Jacobin Radio

Michael and Us: It's Joever w/ Branko Marcetic

It's a politics-only episode, because we've got a big subject: It's time to say goodbye to your favorite American president, Joe Biden. We welcome back Branko Marcetic to tally #46's successes and failures—and do a vibe check on the Democratic Party following the ouster of its standard-bearer. PLUS: Branko reports on the Republican National Convention.

"Joe Biden Wanted This" by Branko Marcetic - https://jacobin.com/2024/07/biden-2024-dropout-gaza-legacy

"How Joe Biden Became a Steadfast Israel Defender" by Branko Marcetic - https://jacobin.com/2024/07/joe-biden-israel-support-history

"Never Forget How Many Times the Liberal Establishment Saved Biden’s Arse" by Luke Savage - https://novaramedia.com/2024/07/23/never-forget-how-many-times-the-liberal-establishment-saved-bidens-ass/

"Why Biden finally quit" - https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/21/why-biden-dropped-out-00170106

Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Duration:: 1h 10m
Broadcast on:: 28 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

well body we are in the we are now in like the top, I don't know, 180 a patreon based podcast I'll have, you know, worldwide. So we need only the most euphonious quality for our listeners. Yeah, well, you know, actually a friend of mine in New Zealand, at one point, sent me a message a few years ago and he was like, Oh, you know, we'll slow him. You know, he knows your film criticism. But he was like, I've never heard of him talk about politics. Oh, well, well, Sloan, the toast of Auckland, I've said it often. Luke, does that ever happen to you? Do people ever say to you, Oh, do you know Will Sloan? I don't know. He has a podcast, but I follow him on letterboxed. Well, I've no, I've never heard that. Most times people know you from the podcast, but who's that guy who's riding your coattails, Luke? Well, welcome back to Mike Linus, everyone. I'm Luke Savage. With me as always, Will Sloan. Hello. And joining us official Mike Linus, Joe Biden correspondent, your friend in mine, it's Bronco Marketeech. Welcome back Bronco. Hey, good to be back. Is this the third time or the fourth time I'm not really sure you're definitely though, in the five timers club, as they say in Saturday Night Live parlance, even if it is only four. Folks, this is going to be a politics episode of the podcast. We don't have a movie to talk about because there's so much damn news. And who better to talk about the news than three people who are not American? That's right, folks. We are going to be approaching these subjects with some healthy distance and some sober second thought. But before we move on to the wait, sorry, I'm trouble getting into character. I'm so bold over by the compliment of somebody in Auckland, knowing who I am. Before we get to the main subjects of this episode, plural, I just want to tell you guys actually a film related thing. Before I started recording today, I got a bright and early and I threw on the old Netflix. And I started watching, you know, I watched about 40 minutes of a movie called Beverly Hills Cop Axle F, which is the fourth installment of the Beverly Hills Cop franchise. And a couple of weeks ago, I had watched Beverly Hills Cop 2 on Netflix because I'd never seen it. And I thought to myself, this feels like the sort of thing that I know at some point in your life, you know, you should have in your back pocket that you've seen Beverly Hills Cop 2 in case it ever comes up in conversation, you can have an opinion on it. And I thought maybe this would hype me up for the new one, the fourth Beverly Hills Cop. It didn't at all. I thought it was a terrible movie. And if anything, it made me like maybe less excited. It's like sometimes a sequel comes along and it has a kind of swagger to it that's like, Oh man, remember when they made good movies? You know, remember when they made movies in the 80s? And that's what this new Beverly Hills Cop movie has arrived with. So I started watching Beverly Hills Cop 4 anyway. And Eddie Murphy's in it. John Ashton is in it. Judge Reinhold is in it. Bronson Pinchot is in it. The whole gang's back. And they're all 40 years older. And, you know, Eddie looks pretty good for a guy who's 60. Gossay, you know, he's keeping it pretty tight. John Ashton, a little less so, he's probably 85, honestly. I don't know why he's still on the force. But the gang's back, you know, they're dressed very similar to how they were 40 years ago. They're they're doing the same things they did 40 years ago. The cops are like, Eddie, you can't do that. He's like, no, I'm gonna do it. It's all the shenanigans that you know and love from the first three movies. And I felt this sense of sort of spiritual malaise watching it. I felt this feeling of, is this the best we have the hope for that like, you know, there are no new horizons. But what you can do is like dig up Eddie Murphy's corpse and you can make him say the things that he said 40 years ago. And he can like do a car chase. And the music from 40 years ago is still is playing. How cool is that? It's like the movie from 40 years ago. But they're older. And it's not novel anymore. But it has a lot of like professionalism. Like it's very well shot. It's very well paced. And so you watch and you think, yeah, this this reminds me of something that used to be very fresh. And I don't know guys, I just think there might be a metaphor for like something, something in our world. That's actually perfect because I did want to begin the politics discussion with something of a vibe check. I feel that the vibes are very off right now. They're very bad. And actually, well, I do think that sets us up pretty nicely for what I'm about to say. We've got a lot to talk about. There've been a lot of events. Bronco is obviously one of the world authorities on Joe Biden. He's also just been at the RNC. So we're going to talk to about that as well. As a delegate, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Michael and us nation had boots on the ground at the RNC. But yeah, I don't know, you know, it's hard to know exactly where to begin. We will get into some actual serious discussion, I hope, in just a little bit. But I think just by way of setting the table a little bit, I want to just say that I have feel like I've been driven slowly insane by a number of things over the past few months. The fact that the news has seemed to just again and again have the same underlying dynamic, which is just people asking us to reject things that we can say are objectively true with our own eyes and ears. I will say, you know, I feel a sense of relief that Joe Biden has finally dropped out in this that this shirad is finally at an end. But I mean, the Joe Biden stuff did not begin for me with his debate performance on June the 27th. I mean, this has been going on since 2019. I feel like we've been living in a completely insane world where again and again, there's just been this total freeze out on any public admission of the fact that even five years ago, Joe Biden was constantly going off on these bizarre tangents talking about how we need to, I don't know, give black families record players or whatever the fact that thing he said was, you know, like that insane thing about corn pop, where, you know, the response of liberals was to fact check the corn pop monologue and be like, oh, no, there actually was a guy who, you know, was called people called corn pop that, you know, used to frequent that pool. And it's like, that's not why we're focusing on corn pop. Like, did you watch the speech? Did you listen to it? Why is Joe Biden running for president and talking about how children are stroking the hairs on his legs, which turned white in the sun? That's how he learned about roaches. You didn't listen to this thing. And corn pop was a bad dude. And he ran a bunch of bad boards. And I did, and back in those days, and sure, things have changed. One of the things you had to use, if you use pomade in your hair, you had to wear a baby cap. And so he was up on the board with a list. And I said, Hey, Esther, you off the board, I'll come up and drag you off. Well, he came off. And he said, I'll meet you outside my car. This was mostly, these were all public housing behind it. My car, there was a gate out here. I parked my car outside the gate. And I he said, I'll be waiting for you. He was waiting for three guys and straight racers. Not a joke. There's a guy named Bill Wright, mouse, the only white guy. And he did all the pools. He was the mechanic. And I said, what am I going to do? He said, come down here in the basement, where mechanics, where all the pool builder is. The comp of speeches, as I would say, his greatest moment, like post vice presidency, like in terms of telling a story and, you know, not getting bogged down too much and, like, and losing a straight thought. By the way, I have been to the corn park pool, which is that was cool. Wow. Holy shit. We're not worthy. Sadly, sadly, there's no mention of that story about a Joe Biden braille confronted a black teenager at a pool, which is what that story is about. But, but it has been renamed the Joe Biden swimming center, I think is what it's called. It