Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Donald Trump's closing argument on the campaign trail was a ten minute story about golfing legend Arnold Palmer's Genitalia. We have such a great show for you today, the Lincoln Projects. Rick Wilson joins us to
discuss everything the state of the race. Then we'll talk to politifacts Bill Adair about his new book Beyond the Big Lie, the epidemic of political liars, why Republicans do it more, and how it could burn down our democracy. But first the news.
Mally So, there's a lot going on in the race. When Trump's not discussing genitals, he visited the McDonald's, big big event. What'd you see here?
You know?
I am without words. I guess the thinking here was that visiting a McDonald's would somehow make Trump more relatable. There's slightly more than a than two weeks left before election day and Donald Trump is in Pennsylvania working at a McDonald. Now he's doing this to troll Harris because she said she worked in a McDonald and he believes she didn't actually work in a McDonald's.
This is his new truther thing, the McDonald's working. It's like when he didn't believe Obama's bre certificate.
Maybe there are some people for whom a quote unquote billionaire cause playing working at McDonald's, you know, moves the needle. I just don't see it. But maybe I'm wrong. He's had some problems, canceled a lot of interviews, but today he did do an interview with the very Trump friendly Howard Kurtz, and Kurtz actually asked him some hard questions. I'm kind of shocked while.
We listened to this one listening you're a famous line about Springfield, Ohio, and I take your point that fifteen to twenty thousand legal hation imemberrant sitting in that area, a lot of friction. But when you said, you know it's gone viral, they're reading the dogs, they're reading the cats. You said, you're just reporting what had been said. But why not say, now, well, look that turned out not to be true.
I don't know. I don't know if it's true or not to it.
I read to that you don't know if it's true or not true.
You know it's been the monk by, well, it's true.
What about the goose, the geese? What about the geese?
What happened there with him?
They were all missing.
It was one listening with hell.
How he howly I have no idea and I said.
Something, yeah, I mean okay. So Howie Kurtz manages to somehow ask and I think, look, this is always what I think about interviews. When you get someone feeling comfortable, you get much more from them. Another question, Howard Kurtz asked him, your defense secretary and top general are warning that you are the most dangerous person ever to America, and Trump said, I don't respect them as soldiers, never did so. I actually think how Kurtz did a very good interview there. So up is.
Down left going to say words I never thought i'd hear Eddie would say, especially you or I.
He certainly got him to say stuff that was pretty interesting. He did, however, scrap his interviews with NBC, CNBC squad Box, a bunch of other things, and then also on Friday, it looked like he was dozing off an event in Michigan.
Mike, what do you think now that the It seems like the Harris campaign just put out an ad about his unraveling mental state.
The AP just put up an article.
It seems the mainstream media is finally doing what we've been begging for months, to talk about his unraveling mental state.
You know, I don't know that it matters, and I actually think that at this moment, the Harris campaign is bigger than much of the mainstream media. Remember it's a billion dollar startup, and so they are sort of their own media at this point, just like on the Republican side too. But I do think like the contrast of him working at McDonald's not to show that working at McDonald's is an important and the sanctity of work kind of thing, the way that Shared Brown did a whole
tour about how important work is. Donald Trump did this to troll Harris. Whereas Harris was in Detroit on Saturday with Lizzo, in Atlanta later on on Saturday with Usher, then on Sunday, she's going to be with Stevie Wonder and then she's also going to be in two different churches. So it feels like a radically different kind of campaign, right. He is trying to just attack her for saying she didn't do something she obviously did, and she is just trying to get voters.
Yeah.
So the other I think very bizarre bizarre dudes. And one of the only people who is a worst public speaker than Donald Trump these days is mister Elon Musk, and he's doing a lot of speaking in Pennsylvania. What are you seeing here?
