Spencer and David Bloomberg dissect the U.S. election’s chaotic landscape, with Biden clinging to the Democratic nomination despite "too old" critiques—mirroring 2020’s embrace of Bernie Sanders—while Trump faces 91 charges across four jurisdictions, from New York’s $34M fraud case to Georgia’s racketeering indictment. They mock media "both sidesism," contrasting Biden’s occasional gaffes with Trump’s dangerous misstatements, like praising Putin or urging NATO attacks, and predict Haley’s eventual MAGA pivot. The Supreme Court’s Colorado ballot ruling looms, testing partisan legal consistency as states like Texas could target Biden similarly. Meanwhile, RFK Jr.’s fringe anti-vaccine bid risks amplifying public health fallout, while Trump’s base thrives on provocation—like a neighbor’s "make liberals cry" flag. Election dynamics hinge on immunity claims, prosecutorial bias, and whether legalism or politics prevails in 2024. [Automatically generated summary]
The podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
And I'm back again today with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
Good.
How are you?
Very good.
I guess I should say I can't remember.
I think I'm doing good, but I can't remember because that seems to be the focus right now.
I think it's, I do not recall.
I do not recall.
Well, it's, I do not recall if you're being questioned.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And, but if you're attacking someone, then it's he doesn't remember.
You're right.
Yeah.
Well, memory is imperfect.
It's a, yes.
Therefore, this is a perfect defense.
So, uh, yeah, we're going to get into a uh what I hope becomes a regular series of updates on the current state of whatever you call an election down there south of the Canadian border.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you, what's regularly talked about in comedy circles is, is how quaint the Canadian election is because it'll last maybe two months, sometimes a little longer.
And they go, oh, how refreshingly brief that is.
Yes.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure this election started before the last election.
It started on January 6th when Trump failed to make himself king, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I, in, like I said, in many ways, I think it started even before then.
It started, you know, this is just a continuation of the last election.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it's, we'll get into it.
Shaping out to be a rematch.
So how do we get there?
Well, first of all, we should mention, we should timestamp this.
We are recording this one day after the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers to win the Super Bowl in an incredibly close game.
Thank you, Biden.
Thank you, Biden, for doing this.
Doing this for it's not even clear, like whatever.
Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift.
Now, here's the thing.
Yeah.
Many, many podcasts ago, you brought up Taylor Swift.
I did.
Yeah.
You talked about context.
Right.
You talked about how she is very careful with her image and she never goes anywhere or does anything unless it is pre-planned.
Yeah.
So someone could look up that old podcast and use it as evidence that she is part of the conspiracy because obviously she has planned this out to the T. Right.
Well, I used it as evidence that she's very diligent about her doing her makeup and wearing clothes that make her look very, very sharp at every time that she's seen in public.
Not that she's part of a cabal that's, you know, somehow planning the outcome of the Super Bowl for reasons that somehow dovetail into politics, which, yeah, I don't know.
It doesn't, the Super Bowl doesn't have anything to do with politics.
And it's not fixed.
And if you thought it was, you could just bet on the side you thought it was fixed for and make all the money that you ever needed.
Like, yeah, more stupidity.
But we have to mention it because it's wrapped up in this in a way that is so stupid that I can't even put into words.
But it will dictate some things, why we know certain things, because we're not going to release it the next day like some podcasts do.
I plan to have this out before the South Carolina primary, which is on a Saturday, the 24th.
So hold me to that.
Finished or not, it's got to be released before then, the Friday at least.
Finished or not, how long are we going to be talking?
Geez, edited or not, David.
Oh, oh, oh.
Right.
I edit some things out sometimes and also try to make the sound levels work right.
Yeah.
Nikki Haley is still in the presidential election.
She's still running here.
That's the claim.
Yeah, you don't hear much of her on most of the media channels.
She says some things.
Everyone tries to determine whether what she's currently saying is more or less racist than what Trump is currently saying.
I think Trump is still winning in that respect, but she caught up to some respects at some points along here where she's claimed that the Civil War wasn't about slavery.
And that it's not a racist country.
It never has been.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's also demonstrably untrue.
But she's still running right now.
Trump isn't the nominee, but it's felt that South Carolina is her home state.
She was the governor of South Carolina.
So if she doesn't win there, she probably can't win the rest and she should just pack it in.
As opposed to if she does win there, she still can't win the rest and she should pack it in.
Well, yeah, but maybe she, you know, maybe she gets more donations.
I don't know.
I mean, at this point, well, pulling for her to do what?
I don't know.
I mean, you know, it's like, you know, do we want the MAGA in what someone said, and I can't remember who it might have been my governor, Pritzker, I think said, you have a choice of MAGA in heels, MAGA in cowboy boots, or MAGA in its original packing back when DeSantis was still in the running.
And that's not a direct quote.
It's a, you know, a paraphrase, but it's close.
And I mean, like you said, she's in a race with Trump.
You know, I mean, she's, she's never going to win.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm pretty sure Trump could need to pull out of the race for medical reasons and he'd still win.
And then the, you know, Republican Party would pick someone other than her.
So just they'd be like, DeSantis, get back in here, man.
Yeah.
I'm not changing her.
We need you.
Yeah.
I mean, someone.
Old white guy.
Come on.
Come on.
But I do like that she's still in the race for one reason, and that is because the Biden campaign just keeps putting out videos of her attacking Trump.
Like Biden doesn't even have to say anything.
He just leaves it up to Haley.
She does all the attacking and he just posts it on his social media.
Well, he like he's the one posting.
