Chapo Trap House - 472 - Guess I’ll Just Kill Myself feat. David Roth (11/16/20)

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

Fan favorite David Roth is back to talk Trump’s sad boi coup plotting, Democrats’ fragile new coalition, and Michael Bay movies. 🚨🚨 MERCH DROP ALERT 🚨🚨 New and restocked merch available at shop.chapotraphouse.com Caps! Pins! Posters! New colors! Re-stocked favorites! Check it out! Find all your Roth content at: www.defector.com and the Distraction podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-distraction-a-defector-podcast/id1525039108

Is he puckering the whole time? The Baldwin thing, I can't even watch like the imitation because I hate the still image of his face, making the like the little kissy face or like end of the hot dog where they tie it up mouth that he does. Yeah, he's doing, yeah, he's doing the, your face he's doing, it's not Trump,

but he's like, what would you do if I was here right now? Ha-ha. Yeah. You guys, do you know what he did at the end of the last episode? You're welcome. Well, yeah, he telephased and said, you're welcome. You're welcome.

Like me, he honestly thinks that taking time out of his not busy schedule to be on SNL in a city he lives in anyway, like, you know, 10 times a year is such like an emotional sacrifice on his behalf. I feel like he did for us to rid us of, to remind us that in fact the orange man was bad so that we would vote against him.

I think spending even 30 seconds in Alec Baldwin's brain would drive a normal person mad. Oh, God. I saw him one time when I was coming back from recording the dead cast, I was walking up Fifth Avenue in Lower Manhattan, like across the street from that movie theater around Union Square and he was holding a toddler

and he looked really mad, but he was holding the toddler in the most, like it's not even a way that you would teach or not teach someone. He was holding a kid, like a three year old, like it was a slice of pizza on a paper plate. Like he just had his hand flat and the kid was just sitting,

his, the kid's ass was here and it was like, it was like a chair. David, you looked really upset. Alec Baldwin and Morrissey had the same thing happen to them where they were both like two of the hottest guys alive and then they had that thing that happens to all Irishmen where their torso just turned into a blister. Yeah, just their head got really big.

And for Alec Baldwin, the way to solve that was to get really into liberal politics and call his daughter a pig. And for Morrissey, Morrissey actually got really good politics. Yeah, he's still, he's still working it out, but he's proof that you can succeed in the becoming wider as you age. I can say with regards,

with regards to Alec Baldwin's toddler holding technique, I mean, similar to a piece of pizza, if someone hands you a toddler like a slice of pizza, you'll have to like often hold them upside down or blot them with a napkin and soak up the excess grease that is often. The reel in the York way, the way we do it here, you fold the child.

In the original intro to Louie, he is eating a toddler. It was produced by the Podastic Group. Real quick, before we start, I mean, like, we've run up Nicholas Cage, a guest with movie we watched this weekend. Catherine never seen it. That's right, Con Air.

Hell yeah. One of the best action movies of the 90s. Probably, as you said, Matt, the best Michael Bay movie not directed by Michael Bay. And I think Catherine nailed it when she said, like, this was Con Air is, this is the one thing we didn't want to happen, the movie. Yeah, yeah.

We got all the terrifyingest criminals together on one plate and now they're at charge. Oh boy. It's crazy, I think that used to be a model for doing movies, like, just, like, get some recognizable actor and then just, like, the 10 best and most engaging character actors alive and be like, right, like, at some point,

you're going to be in a bus accident. We haven't figured out what else happens yet. And then just, like, let them rock. Yeah, that's the thing about, like, that's the secret of Bay and the Bay style, of which this is the exemplar, is that one of the big things that props it up in the absence of, you know, story or plausibility

or character development is the good actors, the good craggy character actors who fill out the rest of the cast. Bay in particular gets performances, like, real for the rafters' performances from people who checked out in every other film they've been in, in 20 years. If anyone has seen The Last Knight, The Last Transformers movie, Sir Anthony Hopkins

is in that. And if anyone has seen an Anthony Hopkins movie since, like, 2000, he has checked the fuck out. He is at, like, Robert De Niro level. And in this movie, he is like a shrieking baboon. He's, like, going for the rafters. It's like, I'm assuming that this is just because Michael Page screams into their face with a megaphone.

