall Street Journal piece, which was actually weak tea about mostly Republicans.
And that Wall Street Journal piece, you know, the editors of the Wall Street Journal I'll just say I think are very dishonest, but I know that they are, some of them.
But that piece was really the only piece in a big publication to make the point that, hey, people are talking about his senility.
But that piece was so watered down that it, like, what was the point of even running that?
I'm surprised they spent so much time on it, and that's what they came up with.
But again, it helped Biden, because it was a weak piece.
It certainly did help Biden.
Now, it hurt the Democratic Party because if Trump wins, history is going to show, of course, if they'd replaced him sooner with anybody, including Harris, they'd have had a better chance rather than rushing her into this.
But how there could not be, I mean, she's not been asked about it.
She was in the town hall the other day.
But she's not explained her connection to this cover-up.
I remember when I was a kid and going into this business and hearing people speak derisively of the White House press corps during the 1930s, which covered up the fact, supposedly, that FDR was in a wheelchair and thinking, you know, how could that, you know...
I think the degree to which Trump was helped from 15 onward with the press hostility is obvious.
But this one really frightens me.
It really frightens me that it's beyond just like, you know, North Korea or communist China.
It's beyond that.
It's the fact that it's occurring.
In a society with alternative media and social media and White House briefings, and reporters presumably wanted to make their bones by getting big stories, no one reported it.
When it was clear they needed to turn, they just turned against him.
No accountability for themselves or for the people in the government who engaged in the cover-up with them.
I just find it frightening.
It's fun to say it's a big media scandal.
And provocative to say it, but I find it frightening that that could happen in this country now.
I find it frightening with all the media that we have, different from back when other presidents, Kennedy, Roosevelt, etc.
Wilson, this is now.
This is the age of transparency.
And had he not had a bad debate, he'd still be running for president.
I mean, also, there seems like there's a lot of pressure not to report what the data show, which is, you know, if a Democratic candidate or president is behind, no one wants to report that.
To me, it's more to appreciate that the things that people liked about him who liked him in 2015 and 2016 are legitimate things.
That they don't believe Washington stands up for them.
That they don't believe there's too much government regulation.
They believe that there's no plan to deal with China.
There were serious things he talked about that the border needs to be secure.
There are serious things he talked about that are, he talks about them often, almost always in a cartoonish way.
But those are aspirational things and worries of the American people that other politicians in both parties weren't addressing.
You can analyze the poll numbers, but you can also say, as I said in 2011, which is really how I met Trump, he's talking about stuff that people respond to viscerally that aren't being addressed, and they're not incidental things.
They're core things for tens of millions of Americans.
So it wasn't to me when people say, oh, how did you know?
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Well, I agree with you completely, and I also wrote a story in Politico making some of these points, but I wasn't attacked for it because I was already on the outside.
You were the inside.
And I just thought the response was so interesting in 2016 because really the demand was not that you be a democratic partisan.
The demand was that you just deny observable reality.
So I have great empathy for the people who support Trump and who are angry that the establishment media and universities and All these liberal cultural institutions are hostile to them.
I appreciate.
And to see their candidate get four indictments that are wholly political, even though some of the underlying actions were wrong, but wholly political indictments.
But I also have sympathy for the people of Trump derangement syndrome.
I get why they think this is the worst thing that could happen to America.
And I hear it from Democrats all the time who say, Donald Trump being president is not the worst thing that's ever happened in my life politically.
It's the worst thing that's ever happened in my life.
I don't want to put myself on a pedestal, but I don't believe there are too many people, forget just journalists, I don't think there are a lot of people who have empathy and understanding for both those groups.
And I think that's the core challenge for the country right now, is for all of us to try to understand both groups.
One is, I covered Bill Clinton, was the first presidential candidate I covered, and I went to 46 states with him and listened to people unhappy with the status quo.
Not just the short-term economic pain, but the long-term dislocation we've seen with surveys.
Are your kids going to have the same economic future you didn't know?
Do you understand your place in the world in terms of the economy?
Are you confident that you'll have a career that you like?
Are social changes...
Is a society changing in ways that are offensive to you or unsettling to you?
So I saw the importance of getting out of Washington and New York and watching presidential candidates talk to voters and talking to the voters.
And I saw some people like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan, I put those three ahead of the others, saw the mood of the country and saw that their party was not necessarily addressing everything that needed to be addressed.
And they did.
So that's number one, is I just understood the concept of someone speaking against the status quo in the establishment.
Number two, I've always seen liberal media bias, even early in my career.
Peter Jennings was my mentor.
He saw it too.
