Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm John Fabre. I'm John Loveett, I'm Dan Fyfer. I'm Tommy Vithor. Greetings once again from Milwaukee where the only two political stories that matter right now are about Donald Trump, the convicted felon who just survived an assassination attempt to officially accept the Republican nomination for the third time in a row.
And Jill Biden, the hugely successful president who will reportedly decide in the next few days whether he still plans to accept the Democratic nomination, even though most of the party's senior leaders are now urging the 81 year old incumbent to pass the torch. Let's start with Trump who just finished a record breaking 96 minute nomination speech. He broke his own record. The second longest speech was his speech in 2016. The third longest was his speech in 2020.
But boy, he blew those records out of the water with a 96 minute speech that lasted into the next day. Technically a five day convention. Congratulations sir. Thanks to the speech. So it started with a very long detailed story about the assassination attempt. Hard to describe here. You'll have to watch it for yourself, but we do have a clip. The years are the blitiest part. If something happens with the years, they bleed more than any other part of the body.
For whatever reason, the doctors told me that life said, why is this so much blood? He said it's the years. They bleed more. It is the years that was not part of the prepared remarks. I don't know. I don't know. I just know that this was something that I could relate to because I had my ears pinned back when I was 13 because I used to stick out. And then I had a blood clot in my ear and I had to do surgery without anesthesia on my left ear. And it bled a lot. Man. What a personal anecdote.
Sorry about that. Trump started his speech with the story of his bleeding ear and you started this podcast. The story of his bleeding ear. I'm the Trump of this podcast. We've always on some level. No matter you said it, you said it. I don't want to sound glib, but it's really late and we've been drinking. It's very hard to make a speech about narrowly avoiding getting assassinated, boring, but he managed to do it somehow.
A friend of ours described it as if a second grader were telling a story about a horrifying incident. Is that what I was listening to? It's really, he's somehow making, even though it's obviously a story about the assassination attempt on him. Like I went into the speech thinking that's going to be a really, even for Trump, that's going to be a moving moment telling the story. And he somehow made it even more narcissistic than like you would imagine.
Like at one point he was like, he's a crowd and they were all these shots and the crowd didn't leave. And you know why the crowd didn't leave? Because they were worried about me. They were worried about me. Secret service had guns and told them not to leave. It was wild. It was like, and I, and before they, before the shooting, I started this speech and I was speaking so powerfully, so strongly. And it was such a big crowd and there were so many stats and the stats were about immigration.
All the good things we charted. It was just, it was that way. Even that part, which people probably say was the good part of the speech when we get to the other speech was a little weird. But you just delivered that with way more emotion than he did. He told that story as if I was telling a story to my three-year-old to get him to fall sleeping bed. It was that same cadence. So weird. It was bizarre. It was uninteresting. We actually learned truly nothing from history.
There was not available on video. Yeah, it was, well, I just think it's, you know, stories saying that he's had some sort of spiritual awakening, notwithstanding. The man has no interior life and that did not change. And so he drew no lessons from it. He learned nothing about violence in America, the danger posed by guns, the rhetoric and our country. At least nothing that we heard in this speech. Nothing that we heard in this speech. There's something floating around in there.
I don't want to assign motivation to the man. I don't think we heard what I heard. I will say, I think we're pretty jaded and also we were following the story very closely. I am like, I do think that was one of the most interesting things we've ever heard. It was ultimately the most boring version, but it was the most interesting part of an otherwise very, very boring. What happened to him is what happened is interesting, but show don't tell.
The image of you, like avoiding the bullet, getting cut, punching your fists is on the screen. You don't have to describe how you clenched your fist. I'm numbing detail that you described that picture that was in seven versions arrayed around his head on the big screen. On the Minecraft bigboards. He tells that story, and he thinks, okay, that's the thing. Then he ends it by walking over to hug the uniform of the man who was killed, the firefighter who was killed in the shooting.
Then we're like, so then we're like 30 minutes into the speech and then he starts acknowledgments. Then he starts narrating what happened throughout the night. He's talking about Dana White who introduced him. He's talking about Hulk Hulken. He's talking about Kid Rock and so he does all this thing. Then we get into what we were promised is going to be a unifying speech where his aides were also pushing that he was not going to mention the name Joe Biden at all.
It was going to be unifying and different. It was a new Trump because he's now spiritual because he survived this. Here is just a sample of what we heard for the rest of the speech. And we must not criminalize dissent or demonize political disagreement, which is what's been happening in our country lately at a level that nobody has ever seen before.
In that spirit, the Democrat Party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labeling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy, especially since that is not true. In fact, I am the one saving democracy for the people of our country. Every week they get another subpoena from the Democrats, crazy Nancy Pelosi to Hulk and just boom, boom, boom. If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States, think of it. The 10 worst added them up.
They will not have done the damage that Biden has done. Only going to use the term once. Biden, I'm not going to use the name anymore just one time. We don't have fierce people. We have people that are a lot less than fierce except when it comes to cheating on elections and a couple of other things. Then they're fierce. Then they're fierce. I am trying to buy your vote. I'll be honest about that. That was actually, I was saying to Wisconsin, I want to buy your vote.
