Vance Vance Revolution

Welcome to Positive America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. I'm Tommy Vitor.

with you boys recently. I don't want to talk about the worst. So there's also Biden's speech.

So Vance's speech was about 45 minutes. It felt like an hour. Yeah, it felt like an hour, felt longer. There was some. there was a lot of his bio.

pissed me off. I don't know what you guys, well, he said. he, his whole line, JD's line, was. Trump called for national unity right after an assassin tried to take his life. And okay, sure.

uh, a couple of minutes of Trump worship at the top, and then he finally got to his bio and sort of his message of, you know, he's trying out this sort of the mega version of economic populism. Uh, let's listen. We need a leader who's not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike, a leader who won't sell out to multinational corporations, but we'll stand up for American companies and American industry. The people who govern this country have failed and failed again. We're working class boy, born far from the halls of power, can stand on this stage as the next vice president of the United States of America.

bad speech is you're not sure, it's over till he just stops talking that I really had absolutely, cause. it was, it was a couple of different endings, a couple of different endings. It, it really circles back. He, he hits the bio a lot in the speech, but not in a way that that's particularly effective, because the speech was so poorly structured. It starts with a whole section of just, you know, pledging fealty to Trump and all that is good about Trump.

that, that he views as being wrong. Yeah. He did this riff where he said, you know, when I was in fourth grade, Biden supported NAFTA and NAFTA, you know, a lot of jobs left where I'm from and all across the Midwest. When I was in high school, buying gave China.

sweetheart trade deal voted for it. When I was in college, the, he supported the war in Iraq,

the war in Iraq, you know, so then there was jobs sent overseas, kids sent overseas to die. And then he said, you know, basically the Biden was wrong on all these issues. Trump was right.

on all these issues, even back then. Right. So I think that was like, if that, if you were to take one section of the speech, I feel like that was like probably the part that I thought was the strongest. And I bet what we'll hear on the stump too, it felt like the start of a stump speech, but the problem is it was in the middle of a meandering and hard to follow speech with a lot of, a lot of lines, a lot of rhetoric, a lot of long pauses for applause that I felt like didn't really land. Like none of it really land landed that hard.

speech was, it was terrible. This is the, no one knows about JD Vance. I know he had a bestselling.

book, but not that many people read it. You know, yeah. Who knows about that? Elite broadcasters.

Exactly. He had, he had. a movie was made of his, of his book. Almost no one watched it. And this is his one chance.

note down. He, he wrote a book. He's been on the book circuit tour. He's been on the, probably had Speaker's Bureau before he was in Congress, did the speaking tour. He sounds like someone who's just been talking to, like too many crowds of CEOs, other people, random organizations about his book.

he was waiting for the applause. The applause kills me. They never built, they don't build anything because they just let the applause die down and then start up again. Like when Obama delivers his version of this speech, which was obviously famously far better. He's like, rising through these moments and, and, and like building to something.

That was a big point in speech prep in 2004 was you have to ride the applause. Don't stop. Talk over it, because it, you know, it might sound loud in the hall, but at home they will be able to hear you. This time it was, it was the reverse. You almost couldn't hear the applause at home, but JD was pausing and sort of awkwardly waving to everybody, and it just didn't work.

I guess that's probably why I took the time to turn the TV off.

I was like, how did we get here?

Now, it's like such a cliche, even in like Emmy award speeches, like, all right, mommy won. Now go to bed. Daddy says, go to bed. Like, how are you saying it out loud? This is an incredible feat.

Process-wise, one guess as to what might've happened is the speech writers wrote a speech that they needed to have for whoever the nominee was. And then, once they found out it was JD Vance, then you insert JD's story into the Trump messaging speech, and then the assassination attempt happens. So then you add that topper in. So now you've got an assassination attempt topper into your bio, into the Trump worship.

Classic structure. By the way, this was my prediction for the Trump speech, that there would just be larded up toppers, which is so far happening.

But just substance-wise too, I think it's interesting that all of the issues that the Republican party and Donald Trump have vulnerabilities on in this election, abortion, election denial, sort of all kinds of extremism, with the exception of immigration, which is sort core to Donald Trump's political philosophy. Weird word to say. Donald Trump's politics, and JD Vance's as well. And sort of this trying to present themselves as economic populists, even though they want to give tax cuts to rich people and deregulate everything. Those were the two main issues.

Yeah. When they get to the working class politics, it's all just vibes, right? It's just. they're doing working class vibes. They're talking about immigration.

The ruling class.

They mention the ruling class.

The ruling class has ruined everything.

Never actually policies on that.

This is a real liberal elite comment or thing to notice.

Oh, I can't wait.