So Elon Musk is doing town halls. He's moved to Pennsylvania for the next two plus weeks. He's doing these town halls where they're basically like Elon town halls, and he's doing them in the name of Donald Trump. But from what I've talked to some reporter who are who have been writing about this, it seems much more like it's sort of Elon making the case for Elon unless him making the taste for Trump. Now, he has spent
a lot of money on Trump's campaign. But you'll remember that there was just a piece from Hugo Lole that just came out yesterday at The Guardian where he talked about how like as much as a fourth of all the door knocks that could remember, they're doing these paid canvassers, and about a fourth of all these door knocks may have been fraudulent. So there's a sense in which a lot of this is actually not working the America Pact
and they're not really connecting with voters on the ground. Always, door knocking is not a science, and it often, you know, it often is hard to quantitate. But supposely Elon is paying about sixteen dollars a door, which is crazy high for canvassers. Yeah, so I meing that's significantly more So definitely Elon is being taken advantage of.
As somebody who's done a lot of door knocking. That's the type of number where you'd want to fact check it like ten times, because it seems inconceivable anyone could run something that that.
Usually it's four dollars a door. Yeah, but it again, it incentivizes fraud because the companies don't want to have to give the money back. So I think we'll see more of that. I don't know if it helps. And then also you'll have to remember that Elon is sort
of a desperate move. Yesterday said he'd give a million dollars every day to a register in Pennsylvania voter who signs his petition that says that a you voted in the swing state and b that you support the first and second amendment, which I mean, does Elon really support the first.
No, he definitely does not. But you know, I don't know if you've read any of the cravid readings of this, is that they're trying to make a list of angry Trump voters that they're going to rile up after the election if it's contested.
Well, I certainly think that they're going that there's data harvesting going on here. Why this data is being harvested, who knows, but there certainly is yes. And also Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said law enforcement should take a look at the Elon Muss voter payments. It's not clear whether this is legal or not. It seems very murky. Again, you're technically paying them for signing the petition, so maybe it's okay, but it certainly feels like vote buying.
Well, you know, University of California election lawyer Richard L. Haysen does say it's definitely illegal, which I think is interesting.
Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and the host of the Enemy's List. Welcome Back, Too Fast Politics. Rick Wilson, Molly.
John Fast, Happy happy day to you.
We are in the tightening of the election. We're what two weeks away?
A little more than two weeks, but yeah, close enough, a little more. Yeah, and Donnie is very tired.
I have to say. He really does look terrible and he might have been better off just not going to the Alsmth dinner.
The first mistake of the Ausmeth dinner was he had Greg Guttfeld write as jokes a man.
Who is Is that true?
Or Yeah? No, it's true, it's true, notoriously not funny. Yeah, there are a million comedians in this world, and you would think to yourself, who would be a great comedian to write for me at a Catholic political dinner? And Greg Guttfeld is never on that list, not once in the history of ever.
What I like about Greg guttfeld show, which I've actually watched because one of my kids believes in capital punishment, is that when you watch it, you realize that, like, none of the jokes are funny, but it doesn't matter because they rely so heavily on whatever that is sort of a laugh track kind of thing.
Laugh track, Yeah, yeah, listen. Laugh tracks are the last refuge of scoundrels. Yes, and if I ever use one, I want you to go ahead and just put me out of my misery.
It's just not a normal thing to do anywhere at this point in American life, right in the.
Year of our war twenty twenty four. Laugh tracks are or an artifact of the before times.
Right. You know when to laugh, it's when it's funny. Yes, So I got a call from a friend who's a Trumper. He made me feel very anxious. He read me some poll numbers, which.
He is Sam.
That's exactly what it was, right, Okay, So here's the story. Sam Number called me this morning when I was really sick because I had gone out for dinner and felt terrible and was super sick and couldn't get it and just was so and I never get sick. And Sam Number called me saying that it was about whatever, and then he started making me feel terrible. And then he said, this one thinks she's going to lose, and that one's good thinks she's going to lose, and so talk me off the lunch.