Yeah, one of his assistants or whatever.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, that's the way that every other pundit calls it as well, pretty much unanimously that I've heard or seen in the last month is that Trump will win and become the Republican candidate.
And then we'll get a full rematch because the Democrats had a Marianne Williamson who was making some effort, but she was told by her party that they're, you know, they just want to run the incumbent.
That's Joe Biden.
In case anyone wasn't listening, Joe Biden is still the president and is the incumbent candidate for the presidency.
Again, Marianne Williamson has dropped out of the race officially as of, I think it was about a week ago.
Yeah.
To which most people said Marion Williamson was in the race.
Yeah.
You know, which she never really was.
She was, you know, she was there for other reasons, as some of her own campaign staffers alleged that she was there to make money.
You know, she was not there to actually win because she knew she couldn't win.
And quite frankly, much of what she does is to make herself money.
So.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was not watching her campaign closely, but I have a few people on my Twitter feed that were enthusiastic about it.
And it was interesting listening to them and then comparing what they were claiming was her platform versus all the many previous things she said of the last 30 or 40 years.
But that's, we don't need to get into that.
She's not important.
She dropped out.
Right.
So let's just assume for now, as you predicted and what everyone else has predicted, that Trump will become the candidate as of whenever Nikki Haley drops out of the race.
I just want to do a quick review.
I'm going to try to make this quick.
A quick review of the other thing standing in the way of a Trump candidacy, which is at last count, 91 separate indictments in four jurisdictions.
So 91 charges.
I don't know if they're technically separate indictments.
Yeah, I don't.
Well, they weren't.
Yeah, he's not determined.
Guilt or innocence is not determined.
The nomenclature gets confused a lot.
As I understand it, once it's filed officially and passed a grand jury, then it's an indictment.
And then it has to be determined whether the person is in a court, whether the person is guilty or innocent of each of these things.
Yeah, what I was saying is there could be, I think, one indictment that contains multiple charges within the indictment.
Yeah, right.
That's exactly right.
You're right.
So it's 91 charges across four jurisdictions for different sets of indictments.
Yeah.
Right.
So top of the list and occurring first was New York.
Those are state level charges that matters because a federal president cannot declare any level of immunity or absolution from any of those charges if they're state charges.
And they are 34 separate charges, all related to business fraud.
Some people claim that this will dismantle the Trump companies or whatever.
I don't think that's true.
I think he just moves to a new jurisdiction and pays a different level of taxes.
Florida, these are federal charges.
These are 40 separate charges related to the mishandling of classified documents.
He was famously raided at Mar-a-Lago.
I believe that was February of last year, somewhere around there.
And they were looking for these documents for a long time.
They found some reason to believe that they were in Mar-a-Lago and they executed a search warrant.
They found them.
They found some of them and then they went back again and found some more.
It's a big mess.
There's been a lot of people saying, yeah, but what about this?
What about that?
What about the previous blah, blah, blah?
That doesn't matter.
Those people weren't indicted.
40 separate charges.
And there's all kinds of reasons why that's happening.
So the third set is in Washington, D.C., federal charges.
Again, this is what's referred to usually as the Jack Smith indictment.
Four separate charges only related to involvement in insurrection and disenfranchising voters through the use of fake electors.
And also, I believe involvement in the January 6th fiasco insurrection attempt.
There's been all kinds of rhetoric about this, whether it's really an insurrection, if they didn't succeed, and all kinds of stupid kindergarten bullshit like that.
Doesn't matter.
I guess there wasn't really a civil war in the U.S. because it didn't succeed.
Yeah, yeah.
It was just, it was just a disagreement between some states about things that definitely weren't slavery.
Right.
So the fourth set of indictments is in Georgia.
Those are state-level indictments.
These are collectively usually referred to as the Fannie Willis indictment.
13 charges there, all related to the disenfranchisement of voters.
These are racketeering charges.
Now, these ones make them significantly different than all the others.
18 co-conspirators, and I believe two have already flipped and agreed.
Yes.
Usually that goes.
You know, although now that everything's gone wrong with Fannie Willis and her lover, you know, who knows, those people may flip back.
They may be like, oh, never mind.
We see where this is going.
This whole case is going into the toilet.
And so what was once hailed as the best chance of convicting Trump may get screwed up by someone's personal life, which, I mean, how many times have we seen that happen in politics, you know?
Yeah, one imagines that this shouldn't be quite affected by that.
I mean, this is, there must be court rules related to all of these things, right?
I mean, you could try to smear her and try to say that, well, she's doing this because of some personal reason or whatever, but she filed the paperwork properly, right?
Yeah, but I mean, I, you know, I am not a lawyer and I don't know all the ins and outs of this, but I do follow some lawyers on social media and they were like, oh, this is not good.
And I listened to some podcasts and they were like, oh, this is not good.
Because they can, you know, it's, it can't, if, if they can get prosecutorial misconduct to stick, it could mess up all sorts of things.
And I don't know exactly how it would work.
But if they can, you know, get it to stick, I mean, at the very least, we're talking about long delays until after the election to sort everything out.
Right.
And, you know, at worst, it could get kicked to the curb because of it.
Yeah, could be.
So I just want to mention that I think the, because we have a named prosecutor in two of the four, Jack Smith and Fannie Willis, that this is a sign that these two prosecutors are attractive enough that the media would want to, you know, display their name and picture, whereas the others are perhaps, you know, more mid and perhaps just, you know, not of note in the attractiveness scale.
That's how I understand U.S. media, David.
What's your take on this?
I mean, that's probably right.
It was always happening to me when I would do rulemakings and testify.