One way or another, it makes for engaging film. I have an idea for a movie like that that we can do during the second year of the first modern term. And my scenario for this movie, and, like, you can pick the actors, like, maybe even bring back Nicholas Cage, have the guy who played Chris Hansen, or Robert Hansen, in breach in this movie.

Chris Cooper. Yeah, Chris Cooper, yeah. So it would be about a giant shark that only attacks religious and ethnic minorities. And it would be about the government trying to deal with this problem and the issues that arise from it. You know that Michael Bay is producing,

just for, I think, Netflix next year, a movie about what if COVID became super deadly and killed, like, 75% of the population? Yeah, it's got Archie. Like, hot Archie from the Sex Archie show. KJ Apa. Yep, Peter Stormair. And again, with the fucking Michael Bay thing,

like, just getting, like, the craziest actors and being, like, the script is not bad. I mean, like... But it's not finished. You talk about hyper-normalizing things. Like, this thing is still happening, and it's not stopping at all. It's, like, in fact, worse than it ever was.

And no one has any hope that it's gonna change. And they're making a movie, like, yeah, but what if that thing that was, wow, that thing, what if it was worse? It's, like, it's still happening, dude. Like, you think that? Michael Bay ran out into, like, the fucking Plaza 9-11 with a camera and started filming

the rubble and, like, turning that into the Transformers movie. Matt, like, when they, when they, when, like, when Michael Bay was pitching this COVID lockdown movie, he was, it was probably in, you know, March of this year. And he was like, okay, here's the picture of the movie. Imagine nine to 10 months from now, all this shit is still going on, nothing's changed, and we still have to deal with it.

Imagine that dystopian future. Imagine that horrible reality that that could, yeah, they're trying, they were trying to make a dystopia, and it's like, you undershot our ability to dystopiaize things, dude. All the cultural products that were pitched and accepted in, like, spring, when it seemed like this was at its worst,

are gonna be, like, the most, like, the idea that Andrew Cuomo has a book about how we beat COVID, he's like, oh, that's awesome. In stores now, you know, the, like. You can buy that thing. You can read that, like, while you're in your second lockdown, which is gonna be a big deal to me. What if you, like, open that,

what if you open that book and it's just, like, 2019? They told me that all the nursing homes in New York were overpopulated. But I had a solution. You know what, it's like, it's the strange discordance of culture that's coming out now, shit that was greenlit one to two years ago and timed for the election.

Like, they thought the Comey rule would be this, you know, this big triumphant TV event to coincide with Biden getting elected president. So we've already talked about Breach and you just brought up the Comey rule. Can we do a Billy Ray, like, appreciation? Shattered Glass. Cause I kind of, so I watched some of the Comey rule

cause I'm a fucking pervert and also cause I can't see my friends anymore. So it's just, it's, TV is, it's one of my closest buddies now. We bond over whatever it shows me. You can see your friends, Mueller, Jim Comey, the lady. Yeah, so this is, yeah. All of your friends, right there on.

I consider them more like heroes or minor gods. Well, all the people that Trump, like, whines about are in the movie, like he are Knight from the early Grey's Anatomy. Yeah, Grey's Anatomy. But he plays like Peter Stroke or like somebody that I've known as like a punchline from like tweets where they're like, the lovely Miss Lisa

and like all of Trump's people know who that is. And I'm like, was that like macho man, Randy Savage's girlfriend? Like, I don't remember who you're talking about. But I watched them. The lovely Lisa Page. Comey rule is like 75%. It's watchable in the way the all Billy Ray movies are

where it's like just people that look tired in like prop ceiling sets in DC, like being upset with each other. The Brendan Gleason performance as Trump in that is fantastic. It's so good. I loved it. It's so good.

I don't recommend watching the rest of the series, but he is a monster. Yeah, horrifying. Yeah, yeah. And they really want to get at like the fact that his Trump's imposition into the world of DC is really one of manners. It is, he is a grotesque figure.

It is really like Caddyshack. I mean, we said that like four years ago, but this is essentially a dramatic remake of Caddyshack. And he is, he's Rodney Dangerfield showing up at Bushwood. This whole place sucks. Sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks. That's right, it sucks. Only reason I'm here is remember y'all buy it.