It's just always striking to me that a speech that can begin with a long intro about an assassination attempt, ends up at a place where you're bragging about your grandmother having 19 loaded guns in the house. And no one kind of sees the weirdness there, the disconnect between maybe our gun fetish in this country is part of the problem, not a thing we're proud of.

I'll tell you what my reaction to that was, which is also like my recollection of the book is. it's a lot about how this kind of grievance and sense of being under threat is a way of avoiding facing up to the real problems.

He's very hard on his community. It's not understanding. It's super harsh.

And that's why that book became a liberal darling, because it was actually like kind of being honest about the ways these places were supposed to be responsible for what had happened.

So we have had now a full day or two to digest all the JD Vance takes our eyeballs could handle. One notable subplot is that the Republican national security establishment isn't too happy with Vance's isolationist views, especially on Ukraine. That did not come up tonight. I don't believe he talked about Ukraine tonight.

He made a reference to the big tent on national security issues.

And America first, a lot of America first talk.

Right, but sort of yada yada over Ukraine.

Yeah, I mean, he lied about Donald Trump opposing the war in Iraq, even though last month, in an interview with Ross Douthat in the New York Times, JD Vance admitted that actually, in 2003,, Trump said something that said he supported the invasion of Iraq. So JD, again, a month ago, said he knew Trump was full of shit on that front. And then tonight,

gave him credit for it. And apparently big, some big Republican donors aren't too thrilled with his protectionist views, though they probably like that. Democrats are also pushing around videos of Vance saying he wants a national abortion ban. He said that in 2022,. there was also a clip of him on Tucker Carlson, where he said that we're, we're being ruled by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable with their own lives.

I remember when that happened. I remember that clip.

He really has this like, he's had this like real hard edge over the last couple years, unlike Tucker and some other speeches that you're like, anything else stand out to you guys, since Vance was announced, that has made you either think he'll be, he'll be, valuable to the Trump campaign this way, or, oh, actually he's going to be, this is a real vulnerability. Now the Democrats can exploit Dan. What do you think?

I think that the whole discourse has probably overstated. I mean, the vice president generally doesn't matter very much. Now you can absolutely fuck it up. Like John McCain did with Sarah Palin, and which is, but then it's not really about the vice president, it's about what the vice presidential choice says about the person who made the choice. You know, the idea that they're going to park him in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and he's going to be some sort of Rust Belt ambassador for Trump.

And he said all the states.

He said, he kept saying him over again.

He said all the blue wall states tonight.

Yeah. I'm sure he'll go to those states a lot, because those are the states that if Trump wins one of those states, the election is probably over, but there's nothing in Vance's record, his performance in Ohio, his policy positions, that suggest that he has some sort of secret sauce that is going to help him with those voters, his populism, economic populism. And there's been all these annoying think pieces about how he and Josh Hawley and these cadre of Republican eggheads are coming together to try to create this policy framework around America. first, populism. It, all it is is tariffs and mass deportations.

Yeah. The sort of populism of the tax policy is hating universal childcare more than you hate a child tax credit, but trying to stop both.

Before we move on from J.

Points for trolling. Yeah, they're having fun.

Points for trolling. They're also scared, shitless, that that might be a change.

Can I just flag one other thing that jumped out at me about J.

He is a man driven by visible, palpable ambition and nothing else. Yeah, work for him tonight. Yeah,

but it's funny that it's also why it's like that guy, maybe that, you know, you would never know, seeing that guy on stage, that he has that incredibly compelling story, because he is ambitious, and he did become what he needed to become to get there, and he looks much more like a tech guy in a vest at this point, doing an impression of a politician. And it speaks to actually his credit, how smart he is, and how far he came, but it doesn't make him that much of a.

It's also why he did so poorly in the Rust Belt parts of Ohio against Tim Ryan. People can smell that.

bullshit from a million miles away. The only time I laughed out loud tonight at all was during Usha Vance's speech, which was fine. She's J.D. Vance's wife. She seemed a little nervous.

person possible. 39-year-old vice presidential nominee. A few other notable speakers from tonight. Don Jr., his fiancée Kim Guilfoyle, soon-to-be-obscure-again Governor Doug Burgum, got passed over. Former Trump aide Peter Navarro, who got out of prison today after serving four months for refusing a subpoena from the January 6th committee.

Brought the house down. Many people said it was the most applause at the convention since Trump.

walked in the room on Monday night. Love it, love it. Is this just still because, fucking, what's his name, Kushner Googled trade and came up with this book? That guy goes, anyway, sorry, what were you gonna say?

