From CAFE and the VOX Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I'm Preet Barara. There is also the possibility that Donald Trump doesn't care that much about JD Vance's high-falutant ideas about what MAGA policy shouldn't should not be, and that instead what Donald Trump cares about is the fact that JD Vance will back him. That's Ezra Klein. He's a columnist at The New York Times and host of the Ezra Klein Show.
Klein is an incisive commentator on national politics and author of the book Why Were Polarized. This week we're tackling one question. What the hell is going on with our politics? That's coming up. Stay Tuned. This support for this podcast comes from Washington Wise, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington affect your portfolio and your money every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Washington Wise is an original podcast for investors
from Charles Schwab. The show unpacks the stories making news in Washington and how they may affect your finances and investments. Listen today at Schwab.com slash Washington Wise. That's Schwab.com slash Washington Wise. Support for this show comes from Mercury. There's an art to making the complex feel simple. Everything should be in sync so that even the smallest part serves a bigger purpose. Simplicity can transform your business operations. That's why Mercury powers your financial
workflows from the bank account. So ambitious companies have the precision, control, and focus they need to perform at their best. Apply in minutes at mercury.com. Now let's get to your questions. This question comes in a tweet from Alice who begins with a disclaimer. I have not read all of Judge Cannon's ruling. Okay, fair enough. The question is what is the correct way to give justice to Thomas's concurrence in Trump V. U.S. mentioning special counsel
appointment and appropriations? No one else signed on to it. Now we have an entire opinion relying on it. Thoughts. That's a great question. Obviously you're referring to the Judge Cannon decision from earlier this week in which she found that the appointment of the special counsel on a couple of different grounds was unconstitutional. Therefore, dismissing the
indictment and meaning that for now at least the case cannot go forward. You may recall that last week I was asked generally about the role and legal relevance of concurring and dissenting opinions. My short answer was they don't really matter a whole lot, but I gave a few examples where dissenting opinions later became the majority rule, but it has something to add to that response and it's relevant to your question. Sometimes concurrence
can inspire or influence a judge in a lower court. And that's exactly what appears to have happened with Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida. As I mentioned earlier this week, Judge Cannon dismissed Trump's classified documents case in Florida. And in that opinion, she sights repeatedly to that loan concurrence by Justice Clarence Thomas in Trump V United
States. As a reminder, Trump V United States was the Supreme Court decision from just two weeks ago ruling that former President Trump has at least some significant immunity from criminal prosecution. In that decision, Justice Thomas wrote separately from the majority to address an issue that hadn't even been raised in the litigation or in the briefs. The constitutionality of appointing a special counsel to prosecute the January 6 case against
Trump. He wrote quote, if this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted
by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people. End quote. Now, as you pointed out in your question, no other justice joined his concurrence, not the liberals, not the conservatives, but in her decision to smithing the case against Donald Trump, Judge Cannon took up that exact argument ruling that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith was in fact unconstitutional and referred to Justice Thomas' concurrence throughout her
opinion. Now, to go back to your question, what is the right amount of weight to give to that concurrence? My answer is not a whole hell of a lot, given that it wasn t brief below in the Supreme Court, folks didn t argue in favor of it or against it, no other justice, including the conservative justices who made up the majority in the decision. For all those reasons, I don t think it should be accorded much weight. It s a little bit
odd. How many times she refers to it and how much emphasis she places on Clarence Thomas' opinion in that concurrence? I imagine that on the appeal, the appellate court and the 11 circuit will have something to say about it. This question comes in a tweet from Patricia and also relates to the Judge Cannon case. The question is, can the documents case against Trump? You revived at some point or would it have to be filed in a different way? Hashtag, not a lawyer, that s a great hashtag.
So obviously, the first route to reviving the case against Donald Trump relating to the documents is to win the appeal. So without question, Jack Smith s team will be appealing that decision by Judge Cannon to the 11 circuit court of appeals, not clear how they will rule. Either way, if it goes for Jack Smith or against Jack Smith, the other party will further try to appeal it perhaps to the entire 11 circuit and then certainly to the Supreme Court.
Will the Supreme Court take the case? I m clear, as I mentioned on the podcast with Joyce Vance this week, the insider podcast. There s at least one vote to hear that appeal on the question of the constitutionality of the appointment of Jack Smith. And that s Clarence Thomas, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, whether there are sufficient additional votes, is unclear. That process, by the way, of appealing to the 11 circuit, perhaps to the entire 11
circuit and then to the Supreme Court is going to take a long, long time. And depending on what happens with the election, the result of that appeal and this constitutional question on which Judge Cannon is alone island won t be resolved till well, well after not just the election, but the installment of the next president, whether it s Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Judge Cannon essentially ruled that the special counsel in this case has a certain kind of significant
and considerable authority. And because of that level of authority that the person is exercising with a modicum of independence from the Justice Department, although not complete independence, that person under her reading, which again is an outlier reading, but under her reading, that person needed to have been appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Jack Smith was not appointed by the president nor confirmed by the Senate. He was appointed by the Attorney General and she made a finding that wasn t sufficient, that was outside and beyond
the powers of a cabinet officer like the Attorney General. So under her ruling, someone like Jack Smith is not appropriate as a special counsel, but someone like David Weiss, the special counsel, who s overseeing the investigation and prosecution of Hunter Biden, is okay because David Weiss, although he has the same title, special counsel, was Jack Smith, was previously appointed by the
president and confirmed by the Senate as a sitting United States Attorney in Delaware. So that tells you that I guess it s possible feasible and some people have mentioned this possibility that Jack Smith and the Justice Department could decide to give the case over to a Senate confirmed United States Attorney in Florida or New Jersey or perhaps D.C. or elsewhere if there s venue and have that person refile the case that would cure the infirmity that s at the center of the
decision by Eileen Cannon. Now, although that s possible, given the timing, given the proximity of the election, given the fact that Donald Trump could get reelected and were likely stop these prosecutions by causing his Justice Department to abandon them, I don t expect that they ll do something like that. That might bring criticisms of judge-shopping. So I think they re going to go
the appellate route. In fairness to Jack Smith s office, they must be rather upset, perhaps even seething over the way that this went down in Judge Cannon s courtroom for a number of reasons, but among them, the Smith team literally asked Judge Cannon for an opportunity to brief her, should she be seriously considering invalidating the appointment of Jack Smith on other remedies
that would fall short of dismissing the indictment altogether. And they could brief her on the possibility of simply reassigning the case to other federal prosecutors or putting most of the existing prosecution team under the supervision of a Senate confirmed presidentially appointed
U.S. Attorney and she said no, she didn t need that briefing. So although that remains a possibility, I think just the nature of events as they have unfolded the proximity of the election and the uncertainty of who might win the election, probably counsel against their taking that course, but they could. By the way, we also got a number of questions about the verdict in the trial of Senator Bob Menendez, and I ll have something to say about that verdict at the end of the show.
