Fear and Unity in Milwaukee
2024-07-17 00:45:42
Pod Save America is a no-bullshit conversation about politics hosted by former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor. It cuts through the noise to break down the week’s news and helps people figure out what matters and how they can help. They’re regularly joined by journalists, activists, politicians, entertainers, and world leaders. You can watch on YouTube or listen to new episodes every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Ad-Free Pod Save America episodes available NOW through Friends of the Pod subscription. Head to crooked.com/friends to join today! For a transcript of an episode of Pod Save America, please email transcripts@crooked.com (edited)
Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau.
I'm Jon Leavitt.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer. I'm Tommy Viseur.
On today's show, the Republican convention wraps up its second night with a parade of former Trump critics and opponents bending the knee to their MAGA god.
Trump tries to get RFK Jr.
's endorsement with some anti-vax pandering in a leaked video of the two men chatting. The Trump campaign now thinks they can put states like New Jersey and Maine in play, and the effort to convince Joe Biden to step aside appears to be coming back to life in response to the DNC's plan to officially nominate the president as early as next week. But let's start with day two at the Republican convention, where the theme was making people afraid of immigrants and making former Trump opponents compete to see who could get their head the farthest up his ass. We'll let you be the judge. Here's some of what was said by Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ted Cruz, and Nikki Haley.
My fellow Republicans, let's send Joe Biden back to his basement and let's send Donald.
Trump back to the White House. If you want to make America great again, vote Trump.
God bless, Donald J. Trump. Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period. All right. Under the heading of.
we watch the convention, so you don't have to, did you guys see or hear anything notable from the stage tonight? Tommy, let's start with you.
Jim Justice, the governor of West Virginia, brought his dog out, baby dog Justice.
Interesting that he brought the dog out the night after Kristi Noem spoke.
Yes.
You're the first person to make that joke today.
You know what, I've been trying to produce the show. I didn't even know. I didn't even know that was a fucking joke.
John, it was a good joke.
I was also reminded that Vivek Ramaswamy is a person who exists and he has a repellent personality that came out today.
Jim Justice has the kind of.
We're going all in on the Jim Justice speech analysis, huh?
It was the most interesting by far. CNN went crazy for the dog.
Yes. Everything else is pretty boring. on stage. He has the kind of demeanor of the villain in a Matlock episode where...
That's relatable.
Somewhere, Joe Biden gets his finger on the cultural pulse.
I just want to say. I think, ideology, partisanship aside, the speeches are so bad.
Boring. It's very boring.
So bad.
Paint by numbers.
It's just like.
. I don't know. Can people give a good speech anymore? No. It's all recycled lines, all cliches, all shit that you've heard before.
Not like the music back in our day. They knew what rock and roll was back then.
Even like George W. Bush, could give a good speech back in the day. Nikki Haley came, like maybe the closest to giving an okay speech. Eh.
Eh. Eh. Is right. Right.
You guys are out of the office. Dan, and I watched Carrie Lake. She did a much more muted version of herself. Everything was a little toned down. The previewing that it would be less crazy, this convention, than the last one has been true so far.
Her rhetoric is now sepia toned, is what I would say.
Her rhetoric is.
. They're shooting the rhetoric through the gauze.
I mean, they did have placards that were saying Biden, border, bloodbath. They used the term Weekend at Bernie's Presidency. I'm talking about sort of violence, right? They talked about... Ted Cruz did a whole thing that basically said Democrats purposely released undocumented immigrants who went on to commit rape and murder because they wanted their votes.
They all did the replacement theory. That stuff was not very toned down.
Yeah. And then also just the... It's just Elise Stefanik getting up there and talking about the Biden crime wave. And it's like, we all know that crime has been going down since it peaked in 2020, but you wouldn't know it by watching it, but it almost seems like beside the point.
I mean, it was interesting that Donald Trump was in the arena again to watch.
Of course he was.
Just sitting up there, like some wannabe Roman Empire, just watching his former.
He wanted to thumbs down Ron DeSantis so hard.
He enjoys nothing more than watching people just discredit themselves for him.
Yeah. Nikki Haley finished speaking and he stood up and he said, give it up for Birdbrain. Give it up for Birdbrain, everyone.
He loves it. It's a conflict.
Tiny D. Let's hear it for Tiny D.
It's a conflict, right, because he enjoys people supplicating themselves before him, but he is also quite bored because he has to pay attention. So that was a struggle. The most interesting moments were offstage. One was Matt Gaetz harassing Kevin McCarthy, and then a bystander harassing Matt Gaetz and calling him an asshole. And then Matt Gaetz turns and faces that guy and goes, I don't even know who you are.
And that guy's like, I don't care if you know who I am. You're an asshole. And Matt Gaetz just walks away with his sort of defeated by it, which I loved. Good hit. And then Rudy Giuliani got into a fight with a row of folding chairs and lost.
You see this? He kind of just careened over a set of folding chairs and-.
They're for the grace of God.
