Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/22/24: Obama & Pelosi Force Biden Out, GOP Meltdown Over Biden Dropout, Van Jones Weeps Praising Biden, VP Predictions, Houthis Strike Israel

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

Krystal and Ryan discuss how Pelosi and Obama forced Biden out, mainstream media weeps in praise of Biden, Republicans meltdown over Biden dropout, will Obama sabotage Kamala candidacy, flashback to Tulsi dismantling Kamala in 2020, predictions on Kamala VP, Houthis strike Tel Aviv in major blow to Israel.    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Congratulations, Sagar. I'm sure he's bothered to be missing this week. Yeah. But if you gotta miss it, what better reason than a wedding and a honeymoon? I have a feeling if Jillian wouldn't

instantly divorce him if he was here, he would be here. But we hope he is enjoying with his beautiful bride. And we got some pictures we'll share with you in a minute,

but we have a lot to... Oh, there he is. Sagar and Jillian, they did a part Indian portion of the wedding. They did a did a part Indian portion of the wedding. They did a part Western style portion of the wedding. The picture is absolutely gorgeous. Congratulations to them. Magical evening. And yeah, we hope that he is enjoying and staying away from the news as much as possible. And we expect him to be back here in the studio on Thursday. So there you go.

Yeah, the whole wedding was spectacular. And if you want to do a little special wedding gift for Sagar and Jillian, breakingpoints.com. There you go. Nothing makes Sagar happier than to see those subscriptions coming in to keep the show going. I can vouch that is definitely the case. So, and thank you guys so much for supporting us. We've got a few things to get to this morning. A little bit of news going on in this country. Obviously, we're going to bring you all the latest about Biden withdrawing from the 2024 race. The likely ascent of Kamala Harris, although Ryan and I, because we love to fight losing battles, are going to continue to make the case for an open convention because that's just how it is on the left. We also are going to take a look at the Democratic reaction, which was

slobbering of Joe Biden and over the top, the Republican reaction, which was total meltdown and freakout. We're going to take a look at not only Kamala Harris, how she's polling, how she may run against Donald Trump, all of those things. Also, those people who, like Barack Obama, who are still making the case for an open process and whether that has any chance of potentially playing out. We're also going to look at who she could pick as her vice presidential nominee. There's already some top names in the running. We'll give you a little bit about them.

And then there is so much happening in Israel. We did not want to leave that out of the show as well. ICJ finding that the West Bank settlements are illegal. You also have extraordinary scenes as the Houthis were able to strike near the US embassy in Tel Aviv. Israel responding, so that is on a knife's edge. Also, Ryan, you have some really important reporting over at Dropsite News with regards to Israel as well. Yeah, the National Security Commission there reviewed a plan to basically foist a quote-unquote moderate Muslim government onto Gaza, that it would be basically like a Vichy Gaza regime. So like a Western puppet kind of deal.

And it's a real plan. We obtained the entire version of it and we can run through that. Amazing. All right. So let's go ahead and jump in with the latest with regards to Joe Biden. Just to back up, if you've been living under a rock, let's put the letter up on the screen. Joe Biden posting on Twitter this announcement that he would be withdrawing from the presidential race. He says, I will speak to the nation later this week in detail about my decision. He has COVID right now, apparently sounds like crap. So they decided to do this letter instead of putting him in front of the cameras once again. He says, it has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president.

While it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party in the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term. Now, when this letter initially came out, you and I and everyone else, Ryan, were like, oh, he didn't endorse Kamala Harris.

That's interesting. Minutes later, he did endorse Kamala Harris. Let's put this up on the screen. This was in a tweet. He says, my fellow Democrats, I've decided not to accept the nomination to focus all my energies on my duties as president for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my vice president. It's been the best decision I've made today. I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this

year. Democrats, it is time to come together and beat Trump. Let's do this. So Ryan, we have some behind the scenes reporting. We're going to bring in Dave Weigel here in just a few minutes to go through what we know about those final hours that actually pushed Joe Biden into making this decision. But, you know, initial reactions about the extraordinary journey that we've all been through over these past several weeks. Yeah, quite an oversight to not include Kamala Harris in the initial announcement. And it seems like they sort of like just didn't think about it and then scrambled to recover. Right. Classic. And there was there was some like, hey, wait a minute. You guys said you were going to endorse us. What happened to that? Like, oh, yeah,

we're doing that in the second post. Don't worry. Here it is. It's coming. But yeah, and we'll talk about this throughout the show. The consolidation around Kamala Harris has been pretty swift and broad from the Progressive Caucus, the Black Caucus, the New Dems, most state party chairs coming out saying that they're going to move their delegates in that direction. Party leadership, interestingly, Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries, those types staying out of it at this point and saying that a process needs to unfold. Now, there will be an open convention. There's kind of a misnomer out there. Like, there is no locked-in winner at this point. So, there will be an open ballot where delegates are going to be able to vote. There may only be one viable candidate in that. And so, how open is it

if there's not a race? But we're going to get an actual live vote. Yeah. And one of the only people who was sort of like mainstream candidate who was flirting with that was Joe Manchin. Donors apparently still loving the Joe Manchin dream, even as he's not even actually a Democrat anymore. But he has come out this morning and said, no, no, I'm not going to run for president, but also encouraging there to be other contenders and an open process. You know, just to reflect on how we got here, I think it's very clear, number one, Biden did not want to step down. Number two, he really struggled to grapple with how widespread the fallout was from the debate and just what a problem it was. It also appears from the reporting that

people have found, Democrats have kind of found a scapegoat for how Biden was in such a bubble. I mean, this is a grown man. He's been in politics a long time. He can read the polls in the New York Times and everywhere else, just like the rest of us can. But we're expected to believe that because one of his top aides, Mike Donilon, was just sort of cherry picking only the data that made it appear like Joe still had a real shot in the race, that he was able to insulate himself and convince himself that the fallout hadn't been so broad and that he wasn't in as detrimental a position as he really was. And according to the reporting from Politico, finally this weekend, first of all, they hadn't even done battleground polling in months, which is insane at this level. Insane that in two months they had not done battleground state polling. So finally they bothered to do some

battleground state polling. The reason they didn't do it, the implication is pretty clear, because they didn't want to know the answer of how bad it was. Okay, so they finally did battleground state polling. They brought it to Joe Biden. It showed that in every single battleground state he was losing. Not only that, but in states like Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, places that they did not think that they were going to have to worry about, the bottom was even falling out there. And that was part of the final straw, not to mention

the Pelosi's and Obama's and the very people who helped to consolidate in 2020, who brought him to power, now had formed a cabal against him. And we're making it all but impossible for him to remain in the race. So with COVID, alone, isolating in Rehoboth, the writing on the wall, he apparently came to this decision. And the fundraising mattered too. Fundraising had fallen completely off a cliff. They said it reached something like 25% of expectations. This is the time when fundraising is supposed to surge for both parties. And so when they came to him with the polling in New Mexico and Virginia, they would say, look, money that we need to spend in battleground states, we're going to need to spend now in New Mexico and Virginia and Colorado. Oh, and by the way, we don't have any money.

And then there was a great line in a political article that said Nancy Pelosi had told him early on, you know, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Right. And we gave you about three weeks of the easy way. Next week the easy way or the hard way. Right. And we gave you about three weeks of the easy way. Next week is going to be the hard way. Yeah. And if you thought this last three weeks was rough, you know, wait until Nancy Pelosi turns the screw, you know, one more notch. Yeah. I'm very sympathetic to the argument of, like, this whole process is fundamentally anti-democratic. There's no getting around that.

But I don't want us to pretend like there was some democratic process that Joe Biden succeeded in. And, you know, this line that he was clinging to and now Republicans are desperately clinging to, we'll get to that in the Republican block, about, you know, 14 million people voted for Joe Biden. Does anyone really think that if they had had an actual process, including debates in a Democratic primary, that we would have ended up where we are. No, that's the whole thing, is that because they blocked any sort of a Democratic process from playing out, and the very elites who then, you know, did form this consensus against him, they were the ones who protected him and made it so that he was in there for so long, blocked the American, were part of this overarching cover-up that blocked the American people from

being able to see the reality, number one, and number two, to be able to actually go through a democratic process and have a choice. So that's where we are now. The polls are very clear. There is an overwhelming consensus within the Democratic Party and with the nation at large that they wanted Joe Biden to leave. So, you know, the idea that, oh, this was just elites who wanted to push him out for whatever reason is just not accurate. They were the last ones to actually acknowledge what the truth was about Joe Biden. I mean, we did those word clouds, but long before the debate with jail partners and the number one descriptor for Joe Biden in every single partisan breakdown was old, was old. This has long been, along with genuine concerns about the economy and dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. But this has been the primary issue for him. And the other place that it's really borne out is the fact that every single

other Democrat, literally every Democrat that I've seen polled across the country, outperforms Joe Biden. Regardless of whether it's Montana or New York or Pennsylvania, wherever you are, every single Democrat that I've seen pulled, and especially swing state Democrats in those Senate races, has been outperforming Joe Biden, oftentimes by double digits. So it shows you that his age prior to the debate performance, which made it so that this donor group and Pelosi et al could no longer deny the reality that was in front of everyone. Prior to that, the American public already wanted a different option. They already were deeply concerned about this man's ability to serve for another four years when they already saw very clearly, even in the little tiny glimpses, stage managed glimpses that we got of him, even in those glimpses, they could tell what a difficult place he was in and how much he had declined even in just the past couple of years.

Yeah, we were going to get an undemocratic process either way. Yeah. More than a majority of Democrats did not want Trump. I'm sorry, did not want Biden to run for reelection. Now, a majority of the American people didn't want Trump or Biden. And the political system said, well, that's too bad. That's what you're going to get. And so because there was no democratic process to choose the nominee, in order for there to be some facsimile of democracy, which is pressure from people on elites and on those in power to do the thing that they want you to do, that is what

participatory democracy actually means, there was no process left. It was just going to have to be full-on pressure. And if 65% plus of Democrats were not calling for Biden to step aside, then you'd have a much better argument that this is not a fair process. And also, this happens all the time in parliamentary systems everywhere. The leader of the party loses the confidence of the party and of the party's base. They hold a vote in the parliament, no confidence, you're done. That's just normal. We don't have that. So they had to hack it, and they hacked it, and it took four weeks instead of what it would take in the UK, like a week.

Yeah. We managed to get done in a month what every other country gets done in a much faster amount of time. Let's go and put A3 up on the screen and we can take a look at some of this inside reporting. This is from the New York Times. What happened in the final moments as Biden decided to withdraw. You know, they really set the scene with Biden's diagnosis with COVID, which, by the way, now there's a whole conspiracy theory on the right that he didn't really have COVID. I also love the conspiracy that it wasn't even really him that sent out the letter on Twitter. That's my favorite.

Yeah, I saw you enjoying that one on Twitter, that it was like, you know, someone who happened to gain control of the accounts, Nancy Pelosi pushing the buttons or whatever, and he just has no idea what's going on. I like that one too. Anyway, they set the scene of him at his house in Delaware, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. And he calls and he says, I need you and Mike at the house on late Saturday afternoon, you being Steve Ruschetti and Mike being Mike Donilon. These are his two probably longest serving, very close aides. As I said, these are also the two that seem to be getting thrown under the bus right now as, you know, creating this bubble and insulating him and, you know, creating this poll denialism where

he had no idea reportedly how badly he was losing and how bad the fallout was from the debate. So he says, I need you and Mike at the house. Mr. Biden was on the phone from his vacation home in Rehoboth with Steve Reschetti, one of his closest advisors. The president was referring to Mike Donald as chief strategist. Soon, both men were in Rehoboth, socially distanced from the president who was recovering from COVID. From that afternoon and far into the night, the three worked on one of the most important and historic letters of Mr. Biden's presidency, his decision to withdraw from his reelection campaign after top Democrats, donors, close allies, and friends had pressured him relentlessly to get out. Also in this report and others, Ryan, they talk about how closely held this decision was.