People would always want my picture.
And I'd be like, no, your name in the paper.
David Bloomberg strikes again, yes.
Yes, yes.
And I'd say, no, no, no pictures, no autographs.
Right.
Okay.
Well, that is how this is how Canada views the U.S., though.
Yeah.
I mean, this is an audio podcast.
So as far as people know, everything I'm saying is true.
Sure.
And I'm not here to tell them that it's not true.
It's not what I'm here for.
So another thing to note about this is that the main through line of all of these is that Trump has often said he has presidential immunity from prosecution for pretty much everything, whatever he likes.
He just says, I have immunity for that.
So far, from various judges who've looked at that claim, this hasn't worked out in his favor.
No one has yet found that the president has immunity.
And can I just, can we just pause a second, Jerry?
And talk about how stupid this is.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Because he's not currently president.
Yeah.
He's running against the president.
If he wins the election, according to his own theory, Biden could walk up to him with a gun, shoot him, and say, hey, Republicans aren't running anybody because Biden would have full presidential immunity.
Well, some people have tried to point out that he only has immunity for the, you know, of the people who are on this side and believe this, they say he only has immunity for the things that he did while he was president, which would just mean that Biden should just go and whenever they have a debate, just pull a gun out and shoot him right there on the debate stage and say, I'm president now.
What are you going to do?
Yeah.
You can't prosecute me.
Yeah.
Boom.
Immunity.
Drop the mic.
Walk off stage.
I have better things to do as president than to wait for another person to come by and become president because obviously presidents should use all of their power to remain president.
That's ridiculous.
That's not a democracy.
Yeah.
And it, I mean, there's just zero logic in it whatsoever.
It's self-serving logic.
Right.
And it goes back even to the people, you know, a similar thing.
There are still people arguing that Pence did have the right to overturn the results of the election.
Yeah.
That's not his job.
Right.
No more than it's the job of Vanna White to declare who won the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune.
His role that night is the same role as Vanna White is to just reveal what's there.
Right.
Turn the numbers over and show that this is the winner.
And he's just an announcer.
That's all.
But the thing is, why, if you're a Republican, why are you arguing this now when there is a Democrat in the vice president's office?
So you're saying you're arguing full-throated, the vice president has the right to overturn the results of the election.
Okay.
Yeah.
We'll go with you this time.
Why bother campaigning then, Biden?
You have a vice president who will just declare you winner at the end.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's incredible self-serving logic.
It's it's an interesting view at directed thinking in that they are it's what I said.
I said on a very early episode of this podcast, and it's something I should probably circle back to more, is things I said previously, which is that politics works the exact opposite way as science does.
Science looks at evidence in the world and then attempts to explain what that evidence means.
Politics looks at what result it wants and then looks solely for the evidence that would support that conclusion.
And that's exactly what this is.
They wanted a Trump president.
They felt that it wasn't happening from the election.
So they just said, well, what if, what if we could just get it this way?
And that's the way they wanted it.
And so that's what it is.
But this is purely political in nature, driving logic.
And that's not how logic really works.
It's not real logic.
Right.
So moving on to other court-related issues related to Trump.
Trump has another set of problems in that there's a little thing called the Constitution with a number of amendments.
And one of them is Article 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was written just after the Civil War, in which it said that people who participated in insurrection are not allowed to hold public office.
Colorado, as a state, went to their Supreme Court, their state Supreme Court, and they determined that that it's sufficient in their eyes that this candidate, Donald Trump, participated in an insurrection on January 6th, and they will disallow him being on the ballot in Colorado.
So this got kicked up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court is looking at this last week.
They had a public hearing where both sides got to make their arguments.
And then there was a little bit of discussion between the nine Supreme Court justices.
And based on what we got from that hearing and their responses to each side and the little bit of public discussion we got from that, it is looking like they're leaning toward rejecting the Colorado block.
There's all kinds of legal minutiae in this.
And there's a lot of people who've written a lot of very detailed and very good stuff related to what this looks like.
So we're not going to get into it really deep here, but this was looking like something.
Some people were thinking this could block a Trump presidency, because if you got Colorado that was allowed to do this, then you might have other states that did it.
To me, that's a slippery slope argument.
If other states wanted to do this, they would have set the thing in motion already.
This isn't the case where...
Some did.
Several did.
Even here in Illinois.
Even here in Illinois, the Board of Elections, I think that's the term, had a former judge.
Now, he may have been an administrative judge.
I can't remember, but he's on the board.
And he said, look, yes, he was part of an insurrection.
He should fall under this statute.
However, we do not believe it is the board's job to determine who can or cannot be on due to that reason.
It should go to the courts.
And so the board of elections said, no, we're not doing it.
It was immediately appealed.
And I believe as of this moment, the latest I had heard was a court said, yes, it can proceed, but it just means the case can proceed.
You know, they're just waiting to see what the Supreme Court says.
And as soon as the Supreme Court says no, then this court will just gavel itself into session and say, never mind, and then gavel out again.
And that's going to, you know, there's other states that are similar.
They have put decisions on hold until the Supreme Court hears it.
And I mean, it makes sense.
Why go through a lot of work when you know it's going to be determined elsewhere?
Not to mention, let's face it, with the makeup of the court.
I mean, with Clarence Thomas not even recusing himself, despite the fact that his own wife was part of, not just part, one of the leaders of the insurrection, you know, and there's nothing that can be done about it because the only thing that could be done is he could be impeached.
And, well, that would require the House and Senate to cooperate on that.
And the Republican-controlled House is not going to impeach Clarence Thomas.
Right.
