Also media.
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis and joined with Robert Evans and Sophie Lichterman or Day one of the official RNC, the Republican National Convention. Robert, Sophie, how's your day? Ben?
Well, I'm tired.
It was a long day.
It was very red, Yeah, a lot of red. It was very loud. The drinks were very expensive.
Yeah, we got Sony free drinks yesterday and not today.
No, not once you're in the convention center. I don't know. We were trapped in a room with a lot of people who had were either used car salesman or spiritually were used car salesman.
Also a lot of people who want to kill me specifically.
Yes, we'll talk about this that more later. Yeah, today, just structurally, what happened is, you know, it was a series of speeches. So you had first off, the big floor boat, right, So we got to watch all of the different had their delegates and they have to form even though everyone knows what's happening, they have to like formally follow Robert's rules of order or whatever and confirm that Trump is the nominee. And then they announce and confirm the VP, who you all know by now is
jd Vance. We'll talk I might as well talk a little bit about him now. Jd Vance is a guy who in the wake of Trump's initial victory. He's a dude who came from Appalachia sort of part time, went to an Ivy League school, did some time in the Marines, and then made a bunch of money in business. And then when twenty sixteen happened and a lot of liberals
were like, wow, how could Trump have won election? He capitalized by writing a book trying to explain the Appalation experience, even though again he only kind of lived there part time and mostly yeah, had abandoned those people, and that part, like the book is about him abandoning that part of his life as soon as he possibly can. Not a great book by my opinion, as someone who grew up in a really fucking poor town in the Deep South.
But see, technically a millennial, Yeah, he's.
The first millennial who might become vice president.
That's a big part of why I think he was picked.
Agreed, Yeah, that's a big part of why.
So it was time for them to announce jd Vance. They officially approved him. Delegates officially approved him, which happened very quickly, and he came out to Chance in Ohio, where he's from, was very stoked to have him there. Lots of chance of JD JD.
You're right, he had a hype man.
Yeah, and he advanced his way out there with his wife and looked emotional and yeah. All I know is that he really fucking hates lb gt QIA people and I really fucking ate him.
Uh huh, Yeah, I mean he said that he kind of like turned the corner finally on what side, because he had said some anti Trump stuff once in the day, but he turned the corner.
Who has his.
Movie got really bad reviews? So if we wind up going into full fledged fascist dictatorship, we can blame Ron for some of that. And to be honest, we always knew that was going to be the case.
Yeah, valid, Yeah.
After that, Yeah, Marjorie Taylor Green gave a speech, a couple other people, Tim Scott had a speech.
So there was a break between sessions. We came back for the second session. The second session opens up with what I could only describe as I was like, Christopher Nolan, are you here?
It was like a reception.
Sounding music like, Wow, traumatized. Thank you for that dramatized video of like in a world, yeah, like showing crime and people losing money and women and babies crying.
And then there's like literally bad clip art of money on fire, bad.
Clip art of money on fire, and it's about It was like three to five minutes long, very long. Because I took a video of it.
It felt like a really bad, like action thriller trailer could have been partly AI. There was sort of some stege animation towards the end because they were they had this camera that was sweeping through this fake city. It was all cg and it landed on this this this floodlight on top of a room, this broken flickering in
the floodlight. Gears are turning, the music is ramping up, and finally it lightens and we see Trump, the Trump signal shining in the cloudy sky, calling calling the hero the mass Avenger as.
If it was the bat signal from Batman.
It was shameful.
And then and then people loved it.
They yeah, I got a great reaction. There's also a video of all the scenes. If you if you've ever seen clips from rallies, you've probably seen little clips of Trump, like fake dancing.
Doing doing that weird dancer.
He does his hand, he doesn't dance, he's excited, he's in a good mood.
You know the dance.
It's what we would describe as a little wiggle. Anyways, it was a very long.
Wiggle video and people loved it.
No, it looked like this is the type of video that liberals would post to make fun of Trump, and the fact that it was used as a hype video shows how useless that style of like political property end is like, No, you can't make fun of Trump for doing that little dance. That doesn't That doesn't do anything.
You can't make There's no use in making fun of Trump. There is no value in satirizing him. There is no value in laughing at him. Like if it helps you personally, that's great, if you need that to get by, we all do it sometimes, but it is no, it does no damage to them, like the not to shit on John Oliver. But the Trump stuff was a wild and
spectacular failure. None of it accomplished anything, and everybody who ever thought that you could make fun of Trump and have any positive impact was wrong, And you should feel a little bad I do.