He was ahead of his time in understanding half our potential consumers were conservative.
And so you have to constantly be questioning whether your news product and your analysis is appealing to, The entire country and not just the people on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
And then lastly, I've always been concerned that the...
How do I explain this?
It's like you have to be honest as a journalist.
You can't...
Just go, not just not go with the Upper West Side, Washington, D.C. mentality, but you have to be constantly questioning the assumptions.
That's core to the job.
And so I did that, whether it's politics or not, just are we thinking about this throughout the way?
I covered the gaming industry for a little bit and am fascinated by it.
And I think the way we cover the gaming industry in this country is insane.
And the fact that it's like a regressive, you know, that it hurts poor people.
The fact that these businesses are extremely powerful and they're lobbyists and they rarely have rules that are deleterious to their interests.
And the fact that they create economic opportunities some places that has been successful.
But just it's one of the biggest businesses in the world.
And you pick up the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Associated Press, the networks, they're barely covering it.
And when they do, they're not covering to me the essence of what it's really like.
So when I covered it, I got backlash from the people in the business, both in the journalism business covering and from the gaming industry, because I was coming in and questioning assumptions.
I learned the other day that it's really common for young men in their 20s, recent college graduates, who by definition have no money, most of them, to spend a lot on sports gambling.
But I'm saying I saw it in 2011 as I started my relationship with Trump.
I saw him speak at CPAC where, you know, Mitch Daniels and a bunch of potential presidential candidates spoke.
And I went on TV the next morning and said...
Trump was the best speaker, not just because of the performance, but he got the best reaction.
And you may not take him seriously as a presidential candidate, but you need to take what he's running on and talking about seriously.
And I say always that Donald Trump is in some ways a complicated man, but in some ways he's simple.
If you say nice things about him on television, he likes you.
So he called me up and invited me over to Trump Tower.
And I mean, he wasn't like my best friend, but I talked to him about politics then pretty consistently from 2011 to 2015. And part of why I had some access to him was because when people on the networks were interviewing him and talking about him because he's a great box office, but mocking the notion that he could win, I took him seriously.
So, I keep getting sidetracked, my apologies, but how exactly did it happen that Biden went from telling the world, telling people around him that he was going to stay in, with the full support, I think, of his wife and son, to announcing that he was not running again?
That's what she said, I believe, in an interview I just read.
She knew where the pressure points were.
She's extremely skillful, right?
She knew what it would take.
To get him to cry uncle.
And I'm not sure exactly what that included, except more and more governors and members of Congress saying he had to step down.
Donors saying they would not write a single additional check.
Right?
So, if you're the incumbent president and your fundraising dries up pretty completely, because he wasn't raising small dollars, right?
He was reliant on big checks.
Could you stay in the race if leading members of your party called for you to resign?
Could you stay in the race if you had no money to run a campaign and really had to lay off tons of your staff, not be able to afford advertisement, not be able to fly around and do big rallies?
Could you stay in?
You could.
But if Nancy Pelosi is saying to you, you will have no money, you will have almost no one supporting your continuing on, donors, celebrities, members of Congress, governors.
You will lose and you will be blamed in history for having stayed in and lost to Donald Trump.
Or, we can celebrate you at the convention, we can say you're like George Washington, and you can salvage your reputation.
I think presented with those choices, he didn't have a choice.
I remember Hunter Biden, who was my neighbor for many years, telling me more than once when Biden was vice president, how much they despised Barack Obama.
Well, what he did to Joe Biden in 2016, a man who'd run for president twice, who thought it was his birthright to then be the nominee in 2016, to say, we're going with Hillary Clinton.
That and the Biden family, that's as bad as it gets.
That's as treacherous as it gets.
And then in 2020, he didn't really support him until he had to when it was just him and Bernie.
So Obama had to worry, and this is why Pelosi was singular.
If it hadn't been for Nancy Pelosi, I don't think this would have happened.
He had to not get Biden's backup.
Biden had to see this as inevitable.
But minimizing the embarrassment.
And so Obama was very careful to not be, and doesn't like to be public anyway at this point, but he was careful to not have Biden think that he was engineering it.
But he was strategizing about how do we put the pressure on him publicly and privately, and how do we end up with the strongest possible nominee?
So we just got back from a month on the road, coast to coast, and everywhere in between 16 cities in 30 days.
And I've got to say, almost everyone on our team looks suspiciously well-rested every morning as we got back on the plane.
It turns out most of them are using a product called Sambrosa, which is one of the sponsors of our tour.
Sambrosa blends antihistamine with a syrup of herbs and honey and is designed to help you sleep well, waking up, feeling refreshed and revitalized.