I don't know. It was, they love a convict, you know? Yeah. And then there was... A man with convictions.

withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yeah, it was the families of service members who were killed at Abbey Gate in those final days of the Afghanistan withdrawal, and there was a six and a half minute pre-taped video where they talked to, you know, moms, wives, you know, sister, brothers of the families, talked about, you know, who these service members were. And then they also talked about, you know, they showed footage of President Biden at the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover, looking at his watch. They talked about how things didn't go well in the conversation with Biden and the families. And then they said in this video that...

has never once mentioned their names, not one of them. Honestly, I don't feel like Joe Biden cared.

He just had no empathy for us at all. I do think incompetence played a huge factor in what happened.

country. There was no point in making that hard deadline, August 31st. It was 100% a political.

stunt. He let my son down. He let the 13 down. He let the 45 wounded down. He let those 174 civilians down.

Yeah, and then, after that, the parents of the fallen came on stage and they read the names one by one. And it was, I thought, an incredibly powerful, well-done, and brutal political hit. Biden did reach out to all those families, right? Well, he met with them at Dover during the transfer of their remains back home. But I think this is that really tough scene that Jen Psaki actually writes about in her book, where I think he tried to talk to them about his loss and losing his son.

that moment if you just lost a loved one. So then there was Don Jr. He went up to speak. He then introduced his daughter, Kai Trump, who's much better than him. By far.

Who's running things?

I was going to say, you have to be the biggest junkie, left or right.

That's 2019, right?

It's also, it's a deep cut for political junkies.

It's also logical, logical nonsense. It's not a good, it's just not, what does it mean? Oh, maybe it's corn pop. This old story he tells. It doesn't make sense on its own terms.

A guy he argued with when he was a lifeguard in the fifties.

Like remember Build Back Better? No, no one remembers Build Back Better.

That's the problem, actually.

We now call it the IRA, and no one knows what that stands for either. And nobody knows it happened and nobody will never know. Have you heard about the chips ad?

Yeah. And then next year it'll all be turned into highway funding anyway. But Don Jr. always has the energy of just like a coked out, drunk, terrible customer at a restaurant calling a waitress sweetie. That's just sort of like his whole vibe forever.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Donald Trump's granddaughter, Don Jr.'s daughter, 17 year old girl, talked about him as a grandfather, calling her when she's at school, talk about the golf game, like all the humanizing stuff you'd expect from a family member. And then they bring out his son and he just does this red meat screed. that was, you know, probably should have been left on rumble.com or wherever he usually does his podcast.

Yeah. Where does he speak from? It's all, it's up here. He speaks up high. It's up high.

It's hard. Lines, like Teddy Roosevelt's. man in the arena has a name, and it's Donald Trump.

I mean, every convention is of both parties, is just fucking chock, full of way too many cliches. But the last couple of days have been really, do you know, our best days are yet to come? Have you heard that?

It's also like maybe, maybe when they made, maybe when they went through and did their unity pass on all these speeches, they took out all the good lines. I bet the division lines are probably the toughest stuff.

Ron Johnson's got to get his old speech back. All right. We'll be right back.

Dan, you think it's as big as it seems? Yeah, I think, I think it's, it's a very big deal because there have been rumors for a long time that there's a bunch of senators who privately went Biden to step aside. Remember it was like two weeks ago, it feels like a hundred years ago, when Mark Warner was organizing a meeting that then got canceled. We only, as of right now, have two senators who've come out. Uh, well, I guess one Senator and one Senator to be shift.

you know, you know, what's interesting, though, is I'm thinking the timeline now. Schumer and Biden meet on Saturday. Biden does the Lester Holt interview Monday, in which he was no less defiant publicly about staying in. What, unless now I'm, now I'm rethinking it. Did I miss anything?

I don't love it. What do you think? I think there's two ways to see it. One is, as we talked about in the last pod, Joe Biden has to be defiant until the very moment he's not, there's no other option. I think it is interesting.

they had hoped. Yeah, I think the initial strategy was to try to have these conversations privately and politely. And now people are going public with demands, not requests. I did see that Jeff Zeleny, a great reporter at CNN, just reported that President Biden is now more receptive to the push for him to leave the ticket. He's gone from saying Kamala Harris can't win to asking if.

Kamala Harris can win. So it does seem like senior Democratic sources saying this to Zeleny. In private conversations, he's sounding a little more receptive, even though he's not publicly. The other possibility here is that Schumer had this conversation with Biden, and Biden was not so receptive. And Schumer thought that maybe there'd be some movement on this, and there hasn't been.

way to introduce a new thought. And they also said that leader Schumer conveyed the views of his caucus directly to President Biden on Saturday. Not sure what that was clarifying. Yeah. And we.

know that most of the caucus at this point, I mean, there was reporting in the caucus meeting that John Fetterman asked everyone, okay, who's actually on board with Biden? And only four senators raised their hands. Wow. That was from last week. When was J.D.

And also Menendez was still there at the time. So where was he on this? Right. Yeah. Well, it depends on who makes me a better offer.

