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.
Nearly every major player at the Democratic Party has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the top of the ticket. We have such a great show for you today. The Lincoln Projects Rick Wilson recaps the Arts Convention with us. Then we'll talk to Somemaphore's Dave Weigel, who will tell us what he saw at the Arts Sea. But first we have legendary campaign manager, the author of the Conspiracy to in America Five ways my old party is driving
our democracy to autocracy. The Lincoln Projects owned Stuart Stevens to react to President Biden withdrawing from the Democratic nomination for president.
Welcome to Fast Politics Stuart Stevens for an emergency podcast.
Ah, great and great to be here. What do you want to talk about?
Nothing? There's no news.
We do these emergency podcasts when there's no news, because why not. It's Sunday. Joe Biden has just dropped out of the race. He has endorsed Kamala Harre. We are now in a very precarious but very exciting moment in American democracy.
You're a campaign guy, what do you do next?
The key thing here is that the Harris campaign, and I think it's pretty clear she's going to be the nominee.
Just since this.
Dropped, she's been endorsed by the Black Caucus, endorsed by Clinton's I can't imagine she's not going to be endorsed shortly by President Obama. I think the key is that there'll be as seamless as possible transition from the Biden Harris campaign to the Harris campaign. On staff and organizational level, they say they have twelve hundred staffers out there, hundreds of offices. It's really important that that be handed off.
I would be really focused on trying to put together a call with the president and the Vice president and all twelve hundred staffers who wanted to join, talking about the same mission, continuing asking everybody to stay owned because you just can't replicate this. I mean, a presidential campaign is now a two billion dollar startup that's opened for a few weeks. You can't launch that because of Harris should be able to keep the same money.
But she's got to catch up.
You know, every evil and the various billionaire in the world has pledged Donald Trump as much as he wants because Trump is play pay for play, So Harris is going to have to catch up.
Right, Well, we'll see about that.
People like Elon Musk make a lot of promises they don't keep about money. I think I think when they're looking at it's going to be perceived that Harris has better odds to win. I think that's going to change their calculations. We'll see. You know, we went to the same thing in the primary when Allison said that he was going to give forty million dollars to Tim Scott, and my response to that was that not enough. I
don't think this campaign will be decided by money. And you have this huge inefficiencies of the Trump campaign because it has always been a sort of large criminal enterprise, right, that's right, a lot falling off the truck. I think that there's going to be an interesting moment here that the two people running a Trump campaign, Chris Losovita and Susy Wilde, what have they been telling their candidate? Have they been telling their candidate they're going to run against
President Biden? They are in the position for the first time in American history they held a convention attacking someone who's not in the race. So I expect, if you read that Atlantic article, which I thought was extraordinary, lots of Vida's out there. I think that lots of Vida has sort of become like Trump's doctor. You know, he'll be the fittest president ever. He'll win, They'll win by large numbers, and this will shake his confidence in them.
This is going to be a probable dump. Be your moment. I would suspect within the Trump campaign that inside what will quickly become the Harris campaign. You know, you look at the kind of campaign that they want to run. That was in the prepared remarks in that speech, Trump's convention speech. But then you look at the kind of campaign they're going to have to run, and that's what Donald Trump gave.
Because Donald Trump is not going to change right.
Like, I feel like there are two different things I've seen here that have made people anxious. One is that Americans are racist and sexist, and they won't vote even though she's the most qualified. They will somehow act out against her because of that. The other positive I've heard about that is that Trump will not be able to hide how racist and sexist he is, and it'll make people want to vote for her.
Yeah.
Look, you know, these things are always true until they're not true. Like, you know, we've never elected a black woman. We've never had a black vice president either. You know, there's this rap out there that Harris isn't a very good politician, which I just find to be a head scratcher. So let's just kind of look at it. So, she defeated incumbent DA in a party primary, which is.
Right, that's right, a primary, which is not.
Not easy to do.
Ever, she was seen as strong. That so strong she wasn't challenged. Then she ran for Attorney General against this guy who was the golden boy of California politics, Republican politics, not named Schwarzenegger, who was a very popular Republican DA in heavily democratic La County, and she him, and then she got elected to the US Senate. And now she's Vice President of the United States. So how far would
she have gone? And she was a good politician, you know, I mean, it just seems to me to be an absurdity. More people have voted for her than any woman in American.
History, right, exactly.
Well, and also she's been a DA and ag Yeah, the second black female senator ever. I mean she has way more qualifications than Trump or Vans or even really Secretary Clinton, right because she came.
Up through the AGDA route.
Yeah, and you know, she doesn't have the difficulties that Clinton had of sort of putting someone back in the White House who was sort of in the White House for eight years. No one is going to attack her husband. It's a cleaner, a much cleaner race. You know, you have to assume. I think it's reasonable that the one hundred day agenda that President rolled out in Michigan last Friday is going to stay the same. So that's about
eighty twenty to the positive. You look at what they rolled out in the convention and the Project twenty twenty five, that's about twenty eighty to the negative. Right away, is very simple. I'd take the eighty twenty and run it against the twenty eighty.
And she can run on his on his accomplishments.
Absolutely, And you know, you have a real generational contrast. Now there is this odd reality you know that when the White House changed his hands and change its parties, it tends, you know, the candidate who is least experience tends to win, which is sort of interesting.