It was actually one of the charming parts of the speech. He finishes the assassination topper, does a pay-on to unity, then does acknowledgments for about 15 minutes. Malone, good to see you. I hope you had a great summer. Spends a long time on Dana White's travel logistics. Yeah. A surprising amount of time on Dana White's. When somewhere with his wife, Italy. Dana White said it publicly, is Italy. Okay. There you go. He wouldn't say it was Italy. You might think that we're going on about this.
He went on for a couple of minutes at least about just Dana White and his travel plans. Eventually, acknowledge all the members of his family and then get to JD Vans. We get a couple shots of Usha looking absolutely fucking miserable. Like Usha, I think, could pull up a chair and be the fifth-hose to the show. And then he just went into his stop. There really was an assassination attempt topper into not even that much of a revised version of his stop speech.
Here's a, you know, I tried to write questions ahead of time for this podcast for you guys. Here's a hilarious question now that I'm reading it. What do you think was the goal of this speech? What audience was the drum campaign trying to reach and what message were they trying to drive home? Dana Klough. Not a Klough. Yeah, Dan. I really thought there was going to be a plan. Me too. I mean, there has been all this talk.
And some of it warranted about how much better this version of the Trump campaign has been and how much, and I used, I swear I'm doing this on a curve, but how much more discipline Trump has been throughout the scene. Like, he doesn't want to go to prison. Yeah. And it's either he wins. He doesn't go to prison or he loses and goes to prison. And so he has been more focused than in previous efforts. But this speech was fucking insane. Just like the content is insane. It makes no logical sense.
But the convention speech itself is the easiest lay up in American politics. All the networks agree. We're just going to let you speak for an hour directly to tens of millions of Americans. Just say whatever you want, deliver your message. Here is free propaganda. And he took that and he just could not do it. He made no sense. He had no message. He was all over the map.
And the convention, the convention, the people who produced the convention actually did do a good job of just the rest of the convention. You and propaganda. The rest of the convention was incredibly disciplined. They even made even the most the craziest of mega freaks kind of tow some sort of line. There was no discussion of the 2020 election throughout four slash five days of this convention now.
Did all of this and then Donald Trump gets up there in his moment and thinks he's at a rally somewhere in like, it was like, it was like a long rotary club. It was great. It was, it was, he was honestly doing like open mic night at Mara Lago. It was the same. It was, it was a, it was heartening actually. And it was a reminder that this, like we, I know we've been in a very hard debate about fears the Democrats have about losing, but this is a reminder about beatable.
This guy is, and what I, what I thought while watching his speeches, fortunately for us, you can run the most disciplined campaign and discipline convention in the world, but it doesn't matter if your candidate is one of the most undisciplined figures to ever grace American public life, like that is their weakness. He is their weakness. Yeah. I think that, I think that's right. I think people like us who are sickos who watch the full speech are like, what was that?
People in the hall are probably wondering, Tim Alberta, great reporter, the Atlantic was tweeting that even like the diehars in the front row were like, look at their phones, wondering what was to be over. I think most people turned it off. And the bit in the takeaways from the week will be, Trump is tough, he's a survivor, and he will sacrifice everything for you, his flock.
It's always been this narrative that this rich man, he gave up fame and fortune and money, and he didn't need the aggravation. And that was obviously bullshit because Trump's a narcissist and he only wants attention and politics has been his vehicle for attention for many years. But now the assassination attempt is the ultimate example for them of him sacrificing for you, the voter. And some of the voters hear that and think there was literally divine providence.
There's a lot of like, this was a gift from God, talk throughout the four days, and then other people just think he's a badass and the core image is going to be that photo. So I think the like takeaways will be like strength. They wanted it to be unity, I don't know that they succeeded there, but you know. Yeah, I think the most generous analysis of what happened tonight would be undecided voters.
Like if the whole, this is his flock thing, that's not going to work with anyone who's not already voting for Donald Trump. But if you're an undecided voter, you probably turned off the speech 20 or 30 minutes in if you made it that long. Maybe you thought that the assassination attempt story that he told was, you know, moving, charming, whatever. But I do think that for him, and I started thinking about this today because he definitely feels so confident that he is winning.
I mean, he just, this whole convention when he was singing there, he just exudes this confidence that he hasn't had in a while that like, I am winning this race. And when he is winning and he is doing well, he gets lazy, you know, and he gets like, oh, I don't have to try that hard. And I can just, and he gets self indulgent. This was like a self indulgent speech. Yeah. Like I can now do my stump, say whatever I want. I don't really have to try beating the sky. I'm going to win.
So he just did whatever he want. You can tell when his like backs up against the wall and he's in court and he's doing this. He's like, he's doing his fighting thing. This is his vulnerability now as he thinks he's ahead. And which means I do think he's, he's, the Trump that we saw tonight was beatable. Yeah. I do think he's like running on a post in his mind. The all the talk from inside the campaign and the spin that, you know, he's had this, he's different.