was enough to some other guy, but now it's now it has his phone. Fuck that other guy. But yeah, completely insane. And you raise a good point, Bronco, because that is actually the subtext of that story. There's that whole weird twist where he's talking about, remember how people used to put razor blades in the rain barrel to make them rusty? And corn pop did that. And like, the whole story is about like, oh, yeah, like this bad guy that ran with bad dudes or whatever, however he put it. Yeah, I put him in his place. Like, it's a very weird subtext, a lot going on there. That pool is in a more impoverished part town that is also like a heavily black part out. And if you look at the speech, a lot of the kids around in the African Americans, it's a strange, strange story to tell on multiple levels. Yeah. And actually, let's let's stick with the pool for a second, because you can correct me if I'm wrong, Bronco, but I believe the pool also central to Biden's, you know, his big lie in 1987 about, you know, having marched in the civil rights movement and things like that, which he had lie, which he retracted. And then in 2020, just started repeating again with virtually no pushback. And when he walked it back, I believe what he was forced to admit was, well, no, I didn't actually march with Dr. King. But what I did do was I worked one summer at a pool in Delaware that had a predominantly black clientele. So the pool and corn pop are two very important pieces of the wider Joe Biden story. Yeah, the corn pop, his defeat of corn pop was Joe Biden's extent of his civil rights activism. Yeah. I can all agree that that in the timeline of important civil rights victories, that's, you know, it's like the march of Washington. That's right. And it also, you know, the grandiosity and historical importance of the battle of Gettysburg as well. Yeah. You were talking about the vibes being off. The narrative around Joe Biden is one that's remained remarkably fluid over the last five years. I'm old enough to remember when the common received wisdom among left liberal people, even liberals is that he was the bussing candidate. You know, that little girl was me. And then all of a sudden became that it was, it was anti black racism to dislike Joe Biden. What happened after the debate, you know, did at least momentarily feel like a fever breaking. It's like, okay, so there are actually limits to, you know, American culture and it's overriding machinery in terms of like what truths can be suppressed. And like, yeah, if Joe Biden goes on national TV and gives that performance, you know, people can basically see what's up. But then once Biden actually said he was going to go, I feel like we're now just being treated to another round of this where, you know, John Meacham is writing his stupid essay in the New York Times about how Biden's an American hero. Absolutely. Everybody is just aggressively insisting that Joe Biden is this great and honest and decent man. And again, we are being asked to just deny, you know, what is before our very eyes, you know, and I don't only mean pictures of limbless children, you know, in Gaza. I also just mean all of the times where Joe Biden has visibly done and said appalling things. Joe Biden is one of the most serially dishonest. Like he's like, at times, it seems like he's a pathological liar. He's just somebody who is for years, for decades, made up stories, whole cloth, and said them with great confidence. And this is all part of the historical record. And there's just a total freeze out on any of that becoming part of the public narrative around any of this. And so I feel like, you know, the vibe, I think that a lot of people are feeling the ambient mood is one of relief. But I'm feeling like even in, you know, Biden's departure, I feel like all of the things that have been bothering me over the last five years are actually just kind of reasserting themselves yet again. And yeah, the vibes feel very off. Don't you feel there's a kind of disconnect in what's actually happening and what's sayable in mainstream or corporate media? Because everybody knows the Joe Biden was pushed out by his own party and is leaving unwillingly. But you can't get an op-ed framing his departure as an embarrassing failure of leadership. Right. Right. That's another thing. Like, even just the public line on the events of the past four weeks that all of us have been following so closely, like, we all know what happened. We watched it. We watched it on TV. We know what everybody said and saw all the tweets from loyal Democratic partisans calling for Joe Biden to go. And now why is that now unsayable? Yeah, he did this heroic thing and he stepped aside. And it's like, no, he didn't. He threw a petulant tantrum. He did the debate and then went to do a photo shoot with his family, with an anne liebouettes in the Hamptons. Joe Biden went on the cover of Vogue. And when Biden did that first interview with George Stephanopoulos after the debate, he was asked straight up, how would you feel if, you know, the sort of bleakest poll numbers come true? And Donald Trump got reelected. And his answer was, well, you know, at least I'll be able to say I gave it my all and and I and I did my best. And that or no, I did the goodest job that I could. And that's what this is about. It was a good as job. Please. If you can have some respect and use the actual words they use. No, I mean, I think it's part of the unspoken agreement that all these people have to make, which was the only way to get this eager maniacal man out of the position that he clearly should not be in. And to stop our entire party from being absolutely massacred in the election is that we have to preserve his dignity and give him a face saving out. And so we're going to now keep praise on him as if he's done this resuppless thing. When you're right, I mean, you know, the reason why he left, according to a piece in Politico about the moment that he decided, according to this, even as late as Saturday, he was still like, no, full steam ahead, I'm staying in here. Fuck everyone. And then on Sunday, finally, two of his advisors went to his house in Delaware. And they were all wearing masks in these distance. And they showed him polls, which apparently they hadn't done any polling his campaign and done any polling in the battleground states in two months. And then they showed him these polls and they said, yeah, look, basically, it's impossible for you to win. There's so many things to say about this. But number one, it kind of maybe not quite confirmed, but it hints that a lot of the things that people have been saying and reporting over the last few weeks, that basically his advisors have been taking advantage of his state and not feeding him at least the full information, if not accurate information and keeping the truth about both his political standing and God knows what else from him appears to be kind of true. I mean, he that was the moment he decided to step out because he realized he couldn't he couldn't win. But I mean, looking at any polls over the last, you know, some number of weeks would have led you to that conclusion. So he really must have been completely in the dark by the this this inner ring of incredibly power hungry hangers on who just wanted to keep him there. I want to add one more thing, which is that in this piece, Jill Biden, after her husband makes the decision that he cannot go anymore, apparently said something along the lines of the most important thing is we have to to preserve my husband's dignity. And what is humorous to me about it, or just kind of, I don't know, ironic, hypocritical, self-serving. I mean, Jill Biden reportedly is one of the people around him, this tiny little circle of people who has been pushing Biden to, despite the fact that he embarrassed himself at this debate on a national audience, national stage, has pushed him to continue going out, doing interviews with ABC and whoever, where he has gone on to embarrass himself repeatedly by making bizarre statements, apparently seeming to say that he was a black woman, or when he was listening to Secretary of State, he couldn't remember his name, so he could just call them the black man, and so much more. So, you know, at that point, her husband's dignity, not so important. As long as it, you know, they could just steamroll him into the nomination, and maybe try and keep this train rolling into the election, whatever, he can embarrass himself as much as possible in public. Now, suddenly, you know, we put a premium on preserving his dignity. Yeah, and I mean, just on the subject of dignity, there has not been a lot of that to go around, you know, taking a step away from Biden as a person for a moment. I mean, one of the things that the last four or five weeks has really catalyzed for me is how all of the worst and most deranged forms of liberal partisanship that we've known since 2016 have seemed to come out. Like, we've done a speed run through all of them over the past four weeks. And I mean, I do think that Biden people are partly responsible for this, because after the debate, it really seems like they were the ones driving, you know, like their communication strategy was to say that, like, wanting Joe Biden