And Trump has been president.
He has full responsibility for everything that happened to him as president. Look, I've always thought that Trump was going to lose. I've always thought that it's not going to be particularly close.
I still think that.
I just don't think America is going to the majority of Americans are comfortable with someone at their convention who's a wife beater, introduced a guy who has been found lively sexual assault to Judge Carl Rape, who's a convicted villain. I just don't think that that's where most Americans are. And there's this weird thing that happened in the Republican Party.
Trump won one race for forty six point two percent of the vote, Romney lost for forty seven point two and all of a sudden, Republicans decided that everything we knew about politics was wrong. And I don't think that's true. And when you look at these Trump like candidates that run like Mastrian, they lose. I think it's always an interesting question to ask about a presidential candidate. Can you
imagine them getting elected governor in a certain state? And I think you could imagine her being elected governor in Pennsylvania more than you could imagine Donald Trump certainly can imagine her. In Michigan, they already have a woman governor. I think that's true. In Wisconsin, Arizona they have a woman governor who ran against another woman for governor. Right Nevada, they've elected women. You know, in New Hampshire they seemed to only elect women.
That's a good point.
If a swing state will elect a female governor, why wouldn't they elect a female president.
And it's true in Michigan.
Yeah, Pennsylvania never has. But I think that's just a quirk of candidacy. I don't think there's anything that's different about Michigan. Look, you know, one of my favorite clients and old friends of mine's Haley Barber from Mississippi, and he had to sing that. I always thought it was both funny and sort of profound. He says for the future, it's going to happen anyway, and clearly has the future.
And Trump wants to go back to this America. I mean, this is the guy who is against mandatory vaccines and schools, so like he's going to get the procolio and whooping.
Cof roath, oh measles Roate.
You know, he wants to go back to back alley abortions, and a lot of states just don't think that's where the country is. I think their whole notion of where the country is culturally is off. So I mean, look at what happens they get in a culture war with Nike over Colin Kaepernack.
What happens Nike makes nine billion.
Dollars, gets in a cultural war with Disney, Like, how do you get to fight with the happiness country?
How do you do that? It just isn't where the country is, you know.
I thought there was that moment in twenty toward the end of the campaign when Trump made a run at trying to scare people in the suburbs that someone next door might move in who wasn't white or wasn't Christian, And it didn't work because you know, everybody that we know lives in the suburbs. If somebody moved in next door for a different religion or different race, they would go out of their way to show their kids to be welcoming. I don't want to be that person, you know.
It's the kind of thing you would expect when an old guy from Queens who's always had problems with racial issues. Would think I think it's going to be a very very simple race, pretty straightforward.
You know.
I've interviewed her a bunch of times, and what I've found when I've interviewed her is that she is when you get to know her, you love her like she's very charming and person of all. And so I wonder if it's just a question of getting her out there every day, all day and because she's only fifty five. Like one of the things that you didn't notice in the debate because it was all about Biden, was how much Trump is much less energetic than he was four years ago or eight years ago.
I think Trump had a terrible debate.
He went out there and set up a lot of stuff that people just don't agree with.
It's like we're dying to get rid of Roe V. Wade.
He said that America is a third world country, that we're an uncivilized country. I just don't think most Americans. I mean, you say that stuff in you know a bar where I grew up in Mississippi and somebody asked you to step outside. It's it's a very negative view. Usually the most optimistic candidate wins presidential races, and it was just a huge lost opportunity if Donald Trump had walked out of that debate and says, look, I never run for office. Before I got elected president, I learned
a lot. I'm going to be a better president next time. It was a turbulent presidency and I'll take responsibility for that.
And that's not what we need now.
That guy would have walked off stage a more formidable candidate, but he's capable of being that. I always think it's important to look at the structure of races. You know, Boden Harris won by seven million votes. So Trump needs new customers and where is he getting them?
That I think is the big question is where is he getting them? And when you watch the when you watch the convention, what I was truck by was he hadn't chose a woman candidate. He hadn't chose a softer, gentler revision. He had, in fact chose like super divorced Dad, angry energy.
And you have JD. Vance, who's a weird little guy. If it was in his best interest, she'd be a Trotsky, you know, I mean he's just here. He is international investment banker running you know, the creature of Peter Thiel. Really, right, it's just something about the guy that is off. I don't think he's a very good candidate. He trailed the top of the ticket last time he was on the ballot, the only time he's been on the ballot in Ohio, by four hundred thousand votes.
Right.
No, No, I mean if you look at what he lost by, he won by six and the Wine won by twenty six, So he did twenty points below.
The Wine, who was not a super trumpy guy.
Right, No, So I mean what does that mean. That means that people went in there. He can't say they didn't turn out to vote for Republicans, but they didn't vote for him. You know, that is a huge what we would call undervote. To me, it was a very unconfident pick because it's a pick in your base, and you don't make a pick like that if you really think you have your base secured. But you know, I
don't really think that it was political. I think that you had a bunch of people like Elon Musk and Tucker Carls and they were all pushing this weird little guy and John Junior and Trump said okay, fine, I'll do it.
Because also he doesn't believe that anyone cares about the vice president.
Yeah, which I mean, it is true.
It's very difficult to point to any race where vice presidential candidates made a difference ever.