Because and because they used it as a hype video. They used it to stitch between their different musical acts, different segments, and oh boy, the music so that the music was better than the music at the at the welcome party that we talked about in our last episode. But that bar is not very high. It's all. It's also it's all country music, right, there's country music cover bands.
It was not all country. No, there was a lot of like nineties stuff.
There was a fucking it's played in the style of country.
But there was some bye bye by your boat guy.
There was the talk about they had a they had a Fleetwood Mac song someone did you was?
There was like a essentially like the the run of the evening.
And and country music. My apologies, it was dad rock and country music.
You know what I have to tell you. We do not care enough to argue about this anyways. The music was fucking mid It was like the way because I of course, like a bunch of people have Texas today and been like, how is it? And the only way that we can describe it is if a normal person went to their favorite concert and and had great seeds, yeah, and uh you were very happy. Is the same exact or you went to a Game seven of the NBA Finals.
That's exactly the the reaction that the people in the crowd were having.
It's a mix of like a sports event, a concert, and like a mega church. There was if there was some kind of concert that a whole bunch of boomers really enjoyed. That was the general vibe of the convention today, which is.
Not all that different from how Trump rallies feel totally. It had it had that vibe, and it felt more more like a concert than the twenty sixteen RNC diad.
Yeah, I mean there was also there was so much music in so few speeches. The speeches were only like two minutes long each and there would be like extended, like ten twenty minute musical performances in between each speech. Like mostly it's just it's just people playing songs on stage. That was most of the R and C today.
There was there was several different speeches that came after those strange videos, and we'll get into that, but first we're gonna go to an ad break, and when we come back, we're gonna play live us from the RNC.
Well it was live when we recorded.
Yeah, as what I'm saying live us we were alive back then and now questionable talking about what we were experiencing in the moment.
But first ads, Okay, we are back, and now we will tune in to our recording we made on the convention floor.
Doun dun dun.
Okay, we are well recording live, broadcasting a little bit later, but recording live on the ground at the Republican National Convention. We've had a very a very busy morning. It's now mid afternoon. We're in between sessions. The first session just wrapped up, and we thought we were we should record some of our immediate thoughts before our little debrief tonight.
I guess let's start with Robert Evans.
Yeah. Well, first off, my main overwhelming kind of takeaway is that the tone and tempo of this is a lot milder than I expected. And I think it's because the over majority of people here are extremely conservative, the most dedicated and active members of the party. But it's not like the Proud Boy Crew over Definitely some of those people here, but.
These are electoralists.
These are electoralists. Most of them are a lot older, you know. I would say the average age is somewhere between the late forties to the sixties of like people you encounter here, And it is interesting to me that I have not, you know, as soon as we, like we said yesterday, as soon as we landed, we saw a guy with a Trump after he got shot, sticking his fist in the airshirt. I haven't seen a ton
of that on the ground here since. I've not seen a ton of it, nor have I seen a ton of direct references to it.
I guess the sophie here, I think that guess the main reference that I've seen is when they did the delegate.
Official photo, that would be the big one.
Yeah, they all turned around and raised their fist in the way that Donald Trump did after the attempted assassination, which was fascinating to me.
Yeah, yeah, especially given the lack of otherwise direct emphasis on what happened. And maybe that's coming up. I kind of do. The way I'm interpreting it now is because the thing that just dropped a few minutes ago is the FBI got into the shooter's phone. So far, preliminary findings nothing in there that makes it clear why he did it, So I kind of think they may just be sort of confused as to why one of their
own seemingly carried out the shooting. Not really clear what the rhetoric on the shooters should be, but very clear on how they should respond to the Trump photo, Which is the primary takeaway from that is the photo is the pose, is him cementing his image as this indestructible, you know, man who's constantly under attack, right, And so it makes sense to me that they've adopted that hand sign, and I expect we'll see more of it, And boy, howdy, does it just look exactly like that the hand sign
from the far right that everyone's familiar with.
So as we were kind of in between speakers, they had this little band playing, and we happened to be sitting next to one of the younger people that I've seen attending the convention, but like still still like an adult, like a very young adult, maybe twenty one, maybe twenty at most.
He couldn't have been older than twenty one, because he said this is his first election. He'll be able to vote in yes presidential election, so probably a little bit younger than me.
