Good morning, peeps, and welcome to ok F Daily with Meet Your Girl. Daniel Moody recording from the Home Bunker. I want to start off today with talking about the two debates that were announced. So first off, I got to say that I will be surprised if these debates take place. The first one is supposed to happen, I believe in June, I want to say, And this second
one is supposed to take place in September. And the Biden administration is calling for, you know, two debates instead of three, and putting them much earlier in the calendar year. And you have some folks that are having the most ridiculous takes on this change, right and talking about, oh, the Biden, particularly Nate Silver, who I don't understand at all, but who says that the Biden administration is supposed to be the organization is supposed to be the administration that
upholds norms. First off, what the fuck norms do we have left in this country? And are we supposed to pretend that Donald Trump did not blow off debates, did not bring COVID to one of the debates that he attended as a way to I don't know, get Biden sick or everyone in the audience sick. Do we not recognize that we no longer live in an environment where
political norms are upheld? And so this idea that one party is supposed to be the party that holds up political norms while the other one can be as badshit crazy as they'd like, doesn't make any sense to me. And so I think that it is incredibly important one that, of course there'll be some sense of normalcy, meaning that the Biden administration is going to move forward as they would normally do when seeking a second term, but they're going to do so on their terms of what makes
sense for them. Because Donald Trump, like, why are we trying to negotiate in good faith with the domestic terrorists? I have no idea. Also, I think that debates are stupid. No one is going to watch a debate for anything
other than some type of entertainment value. People do not make decisions about which candidate they're going to vote for based on how someone performed with prescripted questions by a moderator that is not going to offer any type of hard questions, that is not going to do any type
of follow up like this. Debates are essentially a game show, right, If you really want to hear from people, if you really want to understand the substance of whatever the campaign agendas are, then to me, town halls make more sense, right, actual town halls, and not with your super supporters, but with the mix of independence, Democrats and Republicans from all walks of life that actually reflect America and allow people to ask questions that like make sense to their day
to day lives, and the candidates then respond to that. I can tell you that I remember. I'm not, you know, too old to remember when MTV was doing you know, debates and Bill Clinton went on, right, and you're sitting with a group of like, you know, young people and getting to know what's on their mind, and like you, there's no way to really prep right, like you're you're listening and you're answering questions and you're trying to connect. I miss those days. I don't think that we'll ever
return to them. But I think that it's important for us to understand that like, this is political theater. This is not some type of framework that is meant to give you any more or less information than you have right now. And the fact is is that most people only begin to tune in to the election, maybe about
two months to a month beforehand. So even this first debate taking place on June twenty seventh, will most Americans be tuned in, probably but probably to see what kind of hot shit is going to come out of Donald Trump's mouth, whether or not he's going to fall asleep or fart, and whether or not the moderator who, regardless of who they are, going to have the worst job on that day, because no one will think that they did well, and if they do do well, it'll be
based on you know, which candidate ended up doing well. No one wins in this right, But I think that the takes that I'm seeing on social media around the scheduling and whether or not Donald Trump will actually show up and show up in a way like I don't really care. We already know who Donald Trump is, right, anybody with eyes and ears no know what Donald Trump is, what he is about, what he cares about, and what The plan that the Republican Party has for this country
is Project twenty twenty five. It is about finishing the gut job on our democracy, taking over the agencies and rooting out who they deem as you know, politicized actors, which is exactly the opposite of who works in government, right,
they are apolitical. But the fact is that you know, we know what the Republicans are going to do, whether it is voting against raising the age of children to be able to get married right until they are adults at like eighteen, whether it is reversing child labor laws, whether it is further marginalizing trans people and the LGBTQ community, whether it is trying to stamp out the advancements that black people have made since the Civil Rights movement, whether
it is to criminals lies Latin X people, whether it is to criminalize migrants and immigrants that are trying to find work in this country because of the ways in which the United States has interfered in the political structure in their countries making it unsafe, which America has done for decades in Latin America. So I think that what we have to understand here is that debates, I think, in this day and age again are mostly of entertainment value, and the fact remains on whether or not Biden can
really sell right what his vision is for America. In stark contrast to Donald Trump. Now, Biden has a lot of other issues that are in front of him, Gaza being the most glaring one, with net and Yahoo most recently saying that they're not a whatever it was, some colony or whatever it was of the United States. And you know, here's what I will say about net Yahoo who this is what he said, We are not a
vassal of the United States. When it pertains to Biden saying that the RAFA invasion is the red line, you know, my whole thing is that Netanyahu has been playing chess, and I don't know what the fuck game Biden has been playing in Gaza, but he is losing. He is losing public sympathy, he is losing public engagement, and the unrest around. Our tax dollars going to fund a genocide are getting bigger and bigger and bigger by the day.
And so when this man Netnyaho decides to publicly embarrass Joe Biden and the United States, do you know what I do in response to that, I pull the fucking funds right and stop playing games and let Netanyah who know who exactly is in charge and he wants to go it alone to pursue his genocide, then let him fucking do that right, But Joe Biden is facing that in this election right where a war that is not happening on our shores are shaping public opinion, and not
to mention the trials that are taking place right and people feeling like in some instances that these are politicized when in fact that they're not. Because had Merrick Garland done what the fuck he was supposed to do in twenty twenty one, we wouldn't be here right now. So will Biden the Biden that we saw at the State of the Union show up at these debates? I think if that Joe Biden shows up and is very clear, is very assertive, is forceful and commanding, then I think
that we have a shot. But right now we're at a fifty to fifty toss up and that scares the shit out of me. Coming up next, my friends, our conversation with our in house doctor, doctor John Than Metsill, where we talk about Biden's latest poll numbers, whether or not they matter, what Democrats need to be doing in these critical days leading up to the twenty twenty four election. Folks, you know that whenever we have the opportunity to speak
with our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel. We are always thrilled it is you, and so this week we are going to discuss Joe Biden's latest poll numbers, which, surprise, surprise, not great. You know how I feel about polls this early, but we'll still dig into them because I think it's a good barometer for where things stand right now, as we can all see different headlines playing out. Jonathan, So you're saying, latest polls tell us Biden is down everywhere.
Yeah, that it was a couple of days ago, and whys and other people have been tweeting about this A lot two things have a first, Biden's pretty much down at least five percent in most swing states according to some pretty convincing polls recently, and it's true across the board. And so that's point number one. And then point number two is he and his advisors at least are saying publicly in these interviews and stuff that they're not concerned about it. And so, you know, I guess the question is,
did they share your disdain for polls. One of the things a lot of articles are pointing out right now is that Biden voters are much more invested in speaking to polsters, and so If anything, the fear is that it understates the number of people who are actually voting for Trump. So I guess the question is, you know, where are we now? Like may I think it is? What does this mean? Is there going to be some rallying?
And usually there's a bump? I mean, think about Biden for example, everybody thought he was weekend at Bernie's and then he did that stadium with the Union dress, and all of a sudden, everybody's like it totally stopped all that talk about you know, at least for now all that talk. So is there going to be like a
bump moment, a turn moment? Do they have some secret strategy that civilians like you and I don't know about, like the old member like Obama, like they had this secret where like people didn't know about like digital marketing quite yet or something like that. And so is there some is there people smart people? Or is this oblivious? And I hope it's not the third one, but it just seems like the the I mean again, there's so many things that could happen. Trump could get convicted. I
send you a great article about you did ye? Trump now being as smart as he thinks he is this. This trial shows it that his impulses are often wrong. So there's a million things he could do wrong. But I don't know, like, what do we do at this point? You know, for a while there was a oh my god, we're going to go to the convention and then we're going to nominate like Omegatron or I don't know, stay Puff, marshmallow Man or somebody else. But I don't know what's your sense of all this?
So I will say this that everybody knows that, you know, polls are subjective, right, depending on the questions that are asked, who they're asked, and how they're sent and all of these things. I say that as a precursor. I think that largely when I talk to folks, the Biden administration has a lot of wins. And I'm just speaking domestically, they have a lot of wins. What they are terrible at as every single Democrat, it seems, is really talking
about those wins. Where I think that there is a lot of issue right now is that one Biden is not I think that the people that are around him do not have the pulse, like their finger on the pulse of what's happening on the ground. I think that they believed that with Donald Trump dogged, with all of these different trials, with him saying these outlandish things and
spiraling out of control, that that was going to be enough. Right, it's not because the only people that are paying attention to the Trump trials are people that watch CNN and MSNBC. It is not being played on Fox, it's not being played in the right wing. It's not being talked about at all. So even when reporters, when people go to Trump rallies and they're like, well, what do you think about what's happening in the electoral fraud trial the hush
money case, they don't know what you're talking about. So two things can be true. I don't think that Biden is getting the right advice. That's one two. I also don't think that Trump is expanding his base at all. He is not going to be able to win without expanding his base. The only people that we talk to are the most fervent Trump supporters that don't care who he kills, what he does, any of that. But that is thirty percent of the population. You're not going to win with thirty percent.
I mean. The red herring, of course, is the Helman and the brain campaign of RFK Junior, you know all these other things. I just texted you the polls, But I mean, I don't know. Like again, I don't want to oversimplify them. Like there's a million times that I've thought, oh my gosh, you know, those people are idiots, and then it turns out they had some strategy I didn't know about, and that you know, they probably have access
to a lot of data, a lot of methods. But I will say that, like I study guns, right, eighty five percent of people support background checks, but that doesn't mean anybody's going to win an election based on a background check, right. People don't vote based on gun issues.
Liberals don't vote based on gun issues. So even though eighty five percent of people will tell you I support background checks, Democrats for so long have misinterpreted with that data means because popular support is not the same thing as winning an election. And so I don't know there. I mean, I just feel like we're like floating around in space right now. There are so many different medias that could hit us.
You know, that's good, that's such a good enough.
I mean, I went down the route all of watching the part of the speech of RFK Junior's vice presidential candidate, Like I do, it is time and and so you know, I just think there's so many things that could happen. But again that's where like having a really robust they're gonna have to mount some kind of really robust, vibrant campaign. I mean, there are things that are happening, Like did you see that Biden now is raising all these tariffs on China in ways that people are actually going to feel,
So you know, that's such a Trump move. He's kind of taking a page out of Trump's playbook. So I mean again, there if for some if some miracle, they get a a cease fire and some viable strategy forward. I mean, I actually think, in my opinion, Lincoln's making a ton of sense right now about the long term plan, and so if any of these things could kind of change course. And I don't know what's happening behind the scenes,
but I will this is what let me say. This is my long way of sharing your nervousness but not wanting to articulate it.
I mean, but I will say this, Like to be honest, I think that Joe Biden needs to not run a campaign against Donald Trump. I think that he needs to
run a campaign against the Republican Party. Yeah, and I think that what we are missing right now, and I literally just talked about this on another show, is that the Republican Party take out Donald Trump and the circus of the trials, right, and now all of these Republicans going down to the courthouse where his family isn't even so that they can show their.
Subject, well Johnson's corn trial.
Right or auditioned for you know, Vice president, Like, this is what they're doing, right, to show their support. His own family's not showing up except for Eric and who cares about him. But in the meantime, what do we have going on in Missouri? Well, the Missouri Republicans have decided to block a measure to raise the age of marriage from sixteen to eighteen years old. Right in twenty eighteen, the age to marry in Missouri was fourteen years old.
Oh yeah, right, and they raised it from yeah. And so now two of there are Republicans that are blocking it with the audacity of saying that people need to stay out of other people's private lives, the audacity right, at the same time that they don't want to raise the age of child marriage. They're also rolling back child
worker protection laws in Alabama, right, and in Florida. You are seeing this attack of this slow roll back of an industrialized modern country into like back to a developing age. And we're not paying attention to that because we want to know if Donald Trump is farting or is falling
asleep in a courtroom. And I'm like, and meanwhile, you have Republicans that are literally we just Arizona people might not have had that eighteen sixty four piece of legislation stay on the books if not for it making the headline. So we're not talking about what this party as a whole is doing outside of what Donald Trump is doing. So if I'm the Biden campaign, I don't care about
Donald Trump. I care about what Republicans are doing with or without him, right, and making the case that the American people need to see that.
Okay, I want to give you three rebettal points.
Viral means, can we.
Get a screenshot of the do it? Okay? See here's the I'm from Missouri and I live in Tennessee, and Tennessee you can marry your cousin now it's legal.
Yeah I can't. That's not real life.
But the thing is, it's not like that's any surprise, but this keeps happen. People don't lose elections in red states for this, and so the Republican Party is a known quantity and and and they still win. And it's not because they have public public support. It's because they have from the ground up rigged the system by jerremandering and so people are safe, like nobody's even after the Covenant School shooting, when all these Republican ams were demanded guniform,
they didn't have. They didn't threaten these guys. And so in a way, part of the story is about the it's about the system. And that's why I was kind of hemming on a little bit before, is like, what's the goal of a presidential election which I don't know enough about, but is it sway popular opinion or is it to convince these twenty people in this one little area that might swing a swing state? You know, I think it's it's just the checks and balances about this stuff.
And I the reason I say this is because like every time in Tennessee, like literally a month ago, they legalized and it's because a guy, one of the legislators had had marry his cousin, and I'm like, oh my god, there people are going to see it for it. But now look, I mean, we've got Mike Johnson at the porn trial, you know, at the adultery trial, and so
it's all it's a power game. It's a power game, and so the question is exposing stuff that will that bring people to our side or are we trying to just mobilize our own coalition.
I mean, I think that we're only trying to mobilize our own coalition, So.
In that sense, I mean, and I don't know why this is, but like if you turn on a s NBC or something like that, it's Trump for four hours every single night. Yeah, get a story about Biden. But like last night there was a two hour special about the Trump trial, and then the next show was a whole hour about sun trial. And maybe they feel like that is what drives revenue or audience. Now, there are some I think great lessons about the Trump trial. I
mean Trump, I don't know what's going to happen. I cannot believe that they're going to get a unanimous jury on anything about Trump, just because the way the country is. But there are great articles in Politico really looking how Trump is giving all this advice. That's terrible. He's not as smart as he thinks he is. He's sabotaging his
own case by his own stubbornness, all these kinds. But there are things about Trump that, if you follow that trial, would make you nervous about that guy being president, even if you didn't know anything about all the other stuff you've done. So I think there are stories about that, but its just I don't know. I felt this for for a while, like if Biden was in our nominee, if it was Gvin Newsom or somebody else, it just seems like we would have a more news worthy candidate.
But we don't, and so in that vacuum, it's just four hours a night of Trump. And so in a way, like liberal media and all that kind of stuff in our Twitter feeds and all that all kind of play into that. And so I guess my question for you is, are you suggesting I don't know why they do that. Honestly, it doesn't make any sense to me except that it probably drives ratings or something. But are you saying we should focus on other stories or something or what?
Yeah, I think that First of all, what MSMBC does with their four hours of Trump trial coverage, This is like, honestly, this is not the O. J. Simpson trial. This is not a murder trial. If it was the document's case, right, and if it was actually televised and then you're playing back clips, this wouldn't that would make sense. In the meantime, you have Senator Katie Britt who just rolled out a piece of legislation to start a pregnancy database to track
women's pregnancies nationally, right, to track their movements. No linkage to obgyns, to actual reproductive health clinics. No, it's all about religious zelots and these fake clinics that they put up to scare women into having their babies. She's created a national policy around that. That's a fucking headline news story, right. That goes along with the IVF blockages that came out of Alabama. That goes again to say half of this country are women and people with uteruses. Pay attention to
what they're doing. Because Donald Trump becomes president and you're looking at this abortion band that's in twenty states being in fifty states, and you're looking at these national registries right like these to me are important stories that are not being like even if Biden was only putting this shit up in his social fi feeds, right and saying, look at what the Republicans have done now, right, like, you have got to show people that their agenda is
much bigger than Donald Trump. And to your point, Yeah, if we had a different candidate, I don't even know, Jonathan, if they would be newsworthy, because we've been so conditioned over the last nine years to never turn a camera away from Trump. Yeah, Like, I just I don't know who the candidate would be that would take the camera attention, the news attention away from Donald Trump.
Yeah. No, I mean again, this is this is the situation we have. We're down five points, and if we rebuild our coalition, we win. And not only if we if we rebuild our coalition, we win, but if we rebuild our coalition and we beat Trump, then we also change the Republican Party because he will have brought the presidential election twice and that'll be I think the last straw for a lot of people.
And so you know, but do we really, like we always say, and I feel like you and I have said this multiple times, this will be the nail in the coffin for the Republican Party. This will be the end for the Republican Party. Do we believe that trump Ism hasn't been metastasized so much in this country that if he loses, it doesn't just continue.
Well, I mean, look, I live in Tennessee. Trump is not the president of Tennessee, and we have horrible everything, you know. Yeah, And so I don't think it's the end of the far right turn to the conservative movement. But I do think that somebody who if Trump loses two presidential elections, I would bet that he will not be the nominee the next time after that. And so, yeah, because his whole brand is not losing, And so I do think it would be something like the end of
that particular chapter, not the not the ideology. But I mean, I guess the reason I think that's important is because think of all the all the deals we haven't been able to make, all the yeah, from Ukraine to healthcare reform, all these things, I mean, we haven't really Like when they put out the Affordable Care Act like seventy five thousand years ago, the idea was, this is version one point zero, and we're going to improve this by all negotiating and improving it, and by now we would probably
have a public option and we would have public health infrastructure. But like literally the Trump campaign was like, that's bad for our re election and so we're not gonna, you know, do it. And remember during the pandemic they tried to
like overturn the whole ACA. So it's all these things where he just stands in the way of like governance in a way, and so I don't know, I just I think there was something encouraging to me that like things could really change for the better if he That's my personal thing.
I mean, I look from your lips to God's ears, because I believe that if we are able to pull off this election, Biden puts up the same numbers that he did in twenty twenty and we're able to win. I do believe that Donald Trump's all of his trials will proceed right the ones that are on hold, and I think that he will fade from the public political discourse.
He'll still be news because of who he is, but I fear I believe that he will fade from the public the political discourse in terms of like we're not going to be looking four years out right to see if he'll run again in twenty twenty eight, right, And so I think that, yeah, we'll have an opportunity to rebuild.
But I don't think that trump Ism goes away, No, And so I don't know, for instance, if NICKI Haley, who has yet to endorse him, who is the longest lasting Republican you know in the primary challenge, who is not directing her voters to go after Donald Trump? And Donald Trump has said I don't want your voters, right, and we're talking about elections that are one in these swing state areas by thousands of votes, not hundreds of thousands or millions, you know, thousands of votes, and he's
negating that. I don't know if the Republican Party reverse his course and goes back to being normal Republicans. I think that it's been a decade of crazy. I think they just annoint a new person. But your final thoughts, well.
Again I just said my final thought is always the same, which is, we need to rebuild our coalition, like starting yesterday and so and not that that's not happening, but it's there's so many things are so so much more complicated than they were even in twenty twenty, which is hard to believe. I mean, we're in the middle of this, you know, horrible time. I'm in all these things. But right now there are so many competing narratives and that's
kind of part of the point. And so I think, I think everything we need to do is to rebuild our coalition again because I just I interview a lot of people who are well, we'll talk about it coming forward going for you know, there's a lot of regret by people who are in our position right now who then vote for some fascism, like why didn't I, why not do more? And I don't want to be in that position one hundred percent.
Well, we will leave it there. Next week, folks follow us on social if you don't already follow Jonathan and I because we are going to start our reading group conversation next week with two articles that we will tweet out and post so that folks can get engaged now and prepare for that conversation next week. Thank you, Jonathan, always appreciate you, Take care, and.
I'm going to practice the look all day.
That is it for me today, dear friends on woke A app as always power to the people and to all the people power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.