I mean except maybe Obama. That Biden helped Obama by being Can we.
Pause there for a minute. I guess here.
The thing that bothers me the most about this little period we've gone through is how this group of former Obama staffers have gone out after Joe Biden. Now, these are people whose careers were made because they worked for it in this amazing campaign and a successful presidency. I think you have to say, but had none of those guys, and they seem to be mostly guys not worked for Biden, for Obama Biden Obama, Biden would have won without Biden.
You have a very interesting question that you just rake what Obama have won?
Maybe? Probably, but it's you know, to me, this is like.
They have opinions about this fine, people that work in Buckingham Palace have opinions.
About the royals. But is it ever a good.
Moment when you pick up the Daily Mail and you have a butler talking about the royals? Why couldn't they go through this period and keep their opinions to themselves. They weren't going to matter. I just find that something about it is offensive. You know, you ought to be a quiet professional, and you ought to have respect for your former bosses. And yeah, you know you had that great at campaign. But do you want to be the guy showing up at your thirty year high school reunion in a letter jacket?
Right right, right, No, it's true.
Don't reduce the importance of a moment because you're not part of it. I don't know something about it, just culturally and political culture just really bothered me. And I like all these guys, they're all super smart, they were in brilliant campaigns, but they're staffers, your.
Staff right, and staffords Historically staffers don't speak, right, I mean that's almost never.
Well, it's just it's classless. And what good did they think it was going to do? They think that they think that the president, I says, was going to say, well, I saw this guy in the meetings, and wow, he wants me to get out. I guess I'll get out, you know, I mean, you know, it's silly anyway. I think this is as on track to be as seamless as transitions you could have.
I think Joe Biden would have defeated Donald Trump.
Yeah, I do too.
There is this thing about campaigns, kind of like life. Those who think they can't win or sell them disappointed.
Right, right, right, right, And no, it's true.
You know, there has just been this moment where he lost the party.
Yeah.
I don't know what you do about that.
And I think, you know, in a historical sense, had he lost, he would have been very possibly unfairly blamed for the end of the American experiment.
Yeah.
No, I mean the stakes were just so impossibly high. I mean I really love him and hoped he'd stay in, but I think he was having trouble making the case against Trump, and ultimately that was the job, right, Yeah.
Yeah, I mean it is interesting. I mean, it is a true statement that he had the best first debate as an incumbent president since Clinton, Doe. I mean, as far as going down numerically, Bush went down about six and a half points when he debated Carry the first time. Obama went down about the same and Biden didn't. So one of the sort of oddities about this It was a terrible debate, horrible, but at a certain time, you know, a certain point, you kind of can't just keep pressing.
And I think he's done the right thing the right timing and people will rally around I hope.
So thank you, Stuart Stevens. You are the best, all.
Right, Molly, great, great to talk, great to talk.
Are you concerned with Project twenty twenty five and how awful Trump's second term could be? Well, so are we, And by the way, we really are, I have to say, which is why we teamed with iHeart to make a limited series with the experts, a lot of academics, really smart people about what a disaster Trump's second term would be for America's future.
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Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and the host of.
The Enemies Listen Welcome Back, Too Fast Politics.
Rick Wilson New Tone. The tone is new. It's all about unity.
It's a brand new tone involving hannibal lecture, sharks, batteries, and of course that fed the aliens crawling across the border seeking to mudor every American white woman in her bed. Yes, it's the brand new tone of the same old shit.
One of the things that I loved about this Republican National Convention was it's fact freeness.
No facts.
Honestly, there's a part of me that kind of admires it in a sick way, right right, there's kind of like a part of me that's just like these fuckers just they have zero fucks to give. They're just gonna go out there and say what they want to say. I mean, and the fact that they had a guy who beat a woman introducing a man who raped a woman as the Republican nominee. I just find the whole thing so so astounding, so astounding.
Do you want my take on this for a minute.
Of course, So this RNC, if you were going into this and you wanted to pivot to a general you would have Picnicky Haley as a vice.
Presidentialve hundred percent right.
You would have had speakers that were moms, you know, moms for liberty or women who were happy that they had made abortion illegal in their state, or you would have, you know, But what you did instead, and I think this is the quote unquote genius and it's actually not genius of Trump and Don Junior is instead of trying to pivot to appealing to anyone who is not an angry divorced man, they went harder on angry divorced men.
The look of having JD. Vance as their standard bearer, who, especially with the beard, gives us the strongest possible Handmaid's vibes.
Right, it's true.
And I've always been one who like try to suppress the Handmaid's over exaggeration, but honestly, it's not exaggerated, right, It's kind of creepy. But look, they had a chance, and you and I both know you and I both talked to a dozen reporters yesterday, I'm sure who were like the new tone will be so much more elevated, and it will show that Trump his life has changed after the traumatic events of Joe Biden attempting to have him assassinated, all the frocking bullshit. He can't change his tone.
Trump is the frog or is a scorpion being bitten by the frog? For the hundredth time. Trump is the snake in his own obsessive piece of poetry he reads. He will always do what he does, brand new tone, same old shit, over and over again. There's and here's the thing. A lot of our friends in the media are very credulous about this stuff, and they need to be less credulous. He will lie to you every time. He's always full of shit, and I just find it
fascinating that they bought it. And he then he gets up. You know, a three thousand words speech should clock in somewhere around thirty five minutes. I've written enough speech is to know these little little fun facts ninety three minutes in and everyone's thinking, oh, sweet Jesus, O angel of death, come to me swiftly and relieve me from this misery.