Well, that's sure. And, but I felt bad for you. You see it. Did you? It wasn't just that he fell over.
It was how long it took them to get him back up. And ever since he told someone at Mar-a-Lago, and it was overheard by Page Six, that he feels as though he's trapped in a living nightmare. I feel bad for him.
Yeah. Well, join the club, Rudy.
Let's talk about Nikki Haley's speech. So first of all, she got cheers. No boos for Nikki Haley. She started off by saying, Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period, which, you know, she had obviously said before that she was voting for him. It was not a full-throated endorsement before.
So now she has decided to just leave it all behind. She's back. She's back. She said, you don't have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him. We must expand our party.
Certainly the only speaker so far at the convention that has said anything like that. Will anyone care? Will any swing voters tune in and hear that? What do you think, Tim?
No, I don't think they will tune in. I don't think they care. And Nikki Haley, speaking at this convention, is not Hillary Clinton speaking at the 2008 convention. It's not Bernie Sanders speaking at the 2016 convention. Nikki Haley is nothing more than a basically generic vessel for anti-Trump Republicans.
They don't care about Nikki Haley. They don't have Nikki Haley signs in their yard.
Many of them can't figure out of a lineup. Many of them didn't even know she had dropped out of the race that they voted for.
A lot of them voted after she had already dropped out. It was just a protest vote.
Yeah. The narrative of what will happen with the Nikki Haley voters, they'll probably vote for Joe Biden again, like they did in 2020..
We hope.
Right.
That's the best case. They're still a persuasion target, but their affiliation with Nikki Haley tells you nothing about them.
Right. It's not like she has a hold on a section of the party, like a Bernie Sanders did, like a Hillary Clinton did in a way.
I think that goes to why the speeches feel so ineffective. more broadly. Even that statement, like, he, has my strong endorsement, period. As if she's saying that in defiance of some media campaign to say that she hasn't endorsed it. Well, she hasn't.
Right. She hadn't actually endorsed him. It was an open question as to whether she would. She did dodge it for a long time. And there's a way in which both her and DeSantis and Ted Cruz, they're performing this version of themselves that is just so completely phony.
And it leads to them with these kind of grandiose, overwritten speeches that all feel pretty empty. Because none of them are saying what they really think. They're putting on a show for Jabba.
Yeah. All I could think when I saw Ron DeSantis come out was he might be the biggest loser of the JD Vance pick in terms of people getting leapfrogged for next up.
Well, and his speech is just like he. just he is not cut out for this. He's not cut out for the, for the, for the, for the big stage, like a bunch of lines. You can tell that, like some consultants or advisors or speechwriters wrote him. like, you know, he did.
Our enemies don't consign their designs to between 10 a.
m. and 4 p.m. Right. America can't afford four more years of a weekend at Bernie's presidency. Right.
So he did. But he's like his voice still with the voice too fast, too annoying, too yelly. He's yelling the whole time. He's a little sweaty. He's just not the one that doesn't have it.
The one thing I thought watching this convention is they are so lucky that they have Donald Trump, because so far there's not one other Republican that's taken the stage that you're like, oh, I'm worried about that person. That person has gravitas. Like they. just it, just. No one has it.
Yeah. In fairness, we left right as Eric Schmidt started speaking here to four unknown senator from Missouri. Yeah.
Google guy who was like? who was like, my presence on the stage is unlikely. I'm a tall white guy from Missouri. What are you talking about?
This spot has been held for your whole life.
It's the likeliest presence of anyone. All right. So another group getting speaking slots today were the Republican Senate candidates and key races. We've talked a lot about Democratic Senate candidates and how they're all polling ahead of Biden. But it also seems like the Republican Senate candidates in these swing states are polling behind Trump.
Dan, what do you think's going on there?
In most cases, they are pulling behind Trump because they are thoroughly unknown. Yeah. Right. Eric, they. Eric Hovde is in Wisconsin, Sam Brown in Nevada, David Cormack, a little more well-known, because he at least had run the Republican primary.
But they're just that he lost once already.
So it's just. they don't have any real name ID. And so there are a couple different ways to look at these races, right? You have a handful of incumbent Democrats like Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, Timmy Baldwin, Bob Casey, who have independent, strong brands, and they are running well ahead of Biden. Their coalitions look much like a traditional Democratic coalition.
They don't have Biden's same struggles with young voters or independent voters, or black voters or Latino voters, whatever else. they look like a 2020 Democrat. Then you have Jackie Rosen in Nevada, and Alyssa Slotkin, who is running for an open seat in Michigan, who are basically running as generic Democrats, right? Jackie Rosen, not well known. They are still pulling ahead if they're Republican candidates, but they are pulling at about Biden's level, right?
Their top line number is in the low 40s. There is a poll out today which has one poll that has Slotkin up in the high 40s. That's the first one I've seen like that. And then you have the Arizona Senate race, which is unique because Ruben Gago, who's not super well known, but he is running against Kerry Lake, who is incredibly well known and incredibly unpopular. And so she's sort of functioning as the incumbent and anti incumbent race there.
