There's something happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear. Six weeks until the election and Kamala Harris remains the least-known and least-substantive presidential candidate in American history. Can it remain that way? Can she glide to November? Give a listen.
The Commentary Magazine Podcast
Kamala Better Start Talking
There's something happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear. Six weeks until the election and Kamala Harris remains the least-known and least-substantive presidential candidate in American history. Can it remain that way? Can she glide to November? Give a listen.
- Broadcast on:
- 24 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, September 24th, 2024. I am John Pudhoritz, the editor of commentary magazine in just a little less than two months. We'll be having our roast, the commentary magazine annual roast. This year, the roasty is, as you've heard me say before. Natan Sharansky. How do you roast Natan Sharansky? Come find out. Go to commentary.org/roast. We have fantastic speakers. We have a community of 400-500 people will be present in New York as they are this year. This is now, I think, the 14th year that we have been doing this wonderful event that people really seem to like so much that we just keep doing it. So if you want to find out why commentary.org/roast, then you will meet my fellow panelists when you come. Those are, of course, executive editor, a green malt, high Abe. Hi, John. The laughing, the amused, Washington commentary columnist, Matthew Cottonetti. Hi, Matt. Hello, John. The also amused, but more quietly amused, media commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John. And senior editor, Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth. Hi, John. Actually, we have a policy day coming out of our ears. There's policy coming left, right, and center. We have, at the conclusion of this podcast-- so we will not be talking about the text-- Joe Biden will be appearing, giving his speech at the United Nations General Assembly, which should be an interesting hour to spend with the president, assuming that he is the president, and that Jill Biden isn't the one delivering the speech the way that she was sitting at the cabinet meeting last week. I assume, from what we can gather, that it will be a speech defending his record, explaining how he's made the world so much. I can't even say it safer and better over the course of his presidency. That's quite a record. He's going to have to propose and propound there for himself. Yesterday, afternoon, an interesting event in Pennsylvania, where Trump had a panel discussion chaired by Rick Grinnell, his former U.N. Ambassador, and Lee Zeldin, the former congressman, and nearly governor of New York in 2022, on the issue of China and its economic threat to the United States cast in a relatively peculiar light, which was the Chinese government's purchase of American agricultural land, though it was expanded out to talk about the question of whether or not we are taking adequate measure of China's efforts to seize our intellectual property, that are we doing enough to make sure we're not selling them the rope, to hang us with stuff like that. But the main detail, which is clearly an effort, of course, to appeal to farmers and rural people in the United States, is that China has now purchased 350,000 acres of arable, I guess, what they call agricultural land in the United States. And there are 81 million acres of agricultural land in the United States, so 350,000 acres out of 81 million is 0.4%. So either this is an important warning of something that is accelerating, that China is purchasing American land in a way that we are, has been here to forbid, invisible to us, or Trump is trying to shoehorn two issues in at once. I did not watch the event, John, but did they mention the location of the land that is being purchased? Because I think it's less the total amount of land being purchased and more where that land happens to be situated. And it is the case that oftentimes these Chinese linked companies and entities purchase land near US military and intelligence installations. That's correct. And it's not just the Trump folks who are worried about the Chinese penetration of the US economy. It's also the Biden administration, which just came out yesterday saying that they are going to attempt to block Chinese smart vehicles from coming into the United States. And I think that's a completely rational move in light of the events in Lebanon last week, right? When we're entering this new phase of warfare where it's less armies, aircraft carriers and tanks, and more drones, missiles, and weaponized technology that you have to worry about. So I'd want to mention those details to say that-- That's an important point. As much as your math is very good. I know. You know. Thank you. There is an itch. I'm always skittish when you do math. Where am I? Am I 600? I'm the SNT. Did I get to 600? Your score is rising. Your math is very good. But there are some issues here I think that deserve airing in an election year. Look, you make an important point. We know from reading stories about not only self-driving cars, but Teslas and things like that. That somewhere in some center location in Teslaville, the Tesla center computer can speed up or slow down your car, can keep you from driving over 90, that kind of thing. Yeah, so imagine a world in which there are 20 million American-- there are Chinese vehicles on American streets and highways and things like that. And somebody decides to get clever the way the Israelis got clever and start speeding your car up. I mean, it sounds like science fiction. It is literally science fiction. It is the plot point in an Amazon show that Christine and I both loved called upload, where the character who ends up in this sort of world after death is in a self-driving car that gets into an accident and he is killed. And it turns out that he was murdered by somebody taking control of his self-driving car. But it's not just speeding up and slowing down your car. It's the problem with Chinese tech in this country generally, which is that they can suck up all your information and use it. Right. And also, we voluntarily do stuff like this, too, that we don't think about, which is I think probably all of us-- or most of us live in places where the government will ask you to, if you don't want it, opt out of a sort of centralized heating and air conditioning control, a thermostat watch for green purposes. And we had friends who didn't see that fine print or whatever, forgot to opt out, and they were like sitting in the summer here in Maryland in the sweltering heat. And they were playing with their thermostat, and it's like, sorry, it's not responding because the central control is being overridden. So there's all sorts of stuff that could be packed, and we have this sort of the internet of