It's going to be more subdued, it's serene, it's unity. He's not going to say the word Biden during the speech. My expectation was like, that's a pretty, that's in smart to me, right? It seemed to acknowledge that what we have talked about a lot, right? That, that, that, that the die is cast on Donald Trump. The country knows Donald Trump. The reason he's up right now is because they have deep concerns about Joe Biden.
But maybe Trump would take the assassination attempt as an opportunity to reset with the American people and present a slightly different version with the, with the, with this as a hinge point, they could lead people to say, oh, like this is the narrative of this election. He decided to run a different kind of race and be a different kind of candidate. And he just could not do it.
Crazy Nancy, Democrats destroying the country, election 2020 stolen, the media's lying to you, China virus, evasion, mass deportations. He couldn't stop himself from doing all the things that repel the kind of people he needs if Democrats can launch a better campaign. Yeah. The, they had two goals with this convention, right? What he said really was going to matter that much, it was, would he see more normal, right?
The whole point they can mention, all the humanizing stories, Dana White reading the texts that Trump said and hit the granddaughter, all those things was about making Trump seem more normal, making them acceptable to more voters. And I think cleverly he took, have really pushed this idea that the assassination attempt changed Trump because people don't like Trump, right? They're looking for, like, they don't like either of the candidates right now, they're looking for somewhere to go.
And the idea that Trump is different, like the Biden folks have a different theory that losing the election changed Trump and made him even crazier. Right. And so they're trying to take the opposite of that, which is the shooting made Trump a more serious and more serene person. And that was the part, the point of starting the speech with that story, which I will say he did pledge he would only tell once and I would bet $5. He tells it at the rally in Michigan on Saturday with JD Vance, 100%.
But then he went and as soon as he said that, he just went right to Trump, right? When we were watching the coverage beforehand, David Axelrod was on and he mentioned a voter and a focus group who said, having Trump as president for four years felt like having a neighbor who always had his leaf blower going and he hated that. And then this was leaf blower Trump, right? He just loud, wouldn't shut up, didn't make a lot of sense, talking about himself.
I will say the only, if you're the Trump team and you're looking at this and being like, was this, let's try to find the win here. It's, they're probably worried that he would come off seeming scary and threatening. And he didn't necessarily seem as scary and threatening as he has been in the past. He seemed boring, incoherent and sort of weird, which maybe they'll take that over the scary threatening and maybe people who tune in are like, yeah, he didn't seem like he's going to come get us all.
You know, like he seemed a little, he took half his annex too many. I'll tell you, I'll just say it, which is that what I thought is I don't know if when you get shot in the ear, if you get a full week of Tylenol plus coding, like that was my question. And I'm just going to leave that question. I'll just bring people behind the scenes here for 96 minutes. Love it was debating whether to tweet that. So it's just sitting out. I'll just leave it. After some careful consideration. I'll just say it.
But it's also, it's like the love talk, the meandering acknowledgments. Yes, it's very Trump, but there was a, there was a, if there is a new and serene Trump, I do think it came in a little bottle. That's just, I'm just going to, that's my, I don't know. I don't know. Before we move on, the, also it wasn't a bullet. No, I'm kidding. I don't believe that. That's, that's blue and non-stuff. That's not, that's not blue. That's not blue. That's not blue. That's not blue. That's not blue.
That's not blue. That's not blue. That's not blue. That's not blue. That's not blue. That's not blue. That's not blue. Before we move on, other prime time speakers, not anyone worth mentioning, Eric Trump was sort of angry, Kid Rocks, I'm kind of crazy. Dana White was there. Tucker Carlson was actually, oh, Tucker Carlson was early on and was sort of, he, he told a personal story that I think really worked in the room. I don't know about people back home, but it works in the room.
Yeah, Tucker Carlson is the one where I was like, I was, I thought the JD Vance would be that kind of scary and JD Vance is speech sucked and I'm like, Tucker Carlson is the one you could put in. By the way, Trump, I think detailed Dana White's travel woes before getting to JD Vance. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did need to answer one question brother.
What should I go do when Donald Trump and all the Trump maniacs run wild on new brother? Well, I mean, well, Mitt Romney will run from them and Mike Pence will try to escape before he be hung and Nancy Pelosi will call as vice president and they'll be a long term investigation. Can I just say, you been just hearing that clip? Because now we're hearing it a second time, it really does light up the kidney who saw Hulk Hogan after American Go-Aidators. We're the real.
I still, I saw no holds barred was a movie I was too young to see when it was on television and we got to get Stone Cold Steve Austin. He said he was in favor of gay marriage in 2014. I think it's an opening. The Undertaker also donated to Trump. I was googling this during the event and the ultimate warrior's fucking dead. So I earned cheek was a tag. I earned cheek we got. But I mean, that is something like a consultant would say in a Democratic campaign meeting after this convention.
What's the rice bucket challenge? Yeah. Oh, you don't want Stone Cold. You don't want to. Okay. So you're going to say that I was googling during the convention. You're saying you don't want to hold. You don't want Stone Cold Steve Austin at the Democratic convention. You just want Lin-Manthal Brando. You want the cast to fucking SUPS. I want his Stone Cold Steve Austin. That was my joke. Steve Austin. Yeah, it was literally talking to me. Fucking absolute joke theft. I took it to theft.