Right all right? No, I mean we you and I you know.
We've said we were talking last night about it.
Like, but one of the things Trump was able to do in twenty sixteen, which is what I think he's trying to do now, is he was able to get an electorate that tends to not be a high propensity voter electorate.
Yeah, low propensity voters, yeah, right.
And so what he's his calculate is that he can get enough angry white guys to turn out for him and divorce.
There are enough divorced dads in America that he can win.
And again that may or may not be true, but that's the that's the play.
I think.
Look, you put wrestlers and UFC people up there and all these other these, all these other signifiers to that group. I mean, why not just have Andrew Tait on the stage at this point?
Right? Well, no, I mean that's where this is going.
The matrix has Trump, and I will free him with my masculine testoster run.
But the answer is that the US has extradition to Romania.
That's the problem.
Why do we think that the mainstream media keeps trying to normalize Trump? And I think it's because they don't want to look partisan, so they feel they can't talk about what Trump.
Really is I have a darker vision of that.
Okay, let's do it.
Tell me Caesar Konda at MSN, he's got mergers and acquisition questions ahead. That was an article about that the other day. I think CNN, with its current management, has decided that Trump is good for business.
Right.
Well, also CNN, they've worked the ref so hard with CNN that it doesn't write so right. Right, I mean like CNN has become they're just scared of their own chadow at this point.
They are, they are so terrified of anything from Trump world. They are petrified. Yes, you're correct. The refs have been worked so long and so assiduously that you know, they don't take a dump without worrying like, oh am I going to offend Donald Trump?
Oh yeah yeah.
But it's also I think there is a certain feeling that people have that there should be a narrative about Trump, and after so many years, perhaps this narrative.
Can now be He's normal and.
So but again, what people it was so it was covered so incredulously, and for example, like make America Affordable again?
Right, that was a whole.
Night of speeches, right, And then here's a person who wants to do one hundred percent tariff.
I'm Chinese, gu I mean I find that true, truly, like beyond comprehension. Tell me how one hundred percent tariffs works to make American lives better? It doesn't.
How does it make things cheaper?
And they say all the time, like everything good American goods made in America. Okay, that's a lovely sentiment. It really is.
We do.
However, sorry to tell them live in a global economy. That global economy is a complex monster, and if you're not in it, you lose. You can't exist in the world. Look, America cannot get workers who will work for the wages and folks, and this may be right or wrong, but you can't get American workers to work for the wages of somebody who's making shoes in a factory in Vietnam. A lot of the stuff that's happening now is you can't even get some of the materials in this country anymore.
We don't make computer chips in this country now. Joe Biden's trying to fix that. But we don't make the chips that go into every one of your iPhones, folks, we don't make them here. They're all made in Taiwan, every single fucking one of them. It's made in Taiwan or South Korea. We don't have the manufacturing base to provide all the things that we need. And this is a fucking fantasy. It's an eighteenth century, nineteenth century fantasy about what trade and the economy really looks like. And
I got to be honest, it's tiresome. It's tiresome as shit. I mean, it's just it's boringly tiresome.
Yeah, I mean, it's just a lie, right, Like for example, a lot of that stuff was like, you know, mass deportations will look like those people will be put in camps. Right, you can't deport you can't put twenty five million people on an airplane or even ten or five, So they'll go into camps. And mass deportation will make America more expensive because it won't be labor, right, and you won't have people coming here. You'll have these camps that will
be expensive. You'll have deporting people, which will be expensive, which will make the economy shrink. And I mean it's just this is this is easy to play this out, but no one is. Like finishing the sentence, The.
Biggest part of vast deportation is that they have said.
They said the actual words, reporters, Let's focus on this. They said the actual words getting rid of birthright citizenship. So on top of the people who are here illegally, you are going to take tens of millions of Americans and turn them overnight into illegal aliens.
Yeah, overnight.
Now, you tell me what happens when that. When that occurs, you are going to have fathers shipped away. You're going to have mothers shipped away. You're going to have children who are who are who are deprived of their parents. You're going to have an economic impact on this that none of these morons is calculating at all.
This would be the.
Single most destructive decision that you could make about the state of the American economy. It will wreck this economy. It is not even a debate about what happens. It will cause untold economic and personal and societal suffering. No serious person would would believe that this is a good idea except the people around you know who.
Well, it's also they don't care, right, because they there's some amount of people who just think that maybe it won't necessarily matter, right, There's some amount of people who think he won't do it, or they'll just get the tax cuts and he won't actually do the crazy stuff. But we know from the four years of Trump that he actually will do the crazy stuff.
Here's the thing, there's a mental construct among a lot of softer Republican voters that they can do what I call the buffet approach to Trump. Oh, I can take just the things I want out of the buffet, and I'll skip the mass deportations, the racism, the craziness, the bullshit, and I don't have to accept or take responsibility of any of those things. But the rest of it. I want my tax cuts, I want my regulation cuts, those things.