It's interesting because yesterday we talked with some, you know, very old people, and today we talked with some very young people to yet and it's it is a it is an interesting contrast. So, yeah, this young conservative from from California but now lives in South Dakota and I don't know. We were asking him about, like what what focus he has in politics. He seemed really concerned about the economy. That was that was kind of his main his main.
Issue, almost the only thing he wanted to talk about was the economy. He was one thing, I'll say, very good natured, like not in the I am doing the pr thing, I am trying to put on an image, but just in the not at all aggressive, did not react kind of negatively to the fact that we were media, which you get a lot of that at events like these. He expressed that the only places he gets his news
is Fox and News Nation on TV. He is not on social media, which I found interesting and statistics suggest obviously that's not the norm, but it is a growing number of gen Z and Jen Alpha kids who avoid a lot of the internet.
Well, and that's especially among conservatives. I mean, there is a lot of young conservatives who do get their news on TikTok, who do get their news. Podcasts are one of the biggest, biggest ways that young people to the right get their news obviously, like the Daily Wire is very dominant in the podcasting scene. But no, I find that very interesting, And I assuen that's probably like, you know, influenced by his family. You know, whatever is on, whatever's on the family TV.
His uncle is about to be the mayor of Huntington Beach, California, and is the sheriff. Huntington Beach is the most conservative city in California, probably a pretty wide margin.
Yeah. No, he expressed a lot of frustration that we were giving lots of money to Ukraine, that he felt that Zelenski was suspending on himself instead of on the military. And yeah, I mean he seemed like a good old Christian boy. He was very very in to the praying section of the night. I asked him and ed ed
at some point when when JD. Vance was coming out on stage to be announcedly the official vice president, like if he thinks that they're gonna win this year, Like do you think that the Republicans are gonna win?
And he said yes, if it's fair.
Yeah, that was the same. That was the first thing I asked him, And that was the same answer he gave me. And you know, speaking of Vance, because Vance is my first thought and a lot of people's first thought, and I think this is probably the accurate thing to say about Vance. He does not provide a lot to Trump, right, He's not a guy who won by a wide margin. I'm not even confident he on his own does anything
to deliver his state Ohio. But what this kid brought up and what I suspect Trump season him, because when I asked, what do you think about JD. Vance, he repeatedly said, I think he's loyal. I think he really likes Trump. I think he's loyal. And I did bring up the fact that Vance has said bad things about Trump in the past, and then he went on this thing where he was like, I think that DeSantis and
Trump really like each other. It's all politics. And I wanted to say, how deranged, but then he was like, you know, it's like Kamala and Joe. She was really mean to him during the debate and now she's his vice president. I was like, well, that's actually a pretty reasonable way to look at the situation. I don't know that I think it's actually accurate, but I see the logical through line there, and I was kind of you know, I thought that was interesting.
I thought it was interesting when they were bringing out JD. Vance and he was dancing vamping. I'm going to call it dancing vancing advancing that. You know, they were quick to call out that he he was a marine, quick to call him a patriot, quick to call him a family man.
And I think that's what he brings to the table.
He brings those three things as well as his age, and I think that's that's what the GOP is focusing on. Yeah, I mean, other than that, there was a really weird prayer thing Gare.
Yeah.
That was after Vance came up. They did the benediction.
Yeah.
It was what I could only express is a little bit like spiritually disturbing. All of like the led screens behind behind, like the speakers all flashed like very like Facebook esque like images of like you know, the Bible of like families praying, like kids glowing like glowing like like the heavenly glowing light, like the the the whole environment change from like you know, it's usually very like
sports debate, you know, Red versus Blue. It's you know, it's it's very traditional like Americana, And it was a very it was a very intense shift to like to like this to this like a like strong like facebook Christianity almost. That's that's the best way I can I
can describe it with words. And I mean, you know, it was a typical Christian dominionist moment where you have you know, the the one of the largest of two political parties, just fully fully embracing the UH and fully you know, putting out that you know, this is this is a this is a religious party almost more than anything else. The religion is so important to the ceremony, and specifically not just any religions of course, just Christianity.
And I don't know, they spent like almost like the last half of the prayer talking about Israel and you know, specifically saying the children of Abraham and the Holy City of Jerusalem and you know, all all of that kind of.
Language prayer for the hostages.
Talking about how the hostages are being kept against their will. But no, all the language reminds me a lot of like my childhood and the rhetoric around Israel as this place to secure so that so that you know.
