(upbeat music) - Hey everybody, welcome to a 4th of July version of the Weekender at the Lickering Podcast. I'm Jay Dade Sexton. Happy America's birthday Nick, it feels great today. - Yeah, thanks, that feels great. What? Yeah, it feels good, feels real good today. Like it, love it. - Yeah, you know, it's funny because some people like on their Twitter accounts will have like the American flag, a patriot in their thing and at what point did this become a signal that this is someone you might not want to interact with? - 2003 A.D. the year of our Lord. - Okay, so when was Afghanistan? - No, when we went into Iraq. - I mean Iraq, I think that was, I think that was when the worm turned a little bit. I think it started feeling less like a symbol of patriotism and more like an aggressive posture. - Okay, yeah, I suppose that was beginning, you're right. It definitely feels like it's probably that old at this point, but now it's a little tough. It's tough to sort of want to have pride in what's going on in this country. - It's a tough time, but we hope that, you're going to be hearing this on Friday, July 5th. We hope you had a decent 4th of July. Maybe you were able to hang out with your family. Maybe you were able to grill outside. That's the thing I'm doing as long. And also I like fireworks. I know that they're obnoxious. I know that they scare a bunch of people. I wish that they didn't. I do enjoy them. I wish that they had a more ethical sort of way of happening, but that maybe isn't the topic for today. We have a full episode. I have a really, really good conversation on Fuajahad Ali, who is a friend of the pod. Also now the author of a new sub-stack left hook. You'll be able to watch the video of this over at my sub-stack dispatches from a collapsing state if you're so interested. But before we get to that, oh, and by the way, go to patreon.com/muckrakepodcast. You're going to want to hear the conversation with Fuajahad. You're going to want to hear this entire show. You're listening with the previews. You know that this is one of the most wild times of American politics that we're ever going to see in our lives. Nick and I are right there on the front lines giving you exclusive independent analysis. And we kind of told you where this thing was going and maybe you want to listen in. - Yeah. And also, I think the plan is we're going to be at the Democratic National Convention Live. - I mean, I can't imagine that that will be an interesting event in any way, shape or form. - Well, we can only hope. - Well, y'all, a lot has been going on over the past couple of days. Of course, after the disastrous debate last week, Nick and I took to the airwaves, we both expressed how we were feeling. We've watched the fallout since then become rabid, fervent, dysfunctional all over the place. There have been so many twists and turns over the past few days. We need to talk about where things are and where they have been to set the table. There has been an absolute panicked response within the Democratic Party about whether or not Joe Biden can continue being the Democratic nominee. Depending upon what poll you look at, what exit thing you look at, there are a lot of differing opinions about whether or not he can beat Donald Trump. Biden has been defiant. The campaign has sent out multiple emails targeting critics, calling them bedwetters. Meanwhile, the entire apparatus of the Democratic Party has been in a feverish mode of trying to figure out what's going on. I'm going to let you know some of the reporting that I have had so far. But where we stand today, before we get into the minutia of the last few days in the back room sort of bargaining, as of right now, officially Biden has told people and has been reported that he understands he only has a few days to fix his campaign reportedly. And this is what I have heard and other people have heard. He has been delivered an ultimatum by members of the party that in those few days he needs to turn the campaign around or else he's going to face a slew of Democrats calling for him to step aside. Biden apparently understands that. And I guess the clock is ticking right now, Nick. As it should. It is telling that you have people in the Democratic Party willing to stand up to the president like that, which sounds pretty crazy, right? Who could imagine someone being able to go to the most powerful person on the planet and give him an ultimatum like that? That sounds pretty telling to me. You know, if he wanted to even play the game where he's going to step down, there's a lot of things that we probably didn't really go over in the last couple episodes about how that would work because Kamala can keep all the money he's raised, nobody else could. And how would we make this democratic? And is picking Kamala democratic? I suppose, is that democratic because we voted for them as a ticket? I mean, to be honest with you, small, the Democratic, there is not much room left for that right now. And nor was it really democratic in the first place. I mean, Biden's nomination process this time around was a fait accompli. You had one upstart who didn't, you know, basically got defeated by uncommitted and undecided. RFK Jr. and his brain worm, you know, I guess at some point or another was a quote unquote rival. But yeah, this process, it's getting even uglier than I think we thought that it might. And here's what I underestimated. And here's what's become obvious to me over the past couple of days. Nick, there is a huge generational rift within the Democratic Party. You have a leadership, of course, consisting