And so they have to like emphasize the physical grotesqueness of Trump. And he just gets it with the breathing. Yeah. Oh God. It's all, it's the same thing with the, like all the best imitations, like basically, I mean, the famous, like the interview with the James,

to James Austin Johnson, I'm forgetting his name, the guy that's like the king. Yes, that's it. Where he was like, yeah, you have to like get a lot of mucus in there. And like, I like to get my glottis swollen. Like you have to like physically get sick to do a good Trump imitation.

Yeah, you have to like drink, if drink a lot of milk right before it, get a nice, flemy throat. That's what I thought about, like when it, like thinking about like physically being Donald Trump, it's like, he's probably had what's felt like a low level cold for 40 years. Oh yeah.

Like he, yeah. Just hor, like he just wakes up every day with like a sodium induced headache. Yep. And like just some type of conge... Like, and I always thought, you know, they do it in the movie, but I always thought about this

when Trump like made Comey take that picture with him. I was like, what does it feel like to like pat the back of Donald Trump? Oh God. So, oh, I just imagined like he's, he's personally clammy and yet somehow covered in baby powder. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like I feel like it's a weird combination of like softness that shouldn't be there. Some weird things that are hard, not hard like a bone, but hard like congealed fat. Yeah. And like there are certain scents that are way too minty. Oh God. Yeah.

Like Spreej, all this, cause all the shit that he uses for like grooming or for like freshening his breath is like discontinued 80s products. Like he has like a, like a storage facility full of like the like pale, like blue tic-tacs that they like stopped being able to sell in like George H.W. Bush was president.

And yeah, but I feel like Trump definitely would have like a, like a wet laundry feel. And not like the dryer, but like the washer to dryer segment of laundry is what you're dealing with there. Yes. Okay. Welcome. It's shop for everybody

in case you haven't figured it out already. It's me, Will here with Matt, Felix and Virgil. And joining us today is longtime fan favorite, David Roth. David, how's it going? I'm good, man. How are you? We're all doing good.

You know, I guess we wanted to have you want to check in because, you know, we're, we're working hard now to stop the steal. Every show now we're doing is about stopping the steal. That's great, man. That's how you can do. Supporting the million mega march and just that we all know that like, look,

Trump is going to be inaugurated in January. I mean, like, do you honestly think that Trump didn't have a plan for this? Do you honestly think there's not a plan in motion right now? You have to hashtag trust the plan. Have not you been paying attention? Yeah. See, I've been like watching the transition from Q to E has been really exciting for me

just to see the next stage of where this is all actually going. You'll know about the E thing. This is a real thing. It's about the E from entourage. Just take it over from Q. It's Mark Esper, right? It is. No, it's supposed to be Ezra Cohen, Wattnick, who's like, oh, that again.

It's another like like a Peter Stroke, Lisa Page level dude where like only the real heads know about Ezra Cohen, Wattnick from Vampire Weekend. Yeah. Yeah, he's changed a lot in the past couple of years. Ezra Cohen, Wattnick, he's like he said, a DoD swamp creature. He's the protege of Michael Deane, who's an Iran hawk and gladiose guy. Oh, wait, I'm confused. I thought these guys were defeating the swamp monster of intervention.

Well, it's like a vaccine. You have to inject a little bit of gladio to beat gladio. It seems like you need to get up to speed on the white hat, black hat dynamic. Oh, right. In the psychotic mind realms. Trump has to do a little bit of pedophilia to get himself in with the better pedophiles. Yeah, it's like how sometimes if you're deep cover, like with a criminal organization, you might have to like shoot heroin

to show him you're not a cop. It's true. The same thing for Trump with the adrenochrome. Yep. I mean, there's just been like a reshuffling of tons of guys in the cabinet since after the election. The guy they had replaced Esper at his first day walking into the Pentagon. He checked if his fly was open in front of everyone and then tripped over the steps on video. I love I love just metaphor being murdered in front of me.

It's incredible. Well, they're definitely down. It's like a full employment plan for anyone that's ever said anything nice about Trump on Twitter. Now, like they're going to like hire Jack Del Rio away from the Washington football team to like spend three weeks running the FBI just because he's been very supportive. Tito Ortiz just got elected to elected official city council.