You know, I listened to, I don't want to spend too much time on this because I think we all know which way it's going to go.
The Supreme Court has more or less indicated heavily which side they're leaning on, but some of the arguments here on every side of this seem very spurious to me, very, You know, and I think it's summed up.
I put it into a tweet, but I'm going to say it here.
It's summed up by what's, I don't know why.
I also don't know why Supreme Court judges need to be labeled as liberal or conservative.
I don't think they really belong to political parties generally.
So I don't know.
Well, they're not supposed to.
That was the idea.
I know.
Yeah, I know.
That was the idea.
And then reality took hold.
Yeah.
Right.
So there is a judge called Justice Elena Kagan, who is described as a liberal Justice Elena Kagan in some sources.
Yeah.
She said during that public hearing that was sort of the nail in the coffin for the idea that this might stop Trump from appearing on the ballot in more states was that she said, and I quote, I think that the question you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States.
So what she wouldn't have a problem with it if more than one state had gone to their Supreme Court and declared him off?
Or like, what if it's such a close race that like in the actual election that one state has the electors, they decide it one way or the other?
Is she saying that that shouldn't be allowed, that it should get a recount of some kind nationally?
Should they rerun the election?
Like, what is she really saying there?
The only one state.
And also, Colorado isn't saying that he doesn't get to be on the ballot everywhere else.
Colorado only said, we feel he shouldn't get to be on the ballot here because, in our opinion, we run the state elections in our state as they do, as every state runs its own election.
Like, that's incredibly spurious logic.
And I summed it up on Twitter as I think I said something like, we as a Supreme Court, we want to enforce the laws, but not if they will make a difference in what the outcome really looks like.
Which is, of course, once you put it that way, it's crazy.
But that's exactly what she's saying.
She's saying we shouldn't make a decision on this because it will affect the outcome.
Like, of course, it will.
Why do you think we're going to you, the Supreme Court of the United States?
It will be a decision that will affect the outcome of many people's lives.
Yes, we want, yeah, it's a cop-out.
It's an incredible cop-out.
And another argument that was made, and I don't know the quote right now, but it was something like, well, if we allow this, then there will be other states that will just disallow Biden.
Well, there's a little thing called grounds that was used to justify what Colorado used to justify.
They didn't just say, we don't like Trump.
They said we believe he was instrumental in preparing for what happened on January 6th and encouraged it.
Would the other states have grounds to disqualify Biden?
And if they did have grounds, they should do it.
You know what I mean?
If they had grounds to this, you know, if they found out something and they had proof and they brought it forward and they said, look, this guy is Illuminati, like full on.
We found it.
We found the actual Illuminati and he's right there.
And he's not really working for us.
He's working for them.
Then yeah, they should just like, of course, you should.
Every, yeah, you shouldn't let the candidate be a real candidate if they're not sincere.
And I think what Colorado was saying is that he's not sincere in his effort to serve the people as president.
He wants to serve himself as president.
He wants to, he doesn't want to empower the voters to, he wants to disenfranchise them.
And that's what they were saying.
Like the whole thing is a huge cop-out.
I don't know why they took the case at all.
Well, I mean, they took the case so they could, you know, overturn it.
But I mean, the thing about saying that other states could do this, the fact is other states will do it.
There are other states, grounds or not.
Yeah.
There are other states that are so heavily Republican.
Texas and Alabama and Florida.
Yeah, right.
You know, especially Texas, I was thinking of that they could do it.
They could just determine Biden's not on the ballot.
They could make up some reason, you know, that by allowing immigrants in, he is helping to support an insurrection of South Americans and Central Americans against the U.S.
And therefore, he has violated this and, you know, should not be on the ballot.
And because that's the thing, people forget, some people forget.
Democrats, I'm going to say generally speaking, try to follow the rules.
Republicans, more generally speaking, and especially MAGAs, don't.
So the Democrats will sit there and they'll be like, well, we don't want to expand the Supreme Court.
We don't want to get rid of, what's the term in the Senate?
The filibuster.
Yes, we don't want to get rid of the filibuster.
Because if we do that, then for this vote, then Republicans will do it for everything.
Yeah, the Republicans are going to do it whenever they feel like it anyway.
They're going to overturn the normal rules when they want to do something because they don't care.
They are hypocrites.
You can see it in the way that they dealt with Supreme Court appointments.
When Obama had an appointment to make in, you know, and there was one year left in his term, several senators got up there and said, no, you should never do it in the last year of a term.
And if this happens to the next president, to a Republican president, then you quote me on that.
And so it happened with a lot less time for Trump.
And they said, yeah, we don't care.
Tough shit.
Yeah.
And they shoved, shoved in another justice because they just don't care.
Yeah.
I've said it plainly on this podcast as well, actually, in that exact context of exactly the placement of those justices.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They will, they will do what it takes.
And so if that means knocking Biden out of, you know, off the ballot in certain states, they'll do it.
Now, is it going to matter if he gets knocked off the ballot in Texas?
Probably not.
I mean, I guess it's possible, but probably not.
You know, I mean, from an outcome situation, is it going to matter if Trump gets knocked off the ballot here in Illinois?
No.
You know, I mean, that's the one, the one thing that makes me gives me a little bit of joy with the Electoral College is that the people I know who are Trumpers here around me, their vote doesn't matter.
But it could happen in a state like Wisconsin, a swing state, where it could go either way because their Supreme Court has recently flipped to Democrat.
And so going back to the Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court, with Kagan, you know, questioning it, I could see some of the Democrat-appointed justices siding with Trump on this one because they could say, well, you know, it's, it's like you said, it's a state.