I ll be right back with my conversation with Ezra Klein. Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry s podcast about joy and justice produced with Vox Creative. In season three of this award-winning podcast, Into the Mix is covering stories on the ordinary people fighting for justice in their local communities.
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workflows all within the one thing every business needs, a bank account. And with new bill pay and accounting integrations, you can pay bills faster, stay in control of company spend, and speed a reconciliation. As for Client, thanks so much for being on the show. Welcome back. Thank you for having me. There s a lot to talk about. Why? What s been going on? Couple three things to talk about. There s a lot to talk about with respect to politics and how recent unprecedented events affect
the outlook for the future. Before we do any of that, we re now a few days from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. And before we talk about what that means for the race and what that means for politics. I wonder if you have a view on what that says about the state of the state and level of political violence in this country. Was it a one off? Is there a direct
line from some of the other things that have happened, including January 6th? To this act of violence, we ve also learned in the last number of days, this is not domestic, but that there were forces in Iran who were contemplating a plot to assassinate Donald Trump. Do you have anything to say about the fact that Joe Biden had talked about lowering the temperature in this country? And it seems that we're at a high mark, not just because of climate change, but
politically as well. Any thought on that where we are? I don't have a view backing out of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. We know there are quite a number of assassination attempts that happen in the country that was a very serious plot against a Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. The scary thing about the assassination attempt against Trump is that it came
so close to succeeding. It seems among other things to be in a quite profound failure on behalf of the Secret Service who did not have an agent posted on the relevant roof because they felt the relevant roof would be unsafe for the agent to stand on. But I think it, look, I am not a security professional, but my assumption be the kinds of people who try to assassinate political leaders are highly risk tolerant. So maybe thinking that a roof looks dangerous to stand on is not actually
going to deter them. So first and foremost, it seems we had a terrible failure. In terms of what it says more broadly than that, I wouldn't I wouldn't venture to guess yet. Let me ask you a different question. What does it say to you that on both sides of the aisle,
there are oil and conspiracy theories. There are some folks on the left who in the immediate aftermath of the event filled up social media with suggestions, not suggestions, but conclusions that the whole thing was staged because it was a good photo op and it was orchestrated and organized
by Trump himself, which is absurd for a number of reasons. And then on the other side, people maybe, I don't know if it's the same degree or not, suggesting an even concluding because this was an inside job and it was an attempt on the part of Biden or his supporters to assassinate Donald Trump, but it failed. What does that say about where we are? You know, there's a theory in public safety, which you probably know better than me about what conditions are what gets called criminogenic,
right? What conditions are encouraging to people to commit crimes. And what I would say about social media is social media is conspiracy theory, Ogenic, that it is a space in which conspiracy theories are encouraged. Do they get high engagement, both negative and positive, right? We end up talking about them. So they've is lying into more mainstream media spaces, which they might not
otherwise breach if this was a different time. And these were more confined to people talking to their neighbors or sending around email forwards or using the venues that were once more popular for conspiracy theories. So the truth is, I don't think that much of it. I'm not sure it tells you that much, except for something we already know, which is it social media is a place where extremely extreme theories, opinions, perspectives tend to prosper because the structure of social media
is designed to reward that kind of thinking. So the Republican National Convention is underway. You and I are recording this on Wednesday, July 17th, so we haven't seen the conclusion of it yet. Big night tonight, JD Vance is going to speak tomorrow. The former president is going to speak. Do you have a sense of how unified they are and how much of that will persist? How do you think that Republican Party is doing? I think this is the most unified Republican Party. We have seen
since George W. Bush's second term convention, since the 04 convention. I think part of that is a sense that Donald Trump is hurtling towards a huge victory. I was just talking to Tim Alberta, the Atlantic reporter, who had been embedded with the Trump campaign for some months. I mean, they believe they are going to win. Functionally, everybody believes they're going to win, including elected Democrats at the moment, as they keep telling not just Axios off the record, but me off the
record. The degree to which the Democratic Party seems resigned to losing. They expect Joe Biden to lose, but do not really think they can do that much about it. So they're just marching forward in this grim procession towards predicted defeat is the baton march. It's a little shocking to watch
and to hear people rationalizing to you in private conversations. The other thing is that is something that I think we are seeing in this Republican convention is that it has long been noted that the Republican Party seems to have collapsed into being a personality cult behind Donald Trump, which is true. But in becoming the property of one man, the Republican Party has
also become more malleable. So we are seeing more ideological change and moments to me of flashes of things that are actually ideologically interesting happening on that stage this year than we have in in other conventions. I mean, the Republican Party, it is too early to say if it will change, but some things in it are changing. It was very striking to see the head of the teamsters giving a keynote speech on the first night. JD Vance, there is a lot to say about him, and he's in many ways a
complex political text to read. But he doesn't feel here to talk about him. He is ideologically interesting, and he's somebody who thinks hard about policy comes out in places I find more
congenial and then dramatically less congenial. Can we analyze that for a moment? Because the most notable thing JD Vance is known for, and I don't think this is an ideological issue or it's not in the dimension of ideology, is that he compared Trump some years ago to Hitler, said all manner of terrible things about him as a thoughtful best-selling author, Yale Law grad, adult, fully formed
brain and mind. And he's recanted all of that and become such an ardent supporter on the flip side that he's now the choice to be the vice president, one heartbeat away from the president, if Trump wins again. Is that only a flip of political opportunism, or did he manifest changes in his ideology along the way for it to fit the flip flop on Trump? My first, I would say a couple of things. So one, the path he has traveled there is a very normal path inside the Republican Party.