of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, which is aging, that is of a different generation. You have a lot of back ventures, people who want to run for president, who want to take over positions of power. They see this as not only their opportunity to take that power, but maybe their last chance to do so. They have, I mean, literally, and this is not a joke, the conversations I'm having, are people wondering if there's going to be a Democratic process going forward? We don't know. So the panic is going, the control over money and sway of the party has taken over. We have seen so many different blocks of the Democratic Party start to define themselves and come together in horse race. There's a lot of paranoia. There's a lot of going after each other. Biden is very, very weak within the party, which is one of the reasons, as you said, you can go in and tell the most powerful person in the world, like, hey, time might be up. That's how this came about. And it is getting more complicated and more pressure-packed by the moment. - Right. I've heard about this notion of having a mini primary and trying to have people be able to weigh in somehow, but I don't know if you have enough time to be able to put together some sort of national vote across-- - Know what? - Nates and with whatever. It doesn't, you know, and then raising money for anybody would be really difficult. So I said-- - No one will cast a vote on this. That is the nature of the situation. They're not going to be any ballots. There aren't going to be any primaries. If anything were to happen to open up this process, it would be a purely informal, media-driven circus more or less. - Right. You know, because even him, like I said, it would have to be Kamala. There is a succession here. And so in theory, that would be the next logical choice for any other reason. But we're not that excited about her. I don't know if you've seen that edit that where, you know, she's got that phrase. She keeps saying over and over again about the future and the past. And we're not burdened by that. Whatever it's, she's just-- Whatever, for whatever reason, it felt like maybe-- Do you agree with this? Like, it seemed like in the very beginning of the administration, they were putting her out front to prime her for taking over and he'll do the one term. And after that went into word salad territory, they realized this wasn't going to work, right? That's sort of what was the plan? - I disagree with that. I actually think they put her out front in order to take the flack from Biden. I think they set her up to fail. - Interesting. - I am not Harris' biggest fan. I have a lot of concerns about her policy positions. I mean, you might remember like the 2020 primary, she didn't do well. It was not like her best moment in any way, shape or form. But I will say this, Nick, that money, you're exactly right. It can't move from Biden, Harris. It can maybe move to a super pack and that's a possibility. There's also a concern here too. People don't like to talk about this, but democratic politics is based on like fundraising apparatuses, right? Like Biden and Harris and particularly Biden, that's what it is. They know where their money's coming from. They know where their support's coming from. All those people are meant to stay home and send money and that's how that thing works. The only person who's close to it besides Kamala Harris, your governor, Gavin Newsom, who is more or less attached himself to the Biden campaign almost as a barnacle, right? - Yeah. - Which by the way, Nick has really freaked out the young Democrats. Gavin Newsom, as we have reported, he has been running a shadow campaign for years now. And you know how he did it? It wasn't by saying he wanted to be president. It was by being the loudest, most vocal surrogate for Joe Biden that there was. So he has gone ahead. There's a feeling among young Democrats, including people like Gretchen Whitmer, who is already floating one pole after another. Like people like that feel like Gavin Newsom has a head start on them. So as a result, time is of the essence to try and catch up and keep someone like Newsom from sort of co-opting the Biden apparatus that's in place. So you have a lot of panic that's developing. And meanwhile, what we haven't discussed yet here, Nick, is that all of this hinges on one individual, Joe Biden, who has been surrounded by his family, he has driven more or less by spite. He wants to prove everyone wrong that counts him out. Also on top of that, like he's been at war with the media for a very long time, he doesn't like the way that they treat him. His family wants him to stay in it. They want him to keep moving forward. And now he is facing a full revolt from the Democratic Party. And I don't know if you noticed this. He made a statement and you texted me and you said, well, I guess that's over. Where he said, I want to make this clear. I'm running and I'm head of the Democratic Party. What gave me pause, Nick? If you're the head of the Democratic Party, you don't need to say it out loud. Do you know what I mean? It was a warning shot across the bow, telling all these upstarts, you need to back away. And now the question is, has the horse gotten out of the barn too far? And we don't know. Well, there's a couple of interesting things about the timing of all this stuff. So we were always scratching your head why they wanted to have a debate. It's so early in the process. And I'm starting to wonder in my radical conspiracy theory brain, thinking that did they do it because they knew this was going to happen, then it needed to have time to