to step aside is anti-black racism. They did that unbelievable email about the Pod Save America guys, where they were saying, you know, podcast, bros, all that kind of shit. I mean, there was that absolutely insane tweet we saw that was basically suggesting that like, wanting Joe Biden to drop out. I mean, the tweet was like, you know, politics and rape culture are too similar for comfort. I mean, what do you even what do you even say about that? Like, in this moment of crisis, where, you know, his entire legacy is on the line, his political futures on the line, Joe Biden and his people were waging like a phony war through like anonymous sources against Pod Save America. You had this ridiculous spectacle just a few days ago of like Jamie Harrison, the chairman of the DNC, fighting with Nate Silver on Twitter and spreading misinformation about ballot access in Ohio. I don't know if people saw this, but you know, there's been this whole idea that like, if they change candidates, then the Democratic nominee won't be on the ballot in Ohio, which as far as anyone can tell is completely false. And this, you know, this is the chair of the DNC saying this, I saw in reaction to that the Mueller she wrote podcast, you know, which has a very active Twitter account, they tweeted this photo. And it was like, you know, beware those who don't prioritize democracy. And it was a picture of like Steve Schmidt, the former Republican strategist who's a never Trump guy. I don't know what he said to have done. I don't care. Nate Silver. And then I'm forgetting which I think it was JD Vance as well. And it's like, all of these people are the same because they're they're calling for Joe Biden to drop out Jamie Harrison and also then tweeted a meme of Gandalf saying you shall not pass. And he's like, I feel a lot like this. I've been feeling a lot like this these days. But you know, despite all that, I've been very struck by how seemingly unanimous the relief of Biden stepping down was and how quickly and enthusiastically everybody connected with the Democratic Party got behind to the point where, you know, it looked like for about 10 minutes, there might be some sort of competitive primary. But you know, by the end of the afternoon, it's like, no, everyone's just incredibly happy to be done with it. So after, I don't know, two, three weeks of just this nonstop discourse that you're describing. Yeah, no, I agree. Although I also think everything we've seen really just suggests that like what to me appeared at least momentarily to be like, oh, you know, there is like a major disagreement within like the, you know, there's like a public disagreement happening within the Democratic Party in between like major powerful figures within the Democratic apparatus, which is completely unprecedented as far as I know, like the reactions to the debate on CNN, leading with David Axelrod, who I think reacted first, and you know, then followed by a very weepy Van Jones, who's been weeping a lot lately, speaking of dignity. But right away, we were seeing things that were unprecedented. The New York Times editorial board calling for Biden to drop out. And so I thought, okay, thank goodness, like a fever's breaking, something's happening, things are moving, you know, news is happening again. But then very quickly, what we saw was a lot of parts of the sort of liberal apparatus, you know, Jamie Harrison, Mueller, she wrote and the people who listened, listened to it fucking John Federman, lots of people clinging to Joe Biden. And we saw many people clinging to the most insane QAnon-like partisanship. There were those like two weeks of people being like, oh, well, actually, Joe Biden did really great in the debate. And what they actually did is they sabotaged his microphone. And here's like a 27 tweet thread by me. I'm actually an audio expert. And, you know, it's crazy. And that was after the better part of a year of a lot of people, including the guys from policy of America saying that all those clips you're seeing of Biden, where he sounds completely incoherent and forgetting people's names. Yeah, those are like deceptively edited and stuff. So I feel like all of this has really come to a head. And now that things are kind of gathering around Kamala Harris, there's a transference going on. And I'm actually not sure that the events of the past month have really shifted that much on a fundamental level, although obviously Joe Biden is gone, which is a good thing. My favorite part of the whole saga was when they were gearing up to push Biden out. And there was a bunch of people ready to go public and say, you know, he needs to step down. And then on the Monday, someone just posted a letter signed by Joe Biden, and he was like, I'm not leaving. And they were all like, Oh, well, we can't do this now. What are we, what are we supposed to do? He just someone posted a letter online. We the power of that is too much for us to go. I mean, as you guys were saying a little earlier, what is kind of striking about this moment is like, it's always been this absurd. It's been this absurd. They've done all these elaborate techniques, like smoking mirrors, camera angles, all this stuff, to try and keep us from noticing that Joe Biden is clearly suffering, declined. And they've done it for years. What changed was that that yeah, you were allowed to say it openly, suddenly again, because you were briefly in 2019, people were saying it briefly. And then he became him and Sanders, and then everyone went, okay, well, we just have to pretend. But one of my favorite bits in the early part of when they were doing this fiasco was when Biden just disappeared. And I think it was like April 2020. It was like, remember this COVID hit? And then he just went dark. No one saw or heard anything from him. And then the excuse they used was well, he's in his house in Wilmington. But they've had to set up the mics and all the cameras and all the media stuff in his basement so that he could do interviews. And it's taken it's taken an entire week. Yeah, exactly. And then he came back and he seemed really just frazzled and totally together. And I remember there was one bit where there was some Instagram live thing. It was in the middle of him just being invisible. There was some Instagram live event. And then, you know, on the little lower left hand side, there's all the comments and reactions that people who are watching it live are doing. And then one was through the Joe Biden account, a little thumbs up campaign advisor at the time, Simone Sanders posted a picture on it to Twitter. And she went, Joe Biden popped up in the Instagram live today. Good to see him there. And I was like, come on. I mean, at that point, that's just insulting. The idea that anyone's going to believe that that's a sign of life. I mean, it is incredible to me like the sort of infantile way that people have talked about Biden not just in the past month, but I mean, for years, I mean, in the past month, there's been stuff about how like, oh, you know, Biden, he's not seeing the same polls that that we're seeing. And it's like, they didn't commission any. And like Bronco, I, you know, I read the same reporting as you from Politico. It does seem like an elsewhere that, you know, his inner circle, we're not exposing him to this bad polling data. But it's like, Joe Biden is a grown ass man that pulls that we're all seeing in the New York Times and stuff, aren't like secret polls that like he couldn't have access to if he didn't want to all the stuff about how like Biden needs to be given this graceful exit. And he needs to be, you know, which I agree with you, Bronco was a tactic that they were clearly using. I mean, again, it's like speaking about the most powerful man in the world as if he's like this child and also as if like, we're all children, like, we need to be given a narrative by the adults in the room, like it can't just be like what we're all seeing. And, you know, before our very eyes and have been seeing for the past five years, like that can't possibly be true. Yeah, I found it all so kind of unsettling and disconcerting that I feel like I've not really been able to enjoy this moment as much as I as much as I should. One of the biggest moments in this, we can move on. We have to talk about this for him. But like it is, it is just extremely funny to him. I mean, it has kind of bizarre and surreal as it was to live through it. It was often very funny. But I remember one of the big dominoes to drop was when the guy who in 2020 wrote that ridiculous Atlantic piece that was like, anytime that you've seen Joe Biden go haywire in public and like say something weird or lose track of what he's saying, forget someone's name, that's because he has a stutter. And it's actually kind of offensive that you would even come up with this. Well, then in 2024, I mean, at some point, maybe two weeks ago, that same guy wrote a piece for the Atlantic, basically revoking the Biden campaign's stutter privilege. He was like, no, what we're seeing is not a stutter. This is clearly something else. And I was like, okay, this is officially now the end of this. As you say, sure, that we've all been kind of buying into for the last few years. But you know, a fun fact