Rick Wilson, Donald Trump is sick, he's tired, he's old, he's exhausted, he's not doing well. You see, every day this guy gets more and more shaky and infirm this is not This is not the race they think it is. Would I like to be ahead twenty points in every state? Of course I would. We live in a closely divided country, and that's just a hard reality for us that we have to have to endure. We don't get a vote on that, We're going to live in a tough divided country.
And for all of this bullshit, okay, for all of this, all this noise and agita and people getting wigged out every single fucking day, which I just look, Donald Trump is doing base only activation right now. He's not getting new customers. As I like to say, you.
Have got a Stuart Stevens accent when you say it, which is how we know.
I stole that from Stuart Stevens, so I'll give him full credit. Trump's not getting new customers. But no, Stuart's very wise about that. It's like this guy is not out getting additional support. He's not out getting new people coming out of the woodwork saying, you know, I rejected Trump in twenty twenty, but now because of his ad about communism, I'm going to go back to him. Nobody's saying that, nobody's waking up in the morning, thinking that the way to victory is is more Trump right right.
No, I think that's a really good point. I also think that one of the internal divides, which I think is interesting that's happening in Trump world is there certainly a feeling like who gets to take over once he wins.
What you saw today with that release of that email from Susie to Chris Losovita, the forwarding of an email from Corey saying I run the budget, I run expenditures. Now, I mean, these people are there in their own little mini Trump civil war, and it is delicious. It is delightful how much they are buddy fucking each other. And for all of the idea that Donald Trump runs his own campaign, wake up people, not even close. Donald Trump isn't even He's barely conscious of his own campaign at
this point. I think it is kind of remarkable that all these rats in the sack are fighting with each other, and as of right now, there's no good upside for him. There's nobody who's got like a breakthrough moment, Like Elon Musk is out there running around using an app that is notoriously buggy and shitty to to try to canvass all these voters. We're picking up today in a couple of articles that the app over twenty five percent of the doors they claim to have knocked on using this app.
That are they're just being ripped off by the vendors who are sitting running taco restaurants going yeah, yeah, I knocked on seventeen doors today for sure, man or whatever. These are not smart guys.
It does feel like this Hugo Lowl reporting from the Guardian about how they may have knocked on about a fourth less doors than they're claiming.
Yeah, that's the thing I was referring to. Yeah, I mean, Molly, listen, there's another part of this. I think it's important. The Trump campaign is playing severe catch up right now. They do not have a field program. Field programs do not emerge overnight. You don't go down to political Mart and buy a field program. They take months and years to develop.
Elon Musk hired a bunch of Ronda sand contractors, and as we all know, Ron DeSantis is the apotheosis of excellent campaign technique to run their field operation and to put them together with all this stuff for their field program, and it's just not working.
So tell us what you're seeing right now.
We're seeing right now that these early vote numbers are telling a good news story, not unequivocally everywhere one hundred percent, like oh it's done, because we're not done.
But where are you seeing good stuff?
I'm seeing good stuff in Pennsylvania. I'm seeing good stuff in Michigan. I think Trump is now headfaking Michigan for weirdly like almost sentimental reasons.
Interesting because of his winning the Man of the Year.
Well obviously, duh, we're.
Referring to the fake Man of the Year thing that he made up.
Yes, that Trump claims that he was named Man of the Year in Michigan. All this comes down to a really, i think painful recognition that the divided country is divided. We're not going to wake up any day for the next sixteen days of this campaign and go, wow, it's in the bag. Got to fight this thing to the finish. You got to run through the tape, you got to push it all the way down. Somebody yesterday said, I watched a video of you. You looked really tired, And
I'm like, oh, you think really, you think I'm fucking tired. Yes, I'm fucking tired, and you should be you know, there's two rules in campaigns, die broke and die tired.
One of the things that this is this sort of impossible new phenomenon again who knows, was that in twenty sixteen there were these secret Trump voters and in twenty twenty four there are perhaps secret Harris voters, an underground of people.