I mean, she didn't phrase it well, but can one state's court determine it was an insurrection and therefore that this amendment applies?
Or does it need to be a federal court that determines it?
I think that's probably where she was going, even if it wasn't voiced particularly well.
Right.
This has been a sort of a legal shell game for some time because the argument has been made in some places that you're not allowed.
His lawyers have really said you're not allowed to charge him with anything unless he's been impeached.
And I think they said when they're impeaching that these aren't impeachable offenses.
These are things that should be handled in the court.
And each one is saying it's the other's responsibility.
And no one wants to be the one who says, yes, this guy's definitely the guy that did it for these specific things.
But if it's neither, then what happens then?
If no one has the responsibility of declaring him guilty, then he really does have functional immunity.
Right.
I mean, but the other thing is that she's missing is if the Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court says, yeah, we agree that he participated and led an insurrection.
Well, then you have that, then you have that federal stamp of approval.
You've taken care of it.
But what I was getting to was I could see some Democrat or some Democrat appointed justices siding with Trump on this because they will at least ostensibly look at the law.
And it goes back to what you were saying about using the facts to reach a conclusion rather than using a conclusion to decide which facts to accept.
Whereas the Republican appointed justices, they made up their minds before this ever got to them.
Let's be honest here.
And so we know which way this case is going.
And it's very much like the abortion drug ruling that was done in a court in Texas, where, you know, once it got assigned to that judge, you knew he was going to find a way to say it should be illegal, even though the reasoning that he used was absolutely preposterous.
And, you know, that he called it a safety issue when these drugs have been proven safer than Tylenol is one thing that I saw a lot of people saying online.
And so these judges that get appointed are supposed to be, you know, these wonderful, objective people.
And I think, you know, a lot of them try to be.
But it always seems to be, and this, you know, this could be confirmation bias on my part, but I don't think it is.
But it always seems to be that the Democrats, again, stick to the rules and they're like, I will view this objectively.
And the Republicans are like, I will view this the way I want to view it.
Yeah.
And you see it.
I got a kaleidoscope for mine.
Yeah.
Right.
You know, you see it in these decisions, you know, the Supreme Court.
We're in favor of states' rights, except when we don't want to be.
Yeah, except when we think the states will decide something that we aren't in favor of, in which case, yeah.
Yeah.
So it just, you know, it keeps happening and it goes back to following the rules versus not following the rules.
So, yeah, we're expecting that Supreme Court decision any day.
They don't, it's, it's widely felt that it won't take them long.
They've had the one hearing.
They don't, they don't have any other scheduled for that.
They went back to their chambers to write it up and discuss whatever they do.
Or they already had it written up and just went back to sign it.
Make everyone wait anyway.
I don't know.
Yeah.
But we should move on.
We got a couple more things to touch on before the end of this, which is that the Democrats, as we said, Marianne Williamson dropped out.
They just have Biden now.
No, nope, they still have Dean.
Who?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Dean Phillips, he is a congressman from Minnesota and he just up and decided a little while ago to run.
I mean, he has been absolutely shellacked in every election and should be dropping out, but for some reason isn't.
And no one really knows why or what his game is.
You know, it's really strange.
I mean, maybe he's hoping, you know, Biden will have health issues and then suddenly the Democratic Party will go to him, but no, they're not going to.
It's not going to.
They have a vice president to run if they just pick a new vice president for Kamala and Oilo Go, which does get right into the Biden talk, right?
I mean, Dean Phillips or no Dean Phillips, generally the Democratic Party has said, they told Marianne Williamson a long time ago, they told RFK Jr. a long time ago, we are going with the incumbent.
Joe Biden is pretty boring.
The only rhetoric I hear about Joe Biden from this side of the border is that, you know, he's too old.
It's difficult to say, which really weird because a lot of the people who say he's too old were people who were pretty enthusiastic about Bernie Sanders last election.
And he wasn't, Bernie Sanders wasn't too old for them at that time.
I think he was already over 80.
But Biden just turned 80 this year or just recently, I think, and he's now too old.
But of course, this is the same thing as I mentioned before, right?
It's choosing the evidence you have to get the political situation you want.
Yeah, absolutely.
They don't like Biden, so they'll say he's too old.
If they had a candidate that they liked better that was older, they would say, oh, that one's not too old, though, because of reason, blah, blah, blah.
And away they go.
Yeah, I mean, you see it on the Republican side.
They, you know, Trump is a whopping, what, three years younger or something like that.
And, you know, I mean, the evidence of Trump having problems thinking, you know, is are obvious.
They have been well documented.
He confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi.
He confused when Obama was president.
I think it's important.
Sorry, I think it's important to note the difference between him confusing those two and times where, like Biden just did one the other day where he mentioned the leader of, I think it was maybe Egypt instead of Libya or something like that, two world leaders and he put one in place of another.
It was a straight.
Right.
Right, right.
So when you are talking about the context of a thing, like, let's say I'm talking about the United States president and I mistake which president it is at this current moment, right?
That's that's a sort of gaffe like what Biden did.
But when I'm talking about when I'm trying to talk about, you know, Biden being president and then I start talking about England, that's a whole different level of, that's a whole different game of what's mistaken here.
Because at no point should anyone have confused Trump with being in charge of England and what's going on there.
So and that's exactly what Trump did with the Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi thing.
He was in context attempting to tell people why they should vote for him in the primary ahead of Nikki Haley.
And then he started going into all of the things that he has claimed in the past.
Nancy Pelosi did on January 6th.
Yeah, Nikki Haley, blah, blah, blah.