is we're actually recording this while Netanyahu is doing his bipartisan address to Congress. And I've been feeling a little cognitive dissonance about, I mean, I understand the relief and excitement that people are feeling on some level that Joe Biden is gone. But the the tenor is probably built on a fairly weak foundation. But this tenor of, Oh man, politics is back. The Democrats are back, baby. You know, we got a fresh young with it candidate. And I realized she is not at the address today. But many of the people who are her contenders for VP are there. Schumer is there. Jeffries is there. They're all applauding. I don't know the amount of cognitive dissonance it takes to be excited for any Democrat at this moment is difficult for me to comprehend. Yeah, just as a final summing up point about the vibes. I mean, I think can like look, it gives me no pleasure to report this. But our days of, you know, coconut trees and Venn diagram love and all that stuff. Like, I hope people enjoyed it. I hope you know, you know, you all got it out of your system. I think the five minutes in which that stuff was funny are rapidly coming to an end if they haven't ended already. I saw yesterday that Kamala Harris campaign website has like when you get an error message, it says something like, this page exists in the context of all that has is and has been you know, you know, you know, you know, the thing I'm quoting. And once like a meme becomes self aware, I feel like that's the precise moment it becomes stale. Like Will remarked when I shared with him earlier, you're trying to do like dark Brandon shit with Kamala Harris and like, it actually was like kind of funny when, you know, we all thought that Biden like wasn't going to drop out. And then yeah, there's all these clips of Kamala Harris, all these kind of like strange flourishes she has. And it's like, okay, well, you know, yeah, that's that's fun. Like Joe Biden's not fun. That's fun. Just on like an abstract kind of aesthetic level. But I feel like vibes are going to shift again very quickly to just like unavoidable realities. Like, I mean, I saw apparently Harris's team is courting Jim Messina consultant to, you know, worked for Obama, obviously, I think deputy campaign manager, something like that also worked with the British Conservative Party, I believe on two election campaigns, a guy with an avowed Lee corporate Ben, I feel like and Anna's yeah, literally a serial loser, one of the architects of the British Tory parties 2017 election disaster. So I feel like all the sort of fun Kamala stuff is going to get dashed against the rocks pretty soon. And again, it brings me no pleasure to report this. There was a very funny space that existed for a little while where like left wing accounts could like ironically post Kamala content. But I feel like, yeah, that moment is rapidly passing. And we're going to be sort of snapped back to I fear, I mean, we'll see what happens. But I mean, I fear a campaign that is going to hit many of the same notes as, you know, recent Democratic Party presidential campaigns. And you know, like those notes being the bad ones. This is kind of the paradox that we're in, because between the two of them, Biden and Kamala Harris, they could almost make a decent candidate because Harris can speak in full sentences and is not suffering from some kind of mystery condition. But then on the other hand, Biden adopted this very late in the game and progressive platform that was actually really good. And it should have been he should have been running on it months ago, if not before that. But the problem is that the only reason he decided to do that is because he had become untenable as a candidate. And he agreed to it in an active desperation because progressives had gone to do it in exchange for their support. This is the trouble. It's like, Harris should run on that, but it would only take a point of desperation for how to do something like that in the first place. And so we're just kind of like in this no-win situation. I mean, you know, unfortunately, in the end, Harris is bad as she is as we could campaign where she is, just unprincipled as she is, was the better option because ultimately every single person in the country could see there was something wrong with Biden. And the idea of running them as the guy who's going to run the country was absolutely preposterous. So she was a better option. There was hope and there still is hope that she could run a decent campaign and be Trump. But you know, I think you're right, pretty soon we're going to get reminded of why it is that for the longest time, a bunch of people around Biden will be like, well, we can't really get this guy to step aside despite the fact that he has an illness in his brain because she is that bad of a politician. Yeah, I mean, there've been lots of reports about a very high turnover in her office. She had very little visibility, I feel like in this administration and obviously in 2020, her campaign made some, I mean, really elementary mistakes. She let her sister run it and decided not to campaign, like not to focus on the early states and instead to go for viral debate moments, which, you know, very similar actually in some ways to the strategy beta or Rourke adopted, also not successful, even less successful in his case. But we'll have to wait and see, I guess, what kind of campaign she runs. I do just want to say, since I didn't say it before, I mean, it's a good thing that Joe Biden is not going to be the Democratic nominee. And Kamala Harris is just by definition is going to be a better candidate for all the reasons you said Bronco, you know, she can speak in complete sentences. She has a, you know, basic command of things like message discipline. And she can talk about abortion, which is the strongest issue for the Democrats with some actual conviction, not like Biden who is, you know, personally, I don't think it's ever been really comfortable with the positions he has to take on it. But it's ridiculous that the demand isn't for Biden to step aside immediately. It is beyond me how anybody can have seen that debate. Like, would you trust this guy to like drive you to the corner store, let alone wield nuclear launch codes? Like, I think it's completely ridiculous. And over the past any constellation, I don't think he's coming to work much anymore. Yeah, fair, fair point. But yeah, just over the past few weeks, I feel like I've had a number of conversations with older people, especially some of them very much on the left to I feel like just do not see or hear the same thing when Joe Biden speaks that I do. And I found that a very difficult pill to swallow. The thing I've heard people say in watching some of his interviews and that debate is, you know, he'll dabble and answer kind of smush two thoughts together. And I'll go, well, but you can kind of, you can see where he was going. You can see what he was trying to say. That should not be an approach that we take to the most powerful person in the world. That's something that you apply to, I don't know, a toddler. Yes, this is again, the point about everything being so infantilized. Like Biden did that NATO press conference, right after the NATO meeting. And like, this was an hour after he called Zelensky Putin. I wouldn't have chosen vice president Trump if I didn't think she was qualified to do the job of president. You know, it was an awful press conference. And then you had like two days of people being like, this churchillion oratory just Biden's command of foreign policy is unparalleled, you know, mojo back. I don't know. Part of it is that journalists know absolutely nothing about foreign policy. So if you just say a bunch of stuff that sounds vaguely quote unquote serious, they'll just be like, oh, that, that's incredible. Like his answers in that entire press conference were sometimes completely baffling and nonsensical. I'm going to read you one bit. This was about please. He was asked about would he allow Zelensky, the prison of Ukraine, to use US weapons to strike inside Russia. And this is this response. We have allowed Zelensky to use American weapons in the near term in the near abroad into Russia, whether or not he has we should be he should be attacked. For example, should Zelensky, he's not. But if he had the capacity to strike Moscow, strike the Kremlin, would that make sense? It wouldn't. The question is, what's the best use of the weaponry he has and the weaponry we're getting to him? I've got him more him. I got him more long-range capacity as well as defensive capacity. And so our military is working. I'm following the advice of my commander in chief, my of the chief of staff of the military, as well as the secretary of defense and our intelligence people. Like, beyond all the kind of halting and like swerves away for senses, what was he actually saying there? Can you can you tell me what the answer there was? And so it's actually, I mean, it reflects incredibly poorly on the press corps that they listened to that and they were like, oh, this guy's still got it on front policy. Okay. I couldn't believe it. It's like Biden was just saying the names of countries and then so many people afterwards, like the consensus was like, wasn't