I love those things. Yes, I'll do those things and not have the people, you know, trying to overthrow the election in the Capitol of those things and not Steven Miller and Seb Gorka and Rich Grennell running immigration in this country. It's a fallacy that they really believe they can just say I want I only want one part of this pie. I only want a little slice of this pie, because you're eating the whole pie or you ain't having pie.
I want to talk to you about the billionaires who have decided that Trump is their guy. So there are a couple of different groups that have decided that Trump is their guy, and they.
Mostly are people who either like love crypto. Talk to me about what the crypto situation is here.
Well, a lot of the crypto bros are all in ha ha ha.
I'm making a joke.
That's a joke about their dumb podcast.
About their stupid podcast. Yes, I made a funny.
Can we have two seconds on how bad David Sachs was?
I was just about to bring him up.
Actually, So he has rebranded as a here's a This is one of the many reasons why I love billionaires.
He's so rich, but he really just wants to be famous, so.
He just wants to be Dana bash, right, And so he's rebranded with this podcast where he and other fascists talk about how great they are.
So he gets to speak.
He's probably given millions of dollars at the Republican National Convention, and he is just so bad.
He's so bad that he had in his speech. As I was listening to it, because again, remember speech writer writer, Yes, I do this a lot, he had eleven separate places in the speech that I counted. There might have been a couple more where he expected applause, and to say the applause was tepid is like saying that five day old bathwater is tepid clean. Yeah, this was a historically poorly received speech. Why because even among the faithful at the RNC convention.
Right, these are your people.
I know these people.
They're wearing cheese hats, as.
One does, but they still don't believe that Vladimir Putin is the good guy. Okay, And even during Jade Vance's speech, the awkwardness when he touches on that subject was palpable. People are like, yeah, yeah, can you not mention that because you no, Yeah, that was not good.
I mean, you know, he had an applause line that was basically Putin wouldn't have I don't know, was something to the effect of, like we should love Putin have Ukraine, which the signs say, right, they're holding up signs that say stop giving Ukraine money, right right in the.
War in Ukraine, and the only end of that war is with Daddy Vladdie killing everyone in tanks in the streets of Kiev.
Yeah.
So that was, you know, before he rolls into Poland. I mean, that's where this goes. But yeah, I thought that was.
To give back to your question here about the billionaires. Yes, the crypto bros are a sub set, and a lot of them have a lot of money from this, from this ludicrous Ponzi scheme of theirs, and a lot of them have a desire to do what other industries in America have traditionally done, which is to engage in regulatory capture, right, And they would just like to They'd like to get the money. They'd like to get their scam protected by
the federal government. If that's your baby and you're going to go spend the money on it, I mean, I get it.
But it's also really gross.
It's pretty transparent too.
Well.
And they bought they bought the vice president. Okay, they bought the VP. They bought the VP. They said, how much does it cost us to get JD on the thing? Because JD is part of this like weird, weird, weird weird ass Silicon Valley cult around this guy named Curtis Yarvin, who is the intellectual dark web, deep in dark enlightenment. He's a guy who believes in monarchy, monarchy, molly monarchy.
No, I listen, I love it. Yeah, who among us?
Who among us hasn't blogged under the name meniscus moldbug mniscous moldbug.
And I actually actually one time, a couple of years ago, went on a deep dive. I spent about a week in a rabbit hole. And that guy's writing is the most discursive hot garbage. I mean, I mean, somebody gets at me. I'm a fucking editor.
Yeah, well that was last night too. Everybody went on and on and on. I mean Eric's speech.
Eric speech is a pregame for Eric's campaign.
No, really, what's he running for daddy's fancy lad?
What's he running for daddy's large adult son.
I mean, my dad and I, both of whom had famous parents, were both like we were watching it together and I was like, you know, he just makes me sad, and my dad was like me too, it's so relatable to be the kid that dad doesn't like.
Sorry, and I tweeted it last night. He will never love.
You, Eric, He really won't. I mean, I just he will never cry. I feel I actually always feel really sad for him. I know, obviously that's not the appropriate response to have, but I do always because he looks like he's gonna cry.
He always looks like he's gonna weep, right there.
Yeah, I have no real sense of pity, mercy or kindness about them. But you have to say, this is a guy who was obviously raised in a very abusive, very abusive.
Very weird knows, but certainly very weird.
Well mentally abusive at the least. Let's not pretend that this was a normal childhood.
Yeah, I mean, who knows. But there's less than ideal I think is fair.
It would not surprise.
Yeah, but if you look at this whole thing, you learned one key thing. No matter how much they spend the media, there's no better version of them. There's no better version of him, There's no better version of them, There's no better version of the policy stuff. I mean, even had Mike Johnson last night saying why Yes, our project twenty twenty five was written by many of my good friends, and I will agree with many of the things they wrote there subtle.
You can't.
I mean, the problem with this is, you know, they published what they want to do.
I mean, the good news for them is that almost no one is.
Covering Yeah, I mean, they really have had a very fortunate kind of run on it. But once people do cover it, as both the Trump campaign found out and we found out, WHOA, you start asking people about this.
And they hate it. Oh they don't, just don't. They just dislike it. They hate it. It's bad. Yeah, it's bad.
So but look like I said, you saw who they are, and you saw that none of them change.
They can't.
They're mentally, cognitively, philosophically and capable of being anything except exactly what they are.
Thank you, Rick Wilson, my.