things. We have a whole system where we don't even realize how much we introduce into our daily lives of things like this, and then we start to rethink it only once we realize just how deep we are into that lifestyle. But Matt, you make a point that is worth expanding on, which is that there are almost no bipartisan issues left in the United States as far as we can tell. China is becoming a bipartisan issue in the United States. We do not have the normal, if Trump says China's a threat, that we better get-- how dare he? It's so xenophobic, whatever. That is not the tone and tenor of the Biden administration. Go ahead. And I think Trump deserves a lot of credit for changing the American conversation about the People's Republic of China. In 2016, this was around the time where Obama visited China, and he was left waiting on the tarmac in an absolute humiliation, but there was still a real sense among the Washington political class that China was a competitor, but some thing that we could get along with and continue to integrate our two economies. It was Trump who really, I think, upended that consensus to the point where now, as you suggest, even Democrats, even the Biden administration, view China not just as a strategic competitor, but as a potential and often real adversary. And the best illustration of this is the Trump tariff policy. In one of his better moments in the-- what he would call the perfect debate with Kamala Harris a couple of weeks ago, Trump pointed out that, you know, Harris, you're calling these tariffs a sales tax, but if you really didn't like the tariffs, why are you keeping them on China? And that's absolutely the case, and she did not have an answer for that. And then we think about the TikTok ban, right? This was the TikTok ban, the fourth sale of TikTok by January 19, I think, of next year. Interesting date. Interesting date, right? Was bipartisan legislation included in the national security supplemental earlier this year? And, you know, as I think we mentioned last week, when TikTok went before the DC Court of Appeals to say that the forced sale is illegal, the judges of the DC Circuit, the initial panel of three, were very skeptical of this. So TikTok, too, is oddly a bipartisan policy, yet both presidential candidates are trying to run away from it because they want to exploit TikTok this election until November, right? But there's also this question of what Biden will say today in front of the UN, the attempt to actually describe what his foreign policy has been as he's about to leave the White House, that Foreign Affairs has an early attempt, and I thought it was Jessica Matthews wrote a piece for their most recent issue, and the headline, "What Was the Biden Doctrine?" Which is exactly what we're trying to figure out. The subtitle is "Leadership Without hegemony," which is an interesting way of trying to parse the fact that he has far more foreign policy failures on his record than successes. But with China, I keep going back to the balloon and the response of the administration to several provocations from China where they would just shrug or say, "Oh, this is overblown." How is Harris gonna defend the record on China, on Iran? I mean, a lot of people are putting pressure on Biden to talk about Iran today at the UN. She really has not, I don't think, set out a very clear model of her own foreign policy as distinct at all from Biden's. I, she hasn't set out a model of her foreign policy at all. And Abe, what we are looking at is a looming war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon that will likely involve a significant ground invasion of Lebanon by Israel. And Kamala Harris is going to be, when that happens, the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. And she's not gonna be able to say, we need a ceasefire right now when the Palestinian state because Lebanon is not a Palestinian issue. It was 40 years ago, 40 years ago, it was the PLO that had occupied southern Lebanon. Southern Lebanon is being occupied by Hezbollah, which is an Iranian subsidiary, the IGRC, and was maybe once semi-Palestinian, it's not a Palestinian issue, this is not the issue here. And-- - But she will be able to say, de-escalate, de-escalate, all sides de-escalate. We don't want a larger regional war. That's the important thing. I mean, that's what they've said, the entire, that's what the Biden administration has said, the entire time that the war has been growing, that new fronts have been opening up. That, as Israel has been bombarded from this party, that party, and yet another party, and all they do is call for de-escalation. That's the only, I think it's not even a tool I have, hesitate to call it a tool, but that's the only tool in their toolbox. - Okay, well, tomorrow she is set to deliver a speech on the economy. To put, to put, "Me on the bones of the opportunity, "economy idea that she has been promulgating." I think there's another word that she's now going to use. I can't remember what it is. It's the nice economy, the economy. - Joyful economy, yeah. - Joyful economy, right. Something is going on here, and it also involves her wanting the debates, not only I think, what does she want to debate Trump again, because she has a high likelihood of looking like she won the debate, and she feels probably like she benefited from the debate, but we are 42 days from the election, as we speak. And I know I've been saying this, and she got in the race, but I really think that it is true now that she cannot run on fumes from here until November. There are numbers and emanations from the campaign that that very successful launching strategy to make her as anodyne as possible with as few jagged edges as possible, has run its course, and that people really are going to want to know if they are choosing between the two of them what one will do or what the other will do. And we're getting a pretty fair idea of what Trump will do, not only from the fact that he was president and did all these other things, but he is saying these things, some of them crazy, like a 10%, you know, ceiling on credit card charges, and you can say they're crazy, but at least he's putting it out there as a thing that you can judge and say, you know what, that's crazy. I'm not voting for him or that sounds good. I love that, I'm buying for straight is 27%. Please cap it, you know, I mean, we still don't know who she is, and voters still don't know who she is. Axios today had a story on how she has not said anything about her position from 2019 on decriminalizing sex work. So here's yet another issue where she hasn't specified whether she still holds to the policy that she laid out in 2019. Kristen Solts, Sanderson has a very good piece in the New York Times this morning on the difference between the national polls, which are pretty good for Harris, and the swing state polls, which are much tighter. And Anderson points out