And so there's a bunch of different things happening there. There's reasons in some of those incumbent races to have hope for Democrats, no matter what happens at the top of the ticket. Where you have a lesser known Democrat, that's where there could be drag if Biden doesn't perform strongly in those states.
And you would imagine that once the Trump campaign and Republicans really start spending money in some of these Senate races on TV, that, like at least Trump's number in these states, is achievable for a lot of these Republican Senate candidates, who aren't like a Kerry Lake, right? Who is well known and crazy. But some of these were just, you know, the Republicans did a decent job getting the... They're still pretty crazy. And they're still pretty extreme, a lot of these Republican Senate candidates, but they didn't do a 2022...
They're more generic. They're more generic than they have been in the past.
And it's worth remembering that in the states that are swing states, in the presidential, Joe Biden has been on TV fairly heavily and Donald Trump has not.
So tonight's theme was making America safe. Once again, we're doing once. We haven't talked about this yet. Everything is making America wealthy once again, making America safe once again, making America great once again. I think you don't need the once.
You could have gone. make America great again, again.
They tried that.
Well, they tried that. It felt... It was tough.
That was the 20.
. That was that... Yeah. No, what was 2020??
I think that's.
Make America.
. Keep America great. Oh, yes.
He did roll out, make America great again, again.
Kaga. Kaga.
Kaga. Make America great again, but she also...
It was just Kaga, right?
Just Kaga.
Kaga, right. So tonight's theme featured a bunch of, quote, everyday Americans talking about things like immigration and crime. You know, got really dark and awful. How persuasive do you guys think that was for voters beyond the MAGA base? Ted Cruz took a lot of this, right?
He told.
. He kept doing every damn day and then he would tell another story of someone who was murdered by an undocumented immigrant.
Tommy? Well, it's a... Grizzly. crime stories are a feature of most Donald Trump events. I'm not totally sure how effective they were tonight.
It's worth noting, just for context, I mean, in November of 2023, there was some polling on this, I think, from Gallup, that found 77% of Americans said they believe there was more crime in the US than a year ago, including 55% who said the same about their local area. So it was a national issue in their mind and a local issue. Now, again, since 2002, that annual poll has found that a majority of Americans think crime is on the rise every year, even when it's falling, usually sort of in the 60% level or not. So it's not clear to me how much of a vote driver crime will be this year, as opposed to every year. It may be that we Americans just always think crime is a problem and on the rise.
In reality, violent crime has decreased year over year, but those statistics aren't as lurid as the stories you are hearing out of someone like Ted Cruz. So I just, I don't know how salient the issue is compared to a year ago or two years ago, when crime really spiked.
I mean, the rubric that Donald Trump wants in this race is strong versus weak. And that only works if people are scared, right? It's the famous Bill Clinton line about someone, you would rather have somebody strong and wrong than right and weak. And that works when people are scared and insecure and afraid. So you have to gin up fear, right?
It's basically the entire reason that Fox News exists is to scare the living shit out of people that a terrorist, an immigrant, some other person is going to come to your community and your family is at risk, so that you will then put aside other things you may care about, like higher minimum wage, more fair tax system, access to abortion in order to vote for the candidate. you think of multiple criminal convictions to vote for the candidate that you think will keep you safe.
Fear and unity. That's the, those are the themes.
That's actually basically.
. That is fascism.
It's unity for us and then be afraid of the people who aren't like us. And to your point, minimum wage, abortion, those issues haven't really made an appearance yet. You don't hear about those a lot at this convention. So they have done... I mean, boiling it down to just strong versus weak, it also reveals, like there's...
Do you hear anyone talking about, like policy, what Donald Trump's going to do, what to do about the immigration, broken immigration system, what to do about inflation? I don't know. It's just like Donald Trump is strong. He will get in there and things will be better.
We heard some build the wall chants.
There was some talk of mass deportations. Right.
Yeah. But not a lot of solutions from this crowd.
I would just say, watching this for two days now, one, I want to apologize to myself for that, but is, this is a party that desperately wants to win.
Oh yeah.
They are on script. Like the unity thing's mostly bullshit, but they have tempered the crazy from like a 15 to like a seven. I don't think I've heard a single thing about the 2020 election in any of these speeches.
Me either.
Right. They know that is a massive vulnerability for Trump and they are not talking about it. They want to win. Donald Trump wants to win and stay out of jail. And that sort of discipline is, throughout the speaker line up here, as boring and lame as many speeches are, they are not doing damage to the effort to elect Trump.
Right. Yeah. Like, I don't know necessarily that they're moving voters to their side, but you're right that they're not doing any damage because, to the extent that they're saying crazy stuff, which they all are in their speeches, it's all language and rhetoric that we've heard before from them. It's not anything new and extreme or new and great. Like.
it's all sort of warmed over crazy.