I took the SUPS. Dan? Do you have something smart to say? Oh, please. Oh, please. Like Obama once said, I am my best joke writer. Hulk. Hulk Hogan will be what is on every social media platform tomorrow, though. Yeah. He ripped his shirt. It was so cool. Fuck. For the people who are pointing out some of the terrible things Hulk Hogan has done in his life, yes. He would very... He said it in a way. He used the N word. It was very public. It was a cockroach. It was.
It was a knife or angry divorce that's 100% more. I think most people probably were. Yeah, probably. You tweeted this. Yeah. We're all trapped in the 80s. All right. Well, let's just take a step back and talk about the convention. It's a whole now that it's over. Dan, you kind of talked about this already, but the overall strategy, message of the convention seemed to be, hey, Trump is not as scary as you think. He's a changed man. He's nicer than you think. Don't be afraid.
You don't want another term of Joe Biden, but you're worried because you think Trump's kind of scary and weird and we're going to soften him up. Does that... Did I miss anything? No, I think that's what we're not going to talk about abortion at all because we know it's super unpopular for us. I mean, this was a convention of a party that really wanted to win. All right. This party is the party that passed all these abortion bands.
They have spent their entire lives trying to repeal, row, and then to pass these sort of bands and they went four days without ever talking about it. He didn't know. Trump never mentioned it. There was no fight about it. In a normal convention, there would have been a platform fight about it. There would have been speakers who would have... No one. No one did it. The other thing, the other sort of takeaway for me from this is that this is... Now, Donald Trump's party.
Even the last time, even in 2020, there wasn't an actual convention, but if we think back to the Trump presidency, most of these Yahoo's were trying to simply survive the Trump years without getting indicted and then just wait for the next person to come. But now they are all true believers. Top to bottom. The only non-true believer is Mitch McConnell. He stood up for one second and got booed. And everyone else that whatever Trump believes, they believe, whatever Trump wants, they want.
And that is scary because when or lose this election, one of our two parties is now a mega extremist party going forward. And that's going to make it really hard to govern in a two party system. Yeah, that's what I... When I saw it's... You know, that like... It's not a betrayal to turn on your friends and say, you love Big Brother. Like the actual betrayal is having Big Brother in your heart.
And you feel like at this convention, even the Republicans that once like gritted their teeth and said they were for Trump, you can feel them having persuaded themselves to believe that this is actually the way. Yeah. Like this is... It's not just that the old guard has been cast aside though a lot of them have. It's that they didn't just relent in their words. They have like adopted Trump. Yeah. When JD Vance is the perfect example of that.
Did the convention give you guys any new ideas about how Democrats should run against Trump in these next few months? The convention did not. Trump's speech did. Right. It is a reminder that we want people to see Donald Trump. And they haven't really seen Donald Trump at all in this campaign, particularly over the last three weeks as the focus has been understandably so on President Biden. Right. And you can imagine, you know, there's something new. The conventions are not news per se.
It's just a show that gets put on. And there's been a real conversation, a very important conversation that could lead to a historic decision that we'll get to. President Biden. But Donald Trump is incredibly vulnerable. Just absolutely beatable. He has a bad candidate. Others do not want to vote for him. They do not like him. Right. And it's just like what when I sort of think about what the purpose is trying to do, it's sort of like reverse permission structure. Right.
Normally, you want to be for something and you're just trying to give people permission to do what they want to do. Here, they don't vote for either of these guys. Right. So you got to give him permission to not vote for that person. And there's a lot of room that a lot of ammunition that Trump gave us in that speech to accomplish that task. Yeah. I also think we got to make sure we get under Donald Trump's skin.
So we don't get the barred out chill version and we get like the really angry, ranting, raving person that everyone hates.
Also, we need to make sure we're highlighting the freaky religious guy who spoke after Hulk Hogan who wants to control your life and your contraception use in IVF and make like the younger males that they're going after worry about that guy being on the Trump train and not think about Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off and like the manly man, you know, kind of cool version of Trump who they think has emerged since he's assassination attempt.
Yeah. I mean, what you got from this convention is they do not want to talk about abortion. They do not want to talk about any of the policies and proposals in Project 2025. They don't want to talk about their tax cuts for the rich with the exception of, as you mentioned, last night Steve Scalise, they just don't want to talk about any of these things that aren't popular and we need a campaign candidate who can prosecute the case and make sure that everyone is hearing about this all the time.
I also, like, the, there are moments in this convention where you have someone staying up there being like, Donald Trump shall be a champion for our values and the blood and spirit of this country shall reign supreme. We will have a country again that is the first in all the land and like, I can just picture like a, you know, even a George W. Bush call on something like this is some weird shit or Barack Obama kind of making a funny joke.
Like, hey guys, your job is to pave roads and send out the social security checks. Can we tone it down a notch? Like, what the fuck are you going to do when you're in office? There was no policy agenda. There's no details. It was a rambling meandering sort of grievances, attacks, lies, bullshit and all the rest and just a, the, the, the, the incredible power that just new and normal would have. Like, I'm just a, I'm just here like, I want to do these 10 things.