that that's maybe because Trump is really only running ads in the swing states. And the swing state ads that Trump is running are 100% attack ads on Kamala Harris, defining her as a far left progressive who is not up to the job of being president. Whereas, Kristen points out, the Harris ads are kind of a mix. And I've seen this on my own TV set in Virginia, which is no longer considered a battleground if there was a recent poll that showed the race within three points, Trump is not running ads in Northern Virginia, but Harris is. And there are these gauzy bio ads. She's still trying to introduce herself to the voting public in a way that suggests she's somehow different and somehow better than Biden. I mean, she's better in the sense that she's, you know, not noncompassmentous, but the separation from the Biden policies, I think, has not yet been achieved. - And who she is goes beyond the policy, the introduction stuff, because I think that this is, I think skipping the Al Smith dinner is a real problem and a real symptom of this, which is that people can see her give a speech and say, I will do X, but she doesn't interact with the public in anything resembling a sort of natural, I want to say human way, but there's a kind of uncanny valley sense about her, which is that she can't go even to this dinner where other people will write the jokes for her. You know, Hillary Clinton, she killed at those dinners. She knows how to schmooze. She's not the most charismatic person in the world, but she knows how to tell jokes that other people make and how to deliver them. - And it kills, it kills us, it kills us doing all the work. - I just mean, like she's, nobody watches. - Slade queen, she's slade. - No, they're all funny. Everybody who goes at dinner is funny. Her writers would make sure that Kamala was funny. They would make sure her jokes were funny with every president and presidential nominee. And she can't even seem to sort of do that because she's concerned about the delivery of the jokes. We remember the story, I think Matt mentioned a while ago, that she was going to some big socialites dinner in Washington, DC, and she had to do a rehearsal dinner with her staff so that she could practice talking to people and learning when to sit and how does it maybe even which fork to use for the fish, I don't know, but this is a problem. - Her campaign surrogates are also not really doing a great job for her. I think they probably assumed we'll send out all these people to talk about policy. We'll have statements from unnamed sources from her campaign saying things to counteract what her more extreme progressive on-the-record statements had been as a senator and yet her surrogates go on air or ask basic questions about her economic policies, for example, as one was on Fox News the other day and they bumble it. I don't think they know what the policy is and that and Bernie Sanders kind of giving the game away by saying she'll say whatever she wants. Every time they put a surrogate out in front of a camera they also tend to have a mixed message or an unfortunately revealing message for those voters who still haven't understood who she is. - I think her not going to ask the Al Smith dinner is fascinating because I don't think it's just a matter of her insecurity about delivering lines. There's something about that dinner where the sort of the whole idea is to become a sort of caricature of yourself and where's what's the self that that, as Matt says, we don't know who she is. What is there to caricature exactly? It's she's sort of too empty a vessel to show up there in a sense. There's nothing to work with. - So the Al Smith dinner, which is a New York, which is a New York institution, I think she's the first major presidential candidate not to appear at the Al Smith dinner in many, many, many, many years, Walter Montier was the last, okay. Okay, good company she's in there. - Yeah, so what's interesting about it is that there were there are these things that politicians do and granted Trump broke the mold. So he didn't do things on other politicians. He chose not to do. He didn't go to the White House correspondent's dinner. He, you know, there were games he wouldn't play along the way of the games that you play as an American politician. But there are these things over time, right? You're you're a presidential candidate for your party. So you go to state fairs. You go to the Iowa state fair, you eat it for you, you eat it for you, you eat it Twinkie. You know, you know, deep fried Twinkie. You go to the, you have a, you have a Turkey leg in Minnesota. You, you go to one of these dinners in Washington. You go on the view, you go on a, you go on Colbert or Jay Leno or whatever. And there's a reason why these things happen, not just because you need to sort of cross them off the checklist of this is what other people have done. They reveal facets of your personality. It was an extraordinarily important moment in the George W. Bush campaign in 1999 when he went on the view. People forget this, like Bush was seen as a wooden, inarticulate, great on paper, terrible in person, candidate. I thought this, I'm pretty sure Matt thought this. It was like, he'd be president. Like the guy can't get a sentence out. And then he did a couple of things. He gave a big speech to them and had an institute on compassionate conservatism. And he went on the view and he was charming. And it turned out that he had political gifts that he had somehow buried or that he was so uncertain of himself on the national trail having really only gotten into electoral politics five years earlier that he was unsteady on his legs. And he then was able to say look, I am a person here. I bring my pillow on the, I brought my pillow from home and I use it on the campaign trail. So I have something to make me comfortable when I sleep or whatever and here's my wife and she's a librarian and whatever it was. These things don't exist simply as rituals. They're not like you need to cross the, like your skull and bones initiation. They have a place and they've been in the political game for this reason and she is playing none of them to the extent that she does this thing with Oprah and she has a teleprompter. Now, okay, it was a fundraising event run by the campaign. It was not a media event where she is being interviewed, free for all on ABC by Oprah and an Oprah special. But she had a teleprompter like it wasn't infomercial and like she was share reading off about whatever her skin product was. The inability to be a real person in front of people, even though we know they're not really real people the same way we know if you're watching a celebrity being interviewed on Jimmy Fallon, that's not who they really are. But it's important because they're gonna be playing this role on the world stage for four years and people, I'm not saying I think it's important. The public thinks it's