They feel like they're winning, and that's pretty unifying. Nothing brings a team together. Like a feeling like they're winning. There've been a bunch of reporting from different places about reporters being surprised by just the feeling of being on the ground in Milwaukee, that they expected a kind of darker, scarier version of Republican politics. But after the assassination attempt, given how poorly Joe Biden is performing and the fact that the polls look so good for him in these swing states, it's a joyous affair.
They're having a fucking blast.
Well, we'll be the judge of that, because we'll be there tomorrow.
Yeah, we will.
Speaking of polling, here's some interesting convention news. Politico reported that on Tuesday afternoon, Trump pollster, Tony Fabrizio, talked with the Florida delegation about just how good the campaign thinks the map looks for them. Fabrizio said that the Sunbelt states are locked up for Trump, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida. But he also said that they now think Minnesota, Virginia, New Mexico, and New Jersey are toss-ups. He claimed that the campaign might even make a play for Maine.
Fabrizio also reportedly bragged that the campaign is this competitive without having done much in the way of TV ads, which is true. And he said, quote, get ready, they're coming. How much of this, Dan, do you attribute to Trump, world cockiness? And how much of it do you think is real?
It's not Trump world cockiness. There is a strain of thought in Republican politics that goes back to Lee Atwater, which is you should always look like you're winning, is a wisdom of crowds approach to politics. It's why Bush sent Cheney to Hawaii in 2004, to make it look like you're winning. You're always on offense.
I do remember that. And also claimed New Jersey was in play.
Yep. Republicans claim New Jersey in play in every election. I don't know if it is here or not, but it's worth remembering that Phil Murphy barely beat a heretofore unknown truck driver, I think, new to politics in the 2021 gubernatorial race. I don't want to like depress people or scare people, but what Tony Fabrizio was saying about New Mexico, Maine, Virginia is showing up in private polls that Democrats are passing around everywhere. Yeah.
Yeah. We haven't talked about Martin Heinrich, who's the democratic center from New Mexico and people associated with their, they're worried about his race because Joe Biden's pulling so poorly there.
Well, you look at all the polls, we can debate the size of the margin, all of these, but there is a consistent theme, which is that Biden struggles with a certain number of groups, black and Latinos, primarily men and younger men, Republican leading independents, the Trump Biden voters and young voters in the States that we're talking about here are ones that over index on a lot of those groups. It's why Virginia is in play. Even though it is the reason that it turned democratic, for Barack Obama in 2008 became a safe democratic state years after. that are the same reason that Joe Biden is struggling with it because of the demographic change in that state, which used to benefit Democrats and is now hurting us. If those Biden continues to struggle with those groups, do you think Democrats will?
have to spend money to defend some of these states, like New Mexico, Minnesota?
We shouldn't.
I mean, if we do, it's a huge deal. Yeah, that's what folks need to understand. is there's not unlimited money out there. You're budgeting, you're budging for really expensive ad spends in a lot of big, major cities. And all of a sudden, if you're putting ads on air in Washington, D.C.
or the twin cities, like that, is going to impact everything else you do.
You can't, right? I may be the only person who will remember this, but in 2012,, when we were running for election, we knew we were going to be massively outspent by the right, because it was the first post-Citizens United presidential campaign and the right had raised hundreds of millions of dollars in super PACs. We did not have that apparatus. So we knew the Republicans would outspend the Democratic side. And so Plouffe and Axelrod and others made the decision that we were not going to run ads in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, because if we, because we had to get to 270, we had to get Ohio and Virginia.
And there's no way, the states are correlated. And so if you are losing Pennsylvania, you're not winning Ohio. And so, in order to husband our resources so that we could compete in these states, including Florida, which was a big, important state for us, we said we were not going to spend money in those states. And we did not do that other than one brief period of time when we had to go up in either Michigan or Wisconsin at the very end, briefly. And so if you're in the Biden land, you can't afford to be in all those states.
So you're going to have to spend all your money on the blue wall states because that seemed. and look, if you're losing Maine and second district in Nebraska, if you were losing.
Maine or Virginia or New Mexico, you're winning nowhere.
It's look, ads don't just fall out of a coconut tree, they exist in the context of all that came before. But no, if we are talking about spending money in those places, we are talking about Senate candidates and house candidates who are running away from Joe Biden and trying to save themselves. We were talking about Joe Biden after having spent tens of million dollars in ads that haven't seemed to change the dynamic in this race, suddenly facing an influence of Trump money, tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in money from Trump's backers. There's been story after story in the past couple of days of all of these people, from Elon Musk on down deciding they're going to pour money into this race. So you know, if we're talking about the Biden campaign and whether or not they should be spending in Virginia, we're talking about senators everywhere desperately trying to save themselves and running away from the Democratic ticket and saying how they will be a check on Trump.
Like that's the world we'll be living in, in the fall.
And these things sometimes change over the summer, right? A lot of these states that are traditionally Democratic, Republican revert back to the mean as more people to do the race, right? In that undecided pool. So we may be just like. Trump may certainly outperform his 2020 numbers in all of these states, and Biden might still win all of them.