I don't care about all this other stuff. Yeah. Like, would be so powerful. So that brings us to the drama surrounding the Democratic nominee for president, which has really overshadowed the Republican convention this week. Here's the latest from the New York Times. Quote several people close to president Biden said on Thursday that they believe he has begun to accept the idea that he may not be able to win in November and may have to drop out of the race, though he has not yet made up his mind.
So the time story matches all the other reporting as well as everything we're hearing to senior House Democrats told CBS they expect Biden to make his decision within three to five days. Of course, he's still recovering from COVID at his home in Delaware. But even since we recorded last night, there's been a flood of bad polls and leaks about how most senior Democrats now believe that Biden should step aside congressional leaders, party leaders, House and Senate Democrats.
John Tester became the, of Montana, became the second Senator, put out a statement tonight that saying that Biden should step aside, strategist donors. And of course, there's the polls show now at least half, if not more, of Democratic voters. We should note, though, that the White House and the Biden campaign continue to deny on the record that the president's considering stepping aside.
Those denials got more intense, I would say, as the day went on tonight, a source close to Biden talked to Bob Costa at CBS and said that they're furious that while the president's trying to recover a pressure campaign keeps picking up speed. So a little hard to tell. There's also sources close to Biden that talked to the New York Times and the Washington Post and NBC News.
So it's sort of hard to figure out what's going on, but it did feel like today, even since we recorded last night, was a bit different. There was speculation earlier this week that the combination of the assassination attempt on Trump and the convention would freeze or even end the effort to persuade Biden to step aside. I certainly thought that might happen. What do you guys think changed and what do you make of all the leaks from the last few days, especially today?
I mean, I think it was what Seth Molten told me earlier this week, which is that people who were worried about Biden's candidacy became even more worried after the assassination attempt and felt more urgency to move quickly. And then on top of that, it seems clear that a bunch of polling came back.
Like, I think John Tester coming out and being the second US Senator to call for a change at the top of the ticket tells you a lot because he's one of the most vulnerable senators up this cycle, and it probably tells you where the polling is in Montana. And so, you know, I think what has happened is, or at least what we're reading, is that people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are making an argument that this is bigger than Biden, bigger than the White House.
This could be Democrats getting wiped out in Congress as well. And that is kind of motivating the extra push. I think what happened is a lot of people try to do this privately. We know that the King Jeffries talked to Biden on Friday night. Schumer talked about Saturday just hours before the assassination attempt. At some point in that same period, Nancy Pelosi spoke to him at least once. They tried to do a privately, a bunch of House Democrats did Zoom calls with the president.
No one felt that they made any ground there, and they started going public. I think they feel, the leaders particularly feel a tremendous amount of pressure from their members to try to get a better result because their members are scared, cheerlist, they're all going to lose their seats over this, and we will lose our chance to take the House back and definitely lose this on it.
And so, when the private route did not work and Biden seemed, according to all reports, it was totally unopened to any sort of conversation about it. They started to go more public to put more public pressure on them. The truth is, we are now in reporting silly season. These two House Democrats who are like three to five days, that's their guess based on like the calendar.
There are by all reports, like five people talking to Biden right now, and I don't think any of those people are telling reporters that Biden is changing his mind. They're the people who are on background telling their reporters he's not changing his mind. So the political environment has shifted dramatically since we last podcasted about this, but we just have no actual insight into whether the president's mindset has actually changed.
I think some of the people in the outer circle, or not the inner inner circle, the outer circle, have come to the conclusion that Biden should step aside and eventually will have to step aside, but we don't know whether that has actually gotten to the president himself. Yeah, and we recorded last night. As we do every night.
And while we were recording or right after, there was that story that Nancy Pelosi, I think the New York Times are in the story and then CNN re-inversion of the story as well. Then Nancy Pelosi got on the phone with Biden and then when Biden started saying, oh, well, there's Paul show me winning. And she was like, get Mike Donnellan on the phone. Mike Donnellan is Biden's closest communications messaging advisor. And she was like, show me the pulse. Show me the pulse.
Because there's concern among Democrats that Biden and Donnellan and other people keep saying that there's these polls showing that he's winning and that they don't really exist. Yeah, we don't know what happened after that moment either. The story sort of ends there. Yeah, I just imagine Biden trying to conference in Mike Donnellan from his beach else in Rohe with. But also Nancy Pelosi, just the best of what she does. Like everyone else in the president state says there are polls.
They're like, okay, there must be polls. She's like, no, get your guy on the phone, get your guy on the phone and show me the pulse because I don't mean. That's what everyone's like, I wonder. It's some strange bedfellows in the group of people who are worried about Biden staying in versus the people who think he should stay in. It's like really all the people from left to center to center left to wherever else where you fall in the spectrum.
The people who are concerned about Biden are people who have been on campaigns who are currently in office who are in competitive districts who have had to run tough races, who have had to persuade voters, who have knocked on doors to talk to undecided voters.
Like these are the people that are most worried about that because they are not like insconced in a bubble on Twitter or in the White House or wherever it may be, hearing from people who are obviously going to vote for Biden no matter what, like us, right?