Pleasure as always.
Dave Wigel is a reporter at smerfore.
Welcome back to Fast Politics. Dave.
It's good to be here. Thank you.
I'm so excited to have you because again, and I've said this before, I was like, we have to have them back because I just need to know what the fuck is going on in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And again I wasn't there. You were there, so tell me if I'm right. It feels like it started out as a different convention and then sort of pivoted back to what Trump conventions are.
Like, Yeah, I think it'd be fair to saying that Trump was the low light and the convention not his first twenty minutes. And this is where trait gets you in trouble because I think people who were writing off the beginning of his speech said that this was a different tone. Who was describing in detail what it was like in butler pencil, They did it. That was all true.
And then he for really for the first time, because you look at how tight his speeches were in sixteen twenty, he turned into more of a rally speech, and obviously there's this gigantic binding cloud over everything. Without that, this is the sort of thing Democrats wanted. They wanted some evidence that the Trump peoplehood it for in the past is not still running. This is somebody with a lot
more resentments who's less on message. The rest of the convention, though, was I think, having gone over in two thousand and eight, the tightest they've ever had. Nothing that was off script. And the first one I covered in two I was a day. There was a day that was sort of half canceled by Hurricane twenty twelve. There's day this again
by the hurricane sixteen. There were some chaos twenty with COVID that they got the package they want, said in the speakers they wanted, and even because of Butler, they got NIGGI Ailey delivering kurse Stump speech and enhorsing Trump. They had a great message out unified in a party that has purged maybe five percent of people because they're Trump positions, but very effective in saying this party is unchaotic and ready to govern, and everything was better when
Trump was president. So just put it back in back ower.
Right, And then the problem was you had.
Trump, Yes, that's why I would put it. Yeah, if you.
Hadn't had Trump, or you even had had just sort of jade Evans. I mean what I saw was, and I watched all the speeches or listen to them, at least the first two days, they really did try to tamp down on the rhetoric. I mean you still had Marjorie Taylor Green the first day saying that, you know, illegals were poisoned. I don't know if she said poisoning the blood, but there was certainly talk of illegals, which is not very unifying.
But they did.
Try to stay away from some of the insindiatory language, which is the brand now.
Some of it.
So there were a lot of photos I should sell, but I saw professionals look better, people saying mass deportation on their signs, and that's something that Romcos wouldn't have said twelve years ago. The premise is that that is now popular. The idea of saying to white voters and working glass, black and Hispanic voters that we're going to do a massive deportation of a certain come over the border in the last three years, that polls very well.
Is that unifying to the whole country. No, but it's unifying to sixty percent of the country and that's good enough. A lot of mentions of gender, not in great detail, really just things like keith men out of women's sports.
They seem to back down on that a little bit.
I thought, well, yeah, there are conservatives who when they talk about that, get into more detail. But that's also that's not that an issue that makes everybody happy. No, is an issue that's popular for them. It is. So they were more conservative in ways that are more popular than they were when Trump was running in twenty sixteen,
and they dropped some stuff. But I really thought was significing that if you look at jd Vance's speech and the way he talked about America's economic problems, what's holding people back that has been done before for that? If you look at that Ooran did that in twenty twelve, or I gave the speech about the national debt and overregulation and Obamacare, things like that, whereas the advance argument was more about protections and the manufacturing and stopping jobs
from going overseas, stopping drug addiction. It was just different. The way they talked was different. And populism is just such a flexible word, so everyone claims to be a populist unless they're unless they want to lose, but more populists in that they really did discard a lot of the fiscally conservative ideas that just aren't very popular. But Republicans realize, when we get in power we talk about cutting SEB security or work tax cuts, we just don't win.
So I could do it. Fewer mentions of tax cuts, a few mentions of Biden raising taxes if he's reelected, but very little about tax cuts, less than I've ever heard of convention. Just the economic issue were different.
Right, But there was no talk about any of the stuff. That is someone who's just done a large YouTube series on Project twenty twenty five, like, there's no talk about any of the stuff that they're planning. I mean, maybe
they've stopped planning all that stuff. But like if Project twenty twenty five is allowed to get implemented, which that is certainly the plan the Heritage Foundation, which is written by the same guy who wrote the RNC platform, Right, So that makes me think that there's some right Russ void. So there's clearly a lot Vought a lot. There's clearly a lot of synchronicity between the Republican Party today, the people who work in the Trump admin and Project twenty twenty five.
But none of that was mentioned.
Yeah, and the Trump campaign not at the convention with Chrystal Zivida talking to Jonathan Martin at Politico's event, sitting there paying for the campaign to really shorten that story. When the Trump campaign was very small and reported writing about what would Trump's seond term agend to be, they would point people to Heritage, to Steven Miller, people like that. Once they staffed up and they realized those stories are unpopular,
they said, that's not us anymore. But after preface everything by how little Democrats to get their best and get now, they were pretty happy with the Van's choice because Vance is a big ally of a lot of people who wrote, first of all, a lot of people in the Project Pitt twenty five papers works for Trump administration. Second, a lot of friends with Vance Vance. Advance wrote the four to the upcoming policy book by Herring Try Nation's President
Kevin Roberts. So they can keep connecting them if they ever get back to a normal campaign. They're argument saying what these guys are running on is not the real agenda. They can still do that. They kind of did that. They did that at the convention Democrats off site, out of the perimeter when they argue they said, he is this party is going to highlight the ideas that sound good because it's hiding its real agenda. So that they
got to do that. But there have been conventions where they it's harder for Republicans to conceal the least popular ideas from the floor.