It was very common in 2016 to amass these roll calls of the terrible things that every one of Donald Trump's opponents in the Republican primary had said about him as an outfellal line behind him, as they endorsed him, as they took cabinet jobs. I mean, the things Trump said about Rick Perry and then Rick Perry becomes head of the department of energy, of course, a cabinet, an agency,
Rick Perry had said that he wanted to eliminate the things that Ted Cruz said about Trump. The things Donald Trump said about Ted Cruz and about Ted Cruz's wife and about Ted Cruz's father, very weirdly suggesting Ted Cruz's father might have been involved in the assassination of JFK, but Ted Cruz became a complete licks fiddle towards Trump. So this is a common path. The question of, is it mere opportunism? I'll offer you my observation on this from covering
people and politics for a long time. A lot of my 2020 book on political polarization is about political psychology. Insincereity and cynicism, I think, are overused explanations. It is very hard for most people to maintain high levels of cognitive dissonance. And so when they need to change their mind or when they begin changing their mind, that process can be internally violent, but end with them in a place that is entirely sincere. And to maybe offer an example of this,
it is a little bit more easy to absorb for people listen to this show. The never Trump Republicans, who were hardcore Republicans in 2012 and thought Democrats were terrible and thought Barack Obama was going to end the free enterprise system and it was, you know, destroying America's prestige abroad. Many of them have become like more hardcore partisan Democrats than liberals like me now. Right? The conversion process for them as they were repelled by Trump has ended with them being
the most hardcore supporters of the Democratic Party to some kind of Joe Biden. I mean, Stuart Stevens, a former Romney campaign head. I mean, he's just like out there pumping for Biden, nonstop. Right? Like many of them, they've undergone this full conversion process. He was changing that category? I wouldn't exactly put this change in that category. I think she's more focused as an anti-Trump figure rather than a pro Democrat figure. But this thing where people
undergo conversion is not new. I don't know if Vance's conversion is initially motivated by sincerity. But I think there are threads of resentment that were there in what he was doing with Hillbilly Elegy, his first book, which I think had a very different line on what was leading to poverty and the reasons that he grew up near and identifies with, the disfamilies from,
and then what he says is a political candidate. But I do think that like a lot of people, he was able to find his place in the Trump cosmology through his resentment of the people who are attacking Donald Trump and in attacking Donald Trump or attacking the people Vance identifies as his people. If you're trying to take him generously and I try to take people generously, I would say that Vance begins moving towards Trump not as a pro Trump figure but as an anti-anti-Trump
figure. And then Vance finds his way ideologically into the national conservatism world, which we can talk about what that is and how it differs from other forms of conservatism. And that from there Trump, I'm sorry Vance, finds his way into understanding Trump the way many of these people understand Trump, not as necessarily in every respect and admirable human being. But as a kind of mystic interpreter of like the wisdom and resentments of the people they
identify as like the common man. And so Trump becomes, they see Trump like as a mystic figure. It's like he's like the Ayatola of national conservatism, not like the technocratic president of national conservatism. And that gets Vance all the way there. And then I think there are elements of Vance becoming what he felt he needed to become in many respects. I think that the rage and contempt and antagonism with which he speaks about liberals. I mean Vance is a guy who's on my show
back in the day, right? And then he once said that like it's like people like me and David Brooks really lost our mind in the Trump years. But we didn't change at all. He changed dramatically. Do you believe this theory? Some people have suggested that kind of kind of, you know, on a parallel with the rage and grievance that Donald Trump felt when he was humiliated and mocked by Barack Obama at the White House correspondent's dinner that JD Vance was enjoying a great life, a lot of
a claim from quote unquote elites, liberals included. And then his book, which was highly acclaimed in a bestseller, was made into a movie and the movie failed and was made fun of by a lot of people in Hollywood and elsewhere. And that deepened his disdain or caused in part his disdain. It's a too facile a story. I don't buy that at all. Yeah. I really think that it is important. I think liberals are so hung up on who Vance was that they're not really trying to take
seriously who he is. It's like on some of what I don't care what leads to Vance's conversion. I think the issue for a lot of people is that they don't buy that there's been a bona fide conversion of feeling thought, you know, approach to Trump, approach to ideology, that he still he still harbors and holds all of those negative feelings and views. He's just masking them. You're saying we need to take seriously that there has been an actual conversion of his thought.
Yes, but I guess I'm saying something a little bit deeper than that, which is a way of apprehending politics and figures in politics. And look, I'm perfectly happy to be called naive on this, although I think I'm actually in a way more realistic or cynical than a lot of people. People go through ideological conversions all the time. I mean, that's why I use the example of the never-Trumpers. I don't think the people who look at JD Vance and say,
there's nothing sincere in that conversion. Look at the never-Trumpers and say, there's nothing sincere in that conversion. And I think the reason is that they can emotionally connect to where they are now. Just is myself and liberals like me can emotionally connect to where JD Vance was before, but they can't emotionally connect. There's an empathic chasm for many in believing or
understanding Trump is appealing. I think for many liberals, he is so repellent that to get over the jump where you actually go from finding him repellent to finding him appealing, seductive, admirable, it's impossible. But obviously, many people do it. I mean, many, many people think Donald
Trump is magnificent, important, right? A world historical figure. And I really think that a beginning place of a certain kind of political wisdom or at least a place where I think you can learn more is to try to ask why people would authentically feel that way as opposed to assuming that there
must be inauthenticity in it. A different way of putting this might be, I don't think liberals wander around now being like Ted Cruz does not actually like Donald Trump that saying Marco Rubio has not actually come to a deep kind of intuitive accommodation with Donald Trump. And I don't know. I've watched Vance in his political rise. I find what I find harder to believe about him is the way the sort of temperamental gentleness in him turned into a deep-seated
contempt and antagonism. Something in him curdled or I would be willing to believe that he adopted a tone he had not adopted before because he was convinced that that was what the politics of the era meant. But whether I believe that he's actually become a kind of national conservative, I actually do believe that Vance believes what he believes now or at least believes it for now.