And based on the sunny, cheerful faces of the people I work with, it works.
It's inexpensive.
It's less than 50 cents a night.
And we know the people who own the company.
And they are great people.
They are faithful people.
And they are about the happiest family we've ever run across.
The product, Sambrosa, has a ton of five-star reviews.
You can check it out on their website, sambrosa.com.
What's the underlying illness that he suffers from?
No idea.
How crazy is that, that a nation on the cusp of nuclear war, which we are to this day, could have a commander-in-chief suffering from some illness and nobody demands to find out what it is?
And just as people on the right, I'll say again, are revolted by the slanted press coverage, the lawfare, the unequal treatment, I think people on the left have proper grievance about the things Trump has done that are, again, antithetical to a lot of what America stands for.
They're right about that.
He's hard to cover.
But the way that most of the press has chosen to deal with it is to just focus on the negative aspects of Trump and disregard the grievances of the other side.
But honesty, just, I mean, even leaving aside the ideology or how you think Trump fits into American history, just like, I don't know if it's raining out, you can't say it's sunny out because that's lying.
Besides liberal media bias and besides just the emotional Trump derangement syndrome, they've decided that January 11th and Stormy Daniels and documents at Mar-a-Lago and his comments about immigrants are more important, are so important that they have to cover the exclusion of Americans being killed by people in the country illegally.
They'll have to, very late in the game, adapt to digital sales and different models besides people paying for subscriptions, people paying for advertising, or cable systems paying for carriage.
They'll have to find different sources of revenue, and they'll have to make products that appeal to enough audiences that there's this mass there.
Yeah, so we just need, whether it's legacy places that find their way or new places like what you're doing, what I'm doing, that say we're going to make money off of quality content that some number of people like and we're going to find business models that work.
And we're not going to be wedded to the old business models, which is just not going to support journalism.
How long were you at ABC? From 87 to 2007. Long time.
It's 97, 2007. Did you ever think that you would be part of independent media?
I never did.
I mean, I loved working for a big, powerful, you know, one of the most powerful news organizations in the world.
Uh, and I assumed I always would.
And, uh, and I still think there's some value in it.
I mean, you and I both now do things for ourselves and with our small, merry bands that before 17 people would have been working on, we never would have had to think about it, but it's a small price to pay to not be freed from the downsides of being, you know, in an institution where you can't do what you think's right, you know, some of in an institution where you can't do what you think's right, you know, some of the time at least or best, Like what, looking back, like, can you give examples of things that you couldn't do that you think you should have been allowed to do?
File more Freedom of Information Act requests, even if they were going to annoy people we covered.
So if somebody said, well, we're trying to book that person as a great guest, so please don't file that Freedom of Information Act request.
That happened a few times.
Now, there was another equity involved for the organization, right?
They wanted a booking more than my fishing expedition on a FOIA. I will say that that's an example.
I could give a few others, but I was blessed when I worked for ABC, when I worked for Time Magazine, when I worked for Bloomberg, I was blessed with a fair amount of autonomy.
So I was never told by the corporate side what to say.
I was rarely told, don't pursue something because of another equity.
I gave you one of the examples.
But it's more just...
You know, putting on a TV show at a major network, like 200 people are touching the product, right?
It's just a hard bureaucracy to be super creative in, but it also produces, you know, from a production point of view, quality stuff.
I'm not imagining, without getting into it, this is my read, you may disagree, I think in the end you are very severely punished for demanding to think for yourself.
That's my view of it, but I don't think you're the only one who was.
It did seem like a systematic cleansing of anybody in media.
It wasn't even a left-right divide.
I felt it was a testosterone divide, but people were like, no, no, no.
There are others, but she's one of the exceptions that proves the rule.
Most people don't want to cross the orthodoxy or their corporate bosses.
And in that sense, they're not so different than working for JPMorgan Chase or working for Boeing.
There's not a lot of stepping out of line.
The difference is, of course, to state the obvious, that we're in a business of truth-telling and challenging powerful interests and holding powerful interests accountable to the public interest.
And sometimes that has to be either your own employer or sometimes it's liberal Democrats.
It's like the grimmest episode of your program ever.
Let's play paper football or something to shake up the mood.
I mean, I'm a big believer in finding consumers who want quality.
And that can happen independent of...
Of ideology.
You know, my new platform, you know, we've not started to make a ton of money yet, but it explicitly tries to appeal to people not just centrist, moderates, and independents, but people on the left and the right.
And I'm hoping that there is a market for that that is different than the conventional wisdom, which is the only way to make money is to go hard left.