We believe that to be the case. And i'll tell you why. This goes way back to Margaret Thatcher, where the Labor Party did not believe Margaret Thatcher could win that race. She was just not as popular as that as she should have been on paper to win that race. And when she did, they discovered the presence of what they called shy Tories. We tories were people that were going to vote for Thatcher. They were going to vote for her, and it was going to change the ballgame. Well,
they didn't pick them up in they're polling now. In twenty sixteen, there were shy Trump voters. They were mostly Republicans and moderate Republicans who bought into the oh god, it's Trump or communism, okay, And this year we're starting to pick up and I'm not going to say it's like a complete, utterly apparent and abundant polling phenomenon. Yet we're not going to see it. I mean, that's part of the definitional thing of this. It's harder to pick it up because it's hard to.
Pick it up right because they're not telling you what they're going to do right right.
We believe there are going to be a lot of Republicans who say, Okay, you know what, I can't fucking do this. I just can't. I can't do this. I can't or I won't because you know what, if you're right now at this point in this election, you haven't made up your mind publicly, it's because you have problems with Trump. That's that's where it's at. If you're not declaring who you're with right now, it's because you have problems with Trump. M The race is coming home for Harris.
Democrats are coming home. Even the worry spots on the map, African American male's, Hispanic males, they're coming home. We're still going to win a majority of their votes. Now, that's not as much as we should because there's a lot of work to be done in those categories in the next couple of years. We can't fix the whole problem today, but if you're a shy Harris voter, there are a
lot of incentives to be that way. If you're a Republican or independent, you don't want your husband to know, you don't want your friends to know, because you're probably surrounded by people who will call you a communist, a pedophile, terrorist, an ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter fan, all that shit that they pile on people to keep them in line.
So tell us what you're seeing in Florida on the ground.
Look, the early vote here in Florida is just starting to come in the mail in early vote is actually starting to come. We're going to see in person early voting start next week. That'll be something that I'm going to keep a close eye on. So right now, it looks tied up in some of the early data for requests of ballots of Republicans and Democrats. That's a good news story. That's a good news story for Democrats.
Because many more registered voters in Florida, Yeah.
Many more. Yeah, And the Republicans took a million Democrats basically out of the voting roles in the last two years. Surprise Ron de Santis and the election police yay, which you know, we can litigate that another time. But if you're seeing tied numbers, you're looking at something that's pretty probably pretty good for Democrats. You know, there's going to be a lot of attention on it. I still, as I've said, you know, Florida is in sight, but it's
not fully in play. Now. Again, this is going to come down to the last week of the campaign and where Trump is mentally, physically politically in Florida in a way that will help decide not only the continuation on the early vote totals, which right now, look Democrats are at forty two point six and Republicans are at thirty six point nine as of Sunday afternoons data. That's about
a million votes turned in. So we're going to have a struggle in Florida for the Republicans if Trump continues to behave like he's behaving this week, if he keeps wandering around on stage and it's DJ Donnie's dance party, or he stares out into space or falls asleep. I really believe this race. And interestingly, in most races, the die is kind of cast about six weeks out. Not this one. It started so late for Harris, there's such
a growing understanding of what Trump had. What's broken with Trump that I think it has become very evident, very evident, how badly off he is physically and mentally, and that's gonna and that's going to continue to shape the race later and later. This will be a late decided race.
And look, the likeliest scenario is that we're going to come down to election night and it's going to look an awful lot like twenty twenty, and she's gonna squeak out a win, and that is amazing and wonderful and historic. And yet then we go to war for seventy six days because I think these fuckers are going to burn this country to the ground. So everybody's like, I know how tired you are. I'm like, yes too, So why aren't you going to take a vacation after the election?
I'm like, what in the spring of twenty five? Jesus Christ.