Yeah, that curdling in that tone, usually you see generally speaking in people who've been around the block a few more times and have had a few more revolutions around the sun than 39. But just persistent in this just for another minute. When we compare the conversion of someone like JD Vance with respect to Donald Trump to the never-trumpers, what exactly is that conversion
and how are they comparable? The point I'm making there is that often when people go through a conversion, they don't become a moderate version of the thing they're converting to. They become the most full-throated and in some ways unsuddle version of the thing they're converting to. A lot of the never-trumpers to me and I like them. This is not exactly meant to bash them, but I have found it to be very interesting. They've become like a crude version of liberals and
Democrats, right? They believe kind of everything down the line with very little variation. I mean, I remember watching Bill Crystal begin to argue that Republican tax cuts were deranged. I was like, Bill Crystal is arguing Republican tax cuts are deranged. Where was he the last however many years on this? I see this sometime and I see this with people like Vance, but look, you see it with religious people, right? I know people convert into religions and they often become much more
dogmatic than people who were raised inside those religions. Conversion, as I was saying before, there's a psychological violence to that process. It almost requires you to kill an old version of yourself. Yeah, I guess a couple of things. One is unlike with the never-trumpers, it's a little convenient for the conversion in the direction towards Trump who dominates the party and has been re-nominated and maybe re-elected with a fairly decent likelihood. That conversion is consistent with
that with JD Vance's and his cohorts. It's consistent with and aligned with their ambition and they're forward-looking about their own careers. Whereas, arguably, the never-trumpers are in a worse political position and a worse position with respect to power than before. I don't know that it's correct or accurate or wise to say that somehow more noble or more appropriate, but there is that distinction. Well, that wasn't quite true in the Biden years. They've been
much closer to power in the Biden years and they would have been otherwise. I know you said, Liz Cheney doesn't fall in this category, but the people who have become violently anti-Trump who were Republicans, generally speaking, are without a base and without power. Liz Cheney is a different. I agree with you that Liz Cheney sacrificed something, right? She's not a pundit, she's not a commentator. She was a member of House leadership and she gave up her seat to
oppose Donald Trump. Adam Kinzing or two? Yeah, I think I would agree with you that there is a different set of considerations for elected officials. But again, the point I'm making is about ideological conversions, which is a slightly different point. Look, I don't really see.
What is actually the ideal... If we can distinguish between a conversion with respect to a particular figure, and that seems to be a lot of what's going on with JD Vance versus an ideological change from being, for example, somebody might be opposed to every form of abortion with no exceptions, and moderate on that. That's a change of ideology. Or going from protectionism to anti-protectionism.
What I guess I'm not sure of and I haven't studied it deeply enough is what is the actual ideological, other than the tonal conversion and rhetorical conversion, what's the ideological policy-based conversion that JD Vance has undergone other than once hating and despising a man and finding him contemptuous and now finding him to be the savior for America. So the ideological conversion for Vance, and it's funny because I don't really want to put myself as a JD Vance expert. You might
have rust out the dawn or someone for that. But the ideological conversion has been to me the interesting part of him. And it's I think very important to understand about him if you're sort of coming to this from the outside, that he is considered among the people trying to construct a cohesive ideological platform around MAGA intuitions to be the chief ideologist in the Senate. He is considered to be the person doing the most ideological work to fashion something coherent
out of what Fr. Donald Trump is intuitive. So a good place, maybe to start if people want to start somewhere is I was just listening walking around yesterday to the speech JD Vance gave at the 4th annual National Conservatism Conference, which happened roughly a month ago, two months ago, something like that. And the National Conservatism Conference was started by Yoram Hazoni and some other folks trying to build and Hazoni is an Israeli political thinker trying to build an idea of
a conservatism that was much more built around blood and soil nationalism. The real threat to American democracy, it's not certainly not Donald Trump. It's not even some foreign dictator who doesn't like America or our values. The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more. That is the threat to American
democracy. And I have a lot to say about that and a lot of very profound disagreements with it. But it is a reformist faction, a highly ideological reformist faction inside the Republican Party. And I think Vance has been at every one of those conferences going back to 2019. And these are not like the conferences of all the people in power, right? Mitch McConnell does not speak at this conference.
This is a highly ideological subgroup that is basically saying a couple of things. It is making an argument that understanding nations as cohesive and contained things where the national community should have vastly more moral weight than it is currently given. That should be the center of politics that foreign policy should be much more based on national interest and much less based
around values. It's why you see Vance and others like him becoming much more isolationist. One of the things that really repelled a lot of never-trumpers, of course, who are primarily neocons, including Liz Cheney, is that Trump and this factions foreign policy views are much more isolationist. They actually have a very profound ideological disagreement, whereas Biden is very pro-Nado. He's a humanitarian interventionist, etc. And they tend to believe that Republicans, or these national
conservative movements, should be pro-worker in a way that they have not been. And that does not mean pro-worker in the way Democrats often think of it or how Democrats would get there. But they are union curious, I would say. One reason you saw that the team's President up on the stage on the first night of the RNC, they are much more open to things like the Child Tax Credit.
And the reason they think about this is because they believe that one of the great failures of speaking here in the American context Republican Party economics over the past however many decades has been to break apart the economic structure. They'll allow you to have a two-parent family with a single male breadwinner with a mother watching a number of children that is larger than two. And like that is like the core unit of what makes America great.
And politics should be, I'm sorry, economics and for that matter politics should be subservient to elevating again that more traditional vision of how things are structured. And so within that they're also very mad about woke ideas and gender ideology as they would call it. Right, all these things that are breaking this more traditionalist view of the nation,
the family, and the community. So in many ways you can understand this, I think, as a emergence in America of an ideological tendency that is very, very common in other parts of the world, which is social conservatism, Christian conservatism, these parties in the quadrant of more economically populist, more socially traditionalist, which is largely been suppressed within their Republican Party until kind of Donald Trump broke that suppression. If you listen to the speech
JD Vance gives at that conference, I don't think you can listen to that and hear him. And not hear someone who's been doing a lot of ideological work. He is extremely critical of the Wall Street Journal, like really attacks him, you know, in a way like without provocation. He's making up a series of points about how simultaneously of a kind of Republican Party establishment, the things we need to be ready to fight a war with China, but is also shipping American manufacturing and industrial
capacity out to China. And his argument is, how are we going to fight this war with China that you all want? If we've given up all of our manufacturing prowess to China because it is industrial capacity that the winds wars, he gives a very long and strange in many ways to me discourse against immigration about how it makes nations poor, which it does not do, but he goes through a large thing about how it makes housing prices higher. And I would say you want to lower housing prices
by building more housing, but he has a whole thing about immigration economics in there. The guy is a highly, highly, highly ideological thinker. The level Donald Trump frankly is not. A lot of people
are now trying to build ideology around Trump. And that is what vans is. Well, to hear you talk, one could argue then and maybe you have this view, the Donald Trump is actually sophisticated enough and far-sighted enough to have selected a perfect and deaf choice to be his vice president because he can do the ideological work to consolidate and crystallize whatever Trump is
and is into the future when Trump is gone. Is that what happened here? I think with Trump, you have to accept everything as existing in like a foggy cloud of probability distributions. And so I'd say if you could take it. So it's accidental political genius? Well, does it have to be political genius or not? I mean, it might be that it works out exactly that way. It also might be that JD Vance gets in there and imagines that he's going to be the
chief ideologist of the Maga movement. But Donald Trump, as he was musing to Bloomberg, picks Jamie Diamond to be Treasury Secretary and everything JD Vance is saying about how Lena Khan is great and we should have this robust antitrust enforcement and we should get rid of this globalized financialized capitalism and the guy who's actually running a lot of economic policy for Donald Trump and who Donald Trump respects as a business person is Jamie Diamond.