We had gotten some reports, I covered one on our channel, about how he may be coming to a decision this weekend. It's looking like he's open to the idea of getting out. He and his aides forcefully pushing back against that, planning campaign events for this week. There was also this nugget that was reported of like, oh, he doesn't want to do this before Bibi Netanyahu comes to town because he doesn't want to give Bibi the satisfaction. So it was looking uncertain. And reportedly, even right up to the minutes before he posts this letter on Twitter and makes it official he is dropping out of the race, they were still, his team was still calling delegates to make sure that they were still in for him and still had his support. Kamala Harris herself was not notified until shortly

before the decision was made. The entire campaign herself was not notified until shortly before the decision was made. The entire campaign team was notified, I believe on like a Zoom call, literally a minute before this all went public. So they really held it as close to the vest as they possibly could until he pressed send or whoever, pressed send on their tweet. Post. Yeah. Yeah, I guess impressive discipline. Although, for what? So, no reporter, like, gets the little scoop? Okay. Right. I guess, who cares? Like, at that point? But, yeah, I mean, he wants to control how he goes out. Yeah. Once again, you know, I get it. So, good for him. And he pulled it off. And it was a tight set of campaign staff that he told. So a lot of the campaign and White House staff learned on Elon Musk's platform that their

man was dropping out. Yeah. Elon Musk is now throwing $45 million a month at Donald Trump. Which somebody pointed out, a classic VC move to buy at the peak. All these VC guys bought Trump at the peak. Yeah. Geniuses. I loved that too. All right, we've got Dave Weigel standing by to give us more insight into how all of this unfolded. So let's get to that. Dave Weigel joins us from Semaphore now. Great to see you, Dave. Good to be here. Thank you. I wanted to start with any insight you could offer into how this decision was ultimately made. Ryan brought up this great quote from Politico that they had in their sort of like tick tock of how this went down. They said Biden was bracing for Pelosi to go public this week and possibly even disclose Democratic polling, clarifying Biden's dire political straits.

Quote, Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way. It was about to be the hard way. Yes, I didn't have that exact anecdote, but that's what I heard from the very tight circle around Biden that they made multiple attempts to end this discussion to prove that Biden could handle it. And what really was hurting, look, if he had nailed the debate, none of this would have happened. If he nailed his BET interview, it would have been slowed down. It was just that nothing he did apart from arguably the North Carolina rally right after

the debate gave Democrats confidence that he was going to be a credible nominee. And I don't think they got more worried during the RNC. I actually think they slowed down because during the RNC. I actually think they slowed down because of the Trump shooting for the Democrats I was talking to who were on the fence. But yeah, that was going to happen. They were going to keep coming out. You were heading toward not a situation where Democrats come back to Biden, but a situation like October 2016, where Republicans said, yeah, I'm running my own campaign. I don't support the ticket anymore. And that meant Biden would lose and he couldn't

handle that. I think reasonably couldn't handle that. Nobody had been in that position before. I was hearing from some Democrats that Trump's speech, which some had been, everybody was curious how, which Trump was going to show up. He'd just gone through a near-death experience. Was he going to be some kind of unifying dynamo that was going to look like he was just going to steamroll to a landslide? When Democrats saw him maybe do a version of that speech for the first 10 to 15 minutes and then go off the teleprompter and for an hour and a half be the old Trump, they started thinking, they started reminding themselves, this guy's really beatable. What are we doing losing to him? And then that gave more juice to the, wait a minute, let's actually try to win this. Did you pick up any

of that from Democrats? I saw it happen real time the same way, because I was texting Democrats during the RNC, the RNC, but then that speech. And there was a worry on one hand that Biden might view the Trump speech and say, this is not the dynamo that people think I'm running against. This is a weaker candidate. But it was counteracted by what you just said, which is a lot of Democrats saying on Sunday, they were worried that Trump might have gotten a huge advantage from the reaction to the shooting. As that speech went on and on and on, really by minute 70, when it was becoming the longest convention speech of all time, they said, OK, this is an undisciplined candidate who you can even run against as faded and lost his fastball in a way that you cannot if Joe

Biden's the nominee. So maybe we are in a good position with Kamala. I think it did both at the same time. It briefly, I think, jilted the Biden campaign, thinking that Biden was weak and Democrats come around. But it did more for Democrats to say, we don't need to just take the L and elect Donald Trump this year. So Democrats are very predictably, now they're out with Joe Biden's greatest leader of all time. He's like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln in one. He's perfect. He's amazing. We love him so much. And in an effort to keep that Joe Biden image unsullied, they're sort of trying to cast blame

on, which I think is deserved by the way, but I think Joe Biden also deserves a lot of blame for the situation that the country finds itself in and the Democratic Party specifically finds itself in. But it looks like Mike Donnell and Steve Ruschetti are really taking the hit for constructing this bubble around him, keeping out any bad data. This anecdote came out in Politico that they hadn't done battleground polling in two months because the national picture looks a little better than when you look at like, you know, okay, well, how are you doing in Nevada? How are you doing in Arizona? Could you help people understand the dynamic within Biden world and this very closely knit campaign team and set of advisors that have been with him for such a long period of time and how this process would have played out

with that very close in team? It has been pretty well reported by the people on the Biden beat with a very tough three years because the White House gave them nothing. They got to know who Biden took seriously. This was Steve Ruscetti. This is Mike Donilon, Valerie Biden, his sister, Jill, his wife, to an extent Hunter, which was not good for the Biden campaign once that word got out that Hunter Biden was involved in this. But yeah, they were mostly impenetrable because they thought that, and this is pretty well reported over the last couple of days, people had been wrong about Biden enough times

that they were not confident that they were right this time. There was bad polling, but these same people, some of the literally same members of Congress and pundits had said Biden can win and he could. And that fell apart as more information penetrated the cell wall and got to these guys. To what you were saying before, though, there was no perfect way for Biden to leave once he decided to seek the nomination again. What he's getting now is i think an echo

of what he would have gotten in 2023 if he said i'm not going to run again uh and everyone i don't think people had talking points they dusted off they're writing newly today uh but that was always going to be how they moved on from biden if he decided not to run again he complicated it by running by winning the nomination i noticed that um the chairman of the Minnesota DFL, when he was endorsing the Harris ticket, said 50 million Democratic primary voters already endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket. That's kind of how they're advancing this and saying that, well, this is not anti-democratic because everyone assumed who voted for Biden that Harris was on deck. And let's not talk too loudly about this, that Harris might have to serve as president because the president is in his 80s uh that's how they're pitching it but yes that would have been easier had Biden been talked down in 2023 but at that point it's easy to blame this inner circle now at that point lots of Democrats even

off the record were saying yes the Biden they saw most of the time was on the ball enough that he could win another election. He had beaten Trump before he could do it again. And what you're going to keep seeing is a discussion of when he declined. And Republicans would say it started five years ago. He certainly was worse than 2020. He wasn't 16. But really, talking to democrats outside the biden circle trying to get in a year ago they were much more confident that biden could pull things together that the state of the union you remember the hot mic on on jerry nadler he was just telling biden like i like to talk about dementia now they were just they wanted him to be better so biden went from

having a close circle that believed this and Democrats outside of it who wanted to believe it to a close circle who believed it and no one else believing it. All those Democrats who were hoping for the best abandoned them, and just enough of them crushed in in the last two weeks for them to be convinced we have no party anymore. They're not going to support us. Dave, what's your VP handicapping? What are you hearing? I've still, it's still been the governors we heard about in the last, in the last few days. That's, that's Roy Cooper. That's Josh Shapiro. That's Andy Beshear. Beshear, funny enough, has the least, the fewest weaknesses, the fewest risks, because if he becomes,

he has a Republican super majority legislature in Kentucky. If he became vice president, his Democratic lieutenant governor becomes governor. No real change there. If it's Shapiro, the Republican president of the Senate becomes lieutenant governor, becomes a Democratic governor. If it's Cooper, he's retiring, but when he's out of the state, Mark Robinson becomes governor. And some Democrats don't think that's a bad idea because there's a Republican supermajority anyway. And people got to flash forward on what it would be like to have Governor Robinson.

But they're already kind of thinking, how would that work? What would be the downsides for picking those guys? It really has. I've not really heard serious talk about Whitmer. I've heard pundit talk about, yeah, pundit too, I guess, but pundit talk about what we're being added to double down on the history-making nature of the ticket. I've heard more, there are voters who need to be reassured that this is not a change-everything ticket, that this is a stability ticket because Democrats have lost the impreparature of stability in the last six months. You don't need to praise Trump to say this, but the Trump advance ticket is now the one

that says we've run this country before. We have no drama. We've had the same nominee all year. Democrats have a more chaotic ticket. I've heard the governors, the Generation X governors of purple and red states mentioned as people who know how to run. They've won tough races. They'd be easy to introduce to people.

I've not heard discussion of the fact that Shapiro, if he is chosen, would be the first Jewish vice president. His wife is Jewish. Doug Emhoff, the currently second gentleman, is also Jewish. I haven't heard about that. I think people are sort of ignoring the more race baiting and othering angles of Republicans because they think you can sell Kamala Harris

to the country as a possible commander in chief. And the only people who will say, I'm ruling her out because she's childless or because she is not a white man. We're never going to vote for her. And you can actually highlight the craziest thing said about her to say that, don't you want to be on this team? Do you really want to be on the eliminationist team or do you want to be with us?

Right. One report I saw mentioned they're potentially looking at business leaders for the VP slot as well. Is that like we're thinking like Mark Cuban? Have you heard any any chatter about that? Not yet. The argument there would be in part that Trump is now raising enough, raising money where Biden

needs to be competitive now. But the Biden-Harris campaign, I keep saying Biden campaign, it's not the Harris campaign, that they raised $ million dollars yesterday. So there's a lot of the moment really does matter. The they they were worried about Biden. They should say Democrats are worried about Biden's abilities at every level.

And they were about donors striking. And they are not worried about Harris being able to get back those Biden donors. There are not people in the Biden orbit who refuse to give to Harris. There are people who are on the fence who might be interested. It reminds me of what was happening 10

days ago where Republicans were saying it looks like the election is ours. Biden's collapsing. The shooting, I should say, a week ago, the shooting in Butler has changed the race. And we don't need to pick somebody who's going to win swing states. We need somebody who's a governing partner for Trump.

That's J.D. Vance. I think at this moment, in this very short window, Democrats are not worried about the money, about like a Mark Cuban pick. And again, I have heard more. They want just to be, look, the narrative of the Biden campaign is not we're going to change everything. It is we actually changed some things and they're working. You've been so distracted by how old he is.

You have not noticed that things are getting better. And how do you sell that? Well, you can sell that with a governor who says, look at my state. Unemployment's down to 4%. Look at what we built. Look at the bridges that are repaired. Look at I-95 being repaired if you're Josh Shapiro, you know? That's the argument they want to make, and a Cuban doesn't fit into that the same way from the Democrats I've talked to. And lastly, Dave, how are Democrats feeling about now their odds of potentially winning? Oh, much better. They really were checking out just days ago. Democrats who never were going to concede the election were

really worried they can't win this year. Biden does not have what it takes. They now think there is a shot. And they do need Republicans to screw up because there are arguments you can make about Harris beyond just is she ready to be president? Polling has said that voters are skeptical. But you get to roll her out again. You get to do speeches again. You get to do interviews again. And then reintroduce somebody who, when she emerged on the American scene, was not incredibly popular, but not disliked. Why has she been disliked recently? They really think that she can be reintroduced to people in a popular way and that they know what Republican attacks are coming. They know that Republicans are going to attack not just the cackle that Trump does, which I don't think is effective, but some positions she took in the 2019 primary that she doesn't hold anymore. They just want to reboot her as the carrier of a successful Obama legacy.

And again, they're running up into that, right? If you pull people and say, is the economy getting better? Are we in a recession? Mostly Republicans, but a lot of people just think things are still getting worse, even though in important ways they aren't. So selling her with her communication skills, her skills as a courtroom prosecutor, they think they can do it. So I just have not found any Democrat who's more worried today than they were before. Even the ones you would expect to say, well, how does a woman, how does a black woman defeat Donald Trump?

Is the country ready for that? I've not heard that from elected Democrats. They really just think maybe they're overanalyzing this. And the problem was Joe Biden could not explain why he needed another term. He could not go on stage and reliably say their message. And she can do that. And they might be overestimating it. She's taken on more of the social issue, more of the abortion portfolio in the last few months. She's very good at that. How is she at saying,

hey, everybody, interest rates are coming down. Hey, we've explored for more gasoline. Hey, unemployment's at record lows. She can do it, but that's like every hour the story is kind of evolving. So that's her next step. How does she actually perform? Hey, she has a great rally or a great speech. I think you'll see all of the coconut pill Democrats with that great decision. Yeah, that all makes sense. Dave, thank you so much. It's so great to have your insights. We're grateful for your time. Oh, very grateful to be here. Thank you. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution.

But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia

that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover,

to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one.

The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams,

and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So as I mentioned before, Democrats' response to Biden withdrawing from the race is to paint him as the greatest leader of all time, the most selfless man that's ever existed, etc., etc. I had the misfortune of watching some of the North Korean level

propaganda that was being spouted over on MSNBC. Here's a taste of Rachel Maddow doing her best. This is history writ large. You know, we'll all remember where we were and what we were doing at this moment. And just thinking about the president right now, you know, what a man, what a patriot, what an act of selfless devotion to your country. And he has been a phenomenal president. He brought us back from COVID. He, you know, gave us the best recovery from COVID of any major nation on Earth at a time when the world has economically been struggling in the wake of COVID. The Biden economy is literally the envy of the world. He ended the presidency of Donald Trump at one disastrous term. And he did it while being decent and civil and honorable and normal

and occasionally boring at a time when boring was absolutely what we needed. And I just, you know, his career of decades in public service as a senator and as a very successful vice president and as a phenomenally successful president, there is no single thing that he has done in that entire career that is a greater or more consequential act of service and sacrifice to this country. So, yeah, this went on for hours. Ryan, I watched John Meacham came on and he did the whole like, I'm not a great man, but let me tell you who is. Joe Biden is a great man.