I think that's a really good point. And I do also what you're talking about with the contrast between the two. Last week, right, you had Trump on the Al Smith dinner making jokes, looking sweaty. You had him on the curvy couch with the Fox and Friends crew sort of struggling to get through an interview them trying to give him advice, right, like maybe you should campaign with NICKI Haley like everything they've been talking about, right, and him
being like, no, fuck you. And then you had Harris right back and forth to different swing states giving speeches, doing rallies, an interview with Fox News. I mean, sort of going into trying to do Joe Rogan. I mean it's a pretty star contrast.
It is at given that she has the pace and energy to keep it up and he doesn't. I suspect we're going to end with Trump being off the road at least a day or two this week. He is not sharp. He is not doing well, and I think it's important for the campaign. If they're going to sustain this thing, they're going to really have to deal with his problems. And it's tough for them right now. They are not having a good time. There is no fun being had it.
I feel like, as you say this, you could hear this sort of like salivating from Rick Wilson.
Do I have to plan to fuck with him in his physical and mental well being in the next two weeks every mother fucking minute of every motherfucking day.
So, Rick, one of the things I wanted to ask you about was when Trump was on the Curvy Couch this week, he was talking about how he didn't want Fox to air any more negative campaign ads about him, or to have liberals on the station. In my mind, I was thinking, Fox is what, at the most four million viewers US listen.
Fox is the largest cable outlet in the country, right, but.
How many many.
Millions it dwarfs everything else? Everything else together is smaller than Fox. Okay, Trump wanting to do that is a sign of his enormous political weakness right now. This is not a strong candidate with a strong campaign. The idea that you have to shut down the media for him to win tells you an awful lot about how fucked up and how weak and how broken his campaign is. Part of that is just Trump doing what Trump naturally does, which is trying to stack the deck in his favor.
But part of it is this autocratic model that they think will win this for him, and I find it absolutely fascinating.
The other thing that I thought was interesting about this was, I mean, even if Fox still is a lot, the cable numbers are large people watching television. Cable television is not a huge group right. I mean that's three hundred and thirty million people in this country.
In terms of likely voters. There's going to be a lot of TV watching, okay, I mean just real talk, but this just being waged on people's phones.
Right. So that's why my point in this is that you're really seeing that the audience of one ads are affecting him because he's watching a lot of Fox News and he doesn't like the negative ads.
He has said that before about us. I'm going to sue the Lincoln Project and Fox for showing bad ads about me. Okay, great, you should do that, don But for all that, I think it's really important to understand that again, this is another sign of Trump's incredible weaknesses. He's a broken, brained, sick old man. The campaign isn't. It isn't the kind of thing that they had in their heads in the beginning of this because they thought
it was going to be Joe Biden. They thought the old man Joe was going to be easy to beat and that nothing could go wrong. Well, as we've seen, a lot can go wrong for Donald Trump, and so much has gone wrong that it's hard to go through this thing and go, oh yeah, this is the logical
outcome for this campaign. It's going to be a psychotic Trump looking more and more senile and deranged on stage every day, and a competent, confident Kamala Harris out there beating the doors down in what has frankly been a quite good campaign. And one part of that good campaign is again, they are running a field program. They are running an operation. They're not outsourcing it to Charlie Kirk
the human flounder hybrid and Elon Musk. And by the way, again just remember Elon Musk is using Ron DeSantis's political team for this campaign. I mean, come on, really, it's just like I keep going back to that. I'm like, no, come on, he's kidding, right. These guys, the guys around DeSantis were exceptional with de Santas at making. They spent about two hundred million dollars and their profit margin was about one hundred and sixty And they're going to do
the same thing to Elon. The greater fool theory is playing out with Elon right this minute.
Thank you, Rick Wilson.
You are welcome as always, my friend.
Are you concerned about Project twenty twenty five and how awful Trump's second term could be. Well, so are we, which is why we teamed up with iHeart to make a limited series with the experts on what a disaster Project twenty twenty five would be for America's future. Right now, we have just released the final episode of this five
episode series. They're all available by looking up Molly John Fast Project twenty twenty five on YouTube, and if you are more of a podcast person and not say a YouTuber, you can hit play and put your phone in the lock screen and it will play back just like a podcast. All five episodes are online now. We need to educate Americans on what Trump's second term would or could due to this country, so please watch it and spread the word.