important. It has a certain level of expectation. We know too much about Trump. We know Trump too well. Trump is on our TV screens forever. So in that sense, she's an interesting contrast because we don't know her. But I just think that's getting unnerving to people and the fact that she is stymied when she should be, I think, the logic of the races, she should be pulling away with the race. And there are some of the national polls would suggest to you maybe she's pulling away with the race. But remember, as Matt says, since Trump is only campaigning in seven states, she might be pulling away with the race in the other 43, let's just say, not the 43. But in the states where he's like, I had a hell with it, I'm not doing anything in California. I'm not doing anything in Illinois. I'm not doing anything in New York. I'm not doing anything like highly populated states that were Democrats do well. And people aren't gonna, she is relying on not just joy, but people being tired of Trump. And maybe they're not as tired of Trump as Democrats hope they are. - And she's relying on surrogates. That's the other thing about this. - But you can't. - But that's what I'm saying, is that in the electorate. - Sometimes in a party primary, sometimes you can remember when Joe Biden, when the Democrats decided to all drop out and back Joe Biden, he hadn't been to Minnesota yet in the primary. Amy Klobuchar drops out the night before and says, give your votes to Joe Biden. And he gets, that's a primary. - But remember the P&P. - Right, but the pandemic was already on. And Biden had the pandemic to give him that room. Here's the problem. The electorate in this country is way too large now. Like, it used to be that it really mattered if the governor of a state went out and like, went on the campaign trail for you. Because, I mean, 150 to 170 million people are likely to vote in this campaign. One of the reasons why Harris might really want a debate is that she got an audience of 69 million people and it helped her. It helped her to get that audience. Maybe if she's better in a second debate and that debate probably wouldn't have the same size audience. Let's say it has 50 million people. Where is she gonna get 50 million people that she can reassure at one place at one point in one time, unscripted? Where is that gonna happen? - I mean, she benefits from earned media, right? I mean, the media loves her, they want her to win. If she gave more appearances, if she did more interviews, they would be publicized. In the NBC poll, it's fascinating. It came out over the weekend that showed her up. The pollster Mark Murray or the NBC guy who kind of runs her polls and analyzes them noted that her jump in favorability from July to now is matched only by the jump in George W's favorability in the aftermath of 9/11 when he went to around 50% approval slightly lower to 90% approval. And her favorability ratings, which were stuck at 38% when she basically took the nomination after Biden withdrew in July. And now she's net positive favorability, but she didn't do anything. There's no reason for this except she's not Biden. She's not associated with any grand cause. Her presidential campaign collapsed in 2019. She's had one competitive race that we've discussed on the podcast before, which she almost lost. And she's afraid of the media. And it's scared to define herself. And in that situation, you're vulnerable to being defined by your opponent. And I think that's what Trump is doing pretty effectively in the swing states. And that's why this race is so close. - And the cognitive dissonance. The cognitive dissonance that I think the undecided voter or the independent-minded voter has about her is her messaging doesn't match her record. She has a record as the vice president and she spends every time she goes out in front of a rally or a gathering saying, we need a new future, a new hope, whatever is her mantra of the week. And if she's not gonna answer questions about the record that is partly hers, Biden-Harris administration, then I think people are unsettled. They're like, well, why do we need to turn over a new page on the economy? You guys were running the economy for the last four years. It's been terrible for us as consumers, so. - And by the way, not answering that. - Right, so not supplying some of that information leads to very interesting moments on her surrogates on the campaign trail. Like Tim Walz saying, we can't go on like this another four years. - Right, you're like, but-- - Now, why did he say that? He said that because, of course, the idea that they wanna get into their heads is she's not to have the Biden administration's record laid at her feet. - Come on, John, say it. She's unburdened by what it's been. - It's unburdened by what it's been. - Thank you, thank you. - Okay, thank you, right. But if she doesn't give Walz material, if the campaign can't give Walz material to work with, and he's out there every day talking at two or three events for three hours, he's gonna make these mistakes because he's got no, he doesn't have anything. - This is why the vice presidential debate is gonna be very interesting next Tuesday because say what you will about J.D. Vance, he has pretty well articulated views on almost every subject. He is preparing for this debate in a way that Donald Trump never prepared for the debate. In some ways, Vance knows the MAGA movement better than Trump in a way because Trump is the leader, follows him, but sometimes as we've pointed out before Trump, it can be more moderate than MAGA. And so you're putting Vance up against Walz who is, he's a pro, he's been in politics since 2006. He was in Congress for 10 years. He's been governor for two terms, but Walz is kind of new to this whole national scene in the Trump era, and he doesn't have the benefit of a well-defined bold leader at the top of the ticket. So I'm very interested to see how these two personalities clash next week. - I think also there's the expectations thing that might work in Vance's favor, not that people don't think he can't string sentences together, but he is the least popular, right? Most underwater in terms of favorable numbers, vice presidential candidate, I think ever, is that right? I mean, that we can, in memory for sure, his numbers are underwater. So there's also the flipping around of the expectations. Kamala had the low expectations, the low bar to clear in the debate. - I think JD Vance has something similar in the sense that his numbers aren't going to get worse, right? He's unusually unpopular for a vice presidential nominee, those numbers, that he's pretty much reached the floor considering the split of the electorate. He has a place to go up from there, much more so than, while he has room to the ceiling that he might actually make up some ground. - He really should bring a cat. He should bring a cat on stage to hold a cat. - I just think he