But when you actually go talk to the voters that you need to win, everyone who is talking to these voters, polling these voters, sitting in focus groups with these voters, they're so worried about this and they've been worried about this for a long time. I think that there is a lot of the people who are making the argument against a switch or doing it in denial of polling reality to say all the polls are rigged. It's March in a verror, all of that without any evidence of proving that.
I think that there is a good faith argument to be made and some people are making it, that the risk of a switch is greater than the risk of sticking with Biden. And that's ultimately, and I think, like, I have come to not agree with that, but I think it is completely fair and a competitive issue. Because we know and know what's going to happen. We just do not know. And unfortunately, you have to make the decision now. It has to happen in the next couple of weeks.
Ultimately, it has to happen really in the next 72 to 96 hours to maximize the opportunity to have the upside that may be available as I can candidate, but it's a total unknown. So you can have the opposite opinion and good faith, but it has to be based on the data in a realistic assessment of where the race is.
And I also do think that, like, we are now at the point where so many people have come out against Joe Biden being nominee wanting him to step aside, that it is hard to imagine a democratic convention under these circumstances that leads to like a Joe Biden sent out. Like even if everybody comes together and says they're going to do everything they can, like we are now at the point where huge swaths of elected Democrats have called for Joe Biden to step aside.
Like I think that the idea originally that the damage was not from the debate, but from the response to the debate, I think was not justifiable, but it is hard to argue now. That what is happening is not doing ongoing and irreparable damage to Joe Biden because the people stepping forward believe he cannot win. And so that what must happen is people coming forward and saying we have to make a switch. I mostly agree with that.
I think it's not clear in public opinion yet that ultimately people, the number of Democrats who think Joe Biden is too old has gone up, but it was really happy for him. It's only gone up a few points. It's like five points in the air times pool. But what is, what the point you're making is very important, which is how do you imagine the campaign going forward after this, right? This is a convention look like. How does he raise money, right?
The reports that fundraising has been cut in half since then. Now, there are people who are not giving bundlers who are not raising money. They said they're simply focusing on House and Senate candidates instead. What happens when he goes to Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, all the battleground states that also have Senate and House candidates? Are they going to simply avoid being with the president for the next four months? It is and we're the president to continue.
And he's certainly historic and you could do that. It is just a death march to the end and undignified terribly damaging death march because the party will be running away from him. And look, this is, this is awful and sad and shitty for Biden, his family, his staff, the entire party. Like no one is happy about this. No one wanted to be spending the summer arguing about this while we are currently losing to Donald Trump, but we are losing to Donald Trump.
And I think the RNC crystallized that reality for Democrats and no one thinks to your point and that Biden stepping aside will guarantee a win against Trump at all, but a growing number of people, including Democratic voters, a majority of Democratic voters believe that it will give us a better chance against Trump. And like you said, if he doesn't, it's up to him. If he stays, then I can still make an honest argument for Joe Biden.
Like Donald Trump presents a threat to democracy from his, the plans that he proposed, from the things that he said, from the party that he now runs, like absolutely we'd be better off. And if that's where we're like 96 hours from now, that's where we are and everyone said that's it. Joe Biden's it. We've all agreed. Then I'll give money that day. We'll go knock tours the day after that. Like we will be 100% in for that. Well, I'm maxed out, Dan, so I can't do that.
But just for the general time, I can do the victory fund. And just so people will know like the data behind these anxieties, the Wall Street Journal reported today that a research firm called Blue Rose Research found President Biden in losing in all the swing states behind or even in New Hampshire, Minnesota, New Mexico, Virginia, and Maine in leading by only 2.9% in New Jersey. So that is like not good panic button numbers. Not good people, not good.
I also just like watching Donald Trump deliver this meandering and terrible address. It is a it is absolutely mad. It made me furious. We should beat this guy. We should fucking beat this guy embarrassing if we lose to this guy and that is pretty good. And one thing he said in his speech, which I would with some version of build the wall, build with some version of we should be excited about the future, right? Yeah, that was a good line. Actually, I don't know if that's it. He did.
I'm sorry, I missed it in the 96 minutes. And we have spent weeks arguing about how or why we are most likely to lose. We have also, I think, even when we were hopeful that Joe Biden was the one who could defeat Donald Trump despite concerns about his age, we're constantly watching Joe Biden in these settings, hoping for the best version of them, hoping that he would, you know, holding
our breath a little bit and watching this tonight, watching this fucking terrible, ridiculous, fucking dumb speech, just imagining what it would be like to have a candidate who could fucking make the argument in a way that wasn't just good enough, that wasn't just like to get us over the finish line, but to actually fuck this guy up, you know, beat him, do him. Yeah, yeah. Well, we're the, we're the temperature. We're totally, we're totally. Yeah, right. We're totally.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're the temperature. We're totally. We're totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's say Biden does step aside, one possibility for that candidate, that probably the most likely possibility is that Kamala Harris becomes the Democratic nominee, either because Biden explicitly endorses her or because party leaders rally around her and no one else jumps in the race or both.