And he's going to have like a week where he can be secretary of state. Just great. Representing. Well, I mean, I mean, this is the question that, you know, where we're considering that is, you know, what what now for Trump? You know, I think we're I think we're already sort of a little bit starting to miss him, you know, missing our boy. And I'm already feeling it.

You know, I already feel it like I actually saw someone. They did a side by side. I think this is one of those that I aired Rupar, one of those like resistant students who just tweets about how terrible Trump is all the time, basically Margaret Dumont getting the pies in the face every day by the horror of Trump. And he did a side by side of the of of Trump and Biden responding to the announcement of the shuttle that went up or

whatever the fuck happened, the SpaceX launch. Yeah, it was a NASA. Wonderful. Oh, don't you love a good private private partnership? Yeah. What we don't. And Trump replied, he said, when I got it, NASA was a washed up dump. Now. The hottest.

It's the hottest. It's the hottest space hub. And next to that was Biden going today's momentous event is a tribute to both the public spirit of NASA as well as the private people and congratulations to the and he said, compare and contrast as though we're supposed to read that and not think. Yeah, one of these guys is hilarious. Yeah. Yeah.

One of these guys is cool and one of these guys is a fucking square. Well, he just literally said, not hot. Graydon Carter's Oscar parties. I know NASA. Thanks to me. Barack Obama's failing NASA program has a problem. It's shuttle program is no longer hot. I think like Biden, I think Biden himself is incredibly funny,

but the problem is we're never going to see actual. Yes, he's not going to be tweeting it all day. He's not going to be his like his central nervous system is not going to be wired to the Internet. We're going to get more of the the Reagan thing where the president's clearly declining and a puppet of others, but he's also fully aware of himself and his role as a puppet. And so he's going to hit his marks, keep his mouth shut,

let them, you know, we lead him around and feed him juice boxes to keep him quiet and we're never going to get just his minute by moment ego just exploding out into the cosmos. It's going to be. But when he is funny, it's going to be very funny. Yeah, because it's going to be more concentrated, take like a weird Blarney break during them, although he won't break with the script the way that Trump does.

Like Trump always needs to add like a little actorly bit of business to every script that he's given to like nearly make it pop, which is why he'll like the best moments to me at the end from the rallies were when he'd be talking about something that you know, just like deep Trumpiana, like weird enemies list stuff or like a time that like Lonnie Anderson like winked at him and it definitely wasn't an accident or something like that.

And then he would have to hit the transition back to the script at the end of it. And he'd be like, so that's definitely one of the reasons why we're making sure that the border is not like just a place where anybody can drive across. Lonnie Anderson would have understood that, of course, but like you have to try to like steer back off the like out of the gulch and back onto the road, whereas Trump will never

Biden will never leave the road. Yeah, he's he's I think about my favorite Trump performance is when he pretended not to know that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and he put he like closed his eyes very theatrically. That way like Biden will never do stuff like that. But all Biden's funny shit is when he's in reverie of something that happened 60 years ago. Yeah, yeah, very loop.

Or when he has like a dementia explosion in terms of the Betty Draper's dad, when anyone asks him a tough question. Oh, yes. Yeah. Why, why, why, why, why, man? Hold on now, yes, slap, happy jackal. Like he everyone forgot this, but like he did say look fat. And yeah, the guy to a pushup contest.

That was awesome. That was amazing. There was a period of time where I thought that was going to be his strategy against Trump, where he would like in the debates that like Trump would get up there and be like, I've owned every type of car, like in all the different colors that you can have it. And then Biden would be like, I would love to see you try to do a chin up and that would just be it would be like grandpa fights.

I expected that because it was like that stuff. People actually like that stuff. Like if you watch the that's why they didn't do it. Yeah. If you watch the look fat video, it's like a it's like everyone in that crowd is just a completely stationary octogenarian. And when Biden goes, listen, look, look fat, you want to do a pushup right now, man, they they're just like humming and approval.

They're like bees. Yeah, they love. They're just like, but that's the thing is that Democrats, because they're the party of the superego, they have to turn away from all that works, like works at a political level and turn it into an abstraction. They have to turn it into those like, no, I'm going to be the center of decency for the good, uh, the good middle class people who want everyone to turn down the volume because no one agreed with me on this.