And listen, I'm gonna say all the obvious things. This is a man who's overseeing a genocide. This is a man whose stubbornness, ego, narcissism, et cetera, led to this place where after he pledged in 2020 to be a bridge to the future generation, then he got in his head the Trumpian, I alone can fix it. No one else can take the keys to the car from me. And his insular circle that was really holding power as well didn't want him to go either. And so leaves it to this place where there isn't going to be a democratic process,

where voters don't really get to have a say about who they want to be the next Democratic nominee. It was a fundamentally selfish decision. And let's make no mistake about it. He has put Kamala Harris's likely successor in a very difficult position in an uphill battle in order to block Donald Trump from the White House once again. So this whole he's a great man, his legacy, etc., etc. If it was before the genocide, I would have been sympathetic to it because I do think on domestic policy, especially with labor and antitrust, he is better than Obama. He does represent a shift away, somewhat of an incremental shift away from the hardcore neoliberalism of the past.

But you can't just hand wave away the tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed by his policy. Yeah. Like you said, he suggested that he would be a one-term president. He finally buckled to an incomprehensible amount of pressure that he was under. None of us can remotely understand how much power people like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, combined with all the entire donor class, plus 65, 70 percent of actual Democratic voters, are able to exert on a human being. Right. He withstood that for weeks and then finally buckled. That does not make you a hero. It's good that he buckled under that pressure, but it doesn't make you a hero. It's good that he buckled under that pressure, but it doesn't make you a hero. The heroic decision is like, you know, Washington, when, you know, after he wins the

Revolutionary War, he actually goes back to farming, like the Cincinnati's at the time. Like King George famously said, if he does that, he's the greatest man alive. And look, yeah, like, I mean, he's got his own genocide and slave owner, so we're not going to say he's the greatest man alive. But he was under pressure to take power and refused it. Yes. Biden was under pressure not to take power and buckled to that pressure. That's right. Completely different situations.

Adam Tooze actually had a good tweet about this. He said, so monarchical is Americans' conception of presidency that Biden is feted as a ruler who, quote, gave up power in favor of anointed successor rather than a vain politician who misjudged his sell-by date and has been belatedly persuaded to spare himself humiliation and give Dems a chance. Van Jones did his own rendition of the Rachel Maddow, dear leader mode over on CNN. Let's take a listen to that, too. Even people who are pushing for this to happen, it's kind of like when your grandpa, you got to take the keys, and everybody, you got to take his keys, you got to take his keys, and

he's fighting, and he's fighting, and everybody's so frustrated. And then you finally get the keys back, and then you just cry. Because this is somebody that you love. This is somebody that you care about. This is somebody who was there for you. This is somebody you wouldn't be here without him. And you had to take something from him. Now, this is not, look, politics is politics. But this is a human moment for one of the great humans in America.

This is a huge moment for him, for his family, for all of us who love him, for all of us who wanted him to get across the finish line. But if you're a young person watching this, this is leadership. This is patriotism. This is what it means to put the country first and put the party first and put the cost first. When your arm gets tired, you let somebody else finish pitching the game. That's what Joe Biden has done. And he's done that for all of us. And so I just want to say, I don't know who's going to be the VP, the non-VP. I don't know anything about politics. I just know that I love this man.

I care about this man. It was painful every day to sit up here and talk about him like he's just some problem for the party. Wait till we get to the convention. You're going to see people crying, standing, screaming, cheering. He may not get a chance to talk for 10 minutes. We finally get a chance to put our arm around this guy. You did the right thing for this country. You did the right thing for this party. All of us are going to be in this situation someday. And I hope that we take a moment to

honor this man and to love this man. I love Joe Biden. I appreciate what he's done. And a lot of people are heartbroken today. Even if it's the right thing, it's still just horrible. So Van Jones there openly weeping at this great, brave decision that Joe Biden was absolutely dragged to kicking and screaming. The other thing, Ryan, over this whole process, it has been deeply disturbing and unsettling to see these supposed like neutral analysts and journalists have to go out and be like, oh, my God, I love Joe Biden. He's my favorite person. He's the best person oh my God, I love Joe. He's my favorite person. He's the best person that's ever. I adore him. He's the greatest of all time. I do anything for like, you're supposed to have some sort of arm's length neutrality, not go out of your way to, you know, to pledge your undying love and fealty to the dear leader. It is very disturbing.

When Jamie Raskin wrote Biden a letter shortly after July 4th, and it leaked to the New York Times just recently, it's a four-page letter basically urging him to step aside. The first three pages are just a slobbering homage to his greatness. And that's just unhealthy. The kind of person that where you tell yourself, you know what this guy needs? Three pages of praise before I build up to the point. That doesn't actually say anything good about the person on the receiving end of that. It also doesn't make your case that well, because if he's so amazing and the best leader that ever lived, like, well, maybe we can deal with a little bit of senility, right? Like, yeah, if he's so wonderful and he's like FDR and Lincoln and George Washington all rolled into one, then maybe we should just deal with the decline. So it's bizarre

to watch all of this. Yeah. And given his domestic record, it is painful because you know that none of the replacement substitute candidates, Kamala Harris seems to be the one that's going to be, are going to have his administration's commitment, I don't think, to labor antitrust and in general, this kind of pushback against neoliberalism. We'll see. But, you know, you are kind of throwing that out with the baby. What do you make of, so like Matt Stoller's been probably most aggressively making this point, but I've seen others saying as well that there may have been more ideological valence to the move against Biden among the donor set than we want to acknowledge. Because certainly the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the billionaires, they did hate, like, they hate Lina Khan with a burning passion.

You know, they hate the antitrust stuff in particular, but they also don't love the renewed vigor of the labor movement, which has been partly enabled by Biden's National Labor Relations Board. You know, what do you say to people who are concerned about that and that you may, this may sort of quash those burgeoning positive pieces of Biden's domestic agenda? We'll see. It's a live fight. But anytime that the donor class is happy and gets what it wants is bad news. We should be uncomfortable. Yes. Yeah. So definitely. You know, they definitely think that Kamala Harris is going to be more pliant. Now, it's hilarious because Joe Biden, his nickname for his entire career was Joe Biden D-MBNA, which for those who don't know,

MBNA used to be a credit card company, the biggest one in the world, basically. He was the politician who basically created the student debt crisis through legislation. He backed the credit cards, backed Wall Street. Bought with Elizabeth Warren over all of this. Elizabeth Warren. Delaware is the heart of corporate America. He represented that beating heart for his entire career in the Senate. That he happened to be the one that broke, hopefully reflects that that's where the party is pushing. He was just a vessel for that. Because obviously, that's not where his heart is.

Right. It seems to me that there's a combination of both, you know, I am not a subscriber to like the great man view of the world where it's just like one person and their ideology and they decide to do the right thing or they decide to do the wrong thing, that it is more about looking at these eras. And I do think we are in an era of transitioning away from neoliberalism that Biden happens to be part of. I also think that his deep bitterness towards Barack Obama, resentment, envy, whatever you want to call it, also was part of what led him to wanting to go so big on the COVID stimulus package. Because the thinking is that Ron Klain, as initial chief of staff, basically sold it to him as like, listen, Obama screwed up with the

stimulus. You have a chance to show you can do this bigger and better. And you can, let's hang the FDR portrait in the Oval Office and you can embrace this. And so he played to his ego and his sense of grievance. And that's partly how you end up with some of the better domestic positions. And then I also think, from what we can tell, Biden is pretty checked out on domestic politics. Like, they couldn't- He wants to talk about NATO. All he wants to talk about is NATO or like, you know, some sort of esoteric Asian Pacific pact that no one has ever heard of. That's where his heart really is. So I think also that those

domestic policy pieces, they were sort of running on autopilot or with Ron Klain or whoever else was in charge over there. And he didn't care about it. He didn't have much to do with it. He was very reluctant to follow through on even approximating his student debt loan pledges, for example. He never wants to talk about it. I think he was quite checked down on the domestic policy agenda. Yeah. And the other hopeful element of it is that not only was Ron Klain making that argument that Obama screwed up, he didn't go big enough, so was Chuck Schumer. And Chuck Schumer, so you have Joe Biden, D, MBNA, and you have Chuck Schumer, whose nickname was Wall Street Chuck.

Right. And both of them just decided, like, the wind is blowing in this direction. We are politicians. Let's go with the wind. So the question then becomes, does the wind keep blowing? And that's a matter for basically the public to keep making sure that there's momentum in that direction, which is driving the Republican Party to embrace people like J.D. Vance and is driving the Democratic Party to say, look, we need to go bigger and we need to actually deliver for people. And the counter wind, of course, is coming from the donor class, which is like, no, we don't need this at all. Right. No, we're good. Just talk

about abortion. Get Lena Kahn out of here. And let's go back to the good old days of just neoliberalism with no concern about moving in a different direction. Speaking of Obama, we've got a little bit, Obama put out a long statement as, you know, no one should be surprised about. Let's put B3 up on the screen and got a little bit of a I mean, it's the same vibes. Joe Biden's amazing. He's been one of America's most consequential presidents, as well as a dear friend and partner to me. Today, we've also been reminded again that he's a patriot of the highest order. Since taking office, President Biden has displayed that character again and again.

I mean, the Obama-Biden relationship has been, I wouldn't say Biden has been one of America's most consequential presidents, but I would say the Biden-Obama relationship has been extremely one of the most consequential, complicated relationships in history. I mean, first of all, you have this, as I was referring to before, this sense of grievance and this tension between the two when Biden is Obama's VP and Obama's the smarty pants, Ivy League, and the super intellectual, you know, sort of like high-minded, hands-off, doesn't like to sully himself with the dirtiness of, you know, the backslap in politics. Joe Biden's on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. So you have that dynamic. Then you have in the 2020 primary, Obama does not endorse Biden until the very end. It's pretty clear he favors any number of a range of other candidates. Some of his staffers were actually working for Beto at the beginning. So, and oh, and let's not forget about 2016 when Obama made it clear, I want Hillary Clinton, not Biden. Apparently Biden really holds onto a lot of bitterness about that. And listen, to be fair, understandably so.

But then on the other hand, in 2020, it really is Obama who has to come to his rescue after he has a piss-poor performance in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. And Bernie Sanders looks like he's going to romp to the nomination. The whole establishment of the party totally freaks out. Obama helps to orchestrate everyone dropping out, consolidating around Joe. And so he owes his, you know, assent to, obviously, the vice presidency, his continued relevance in American politics to Barack Obama. He owes this presidency and the fact that he won the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama. And then Obama ends up being one of the key figures that sticks the knife in here at the end and takes it from him. Yeah, couldn't write it any better.

And then the key thing is Obama did not endorse Kamala Harris in that statement as well. He says, I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges. And Kamala Harris and her team have been trying to kind of work Obama for years. She and they really believe that she can carry the mantle forward of that Obama coalition. And clearly the Obama folks just don't actually believe that. Now, she may end up, it looks like she's going to win the nomination anyway, but it's interesting that if she's going to do it without Obama at this point rallying behind her. Hakeem Jeffries, if we can put up this next element, said the same thing, you know, the similar portrait of the greatness of Joe Biden, but also excluding any mention of Kamala Harris and not endorsing going

forward. This tapped the brakes a little bit on the momentum of the Kamala car that was racing to Chicago with the nomination. Because it gave people space to say, wait a minute, Obama isn't rallying behind her yet? Hmm, maybe there is space here. But it took a little while and then the endorsements continued to accelerate from progressive caucus chair Pramila Jayapal and the CBC. The endorsements are rolling in. Yeah. And she needs an opponent if she's going to lose. Right.

And so far, she doesn't have one. Right. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, Ryan, what do you think? So we have all the way Democrats are framing the Biden legacy, the way MSNBC and Van Jones is framing the Biden legacy. When we look back on this presidency 10, 20 years from now, what do you think will be the lasting impression? It depends on what the fallout is of what is going on currently. Like if Kamala wins or loses?