would then look like Dr. Evil, maybe that's probably not a good idea. - I think in both cases with the top of the ticket and the V-picks, the Harris walls, they're able to get away with, to the extent they've gotten away with being so vaporous because this time around likability is become such a huge thing. And I think we're going to see it again in the walls fence matchup. Take out the alleged or possible stone valor issue. We'll see how he acquits himself. If and when that comes up, people do like walls and they don't like this, just as a sort of gut reaction. And I think something similar happens with Kamala and Trump, to be honest. I mean, as much as we can make fun of her for speaking nonsense, all we like. And it's a huge issue in this campaign and it really threatens to eclipse policy and character and consistency. And all these actually really important questions are getting sort of papered over by this. - We need more factor and less Oprah, right? It's better to be sure than loves, but where yes, no. - But Seth is right. That's an opportunity for Vance. Like he has been successfully defined and through fault of his own, not through no fault of his own. I mean, the things that he said that have defined him that made him unpopular, he said it's not like people stole them. He was, they did normal oppo research and found three or four really, really bad quotes from him that have made characterizing him as a misogynist and somebody hostile to people who don't have children and to hospitals and women. And then defended him. - And he had a chance to walk them back and he's like, no, I meant what I said. - Yeah, so he of course has an opportunity to do that thing. I love the thing that they now do when they show polls as a nice graphic thing that now exists, where they show where someone was before an event and where someone was after an event and you see these arrows. They go in the direction of the person favorably or they go the other way. And that will be the tell of that debate. Is Vance at 40% likeability or something like that? Will that number go to 47 and will it whoosh up with an arrow pointing right or will it not? And no one's gonna vote for president because of the vice presidency. But if the debate gets substantive and remember vice presidential debates can often be wildly more substantive than the presidential debates. I mean, I think the Ryan, certainly the Ryan after the first, the Ryan Biden debate in 2012 was extraordinarily substantive in a way that ended up not really helping Ryan because Ryan was like, I wanna talk details and Biden was like- - Despite him being, despite him being the policy guy which I think is- - No, he said, I wanna talk about policy and Biden's like everything you're saying is nonsense. You're so cute. You're such a cute little malarkey. - That's a lot of malarkey. That's a whole lot of malarkey. - Remember that guy Joe Biden? - He was something else. - Yeah, he was. - Yeah, well, we'll see. - Where are they now? - It's been an hour after we're done doing this. And let me just take a break here for a second to talk to again about our friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and their wonderful podcast, How the World Works, featuring our friend, our contributor, the sage of the American working class and intellectual class, theater critic, guy who threw a phone at a theater critic. Fantastic character, brilliant writer, Kevin Williamson. Each episode of How the World Works, Kevin sits down with a notable guest to discuss the jobs they've had, why work matters and the role of work in our social lives. After all, work involves a lot more than paychecks cached. So listen to How the World Works, wherever you listen to podcasts or visit CEI.com/podcasts. So I am making the case that we are heading into policy time, that Kamala's time as the joy candidate must come to an end not because the world is insisting on it, but because she is gonna have to do this because she's not making the sale. She has done everything she could to get up to the point at which she can make the sale. And now she's got to get you in the car. And the fact that she won't tell you what the price of the car is or what your loan amount or what the percentage of your loan would be or whether the car is used or new or whether it's a Chinese EV. Yeah, or exactly, that the customer is like, but how much is the car? And they must know this. It must be why they want the debates because why would they want to give Trump an opportunity to kind of improve on his reputation? Trump seems to know he probably shouldn't debate 'cause he's like it's too late, which is ridiculous. It's six weeks. We could do anything at any time. They have to solidify her. I have a sense that I can't do that. It's just that Trump believes the election is basically over. And it's just we don't know who won it. And so he's acting like a candidate who thinks the cake is baked. In that recent rally where he said that he wasn't going to debate again, he said the voting has already started. Now this is from the guy who hates early voting and absentee voting, but he'd say the voting's already started. We're going to just plow ahead now. He's done very few rallies compared with the 2020 and 2016 campaign. The campaign has said that they're too expensive, but Trump does have more money at the moment now than he did in 2020. And when his campaign was essentially bankrupt in 2020, they spent a billion dollars on technology and such. That's not the case with this campaign, but he's not doing these rallies. They're focusing on these battleground states. And I think his sense is this is it. We're just what, as of today, we're six weeks away, I think. And then we'll see. Kamala, on the other hand, I think she knows that there still has to be more to be done, but she's afraid to do it. She lacks the confidence in herself. If you watched him after I saw part of a rally over the weekend, and I think you can see why he may not want to do them anymore. I mean, first of all, let's just not forget that he was shot in the head at a rally two months ago. That can change a man. And he obviously behaved in kind of an almost unearthly fashion, rising up after having been shot and all of that. But he is now standing behind this kind of weird, pulp mobile construction to make sure that there is bulletproof glass protecting him from all sides. And he might feel like he's kind of the man in the glass booth rather than this person who is connecting with this audience. There is there is stuff between him and the people that he is talking to. In 2016, he would let women come up on stage and pull his hair to prove it was real. Yeah, pulling Santa Claus is beard. Yeah, and you know, and he was a guy had a gun on him this weekend. You know, it's not fun to be him right now. Can we talk for a minute about what the Justice Department did yesterday? Because I'm still I don't