be able to then switch candidates because otherwise there was no reasoning with him before this to tell him, Joe, it's not happening. And then on top of that, if we had evidence of a thing like this happening beforehand, in some version, it wasn't going to be a debate, but it was interviewed and you see him faltering the way we saw in the debate, would someone then have forcefully ran against him and tried to create a primary in January, whatever that was, where you had to take somebody else seriously and they could have come out forcefully against Biden. Would that have happened if he had had one of these episodes in December of last year? If something would have become apparent, and this is the problem in all of this, there was a lacking moment of clarity. We saw a bunch of videos, we saw a bunch of clips. I mean, listen, let's just lay our cards on the table. Nick, you and I have seen instances of this. We've seen speeches, we've seen performances that look like this, but all of it put together on that big of a stage. It honestly was a rolling of the dice. The people around Biden are true believers. They have shielded him from all kinds of different things. They've tried to massage this stuff for years. There have been all kinds of conversations about the performances that Biden has given in meetings and in speeches and all of this stuff. I think they wanted to roll the dice and they hope that this would be one of his good nights. And by the way, we have a clip here from one of the greatest journalists that we've ever had. And as the media has started to actually talk about this thing, as it always happens, Nick, it's always an open secret. It's always stuff that a lot of people know that it doesn't come to the forefront of a conversation until it becomes a big giant deal. And then everybody talks about it, which is the dysfunctional nature of American politics. So let's listen to a clip that we heard on the Anderson Cooper from-- Carl Bernstein. And Carl Bernstein. According to the people you've been talking to, what are you hearing? Well, these are people, several of them, who are very close to President Biden, who love him, have supported him and have been among them, or some people who have raised a lot of money for him. And they are adamant that what we saw the other night, the Joe Biden we saw, is not a one-off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half, when the President has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show, that we witnessed. And what's so significant is the people that this is coming from, and also how many people around the President are aware of such incidents, including some reporters, incidentally, who have witnessed some of them. I suppose that means that they're covering, the reporters are covering for him. It means that maybe the reporters were giving the benefit of the doubt. You said we all saw this. I was in denial. I kind of wanted to put away and say, "Ah, it really isn't. They're manipulating the video. It's out of context and all that stuff." And I really tried to put my head on the sand for as long as time, too. Well, can I say something that's a little bit hard about this? Sure. This is human. That's what this is. One thing that I've been sitting with for the past week, and again, we strive to give better context to these things. Whether we like each other, all of us, hundreds of millions of Americans, we're part of a family. And it's not comfortable to think about the President being the patriarch of a family, but this was like we sat down to dinner and everybody at the table noticed that something was wrong with that. Do you know what I mean? That something had changed, that circumstances had moved. And what happens, Nick? Suddenly you were faced with, "Do you recognize what happened just happened?" And you deal with it. Do you deny it and pretend like it's not happening? Do you get mad that someone brings up something that's uncomfortable? Do you create a story? Well, he was just tired or maybe it was something he ate. Do you know what I mean? Like there's all kinds of different ways to interact with this. And the problem is that America is so fundamentally unhealthy. And our discourse is so fundamentally unhealthy that we have all kinds of crises taking place right now, but we're not able to deal with them in an adult manner. And so in our media, in our politics, our social media, our discourse in general, it just reflects a deep, deep unwellness that we just can't reckon with. Right. And it leads to things like, "Well, Jill Biden, it sounds like she's really full-throated in trying to push him to continue this." Right? There's people behind him where pushing him, and that's what makes me more concerned. Like that Biden doesn't have control of a situation himself. And it's interesting to find out, we have what's the T minus? Is it four more days until I guess this is coming out on the fifth? The end of the weekend until he has to make a stand? So one of the problems here is that the ultimatum that was given to Biden by Democrats, it hinges on whether or not he can do something dramatic. There's a George Stephanophilus interview that's coming out that's being taped. You know, Stephanophilus, maybe an ABC anchor, he is a dedicated Democratic flag. And always has been, and always will be. If you'd like to hear the rest of this great conversation, head over to patreon.com/muckrakepodcast and subscribe for lots more additional content, including Discord server and live shows. We'd really appreciate it if you could give it a try. We know you'll love it and come back for more.