Well, it's a platform that's not just about politics.
Eventually, we're going to expand to sports and music and writers.
It's called two-way.
Almost all communication is one way, right?
It's you talking or writing a substack or writing a book or cable news.
We bring people together with the people they want to hear from.
If you get the best parenting experts in the world or NFL quarterbacks or great musicians that people are super fans of, sponsorships, payments, super fan payments that are higher than what they pay for a normal access through live video, and then eventually the ability to be the place that people come for two-way conversations.
But in politics, it has the additional element of all voices under one roof.
And I am so heartened when people say, Liberals will say, I understand why people are for Trump more than I ever have.
The other day we had on, just by coincidence, we didn't book them, two young black men both live in Manhattan, or live in New York City, both of whom explained extraordinarily well why they're for Trump and why they don't like the Democratic Party.
And they were listened to respectfully and liberals could ask them questions.
If the anecdotal is even close to true, Trump will break the record among support from black men.
I mean, he'll smash it if the anecdotal is close to true.
It's all over social media.
It's all over my platform.
It's all over every story I hear.
And part of it, you know, I'll give you a couple of elements of this that I think is important.
Part of it is, Trump has always had appeal with kind of a macho, rich, pretty wife thing.
But it's also, you know, this example of biased coverage, the press says when Trump says some young black men identify with him and their parents because he's been persecuted, the press says that's racist.
My experience is just true.
They get the fact that the legal system comes after people unfairly, and if it can happen to Trump, it can happen to them, and it has happened to them and their family and their communities.
And then lastly, the failure of liberals to make life in cities for poor kids better is also a massive scandal.
Another scandal is that the Republican Party hasn't done anything to capitalize on it and create competition to be mayors of these cities.
For sure.
When Trump says, I'm for criminal justice reform, and I'm for fixing schools, and I'm for creating more economic opportunity, he did criminal justice reform.
The other stuff, you know, his record is spotty, but he's saying, as he said in 2016 when people mocked him, what do you have to lose?
These young black men say, the Democratic Party offers nothing to me.
Trump might offer something to me, and he's done criminal justice reform.
I think, again, you could be the most partisan Democrat in the world.
If you can defend the performance of the Democratic Party to helping young black men, good luck.
Right, but in terms of the story that Democrats tell themselves about why they're right and why they're better than their opponents, it's all about black people.
We've saved black people.
And so how do they, like, what's it like if you're a Democratic party, if you're Ron Klain and all of a sudden all the black guys are...
Against you and for Trump, that must be mind-blowing.
Well, of all the sort of canary in the coal mine, of those who believe, as some of my sources in both parties do, that Harris is about to lose, and maybe somewhat decisively, she's spending three days, maybe four days, at the end of the campaign, spending the majority of her time courting black men.
That's mind-blowing.
So, what do they say?
They say...
They're a little bit in denial about the causes of it, but they're not in denial about how big a problem it is.
Again, testament to when have you seen a Democratic presidential candidate with 20 days to go spending her time day after day courting black men?
I just think it's not a foregone conclusion because I think...
Seven battleground states, six or maybe all seven could go to one candidate.
They could.
In other words, if one of them wins the seven states or six of the seven narrowly, by our recent standards, that would be an electoral college landslide.
And I think that could happen.
I think whatever dynamics exist, there'll be some variation state to state.
But if Trump won all seven, I wouldn't be surprised.
I was talking to a member of Congress just a few hours ago who said, I'm totally convinced this election will not be called within a week of election day.
And I think there's a real equal protection questions.
We saw that in Florida in 2000. Like, is it fair to one county compared to another county or the state of Florida compared to the other states that they count differently?
It's a great...
It's got political implications that are messy, but it's a great 10th Amendment question.
When you can start counting different types of ballots and what the rules are for accepting ballots that have errors in them.
If one county says, well, they said 2023, but they meant 2024, we're going to count that because we know who cares what the outside address is like.
One county counts that and the other doesn't.
Is that fair to the voters?
Is that equal protection?
And even if the rules aren't different, just as a matter of course, say, Well, in this county, they stopped counting at midnight because the election supervisor said, we have too many votes to count, we're going to go home.
And in this county, they kept counting.
And so now, is there some chain of custody question in the county where the people went home and said they'll come back in at 9 o'clock?
We just don't have uniform rules.
That's just the way America is.
So, I mean, I would say my base case, unlike everybody else's, my base case is we'll know by the next day because I think more likely than not it won't be close.
But if your person's right, a week would be delightful if it was only a week.
Could be significantly longer.
Because once litigation starts, it never stops.