Like, we don't know if that will happen, but it's the kind of thing that repeatedly happens around Donald Trump. Why Donald Trump chose JD Vance? I wouldn't say I know. There's a theory that he was choosing an heir to the Maga movement who can be the ideologist and he was not. It's also possible that he just likes what I would call this sort of other stream of it, which is Vance's populist aesthetic, right? So I'll give a way of thinking about this,
which which may be policy's ideas apart. I just have on my show or in Cass, who is Mitt Romney's former domestic policy director in 2012, underwent this huge himself ideological conversion, founded group called American Compass, which has become like the nerve center of this sort of reformist populist conservative group in the Senate and in Republican Party politics. And Orncast has no populist aesthetic, right? He's not an angry person. He's not a
contemptuous person. He and I had a very interesting and for me, like very enjoyable conversation, you know, and there's things we agree on and things we disagree on. But he is sort of creating populist economic policy for Republicans without any kind of genuine populist aesthetic. JD Vance, if you listen to interviews he gives to Steve Bannon, to Dr. Carlson, etc. One dimension of him has been to really be an unbelievably contemptuous jerk to Democrats, right? To liberals,
to call them, you know, these miserable cat ladies who just hate their life choices. And that's why they have the politics they do. And then there's this other side, which is, you know, actually creating this populist economic or backing this populist economic policy. So he is he's combining this sort of policy here of the populist conservatives
with this in your face contemptuous and agonistic political style. And that is it's possible that what Trump responded to was that in your face contemptuous political style, it's also possible that what Donald Trump responded to was a sense that JD Vance would be the kind of person who would have done what Mike Pence did not do and refuse to certify the 2020 election, whereas a Marco Rubio, a
Doug Burgham would have done what Mike Pence did and certified something like the 2020 election. And so there is also the possibility that Donald Trump doesn't care that much about JD Vance's you know, high-falutin ideas about what MAGA policy shouldn't should not be. And that instead, what Donald Trump cares about is the fact that JD Vance will back him in the breach. And you know,
we'll fall in line when Trump needs it. Most, which is when some of these other figures would say, no, my my commitment is to, you know, potentially American institutions, not not directly to you. Vance is certainly signal that is not that is not the stance he would take. I'll be right back with Ezra Klein after this. A lot of smart people don't feel smart about their money. We have so many questions.
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But that won't get you the help your business needs. What you should really say is something that can help. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. State Farm agents are ready to help you with your claim to help you get back in business. On the phone or in person, your State Farm agent is there to help. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. I want to shift our focus a little bit more to the Democrats. Here's something you wrote or said.
Quote, I think one reason Democrats react so defensively to critiques of Biden is they've come to a kind of fatalism. They believe it is too late to do anything else. And if it is too late to do anything else, then to talk about Biden's age is to contribute to Donald Trump's victory. But that's absurd. And quote, and one of the reasons she said that's absurd is because it was February. You wrote that in February. And you said fatalism this far before the election is ridiculous.
Yeah, it's too late to throw this to the primaries, but it's not too late to do something. Is it too late now in July? I don't think it is too late now. I think it is not as advantageous as it would have been if people had done what I was suggesting in February. But I think the Democrats are driving me truly crazy, just marching, marching towards what they believe to be to
feed. Look, if I were calling Democrats, if I were talking to congressional Democrats, if I were talking to Democratic strategists, and what they were saying to me is no as right, you're wrong. Donald Trump is not going to win this election. Joe Biden is a strong candidate. He's going to make up the gap in the polls. And we just have a different political theory of this and you do. Fine, fair enough. How many elections have I personally won zero elections?
No. What they are saying to me is they believe Joe Biden is going to lose. And that includes people supporting Joe Biden. That includes people who are mouthing all the platitudes about how he's our nominee in public. And that is driving me crazy. When you're going to lose, try something else. Yeah. Is anyone of note behind the scenes, and you have a lot of people you talk to a lot of sources, is anyone who's notable and prominent saying behind the scenes, they really think that
Biden has a good and clear shot? I have spoken to no people who say that. I think probably, you know, if you talk to like Joe Biden's campaign manager, they will make that argument to you. I have heard people I've talked to people who may are making that argument too, and that argument is not convincing or compelling at this juncture. I will say this is clearly as I can. I do not know a person who in a private conversation will tell me that Joe Biden is a even odds or better than
that chance to win the election. Now, what what some might say is that it is too chaotic. It is too impossible to imagine replacing him, right? For a period of time, this argument was Kamala Harris would be weaker than Joe Biden. People don't do exactly not a crazy argument. People seem to believe that less now than they did before. And then the other version is, you know, doing an open convention, there's no time. It'll be chaos. It'll be due fractures for the party. So I do think
there's been a kind of paralysis among Democrats that they don't believe Biden is strong. They now believe he's probably fatally wounded, but they can't figure out how to do anything else. They don't know how to make him step aside. If he did step aside, they're not sure they would win anyway. Nobody wants to be blamed for the loss in theory. You're not going to get blamed if Joe Biden loses. He's going to get blamed if he loses. So there's been a kind of flight to passivity
that some paralysis, right? Yeah, they've frozen. You wrote this just to analyze why Biden is in the position he is and why his supporters and advisors are where they are. I thought it was very well put. You wrote this again also in February, quote, the question the Biden administration keeps pretending only to hear is this can Biden do the job of president? Well, you're right, but that
is not the question of the 2024 campaign. The insistence that Biden is capable of being president is being used to shut down discussion of whether he's capable of running for president, end quote, why are those two things so different from each other? Back then, and I would say I find them a little less different today than I did then, but back then when we had a lot less information about how Biden was on the campaign trail, but you could see that he wasn't doing many interviews
and was doing no hard interviews. He was skipping the Super Bowl interview. And in this press conference, which was very rare for him, he does not give many press conferences, where he came out to rebut the special council report about his memory. He managed to mix up Mexico and Egypt, creating the very worries about his memory and his cognition that he was trying to quiet. You could see in that set where my read of this was they are keeping him locked up and scripted because they don't believe
he can perform that well in public. And everything I had seen in the moments when he did perform in public suggested he could not perform that well in public. Look, I did not have information that he was not making good decisions in meetings. I thought the administration was largely making good
policy decisions. But if you cannot run for president, if you're an unpopular president behind in the polls, who has not been able to make a case for your agenda, and it appears your campaigning skills and communication skills have degraded to the point that your own campaign staff will not put you out in the places you need to be to make the case for your agenda, then you have walked yourself into a very serious problem, which is you're not going to make up the
ground you need to make, right? If you're way ahead in the polls, fine, maybe you can run a front porch or back porch campaign. But if you're behind in the polls, you can't do that. And so at that point, I would say that they were arguing about cognition and ignoring the question of performance. And they knew it because I had spoken to many of them about it. And they were sort of, you know, I