The prophecies can come true for Jesus'.
Second coming, and like that that is that is the entire the entire bit.
I'm trying to recall if there was a big benediction at the end after the twenty sixteen RNC when Pennce was nominated, and I'm sure there was, but for whatever reason, it doesn't stick out in my mind the way this one did.
No, this will certainly stick stick out in my mind. Like everyone knows Republicans are, you know, the more Christian party, but just the the shar like a consensus about it here, just like everybody is, like even if they aren't themselves Christian, most people are, but like everyone in on this thing happening, it was. It was just a it was just an interesting moment contrasted to the overall, you know, like a concert kind of sports vibe that the rest of the convention kind of carries.
Yeah, I mean, the only other thing that I pointed out at one point, I went to get water and I came back and I mentioned right before we started to record, to both Gar and Robert, I was like, cops keep touching me and like putting their hand on my shoulder, and you know is one cop just wanted to talk to me about my day, and I was like trying to get water and going back into the convention. And then I mentioned that to Garon Robert and they both said that they've been touched quite a lot too,
And I just think that's interesting to note. And you know, I don't particularly like to be touched by strangers, especially cops.
Mine has been on the shoulder by like a couple of different what I would describe them as, like uncle codd, guys who I don't know and was not talking to, just like walking past me and putting a hand on my shoulder, like like someone who is a family member would do casually, like a family event, you know, when you're on the way to do something else. But I've never met these people. We did not talk. That was odd.
It hasn't happened to me before. Maybe everyone's just in a very good mood because they're that sure they're going to win. Maybe we just ran into a lot of creepy uncle types unclear.
It'll be interesting to contrast with the DNC, But no, it certainly has been a pattern. There's a lot more like just casual touching here. And yeah, I think that is most of our thoughts right now. I guess that the last thing I guess I'll add is the young kid that we were talking to who was was very
excited about about this, about this whole deal. As Vance was coming out and you know, the crowd was going crazy and everything, he very quietly remarked that he was like gonna start crying because it was just like so like an impactfully, I think it was. I think it was mostly to himself. He was just like acknowledging that verbally and then said he wants to become a cop and that just you know, that is that is the
entire base. And then he was then immediately went into a very a very intense prayer posture during the prayer.
And that's just a good portion of the country, I guess.
Yep, yep uh.
Yeah.
It was interesting. We were talking about Ukraine for a while because his stance on it was he's fine with them getting weapons, but he's sure they're getting a lot of money that Zelensky is doing something shady with and generally felt like Zelensky wasn't fighting, which I thought was interesting. It is kind of it makes sense to me if you've skimmed the way the right reports on Ukraine a lot,
that would be his attitude. But He also said he wasn't supportive of yielding to Putin on any of Putin's demands. And then when I talked about because I chatted with him about some of my experiences in Ukraine, and when he found out that I had done more reporting, his first question was, have you ever been to Israel?
Yeah?
That was interesting.
Yeah, interesting, just immediately asked that. Oh, one other note, we did run into a fan of the show who was working, who was wearing a USS Liberty hat. Liberty was like a US Navy ship that was struck by Israel, and it's, you know, under very shady circumstances, and it's kind of like one of the better ways you could be publicly critical of the Israeli military, at least at the RNC, without most people knowing what you're doing. Yeah, I thought that was funny.
The very last thing I'll say is that right as we exited the first session, we ran into friend of the pod Ramaswami, who was who was a little shorter than I expected, a tall man, not a tall man. And I did ask the kid that were sitting next to you know, I'm curious about his thoughts on the future of the party and I asked him specifically about the VEK, and he said he likes for VEK because the BEC is a businessman, just like Trump, and he wants someone to run the country like a business.
I should also note that the VEK was followed by a swarm of like I'm guessing, his entourage. All of them, nearly all of them, were very young men who I would describe as nick fuintes coded Yes, like like they really had that physiognomy to them. Groper types, Yeah, groper types, which JD vance. It's one of the things coming out right now is that he's in a group chat with a bunch of sixteen year old groper So I am excited for some of those, more of those chats to come out.
All right. Well, back to future us talking about the rest of the Republican National Convention Day one.
Wow, that sure was great. We had such a fun time. You know what else is fun? Here's some more ads. We're back to conclude. We got a couple of things to talk about. One of them is, you know, obviously we're at a convention. We don't have a car, We're taking ubers everywhere, we're eating at restaurants.