that great? He did really good. He talked about he did a submarine deal with Australia. I bet you didn't know about that, which by the way, this is not important. But one of my favorite things with Biden over the last month is how much he fucking loves that submarine deal. I love how much he talks about having done a submarine deal with Australia. Like, he's going to campaign on this fucking voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. They love the submarine deal, folks. It's a lot more people are talking about. The August deal is kind of a debacle, too. Like, it's not even clear that they're going to be able to produce a submarine that they promised to strap because the industrial capacity just isn't there. Number one, like, Australian politicians are talking about themselves being like, this might be this might be a waste of time. Like, it's not clear that they're going to deliver these. And also, in the process of making this deal happen, what happened was that the France, which had an agreement to give some reason to show they got shunted aside. And they got really pissed off about that. So like, there's not really any level that this is some big policy when for Biden, he pissed off one ally and then has proven actually a cable following through on his promise to another, not ally, but you know, security partner. I did not know that about the submarine deal. And I have to say I'm very disappointed. You did that. I'm going to have to issue in a retraction from the Biden's wins account that I, that's my that's my all now I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination. Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin, President Putin, I'm going to be President Putin, President Linsky. I'm so focused on beating Putin. We got to worry about it. Anyway, yeah, so Bronco, you wrote this piece for Jack have been called Joe Biden want to this. And I thought you did a really good job in the piece of, you know, we've just in the over the course of this conversation, we've really just been talking about the past few years. Something I think the piece did a very good job of was situating the past month in particular in the wider context of Joe Biden's career, particularly in the context of his insane ravenous lust to be president, which he seems to have nurtured since he wrote an essay in the sixth grade, you know, saying that he wanted to be president. So I don't know, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the arguments you made in the piece and kind of how you see this moment in Joe Biden's career, all the kind of sillier stuff we've been talking about as somebody who, you know, has written a book on Joe Biden yesterday's man, it's very good book, you should read it. If you haven't read it already, somebody who's thought a lot about Joe Biden's political career and kind of understands how his mind works. Yeah, how do you, how do you see Biden in this moment? I mean, the piece was partly inspired by, I watched that clip of Biden, you know, maybe the lowest point of his presidency, he got COVID, he was being abandoned by his entire party, he's struggling to get in his car, he looks incredibly weak, I mean, and a pejorative, I mean, he looks very, very weak and feeble, probably because of the illness. And you know, despite the fact that this man is a mass murderer, I mean, you know, he is responsible for the deaths of what is probably going to be hundreds of thousands of people by the time all the dust is settled. There was a bit of me that felt petty for him that felt bad for him, you know, that I mean, I just putting myself in his shoes, this is such a sad, hurtful way to end your career. And of course, I said to myself, I shouldn't, I shouldn't indulge that feeling too much because yes, this man is a mass murderer. But also, this is exactly what he always wanted. He could have written it out into sunset, no one asked him to run to a president in 2020. No one wanted him to be president. He ran because he wanted to. He ran because there was a thing he always wanted to do a thing he always wanted to be, since he was a kid. And you know, we have by virtue of indulging this very ambitious man's childhood dreams gotten to the point where we are right now. So the piece is basically just saying to people, look, I mean, at the end of the day, better or worse, however this ends up. And you know, despite all the eulogizing that that he's getting or the plaudits and everything, you know, I think this is a this is a pretty low end to his career. You know, for better or worse, this is what Biden desired. The coming president does come with a price and signs up prices that is the risk of failure, which I think, unfortunately, despite the fact that the fact that Biden has done some things to advance, you know, certain progressive causes that I don't want to pretend it doesn't exist, I think ultimately he has been in a failure as a president. So how would I judge his political career? Or how would I judge this moment as political career? I mean, I think, you know, if Biden was someone who was driven by resentment at being kind of looked down on in Washington, undercounted, underestimated, didn't come from the Ivy League schools and didn't have the elite backgrounds of everyone else. Well, you know, I think I think he did. He kind of reached this pinnacle in that period in early to mid 2021, when he won the presidency, he was at the top of his approval rating, you know, he had the world in his grasp. And unfortunately, since then, I mean, the ungenerous way to look at is that he has proved his detractors right. And in the end, you know, the elites, he presents are the ones who forced him out, who forced him to be a one-term president, which, you know, I'm sure he does not want to be. But you know, that's also also a result of how he does politics and how he came to the position he's in. As many people have said, and as some Democratic officials have finally admitted openly, you know, the reason he's in this place is because of elites. It's not because, yes, he had some very soft, popular support. But ultimately, the reason he's where he is is because a certain segment of the Democratic Party moved him into the earth to put him where he was. And unfortunately, when you live by the elites, you also die by the elites, you know, Biden did not, in the end, have mass popular constituency that might have saved him in this moment. So if he was a Bernie Sanders, who was being removed by the party elites, or you know, Jeremy Carben, who had a very similar experience with a different outcome in 2017, that's an extremely good comparison. Exactly. He did not have that. And ultimately, because he was entirely dependent on these people to stay where he was, it was relatively easy for them to ultimately push him out. Something you often hear, and I've heard a lot in the last couple months about Joe Biden, is that he was the most progressive president of all time. And you know, you would often actually hear this from, you know, Bernie Sanders, for example, his case for supporting Joe Biden is, okay, if you put aside what's happening in Gaza and put aside this and that, if you look at, you know, the judicial appointments, or a certain other appointments, if you look at certain finer policy details, he's a great bro working class president, or at least the greatest that we've had in modern times. I'm curious, to what extent do you think that's true? And if true, how does one square that with how he lived his political life in the decades before that? Look, there's no doubt that we got the best Biden we were going to get. There were many things that happened that were a complete shock to me, given his history. And I think reflected the historical moment that we were in, I think it reflected the power, or at least, no, not the power, let's just say the power, it reflected the influence of the left, reflected somewhat the left had been able to achieve to transform the political landscape to pressure the Democratic Party into certain positions, so on and so forth. And there's no doubt, look, if he had passed the bill by bill bill, so that was the massive social safety and expansion that was the centerpiece of his presidency, if he had passed that, I think he would have probably gone down even even with this, you know, horrendous mass murder that he has spent the last nine months committing, I think he would have gone down as one of the great president. So the least optimistic policy, but you know, he didn't, which I sometimes feel like people talk about him as if he did get this thing passed. And yeah, I have to say, I understand why people talk about the inflation reduction act, and, and yeah, some of these appointments, you know, to the FTC and things like that. But I feel like people also, if you're gonna, if you're gonna talk about Biden's agenda, there's a few points you also need to acknowledge that I feel like, don't get acknowledged enough. They had a chance to raise the minimum wage, and they wouldn't overrule the fucking Senate parliamentarian in order to do that. Yeah, it's true that Biden was, you know, very pro labor in terms of his rhetoric. And of course, he did march on the UAW picket line. He also smashed the rail