And likely, probably, will.
Just to be clear, I'm describing a scenario, I'm not claiming it as what's happening.
So Trump's apparently feeling confident enough that he took a crack at getting RFK Jr. to endorse him. The two reportedly met in Milwaukee on Monday. Trump also called Kennedy on Sunday and Kennedy took the call on speakerphone while his in-house videographer, according to Kennedy, was rolling for something else. You can hear Trump saying on the call that the bullet going past his ear sounded like, quote, the world's largest mosquito, that he had a nice call with Biden, where the president asked him how he managed to duck out of the way.
Trump also asked for Kennedy's endorsement and then told Kennedy how much he agrees with him on childhood vaccines. Let's listen.
Is Trump like a pediatrician? I didn't know that. He's seen it. all the time. He watches them get the vaccines, then he watches the babies change.
You know, babies, 10 pounds, 20 pounds. Babies. Look, I've seen babies by the hogshead dealing with this kind of problem. Metric tons of baby experiencing these kinds of problems.
So RFK Jr.
's son posted and then deleted the video with an apology. The Biden campaign put out a statement saying the video is proof that Trump can't be trusted to protect Americans' health care. Kennedy reportedly declined to drop out and endorse Trump, at least for now. Trump was talking in that same video about like, maybe there's a big job you can do, a big, like. he's trying to give him a job, get an endorsement.
He's trying to do something here. Let's start with Trump's anti-vax pandering, which he's also been doing in his stump speech. It's not like we needed a secretly recorded video. He's out there saying, I'm not giving a penny to any state that has, where schools have any kind of mandates, not just mask mandates, but vaccine mandates or anything.
Have you interpreted that to not mean COVID vaccine, but for all vaccines?
He said it repeatedly. He has said it repeatedly. He will no vaccine mandates of any kind, half funding for education, get rid of the Department of Education. Like that is his position. He's not, he's not characterized it as COVID and I don't think we should do any work for him.
If he ever sat down. No, no, I know.
I'm out of the situation.
Well, if he ever sat down for an interview with a reporter that was not like a right wing reporter, maybe they would ask him that if, perhaps if he had debated someone who could have brought that up at the debate, we could have learned it there too. But yeah, no, he will not. He has tried to skate over this by just making it seem like it's COVID vaccines for people like that, but also nodding to and pandering to the anti-vax crowd, which is what he did here on this call with RFK. dangerous, obviously also kind of dumb in a general election, although I don't know. What do you guys think to just be out there doing vaccine, being against all kinds of, like childhood vaccine?
Well, first of all, just my reaction is like whenever you hear Trump in context, where he doesn't think he's being recorded or it's for public consumption, he's just like, I got to call that fucking RFK guy. What is he like? Oh yeah. He's crazy about the vaccine. So I'll just tell him the vaccine thing.
See if that works. Maybe try to get him a job. Just very transactional. Very simple.
Back to that speech where he was like, Oh, see, I just talked about tax cuts and no one's clapping. And then I was talking about this trend stuff, and you're all, you're all clapping and applauding. That used to never be like that. A couple of years ago.
I guess I'll keep saying it.
It's just like, is the most, it's like pure cynicism.
We're losing to a Skinner box.
He is actually more of a politician than any politician else in the market.
I'm a big outsider. No, it's like, you know, you just tell any single fucking person exactly what they want to hear, and then you do not deliver in any way, shape or form. That's it. That's like, that is Trump to his core.
I think that anti-childhood vaccine stuff is like a marker of extremism for a lot of voters. And so it was good to do. It's also just funny. Like what it's like to work on a campaign. It's like the Biden folks have to put out the same one.
They want to just say, it's like, that. shit's weird.
Well, I do think like, I think, like, I think the reason project 2025 took off is that it plays into something we don't often get to play into. There is a secret recording of Donald Trump colluding with one of his opponents to try to defeat the Democrats and to take away childhood vaccines from schools. Like, I feel like we're not making enough of the secret leaks caught image. It looks bad. It looks sinister.
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, I think the Trump campaign views all of the third party candidates as tools to help them. They're trying to get Cornel West on the ballot in various states. They are clearly colluding with RFK's campaign and having him continue to run because it helps them. I think one of, someone who, a top person on RFK's campaign, essentially said as much in another leak video a few weeks back, which is basically like, we're all in this to defeat Joe Biden.
Now, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a narcissist with a massive ego that wants to promote exactly these insane anti-vaccine views that we are now discussing. So win-win for him to stick around and do Trump's bidding until the time when they deem him no longer useful, and maybe he drops out. But clearly he's angling for some sort of elevation of the issues he cares about, some job for himself.
I mean, this is working for him.
How much do you guys think a Kennedy endorsement of Trump would matter, change the race?
I think it would matter. I actually do. Like the Joe Rogans of the world will not have Donald Trump on the show, but he will of RFK Jr. and he believes and trusts Robert F. Kennedy.