And this has taken over almost all of the central area of Milwaukee, and there were.
Because of a lot of fuck ups. For one thing, a lot of places that in downtown we're supposed to be booked are not booked. Businesses are not getting the kind of business they had expected to get during this because of some of those fuck ups. Yeah, and kind
of most interesting to us so coming into this. One of the things the Republicans even put at billboards in Milwaukee over this, and this is a big thing that Trump is campaigning on to try to get service worker type people to vote for him, is no tax on tips, And to make a long story short, it works out to be much worse for service workers. Kind of the compromise here is that they can continue to pay far below minimum wage and there will be no attempts to
raise that at all. And of course the kind of people who vote for Republicans don't tip by and large the workers. We have been talking to every Uber driver at all of the waiters waitresses that we've had, and pretty overwhelmingly nearly one hundred percent of them say like, yeah, we're just not getting to.
No one's tipping. The extreme negative views not just because of like the politics right, just.
Because about more than half of them don't really care.
To absolutely not, They're just doing business and like they're just they're these these are just bad patrons. These are simply people that are They're not nice to be around, interact like these types of events like the RNC the dn't see these are like cities campaign for this under the notion that this will like you know, boost local business. Right, We'll bring a whunch of people from out of town. People will get a lot of money to all these
local businesses. And because of how the security set up this year in the in Milwaukee, so many businesses just can get no business because they're completely inside this like fence perimeter and UH and the rest are are not are not seeing very good business from what from from what it sounds like, and even even like hotels downtown are large largely vacant because of weird, weird scheduling area.
We we went to dinner earlier tonight with some friends and we asked one of the restaurant workers like how it was going, and obviously she said the same thing that we've heard so many times, which is not great, not good, not making a lot of tips. But what was interesting is she said, you know, and they really tried to throw in our faces that this was going to be a good thing for all of us and we were all going to make a bunch of money, and it's happening. It's just not happening.
And chatted to Timothy Faust, who was a writer, great writer,
great guy, and a local here. We had dinner with him, and he pointed out that Milwaukee has been and was on the verge of bankruptcy still having a lot of problems with that, and a big part of why they took the RNC was because Republicans in the state legislature that was basically the bargaining point, so that they would allow a sales tax, which was kind of necessary in order to There's more to it than that, but a big part of like how the negotiations broke down was
the Republicans wanted this in order to make it possible for the city of Milwaukee to not collapse because it was on the verge of bankruptcy. And hearing that made a lot of sense, made a lot of things click into place, because it does everyone we have talked to who is a local and who is working in any job that interfaces with the convention and convention goers talks like they've been scammed.
Yeah, and just one more thing before we get into the rest of you know what we experienced speech wise and other is the difference in security today versus the outdoor. But we went to yesterday for the welcome party. Very surprising, very surprising. So just just the one to one example I'll give you listeners is yesterday they took every single item out of my bag that I had after putting
through a scanner and unzipped everything. Today they zipped it up because they didn't want anything to fall out and didn't open it, didn't touch a single thing, went through a scanner. I was through security in like four seconds.
Yeah, no, it was. It was super weird, way more lax getting into the actual convention center than it was to get into the outdoor welcome party, which is just a It came off as a little little surprising to us.
They had they made such a big deal about what you can and can't bring in and had specific measurements for like bags and stuff. But we saw people with some of the large, very very large backround, some bags that were bigger than me, and yeah, you know that's just interesting to note.
One less thing on the service worker thing. On our ride home from the RNC or back to the hotel, we sat in anu Berg with a very nice man who I would describe as the average Wisconsin voter. Yeah, he had he had a Teamsters shirt and you know of a variety of like of both liberal and kind of conservative opinions. You know, it's I think he kind of leaned more liberal, but he certainly had, you know,
of of a variety of opinions. And he was both expressing the same thing in regards to tips, but also a men's frustration at the way police were treating locals. The way police were treating local drivers. Just the sheer influx of cops just to have have made have made functioning in this city just so challenging to any of these locals. And yeah, that was a very fascinating conversation that we might discuss that at a late time. Well, we will talk about now are Catholics those those little fiends?
So after the very like evangelical Children of Abraham prayer that that we talked about in our in our archival audio, as soon as we came back for the second session, there was an opening prayer led by the Archbishop of Milwaukee, which is kind of interesting because a lot of the intendees here are very evangelical, these are not Catholics, and there you could definitely see there is you know, a little a little bit of groans amongst amongst some of these people.