And this time, the Democrats are as lawyered up as the Republicans.
In 2020, the Bush campaign said, we're only going to do Florida.
I'm sorry, in 2000. They said, we're only going to do Florida.
Trump raised a lot of his online money in the wake of all the legal stuff, like literally on the days of indictments, the days of bookings, court dates.
That was a great equalizer for him, to raise more money.
But he's badly outraised.
But again, I don't think it's dispositive.
It might be dispositive, but I don't think it will be.
There's bundlers, people writing checks of $3,900 or whatever it is now.
And then there's people writing super PAC checks for $10 million or less.
Trump is doing...
I think being outraised in all three categories is my guess, but I think the biggest discrepancy is the one that's the most valuable, which is the low dollars, because people can continue to give to you.
And more surrogate travel, you know, just more of all the stuff you can spend money on.
And again, no one's criticizing their operation in terms of how they're going about turning people out, voting early, voting by mail, and then on election day, getting people to polls.
Georgia would be the fifth or sixth state she won if she's doing really well.
In other words, if she wins Georgia, it means she's going to win all the Great Lakes states and probably the Silver State as well.
So it's probably Trump's third best of them, probably.
And I'd make him the favorite there.
And my Democratic sources today would make him the favorite there as well.
There is a reality of Democratic politics in Southern states, which is if you can increase the percentage of the vote that comes from Black vote, which is called the contribution to the vote.
So what percentage of the number of people who vote are Black?
And she can get her numbers back up to where Democrats typically are, two big ifs, she'll win.
But Trump is doing well with the young black men there, and, you know, the normal way he wins states, running up in exurbs in rural areas.
All of the seven states have a pro-choice energy.
In the two western states, there's ballot measures that will help there.
There aren't in the five others, but Georgia, you know, the Atlanta metro area is very pro-choice, a lot of suburban women.
Some combination of her swelling black vote, holding her own with black vote, and suburban voters, particularly women.
She could win it, but Trump is the favorite there.
It's funny, the vice president herself, I'm told, and a lot of her aides have been very bullish on North Carolina as the linchpin for replacing Pennsylvania if they lose Pennsylvania.
I have one Republican source who I trust immensely regarding North Carolina who says no way Trump loses it.
So the storm is a variable.
No way to know who that helps or hurt.
The governor's race is a bit of a variable.
But my sources now, I trust the ones who say Trump is likely to win North Carolina, but the vice president's put a ton of time in there, and I think she'll continue to because they need a hedge against losing Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania has more electoral votes.
So if it's just a swap, if Trump wins the three Sunbelt states and Pennsylvania and she wins North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan, she loses.
So if she wins Michigan and Wisconsin and North Carolina...
But loses Pennsylvania.
She needs one of the other three Sunbelt states.
But North Carolina is the largest and same as Georgia, same number, but that's kind of a linchpin for them.
So that's the biggest mystery.
Democrats are very bullish on it.
Republicans believe that it'll be Trump's in the end.
I'm going to do a two-hour show called It's All About Pennsylvania, because it sort of is.
Now, I say...
Trump can win without Pennsylvania, and she can win without Pennsylvania, and it's not far-fetched.
They both have reasonable paths without it, so people shouldn't say it's all about it.
But certainly, the winner of Pennsylvania, as a matter of demographics and electoral college math, is in the driver's seat.
The other person kind of has to circumvent conventional wisdom about where these states are to make up for the loss of Pennsylvania.
Trump is ahead and he's been ahead for a while.
Now, ahead within the margin of error, but if you're consistently ahead, even if it's in the margin of error, you know, no one thinks these states are going to be won by seven points.
So, she's got demographic problems there.
Changing her position on fracking was absolutely essential.
Whether people believed it or not, she couldn't have won being against fracking.
It's not as big a deal throughout the state as people think, but in part of the state, it's a very big deal.
I make Trump the favorite there, as do most of my Democratic sources, but she's spending an unprecedented amount of money.
She'll continue to work it there.
As a Democratic governor, it has two Democratic senators.
It's more of a blue state in terms of statewide office than a red state.
Trump won it once and lost it once, but he's showing strength there with white working class voters, with older voters, with black men, with the Hispanic suburbs around Philly.
And that's a place, because Biden was born in Pennsylvania and so associated with it, that's a place where trading out Biden for Harris was probably a downgrade for them.
That Biden, at least on paper, had a better chance than she does.
And as we did say at the outset, or you said, she hasn't really, I mean, if I'm Kamala Harris and I'm from San Francisco by way of Montreal, I'm going to make some effort to convince people I'm not as liberal as they think I am.