She didn't authorize any of these troops on January 6th and all of these, you know, and it's obvious that he mistook the meanings behind these names.
And that's a whole different level of mistake than just a gaff where you say the wrong person's name.
And that's.
Attempting to equate these two things is that, oh, yeah, they both had these mistakes, but Biden does this more or something like that.
That's completely flawed and needs to be put in context, which is a reason why we need to look at these real situations.
Yeah, I mean, as someone pointed out, you know, Biden was known for these gaffes when he was like in his 50s.
You know, he was no, I mean, it happens, you know, I mean, my own memory on certain things needs to be prodded.
I was known at work.
I could remember things, but sometimes you'd need to prod me.
You couldn't just say, like, my boss was famous for sending me two word notes.
And I'd be like, I have no idea what you're talking about.
You know, and because I mean, there were other issues there, but it made sense to her.
But then you got to tell me more of the story and then I remember it.
But if you just give me two words, I'm not going to necessarily remember it.
You know, I remember being, so my mother has very advanced Alzheimer's, but I went to the neurologist with her for one, I think, her first visit.
And, you know, they gave the test that Trump brags about passing, you know, man, camera, woman, whatever, the five words.
Okay.
I didn't pass everything in that test because now, partially I wasn't the one taking the test.
So I was, you know, but there were certain parts I was like, oh, that's, that's a little harder than you would think in some cases.
So like I told my kids, I was like, okay, if you give me this test in 30 years, just remember I didn't pass it now, you know, 100%.
So, you know, don't, don't, don't immediately, you know, assume anything here.
But, you know, the point is that everybody's memory works a little differently.
And so, you know, there's a reason.
I mean, there are multiple reasons, but there's a key reason I'm not in politics myself is I know that I, my memory does not work with names to associate with faces.
I will remember people's faces.
My memory just does not associate the name immediately with them.
Some people I remember, some people I don't.
And that can be awkward in social situations, but in political situations, it's disastrous.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, if, you know, if I were up there being questioned about something, I might misstate a name.
I might misstate a country, but I'd know what I was talking about.
Yeah.
And that's clearly not what happened when Trump got the meaning behind, you know, the actions of Nancy Pelosi mixed up with the actions of Nikki Haley.
And that needs to be underlined is that there are problems there.
And the way that we see those problems, the evidence of them is an indication of something different that's wrong.
Yes.
I just want to clock a few other things that are small.
Well, I don't know how small, but they are criticism, legitimate criticisms of Biden to some extent or other.
Some people question how appropriately he's handled COVID, given that he's essentially been ignoring it for two years now or so.
That's legitimate criticism.
That should be.
Yeah.
And I think that I agree.
They have not done a good job of it.
They have decided.
And, you know, this comes to a political decision.
I don't like it.
It's a political decision.
If they had kept hammering on things, people have decided to move on.
Whether or not, whether or not the politicians did.
Now, you could say he should be leading.
And I agree.
And there are certain things he should not have said and done.
But it's clear that a political decision has been made not to continually hammer on masks, not to continually hammer on these various aspects of things because they believe they will lose votes.
I unfortunately suspect they're right.
I think, yeah, I think that there are people who would do that.
And it is terrible when a health issue like this becomes a political issue.
But I don't know what your other option is.
Are you going to go back to Trump?
Billy?
I mean, there's a worse outcome.
Yeah.
I mean, there are a number of issues like this where people are like, I'm not voting for Biden because he did X.
And you look at it and you're like, okay, but whatever X is, it's going to be worse under Trump.
Yeah.
In every case.
And I hate the idea of voting for the lesser of two evils.
And I don't think Biden is evil.
So it's not even a case of that.
But not as, you know, you've got true evil versus not as good as you'd like to be.
The lesser of two undesirables, perhaps.
I wouldn't even call Biden undesirable.
I'd call him not as good.
Yeah.
You know, I think he is, I think his heart is in the right place.
I think his goals are in the right place.
I think that he's a political animal.
You know, I mean, he's been doing it for a long, long time.
And so have his staffers.
And so they're not going to do something that would turn people obviously against him or that turn the undecideds, the moderates, you might call them.
Yeah.
Well, it's, yeah, you're right.
It's sad when this health issue gets turned into this.
And there will be a price to pay for that too, eventually.
There is every day.
And also true is that our prime minister also doesn't seem to mask up very much anymore.
He used to be kind of a guy that did that, was one of the first to do that.
Of course, his wife had COVID very early in the pandemic.
Now ex-wife, now divorced, but this doesn't bother us in Canada.
We don't bat an eyelash really.
I mean, his dad also got divorced while in office.
It doesn't bother us at all.
Well, it only normally bothers Republicans, you know, like evangelicals until they came to Trump.
You know, then it's okay to have multiple wives, cheat on all of them, rape people, rape women.
You know, it doesn't, it doesn't matter.
That it might happen during their time as the leader would cause a media sensation, which in Canada, it's not even, it's not even a boiling pot, right?
It's, yeah, it's not even a meal.
It's like, oh, getting divorced.
Is he still going to show up for work?
Okay, great.
Yeah.
On we go.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, off we go then.
Another thing to note, that's pretty much all there is.
I mean, for Biden, there's another thing that comes up a little bit.
Some people have some level of rhetoric around, you know, whether he's giving too little or too much military assistance to some nations around the world.
But this is the same question that's asked of every president ever.
These are all, all of those things that I mentioned about Biden are sensible questions.
They're fair criticisms.
They're things that should be talked about.
Absolutely.
You should criticize your leaders.