And I found a very.
Interesting move to somebody who talked shit on the Catholics earlier. The l the old lady that we or at least that I was talking to last night at the party, made a couple of comments about Catholics because she doesn't believe they really worship Jesus because pop Catholics. Yeah, and well it's not even the papstries because Catholics. This is a thing that Born Again have an issue with Catholicism is don't believe you have to accept Christ to go
to heaven. Like if you do good thing things, Catholics think you can go to heaven. Sure, And that is deeply offensive to a sizable chunk of the Christian community in the United States.
Yeah, so I found that very interesting. Wasn't really expecting to see an opening Catholic prayer and that that was I want to talk to some more more people tomorrow about that is Chance's Catholic. That that that makes it. That's probably why is a Catholic.
Convert, just like the Red Scare Girl. He is a Catholic convert millennial who has taken a bunch of money from Peter.
Teel many such cases. So one of the first people to speak after this archbishop was famed Republican figure Marjorie Taylor Green, who we could have a lot to say, but I think the first thing that I want to mention is that she feels more representative of most of the RNC attendees and anyone else who we've seen speak like she She has the same energy and vibe as most of the attendees like that, that is why they love her so much, because she is one of them,
to the point where she she was like a Republican fan who just happened to get into office, and now she's this major figure.
She was the.
Mascot exactly and was a lot more popular than dance. Oh yeah, in terms of floor reaction.
No, she is. She is beloved among this crowd. She she's she is them right. The audience members can see her, and they can they can see themselves in her and she got the biggest reaction out of out of the crowd, probably saved for Trump making a short appearance, but her speech had the biggest reaction, and we will we will get to that now. One of the first things she said is you're talking about the assassination attempt and stuff.
Is that Trump? She referred to him as the founding father of the America First Movement, which is a lot of interesting loaded language there. There are a lot of words there, a very extremely loaded language for the founding father of the America First Movement. She then spoke about the wonderful family man whose life was unfortunately cut short from getting shot in the attempted assassination attempt of Donald Trump, uh saying that that Corey embodied the America First spirit.
But no, she she she had all of all of the typical lines that you would say about someone who was who was killed in an incident like this, And and then she talked about the thing that got the loudest applause out of anything else today, which is which
is the whole gender ideology issue. She talked about how how President Biden turned Easter into Transvisibility Day, which is factually because Easter changes holidays, transvisibility days on the same day, you know, but Easter changes the actual day it's on. But that got a massive boo and there was people sitting next to us who were just shouting evil, just super loud sh shouting evil. And this is this is
the most hyped up I've ever seen the crowd. You know, all the other mentions there were, there's a few other mentions about you know, men and women's sports, that kind of thing that got you know, the big, biggest, the biggest booze and the biggest cheers, like respectively. You know, people saying there are only two genders. We're brave enough to say it, We're gonna keep saying it. That hyped up the crowd just just more than anything else.
Yeah, she said, life be clear here, there are only two genders, and the crowd went just nuts bananas.
She right after that made a statement about needing to stop sending money to Ukraine, that Zelensky was going to embezzle or something about half the volume, not not.
Not a tiny compared to the rest of the cheering of a pretty loud reaction.
Like not a bad reaction, but it was clearly about half the volume with the anti transfer and mind.
You listeners, she spoke for like what it was like three minutes top.
Yeah, I would be surprised if the whole speech typed out was more than about a page.
No, it was wild.
She's basically a bullet point list of like hate speech.
If I kind of want to go back through video of the I remember the speeches at the twenty sixteen R and C being longer, but that's a million years ago.
Yeah. No, she had, you know, the the usual comments about you know, how we have to stop the globalists, the wealthy and the powerful few, which is just which is just an interesting thing to speak to an RNC crowd because it's one of the most powerful thing, the wealthy, powerful few. You are talking to them and her the line that came right before this was talking about how how we have to stand up against the establishment who
promise unity but promote division. And I'm like, this is this is this is the most We're all trying to find the guy who did this moment ever, right You're you're talking about how there's there's these these powerful establishment figures who talk about unity but actually just promote division, and like you were, you were talking about yourself and all the times that these like these like people who work in Washington start bashing like the establishment and stuff
like you you are the establishment, that is you, that that is your job, but that those are very very common talking points and stuff like that. I'm sure many listeners are familiar with this, with this sort of like double speak. And yeah, that was her speech. Definitely the biggest reaction we saw the crowd have Trump and his family made a very brief appearance, kind of kind of a surprise appearance, but to some people's surprise, he didn't
He didn't actually give a speech. He instead, i think, took which was the smarter play, show up with a very large bandage on his ear and instead sit down and listen, just become part of the audience. It's an interesting movely. He didn't immediately like take over the convention. No, he's kind of playing this more like statesman role.