Bill Adair is the founder of PolitiFact and the author of Beyond the Big Lie, The Epidemic of political Lie, is why Republicans do it more and how it could burn down our democracy. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Bill, Thank you for having me.
Molly.
I feel bad saying this to you, but I think it is your field of expertise. As far as I can tell, you are an expert on politicians lying.
It's an odd thing to be an expert in, but I think that's a fair statement.
It's sort of one of those things where it's like it is definitely true, but very relevant for this moment in American life. So you've written a book, but you have a long history of being a sort of source for fact checking. So explain to us about that.
I wrote the book Beyond the Big Lie because I have a long history. I guess you could say I started off This actually goes back to when I was in college. I was a student at Arizona State University, and I wrote my senior independent study on the need for more fact checking. And it was because I had seen a lot of lies in campaigns curly in Arizona. It had to do with a initiative that was on the ballot to regulate hospitals, and I was just really
struck that the media was not doing fact checking. And so I wrote a paper that said that the media should do more fact checking. And so as I got into journalism, I did lots of different kinds of journalism, but was always somebody who was bored with the ordinary. And so by the time I got to Washington and became a Washington reporter, I decided to sort of put that passion to work because I felt covering Congress and the White House, that there was not enough fact checking.
This was now two thousand and three, two thousand and four, and so I went to my editors I was then working for the Saint Petersburg Times, a newspaper in Florida, and said let's start a fact checking website. And so I started PolitiFact, and PolitiFact ended up becoming a great success. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It spawned a lot of other fact checking organizations, and we actually scaled it sort of like a franchise restaurant. We had PolitiFact in different states,
and so I'm very proud of what we did. But along the way, I saw a lot of politicians lying. And so by the time I left PolitiFact and came to Duke University, where I now work as a professor of journalism and public Policy, I decided that I needed to write a book, particularly because we had not been completely honest with people about what we saw in the lying.
Yeah, so let's do a minute here to talk about that. It feels to me like we are in the golden age of political lying.
It's great to be in that moment, isn't it. Molly Like we'll look back on this and we'll say it was the Golden Age.
And you make a real point of pointing this out, which is that it's not a both sides problem. Though it's not that every Democrat doesn't lie, right, it's just that Republicans have weaponized it in a way that Democrats have not. Maybe they will someday, but I mean, do you think that's a fair assessment? And say more?
Yes.
So Beyond the Big Line begins with a scene of me on c Span. This is in twenty twelve, and so I'm on c SPAN and it's one of these call in shows, call a program called Washington Journal, and a guy named Brian from Michigan calls in, and it's like and calling in on the Democratic line, Brian from Michigan,
what's your question for Bill Adair? And so Brian from Michigan says, mister Adair, I read in the Nation that if you add up your fact checking and also the fact checking in the Washington Post, that Republicans lie more. Is that true? And so I say, oh, Brian, we don't keep score. If we kept score, that would be like an umpire who would tell you if the Yankees or the Red Sox are out more at home Plate. Well, I was lying. We did keep score. We kept score
by politician. That was one of our innovations at PolitiFact. And I knew because I had seen it, that Republican politicians got more false and pants on fire ratings from PolitiFact than Democrats did. And so I lied to Brian from Michigan about lying. And so, reflecting on that, you know, I've looked at why I said that. I said it because one of the things fec checkers do is try to deal with both sides, and we treasure our nonpartisanship and we try to not show any favor for either side.
And so we all duck that question. And so I wasn't alone in ducking that question. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Book fact checker, also has routinely ducked it. But I wrote the book to be honest about that. And yes, Brian, Republicans lie more, and so I wrote the book to explore the patterns of lying, not just why Republicans lie more, but why all politicians lie and what they get out of it?
What do they get out of it?