Well, no, I think like, so you could see the wheels just completely coming off. You could see a massive escalation that leads to a regional conflict that would be on Biden's shoulders. His refusal to end that, his refusal to get tough. You know, when Sullivan and Blinken told Netanyahu you have till January with this it's July right and they're still going right okay there is such a thing as American power they chose not to use it so if it spins out even further beyond now I think the the world sadly will metabolize a Gaza genocide if it is constrained to that. But if it spins into this massive

regional conflict. But yes, I think politically, if Kamala Harris gets kind of wrecked by Trump in November, then people will remember that Biden clung on until July. And we'll fault her to some degree. But we'll also acknowledge that Biden put her in a very difficult situation. What do you think? I don't. I hope that a genocide in Gaza is a stain on him. I hope it will be. And I fear that you're right, that it won't be, that there will be this attempt to forget that Palestinians exist. It'll be a thing that people know about. Yeah. this attempt to forget that Palestinians exist. Forget about it. It'll be a thing that people know about.

Yeah. And there'll be books written about it. But right, will people get arrested? Will there be actual consequences? I hope so. Yeah. I doubt it. It's hard to say though, because we are coming to this consensus, we want to talk more about

this in the Israel block about this is an apartheid state. I mean, we just had the ICJ ruling saying. They just voted against the two-state solution. So if you have one state, all these people live in it. Right. Some people have rights, others don't. Others don't. It's a pretty clear definition.

It's pretty clear and undeniable definition at this point. And I do think you have, because Netanyahu has made himself such a partisan figure, I do think you have a Democratic Party that is going to move away from the type of unconditional support that Joe Biden has given to Israel. So I think it's possible that, yeah, I don't want to compare him to LBJ because I think that's sort of unfair to LBJ, but there are some echoes there in that LBJ had an extraordinary domestic political agenda that was ultimately his legacy, though, was defined by Vietnam and leaving his party in a very difficult position as well. So I do think that there are some echoes there, but, you know, we'll see how it all plays out. Ultimately, I do think whether

or not Kamala Harris wins is going to be an important part of how Joe Biden's legacy is seen. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating

stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024.

Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.

It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business,

taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick.

Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over on the Republican side,

they're having a really normal one about this. There is a lot of free. I mean, you can imagine from their perspective. They were looking at a cakewalk. They're thinking about, hey, maybe we're going to win New Jersey. New York seems to be in play. We're definitely winning Virginia. We can pick J.D.

Who cares if he's got these like wild out there things he said and super online. We like the guy and we're going to win anyway. So we're just going to put them on the ticket. They go through the whole RNC and then the rug gets pulled out from under them. Not that Kamala Harris is the most formidable candidate in the world, right? Obviously, we're going to talk more about this. And Ryan's pulled some great clips of why she has struggled in the past. And those reasons are very real. But you don't get that same sense of terror and dread when she begins a sentence that she's not going to be able to remember

what she was talking about by the time she gets to the end of the sentence, right? But it's a different kind of dread. It's a different, it's more of like a weird, like, are you on something kind of a vibe. Don't mix the barbiturates and the wine or whatever. It's more like that, which is kind of fun. It's a different sense of concern for where the sentence is going.

In any case, here we have Stephen Miller over on Fox News just absolutely losing it about what is unfolding. Let's take a listen. They held a primary. People, they had ballots. They filled out circles. They went to the voting booths. They spent money on advertisements. And as President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden. Now they just woke up one morning and

said, never mind. We're canceling the entire primary. We're getting rid of our candidate, and we're pretending the election has never even happened and we're going to let donors handpick a new nominee they're publicly admitting that they are an oligarchy they are not running a democracy they are not running a representative republic this is an oligarchy controlled by business interests and the democratic convention is the private corporation that represents those business interests. This is as full frontal an attack on American democracy as we've ever seen in the history of America's major political parties. I think his concerns about oligarchy might land a little better if his side hadn't just gotten the backing of Elon Musk to the tune of $45 million a month. And lots of other billionaires

as well as vice presidential pick is the hand, like handpicked candidate of billionaire Peter Thiel. So not sure they got a lot of credibility here to talk about oligarchy in American politics. And also Democrats overdo the January 6th stuff. But if you did January 6th, to say that this, Joe Biden stepping down is the biggest full frontal assault on American democracy? When there was an actual assault? It's a bit rich. Come on. It's a bit rich. Yeah, no doubt about it. We have some more Republican reaction we can give you from the Trump campaign and the way that they are framing this. Their, you know, immediate pivot to try to tie Kamala Harris to Biden because Biden

is so unpopular. They say they own each other's records, speaking of Biden and Harris, and there is no distance between the two. Harris must defend the failed Biden administration and her liberal, weak-on-crime record in California. Joe Biden cannot take himself out of a campaign for president because he is too mentally incompetent and still remain in the White House. That's been a key part of their messaging as like, all right, well, he needs to resign, which to be honest with you, I'm not sure I don't totally get the strategy of pushing for that, because let's say that Joe Biden, by the way, I actually kind of agree with that line of reasoning. Like if you're too mentally

feeble to be able to campaign, are you really in command of your faculties enough right now to be president of the United States? I actually think that's a fair view. But from a political perspective, doesn't it just make Kamala Harris stronger if she's actually the incumbent president running on the ticket and people get to see her because that's part of this whole thing is like imagining you as commander in chief. People get to actually see her as commander in chief. She could drop some bombs. Yeah. That's right. That's what Americans love. So I don't really, I'm not sure I really get the strategy here outside of just, we're going to tie the two of them together. We're going to make it clear that she was part of this Biden health coverup and besmirch her that

way as well, which again, I think there are some fair points there. But the other thing that I saw, Ryan, is that on Fox News, they were going into this and New York Times was also floating that one of the things that they're going to run against her is that she was for Medicare for all. So God forbid, you know, that she may have some attachment to healthcare for everyone, which no one should really take her seriously about at this point anyway. That was one of the funniest moments in our politics when there was a debate and it was like one of those hands up questions. And the question was, should we ban private insurance? And Kamala Harris, yeah, ban private insurance. No greater signal of how kind of left the parties, at least presidential candidates, had shifted at that point.

Meanwhile, in Congress at that very time, they couldn't even get the Medicare negotiation package through, allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. They couldn't even get that through a Democratic-controlled House. Meanwhile, their presidential candidates were all saying we're going to ban private insurance. The next day, even more hilariously, she said she misheard the question. Oh, yeah, that's right. I remember there was like a stream there of a few misheard questions from Kamala Harris. Oh, ban? Ban private insurance? No, no, no. I don't know what she thought that they said. But yeah, there were a couple of instances like that. I wish I could remember the specifics off the top of my head where she gave the wrong

answer and then pretended like she didn't hear what they had said. So again, these are some of the reasons why she did not succeed, particularly effectively in the Democratic primary back in 2020. We can put Trump's reaction here up on the screen, C2. He is also melting down over what he's describing as fraud. He says, so we are forced to spend time and money on fighting crooked Joe Biden. He pulls badly after having a terrible debate and quits the race. Now we have to start all over again.

Shouldn't the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud in that everybody around Joe, including his doctors and the fake news media, knew he was not capable of running for or being president? Just ask him. Love that. So I mean, it is, I like the end president. Just ask him. Love that. So I mean, it is I like the end hashtag just ask him. So I mean, listen, again, I have some understanding for their position. They just did the whole RNC running against Joe Biden. And now it's like all just out the window.

It's like the RNC just basically didn't happen. Also, I'm sure Trump is really irritated that, you know, he had an attempt is really irritated that he had an attempt on his life that came within an inch of succeeding. How long now? Just over a week ago. And already the conversation has completely moved past that, which seems really wild and crazy. And now they don't know who the VP pick is going to be. And they've got to go back to the drawing board about what this campaign is going to look like. But this truth social that he posted is also, it's a bit of an admission of weakness that they're concerned about having to go up against Kamala Harris, who again, isn't anywhere close to the most formidable Democratic candidate that they could potentially face. I think the fear

is, and I've seen some people saying this online, that, you know, basically anyone but Joe Biden could beat Donald Trump. That the real thing, the primary thing that was holding Joe Biden back from being in a position to win was just his age. And so even if you just swap in his vice presidential, you know, the vice president of the United States who has her own political liabilities, but just the fact that she is not old and not in obvious mental decline could be enough. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think, I think that's exactly right. And now they're, you know, because they've gone from like, I think feeling like they had a guaranteed victory to now feeling like they're very likely to win. Yeah, but they're going to have to fight for it. It's much more fun to have a guaranteed coasting to victory than to actually fight for it.

Do you think J.D. Vance would have been the pick if they knew Biden was going to drop? Probably not. Yeah. And you could imagine that everything lined up for J.D. Vance in the sense that if the assassination doesn't happen even on Saturday night, there was so much momentum to push Biden off the ticket that by Monday, by that Monday, there was supposed to be a ton of senators and House members coming out like that Monday. There was that call that went horribly where he attacked Jason Crow for having like a bronze star.

And everyone on the call is like, oh, this guy's got to go. And they're like writing the statement. And then the shots ring out in Butler, Pennsylvania. And they're like, hold on, can't do this now. So they put the whole thing on pause. They say, well, let's hold this until at least next week. And then in the days after that, Trump's like, I got this. And then Monday, they're like, we're doing J.D. Vance. And then by Wednesday, they're like, actually, we're still getting rid of Biden. So there was like a three day period over the course of like the entire year where J.D. Vance could have been named the vice president. And that happened. And the Monday of the convention happened to fall within that

three day window. and he got through. And maybe he becomes vice president and president as a result of this. It's very possible. Very possible, if not likely, because I think, I mean, you definitely have to view Harris still as the underdog. We're going to show you in the next block when we dig in more on her, what the polling looks like today, which I think deserves a lot of caveats because people aren't good at hypotheticals. Like, how would you feel if it was Kamala Harris is different than it is Kamala Harris? How do you feel now? So we'll see what the polls look like once that question, now that that question is

much more real to people. Can you explain for people, Ryan, why does your view that J.D. Vance is a poor pick electorally? Why there were other picks. What is it about him, his views, his identity, whatever, that you think makes it so that there was just this window of time where they weren't really concerned about the electoral concerns that allows him to sneak onto the ticket? The best argument for him is that maybe he gives Rust Belt votes. Yeah. But they're going to win Ohio anyway. So it doesn't add anything demographically. And he actually underperformed in Ohio in his race against Tim Ryan, who is not like any sort of spectacular being either. I think the main answer is abortion, is that, you know, the thing that has propelled Democrats to the polls is abortion rights ever since Dobbs and

JD Vance is on record with some pretty strong opinions on abortion rights and so Trump despite being the guy that put the three justices on the court and celebrates the fact the overturned Roe Very much wants to be the moderate on the question of abortion rights. That's how he's playing it. Telling all the abortion opponents to go pound sand like this is how we're gonna do it. And then to attach JD Vance just makes that a much more difficult road to hoe. And if that's your main issue and you've made your main issue, if that's your main problem, you made your main problem worse, then you've just hurt yourself a tiny bit. Yeah. Let's put C3. You can just put these like sequentially up on the screen.

We got a bunch of like right wing influencer types who are all saying that this was a coup. Announcement comes after the Democratic Party stages successful coup on Biden. We could put the next one up on the screen. Cat turd weighing in. You just saw a real coup today. Let's do the next one up on the screen. This is like Cernovich, a coup before our very eyes. He's quote tweeting the Biden letter. I think we have one more in this lineup. We are witnessing a third world style coup engineered by oligarchs as we speak, and it isn't going to be pretty. Stay calm, folks. It's

about to get crazy. Libs of TikTok also on the coup messaging. Do you think this will have any resonance, Ryan? No. It is undemocratic. Democrats, the country, are not going to get to weigh in on who the nominee is likely to. It's going to be Kamala Harris. But, you know, obviously these same individuals were not so concerned about Democratic Party disenfranchisement when the Democratic Party just decided to shut down a primary a while ago. Right. And also not running for reelection is not the same thing as losing power. The irony is that pretty much every single one of those people that we had up on the screen there wants Biden to resign under pressure. Right. Which is,

which would be more of a coup than just not running for reelection. Which is, yeah, a normal decision to make. If a massive, overwhelming, super majority of Democrats didn't want Biden to step down, I think they would have an excellent point. But they do. And he's not leaving power. He's just not running for office. And we don't have a, you know, and also they're going to vote at the convention. Like, they can vote for Biden if they want. What happened to him is that he was pressured out of power. Right.

There are, coups are on a spectrum. Like, when Evo Morales stepped down in 2019 under massive pressure, that was a coup because it was undemocratic, it was orchestrated behind the scenes, there was fraud in how the voting was manipulated, etc. That you don't have here. Here you have everything being done transparently. Yeah. Like, you sucked at this debate, you look demented. We want you out. And that was not subterfuge for some other things. Now, everybody has different motivations, but that was the leading motivation for everybody.

Which we know because they had fully closed ranks around Biden before this moment. So if it was really, you know, an ideological, like the oligarchs are no longer happy with Joe Biden because of his, you know, because of Lena Khan and antitrust or whatever, the real time to have pushed him out would have been when you had the possibility of a primary process. Instead, they did the opposite. Instead, they did the opposite. And in fact, if you had a, to me, the real breakdown in democracy happens much earlier on because you have had an overwhelming majority of the country and a clear majority of Democrats saying, we want other choices. We want to have a competitive primary process this entire time. So if you had a more reflective democracy, a healthier democracy, you would have had the ability to evaluate your choices.