He almost looked like he was tearing up.
Yeah, he was sitting in the crowd.
Quiet, subdued. Even Yep, he looked worried at point.
Worried, anxious or somber.
I wouldn't be I wouldn't be surprised if it was a natural reaction to being in your first crowd after being shot and nearly died.
Yeact the last time you were in a crowd.
Yeah, like he is a person, right, That's just how people react, just oftentimes when that kind of thing happens.
Yeah, I know. He was sitting next to Carlson, JD. Vans and Michael and and Mike Johnson with his kids sitting behind him.
Look, when you have a near death experience, you know, when somebody somebody shoots at you and damn near hits, it crystallizes a lot. You know what's really important, and you also know what you don't want to waste your time with anymore. And that's that's why the Trump kids were in the back of that crowd. He doesn't want them anywhere near him. Life is short.
I just want to point out what they showed Trump on the screen with with Mike Tucker and who is the fourth person.
Oh, Jenniebants.
I've already forgot. His face curiously goes nightmare blood rotation, and they are correct.
And that that that was day one of the convention.
That I do want to get into one other thing because this again we had our big don't panic episode a day or two before that, you wild heard one episode in between those two and posting stuff today, posting comments on like how extreme the rhetoric is. I see people getting scared again, you should like you should be very concerned to hear is not an unreasonable reaction to seeing all this happen. But this is also something that I think will contextualize the scale of the actual number
of people that we're talking about here. When we were sitting, we found a quiet place to record the middle bit that you heard. So we were in kind of an empty area, and I would say close to half of the or about right about half, maybe even a little more of the actual stadium was empty, uh, And most of them were clustered in the area that had And so there were a lot of areas where there's just
absolutely nobody. And several times, what was it, three or four times, so if you probably we had different people who were I either worked for the RNC or worked for the venue come by, but I'm guessing the rn C just because of their general vibe, yeah, and because the lanyards, yeah, to try to get us too. Because even the areas that were full had a lot of
patches in them. They weren't all that full, so they wanted to get us to get up from the empty areas and move to fill in the areas that were going to be on camera, so it looked like it was fuller, and they did that because it was not very full. Now, as someone, it's not very full because this is a political convention. It is not open to the masses. I don't know that it would have filled up. It was open to the masses, but there's an inherently
limited guest list. But it did seem to be less people than I recall from the twenty sixteen RNC, and more to the point, everything that you see and everything we're talking about, and all of the extremity and the weirdness of these in a lot of cases freaks, assholes, creeps that we see. This is a couple of thousand of the most dedicated Republicans in the country. This is
the elite of the party. These are the people who have a lot of the money, if not most of it, and a lot do a lot of the nuts and bolts of making the Republican Party run. These are not representative of most of the people who live around you, unless you live in a place that is real hardcore Trump country, in which case a lot of these folks are familiar. But they but they got a lot more money than your neighbors, I'll tell you that much.
Yeah. No, And it is worth pointing on that they were trying to make an effort to move people around to make the seats look more full, because also everything that we're also seeing is theater. There's all these rituals that they're doing to confirm the confirm the nomination. It's like it's it's a very it's very ritualized, a very theatrical experience.
Yeah. There is one point where Robert and Gear were walking around and I was sitting in our intersection by myself, and I had three separate twenty something males come up to me to try to give me Trump signs, and uh, all three, in a very unsettling way, pointed out that I was sitting alone and it made me feel very unsafe.
Yeah, welcome to the Republican Party, so correct.
Yeah, and as they pointed out earlier, definitely a lot of unwanted touching.
Yeah, but he you know, welcome to the Republican Party. And you know what, it's a lot of unwanted touching.
Unwanted touching is essentially part of the main party platform.
It literally and it is only day one.
It is day one, four, well, three more to go and we will be covering it a night.
We'll be back tomorrow with morey. Any final thoughts anyone?
Nope, nope, Tip your service workers.
And wash your hands. It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.