Well, and I think ultimately Republicans are in a very good spot right now. It's really hard to deny that they have had a really good streak and that, you know, they are sort of controlling the narrative right now because people are you know, there's this huge news cycle about Biden dropping out, and so there's no news cycle about how very sleepy Donald Trump sounds.
Yeah, That's that's one thing I heard from I'd say Democrats were the Republicans today, really, but you could tell in the room I had to walk out where the trust seed was over, but you tell me were checking their phones and they were excited to see Trump and they started to walk out. I remember, Alibi, I don't care.
I went to CNN's offsite, Grill, and I walked in behind Byron Donald's who was in the Trump box for a while, and the speech was not over, and the people did not feel the need to sit for all ninety minutes of the Trump's speech. Is he going to lose votes because his speech was longed? I don't necessarily think so. That did him the least favors I think in anything at the event, because coming into it on Monday, Republicans were I don't want to be glib about it,
and they were happy because it survived something horrible. But they were happy because even before that he was leading in the polls. They were in a better position they'd been since the year two thousand. There were Republicans who were in politics who were not alive the last time they were this stronggoing the election. Ged Evance wasn't voting in two thousand and it wasn't all that to vote yet, so they felt incredible. And then the way they talked about I we all wrote about this a little bit.
I kind of focused on this on Tuesday. The way they were talking about Trump was that not just was he a lucky politician, but he was he had the hand of God on him, and that God, Gods had a do from tragedy. It wasn't just optimism. It was a sense that the campaign is ordained. Almost their marching on Jerusalem with the blessing, the blessing of the Pope.
It was very different than we're even four years ago, where they said, Okay, we're kind of in a mess and maybe we can exploit some of the weaknesses and Democrats, but we're behind different mood right yeah, No.
I mean they have every reason. They are certainly winning right now. It was a long speech and I wondered about JD. Vance, How did that speech go over?
That went over very well. So Advance is not a Pence style table pounding political speaker. It's a way of political speed he does not do. He's a much more conversational People still watch Ted talks he's more of a ted talk speaker, and you're doing this for years. He started doing this. I'm counting they went seven seven years ago,
eight years ago for rehabiliology. He is I'm comfortable calling him an intellectual the way he talks about politics and is much more based on his deep reading of things mentioned Saint Augustine, I'll mentioned conservative fakers. He did that and presented himself as a fairly ordinary guy who got lucky in in America and wants other people to do that and then't bastually invites me. When he attacked Biden, it was for or for Biden's voting record as a
senator supporting Knapp in the Iraq war. That is one thing that one think aprilization. It's complicated, but as weak as Biden means. They did not spend a lot of time attacking him. They did not feel that they needed to as they did when Barack Obama was the nominee. They needed they need to spend a lot of time damaging image because they felt like they they're right right now. Image is so negative. They need to.
Yeah, so explain to us what you were sort of surprised by. Besides the fact that so many people got rolled by the new tone narrative.
Yeah, I'm almost why they didn't have the same top sources of people think they're wrong.
There's got to be a human nature thing where people just feel like they want him to be normal and hope that he will be normal. And that's why they keep Lucy in the foot and the football with them, right.
Yes, And there's a little bit of reality based recording on those works. He did interviews with fairly friendly people outlets Sleeve a Zito and people like that after the shooting and was speaking much more conciliatory. And he doesn't talk that much about religion and ways that sound credible to people, and he did after this when he was talking about the shooting of anything else.
He wasn't.
But I do think this led a little bit into the convention because one but yeah, bid was popular too. They didn't want to make it look like a typical slashing, burning convention. Three, there was a sense, especially the last day, that they might have to run against Kamala Ritz and how do they do that. She's also on poppular look kind of case to make against her, and they just
didn't make much of one. I was talking to double Conservatives on the floor on Wednesday, and they were telling me we need to make sure Trump does some attacks on Kamala Harris because he might need to make the case against So anything is didn't do that does come from confidence, which can backfire. There can be people who
they think they don't need to do it. And what's happened. Frankly, twenty eight Democrats missed a lot of shots at their convention and focused too much on celebrity guests who are good at hoasting, and too little on issues. You can win the election. Yet we have a convention that doesn't hit everything. But I'll do too much stage manage. It's gotta shoot back. But the toe mad onceed from those
Sunday interviews. They didn't get it. It was it was more as sorry and English, and except for a couple of red meetings like kid Rocket all oapin coming out and just being meancy alphas, I'm fristing breathing drunk, that was not on the same script. But I think it worked. It definitely worked in the ring.
No, I mean it did work in the room.
It's interesting explain to me about sort of like we had Ted Cruz, we had Marco. We had some senate people. We had one you're watching in the box. I saw Marjorie Taylor Green and a Paulina Luna. I didn't see a ton of like traditional Republicans, people who are not trumpy. Were there's people there still.
They didn't get to speak at the convention.