You would have had the ability to evaluate Biden's fitness much earlier on than, you know, at this one debate that he's sort of, you know, on a I think he I'm not even sure he expected Trump to take him up on his whole like I'll debate you anytime, any place kind of a deal. And because of that, we're able to get this tiny little glimpse, this tiny little working of democracy where the actual of the people who want to move past Biden, and by the way, also want to move past Donald Trump, is able to be effectuated. An interesting point on that. People have said the most consequential thing here was Joe Biden offering this debate in June. I don't think that's right. The most consequential thing and mistake was Trump accepting it. If Trump had said, look, I don't like these conditions. It's fake tapper, no audience. It's rigged. You're going to cut my mic. I'm not doing this. We're not going to debate until September. Then the Democratic elites would have spent June through September

lying about his condition and his capacity again. And then in September, he would have gone into the debate worse probably than June because it's degenerative and it's getting worse. And he just completely falls apart. And at that point, there is no taking him off the ticket. And then trump from there coasts to an absolute landslide victory yeah so the mistake was not biden offering the debate the mistake was trump accepting it but hey american hero he did it for us because now we don't have the risk of joe biden serving another four terms when he clearly is not capable he's clearly not capable of doing it yeah that's exactly right.

All right, let's go ahead and turn to Kamala Harris, who seems to be pretty quickly here locking up the nomination. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye.

Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that

exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high.

And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news

show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action, and that buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering

on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kamala Harris is quickly consolidating party support for the nomination. Let's take a look at the argument that we're likely to see her making against Donald Trump. This is an ad from when she ran for president. It's already making the rounds again. Sick of this? Well, think about this. He's a world leader in temper tantrums.

She never loses her cool. She prosecuted sex predators. He is one. Grab him by the... She shut down for-profit colleges that swindled Americans. He was a for-profit college. At Trump University, we teach success. Literally. He's owned by the big banks.

She's the attorney general who beat the biggest banks in America and forced them to pay homeowners $18 billion. He's tearing us apart. She'll bring us together. This is Trump. And in every possible way, this is the anti-Trump. So if that's what you're looking for in your next president, there's really only one.

Kamala. Kamala Harris for the people. Crystal, what do you think? Is that going to resonate? To be honest with you, I do think there's something to, they're already saying they're going to frame this as like the prosecutor versus the felon. And I do think from just like a, you know, normie perspective, it's a good contrast. And I think that's a good ad. I mean, this is back from when she ran in 2020, but setting up that dichotomy between herself and Trump, I think it works pretty

well. And one after another, her potential opponents, basically the set of governors, are either endorsing her or announcing that they're not going to run. So some reporting from Robert Costa here. Sources close to several of the people who might be considered possible challengers to Vice President Harris for the nomination, people close to California Governor Gavin Newsom, people close to Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, all saying they're preparing to stand down. They do not believe that Democrats will challenge Vice President Kamala Harris at the convention in Chicago. Already in this immediate aftermath of President Biden's momentous decision, you see behind the scenes Democratic consolidation.

The real race will be for vice presidential nomination on the Democratic side. But it is intriguing to me as a reporter. But there's no one at this moment preparing behind the scenes to challenge Vice President Harris. That's right. Governor Gretchen Whitmer just saying with Biden out, my job in this election will remain the same, doing everything I can to help elect Democrats and stop Donald Trump. She wrote that on social media. So she will not get in the way of Kamala Harris seeking this Democratic Party nomination. And the Congressional Black Caucus endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the nomination. The chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, did as well. You can put up this tweet from Osita, who basically kind of puts a fine point on it, says CBC, New Dem, CBC, the matter is closed. It's not completely closed, but in order for it to be open, there has to be a candidate for people to rally behind.

Right. And nobody seems to want to jump out and challenge her. All of these governors want to be president. Right. That is not in question. Right. That is not in question. Right. So they are facing a possibility where if they beat Kamala Harris and Donald Trump over the course of the next two months, basically, they will become president of the United States, which is their abiding ambition. Right. The thing that gets them out of bed in the morning. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are among the two most beatable major party candidates you could imagine.

Right. So yet they are all taking a pass. Why do you think that is? Well, I think you've laid it out pretty, pretty clearly, which is, I mean, first of all, they worry not just about can they beat her, but they also worry about their future within the Democratic Party. They worry that if they go up against her and they lose and then she loses, then they're blamed for it. They're worried, you know, that also they're starting from behind. So even though Donald Trump is a weak candidate, even if by some miracle they were able to overcome the Kamala Harris train, which appears to have left the station, that they would be in a vulnerable position this time around. So they are hoping that she loses.

So they think they have a better shot in 2028. Now, whether or not that's the case, who knows? But these are not really the most courageous of beings. So the fact that you had the reason those groups, the CBC, the CPC, the New Dems, why it's important to put them together is because that's the entire breadth of the Democratic ideological coalition in the House. And the squad, all of them except Rashida Tlaib. All but except Rashida Tlaib, which is interesting because she's been the most outspoken, obviously, on Gaza. And Kamala Harris, it's been, we'll talk a little bit more about this in the Israel block too, but with regards to foreign policy, she's been a little more outspoken on the side of like humanitarianism

towards Palestinians in Gaza during this. Does that amount to anything? We really have no idea, but it has been interesting watching all of the Israeli news outlets kind of freaking out and like trying to parse what she said and what it might mean for the future relationship with Israel and our policy vis-a-vis their atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank. So, you know, you have all of those pieces, but ultimately it really looks like it's going to be difficult to stop her's just you have to not only have a process, you have to have a candidate who has some powerful support behind them. The other thing she has going for her is she's from California. It's the largest delegation, I believe. So you automatically have a lot of delegates who are likely to be in your corner.

So far, I've seen Obama has left the door open to an open convention. Pelosi has left the door open to an open convention. But they're not putting their thumb on the scales for any particular candidate. And meanwhile, you've got Josh Shapiro, Roy Cooper, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, all backing Kamala Harris. And those are some of the top names at the top of the list of who could potentially credibly challenge her in an open convention. But we should also be clear, you know, with the group of delegates you're talking about, even if you had a Gretchen Whitmer, let's say, jump into the race against her, Kamala Harris comes in with a formidable

advantage just from being the sitting vice president and having that sort of apparatus behind her. Yeah, absolutely. So they're thinking, well, I'll bide my time. I'll wait until next time. For most candidates, though, that clever thinking doesn't work. And the window closes on them. The political graveyards are filled with people who missed their moment. Exactly. And one of the people who missed their moment. Chris Christie. Exactly.

And one of the people who knows that better than anybody else, say what you want about Barack Obama, he recognized the moment. He knew his moment. He went for it. We can put up this next element. So this was Obama's statement announcing how much he loves Barack Obama. But the key there is that he trusts the party, he says, to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges, deciding not to put his support behind Kamala Harris. But the other point here is that all of these governors also want to be vice president, want to be on the ticket.

And so they feel like even if they dither for a couple days and think about it, the Harris camp is going to say, oh, wait a minute. I haven't heard from JB yet. Where's JB? JB hasn't endorsed us. Oh, they'll notice. Then maybe you go to the bottom of that short list. Or the calculations, like there is an alternative calculation that she's going to lose. And if I'm on that ticket, there's two ways of thinking about it. If I'm on that ticket, then am I toxic in 2028 for this implosion? Or is it not my fault because I was just thrown into the very last minute and it was actually Kamala Harris that lost. And me being vice president means it's my turn then to run in 2028 at the top of the ticket.

But people don't actually know, you know, how this is going to unfold. And, you know, I'm losing, I think you should, I think you should lose a lot of respect for people who have a shot at power, have wanted it their whole lives and then don't take it. Yeah, true. Who don't know to recognize or seize the moment. One thing you can say about Nancy Pelosi, she knows how to use power. She is one of the only Democrats that seems to still exist. And Obama, too, he chooses his spots. But when he intervenes, it has been quite powerful. I mean, here's the thing, too,

about the rush of Democrats to endorse and line up behind Kamala Harris. This is a party that is terrified of any sort of like even a glimpse of Democratic choice. They just are. I mean, they were terrified of having a real competitive process this time around in 2024. And the argument that I hear, they, again, they can all read the polls

and some of them genuinely do, are committed to beating Donald Trump. They know that Kamala Harris is probably the second weakest candidate you could put up outside of Joe Biden. And yet they're resigned to falling in line behind her because they're so fearful of this, quote unquote, chaos at, you know, at a convention where you really do have multiple candidates making the case and having to gather support and demonstrate some sort of strength and legitimacy to the American people. They're very fearful of a process that they don't have total, like, total tightly gripped control over. And so I think that animates some of the sentiment here as well and the desire to just, all right, we're just going to coalesce behind Kamala. We're going to put this behind us. The Republicans were so unified. That's, you know, Democrats' greatest dream. That's like their greatest accolade is when they can say that they were unified about something,

even if that thing that they're unified behind totally sucks. Yes. And it's based on a lot of public statements from people that were endorsing Kamala Harris. And I also talked to a couple members of Congress who went out early and made these endorsements, asked why. And we can actually put this element up while we talk about this. Harris performs just one point better than Biden so far. I think Biden generally in this New York Times analysis of all these polls was trailing by three, Harris kind of basically trailing by two. But like you said, it's impossible to really know because people are not good at predicting how they're going to feel about something until it happens.

Enormous numbers of Republicans said they would never vote for a convicted felon. Right. And then he was convicted. They're like, ah, that's fine. I'll vote for a convicted felon. I'll vote for this convicted felon. But yes, what people were telling me is that the question of unity was central. They hate the cable news Democrats in disarray type of narrative that's out there. So they want to squash that. They want to be unified. Whereas people like you and me, we would like the Democrats to be in more disarray more often. Freedom's untidy, as Donald Rumsfeld said. And so one of them said that union leaders had been speaking

positively of Kamala Harris and that their swing state members, they felt could actually get behind Kamala Harris. Kamala has been tight with organized labor. So that seems to have come to her rescue at this critical moment. And there's five weeks to the convention. And so there's just this feeling that it's both too short and too long. It's too long to be undecided about who your nominee is. And it's too short to kind of run a full campaign. So screw it, just do Kamala and get on with it and call it a day. I feel like the lefties who have gotten behind her who are, you know, fully coconut pilled rather than just like maybe a little coconut curious. Or ironic about it.

Or ironic about it or whatever. But I think that the sense is basically like, listen, it's not like Gretchen Whitmer is going to be some, they're basically all the same, right? They're basically all just standard issue Democrats who are going to go along with whatever the current political wins are that make sense within the Democratic Party context. She has at least said some things that seem to be a little bit better on Gaza. So we're going to cross our fingers and hope she's a little bit better there and, you know, just let this process play out and see who she picks for VP. And just, you know, it's almost like a resignation from the beginning that there wasn't going to be a real open process. So since it's going to be Kamala, let's just like buck up and get as excited about it as we possibly can.

Since I get from lefties who are truly coconut pilled. Yeah. And you can put up D7 to pair with the last New York Times when this is a CNN. Their poll of polls average like six polls and they find Harris behind just by one point. So basically, statistically tied, neck and neck with Trump. And so prosecutor going against a felon who's polling better than Biden, unity, like that's basically the argument for the Kamala Harris campaign. I think it is my own vibe check for what it's worth. I think it is likely that she actually sees a bump in these polls because for one thing, the narrative about her has been very negative and in a lot of ways, deservedly so, because when

she has had these big moments on the national stage, she hasn't performed particularly well. However, Joe Biden has set the bar so low for a candidate, and Donald Trump has as well in his own way, that I think perhaps just having someone who is not Donald Trump or Joe Biden is going to be a relief for a significant number of Americans. Seeing someone who is going to be, you know, she is elected president and this next term is not going to be 80 years old or well into her 80s by the time it's finished. I think that also just Trump look old. Yeah, she does. And I saw lots of Democrats immediately jumping on that. Can he serve out the next term? He's going to be the oldest in history, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know,

I actually think that there is something to that because when we did the word clouds with Trump, it's not like his his word cloud associations were great. Criminal was the number one. I believe old was in there for him too. There are concerns about him and his advanced age as well. So you get this rollout for her. You get media excitement around her. She feels like even though she's been in politics and she's been the VP, they kind of kept her buried for a long time. So she feels like a fresh face. Also, the fact that she was completely disconnected from any of the power centers in the Biden administration now begins to look like an asset for her because she has a little bit

of seeming distance from any of the negative decisions that were made there. So I suspect she's probably going to pick up in the polls a little bit, at least in the short term. And then we'll see if she's able to carry that on her own. But certainly going into the DNC, there's going to be so much of a better feeling about it. There are still, as Weigel was saying earlier on, still plans for protests against the Biden-Harris policy in the Gaza genocide. So you'll still have some discontent. But I think the young voters who were not going to vote for Biden were disgusted with him over his policy

will be more open to the possibility of getting on board with a Kamala Harris. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left.