It was fascinating, you know, I thought about all the time I had spent as a Washington reporter. I'd covered Congress, I'd covered the White House, I'd covered a lot of state races for governor and attorney general, and I had never heard a reporter ask a politician.
Why do you lie?
And yet we accept lying as sort of this inevitable part of politics, but no one in the media ever asks politicians about it, including me, And so I decided to do that, And so I just would ask everyone I interviewed, whether it was a politician, a political operative, why do you lie? Or why do politicians lie? Now most denied that they themselves lied, because you know, they're all angels, but the answers liars, But the answers were interesting.
So the common theme overall was ambition. Politicians lie to get ahead, and it's a calculation that they believe they're going to gain more from a lie than they're going to lose. And that's more true today, I believe, than it used to be, because partisan media, jerrymandering, the echo chamber have all combined to make it more rewarding to lie. You're not going to pay a penalty for lying. In the old days, a politician would feel shame for lying.
But now if you're in a Gerrymander district. If you're only going on partisan media, you're not going to be held accountable, most likely for your lives the other big Wise, it sort of varies. It can be because you're lying to raise money. You know, there's often you'll lie in a fundraising appeal. People lie, they have self defense lies, denying some misdeed that they're accused of. So those are sort of the basics for that. Then I got into
why do Republicans lie more? And this was interesting because I talked to a lot of Republicans and former Republicans who were willing to be candid about this, and a lot of them trace this to a turning point in the early nineties when Newton Gingrich took over the House, that that was a point when the culture changed. Others took it a little farther back to Nixon and Roger Ayles that that really changed the culture. The culture when hey, we need to get ahead. It's okay to lie on
this one because we need to win this battle. One Republican Congressman, Denver Riggleman from Virginia put it to me, Republicans see their cause as part of this epic battle and in that anything is justified. That really struck a chord with me. And then one final thing that really empowers the Republicans is conservative media very much not only looks the other way when they lie, but echoes their
lies and often profits from them. We saw this after the lies about the twenty twenty election, you know, Fox News, because it didn't go along with the big lie about the election lost viewers.
Right, So then they eventually did.
And recovered their ratings. So lying for Republicans is part of the ecosystem.
So basically they lie because they.
Can, Yes, And I think that's more true today there are fewer journalists that are holding them accountable. Local media has been depleted, the national media has also been depleted, and so you don't have as many journalists that are holding them accountable.
Yes, And I am so profoundly irritated by where we find ourselves as a country. That could have been avoided at every turn, had we just had a tiny bit of foresight. So I want you now to go from mainstream media, which is now a very small piece of the pie, to social media, which is now a very large piece of the pie, and make it make sense when it comes to lying the trajectory where we are right now, and also my head is going to explode.
You bet.
I've got some ideas that actually some of them come from my students. I taught a class at Duke called Lying in Politics, and the final assignment was to solve the problem. Okay, you've spent a semester hearing about the problem lying in politics. Come up with a solution that could reduce lying, and several of them involved social media, and one of my favorites was this simple. You have to think about lying as sort of part of a
political economy. That politicians lie because it pays off. So what do politicians need advertising because they need to reach their voters at election time, and so they depend tremendously on social media companies and ad networks to reach those voters. So what if one of my students said, the ad networks and the social media companies charge differential ad rates based on the track records that the politicians have with
fact checkers. Very simply, and she created a scale charge more to politicians who have worse records for lying, and charge less lower rates for politicians who have good records. And there's an incentive to lie less. Now you probably also have to bolster political fact checking. You would also want more fact checking from conservative media organizations. There is some now from organizations like The Dispatch. There needs to be more, but that could be done. To me, that's
a really intriguing idea. And you know, Facebook at one time was bold about this, started the third party fact checking program on other kinds of posts, not politicians. It has exempted politicians from that program. But you know, if Facebook got bold, if the ad network companies got bold, this could happen.
Yes, Facebook is going to get bold against lying. It has no incentives, all.
Right, all right, Okay, so that's dreaming, Molly.
But you know it's like.