RFK going on that show and endorsing Trump would be a big deal in my opinion.
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, Kennedy's, he had been at as high as 15% in the polling average a few months ago. He's down 8% now. That'll probably continue to go down, but I mean, that's four times the margin right now. Right.
And there's probably some of his voters that don't like Donald Trump, but if, you know, they're parking their votes for Kennedy and if he thinks he's telling them it's okay to be for Trump, you know, he's obviously Trump's not going to get all those people because they've already decided they don't like Trump, but get some, you only need a little, you know, and he's already ahead.
So I think loose kooks go to Trump. But, like, I, also just, the political space Donald Trump has because of the support among Republicans that he has, like it is inconceivable to us that Joe Biden would call, and he shouldn't call, RFK to get his endorsement. Like it is such an assumption that Donald Trump can say whatever he wants, appeal to whoever he wants. Like that, that, like freedom to move, is an advantage he has, and it just, I don't know,
just sucks. Yeah. Lying is an advantage in politics, for sure.
Right. But also lying, and the fealty he has of his base that just trust him, no matter what he says or does.
All right. Just quickly before we go to break, like we said, we're going to be in Milwaukee Wednesday and Thursday. And then on Friday, July 19th, we're hopping over to Madison. Yeah, we are. For a live show at the Orpheum Theater with co-host Aaron Haynes and guest Ben Wickler.
And on Saturday, the 20th, Love It or Leave It will also be in Madison, joined by special guests Thomas Lennon, Victoria Vincent, former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, and state representative Francesca Hong at the Barrymore Theater.
I'm going to have four days of dairy and then I'll fly myself home.
Glad I'm not on that plane. Glad I'm not on that plane.
Safer than a Boeing. And more reliable.
Speaking of loose nukes.
Head to Crooked.
com slash events to grab tickets. now. When we come back, we'll be talking about the Biden campaign and why the DNC is planning a virtual roll call ahead of the convention.
OK, last night we talked about whether the effort to replace Biden was dying out. Pretty clear after today that it has not. The Times reported this morning that Congressman Adam Schiff, the Democratic nominee for Senate in California, just told donors at a fundraiser in New York over the weekend, quote, I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose and we may very well lose the Senate and lose our chance to take back the House. That's according to someone who saw a transcript of the event. He also told the crowd that the Biden team isn't listening to opposing views right now.
An anonymous House Democrat also told Axios, quote, the replace Biden movement is back. One member talking about this on the record is Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who Tommy interviewed on Pod Save the World today. Here's what he said. Very early Sunday morning, the first phone call I got was from a colleague who agrees with me, as the majority of Democrats in Congress do, but, like most, hasn't come out and said it publicly. And he just said, what do we do?
It's even more urgent now. I mean, Trump is going to ride this assassination attempt right into the White House. The only chance we have is a change at the top of the ticket. Tommy, what did Seth say about what his colleagues are saying in private, and does he think more will come out or?
Yeah, I mean, I asked him, I think, the question that we've all had, which was, it felt like there was growing momentum in Congress from Democrats calling on Biden to drop out. And I asked him if that momentum had stalled out after Saturday. And he said, actually, no, in private, concerns have only increased. People are even more worried that Trump is going to ride this scary assassination attempt to victory and use it for political advantage, and that people are talking about it even more. They're just not all together right now.
I think they're all home. So this is happening on text. So I do think these efforts that we'll talk about in a minute to potentially move up the nomination vote have pissed off a lot of people. There might be some more, you know, momentum might be picking back up in terms of people coming out publicly to call on Biden to drop out. But Seth's message to them was like, what's the point of being in politics if you're not going to say what you think?
You know what I mean? Like, what, how can you possibly say your concern now and sit on your hands and then wake up after election day and live with yourself?
Well, so let's talk about the development that also restarted this conversation, which is the DNC's continued push to hold a virtual roll call vote on the nomination, apparently as early as next week. This is not a new plan exactly, and it originally had to do with making sure the Democratic ticket appears on the ballot in states like Ohio that have deadlines in early August, before the Democratic convention. All of this is because the Democratic convention is quite late this year, and some of these deadlines are in early August and obviously the Democratic conventions in late August. But even though Ohio just passed a law, Republican legislature, Republican governor, to give Democrats more time to get on the ballot after their convention, the DNC is still moving forward with the virtual roll call vote, which is leading some Democrats in Congress to believe that it's all about nominating Biden as quickly as possible. in an effort to end the conversation about him, stepping aside.
Congressman Jared Huffman, one of the members who's been vocal about the challenges that Biden presents, is now circulating a letter for other Democrats to sign that asked the DNC to call off the roll call vote. We don't know how many members have signed on, but we do know that several frontline members, including Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, Mike Levin of California, Pat Ryan of New York plan to sign it. Huffman told the Times the DNC forcing the roll call would be, quote, a power play of the highest order. Former DNC chairs Donna Brazile, Howard Dean, and Terry McAuliffe sent their own letter today in favor of the DNC's virtual roll call vote. They don't mention Biden, but argue that this is the best way to ensure the Democratic ticket is on the ballot in every state.