The public polls are done on the cheap, and of all the ways newsrooms have cut back, the polling budgets take a big hit, right?
So, a poll is only good, if likely voters, if you know who a likely voter is, right?
And the simplest explanation is, if you say, I want my poll to have 40% Democrats, okay?
Because that's what I think the electorate's going to be.
So, I think a poll that's good, that has likely voters, 40% of my respondents are going to be Democrats.
So which Democrats are going to fill the slots?
Because you're under pressure to finish the poll as quickly as possible.
You want 400 respondents, say.
The longer it takes, the more money it costs because you're paying for the call center to continue to make calls.
So the Democrats who are most likely to fill the slot are better educated Democrats who are more likely to pick up a phone or answer an online survey and say, I'm a Democrat and I'm participating.
Those wealthier Democrats and better educated Democrats, because those are the particularly better educated, is a single trait by which you can most easily tell if they're a Harris voter or a Trump voter.
They're going to fill the slots.
So you say, okay, 40% are Democrats, so I'm not over-representing Democrats.
You are representing Democrats who are more likely to vote for Harris than Democrats who are likely to vote for Trump.
And that single variable is, according to my sources, probably the main reason why the private polling, which is more expensively done and needs an accurate poll so they know how to make decisions about the campaign, Compared to the public polls, we just want to get the poll done so they can publish it for publicity.
They're not looking to be accurate.
They're looking to get it done as cheaply as possible.
So Bush negotiated them down to like 1% or something.
He also said, you know, salaries are going to be controlled.
Then when John Podesta was chair of Hillary's campaign in 2016, he said, if you're one of the many people traveling between D.C. and New York, you're going to take the bus.
For 12 bucks as opposed to the train or the plane.
Again, that was a very big kind of cultural thing of we're just not going to waste the campaign's money on either spending or salary.
So my sense is that consultants don't make what they used to, particularly ad buyers, but my sense is even pollsters don't make what they used to.
But they do make a lot and they spend a lot on polls, which is why they're better.
It's not a quantitative difference.
It's a qualitative difference to say...
We need an accurate poll so we know how to make decisions about this race.
Well, I'll probably anger some viewers here by saying I don't think you can attribute what the Cheneys did to anything but their belief in the unfitness of Donald Trump to be president and growing somewhat from January 6th.
I don't think the Cheneys are going to get rich off of this.
I think it's possible Liz would take one, but I don't think she's doing it for that at all.
I don't think they hate Donald Trump for some past personal grievance.
I really do believe that they think what January 6th and related things and challenging the election say about Trump's character make him unfit for the job.
And I think another huge blind spot of the dominant media is America's bipartisan, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, disdain for the forever wars.
And I know the Cheneys disagree with that point of view, but I don't think that's what's motivating the mayor.
I think they...
They, and again, this won't be popular with everyone watching us, but they think that Trump makes the planet less safe by not being supportive of Ukraine and not challenging Putin as aggressively as they'd like.
Well, I mean, I think it's worse in the sense that they take...
Their intellect and their worldview and they lock us into the loss of American lives and great cost and hurt our reputation around the world exactly the opposite of what they think.
But I don't question their, in case of the Cheney's, I don't question their belief.
The reason I'm saying it's worse is because it derives not from greed but from hubris.
And I think that's much scarier than greed.
And in other words, if you think you have powers that no human possesses, for example, the power to foresee the consequences of a big decision that you make, a rational person, by rational I mean someone informed by humility, which is a realistic understanding of the limits of his power, you do something big like invade a country and an honest person says...
I have no freaking idea really what happens next.
And the Cheneys, because they are, like everyone in D.C., bipartisan, seized with this crazed hubris, they're like, no, no, I know exactly what's going to happen.
This will start a domino effect where democracy takes root in the Middle East.
I'm saying something slightly different, which is someone who believes that the most important thing he does, and I think 90% of Republican senators feel this way, for example, is sort of manage the world.
And is convinced that he's doing a good job, and this is like a high calling, and he understands, again, consequences which no human can foresee.
So that's deeply offensive to me, because I think it's like stupid and corrupt on the most basic level.
You don't understand the limits of human foresight, and that's a massive problem.
You know, as someone who's part Finnish, it hurts me even to hear the word Finnish because I just think that was a country that had sovereignty, that earned it by beating one of the world's great powers in an actual battle.
The Winter War of 1940, and they just gave it up to NATO, and they're going to just really suffer as a result.
deterrence and spying and action if necessary if we don't have North Korea, Australia, South Korea, Australia, Japan, and NATO countries with some degree of military cooperation.