Maybe Republicans will stop lying. I mean, it's a completely insane notion. You cannot stop lies with the carrot. You have to use a stick. I'm sorry, but go on, yes, tell me or other idea.
All right, Well, here's another carot that works for Republicans in other ways. So a very powerful person in the Republican Party is Grover Norquist, who runs Americans for Tax Reform. So Grover has this way of pressuring Republicans not to raise taxes. They calls it the pledge Republican candidates and elected officials sign a pledge that they're not going to raise taxes, and it's incredibly effective and it's become part of the culture of the Republican Party over the years.
It's been around for thirty years. So imagine if someone with Grover's clout took that same approach about lying and had a very simple pledge that just said I'm not going to lie. You know, there's nothing in the Republican Party's conservative doctrine and its foundational beliefs that means it has to lie. It could turn around and say, hey, we're the Party of honesty, and it could challenge the Democrats and say, you guys are a bunch of liars.
It could transform itself on this issue. There's really nothing that means that the Republican Party has to be the lying party that it is today. And I'd like to challenge the Republican Party on that because it really has nothing to do with the party's beliefs.
Okay, hot take. The Republican Party is not lying as much as they probably should if they want to win this election. So let's play a game here. We know that Republicans want to ban abortion, at the federal level. We know this to be true. Okay, maybe some Republicans say they don't. Maybe Trump in his head right now
doesn't want to. But we've seen that there's a lot of machinations behind the scenes, including two of the Republican Supreme Court justices Thomas and Alito, both of whom have expressed a sort of willingness to ban methapristone using the Comstock Act. So we know that this is happening behind the scenes, whether or not Trump is conscious of it. Again, like can't read his mind. This is a loser for Republicans.
Would be smarter for them just to lie. But as we saw in Georgia yesterday where they've re enacted the six week ban, they cannot lie about this for whatever reason, maybe because the base is so religious, maybe because this is impossible to know, So talk to us about that, because that's something where they'd be incentivized for lying, and they're not well not lying in the zeal that you could see them possibly. I mean, I've seen Republicans live stuff in a much more brazen way, right.
Right, Or are they lying when they say they want to allow states to make individual decisions to get back to your original point. So you know, as a journalist, I'm skeptical every time I hear that, So that argues against my optimism to be candid that because if indeed you're right that they have a broader goal of outlawing it on a national level, then we can't believe what
they're saying. And this gets to one of the challenges that fact checker's a friend was pointing out the other day, which is, if you're fact checking a Democratic claim about Trump and somebody says, well, Trump wants to do this on abortion, and the fact checkers say, well, he says now that he doesn't want to do that, therefore half true.
And my friend pointed out, how can you believe this guy, Donald Trump is the greatest liar in the history of American politics, probably in the history of politics all over the world world, And so how can you do affect check based on anything he says? Any of those prospective
fact checks are really tough. And this has always been a challenge for political fact checkers because what we've done is said, well, one party will say, well, the other party wants to do this thing, and so the fact checkers will say, well, here's what that party has actually said. But in the case of Trump, can you believe anything he says? I have a hard time believing it.
So interesting. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me, Molly. This has been great.
No moment second, Jesse Cannon, Molli Jung Fast. We were talking about Elon's terrible pack before, but a lot of people have been really really jaw dropped at this being one of the most gross things that's happened in this election cycle.
What are you seeing here?
Elon has this plan and he's going to target the pro Israel voters and the pro Palestine voters by making Harris look bad so to the Muslim population. He's running an ad that portrays Harris as a fast friend of Israel whose beliefs are tied to her Jewish husband. In the Jewish parts or the pro Israel parts, He's running an AD that shows her as pro Palestinian. Look, this is so unsurprising, and it is trying to divide choose, trying to divide people who are pro Palestine and trying
to somehow serve Trump. And we all know that Trump will be worse on both Palestine and Israel. But of course He is fast friends with Natan Yahoo and n Yaho would love to see him reelected. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.