believe what happened. And I wish we had a this at the time, if we had some real expert on jurisprude, you know, on her page, Andy McCarthy. I know, but wait, we did not pay. We won't page him. We'll call him. Yeah, yes. On a landline. Yeah, on a landline. Abe, can you follow your Kamala impression with an Andy McCarthy? I have no Andy now. No, you can't do you can't do an Andy. I mean, it's very, very hard to do an Andy. It's very good. But anyway, so a Mr. Ralph, the shooter, they found a document that he had left in the care of a friend or something sort of in a lockbox, something letter. Now, what what happened? Well, this letter that the Justice Department discovered is essentially a manifesto. Now, he had also self published, it seems a book, which amounted to a manifesto against Trump. But in this letter, he says this was an assassination attempt. I was trying to kill Donald Trump. He's like I voted for him in 2016. I really regret that now, but I want to kill him. And I will pay $150,000 to anyone who finishes the job. And former Attorney General Bill Barr said in a statement released yesterday that he's kind of baffled by the Justice Department's decision to release this letter in the open as part of a court filing because, you know, there are a lot of people who want to kill Donald Trump. And if they see this and they're crazy enough to think that they can do it, they might be crazy enough as well to think that this guy, Ralph, or whoever Ralph was working with, will pay $150,000 if they finish the job. So it's a pretty remarkable decision by the Justice Department to release this letter publicly and not under seal. But we also know from the letter, from the self published book, that this was not the case of a just paranoid schizophrenic wanting to kill someone famous or prominent. This was a politicized assassination attempt. And we've also learned, or the authorities have learned from cell phone data, that he was stalking that location for a long time. Well, if doesn't he say it in the letter itself? Yeah, but we also have cell phone data that they were bouncing off Mar-a-Lago. Yeah, for six weeks, he found his spot. He cased it. That's also interesting. So again, Trump came very close. I mean, if that secret service agent hadn't seen the rifle poking out from the fence, Trump, again, would have died. I didn't get off a shot. People were saying the fact that he didn't get off a shot means Trump was in less danger, but I think it's the opposite. I mean, we don't know. He was set up in a perfect place. He didn't get off. It's not like he tried and missed. He was weird. I'm glad you mentioned this because there was weird talk. I mean, this is the problem with social media now is there's talk and then you don't know who it's from and all of that. And there was talk. It's like, well, we heard from the sheriff that he couldn't have gotten a clean shot off anyway. He wasn't in the right spot, something like that. And then someone actually took a photograph from the spot where the gun had been across the road to either the fairway. I'm not sure exactly where it was. My sense was he was located right next to the green. Okay, right next to the green, and you could see the green and 24 hours of air. He wasn't really in danger again, but for the gun glinting in the sunlight. Now, maybe he's not a great shot. Maybe, you know, he's not a marksman. We don't know. We have no idea. I couldn't have gotten off a shot like, you know, I'm not a man with a gun. Although he, of course, has a 20 year history apparently with firearms, including ones that are referred to in court papers as weapons of mass destruction, which I didn't actually know a machine gun is actually considered a weapon. I understand we think of it more like a nuclear weapon as being a weapon of mass destruction. Nonetheless, yeah, so that's Trump knowing that he is, you know, he, I think, has lived in a kind of fantasy world in which he was walking around America, walking around Mar-a-Lago. He had secret service around him all the time, like all presidents, and they get, they can get relatively invisible. And I'm not saying that he wasn't protected, but that, you know, this is like really serious business. He's a world historical figure. He's exactly the kind of person that people want to assassinate. And it suddenly became very real to him. And he is not the same person. We reflect just on, I mean, what a horrible political moment this is. Yeah, because Matt's talking about how Trump has basically decided that, well, the election is done. We just don't know who won yet. And John, you're saying that he's, you can see why he doesn't want to be out there. He's behind this glass. So you're talking about a presidential candidate who's basically been forced into kind of running down his campaign in some sense for fear of his life. I'm not saying he's a fearful person, but I'm saying because of, because of threats. You know, in 1996, when there was all this talk about Colin Powell running for president, which I remember very well, because I was at the weekly standard and we were, we, it were largely behind the, the Colin Powell should run for, but not that by the way that we were endorsing him, just that it was like an interesting speculative idea that Bill Crystal was, was retailing. And it was serious. Like he was polling high, like why not blah, blah, blah. And Alma Powell, Powell's wife told him no uncertain terms. She wouldn't, she would not allow him to run for president because he would get shot. He would be the first serious black candidate for president. He was a military figure. She would not sleep. She would not sleep. She would not eat. This was too dangerous for him to do. This is an attitude that people had because it was remember only 15 years since Reagan had been shot when we were talking about this with Powell. So we're now, you know, 20 years later. And again, we have, we, we were, we were out of the assassination mode. And Trump, we're back in the idea that assassination is a realistic. I just want to add one other element. When Colin Powell was thinking of running for president some 30 years ago, a foreign adversary of the United States had not declared its intention to murder him. And we're in this situation now, we have two attempts on Trump's life. One guy, we still know nothing about except that he had burner phones tied to overseas, no one has offered any explanation for. We have this latest guy who apologizes to Iran, apparently was traveling all over the world. I mean, in, in, he, he was trying to get some weird plot to get Afghan soldiers to fight for Ukraine. But again, Iran shows up again and again and again in his rhetoric and in his manifestos in his letter. And we know there's been an arrest of another individual for being part of an Iranian plot, an attempt to recruit assassins to murder Trump. And now we have today a revelation that the