Dan, who's right?
Both sort of, and no one, I mean, the prior to the debate, the plan the DNC was putting in place makes sense. Even if Ohio has changed the law, you want to be extra careful, because it's not just Ohio. States like California and Washington have their ballot access certification deadlines at the outset of the Democratic convention.
20th, 22nd, 23rd, or some of those states.
And there is a turnaround time between when Biden is actually nominated and you get all the signatures, notarized, et cetera, and filed appropriately. What has happened in previous years is you basically send a pledge to, that you're going to send the real stuff and they will swap them out. when you send the real stuff, like almost an IOU for notarized signatures. That's been fine. People are very worried that in this new world of insane MAGA election interference, they're going to try to deny Democrats ballot access.
So in a completely, in a world where Biden's obviously going to be the nominee, this is all pro forma, just do it early, get it done. They came up with this-.
And not because, not even because the concerns are like- Why not? It's better to be safe than sorry. Why not? Why would you even risk it?
Belt and suspenders, right? And then, and the timing makes sense too, because it is a relatively complicated process to get all these people. You have to get a majority of the delegates to vote. Their votes have to be certified in some way, shape, or form. That takes time.
They're going to give themselves-.
Several thousand people.
It's almost 3,000 people. They gave themselves time to do it. They put that plan in place, debate happened, debate about the debate happened, and now they're proceeding with the plan as if they were, and they're in this position. that is very challenging, because if you change the plan, you're acknowledging the legitimacy and possibility that there could actually be a change at the top of the tech, which is very hard for the DNC, which is run by Joe Biden, to do. But if you go with the old plan, you further inflame the division within the party that has come since the debate.
And so we are sort of-.
Which is why you get these talking points from DNC Chair, Jamie Harrison and others that sound so bullshitty, because they're only, what he has decided is, well, I'm going to blame the Republicans in Ohio and say that, like, you know, even though they passed a law to say that Democrats could be on the ticket, we're going to make people believe that maybe they'll change their mind and pass another law, you know, like, and it doesn't really pass the smelt test. Now, it's true that Republicans in the Ohio legislature are not the only problem here. There could be random conservative groups that file suit. A number of legal scholars were like, well, I don't, that doesn't, that wouldn't carry, really carry any water, but, you know, it might be the same people who are at immunity that are letting the president do whatever they want. So like, yeah, people are a little worried about that.
But, but the other option here is to have the virtual roll call vote as close to the deadlines as possible and not starting next week.
Or, right. Well, the thing that I have trouble wrapping my head around is, OK, so doing this next week feels like the worst possible option, because it tries to silence a debate that isn't done in a way that will be as...
Yeah, and whether it's intentional or not, that's what it does.
That's what it does. And it will be, I just, to attend, like, I'm just looking at this Republican convention and the energy and enthusiasm we're seeing and imagining the kind of enervated slog that would be a Democratic convention, in which this debate was silenced by procedure, I think is just, it's not, not a very optimistic experience. But if you, it's just a horrible...
Anyway, I'll see you guys in Chicago.
It's just, it's what it is. We're fucking around. It's horrible. But so then it's like, OK, the virtual roll call has to be later, so there can be space for there to be this debate and the possibility of another nominee. But it seems hard to imagine that actually taking place until the convention actually begins.
Right. It's like, it's just hard to wrap your head around how you can act like Joe Biden himself, whether aware or unaware of what the actual plan was, said, if you think I shouldn't be the nominee, challenge me at the convention. The convention is the place where everyone's, in everyone's mind, broker convention, that this is where it would play out. If the lawyers are saying that that's dangerous, it leaves everybody in a very confusing position.
Well, when Biden said that, that was not a.
That was rhetorical bullshit.
No, no, I know it was rhetorical. I'm just, I'm telling the listeners, that was rhetorical bullshit. The thing that I do think complicates this conversation is I'm looking at a story on NBC News right now that's talking about the debate over whether Biden should drop out. And here's a couple lines from it. By the end of last week, the president and his team had settled on a strategy forward.
The five people familiar with the internal discussion said that strategy is described by multiple Biden aides and allies is to run out the clock.
No shit, huh?
And if you reduce the amount of clock outstanding, of course, people are going to act like, OK, you're trying to rig the system.
Yeah, just this continues to be part of the problem coming from some of the people advising Joe Biden right now is they seem to be so committed to being the nominee that they want to sacrifice being reelected president to do so. Because, let's say, Joe Biden had been challenged, had a real primary. This is the exact moment when you're doing what the Republicans are, which you're trying to unify the party. You're bringing your opponents in the party into your coalition. It's when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders got together, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Right. That that is how it happens. But because Joe Biden was unofficially challenged, even though 50 percent, and sometimes more percent, of Democrats wanted a different nominee or didn't want him to run. And then he did well. in these very low turnout, noncompetitive primaries against Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson.