workers, what would have been one of the biggest and most important strikes in American history. He did not get the lion's share of the spending plans that he tabled after that first bill they passed in either January, February of the American Rescue plan of 2021. The, I'm already forgetting what they, what they called the second, the second bill. But the Build Back Better agenda, that started at what was it $4 trillion, $7 trillion, I'm already forgetting the number, but it was massively cut down. It was bungled. The whole process was bungled in typical Democratic Party fashion. The moment they split that bill into two, and they created a second bill that had the infrastructure stuff that at all of the bipartisan buy-in, at the time people said, Oh, this is a tactic. You know, this is like Nancy Pelosi is playing 24 dimensional chess. They're going to hold all the infrastructure, infrastructure stuff hostage in order to get all the climate spending, all the social expenditure, child care, etc. And guess which of those things took priority? Guess which of those things got passed? And I feel like these facts do not go acknowledged enough. Well, what happened was that they were going to pass it all in one. So it was going to be the infrastructure spending is in like on physical infrastructure, roads, bridges, rail, all of that stuff. And they were going to pair it with things like expanding Medicare, free community colleges. In fairness, we did finally beat Medicare. Yeah, child tax credit, a million things subsidies for child care, universal pre-K. It was a really good piece of legislation constructed mostly by Sanders and other members of the Senate. And the only way that this was going to go forward was if it was kept together, because think of think of that $100 billion military bill that Biden later ended up passing. Their trick there was we keep it all in one piece of legislation, because then everyone who's pissed off at one part of it can't vote down the part that they hate and make sure the thing that they love passes. That was the point here, but it was Biden who decided, hold on, I want to show the country that is still possible for Democrats or Republicans to work together. And so he split the bill and he said, I'm going to try and get Republican buying on this part, we're going to keep them a link. But of course, you know, keeping them linked, they were only linked insofar as anyone in the Democrat caucus actually wanted to keep them linked. And in the end, they decoupled them. And the part that actually people cared about most and would have really transformed people's lives didn't come to pass. And what's doubly ironic about it is that, you know, after basically sinking the centerpiece of his presidential agenda for the sake of getting a photo of shaking hands with Republicans, for like the next three years, Biden has run a campaign saying that Republicans are going to bring a dictatorship to the country and that they're like the worst people in the world. So it's like, what was even the point of doing this? If he had passed that maybe things would have been different. But as there's, I mean, there's a lot of ambiguous things about his presidency, including the fact that he never fought to keep the social safety and expansion that had happened under the pandemic that had actually happened on the Trump. I mean, you know, this is why I'm a little leery of saying, you know, one person's the best president, one person's second best or this person's worst. I mean, look, Trump's presidency was a debacle, and it was a horrifying and so many levels. But out of sheer opportunism and out of just historical accident, Trump ended up signed to law the largest social safety net expansion, maybe since the New Deal, the expansion of Medicaid, the pause and student loan repayments, the eviction ban, you know, all these things, cynical intent to keep power. But nevertheless, he did it. Under Biden, under Biden's watch, all those things went away. And some of that he couldn't do that much for about, but some of it he could. And he went along with it. He went along with, with throwing, you know, at this point, I think 20 million people off Medicaid off the health insurance, he went along. He actually denigrated the expanded unemployment insurance, which was basically just a massive cash transfer to, you know, working class people during the pandemic. And he basically said, you know, no, this is this is a bad thing. We have to get rid of it. Maybe if he had fought to keep some of those programs, actually, people wouldn't be quite as miserable as they are under the current cost of living crisis in the United States. But you know, as is, it's, you know, his presidency is very contradictory. It's his legacy, I think, is quite complicated. I think he did do some things to, as I said, advanced progress to politics broadly. And I think certainly his NIB has been crucial for union organizing. But you know, this whole, he's the most progressive president. He's the best president of all time. I think that's kind of a reductive framing. I think I think some important victories were won under Biden, just as some important victories were won under Trump. I'm not going to say now that these guys are like, you know, in the top 10 presidents of all time or whatever Trump is. Sorry. Yeah, of course, only only one of them is as well. Of course, there was the great moment in the debate, possibly Biden's finest, where he started talking about like how there's a list of 100 historians who say he's the best president ever. And Trump is the worst or something. I assume all 100 of them are just John Meacham. Anyway, John Meacham, Johnny Meacham, Jonathan Meacham. By the way, worst president history, 159 presidential scholars voted in the worst president in the history of the United States of America. Anyway, I want to shift gears now and talk about the other guys, the Republican Party, because Bronco, you've been at the RNC. And I have to say, I mean, I do feel like people think the Democratic Party after everything that's happened has more juice than I think it does. However, I think if there's anything that kind of reassures me that the Republicans can fuck this up, it was every single thing I saw watching the RNC. It's, you know, watching JD Vance stump. Actually, I saw Harry Anton had some polling that he was talking about last night about how like JD Vance is possibly the least popular vice presidential nominee in modern history. I don't know if the two of you have seen his little riff about Diet Mountain Dew that was making the rounds yesterday. It is the weirdest thing to me. Democrats say that it is racist to believe, well, they say it's racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, I'm sure they're going to call that racist too, but it's good. I love you guys. But these people were telling jokes up in the front row. You guys might not be able to hear it, but I'm getting caught up in it. But yeah, the guy has absolutely no juice. And I thought his speech at the RNC was, I don't know, I thought it was extremely dull, very predictable, very one note. I'm curious, Bronco, I feel like Trump has actually failed to capitalize on the fact that he was nearly killed as much as he might have. So it feels to me that they have no juice, but Broncos, since you were actually there, I'm curious how you would describe kind of the atmosphere. I mean, obviously you were there as a Nikki Haley delegate. So, you know, I know it was probably sort of a bittersweet occasion for you. But yeah, what was it like at the RNC? Well, I will say that night when you get a speech was funny, because Hulk Hogan came out. And the way I'll see it, I could see the teleprompter the entire time so I could see when people went off script and when they stuck to it. So Hulk Hogan came out. And by the way, Hulk Hogan sucks. Like he's a, Hulk Hogan is not only, you know, you might not like him for his politics and speaking at the RNC, he doesn't like reviled by other wrestlers. He's like known as just a self serving. Hulk Hogan is like a child's idea of a celebrity, or like a baby's idea of an action star, you know, pathetic. Yeah, the star of suburban commando is not a, well, I will say when he came under the speech, I mean, it was, it was electrifying. The first half of a speech when he was doing all the like, basically, you know, just ripping a shirt and saying all the stuff, that was all improvised. There was not on the teleprompter. So he basically just came out and did a Hulk Hogan 80 style wrestling promo. When they took a shot at my hero, and they tried to kill the next president of the United States. Oh, no, was enough. And I said, what's up, I mean? Yeah. And the crowd loved it. And then he got into his speech. And I was like, wow, man, he really finds people. I've not seen a reaction like the so far in the last four days. And then Trump came on and just stuck the life out of the room. I mean, I could not believe how boring the speech was. He just would not stop talking. And I could see I was looking at the teleprompter. And it was like every three to five lines, he would then go on a three to five minute long riff. And it was not even Trump's best stuff, because he was trying to, I guess, be