The Trump campaign and Republicans have clearly been preparing for this possibility, just listen to how many times they mentioned the vice president during this week's convention. Our borders are K, mala, Harris. That being so bad. And we have enough that we need some good, we need goodness. Democrats led by borders are Kamala Harris have allowed millions of illegal migrants to invade our country. President Trump did the job that Kamala won't and Joe Biden simply can't.
If we have four more years of Biden or a single day of Harris, our country will be badly worse off. Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I've been alive. 39 years old. Kamala Harris is not much further behind. Perhaps the greatest blame lies with his own vice president, Kamala Harris. She has not been truthful with us. She has lied to us. She has put party above country and she is as unfit in character as Joe Biden is in body and mind. I love to get her name wrong.
I love it. Just a bunch of moons. I'm not even going to talk about who maybe you recognize them maybe you didn't. It's unclear if the vice president is also preparing for the possibility that she may become the nominee, but she certainly sounded like one during an event in North Carolina today. Let's listen. In recent days they've been trying to portray themselves as a party of unity. But here's the thing. Here's the thing.
If you claim to stand for unity, you need to do more than just use the word. You cannot claim you stand for unity if you are pushing an agenda that deprives whole groups of Americans of basic freedoms, opportunity and dignity. You cannot claim you stand for unity if you are intent on taking reproductive freedoms from the people of America and the women of America. You cannot claim to be for unity if you try to overturn a free and fair election.
Dan, what are the reasons Kamala Harris is most likely to be the nominee of Biden steps down? Well, she's the vice president to the stepping down president. In the polls that we've seen in the green assault, she is the, by far, the first choice of Democratic primary voters. Now the Democratic primary is not going to have to say it be delegates, but that would be better to them.
Logistically, Kamala Harris would be able to, most campaign finance leaders believe, simply take over the existing Biden campaign operation, including the $91 million they had in the bank as of the last period. So that solves a lot. It's also unclear to me that anyone would challenge her. And that's whether Biden endorses her or not would step in there. And it may be just the party is exhausted by the drama of the last few weeks and is looking for what would be the most likely outcome anyway.
Even if you have some sort of process that we've talked about in the past, Harris would be a favorite going into that. And so you could see just a cool less thing around her right. So we can get the general election going. Now we only have about 100 days left. And so if we spend a few weeks, fighting amongst ourselves, you could see people thinking, let's just get our nominee right this second. And what are some of the reasons she may not become the nominee? Tommy? Thank you for that question.
UNITY, we've got to let them know. I think she could get tagged with questions about Biden's mental acuity. And the Republican line on this is that there's been a cover up. Right? So she could get pulled into that debate. She could get tagged with immigration policy or Afghanistan or other vulnerabilities. Them delegates are political animals. They're not normal voters. They're people like us. They could have concerns about her political vulnerabilities and ability to win.
They could be worried about misogyny or racism being a factor in this election and herding her candidacy. So I think that she is clearly the front runner. And also, you know, a lot of politicians might look at the political landscape right now and think Trump looks pretty tough. I'm not going to throw my hat in now. Let's let Kamala Harris take this one and if she loses, I'll run in 2028, right? I mean, that's kind of the like, yeah, consultancy version or advice you might hear.
Yeah. I guess there's a scenario that seems unlikely from all the reporting, but who knows where if Biden steps aside and doesn't explicitly endorse Kamala Harris and then again, it's all up to all their potential Democratic candidates to jump in. If then they jump in, he hasn't explicitly endorsed her. And then there is some sort of mini primary open process before the convention and then the delegates start seeing polls and somehow they're performing better against Trump than Kamala Harris.
You could see a scenario where she doesn't. Donald Trump is coming to silence this podcast. You can hear the sirens and the sirens in the background. Like you could maybe see that as a scenario, but I think the reason everyone says she's most likely is for everything that Dan was saying, which is that would take some doing for a bunch of it. It takes like a Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro or Rafael Warnock or Wes Moore, Mark Kelly, Jimmy Pritzker. Jimmy Pritzker to say, you know what?
Gavin Newsom, I'm going to look at this race and I'm going to jump in even though Kamala Harris is in the race and Biden, either endorsed her or said really nice things better. Yeah. I think that like the closer we get to the convention, the more it wouldn't feel like an open race and more like Kamala versus as the incumbent being challenged. And somebody who has to make a decision to challenge her and these are all the same people who decided they didn't want to challenge Biden.
There's a conservative, there's a cautiousness among this group of the the the the vaunted Democratic bench that I find difficult to imagine being willing to do that. But you know, who knows? But I do think Tommy Deer point the way the race would change if it's Kamala Harris versus Trump is they will try to tag her with the unpopularity Biden had not just due to his age, but in compency, right?
So some of Biden's unpopularity, a lot of it is probably due to his age, but some of it is due fairly or not. And we would say not to perceptions of how he's managed the economy, right? Persistent inflation or how he's managed immigration. And so they would try to connect her with with in compency in a way that other candidates probably would not have to deal with. They can't do she's old and weak anymore. So they will do radical leftist from San Francisco.