Trump campaign's emails have the hack against them by Iran. It may still be going on with a reporter receiving documents from some, you know, cutout dated in the past week. And yet the amount of attention that is being done, the amount of the amount of attention that is being paid on this attempt by a foreign power to interfere with our election pales in comparison. Yes. To what we were, what we were treated to in 2016 and 2017 with Russia, Russia, Russia. But forget that forget 2016, 2017. I would wager that if you had a day's worth of Twitter and you tallied up the number of tweets that mentioned Trump as a Russian cutout and the number of tweets that mentioned the Iranian plot or the Iranian intention to assassinate Trump, that the ones that still refer to Trump and Russia outnumber the ones that refer to Trump and Iran 10 to 1, because it is still a talking point. Well, the Kamala's campaign is using that. I'm watching videos yesterday of Kamala HQ, you know, the Kamala campaign officially putting out stuff about how, you know, essentially Putin wants Trump to win because he knows what he's getting in return for his investment. And they show, you know, Trump saying this about Ukraine or whatever. And with Zelensky. And by the way, this was, you know, kind of a problematic thing. This week, you know, we, we, we're all obviously want Ukraine to win the war. And we've been, you know, talking about Abe's piece about the importance of victory and all that. But it is the case that Zelensky maybe took a step over a line. He shouldn't have when he criticized JD events after flying on an American government, playing to a Democratic governor's weapons factory where he was, you know, signing stuff. I mean, there was just, there is a, there is a sense here that the worries about foreign interference and foreign help and all this other stuff only goes, not only does it only go in one direction, but that it's still happening with Trump. It's still the case that he's Putin's guy, and they're still replaying the Putin stuff in ads and on Twitter and on social media every day and doing campaign type things and appearances with figures like Zelensky to continue to try to drive the point home. Especially as you see pain with the FBI. What if you could have a conversation with a serial killer? It is Monday, April 2nd, times approximately 1105. Sit in a room, cross the table. Hear them tell the story of who they are, what they did, why they did it. Following would be a interview with Israel Keys. What if you could separate their truths from their lies and maybe hear something new that they've never told anyone. I'll give you two bodies. They're in big black trash bags. From the team that brought you down the hill, the Delphi murders, this is Deviant, a show that explores the people who blow through society's boundaries, the ones beyond the margins. Our first story is real keys. There is no one who knows me or who has ever known me, who knows anything about me really. The only person who knows about kind of things I'm telling you is me. Follow Deviant, available June 25th, and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or any major streaming platform. Matt, you wanted to talk some about Zelensky being in America this week. Well, I think it's an interesting story. I had noticed some of the reaction from Ukraine's domestic opponents to Zelensky's visit to the munitions factory in Pennsylvania. It's a tricky situation. He is our ally if Churchill had come and visited a munitions factory during 1944, say, would there be such outrage among certain corners? I mean, maybe, but it would have been fine in my view. It is for the UN General Assembly. I think it's... You have to ask yourself, where do you draw the line? And I just think it's maybe not even worth drawing the line. I mean, when Benjamin Netanyahu comes and delivers a speech to the joint session of Congress, that is, in many ways, critical of this administration, the current one, and then did so earlier, critical of the Obama administration, the left protested. But I thought it was fair this time now. Zelensky's here. I don't know quite what he said about JD Vance. I need to check the quote, but still, he's trying to get what he wants, and he is our ally. So I don't really sympathize with the MAGA outrage. I mean, somebody... I saw something on Twitter where someone was saying that signing the munitions that will be sent to Ukraine means that you love death. I mean, people do that all the time. I mean, that is just... That's just what people do and soldiers do. And it's for a good cause. Ukraine's self-defense is a good cause, and we're on the right side. And if you're incapable of making that distinction, well, I think you need to kind of, you know, do some reading, check your priors. Here is what Zelensky said. He said in an interview with a New Yorker that JD Vance is too radical, his message seems to be that Ukraine must make a sacrifice. The idea that the world should end this war at Ukraine's expense is unacceptable. So, is it okay that he said this? I don't know. Is it okay that JD Vance said he doesn't care one way or the other about Ukraine? So Zelensky is guilty of speaking the truth. Yeah, could she understand why maybe Zelensky's annoyed? Yeah. Or that Zelensky is saying something like, is JD Vance somehow... Is this... This is an act of hostility against the United States? No. Okay, I'll be fine with Zelensky saying this. I mean, JD Vance is Zelensky's worst nightmare. And it'd be as an American, you know, as an American political figure. He's other people's greatest hero, that's fine too. But of course he's going to say this. Now, I just want to point out... The reaction is heightened because of Ukraine's role in the Trump impeachment. That's why the... Trump has never... That was Trump. That's not Ukraine's role. It was Trump's role in the Trump. They see this as, like, a head to your trauma. No, you don't like Ukraine. They don't like Ukraine and they don't want to help you with Trump. Trump has never blamed Zelensky or his troubles in the first impeachment. And that is a very significant fact. And he didn't sink the aid. And so I did want to say that this works in the other direction as well. And I log on this morning, one, to the MAGA outrage at Zelensky's visit to Pennsylvania, but two, to pro-Ukraine outrage at something Trump said the other day, also in Pennsylvania. And the clip is being portrayed by the anti-Trump resistance as Trump blaming America for the war in Ukraine. And here's Trump being blamed America first. But if you look at the actual quote, what Trump said was exactly what he has been saying since the start of the war, which is the war would not have occurred had he been president because Putin would be deterred. So both sides, as usual, as is always the case in America history, foreign policy is refracted through the lens of domestic politics. And