So you got. Schumer and Jeffries were both pushing the DNC to push back the roll call vote. Nancy Pelosi is working behind the scenes to try to get Joe Biden to step aside. So it does now seem that the entire leadership of the Democratic Party is working on this. And what has ever given us.

less hope than the entire leadership of the Democratic Party, working on something? I mean,

I think it can mean that they are working to create a path for Biden to step down. It could also mean that, no matter what happens, the best move for the party is to handle this virtual roll call in the most transparent, fair-minded way. Because even if, Schumer, you get a different report, Schumer didn't make that case to Biden, it's still in his interest to handle the virtual roll call better, because it's going to lead to a massive uproar on the party. If you were to go with the plan, the DNC was pushing quite aggressively just 24 hours ago. Yeah.

talk about that. So we talked about this last night and it seemed like it could be as early as next week that they were going to start this thing. Now they're saying no voting can start until August 1st and they do want to wrap it up by August 7th, which is the sort of fake-ish deadline in Ohio, the old deadline in Ohio that we're still going with. If Biden does step aside, doesn't seem like there's much time for any kind of mini primary open convention. It's certainly there's enough time at that point.

all together. in that scenario? I think we would either punt it all together or you would move it back. Based on everything you read and everything there are, Republicans in Ohio say, and I recognize we're taking that with a grain of salt, the odds that somehow they go back and change the rules so that Biden or some Democratic nominee can not be on the ballot in Ohio seems quite low. And it doesn't seem like that risk is not so high that you would short circuit a process to pick our new nominee.

Yeah. So let's talk about some of these, the polling that Biden and others woke up to this morning. So this is from blue labs. And what they did is they interviewed 15,000 voters across seven battleground states to test different options for the Democratic nominee. That's quite a bit.

think about that blue lab polling? Look, I think it is, everybody is sort of looking for polling to validate more confidence in this really uncertain moment. I think it is reassuring, if you want to make a change, that there's polling that shows, even before a campaign has begun, that these candidates start in a stronger position. I just think you'd have to take it with a grain of salt. You go into it, yes, because you are concerned about the swing state polling, you're concerned about the polling you're seeing about Biden, not just that the top line head to head numbers, but the extreme concern people have about his age.

candidates are running ahead of President Biden. That includes Vice President Harris. So she'll like that. Not great for the vice president is. voters are looking for a fresh face.

obviously pretty vocal about, you know, why we think Biden stepping aside would give us a better chance of defeating Donald Trump. But we should be honest that, like, none of the options in front of us are really great options right now, because there's just so much uncertainty. And, like you said, love it, like you cannot have the polling be the only determining factor in this decision. And I'm sure if Joe Biden makes the decision to step aside, it's not going to be just based on polling. And I think there are obviously risks that come with a Kamala Harris nomination.

right now. Can she overcome it? I think so. But racism and misogyny and all sorts of other.

currents. I do think, personally, she gives us a better chance than Joe Biden does at this point. And then you think, well, what about these very popular governors? And it's a fresh start. And, you know, I think.

move? All those candidates other than Kamala Harris right now are basically generic Democrats, right? With a slight bio description, right? Generic Democrat who's a governor of a Midwestern state, or generic Democrat who's a senator who is also an astronaut. And once they become the nominee, they will be defined.

you want to take. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the concern about Biden, where that's coming from, is that every candidate has vulnerabilities and you have to fight back against them. But I think the vulnerability of a large subset of the electorate thinking you are too old is an unfixable problem, because once they have that belief, they know no one gets younger. And I do.

think that's why the Schiff statement, the Schumer statement, it's important because it creates pressure. But I also think it just underscores that that fundamental reality of what we're discussing is not changing. The other thing is the fact that some of these Democrats are pulling Trump voters, I think underscores, on the other side of what Dan's saying is, Donald Trump is a weak candidate. You know, as part of this polling, that said two-thirds of Democrats want Joe Biden to no longer be the nominee, a lot of Americans don't think Trump should be the nominee. These are both weak candidates.

alternative. I think in that poll it is 27% of Republicans would prefer that Trump replaces the nominee. And if we were in a normal election cycle, that would be a huge, gigantic number for someone who's at their convention, who won their primary easily, and one in four members of their party want someone else to be the nominee. That is like a flashing red light, siren, weak candidate. But just because of the situation we're in, everyone's just throwing that number on like, look how strong Trump is.

well, you know, all these Republicans want Trump to step aside and no one's clamoring for that. Luck, you know, obviously, Donald Trump is an incredible threat to the country, but politically they might be better off with somebody who wasn't carrying all this baggage. Nikki Haley would, might've been a stronger candidate than Donald Trump could ever have hoped to be. We'll never know. And we'll never, we'll never know.

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