In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free

on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be

voiceover to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Yeah. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up. So now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. With guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams,

and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So that's the case for Kamala. Let's do the case against Kamala and what makes Democrats so nervous. And we'll start by rolling this clip, this famous clip from the debate in the summer of 2019 when Kamala Harris was running for president. The substance of what you're about to watch is important, but in some ways almost less important

than what it says about who Kamala Harris is as a politician and as a candidate. So let's roll this and then talk about the problems that a lot of Democrats are identifying around this that have not, they don't believe, been reformed yet. Congresswoman Gabbard, you took issue with Senator Harris confronting Vice President Biden at the last debate. You called it a, quote, false accusation that Joe Biden is a racist. What's your response? I want to bring the conversation back to the broken criminal justice system that is disproportionately negatively impacting black and brown people all across this country today. Now, Senator Harris says she's proud of her record

as a prosecutor and that she'll be a prosecutor president, but I'm deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep cash bail system in place. That impacts poor people in the worst kind of way. Thank you, Congresswoman.

Senator Harris, your response. As the elected Attorney General of California, I did the work of significantly reforming the criminal justice system of a state of 40 million people, which became a national model for the work that needs to be done. And I am proud of that work. And I am proud of making a decision to not just give fancy speeches or be in a legislative body and give speeches on the floor, but actually doing the work of being in the position to use the power that I had to reform a system that is badly in need of reform. That is why we created

initiatives that were about reentering former offenders and getting them counseling. It is why, and because I know that criminal justice system is so broken, that I am an advocate for what we need to do to not only decriminalize but legalize marijuana in the United States. I want to bring Congresswoman Gabbard back in. Your response, ma'am? The bottom line is, Senator Harris, when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people's lives, you did not. And worse yet, in the case of those who were on death row, innocent people, you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to do so. There is no excuse for that. And the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology.

And so what's important to understand about that exchange, we can put a D10 here. So in January of 2019, Lara Bazelon wrote a column in the New York Times, which was widely read across Democratic circles that basically formed the research that Tulsi Gabbard used in her annihilation of Kamala Harris there. And Bazelon is part of the Bazelon family that is kind of legal royalty in Democratic circles. And so this was a pitch that Kamala Harris saw coming for six months, seven months. The debate was in July. This was published in January. This was the knock on her throughout the campaign.

So you can talk about the substance of the critique that Tulsi makes, and it's strong and it resonates with people on the left far more than it will resonate with people on the right. But what it also says is, how did you not have an answer for that by that point? Right. Think about what she said there. So first she is, how did you not have an answer for that by that point? Right. Think about what she said there. So first she said, I did the work. I didn't just give speeches. You know, I reformed the system and I want to legalize marijuana. Nowhere in there is a single response to anything that Tulsi said. And then it enabled Tulsi to come back and just like finish

her off with, okay, well, you just, you didn't respond. Right. So how did you have nothing there? Yeah. That's the thing is Kamala Harris, my impression of her during 2020 is when she was prepared, like when she had her scripted lines ready to go, she was good at delivering them. And it actually makes sense with a prosecutor background. Like she's good in that role when she's the one leading the charge, when she's the one pushing the conversation. She's not as good when she's having to respond, when she's having to think on her feet. And now the other piece here goes to also preparation. This was something else that her staff was leaking about her after her campaign imploded,

which is that she didn't, quote unquote, do the work when it came to preparing for these instances. And then when she was caught flat footed and doesn't have a response to what is an obvious, you know, coming line of attack, then she would blow up at her staffers and blame them when they would say, listen, you had the briefing, like you could have done the work and been prepared for this moment, but we can only do so much. You have to be the one that actually does that and ultimately performs. The irony, of course, of this, first of all, number one, you would never hear Tulsi Gabbard talking like this today with her hard right turn.

She was good. Yeah, I was like, oh, I remember why I used to like this lady, right? That's number one. Number two, I've seen a bunch of lefties. I'm sure you've seen this too. Like, all right, leftist, stop talking about her good voting record in the Senate. Now go back to calling her a cop so that the general public wants to vote for her in elections. So the Trump campaign is going to take the exact opposite tact with her and have already telegraphed and already started to put these pitches out that she was, quote unquote, soft on crime when she was in

California as part of, you know, what they portray as like a hellscape, dystopian hellscape in the state of California and is too liberal, coastal, liberal, elite, et cetera, et cetera. Like that's going to be the brush they paint her with. But you're 100 percent correct. It's not the substance here that she has to worry about, because in a way, the attacks that Tulsi is making on her here, like you will never hear those same attacks on her from a Republican. That's going to be an issue. But the fact that she was so unable to handle it in the moment, even though it was so predictable, it's consistent with a number of Kamala Harris moments that we've seen that have not gone particularly well for her. And so perhaps

it looks like Donald Trump now is getting a little squeamish about having to debate her. He put on a truth that was like, well, I only want to do it if it's on Fox News. I think she would have a hard time debating him because his whole thing is throwing people off balance. And I think that's a difficult place for her to be. In a sense, I relate to it because I'm much better prepared and thought through than I am just off the cuff on my feet as well. But it is not her strength to be in a sort of chaotic, free-for-all type of environment where she can't have digested all her talking points and be just ready to go with them. And on the substance, though, I'm not actually certain

that Trump won't hit her with his stuff. Trump loves to talk about how he did the First Step Act, which was that move towards criminal justice reform that he did with Jared Kushner and Van Jones. And I think you are going to see kind of targeted attacks at kind of progressive voters, the black community generally. That's true. That's a good point. That maybe don't have the campaign's fingerprints, but you're going to see a lot of, and you'll hear probably about the people who appear to be innocent that are still in prison to this day. Ads on black radio stations mailers going out to certain communities that would be sensitive to this. Because Kamala refused to like allow the evidence to be seen. Another example that we have that you will probably all remember

of a pitch that you could see coming from miles and miles away and her just badly whiffing on, and your point about her staff complaining that she refuses to prepare for these is very important because that goes to her ability to campaign and to govern. This other one was, if you remember, she was assigned dealing with the border crisis. And the media for, and particularly Fox, but the media in general for weeks had this meme going of when is Kamala Harris going to go visit the border? Why won't she visit the border? Because the argument is it's a complete catastrophe down at the border. Once you see it with your own eyes, you can't deny it any longer and then you have to actually commit to solving the problem. So the question, when are you going to go to the border, was already being publicly asked of Kamala Harris constantly when she sat down for this interview, got that question, and good Lord, watch the answer. Do you have any plans to visit the border? I'm here in Guatemala today.

At some point, we are going to the border. We've been to the border. So this whole thing about the border, we've been to the border. We've been to the border. You haven't been to the border. And I haven't been to Europe.

We've been to the border. We've been to the border. You haven't been to the border. Well, that's true. We haven't been to Europe. We've been to the border. We've been to the border. You haven't been to the border. Well, that's true. We haven't been to Europe either. Haven't been to Europe. And she also has like two moves, if you've noticed. The one is she'll do the laugh to like disarm people.

Yeah. Oh, God, the laugh. And Trump has already called it laughing Kamala. I'm not sure that works. It's not his best nickname. It's not his best nickname. It's not his best nickname. Her other move is indignation, which she did kind of fake indignation. She did it in response to Tulsi.

Yeah. Like, how dare you? I'm doing the work. Right. And she did it to Lester Holt there. Like, indignant. Like, we've been to the border. Right.

It's like, what? This whole idea, we have been to the border, but you haven't been to the border. Right. It's like, wait, what? This whole idea, we have been to the border, but you haven't been to the border. Well. And so first she starts with, just throws her hand up. Yeah. And if you guys want, just scroll it back, watch it again, just to see how just epically bad it was.

First, she throws her hands up and says, we're in Guatemala. And remember, she knew this question was coming. And I think the dumb gotcha question, who cares if she goes to the border or not? What your border policy is, is what actually matters. That's not the point. The point is, she knew the question was coming. When are you going to the border? Why haven't you gone yet? First, she throws her hands up and says, well, we're in Guatemala. Then she says, we're going to go to the border. Then she just freezes and all out of nowhere just says, we've been to the border.

Right. Like that is not an A-level politician answer. No. That's a Selina Meyer level answer. Not even close. But the question is whether you need an A-level politician to beat Trump at this point. That is the Democrats' hope at this point. Yeah. And it's also possible. Trump is historically unpopular. Yeah. And it's, now the other question is what happens to Democrats

if she's president for four years and governs like that? Now, maybe she can grow in the office and learn, but if she, but if she refuses to prepare going forward as president, you know, I, you know, beating Trump for Democrats is the number one priority and they'll figure everything else out later. Yeah. But a historically unpopular president wouldn't be good either. Right. No, that's absolutely the case. And, you know, in terms of like, it's almost a fool's errand to try to divine what her actual policy views are. Yeah. Because, and this was the thing about her 2020 campaign is Stafford in the post-mortem was saying,

like, we were changing slogans with the seasons. You know, it was from the beginning to the middle to the, you know, almost end to the complete end. They kept shifting and kept trying to pivot. You brought up earlier how when it looks like the thing to do was like to get it to the left of the party and to sign on to Medicare for all to the left in the party and to sign onto Medicare for all. She did that. She tries to embrace the debate. She gets backlash from donors.

Then she tries to run away from that. So there wasn't any real ideological core in evidence. And so you can kind of look at her record through whatever prism you want. When she was AG of California, you know, when she was in California, she was, I would say, more conservative. She was very friendly with Silicon Valley, very friendly with like, you know, the business community there. This was at a time, and it was a time when it was really consequential when she was AG, when you had the rise of these giant tech monopolies. She also was, David Dayen has done great work about, you know, her coziness with banks and some of the bad decisions she made with regard to that. Her record in the Senate,

that's when she decides the lane is to be progressive, right? And to sort of hug the Warren-Bernie side of the aisle. She thought that would be her pathway forward. And so if you look at her voting record and things she championed there, then you come away with a very different impression. I think the general public impression of her is just sort of like, you know, California liberal. Probably the issue she has the most ideological commitment to are social issues. Like, I think she probably genuinely cares about abortion and has been a fairly effective messenger on abortion. And that happens to be a good issue for her to be an effective messenger on right at the moment, given how important that has been to Democratic fortunes of late. Yeah.

There was this really revealing moment, to your point, where she was on Colbert. And he pressed her on. You called Biden racist at this debate and really brutalized him. And now you're his vice president. She laughed and said it was a debate. Right. And he was like, he didn't quite get the joke, but what she was trying to say was, I didn't mean it. Right. I was just saying that for the camera. Politics. I just say things because I think they're going to work for me in that moment. And it's funny that you think anything different.

It's like, oh, okay. Yeah. I thought we were taking this seriously. Yeah. So I guess I'm the sucker. How do you handicap it at this point in terms of her likelihood of succeeding in the fall? I think 50-50, I think. Because Trump is just, you know, they're both going to be, well, they're both unpopular.

Right. But somebody's got to win. Right, right. Yeah, I think I'd probably still give Trump the edge, just given, you know, he's such a known quantity, given, listen, I don't want to deny that, like, racism and sexism exists, that there will be some group of voters who are, who can't envision her in commander as the commander in chief role, because we've never seen it before. I do think that those, those are real challenges that she'll have to overcome. I think she is definitely not an A plus political player. She came up in California politics because of basically the California Democratic Party machine.

So it's not like she really, you know, wowed people there and won them over. She completely flops in 2020. So it's not like there's an electoral track record of success that you can really pin on Kamala Harris. So I think it's better odds than not that even with Kamala as the nominee, Trump still wins the White House back. But she got a better shot than Biden. A friend suggested she run on the slogan, I know you don't like me, but I will fight for you. It's the best we can do. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids,

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The endorsements are pouring in from her potential opponents. Right. Mark Kelly, the astronaut, which would be such a 90s kind of way to, 80s and 90s kind of way to go about running a presidential candidate, get the astronaut hero. Andy Beshear, want to hear more from Crystal, our fellow Appalachian. Roy Cooper, popular North Carolina governor, and Josh Shapiro, extremely popular and talented kind of Pennsylvania governor. Gretchen Whitmer has since joined this chorus saying that they're going to support Kamala Harris.