Yes. But you know, they'll try to, you know, accuse her of participating in a cover up over Biden's age issues, right? I think the benefits though, the way the race changes in her favor and the Democrats favor is she gets to make this race now about the past versus the future, time to turn the page. Trump's entire campaign strategy from that Tim Elbert piece in the Atlantic was about strength versus weakness. And Joe Biden's age wasn't just about him being old.
It was about him being weak and frail and if they can't run that campaign against Kamala Harris and they have to do the, she's a radical leftist campaign. It's just not a strong, is an argument for them. I also, it's like, you know, we have been hammering this for months about the need for Joe Biden to make this race about the future. And just I just don't believe Kamala Harris will fall into the trap that we've seen Joe Biden be falling into. She will make this race about the future.
She will, she will be able to pivot when asked a question. Like she will do the things that need to be done to do the politics we, we need our candidate to do. I mean, just listen to her in the clip we just played. Yeah. Imagine that in three states a day, five days a week, right, a full-bore campaign. One that we know Joe Biden was not going to run. We also know Donald Trump can't run that campaign.
Right. And Donald, the concerns about Donald Trump's age, pale and comparison because of a Biden's age, but they're still huge. Right. And now all of a sudden you have Kamala Harris who's 59. Right. Donald Trump is the candidate who's two old, who can't relate to people. It really shifts it. Any as a VP candidate who only has a year and a half worth of political experience and known as talking about it. J.D. Vance, like, is 39 years old and has been in the Senate since what, 2023.
Yeah. I'm saying, if I was president, older than me and a president younger than my parents. And like, to your, to your dance point, like, if Biden remains president, there will be a push I think to get Biden to step down. But I think that's stupid. He should stay. He should have to stay. But Joe Biden remains president. Kamala Harris, like, the VP doesn't really have a day job. You can just hit the road and campaign full time. She's not breaking any ties in the Senate.
Here's the other big difference too, because I can see people who want Biden to stay in could say, well, Biden, when he's on prompter at those events, like we said, his speech in Michigan was quite good. Like he can do that for the rest of the time. Yeah, perhaps. But the big difference with the new candidate is, I really don't think we're getting another debate with Joe Biden stays in the race. But Trump has already said, I don't want to put him through that again.
Maybe he'll get so cocky and confident that he'll agree to it and maybe Joe Biden will go. Okay. I know. I know. I know playing the devil's advocate for the Biden side. But we're, I think everyone should, it's very unlikely we'll get another debate. If Kamala Harris is the nominee or another Democrat, I think it's going to be hard for Donald Trump to dodge another debate. I really do.
And that gives her or whoever the nominee is a huge opportunity to speak to, you know, 50 million, if not more, Americans in front of an in a debate setting. And I think that's a big advantage too. We've, because we've had two geriatric candidates running against each other for a couple of years now, we've lost the thread of what a normal campaign looks like. Yeah. Right. When you run a president, you wake up in the morning and you do interviews. Right. This is my point, right?
What are we talking about? And, and John, you know what, I'd like a candidate who can do interviews. But think about this. Like, we've all, we've all been on the road with the presidential candidate. You wake up in the morning, you do drive time radio in place at battleground markets across the country, right? Then you get up, you go to a first rally, you then you go to the rally, then you sit for an hour and do satellite local television reviews. That's good stuff. Right.
Then you do another one. And you get really mad at your staff for schedule. You get the right. You do. You have to do it. You do a rap in the car. You do a third rally. You were doing federal racing calls in the car on the plane. Like, there's a, there's a cadence to this that Donald Trump cannot keep up with. But we know, probably Harris or any other Democrat could do that. And it would put Trump on the defensive, which he has not been on.
And also just him, all Trump has to say about Biden is criticized. What Biden has done, what you would do against any incumbent and attack his age. Something that's 70 to 75% of Americans agree with. What happens when it's someone else, right? It's a woman, a woman of color, how he reacts. Trump reacts in ways that turns off swing voters. Yeah. He has to take advantage of those opportunities if he gives them to us. But those opportunities will be there in a way they are not in a race with Biden.
But also, and Biden is rightly proud of his many legislative accomplishments as president. She can run on the popular accomplishments because she's part of that administration. But she also wasn't like, she can have some kind of distance whereas she is the future and she is younger and she was the vice president. So she doesn't have to own everything, right? Again, fairly or unfairly. And I'm sure the Biden votes would say unfairly. But like, she gets to be her own person.
And she gets to be the face of the party and, and, and run a future oriented campaign. There's just a lot of. She gets to stand up there with a popular governor or a popular senator on, on, behind in front of a big sign that says the future on it. Yeah. Just to pick a VP. She can pick, right? And it's, and it's, or, or, or governor Shapiro would be, that's what he means. Maybe a sheer.
And I think about going into that convention and the, like, the way in which people will rally behind this ticket and be like, we incredible. What if you pick Mike Pence to be, that's also a possibility. No, it's a brain. Or Hulk Hogan. Okay. We've talked enough. We're done. It's, it's past my mind. You got to sit there. Three years ago. I know. Well, the second day of the spot. We're exactly. Let's close with this. We don't know what comes next.
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