You should criticize the people who have this level of decision-making over your lives.
Absolutely.
And those are real issues.
Comparing those side by side with the issues with the person that everyone feels is going to be the Republican nominee in that what he got accomplished in his first term versus, you know, what came of it, how it ended 91 separate charges in four jurisdictions that we just rattled off.
It doesn't, sadly, it doesn't even surprise me that this is a real candidate in the U.S. because it seems like some portion of the population just wants to do it just to clown the world.
I mean, I saw that.
I saw that when John Kerry was a candidate against George W. Bush in for the run up to the second term.
You had people that, you know, John Kerry was, he was just as boring as Biden.
There was so little about him that, you know, whatever, Swift vote.
I mean, what do you think he did?
He got shot in a boat at some point and they think it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a real bullet or like, what was that about?
It was, it was so much smoke and no fire.
Yeah.
He actually was in the military as opposed to George W. Bush, right?
It was, you know, that should have been highlighted there, but it wasn't.
The idea that he spoke French and this was somehow, I mean, he was married to a woman from France and he was in Vietnam where they speak French, right?
I mean, so he learned the language and I, and this was somehow like negative points for him.
And I, I just, all of that, it led me to believe that there's some portion of the population in the U.S. that would vote for the candidate that the world hates just to do it, just to thumb their nose at the world.
And this is what I thought when Trump first ran was that, oh, yeah, he can win because some of these same people will say, screw the rest of the world.
Oh, they don't want him.
That means he's our guy.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
This is a zero-sum game and we need to be on the winning side of it.
And therefore, if it's what the world doesn't want, then that's good for us.
And that the world isn't that simple shouldn't cause any surprise, but it does.
Yeah.
Here it was more, this is what liberals or Democrats don't want the most, and therefore we should vote for him.
I mean, there's literally a guy in my neighborhood here.
We walked by his house and he was flying a flag that said, you know, Trump 2024, make liberals cry again.
That's his reason.
You know, that's the reason that he is telling the world for wanting Trump back is to make liberals cry.
Yeah.
The political divisions have exacerbated to the point that your win can only be measured by the level of loss of the other side.
Right.
And that's, that's bully logic, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a bully only wins when they make the other side cry.
That's exactly the way it looks to a bully.
They, they only get an up when someone else gets it down.
Well, and that's what, I mean, that's what Trump is.
That's what he's always.
And that's especially, you know, what he's been now.
He, he attacks his opponents.
He calls them names.
He attacks their relatives.
And then in the end, they all at least outwardly support him.
And you know what?
After Nikki Haley drops out, she will bend the knee.
She will kiss the ring again.
Even though right now, like I said earlier, she's attacking him regularly, truthfully attacking him.
He has out, he attacked her husband and like said, oh, where's her husband been?
Like suggesting that he abandoned her or something.
He's in the National Guard fighting for the country.
Yeah.
You know, and no one said, where's Belanya?
Because she's probably hiding from him.
You know, she's certainly not in the National Guard.
And even after all that, I think it's about a 90% chance she will bow down and kiss the ring and be like, well, I still support him because, you know, we need to just like everyone else.
And it's, it's idiotic.
I mean, there's no other word for it.
It is, it is cult-like.
It is bullying.
But they all know, well, we have to support Trump now so that when he eventually is no longer in politics for whatever reason, you know, we talked about this last podcast.
We can inherit at least a chunk of the MAGA people.
Now, she's least likely.
Well, she and Vivek and, you know, what's his name?
Scott are the least likely because they're not white guys.
But still, at least there's, you know, they have some hope they believe.
And it's insane.
It's insane when a candidate gets a boost by their own level of delusion.
So speaking of their own level of delusion, I think I should just put a little side note here that there is one independent candidate, at least one, the only one I know of.
Maybe there's more, but there's one that I know of.
Just a quick note here.
I don't want to spend too much time on him because I hate when I have to put his name on the podcast, but RFK Jr. is still running as a candidate, independent candidate.
Traditionally, this hasn't worked out for candidates in the past being independents.
But, you know, if Trump goes to jail and Biden gets an inopportune stroke in October, then who knows what could happen with this guy, right?
I mean, he's trying to thread the needle here, right?
I don't even think he's doing that.
He's doing it for the same reason, but multiplied many times that I see.
This is Mary Ann Williamson.
Marianne Williamson.
He is, you know, he's trying to get more money and spread more disease because that's what he does.
I mean, he even, you know, through whatever means, he had a Super Bowl commercial.
Yeah, he did.
You know, and he used, talk about disrespect.
He used.
His PAC ran a Super Bowl at.
Yes.
He said he was hands off.
He's not allowed to directly communicate with them.
Right.
No coordination.
Yeah, right.
Of course.
Nobody ever does.
Right.
Of course, it's immediately pinned in the first, the pinned tweet on his account.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, it used his uncle's music and put his face where his uncle's was.
As much of that JFK power as possible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so now it is a pack.
So maybe, you know, and probably these were normally typically Republican donors trying to get him to steal votes from Biden.
I think Republicans were a little annoyed when he went independent because with his anti-vax, you know, beliefs.
More Republican than he does Democrat.
Right.
Which we wouldn't have been saying a few years ago, by the way.
But, you know, so it'll be interesting.
Well, I don't want to say interesting because I'd rather, you know, it's the old, the old, the old curse, may you live in interesting times.
I'd rather they be boring times.
It's like when I'm watching a basketball game with my wife and she says, oh, this is a good game.
And she says it because it's close.
And I'm like, no, a good game would be when my team is 20 points ahead and I'm not worried about it.