toned down and not say anything too crazy. So it was just him just talking in circles endlessly about nothing in particular. There was this extended bit about Franklin Graham and Billy Graham towards the end when I thought it was must be going to end. And he just went on for like, what felt like 10 minutes about the Graham's unbelievable. And I could see I could see down there as all the delegates are saying they're watching this. I mean, people were getting very restless because some of them have been standing up for over an hour, fidgeting around, looking around, people checking their phones, people talking to each other, you see people like moving their feet around because they obviously were getting very uncomfortable standing there for that long. So that's that's my takeaway from trans speech as a whole for the event. I mean, it was interesting. The Republican Party is clearly trying to end gesturing as trying to transform into something different, both in terms of the centering of pro worker rhetoric, but also in terms of upping the diversity of people there. I mean, the actual people that were there there, I mean, it was a sea of white faces, but they very smartly made the programming very diverse, you know, and I had people like Amber Rose, they had all these different African American Republican elected officials around the country. They had more Latino speakers, actually had a Native American speaker who came on and said that, you know, reservations are becoming hubs of drugs and sex trafficking, which, you know, very, very convenient to be able to get people to kind of say stuff that otherwise the Republicans might have been accused of race baiting for work, but to have someone who's a minority say it. So, you know, the sudden change is happening. I mean, I talked to people there who were, you know, genuinely pro union, and I talked to people who were, you know, who were not white men, who were members of the party and very enthusiastic about the agenda and all that stuff. So I don't want to say that, you know, it's a complete put on. However, at the end of the day, I mean, I didn't really hear anything there that suggested there's any actual habit to some sort of working class in populism, all the solutions, well, it's just to port people and drill, maybe drill that was basically it. These shifts in the narrative of the Republican Party, to what extent were they reflected in Trump's speech at all? Is it happening sort of independently of Trump? I mean, Trump said certain things that were, you know, I think he had a line in there about how classic immigrants were all stealing jobs. And that's why, you know, if you close the border and deported a bunch of people, that would be good for everyone. And they went, he said, hurting the black community, the Latino community. I mean, he said, they're also hurting workers, union and non-union. And that's about it. I mean, there was the no tax for tips thing that's probably the most economically populist policy that he actually came out with. But other than that, I mean, the policies that he was saying, when he said, I'm going to cure inflation, I'm going to bring prices down. The things that he listed were, like I said, deporting people, energy production, which by the way, a zodiac record highs. So if there hasn't brought prices down, I'm not sure that more of it is going to do the trick. And then it's stuff like cutting regulations, a corporate tax cut, so that corporations bring their businesses back on short to the US, cutting wasteful spending that the Biden administration have been doing. All of this is pretty bog standard Republican stuff that there's no difference between, you know, what he was running on 2020 or 2016, or what like Mitt Romney was running on in 2012, maybe harsher immigration than Romney was in 2012. I'd have to look to check that. But that's about it. And I mean, the platform is the same. The platform does offers these same empty solutions to, you know, people being unable to afford to rent and for the groceries and all that other kind of stuff. So, yeah, no, I think if the Republican Party is going to change, it ain't going to happen in this year, or something out of the course that I can mention. Something I feel very strongly that I've spent a lot of time thinking about. It's one of the kind of principal things that my book is about is, you know, the extent to which politics today is like, ideal, less and less actual ideological ground or policy space is meaningfully being contested. What is being contested, and in some ways, is being contested, I think, perhaps even more than it used to be, is sort of what what story do we tell about, you know, whatever, whatever moment that we're living through. So, on the right, it does seem like there's been a pretty significant rhetorical shift. You know, selection of Vance is obviously a sort of concession to this or an accommodation to this, where, you know, Vance is now he's like flipped on his own in his own story about the meaning of his own life in 2016. White Appalachia was to blame. You know, we had a defective culture, which is why he was surrounded by suffering and failure growing up. But, you know, he escaped and lived the American dream, you know, Ivy League to venture capitalists to book deal pipeline. But now that culture, you know, our victims of, you know, Washington and of liberal elites, et cetera, et cetera. So there's like a new story that's being told. I mean, not just by Vance personally about his own life, but about, you know, like, I do feel like the kinds of things we now hear at a Republican convention in terms of the narrative of what their project is about, and maybe to some extent, in whose interests it's, it's for that has changed. But as you say, Bronco, I mean, Trump announced a big he wants to do a not like another big corporate tax cut. I think he wants to cut it the rate to 15%, something like that. I mean, a like multi multi billion dollar, like hundreds of billions of dollars tax cut the agenda in so many places. You know, I guess we could talk about there's some like protectionism he wants to do. Trump loves talking about tariffs. Those are, for some reason, tariffs are one of the things that seem to get him the most animated. I've never quite understood that, you know, basically it's much of it is just the same kind of chamber of commerce agenda. A lot of the social conservatism, like they tell a new story about it. Maybe the nemesis, the bogeyman, the scapegoat, maybe changes, you know, like, I don't recall it could be wrong about this. I don't remember the Mitt Romney incarnation of the Republican Party or the Tea Party talking as much about child sex trafficking and things like that. So sometimes, you know, the characters are substituted and things like that. But basically, it feels like, yeah, what's being contested is, you know, the story we're telling about an agenda that's basically fixed. And I feel like that's so often the case on the liberal side of politics as well. That's another thing. The second night was there, the night where they talked about like immigration and crime. And my God, I mean, I had to leave because this was like five hours of programming of just speeches talking about just rape and murder and violence towards children and child sex trafficking. And it just went on and on every single speaker was like, good Lord, who wants to watch this? You know, I mean, this is meant to be a TV event. It's meant to be a thing for people to watch. But yeah, that was that was big on the agenda at the RNC. I mean, you know, I think one of my takeaways from this is that even though I think that none of this will actually solve the pressing issues in people's lives, you know, the inability to afford various things and keep up it economically, it's it is a vision. It's a vision that is at least purported to solve what is plaguing people. And I have to say, I don't see the Democrats presenting anything, even even with Harris now in the picture, it seems like what they're going to run on is protecting abortion rights, which is good. But it's not the only thing that people care about, but protecting abortion rights and emphasizing how bad Trump and the Republicans are and the terrible stuff they want to do. And about how Harris is a prosecutor and Trump is a criminal. And so this is the choice between the prosecutor and the felon, you know, and it's like, okay, but how is any of that going to make people's lives better? I mean, it's kind of a defensive crouch as a campaign page. The whole thing is about vote for us to stop something worse from coming while saying that we say is worse from coming. But nothing actually being offered that will improve people's lives. And like I said, Biden did briefly run that agenda. But but the only way that he was supposed to adopt it was that he revealed that he was completely mentally unfit on national TV. So I don't know. Yeah. And to my knowledge, by the way, they never actually created a policy page on Joe Biden's website. No, I mean, it must be said that for the first week of Republican attacks on Kamala Harris, like they've been pretty bad. You know, the main lines of attack on her are that she's a DEI hire, that her laugh is