Huh they did this not he It's primetime who got the prime time splots? That was interesting. Lard Trump is not anybody out Their speech is that well received. He is the vice chair of the RNC because we see the best person to put in prime time. Maybe not was Martin would be a better person in primetime because he got some face. Yes, every maga Republican who wanted to speak not to speak. I mean one of the only switches is that Ronnie Jackson who has opined vote
that Joe Biden's and dementia or is on drugs. And Tamala Ayris is a low iq I think because of Biden. But we diagnosis. He was a little more mellow with his speech. But everyone that you're used to seeing on newsmat box not time. They just weren't necessarily when every network was fill moving, it's only a couple hours.
Lay do you think that there's any part of this Republican Party that isn't Trump now.
Not fully separate. It's either people who base their identity around him and what he says, and people who agree with him and appreciate. And he is a popular figure. He gets elected one party and gat the right, and so that Bob Good, for example, who's the only republic denotal seat in a primary. He's a pure Trump guy, but he'd retruned the tankers. He thought the banks were more electable, munt conservative in some ways, and he is the Sampluses want more direct about a couple of things
like Trump reversed. I've talked about done Moore in Florida and four conserving being trumping, willing to do Trump one after him, people abortion and things like that. And so he was sweep out of a pardon. But that's the It's not a Gulf like sixteen where there are God winner. He used to go, I noticed that Christian Union being to show up people being so peremonial interviews. And he's retiring.
He's going to be replaced as the nominee here by Anny Trumping Poles who are daddy very pro prounat Gananta. So it's really like you have to look at it, like how many anti Reaguan Republicans the party in ap and eighty eight not really anywhere here, some moderacy, but they all supported Reagan and some capacity, and that's some
of what they voped. The shooting we knew was convinced people outside the convention we're not Republicans since they were wrong about Trump, but also a normalized and say, look, stop thinking this guy in crazy admiration just the leader of our party and liked things republican study at to support it. You can't just run for Larry Ogan, little bump. I don't think they've got that far. Again mentioned Pensulia marks they want, but all I think it's going to be that bad flu.
Yeah, it's so interesting, but I mean even Spencer Cox, right, you know he did actually say that he wasn't going to vote for Trump and now he's endorsing him.
Yes, that happened. I think the most significant endorsements for people a E. One Moss after who were clearly pro Drumps but didn't want to say so. I find that old dance Bettsini, because these are people who really want Frem's politics went out idea an integration, censorship, et cetera. But they felt a little bit offward supporting him. What they tried to say or actively shooting was that this normalized though, this made it and so you didn't have to apologize for suppliting Prout anymore.
Right, Yeah, but it's still super embarrassing. One last question. I saw that the ratings were down twenty percent for this convention.
Did it seem like a.
Smaller crowd or did it seem like the same kind of that what you're used to.
It's hard to compare to. It's out pretty normal. I think there were more of pub hopens in twenty sixteen because there was a tank perfection. Every people wanted to wanting to change the nominee at the convention, but not much Ill.
Right, but you think that it's just found the same as usual.
There might be low ratings PK people have been heard in JD Vansley so both the presidential end by threadline plot near Bradley page Submready.
It all feels like the same material, right.
Same again if you listen concerned to meeting enough Pride, I mean Chucky cross seams and was in prime top Dave thank you, thank you.
I hope you'll come back.
Yeah, thank you.
No moment, Oh fuck on.
Rick Wilson, Yes, ma'am, we're here to discuss the moment of fuckery.
The Moment of Fuckery a feature of the Wilson jong Fast Enterprise, and each week we feature a moment of fuckery. Last night, I think my moment of fuckery came from the fact that it took my researchers approximately fifteen seconds to find the clip of that guy, Dana White slapping the shit out of a woman in the course of some sort of bar fight. And this is a man introducing the rapist as the nominee.
Can you just explain to me who he is.
He's apparently the president of the UFC, which is a some sort of thing where where men were grown, men don tight outfits and kick each other.
Do you want my moment of fuckery?
I always want your moment of fuckery, Molly.
That sounded dirtier than I intended to tell you.
I really did.
I was like, all right, Molly, I always want your moment of fuckery.
One of the things that I was struck by was this was a convention where almost no one believed what they.
Were saying from Donald's no one.
Yeah, well, I mean there probably was someone who actually like believed what they were saying. But maybe but like from Donald Trump who was a Democrat and doesn't believe anything of any of this. Right, Oh god, No to jd Vance who called Trump Hitler, right, but only as a compliment.
Right, it was also a Democrat, right to you know, the Hulk who.
Was doing it because Peter Tiel had paid for his legal I mean, we don't know that that was why he was doing it, but remember he does owe Peter til for paying his legal bills against Cocker. And we had seen that the Hulk had said negative things about Trump as recently as twenty twenty or something like that. So there really were a great number of speakers on that stage who did not believe at all anything they were saying, And that, for me is really impressive.
Yeah.
Look, if you don't let yourself or make yourself live in the deception, you can't exist in that world.
Right.
You must agree to have the consensual hallucination about all this garbage or you can't survive in it. There's no possible world where you wake up in the morning and go, I have an intellectually consistent view of the universe. And here's how, and yet I also believe the following things. By the way, I have to have one other moment of microfuckery. Why he's still wearing the ear tampon after five days?
All right, I have to jet you guys are the best. Thank you, thank you.
See Uh that's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.