Yeah.
This is, you know, this is a tight game.
You know, if I had no stake in it, yes, it would be a good game.
So, you know, from standpoint of that, yeah, this, you know, could be quote unquote interesting, but I'd rather, you know, that that take place in some other world rather than the one we're living in, where, you know, you have Trump out there, you know, promoting dictatorship, his dictatorship, you know, telling Russia to attack the fellow NATO countries.
And then you have a lot of the typical allegedly liberal media pulling butter emails, you know, instead of reporting on the literally insane stuff Trump is saying, they're like, oh, they'll soften the language that Trump uses to make it more palatable somehow.
Right.
And then they'll ramp up the seeming level of accusation about Biden because what's really weird is it's almost some level of like what referees in hockey used to do where they felt like they had to call the same number of penalties for both teams, especially when it was the playoffs and it was really important.
And someone tried to remind them, no, you have to just call the penalties that exist.
You can't just, you know, yeah, you, this guy was hooking.
So what you get to call a hooking penalty on the other side just because you did it to this side.
That guy really did hooking.
You have to wait for these guys to do it.
You can't just, oh, and it's, it's both sidesism, right?
It's the idea that what the media really wants is a good game.
Like you say, a good game, a good close game because it sells more newspapers.
It gets more eyeballs on the news if it's a really close game, if both sides are neck and neck and it's they're really comparable and they're, you know, this is going to be a close one.
You, you know, you don't know which side to bet on.
And that's what the media really wants.
You can call it left.
You can call it right.
It doesn't really matter.
That's what they really, really want is a close game, an exciting game to report on.
Yeah, but you'd, you'd think that they'd also really want to exist after Trump wins, if they help him win again.
Because you know what?
Trump idolizes people like Putin, people like the leader of North Korea, people like the leader of China.
And you know what happens to media who report poorly on their leaders in those countries?
They're either shut down or they mysteriously fall through a high window.
Definitely is a real word for it.
Yes.
And so you would think that these media people might be thinking about that.
And apparently they're not.
Yeah, I really like, I really, really like that the little blurb about RFK Jr. just turns in and talk about Trump.
That's because he's really not worth mentioning all that much.
Other than that he just had an ad in the Super Bowl and it's controversial.
A member of his family, one of his cousins, made a public statement about the fact that they don't support him or his anti-vaccine views shortly after the commercial aired on the Super Bowl.
But I just want to remind everyone to whom this might matter that an RFK Jr. presidency would plunge the world into an unvaccinated darkness in which diseases like the measles would spread rapidly through neighborhoods near you as RFK Jr. sits in the White House safely insulated as he and his children are all vaccinated, declaring victory over vaccine side effects, which are mostly mild inflammation and headaches.
Such a terrible trade-off could only be manufactured by a U.S. president.
Yeah.
Right.
And with that, I think we should just wrap this up.
Where can people find you, David?
So people can find me.
The easiest way is through my link tree, which is linktree slash David Bloomberg.
And there's a dot before the EE in Linktree in the URL.
And that will take you to all my different social media sites.
I spend most of my time, alas, on Twitter.
And so on Twitter and Blue Sky, I am at David Bloomberg.
I also have video accounts for definitely non-political things, just reality TV.
I am at David Bloomberg TV there.
And I'm also at David Bloomberg TV on threads because that's connected to Instagram.
Right.
They didn't think that through, I think, personally, but whatever.
Or they did, and they were just like, we don't care.
We're just going to connect it.
But yeah, there's a lot of people who posted something, you know, like John's pictures, you know, as someone's Instagram account.
And now they're on threads.
And it's like, oh, okay.
Yeah, I'm not posting pictures here, you know.
Zuckerberg, one of our currently benevolent overlords.
Yes.
And less malevolent, I guess, I would say.
Well, I call them currently benevolent because to me, they all have the opportunity to eventually turn malevolent.
The fact that they're not currently malevolent shouldn't fool any of us.
Yes.
So yeah, I am found on Twitter at Spencer G. Watson because I foolishly didn't see the wave and get there first among the Spencer Watsons.
There is, by the way, I should mention that some other person named Spencer Watson attempted to add all the other Spencer Watsons as friends on Facebook and then start a group chat of just Spencer Watsons.
It was incredibly confusing.
It only lasted about two hours.
No one could tell what anyone was saying because they tried to have a conversation and completely forgot which one had told them which thing.
I should screenshot that before it goes away and publish it somewhere because just hilarious.
Just hilarious.
But yeah, Spencer G. Watson on Twitter and Spencer Watson39 on threads.
And I think I'm also Spencer G. Watson on Blue Sky.
Maybe I'm a Spencer Watson there.
But you'll find me if you look.
And we'll sign off.
So it's fun having you again.
Thank you.
And hopefully at some point by the end of all these discussions, we will be able to say it's been fun.
Otherwise, I don't know.
A lot of people say, well, I'm going to move to Canada if this happens.
I just can't take the cold.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to have to find someplace.
There's warm places in Canada warmer than Michigan.
Or Illinois.
Sorry.
Warmer than Illinois.
Pardon me.
If I was to hit Michigan with an atomic bomb, it would affect you in Illinois, I'm sure.
It's close enough from my perspective.
I'm way over on the West Coast where the warmth is, David.
It's not so cold.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, uh, it doesn't really matter if people want to move to Canada because uh, if so many people from the U.S. wanted to really, really wanted to do that, there's no way we could close that border well enough to keep them out.
So, I guess we'd probably just say with a shrug, welcome to Canada, yeah, with an uncertain lilt, as sometimes we've done before.