He and his team have been operating under the illusion of party unity, because there had been unity before the debate, at least publicly, from all the elites in the party, all the elected officials, all the pundits, everyone else. But the electorate was not there. And so the process here, if Joe Biden is going to be the nominee, is not just to run out the clock, it's to unify the party behind him. So as the nominee, he can win. And this is counterproductive to that.
Yeah, I mean, and it sounds as of now, that that they're going forward with it. I could see them saying, like, yeah, maybe we'll, we'll push the final date of the voting to like it. But like it. either way, we are running out of time. Right.
And Joe Biden's strategy of running out the clock is it's, it's, it's going to be effective. Right. And I think the only thing people have made their voices heard, we certainly have, according to every poll, the voters have, Democrats have at least at least half of Democrats and just about every poll registered Democrats want him to step aside. A majority of black voters, a majority of Latino voters, majority of women voters, right. Majority of young voters.
that is not broken through. Some members of Congress have gone through. I think the last play here is back to your conversation with Seth Moulton, that like if a bunch of House Democrats and Senate Democrats either go to Joe Biden or publicly talk about this, or Pelosi, who there's a lot of reports has been behind the scenes wanting him to step aside. Pelosi goes to him like. there's one more play here, right, of people that Joe Biden, yes, has known for a long time and respected senators to.
he's a he. he was a former senator. Go to him and make one last plea. And then, if he says no, then he says no. And we're, that's it.
Everyone did what they could. But I do think, for those representatives who want this, you got to say in the media, you.
got to do it now. I think I do now.
And, by the way, in the meantime, I like, I think, everyone making clear that the DNC moving forward with a roll call vote this quickly would be a fucking disaster. I can't imagine something that will alienate more people. that are the people that are very nervous about Joe Biden, but are also the people that will donate and knock on doors. They are part of the 14 million that voted for Joe Biden because there wasn't an alternative. And, by the way, would be proud to support him if he were the nominee, who would feel so silenced and pushed aside by the decision to move ahead with a roll call vote this quickly.
It's just as terrible a decision as I can imagine.
Yeah, I think it would feel sneaky. All of this is why another member of Congress I was talking to yesterday said that's where they feel like they have, basically from the day after the Republican convention ends till like Monday or Tuesday, to get a bunch of people to come out publicly and say, you know, you have to step aside, because I think members of Congress feel like they try. I mean, Seth said that to me, too. They tried to privately get a message to him after the debate that they thought there needed to be a change, and that was ineffective. So that's why all these members are going public.
Try to get a message through George Stephanopoulos, through Lester Holt, through all those great reporters who ask questions during the NATO.
They're complex.
They keep trying.
They took Morning Joe off the air.
They silenced. Joe. There's smoke signals. There's polls.
They silenced Mika.
We had to do like a kind of to get through the inability to get. We had to drop flyers over the White House, like we're trying to reach people. Like in North Korea. Yes. Yes.
Kamala Harris has been walking by him drinking from a coconut.
I don't know if we're going to end this. This is a this is a high note or not. But one thing we noticed, Chris LaSavita, Donald Trump's senior advisor, told everyone that for his speech on Thursday night to buckle up because it's going to be at least an hour and a half, an hour and a half.
I was thinking about why this is, and here's why. I think it's going to be an hour and a half because what we're going to get English and Spanish. I, because I think what we're going to get is the post assassination attempt, unity topper. Like, I think they're just two things where we're getting a bolted on top and bottom and then the red meat division draft, what I say back together, the PG, PG store up. But yeah, I do.
I do think it's going to be we got. there's no torn up speech. Donald Trump does not start from page one. He's not that kind of a worker. So I think we get a new, a new top and a new bottom and the same fucking American carnage right there in the middle.
That's my. that's my prediction. I'm going to predict something.
A 90 minute speech is terrible.
How much time do they have with the networks?
Two hours, five days after Donald Trump was shot in the ear. He could speak for 17 hours.
He could go full Castro. It could be that he could be there all night. Gaddafi. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Oh, well, they got to get. they got to get to, you know, modern family rewards.
The last gasp of the plus, there's got to leave time for him to read the get well soon card from Melania, who's not speaking again in any other time. We like, wait, what? Not speaking.
Yeah. 90 minutes. Don't give. just here's a tip. 90 minute speeches.
Don't do it. 60 minute speech.
Don't need it. Anything past 17 is.
Yeah, it's not ideal.
Honestly, 20 minutes. 20 minutes is your, that's your, that's your outer perimeter.
I mean, in 1988, Bill Clinton got destroyed for giving a 33 minute speech.
He had a seven minute slap, though. 17 minutes, 17 minutes.
Anyway, that's our show for tonight. We will. we'll talk to you from Milwaukee tomorrow night. We hope. Yeah, we hope.
Well, we'll see you there. Bye. Bye, everyone.
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