I just think it's just the reality of real estate and how long it takes to get places.
We cannot defend and deter from the continental United States.
It's just not going to happen to the same degree that's necessary to deal with.
Middle East and Russia and China and North Korea.
It's just a requirement geographically to be there.
But one of the powers of Trump's idea is if they paid more for it, if more of it was theirs, I think it would be less infantilizing and they'd be more full partners as opposed to being under the American umbrella.
Part of the challenge is also the nuclear weapons, right?
We don't want these other countries to have nuclear weapons.
And if we're not partnered with the Japanese and the South Koreans and the Europeans, they're going to want nuclear weapons.
Well, and Japan especially, because Japan, I think people, it sounds like you like and go near the area, but the one thing, I'm no expert on Asia, but having spent time there, the one thing I'm always shocked by is how totally freaked out by Japan every other country is, particularly China.
People in Okinawa hate the United States because of our military presence.
But the upside is we have effectively restrained them and allowed them to become part of the community of nations and develop a relationship with South Korea that's stronger now.
It's one of the things Biden has done successfully in foreign policy.
It's stronger now than it's been since the end of the war, in part because they do not have a military that's threatening to these other countries.
And I mean, if anything, they could use a little bit more of the fierceness in the current generation, but they've been turned into just completely defanged in a way that I think has hurt the society, but had to be done to some extent because of the specter of the end of the war.
The strong feelings, as you said, in China and South Korea is, wow, to this day, really, really jaundiced view of the Japanese.
Predicting or explaining Bobby Kennedy is like predicting or explaining Kim Jong-un.
I mean, he's a mercurial man, that Bobby Kennedy.
So, why is he for Trump?
I think he's anti-establishment.
And he believes that the current military situation, food safety, foreign wars, all of that requires profound change.
And so I think there's some really strong ideological ties to Trump.
I think he also is angry at the Democratic Party for keeping him from being able to run for the nomination fair.
Fairly.
And for attacking him personally.
So I think that's part of it, too.
And I think Trump offered him the better deal for what it would mean to endorse him.
But I think it's a mistake to just say he's a kook who wanted a big role.
I think food safety, foreign wars, military-industrial complex, all that is...
if he were if he were 50 20 years younger had a normal voice and stayed on message I think he would have been a formidable he'd be the president of the United States formidable his his announcement speech was one of the best and most important speeches of the last five years by any politician but he simply doesn't have the discipline to do this
and and in that sense he's a great companion for Donald Trump who also lacks the discipline to stay focused on the core issues that have immense appeal across party lines not just fringe so he told me I think a lot of them I think your analysis is fair But he told me that the Democratic Party didn't even consider talking to him.
It does seem like, and Bernie Sanders obviously felt this very personally twice, but it seems like the real sin in the Democratic Party is trying to bring any kind of change.
You know, Bernie, had Bernie played under fair rules, I think he would have been the nominee at least one of the two times.
But that's, you know, that's politics.
And whether you've got an incumbent like Joe Biden or a quasi-incumbent like Hillary Clinton, you know, the party establishment's going to do what it does.
And pre-Trump, that would have happened as well in the Republican Party.
Yeah, Joe Biden and the White House Chief of Staff and Senior Advisors to the President and definitely Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan.
If you manage Joe Biden's time, if you recognize when he's up to it and when he's not, he can still make a lot of decisions, and I believe does.
So I don't think there's any Barack Obama or these other things.
But the White House Chief of Staff has to manage that.
And then there's a few very close personal aides to the president who aren't famous people, but they help figure out when to plug him into this and minimize the prospect that a big decision will need to be made at a time when he's not equipped to make it.
It's not a great situation, but it is as evidence of the fact that...
You know, the number of times he's displayed abject inability, you know, it's probably 25 times where it's just abject.
Given the circumstances, that's relatively small, and it's testament to not just the fierceness of the conspiracy, but the degree to which it's well managed.
You know, have to understand under the circumstances, if there's not going to be an invocation of the 25th Amendment, if he's not going to resign, we have to be grateful that it's well managed.
The Democratic Party, as you said, a lot of Democrats, maybe the majority, believe that Trump becoming president again is the worst thing that ever could happen.
I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country.
I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their vision of what their future for them and their children could be like.
They think he's the worst person possible to be president.
And having one...
By the hand of Jim Comey and Fluke in 2016, and then performed in office for four years and denied who won the election last time in January 6th, the fact that under a fair election, America chose by the rules pre-agreed to Donald Trump again, I think it will cause the biggest mental health crisis in the history of America.