we just need to take a step back and ask ourselves, are we on the right side? And we are on the right side in the Ukraine war. And we should aid Ukraine. And we should lift these stupid restrictions that we're placing on their use of missiles so that they have some advantage going into the winter. And you need more about it in Matt's, the book that we spoke about yesterday that Matt will be writing called right and wrong. Right and wrong. Yes. But I do think I do think what is important is that what Trump said, I do not like Trump's rhetoric on Ukraine. And I worry about Trump as president and Ukraine, because his his language on Ukraine is eerily similar to the Biden administration's language on Israel and Gaza. Israel needs to win in Gaza. Ukraine needs to win however we can characterize that in Russia. I guess we're only now characterizing it as Ukraine retarding Russia's advance, pushing Russia back, returning to where things were in 2022. And restoring their sovereignty over the territory that Putin has seized. That that is a goal the United States has supported since 2022 should continue to support. JD Vance can go hang. And I don't like the way that that Trump is talking about this. But Trump saying that this war would not have happened had he been president because Putin would have been deterred because he wouldn't have been the architect of the horrible pullout from Afghanistan that effectively gave Putin the green light. We can't know who Trump also wanted to pull out of Afghanistan, though he did not when he wanted to, because he had been he basically was made made clear to him that it was not safe for him to do so when he wanted to do so. Nonetheless, that is a completely arguable point. And if you say that it's anti American to say that there weren't bad consequences from the biggest foreign policy disaster of the Biden presidency, I understand why you would want to say that if you were a surrogate of Kamala Harris's or Biden's. But every rational person on the planet Earth knows that that is the case. Everybody knows that that Putin said, I'm get America's the weak horse as always seems to happen. America's now the weak horse. If I'm going to do it, I'm doing it now. And what did he do? He waited until the end of winter and then he started going in. He didn't wait for it. He didn't wait long enough because winter wasn't quite over yet. And the and all his tanks got caught in the mud as as as things were were melted. But if we can't have an honest, if we're now gonna have to outrage, everything's outrageous. So outrageous. This is so outrageous. Trump says, you know, Jews should vote for him. That's an outrage. How dare you? That's actually why maybe just to get back to the beginning, Harris has got to get beat on the bones because we're we're in a loop. We're in a conversational loop here. Nothing is changing. We're having the same arguments over and over and over and over and over again to no good purpose. And that will not help her. Because the more you do that, the more it's like, things really aren't that good? Things are bad. Like, we're we're at a we need to break. We need something needs to break and change this pattern. And she's part of the pattern. And he kind of isn't really part of that pattern. Anyway, Matt, you have today's commentary recommends. Thank you, John. Today I'd like to recommend a mini series that is available on the streaming platform Peacock. I know not everyone has Peacock, but if you do, it actually has some pretty good original content. I've been pleased with Peacock. Of course, it also had the Olympics and it has sports as well. But the series I'd like to recommend today is called Fight Night, the million dollar heist starring Kevin Hart and Samuel L. Jackson and Don Cheadle. I should tell our listeners, you know, this is what you would call for mature audiences, mainly because of its language and violence. I'd say if, you know, if you're comfortable watching a Quentin Tarantino movie, then you'd be comfortable watching Fight Night. I love Quentin Tarantino. And so I've been really enjoying Fight Night. It's not quite over yet. I think there'd been five episodes that I've watched. It's the story of a slightly fictionalized version of a true story of a heist of a party that took place in a home in Atlanta in the aftermath of a Muhammad Ali fight in, I believe, 1970 that involved some of the most powerful black gangsters in the country, except they were the ones being robbed. And it centers on this kind of hustler, small time Atlanta hustler, played by Kevin Hart, who's known as Chicken Man, who organized the party and who was blamed by the main mobster, Samuel L. Jackson, for the victimization of Jackson and the other robbers. That's just the premise. Kevin Hart's fantastic, but the real stand out for me is, as usual, Don Cheadle, who plays a black detective in the Atlanta police force, which was overwhelmingly white. I mean, this is, again, this is Lester Maddox is Georgia. And it's amazing to me what Don Cheadle can do with the simple glance of his eyes. The only real actor who has that same power, it seems to me is someone like Paul Giamatti, right? Just a little facial tick or something can just convey a tremendous amount of emotion. Cheadle's fantastic, Hart's fantastic, Samuel Jackson, Samuel Jackson. And it's just a really good mini series. And it's good in this respect. I'll close with this. A lot of streaming, you know, high content TV has these kind of long viewers, you know, where you kind of check your phone or kind of this fast forward, you know, this is especially the case with the Game of Thrones prequel, where, you know, whole hours pass, and it's like staring at ice flows. That is not the case with Fight Night. I mean, it's pretty gripping. I should also say Taraji P. Henson is. Yes, she's also in it. She's also excellent. So it's a great cast, great writing, pretty interesting story. The guy who plays Muhammad Ali does a terrific Muhammad Ali. So it's always fun to see that great character of Ali being portrayed in film. So I recommend, if you have Peacock, Fight Night, the million dollar heist. It's a great recommendation. I myself blown away by Kevin. I find Kevin Hart as a comedian and as a comic actor, very nearly intolerable. So this is really revelatory because he is playing a cowardly, kind of, you know, second-rate loser who is, I mean, it's just entirely credible in every possible way, and a very unglamorous, unshoey, and sort of committed to the truth of this character without whitewashing it in any possible way. So he's kind of like the, where did he come? Like, when did this happen to Kevin Hart? You know, so that's pretty exciting. So that's Fight Night. We will, of course, be back tomorrow to see whether Biden could get through the manga speech. And till then, for bat Christine, Seth, and Abe, I'm John Podbore. It's Keep the Counterboarding. (chimes)