Let me hear your take on Bashir. He's speaking, he's he's speaking right now, like as we record this on Morning Joe, on Morning Joe. What what are the Morning Joe people going to think you think? Oh, I think they're going to like him. So here's here's the thing. So of that list, which seems to be the most core four that are being floated as potential Kamala VP picks. Of those individuals, Mark Kelly, I think, has an issue because he's a senator and Arizona's a tough state. So you immediately have an issue of like, all right, well, then we have to have an election and Senate's already very gravely in doubt. So I think he's an issue. So I think you're probably most likely looking at one of these three governors. Andy Beecher is the one I happen to have the most knowledge of. He's the governor

of Kentucky. He won re-election. He is, the last time I checked, the most popular Democratic governor in the entire country among his constituents. He also happens to be young. He's 46 years old. He's got a young family as well. Comes from basically political royalty in Kentucky. His dad was also, Steve Beshear, was also governor. Kentucky's a state where those things still really matter. So that helped to give him an edge in terms of winning the primary and then being able to beat originally Matt Bevin, who was the Republican governor of the state of Kentucky. And it's hard to say where he is ideologically because he has a republican

legislature so it's not like he's been able to really push and champion his own agenda but i will tell you having lived in kentucky it is a state that is you know it's a rural populist state he wins wins election initially on the back of the teacher strike wave. And Matt Bevin was messing with teachers' pensions. This created a statewide cross-ideological revolt that created the conditions for Andy Beshear initially to win election. Then you ask, then he's faced with COVID and all of the fraught political issues over that. And whatever you think of these decisions, he didn't do what you might expect a Democratic governor in an increasingly red state to do.

He was quite aggressive in terms of COVID protocols, and he held regular press conferences to really explain his decisions. He also has not backed away from social issues in the way that you might expect a Democratic governor in an increasingly red state to do as well. There are lots of anecdotes about him embracing trans people and being confronted with a photograph of him with an arm around someone and saying, listen, you're a bigot for making a big deal of this. Of course,

I support people's equality. Then after Roe versus Wade is overturned, he's up for reelection. They do off-year elections in Kentucky, so I believe it was 2021. He's up for reelection against Mitch McConnell's handpicked candidate, who was seen as having a lot of political prowess, the AG in the state, Daniel Cameron. And he runs aggressively on choice. There was a stunning ad that he aired of a young girl who had been raped. And she's talking about Daniel Cameron would force me to have my rapist baby. And not only does he win reelection, but he increases his margin from the first time he got in there. And I'm talking a lot about social issues here just to show you he hasn't sort of backed down from some of the tougher, more challenging issues for

Democrats in these type of states. But really, his core message that he originally got elected on was very labor-centric. And part of his popularity, why he's so popular in the state, is because he's brought a lot of jobs. He's been very focused on economic development. Some of the new battery manufacturing plants have been brought, are coming into Kentucky, creating a lot of new development. Some of the new battery manufacturing plants have been brought, are coming into Kentucky, creating a lot of new jobs. Most of those new union jobs, it's still a state that has a pretty high union density, which is part of why I'm favorable towards him. I also, I know I'm like, I've met him. We're not like friends, but I've been around him in lots of these democratic party circles. His vibe is not political genius.

His vibe is very like dad in a minivan, just very normal, very normal seeming guy. And the most core commitment I could really tell you is that he's been very tied in with labor. Labor's been very supportive of him. He's been very supportive of labor. And so, you know, I would expect him to continue to bring that commitment to the table were he to be vice president. So, you know, the downsides for him is it's not a swing. Kentucky's not a swing state.

I don't know how well Kamala Harris knows him. So I don't know if there's a comfort factor there, but certainly on demonstrated ability to appeal to, you know, the, to a population that is skeptical of Democrats at this point in time. He more than anyone else has that demonstrated track record for sure. 46 year old dad in a minivan sounds like my kind of guy. Yeah. Also, relatedly, like a black hole of charisma. So how does that play? Like, because oftentimes when these state level politicians move up to the national level, sometimes they catch on, other times they just bomb immediately.

Yeah. And we're like, Kentucky, what are you doing? Yeah, well, I think that's the question mark. He's certainly not going to outshine anyone on a ticket, I mean, just in terms of his personal charisma. You definitely get the sense from him that if his dad, if his family business wasn't politics, he wouldn't be in politics. In some ways, that's a downside. In the other way, it kind of has a charm to it because he does come off as a little ill-suited to the role. And so maybe the non-charismatic dad vibes work for him. Maybe it's hard for people to imagine him

in the role. There's another piece that's interesting to him, which is, first of all, obviously, Kentucky is an Appalachian state. Eastern Kentucky is coal country. He has outperformed in coal country. And these are like historic Democrats. Historically, they vote Democratic. In this part of Kentucky, still at the state level, they will vote for Democrats. And you saw that with Beshear, and that's because he positioned himself in this like pro-education, pro-labor, pro-job way, he was able to outperform in a part of the state that has become a very, very deep red, difficult for Democrats. That's where Trump has also seen some of his highest levels of support. It would make him an interesting matchup with J.D. Vance, who also claims this Appalachian

credibility, and that's like his whole thing. So it would be fun as a political nerd and someone who's very interested in this part of the country and has my own, on my dad's side, Appalachian roots. It'd be very fun to watch that matchup between them. The last thing I'll say about him before I shut up, because I know nobody cares about this as much as I do, but when he initially, the guy he beat, Matt Bevin, this Republican that he beat, when Matt Bevin was elected, he was the canary in the coal mine for Trump.

Yeah. Because he wins in 2015, and he's this sort of brash businessman who comes out of nowhere, and you may think of Kentucky as red. At that point, Kentucky was only electing Democratic governors and still the statehouse was Democratic. Comes out of nowhere. He's behind 10 points, I think, in the polls and is able to beat the establishment Democratic pick, the equivalent of the Hillary Clinton pick on the Democratic side. And so

Matt Bevin is seen as this like canary in the coal mine for Trump. And then Andy Beshear is able to defeat him. So in any case, there's a lot about him that I find interesting just because I happen to know more about his story than I know about the stories of these other potential picks. And he is right. And to your point, he is kind of, he has governed as a kind of progressive, not totally across the board, but he did not do a, I'm going to be a center-right Republican light. Right. He was like, he's just unabashedly, it's an interesting guy. Yeah. So we also have some of the others, you know, top contenders we can put up on the screen. I think Gretchen Whitmer is the next one that we have.

You guys probably heard more about her. Governor of Michigan, 52 years old. She's got a 61% approval in the state of Michigan. I think it's, listen, I think it's unlikely they put another woman on the ticket. I think they're looking for the whitest white man that they can possibly find to be Kamala Harris' VP. It would be something to lean into it and just go, look. Full girl boss? Yes. And actually, yeah, lean in. And position. Mamala and Big Gretch. And just position yourself as, yeah, Big Gretch and Kamala against Vance and Trump. It would really be a clarifying kind of argument on that. That's true.

I think you're probably right that it's unlikely. Then E4, speaking of big, we've got Big JB. Fairly popular, 48% approval rating. Not great in a democratic state, though. Not great, but everybody hates everybody. So like anything over 40 in this world. The thing about him is that he's this, what they call a billionaire everyman. He comes from the Hyatt, was it the Hyatt fortune, whatever the hotel chain is that all the Pritzkers kind of derive their wealth from. Yet somehow he has managed to express this persona of a guy that people just really like and just seems genuine.

Yeah. And he's done some good, like I couldn't, I would be hard pressed to tell you specifically. He did some good like progressive stuff, you know, some wage stuff, some labor stuff. Yeah. All of that. Yeah. Ideologically, this guy is probably the closest of the ones who are being discussed. He's probably the closest to our politics. That's the irony is that the billionaire is the most left of the governors. The left really had a moment with him, too, where they were like really memeing him

hard and they were, you know, socialists for Pritzker. Chapo was all about Big JB. Yeah. But I am not hearing that much about him. He doesn't have the swing state poll, you know, and I don't know if there are other reasons why I'm not hearing him as much, but he's one that's on the longer of the short list. He has not yet endorsed Kamala Harris. True. Neither has Durbin or Duckworth, the senators from Illinois, which. Interesting. It is interesting that the three of them have not endorsed. Hmm. Well, he would certainly have lots of money if he decided to jump into some sort of an open convention situation. That's the other thing. If you're like, hey, we've got all this, there's money problems. He's like, yeah,

that's not, that's not a problem I have. Yeah. Next up, we have Josh Shapiro, who is the governor of Pennsylvania, 51 years old, 59% approval. He won this gubernatorial election in a romp. Like, it was not even close. He, Fetterman won quite easily in the same year, and Shapiro outperformed even Fetterman. So, obviously, the Pennsylvania ties, swing state brings that into play. You know, in terms of his ideology, I will tell you he compared Gaza protesters to the KKK. He said we have to query whether or not we would tolerate this of college student protesters if this were people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia making comments about people who are African-American in our communities.

So that was his, he, I think is the most ideal. He happens personally to be Jewish, but outside of that, he is, appears to be the most ideologically committed Zionist as well. Now his domestic policies have, he has taken on some powerful interest in a way that has been interesting. You know, perhaps he's more in in line with the Biden domestic policy agenda. In fact, I guess if you put that together with Biden's also strident Zionism, that somebody like Shapiro could lead it, which would be a fascinating kind of development as the Democratic Party just kind of structurally sees its tie with the AIPAC wing. Yeah. Weaken. Yeah. So you're saying because of his personal identity and commitment to the

state, he could be the one that would have the credibility to make the break. Nixon goes to China. Shapiro goes to Ramallah. That could be something. It could be. Where a politician is today does not necessarily determine where they're going to be tomorrow. That's true. So there's that. We'll leave that door open. All right, next we got Roy Cooper. This is another one that I feel like he's a top, top contender, it seems like. Kamala's been in the state with him a couple of times fairly recently, so they have some sort of a cordial relationship. Governor of North Carolina, 67 years old, 52% approval rating.

You know, maybe you can put North Carolina in 67 years old, 52% approval rating. Maybe you can put North Carolina in play if he is on the ticket, potentially. I looked it up. Biden only lost by less than two points in the state of North Carolina last time around. Of course, Obama was able to win North Carolina. Now, this guy, from what I could tell, is kind of the safe, milquetoast, Democratic candidate you would expect to be governor of a somewhat red state like North Carolina. That's what I meant that Beshear was not. Yeah, doesn't try to rock the boat, tries to say as little as possible,

really picks his spots. He also has a Republican legislature, so it's not like he's been able to really do anything as governor. So that's my sense of him, is this very safe, cautious, studiously middle-of-the-road type of politician. Yeah. And it would be a very unimaginative choice, and I don't see what it adds to the ticket, but I think it's a high possibility. Yeah, I know. He's the one that I'm like, which makes me feel like that's probably who she'll pick.

Okay. Yeah, I know. He's the one that I'm like, which makes me feel like that's probably who she'll pick. And last up, we have the aforementioned Mark Kelly, senator of Arizona, 60 years old, 50% approval. He's very popular in Arizona. I mean, 50% doesn't seem that high, except when you look at every other, you know, senator across the country. He's managed to hold up his approval rating quite well in the state of Arizona. And he's, you know, it's not like he's, he's not like a Kyrsten Sinema. He hasn't gone out of his way to be super antagonistic to Democrats. He's just kind of a standard issue Democratic politician who happens to have this aspirational personal bio of being the hero, Astron, and also the husband of Gabby Gifford. So that's been his, that's kind of his lane. Yeah. And I think with him, as I mentioned before, the problem is I don't think they're going to want to pull him out of the Senate because of that.

Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's the reason not to do this because you're already staring down the possibility of not having the Senate for like 12 years. Yeah. You don't want to hasten that at all. Yeah. And if you, I mean, Arizona is still really tough. And there aren't candidates just hanging out, Democratic candidates hanging out there that would have as clear a path to power as he does. So I think that is difficult for him. And the next president is going to probably appoint a lot of Supreme Court justices.

Very true. And Republicans have shown that they're willing to just say no thank you if they control the Senate. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And the landscape for Democrats is very dire in the Senate already because Joe Manchin, they are effectively, you know, with him gone, they're losing West Virginia all but certainly. And so they have to pick up a seat. And Texas, I believe, is their best shot. So it's already a really difficult landscape. But it matters whether you're down by one seat or four seat or 10 seats in the Senate. So I have a feeling they're not going to want to go in that direction.