And I don't think it will be kind of a passing thing that by the inauguration will be fine.
I think it will be sustained and unprecedented and hideous.
I think there'll be protests that will turn violent.
I hope there not, but I think there will be some.
But I think it will be more...
It'll be less anger and more...
A failure to understand how it could happen.
Like the death of a child or your wife announcing she's a lesbian and she's leaving you for your best friend.
Like something that's so traumatic that it is impossible for even the most mentally healthy person to truly process and incorporate into their daily life.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think that's what's going to happen for tens of millions of people.
Because they think that their fellow citizens supporting Trump is a sign of fundamental evil at the heart of their fellow citizens and of the nation.
I hope that he recognizes both his responsibility and his self-interest, and that he chooses in his words and in his cabinet and White House appointments, nominations, and in his initial legislative agenda, I hope he sees a confluence of interest between minimizing that mental health crisis and the success of his presidency.
And I think he might.
I'm bullish on him seeing the alignment of those two things.
It'll depend on if it's close and if he and his supporters see wrongdoing in casting and counting of ballots in the seven states.
It's very difficult for me to imagine her winning by enough that that doesn't happen.
I've been disappointed in the efforts in the states.
There are some in every one of the seven, but they're not mature enough to prepare to explain to people elections are messy, but this one wasn't stolen.
Our electoral votes were awarded correctly to Kamala Harris.
I think if that somehow goes well, And if Donald Trump himself doesn't challenge the results, Twitter can do what it wants to do.
I think that the negative impact of her winning on the psychology of the losers will not be as great, but I don't think it'll be nothing.
And I think there'll be all sorts of things.
Lawfare, replacing Biden with her after Trump had spent millions trying to beat Biden.
The media's completely full body on the scale.
I think all those things will lead to mass skepticism that the election was fair.
And I think it'll be up to luck that the result is clear cut enough that people don't feel reflexively it was unfair.
I think it'll be up to what Trump's attitude is.
And I think it'll be up to the governors of the states, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, and most of the battleground state governors are Democrats, to be as transparent and clear about any irregularity and its potential impact on the outcome.
If all that happens and Kamala Harris decides to...
In the transition and in her inaugural address and in her legislative agenda to be gracious, I think that we could be in a decent place.
I think there'll probably be a Republican Senate, and I think people have failed to game out.
If there's a Republican Senate, Democratic House, Democratic President, all of MAGA and those unhappy with her winning will put their chips in the Senate and say it's up to the Senate to keep her from turning this into a far left country.
And that goes first and foremost in the initial instance to nominations.
I think it'll be very difficult for her to nominate anyone acceptable to the left who can be confirmed by that Senate.
It's very limited what you can do as an acting secretary.
And she'll want her people.
So I worry a lot about that.
You know, one of the huge dysfunctions in this country, regardless of party, is the, and every president will tell you this and probably has, is the difficulty of getting your people in place because of the background checks and the confirmation process.
You think about her.
She started running for president not that long ago.
She hasn't had time to start a rigorous transition.
I really do worry about her, even if she emerges from this election with the country in love with her, not a whole country, but enough to have a honeymoon.
If she rises to the occasion, if she...
If world leaders don't seem poised to take advantage of her in some way, even if all that happens, I really do worry about her getting a government in place.
Because I don't think a Republican Senate is going to confirm the kind of people who Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and AOC are going to demand her to nominate.
Civil conflict will take place in the state of some governor, by definition.
I hope the governors all have great bipartisan plans for minimizing this and for policing peaceful protests and not allowing them to escalate, but not trampling on the First Amendment.
We could have violence regardless of who wins.
I think both sides are capable of that.
I think the chances of it are minimized if the losing presidential candidate makes it clear they don't want that to happen, and if the governors are vigilant in devising plans to balance public safety with the First Amendment.
If those things happen, I'm not all that concerned about violence.
If those things don't happen, I'm deeply concerned about it.
It's great to be here, and your place in the world, as you know, we have lots of mutual friends who say to me and to other people you know, what's happened to Tucker?
What has happened to Tucker?
And I say, let me go find out.
I'll be back.
So I'll go report back.
You're right here.
Right here.
Good-natured, iconoclastic, interested in the world, and as we say, unafraid to stand up when you agree and disagree.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing our show.
I know.
Shocking that in an election year, with everything at stake, Google would be putting its thumb on the scale and preventing you from hearing anything that the people in charge don't want you to hear.
But it turns out it's happening.
So what can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it, but that's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that's true.
It's not intentionally deceptive.
And the way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel.
Subscribe!
And you'll have a much higher chance of hearing what we say.