thought making an argument that was disingenuous. Now it is really a, it is really evidence of how far things have fallen that the argument that they are having to go back and forth on is actually about cognition and not performance. I think something hidden a little bit in thinking about that February piece is it the situation now and the perceptions of Biden now are significantly worse than it was then. And it was quite bad then. I'll just say there was an AP, you know,
associated press and or a C poll that came out today. And it found that a huge, a huge, super majority of Democrats wanted Biden to step aside. But it found that only three and 10 Democrats believed Biden had the cognitive fitness for the job. But the more I think telling thing is it noted that in February, it had asked the poll had had that same question. So before the debate and only four in 10 Democrats thought Biden had the cognitive fitness for the job. So this was
the other piece of it for me. You can see this in every poll. The American people had decided Biden was too old for this. And the Democrats were just not listening. And given that they had to change this perception, the fact that Biden could not perform in ways that were changing the perception of him was an obvious blinking red light that the party was simply refusing to see. So what are they supposed to do? How did it unfold in a way that makes sense? It's consistent
with Democratic principles. And that is, you know, a path to victory for the Democratic party. I think it is folly at this point to suggest that anything is risk-free. But obviously running Biden is not risk-free. Running Biden has become unbelievably risky. So that's I think the first place to begin, right? When you're doing something where the expected payoff is tremendously negative, plausibly a landslide for Donald Trump and Senate Republicans. It's going to be very hard for
Democrats to win the Senate if they lose a bunch of the seats this year. The map is going to be very bad for them. Then you have to try something else. My view, like that I've argued over and over and over again, is that the way political candidates have been chosen for most of American history is that political conventions. And yes, it is unfamiliar. But it would be a, I think the Democratic Party has a huge amount of talent that Democratic delegates who are Biden delegates want to win
the election. It's not a super weird ideological group of people. And that running the kind of, you know, Biden decided to step aside after their Republican convention, you could have all these candidates out there, you know, doing CNN town halls and giving speeches and lobbying delegates and doing debates with each other, giving people information. Then at the convention, we could have what we used to have, which is a process of voting for the ticket. And out of that, a strategically
capable ticket could emerge. People say, oh no, that's ridiculous. The Democrats couldn't possibly make a strategic choice. But I would say that if you look at Democratic performance since 2018, Democrats have been relentlessly strategic about candidate decisions. By the way, including in co-in uniting around Joe Biden in 2020, which was like not the choice that was, you know, inside the most passionate hearts of the Democratic base, it was a choice they made strategically.
And so, you know, Trump is having a very, very good convention. As of the moment that we are talking, he had this assassination attempt that led to this iconic photograph of him with his fist up and blood running down his face. He's a much stronger candidate than he was now. He has a kind of fresh face, although I think politically very vulnerable vice presidential pick and dance. And, you know, if Democrats scrambled the chess board and nominated a ticket that actually lit
like the country on, or at least lit their own voters with some fire, right? Where they weren't just voting its Donald Trump, but they were excited to vote for this Democratic ticket, whatever it might be. And I don't prejudge what it might be. That would be a quite strong way to reset the terms of the election. I mean, again, right now Joe Biden is not that far behind Donald Trump. But by the way, like other candidates are pulling better against Donald Trump. And so I think
there's very, and Biden is pulling way behind Democratic Senate candidates. So I think there's very good reason to believe Joe Biden is currently and was before the debate pulling at or very near the floor for a Democratic candidate running against Trump. So you have the possibility of a
lot more upside in another candidate. And yes, maybe you lose. But right now you are almost certainly going to lose whatever like, like if you look at the good election models, not like the 538 model that shows Biden behind in the polls and behind in the fundamentals, but somehow likely to win aside from that. Like Nate's over leaving that that that website like has been very,
very bad for the model there. If you look at the economist model, you look at Nate Silver's model, you just look at like the polling, you talk to Democratic strategies, you look at the behavior of Democrats in purple and purple districts. Like the party can see where this is going. And unless
like all the numbers are wrong, it's very dangerous. Yeah, you know, it's funny. Everyone modeled these magazines, economists and others that you mentioned to a person everywhere in the world, the United States and everywhere in the world predicted to an absolute certainty that we would
have a recession in 2023. And the guy who we've been talking about who I don't understand why he's not said every day 10 times a day, his policies and his leadership, averted what everyone thought was going to be in your certain recession is now a guy who may be in his mind thinks, you know, I've been down this road before and people said it could never happen. So I don't believe them and I believe in myself. Do you think that's true of Biden or do you think there's some part of
Biden that also thinks that this is a low probability proposition for him? I don't know what Biden thinks. I don't know what information he's getting or being given and not getting. Reporting is he's very bunker down among family and highly loyal advisors. I mean, he is talking to some congressional Democrats. So he's certainly hearing from them increasingly on calls. He's probably not reading, you know, the New York Times and the Washington Post, right? He's very,
very angry at the press. People don't, you know, are not in their most open-minded information evaluating perspective when they're under the kind of pressure he is under. So I don't know what he thinks exactly. I suspect he's hearing more about good polls for him than bad polls for him and that's probably happening by a lot. And, you know, if you listen to him, he said something at the press conference that I found very unnerving, which is, yeah, I think it was at the press conference,
but it's possible as one of the interviews. I've been watching a lot of Biden immediately. But he says, I think towards the end of that, you know, the only way he would step aside is if his pollsters, his team came to him and said he had no chance of winning, no chance. There's no chance. But they're not saying that. But I thought it was very, very telling that he didn't say, you know, I would step aside if I thought I didn't have the best chance of beating
Donald Trump. Like this was a very, very important shift in the ways he talked about himself as the best qualified to beat Donald Trump, you know, at other times, the sort of Biden theory of everything, he's got to run because Donald Trump is so divisive. Democrats should have ran him and nominated him in 2016, which is true. And then in 2020, after being counted out, he did, he did win the nomination and he won. And so they've made this mistake before. And like Joe Biden is the
person who can beat Donald Trump. And I think that is the way he understands it. But I think that the fact that he's now talking in terms of he would step aside if he were told it was hopeless, not if he were persuaded that he was not the candidate likely as to win is telling where I think in his mind, this has become about him and about him proving something to everyone else. And you know, that's that's dangerous. Yeah. Well, there's another concerning thing he said during his interview with
George Stephanopoulos. And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January? I feel as long as I give it my all and I take the goodest jobs. I know I can do that's what this is about. I think that gave some Democrats pause as well, right? I'm sympathetic to Joe Biden in the sense that I mean, I'm sympathetic to him in many senses, but but here in the sense it is very hard to give good answers when you're repeatedly
being asked, why don't you step aside? Aren't you wrong for this position? What are you going to do if Donald Trump wins? Right? Like that's a it's a lot of pressure. But to what we were talking about earlier, he's not performing well under that pressure, right? That was a disastrous answer from to give that as long as I've done depending on how how you heard him the goodest job I can or the good as a job I can, which doesn't actually make any sense. He would feel fine about it, right?