annoying, that she's slapped her way to the top. She's childless. Yeah. I mean, all of this encouraging that they don't know how to run against her, which is, which is strange. I have really enjoyed the reporting just on that to the effect that Trump thinks it's really unfair. I guess Trump is as good as said this in truth, social posts. It's like, we made a whole campaign about how Joe Biden was old. You can't switch horses like mid race. That's that's not fair, which is not see the writing on the wall about this. I mean, everybody knew this was coming such such absolute loser to talk. And then, you know, they also chose Vance in what seems to have been a very like, you know, we're going to win, we're going to be running against Joe Biden, which means we're going to win. And so we're going to have a vice presidential nominee who's kind of a stop to the base. That is, as I understand it, their logic for picking Vance, which I also think is very funny because the idea like, if you want to just throw mega chuds, red meat, there's better vehicles for that than JD Vance, like he's not actually very good at this. But I really enjoyed some reporting I saw yesterday from that Atlantic writer, Tim Alberta, who has what have in the past been some fairly reliable sources within the Republican Party, who who were telling him somebody effective. Trump is actually having second thoughts about having chosen JD Vance. And I have to say, if Donald Trump, you know, if he's lacking juice and wants to get some of that old magic back, he should drop JD Vance from the ticket and just like fucking humiliate him. I think people would love that. Yeah, I mean, the vast thing is interesting because I don't even know if it is a stop to base. Most people I talk to are kind of like, oh, yeah, yeah, no, you know, is he brings something to a table? He'll be more aligned with Trump. That's good. No, it wasn't my first choice, but, you know, I think I think he'll be good. No, there was only a few people that were very enthusiastic and I've read similar accounts, you know, people who kind of surprised at the selection. So I'm not really sure what it means. I think probably the thing that people are saying that was a sign of overconfidence that they were kind of already measuring the drapes. That sounds like it was the most accurate. But again, you know, I mean, as people have said many times, no one should underestimate the ability for both of these parties to completely screw this up, which, you know, the hiring of Jim Athena is is a interesting element on that front. It's like, you know, these people, they both want so desperately to lose seemingly that they'll put all the stops to do it. Now, Bronco, are you going to the DNC? I am going to the DNC. It's here in Chicago, where I call home. So I will be right there. We're going to have you back on to hear about that. I unfortunately will be missing it this year. Yeah. Well, what I'm interested to see beyond, you know, if it's going to be engulfed in chaos and violence is whether there will be the same level of enthusiasm. Because I have to say, I mean, one of the things about the RNC was people there were energized. They were ready to go. They saw death for a minute. And then they were brought back into this life. And they're like, you know, we saw it all go for a second. So we have to fight even how to make it happen. So, you know, I'm interested to see if the same kind of feeling is going to be present and democratic convention or if it's going to be just more fear-based about stopping the Republicans. Well, I have one final item here, just a fun little thing for us to go out on. This comes via Sean Moro, who's been posting excerpts from J.D. Vance's old blog. I guess J.D. Vance had a blogger account. It was called The Ruminations of J.D. Hamill. And so I think this is a lot of fun. What is J.D. Hamill? What's that? I don't know the etymology of Hamill. It's like a Hamill Zuckerman, you know, or the rabbit guy from the John Updike books. But I like also that they're ruminations. I really like his choice of word there. But yeah, he's, you know, I'll read some of the actual posts in a second. But he has a little, I guess this is his blog role. He's, he offers his thoughts on various pundits. And I just love this as an insight into where J.D. Vance was less than 15 years ago. This is a section called The Stuff That I Read Daily. The Beckner Postner blog, The Best Thing on the Web. I don't know what that is. Andrew Sullivan's blog. He's a truly conservative thinker, though his politics have swung leftward lately. Okay. David Frum's website, I write here from time to time. I guess he was, was J.D. Vance was like a gas blogger on David Frum's website. This is my favorite one. Matt Iglesias's blog, The Most Thoughtful Left Leaning Thinker. Well, you read that. Paul Krugman's blog, he's become more political over time. So this is running all those lifestyle columns and food recipes. So yeah, this is opposed from December 8th, 2010. It's called Brief. He writes, "Most of first-year students at Yale Law School are mired in a 30-page writing assignment called A Brief, which is a misnomer if I've ever heard one. Anyways, the Wiff and Poofs or something like that, a Yale Acapella group, is having an open bar event to celebrate their appearance on some reality show. Hopefully you can get done in time to go." So that's one post. He was very excited to see the Wiff and Poofs Acapella group. This one's a little older. This is from July 30th, 2005. It's called Back in North Carolina. I don't know what to say. I returned from home yesterday to North Carolina with the schedule of going to Iraq on my 21st birthday August 2nd. Hopefully that will happen. I'm so bored and lonely here that I need something to get my mind back on the right track. I feel really weird right now. I don't want to hang out with anyone except for my closest friends or my family, and I have a few really good friends fear and no family. So a little sad J.D. there. The Wiff and Poofs weren't quite enough to make him have a couple of times like this. I love the spectacle of this guy who's now doing hastily learned Reddit lib trigger ring that he was just some earnest lib blogger in the 2000s. I don't have a date on this one, but this is my favorite one. Needless to say, it was a crappy day, and I hate airports. And yesterday was incredibly emotional for me. I honestly can say that I felt more like a female than I think I ever have or will. Any thoughts about my family, a memory of Megan singing B-A-N-A-N-A-S in the back of the car, the card that my little cousins made for me, or whatever made me tear up. I couldn't watch Garden State because New Jersey's landscape is so much like Ohio's. The music is so relevant to my life right now. And the story of a guy returning home, realizing that home isn't what it used to be, etc. Made me want to tear up. The comment he makes about realizing that the place he grew up isn't really home anymore. And his theory that people settle down because when you lose your home, you want to make a new one really resonates with me right now. And I'm sure it does with some of you too. Well, that's interesting. He's like planning for home and his family, but then wasn't this whole book about how his family was responsible? Yeah, he's growing up just a moment. Yeah, yeah. His family is disgusting. They were in 2016, and I haven't seen the Ron Howard movie, but I understand that that's what it's about, just like the book. And then now, now he's flipped on it again. Actually, here's a possibility. Maybe when Trump drops him from the ticket in a few weeks, he'll go back to being like a weepy indie teenager in the mid 2000s. He'll start doing posts about how like Juneau is his favorite movie. He'll start listening to the shins, you know. This sounds like some Michael when I was foreshadowing. You know, I mean, I'm actually surprised you guys haven't tackled hillbilly knowledge. It's coming. Bronco market each, a pleasure as always. Very fun to run through recent events with you like this and get some shoe leather reporting from the RNC. Yeah, maybe we'll have you back on when the DNC happens. Is there anything you want to plug? And where can people find you if they're not following you already? Yeah, Jacobin, in these times, I also have a podcast, one of 200 that I don't go on anymore, but it's still going. So if you want to know what's happening in New Zealand, I highly recommend that. We also do cover world politics and other stuff sometimes. I have a piece coming out about Joe Biden's history with Israel, the history of his relationship with Israel that I think will be quite interesting that should be coming out anytime soon. It could even be up right now. I don't know. This is this is what's so exciting about the world of news. If people want an interesting and fairly comprehensive read on Joe Biden before, we all never think of him again. I highly recommend Bronco's 2020 book Yesterday's Man. Check it out. [Music] I'm looking here on the good life of mine to never mind without a trust and faith in fear that I do not define the future to you like me. I dance like a queen in the eyes of the mister Bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye