Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News and Analysis - NO SPIN INTERVIEW: Mark Halperin

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Bill talks with political analyst Mark Halperin about the current state of the presidential race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining us now for New York City is a guy I think you will remember or you know well from his internet operation, Mark Halpern. He's been around and he knows politics as well as anybody in the country. He is the founder of Wide World of News Concierge Coverage and a host of Two-Way. So what exactly is the wide world of news concierge coverage, Halpern? Bill, thanks for having me. I have two businesses, and they both involve political coverage. Concierge coverage is really for people who have enough money to afford a premium product. You can go on walking.com slash mark and read about it.

It's a daily newsletter, and it's a series of conversations over Zoom, featuring some of the top strategists and journalists and thinkers and politicians in America. And it gives you a pretty in-depth, sophisticated set of information, if you're in business and you need actionable information to make business judgments, it's there. And if you just want to know what's going on in a very sophisticated, nuanced way, that's there. Two-way is more...

Go ahead. Go ahead. Two-way is what? Two-way is more for everybody. You can go on my Twitter account. You can read about how to be part of two-way. Two-way is a series of conversations that involve people from all over the country, very similar. But it's more open. It's not just the most...

elite political figures and it's a much more affordable and often free product that anybody can be part of. And it brings together sophisticated political players in conversation with citizens from around the country and live two-way video. All right. So based on both of those descriptions, I could not be possibly involved in your operation at all. Because I just don't, I can't read. You'd be a welcome. You'd be a welcome addition. Now, you've been around for a while. I mean, work at ABC. Do you give your opinion? in these things? Do you tell people what you believe and why you believe it, like I do?

I give people my analysis. I'm a nonpartisan journalist. Okay. So it's not an ideological site. You just tell them what may happen. So then let's segue into. Well, it is, here let me just say what's different about it, I think, is it's not for moderate, centrists and independence only, although we have plenty of those. It's for people on the far left and the far right and the center left and center right who want to hear from the other side. So we bring all voices together on our own route, but we don't, we don't have shouting, we don't have attacks, we have peace, love, and understanding, an attempt to give people an insight into what's going on in a part of America. They may not spend much time in their

normal lives. All right, so based upon what you are hearing in your quote-unquote conversations, I hate that word, where does the election stand now? Is it as the polling demonstrates that it It could go either way, or is it tilting one way or another? And based upon what you have accumulated. It could go either way. And while there are a lot of variables, including, you know, very mechanical things like early vote and get out the vote and who makes the best TV ads, I think there's basically one variable. If the country thinks about Kamala Harris when they start to vote, the way Donald Trump wants people to think about her, she'll lose. If they think about her the way they think about her now, she'll win.

all right so she's trying to run out the clock by saying anything that might be controversial like i support reparations for slavery or anything like that and the mainstream media is allowing that to happen you get a little bit of criticism on it but not really a crescendo um and so personally no i mean i'm just in a general sense i believe that the harris strategy is to run out the clock and not say anything controversial at all, just to be hope and values and all that. I think that that's what she's going to try to do. Yeah. And I think her biggest advantage there, well, two really. One is she's got very sophisticated people working for her now. She hasn't always. She won the game of musical chairs because when she was thrust on to the

top of the ticket, she just happened to have very sophisticated people. They know what the traffic will bear. They know just how often they have to put her out to kind of get the public and the press off her back. But the other thing is, the very same people who spent years covering up Joe Biden's loss of mental acuity are the exact same organizations, editors, anchors, reporters, who are now in charge of trying to make Kamala Harris explain herself the American people. It's unlikely that they're going to be very aggressive about that. No, they won't. They're rooting for her to win because they despise Donald Trump. Now, the American voter, though, faced the same thing in 1980.

Whereas the machine, the propaganda machine and Democratic Party was trying to convince everybody Jimmy Carter was the greatest president. And all these problems with inflation and gas lines and no respect overseas, they were going to work out. And Reagan was just dunce from Hollywood who didn't know anything. But the folks overrode the media tilt toward Carter. But that was then, and now we're in cyber world, correct? Well, yeah, we are in cyber world, and that gives Donald Trump outlets. I mean, he's going on all these broish podcasts. Those didn't exist for Reagan, but also Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan.

He's got a lot of strengths. He, like Reagan, has a movement behind him. But I think Reagan had greater political skills than Trump does. And I think Trump's the third best presidential candidate of the modern era. but he's still third, not first, or second. And so it makes it unpredictable. If this were, even George W. Bush running against Kamala Harris, I think they'd have the discipline to define her on such negative terms

regarding her recent policy positions that she would lose. It's just not clear to me and to my sources, including people who work for Donald Trump, that he will have the discipline to do this. Well, I just laid out a very simple way for him to do it on next Tuesday. It's an infallible way. You couldn't stop him for doing that. And he could just load it up with just a few facts. You don't want to overwhelm anybody.

You want to say, look, I mean, how does it go from one four to nine? And how do you accept and promote an open border when the catastrophe is right before everybody's eyes? And you doesn't get any simpler than that. But Donald Trump, to me, is kind of isolated. You know, he's not, he doesn't take a lot of advice from him. outsiders. I don't see it. I think there's a couple of people that have his attention within his campaign. Do you know anything about that? Well, I think it's more than a couple. I think there's probably about 12 people who listens to, three of whom he talks to on the patio at Mar-a-Lago

when he's in South Florida, some of whom work for his campaign, some of whom are outside advisors. But he tends to listen to all of them. And when they disagree, he tends to kind of mull it over and not necessarily go with the best advice. He also has huge confidence, as you know, in his own judgment. He is getting the exact advice you just laid it out, and there's some chance he'll do it, but I think there's a greater chance he won't do it the way you would do it or the way some of his advisors would ask him to do it.

Why not? Because that's almost an infallible way to put her on the defensive where she can't get out because she can't answer those questions. She simply can't. You know, Hillary, yeah, I understand exactly what you're saying. You know, Hillary Clinton has long said that when her husband dies, Bill Clinton dies, they should study his brain. Scientists should study his brain.

I'd say the same about Donald Trump. He's not a stupid man at all. His liberty is at stake here because if he doesn't win, there's a much better chance he goes to prison. He's been given the exact advice that you've laid out and deemed infallible. And yet, just something about his brain does not necessarily allow him to have. execute this. Well, it's emotion. He gets emotional up there. He's got to go in and no matter what they throw out him or say to him, whether it's unfair, whether it's defamatory, he's just going to knock that out and concentrate on Kamala Harris, my opponent, cannot explain her positions and will

not explain them. That's it. Because the American people, it's small ball stuff. That's not what, it's how much money we're spending, what her vision is of a huge central government. that controls every part of Americans' lives. That's what she wants. And Trump is a libertarian capitalist. So, but anyway, final question for you, do you believe that the American electorate, as it stands now, with record-breaking, you know,

amounts of people going to the polls, is not smart enough to elect somebody who's not going to hurt them? I'm starting to lose confidence, of folks a little bit. Well, this takes me back to my platform two-way, where you hear the point of view you just expressed from Trump supporters, but you also hear folks say,

I can't vote for someone who denies he lost the election. I can't vote for someone who set a set down and stood by on January 6th. I can't vote for someone who lies the way they say Trump lies or who's mean the way they say Trump lies, or who's mean the way they say Trump's mean. So this is why this is a tough election. If you look at the charts, like if they were patients of Harris and of Trump separately,

you would say neither of them could possibly win the election. But the reason why they're tied is they both have the possibility of beaten the other guy, or in this case the other gal, because they have deep vulnerabilities. All right, Mark. Appreciate it very much. The wide world of news, concierge coverage, and two ways. Thanks for helping us out today. Thank you, Bill.