That was that was like a an answer designed to freak Democrats out. Is that how Joe Biden in his best moments thinks of it? I don't know that it is, but the problem is that as it becomes clear that he doesn't have the performance skills and he doesn't to make up ground here, he needs to give an answer like that because he doesn't have an answer that people are going to believe that that he is the candidate with the, you know, the highest level of political skill right now.
Look, I don't know if people watched this interview that Biden gave to a YouTuber named Speedy. This is like a 20 minute interview, Speedy, you know, it works for a complex, which is a, you know, he's a young African-American guy. Biden was doing this to reach a group that he's having trouble with, which is like young men who watch YouTube, right? That's some, he needs to win more of them than he is. This is just like a softball interview. Speedy is a friendly chill interviewer,
and Biden is just terrible. Like it is just a bad performance. It's not that he says something so wrong. He doesn't completely lose the thread and go blank, but he's not going to, there is not a person who watched that interview who would be converted by it in my view. And go watch it, right? Like this is a thing people should be doing is like actually watching Biden's performance his day in and day out and seeing if he's up to the job. And this is the problem. He doesn't have
the juice anymore to do it. He can't turn these questions to his advantage. He's not nimble on his feet, right? He gets a question and he, you know, flops it like saying that, you know, if he does a good as job or good as job as he can, like that's enough, I am a person who for years was arguing against the power of presidential rhetoric. I wrote a New Yorker piece years ago called the
unpersuaded about the tendency of presidential rhetoric to anti-persuade, right? The stronger perspective president takes on something the more he polarizes the other party against it. I am like the first to tell you campaign skills are not everything. I have been involved in the building of fundamental based political models to predict elections. We built one at the Washington Post on Wank blog, which I ran in 2012. It predicted the election to within a tenth a percentage
point of the popular vote. Campaign skills are not everything. They are not nothing. When you're behind, they're very much not nothing. And the sense people have of your fitness for office, they're confidence in you as a leader. That is important, right? Like once you clear that bar, campaign skills may not matter that much after that, but you got to clear that bar and he's not clearing it. Just ask Michael Bloomberg or Bill Bradley. I think there was a notable and I think
they're both strong, powerful leaders. I like and respect them both. I think an argument can be made that they were formidable candidates and formidable vision and leadership skills. When when it came to seeking the office of the presidency, their campaign skills fell short. I would say they're both factional candidates. I mean, I have probably a different interpretation of them, which is that they were both factional candidates, right? They were candidates running
from the sort of radical centrist wing of the Democratic Party. And the actual candidates win and can do very well if they have the campaign goods. Yeah, I don't think that kind of factional candidate tends to it, but I take your broad point. Look, I would be in terms of campaign skills, I would be much more comfortable with Michael Bloomberg up on the stage against Donald Trump. And that's not by the way, Michael Bloomberg ran in 2020. That's not how I felt about that then, right?
I thought four years makes a big difference. Yeah, four years can make a big difference. Part of the problem is the reason that Biden is not doing well in the polls is not, I mean, I know there's inflation, but it's not because there is some objective thing that's happening that can then be turned around. The trajectory given how he is is at best, in the best case scenario, the same that he will display the same performance at a debate or an
interview in four months as he's displaying now. And so I wonder what you think, and I think you've written this or some other very smart person like you has written this. The press narrative is an interesting question, right? So if there is a challenge at a convention and there's a replacement with the blessing of Joe Biden and in a sort of like whirlwind, somebody new comes to the top of the ticket and there's a new person at the in the second spot as well, do the Democrats
then start to get more of the oxygen than Trump? Because that's been the story of the Trump campaign. Even when the story every day is that Trump is losing a civil case, Trump has been adjudicated a sexual assault or Trump has been adjudicated at criminal felon, he's still getting all the attention. Can Democrats in some way count on winning a little bit more of the attention if there's a change or does it not work that way? No, it exactly works that way. I mean, look, going back months now,
I was arguing that Democrats have no real theory of attention in this campaign. To the extent they did, the theory was to focus attention on Donald Trump. That was Mike Donald and Joe Biden's key strategies often said this, that the election was going to be about democracy about January 6th. Joe Biden has had whether this was strategic or reflective of his communication limitations. He has had a very restrained presidential communication style. He just not try to drive media
through high intensity appearances. What they've done in 2020, Donald Trump was the incumbent. Obviously attention was focused on him in 2020. A lot of attention was focused on on MAGA figures who were running in Senate primaries and then ultimately in Senate general elections. And the theories are going to do that again in 2024. And the American people are going to look at Donald Trump and say, we hate that guy. We're flocking to Biden. We're with Joe.
And it was a completely reasonable theory that did not pan out. And notably, the Biden campaign asking for and negotiating out a completely unexpected June debate was built on this theory. They thought the whole thing they had to do was get the public to take seriously the possibility of a Trump restoration. And when people saw Trump and Biden on that stage when it felt real to them, they would flock back to Biden. And so an important way, I think of thinking about where the Biden
team is right now, is their theory failed. And they have not come up with an alternative one. They made a huge high risk gamble and running Biden again. They made a huge high risk gamble in the June debate. And the theory collapsed. Now they are getting attention. Every interview Biden does is closely watched. But it's the exact kind of attention you don't want. There is a narrative
that Biden is cognitively unfit for the presidency. And every time, and it happens constantly, that Biden stumbles, that he sort of trails off in the middle of an answer and says, oh, I should stop. I shouldn't go on, that he mixes up words, that he has this kind of low, raspy voice that you can barely hear, that it confirms this thing that voters already thought about him. And so, yeah, you both need a new attention strategy and you want to get a different kind of attention. And
this is a challenge. How do you do it? Biden probably can't do it, right? If he was able to perform at a super high level day after day after day, we would have seen it by now. We are not seeing it, we're seeing the opposite. He has good days, bad days, the press conference after the NATO summit was a good day. Some of the other interviews we've seen have been bad days. The debate was a bad day. The bad days seem to be getting more frequent. They seem to be getting
more severe. If they did this completely unexpected, huge thing and had an open convention, changed the ticket, put all this attention on new faces, it could become a Harris, but not only. Yes, I mean, for better or for worse, they would have a huge shot of attention and the entire terms of the race would be reset. We don't know what would happen on the other side of that,
but that is better than having a pretty damn good idea. What is going to happen on the other side of this and the thing that will happen is Donald Trump winning a significant victory. You wrote speaking of Kamala Harris, that there's a good case to be made that she's underrated. Make that case. I think she is underrated. I think that if you go back to 2020, Kamala Harris was seen as a huge rising star. You look at her 2020 presidential campaign. It was sort of
rudderless, but she had good moments, right? Like the debate where she sliced into to Biden. She was a strong enough communicator that the Biden campaign chose her as vice president. She did not make huge mistakes during the general election as vice presidential candidate. I think that Harris has had a real problem of political identity because she had been a smart on crime, moderate, black, Democrat in California. Then she became national and ran for president at a time
when the politics in the Democratic Party did not want that anymore. They were very oriented towards criminal justice reform. So Harris sort of abandoned that political identity, but never rebuilt a new one that then becomes vice president. Then has this kind of very weird total collapse in the estimation of her in political circles in Washington, D.C. You can't really point to a thing that went terribly for her as vice president, or at least not unusually so. But yet all of a
sudden, it's like, oh, this was a terrible pick. She's so much weaker than Biden. She's pulling beneath him that give her a series of impossible assignments like the border, which she was never going to be able to solve. Then there's a theory that she's quite weak. I think she is underrated. I think you see that in the interview she's given to some of the speeches she's given. She's
clearly more capable as a campaigner right now than he is. But the thing I will say about her is that she is never won an election where she has been the name atop the ticket in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, in Michigan. And underrated, if you say that she is currently seen on a like a political skills measure as like a five out of 10, which I'm not saying is true, but for the sake of argument, she could be underrated and be a six out of 10. And she could be underrated and be an 8.5 out of 10.
And those are very, very different conditions for the Democratic Party, which is why I think you need some kind of, as Jim Clyburn put it, mini primary, where you test out the candidates, you see how she would present herself, you kind of stack her up against other people in the party. And the Democratic Party makes a choice for the strongest candidate. It can have not just falling in line. I mean, they almost fell in line behind Biden. It was a huge mistake.
Don't fall in line with that insufficient information about the campaigning skills of the person you're falling in line behind. I think that should be like an obvious lesson out of this year. Ezra, thanks so much for your time and your insight. Great to have you on the show again. Thanks so much y'all. I really appreciate it. My conversation with Ezra Klein continues for members of the Cafe Insider community.
I do not want to see Donald Trump win the election. But the best case scenario for them is they win a victory that is significant enough. It's just kind of a smooth transition of power. To try out the membership for just one dollar for a month, head to cafe.com slash insider. Again, that's cafe.com slash insider. I want to end the show this week by talking about a criminal case that hasn't gotten as much
attention as it may have deserved. On Tuesday, Senator Bob Anandez was convicted on all counts by a jury in New York. If you recall, the Senator was charged in federal court with wire fraud, bribery, extortion, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent. He had been previously indicted on different charges some years ago. But the jury hung, and Menendez was not retried. The charges here included some salacious allegations related to
accepting gold bars, envelopes of cash, and a luxury car. So it's not surprising at all to me that he was convicted. Now, I have a couple of comments. First, astonishingly, Senator Menendez does not automatically get expelled from the Senate and doesn't have to resign. As fellow senators could vote to expel him, though, if they so choose. My former boss, Senate Majority Leader Chuck
Schumer, swiftly called on Menendez to resign. He said in a statement, quote, in light of the guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, in our country, and resign. End quote. Second, here's my other comment. This was an important and powerful Senator prosecuted by an administration of his own party. Let me repeat that. Prosecuted by an administration of his own party because he was deserving of prosecution,
because it was a meritorious case. Even though he was a Democrat and the Senate hangs in the balance, he was prosecuted without fear or favor by my former office. And in the wake of the conviction, you don't hear me or prominent elected officials moaning and crying witch hunt or rigged or banana republic or calling out the judge or the jury or the Department of Justice. Now, just compare that to some other jury verdicts recently. This is the rule of law,
the Department of Justice and my former office, SDNY at work. Can I respect that work? No matter the political affiliation of the defendant in question. Though I do have but one little quibble with my successor, US Attorney Damien Williams, after the verdict he did what I did many times. He made a statement post verdict and he brought out the team to thank them too. The only problem is that he did it outside in 96 degree heat on a hot Manhattan sidewalk. I might have opted for a venue with AC.
Well, that's it for this episode of Stay Tune. Thanks to my guest, Ezra Klein. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. Tweet them to me at Prit Barar with the hashtag Ask Prit. You can also now reach me on threads or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That's 669-24-Prit.
Or you can send an email to letters at cafe.com. Stay tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tattaschor. The deputy editor is Celine Roer. The editorial producers are Noah Azalai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernandez and the cafe team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Leanna Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I'm your host,
Prit Barara. As always, stay tuned. What if you could remember everything? Everything you said, everything you did, everything other people said and did around you, everything you ate, everything you watched, everywhere you went. What if you could remember all of it? On this episode of The Vergecast brought to you by Metta, we explore how AI might make that possible and what it might mean to be a person in a world where nobody forgets anything ever
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