Yeah, I think that's right. So we now have footage of this strike that the Houthis were able to carry out in Tel Aviv, if we can roll this here, a drone was able to penetrate Israeli airspace, which the Israelis have said was the result of human error, not a system error, and strike an apartment building near U.S. consulate, because the embassy is U.S. something, because the embassy is now in in Jerusalem killing an Israeli civilian an attack on civilian infrastructure which we should all condemn here at the same time what everyone at CNN or elsewhere would say in a situation was like this is that Israel is known to embed elements of its military infrastructure inside

Tel Aviv, which according to human shields, that now that does not justify the killing of civilians. For some reason, that is always held up by the Western media as justification for the killing of civilians in Gaza, because they will accurately say that Hamas does embed its military infrastructure inside its civilian infrastructure. Israel does the same thing, absolutely does not justify attacking civilian infrastructure. Yeah, that is a very good point. We could put a tear sheet up on the screen which from Haaretz which spells out what this could mean. You already have this conflict has spread to Iran. You've had this conflict spread to Lebanon, certainly ongoing back and forth between Hezbollah

and Israel. And the Houthis have been out there doing their thing. This is a major escalation, though, from the Houthis. The headline here is Houthi drone strike on Tel Aviv marks a new phase in the October 7th war. The Houthis say Tel Aviv will now be a main target. An excellent deal for Iran, they say, as Israel's multi-front war just got tougher, though the worst drone threat remains Hezbollah in the north. Another analysis that I read, Ryan says, describes the Houthis as a determined radical enemy that is hard to deter and they invest a lot of effort in psychological warfare and are armed with increasingly sophisticated long-range weapons.

They also talk about the failure in allowing this drone strike through because, of course, Israel has extensive air defense systems. The failure to operate that air defense system, as the Air Force has admitted, looms behind Friday morning's attack. A preliminary investigation shows the drone was detected heading toward Israel, but for some reason was not considered a threat, and the military did not try to intercept it. So for Israelis, this sense of insecurity was a real goal of this Houthi strike, that we can hit you in Tel Aviv is, you know, they expect some danger in the north of Israel has been evacuated, certainly in what they call the Gaza envelope near there. There's

obviously acknowledgement of the dangers that lurk there, but that combatants can strike you even in the heart of Tel Aviv is another level of sort of psychological warfare. Yeah. And the apartment apparently was home to displaced people from inside Israel. Because the North and the South have seen significant displacements as a result of this war. So Israel struck back hard, hitting the port of Hodeidah. Now, Hodeidah is the main entry point for humanitarian aid. The seizing of Hodeidah by the Saudis and Emiratis years ago is what really precipitated the humanitarian crisis, the famine that we saw over years. The Israelis, according to the reporting, have had a real difficulty in finding where the Houthis are

stashing basically their military infrastructure, their drones, their missiles. And so they went right for the civilian infrastructure. They hit a Hodeidah power plant and hit this fuel depot. And they argued that, and this is the reporting in the Israeli press, that it's okay that their attack on the port is going to disrupt humanitarian supplies getting through the port because the Houthis actually steal the supplies for themselves and don't distribute them to the Yemeni citizenry, which of course Israel has profound respect for. The precise same argument that they have used in why they're inhibiting so much of the flow of aid into Gaza. That Hamas is just stealing all the aid. So it's the exact same argument that they're making there. We don't have this element yet because I just got this from a couple sources

who do humanitarian work. But they're saying that the number of trucks that have come through from July 1st to July 15th, average of 86 a day, which is up from, it was a 76 in June. Into Gaza. Into Gaza. They have been saying we need at least 1,000 a day. Like that's what humanitarian aid works. You need 1,000 a day. Like, that's what humanitarian aid works. You need 1,000 a day for the people there. 86 is effectively nothing. Yeah, 86 is very, very close to zero.

And getting reports now that Israelis have now come up with a new method. They're asking the ships and the trucks for their, quote, donation number. It's like a new bureaucratic hurdle. What's your donation number? And all the humanitarian workers, what are you talking about? Donation number. And suddenly they're all being turned back around. You don't have a donation number.

Back of the line. Wow. Don't have a donation number. Where do we get a donation number? Well, you don't have one. And the U.S. isn't even pretending to help anymore. The vaunted pier announced a great fanfare, and Joe Biden's State of the Union has been completely dismantled after utterly failing in its mission. I mean, the amount of aid that got through the pier was pathetically tiny.

And in fact, I think there's a real argument to make that it gave the Israelis an excuse because they effectively went, oh, well, the U. the US is dealing with this, but we don't have to do this anymore. And since the peer was put into place, like I said, now it's been completely dismantled. But the post-peer aid provisioning was much worse than the pre-peer aid provisioning. And so we continue to head down this path of utter humanitarian catastrophe and crisis. We covered here the letter in The Lancet that says the true number of deaths is probably more like 186,000 when you count not just the bullets and the bombs, but when you also count starvation, communicable disease, etc. And Bibi Netanyahu is heading into town this week to speak to Congress with basically no

one in sight. I think his calculation is basically like, Trump's probably going to win and I'm just going to wait it out and do whatever the hell I want to do. Yeah, I think it's people, I think it should be easy for people to understand why the death toll would be at that level. If you imagine the Washington DC area and which is about seven, seven to 800,000 population. So you expand it out to include a lot of the suburbs. You put a wall around it and you stop anything for the most part, stop anything from getting in, stop anything from getting out. You make the water filthy. There's poliovirus now circulating

in Gaza. And then think about your own family and social circle and how many people just wouldn't be able to survive that. Wouldn't be able to make it. Because of appointments that they can't get to, medication that they need to survive, or just the medical crises that arise from drinking the contaminated water and then not having the ability to treat that. You can imagine that of that population, you know, a significant percentage just simply wouldn't be able to survive it. Yeah. No, that's right. I mean, my daughter had to be rushed for airlifted for emergency surgery this week, which, you know. Any chance she survives that without that?

No. I mean, very unlikely. And even just normal things that you would think about, like they originally thought it was her appendix rupture. If that goes untreated, just that, which is a very normal thing, you have sepsis and you're done. So, yeah, it's not hard to imagine why those numbers would be so high. At the same time, we have significant news out of the highest international court, the International Court of Justice, ruling that the Israeli West Bank settlements are illegal, that Israel must immediately cease building new settlements,

that they must actually evacuate settlers out of the existing settlements. Let's take a listen to the announcement of that decision. By 14 votes to one, is of the opinion that the state of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities and to evacuate all settlers from the occupied Palestinian territory. In favor, President Salam, Judges Tomka, Abraham, Yusuf, Shwe, Bandari, Iwasawa, Nolte, Charlesworth, Brandt, Gomez-Robledo, Cleveland, Uresco, Tladi. Against Vice President Sibeth Ndiaye. So quite an overwhelming decision there.

Even the American judge voted for it and put up F6. So it's known as an advisory opinion. But even if it was a non-advisory opinion, it still has to be enforced by the Security Council. But the savage nature of it and the broad support suggest where the global politics are headed at this point. Meanwhile, a wild story that we published over at Dropsite News by a Tel Aviv reporter named Yaniv Kogan. We put up this Next Step element. This is F7. He got a hold of a plan that was reviewed by the Israeli Security Council being considered at the highest levels to basically turn Gaza over to a puppet regime that would be under the control of the Israelis, but would be modeled after some type of, you know,

Saudi or Emirati type situation that is, where the number one kind of priority is just getting along with Israel. And they think that, and you can read the entire report in here over at Dropsite News, but they think that if you fix the textbooks, you know, just redo the textbooks, redo the curriculum, that somehow, you know, that's going to end the resentment. I think every single school in Gaza has been destroyed. So where the kids would even go to read these reforms textbooks remains an open question. I remember interviewing somebody early on from Gaza about the textbooks, because this is a big thing that you hear from Israelis.

The whole reason they hate us is these terrible textbooks. And there's some things in the textbooks you're like, well, that's bad. That's actually anti-Semitic. And you shouldn't be teaching kids that. And so I asked him about this. He's like, look, your entire upbringing of hearing drones flying over your head, of being treated, if you're in the West Bank, being treated horribly at checkpoints or having your parents treated horribly at checkpoints or being unable to travel. But if you're in Gaza, just being aware that you're not allowed to leave almost for any circumstance, including health-related ones. And the reason is the Israelis. The idea that you need to be taught resentment in school is so detached from the reality of their quote-unquote lived experience

that you just cannot change it. Think about the situation right now. Kids aren't in school. Children are not going to school. So in this view, hey, problem solved, right? Not being exposed to these bad textbooks, even as they're being bombed to oblivion and starved and dehydrated to death. So yeah, I don't think that the reformed textbooks are going to really solve the problem here for Israel. I mean, what does this even look like? Is the thought basically we'll install something like a PA, Mahmoud Abbas, like just a collaborator regime and that this is going to have any kind of legitimacy? I mean, it just seems like a way for Israel to have total occupation control,

but have some sort of a feint at. No, no, it's the Palestinians that are really running the show, just as they do effectively in the West Bank. Yeah, that's it. And it's also, I think one reason it's getting kicked around seriously is because there's so much pressure to plan for the end of the war that they have to kind of say that they're planning for it, when in fact there doesn't seem to be any actual indication that this is going to be wound up at any time soon, that the status quo of just complete catastrophe,

ongoing daily catastrophe with sporadic raids and bombings and massacres is actually tenable for now. Yeah. Last thing to wrap up here, I did pull a story that was published in the Israeli press about Kamala Harris. You could put this up on the screen as we're all trying to read the tea leaves of what her Gaza Israel policy might be. This is the Jerusalem Post, which is a right wing after Biden's endorsement. What has Kamala Harris said about Israel? And I believe it's in this piece. I read a couple of these to get a flavor of what they were saying that described her as being sort of like the bad cop to Biden's good cop. Biden Biden. Now, that would be reversed in our view, but her basically being tougher on Israel and saying some more humanitarian things. We have some reporting that she has been

more concerned about Palestinians raising those concerns internally. We also have some reports that her foreign policy advisor, her top foreign policy advisor, tends to come more from the progressive wing of the foreign policy establishment. So, you know, do you have any sense of what we can legitimately say about what Kamala Harris's policy might look like on this issue? No, it's very hard to say. Now, I've seen some serious concern that some of her, some serious concern from kind of the hawkish wing of Washington's foreign policy establishment that she has some advisors who are significantly less hawkish. And so there's going to be a major joc, like, the Obama, like, the best you're going to do within this Democratic Party is basically Obama's, like, foreign policy, where he was willing to buck AIPAC and do the Iran deal, where he was not interested in just cozying up to Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis and that he was willing to push back on Israel. Yeah.

Like, none of this is saying that it's the greatest foreign policy that the left would ever want to see. But it was a break with Washington, and Washington hated it. Like, the blob hated it. In fact, it was Ben Rhodes who created the term the blob. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah, Ben Rhodes was his national security advisor. Right. And he and the Pod Save Bros basically were at war with the blob.

So it's an intramural fight. But out of those, there are some advisors in that world, anti-blob world, that are now Kamala's advisors. And so if they can grow their membership there, then you could see a better foreign policy than Biden. I also just feel like, I genuinely think if you took just random, run-of-the-mill Democrat on this issue at this point, they would be better than Joe Biden. Because Joe Biden has such an ideological commitment to Zionism and the state of Israel as he thinks of it from 1972 or whatever, that he is effectively unmovable on the issue, even when it's become clear that it is directly contrary to his own political interests. If you just had a normal Democrat in there who was responsive to the political concerns and just weighing this in

terms of a cost-benefit analysis in terms of their own personal political ambitions, I think you would have ended up in a different place than Joe Biden, especially as you clearly saw the numbers with young people, certainly key Arab American populations in the state of Michigan, with black Americans who were very dissonant, by and large, from the Biden, Israel, no matter what policy. And then you add to that the fact that Netanyahu is such a partisan figure at this point and such a Trumpy, right-wing aligned figure that I feel like, again, I'm not trying to raise hopes too high here, but I feel like it would at least be a little better than what you're getting out of Joe Biden with his bear hug approach, which has been an utter and complete

disaster for Palestinians first and foremost, but also for the US and ultimately, I think, for Israel. It's an interesting window into the world for young people on the left here. If you came into politics at around 2015, that's when you started following it, you came into a world in which your hopes and dreams had something to attach themselves to in the manner of Bernie Sanders running for president, followed by the kind of upsurge, insurgency inside the House. And so you develop this idea that your political views could be represented inside our political system. And that's just a complete aberration. As Crystal and I have experienced most of our lives, what you're

actually more likely to get from the American political system is bad and slightly less bad. Gradations of bad. Yes. And I worry that we are moving back into what we're more familiar with, which is gradations of bad. Yeah. That we're all forced to settle for, whether we want to or not. Yeah. That seems to be where we are. I think that's a pretty accurate summation for a good place to wrap up this very lengthy show. Ryan, thank you. Is it you or Emily that's in tomorrow? I'm in tomorrow, too. Emily just started on HARD.

You're right. She's got her hands full. Not that you don't also have your hands full. You did just also lodge Dropsite News, which you guys should go and support. I get to be my own boss. I highly recommend that. Yes, and we still do have that discount code. It's DropSiteNews.com slash counterpoints, 20% off for anybody who wants to support DropSite News. Go to BreakingPoints.com to support this program. To celebrate Sagar's wedding, his nuptials. Support him with a BreakingPoints.com

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