But that first Biden Trump debate, I thought, like, I think one of the reasons it was so close may have been that debate. Like they should have had Biden call Trump fat at that debate. And instead he would see, he was just like, you're an income poop, buddy. I mean, like it sucks. He could have like totally out. He could have tried to out Alpha Trump and that could have actually just thrown the whole thing into a different, into a tizzy.

I think that's possible. Yeah. But he was watching a Jeb Bush game tape. Yep. Kind of on the right way to chortle at him. Because these guys are all last year's model. Like the people, the person who's going to defeat Trump is not going to come from within the political order that he overturned.

You know what I mean? Like it's going to come from, uh, uh, it's going to come from something that emerges after it and in response to it. Well, as long as you're talking about, um, uh, things, things that work for Trump, uh, I'd like to look at this house briefly on just like, you know, where he's at now with these like series of lawsuits, because I mean, like, uh, over the weekend, he referred to Biden as president-elect or he's, no, he didn't say president-elect.

He said Biden won the election because of X, Y and Z. And then everyone was like, oh, he's conceding. And then he just showed up 90 minutes later to be like, I'm not conceding anything. I won the election. So, I mean, he, he's still going forward with that. They had the, the sort of the million mag of March and DC this weekend, but I'm just interested in these, in these lawsuits in, uh, the, the states

where he's seeking to overturn, uh, the results from, and what's going to, if someone can explain this to me, cause like, as best I can understand it, even if these lawsuits were, are allowed to proceed by a judge or like, if they prevail in court, you're still, what is being alleged is still talking about like a, a number of votes that even if they were all declared fraudulent, would not come close to overturning the results in any of the states. But what I'm hearing now, although like, a lot of these people seem to be suggesting or hinting at is this idea that Republican governors of these

states can appoint their own electors to the Electoral College, who will then vote for Trump in opposition to the, it's not the governors. It's the, it's the state legislature, state legislatures. Okay. So state legislature is going to point their own electors to the Electoral College, which is like, that was the original way to work to the Constitution. I actually remember this particular rationalization from 2016. Yep, faithless electors, like they have to stop this.

They have to take the, but they have to think of what's best for the country and stop this. As I recall, there was like a letter writing campaign and then the one faithless elector was like a Democrat that voted for Trump. Like he got like one more electoral vote than he was supposed to. There is an SNL sketch where Hillary Clinton played the guy in love actually with the, with the, with the. Of the cards, like you got Bob Dylan kind of thing and it was in front of an

elector's house and she was like making the pitch for her to, you know, just vote for Hillary. Cause come on, Trump's crazy. But I mean, like joke there, I just like, just simply to like, is this a thing that could have that works? No, no, it's not going to happen. I mean, like in mid in Michigan, they already said like, no, we're not doing that, but like wouldn't it, like if they do sub in new, new electors to

the Electoral College, don't they by default have to vote for the winner of the popular vote? It's the question, the question, there's two different questions here. Will it happen? The answer is no. Could it happen? Is there, is there a legal theory behind it? Yes, absolutely.

Right. According to according to a congressional, according to the congressional statute from the 19th century that governs all of this shit, the state legislatures are empowered to appoint their own slate of electors in the event of a bad election. What that means is not, has not, is not defined by statute. So theoretically, you could take the Republican, you know, they have a huge, the Republican legislature in Pennsylvania, they have a huge majority

there because of Jerry Mandry, they could say, okay, well, this election was fraudulent, you know, it's a bad election. We reject all the results. We're just going to pick the electors ourselves and we're going to pick Trump electors and then send those to Congress. And then the conflict, what the conflict would be, but the thing is the conflict would be the governor of Pennsylvania, who's a Democrat, will no matter what certify the election for Biden and then send his slate of electors.

So it's to elect that it would be comes, comes. Yeah. And that's a classic sitcom premise right there. Two sets of electors show up for the same state. It's nice to know that episodes of threes company were a good preparation for figuring out what would happen in a 2020 election. But like some scenario where John Ritter is trying to get somebody to hide in the bathroom, that's basically how you choose a president.

And I believe in that case, wouldn't it then be, I mean, all right, so if they can't figure out if that doesn't work either way, it goes to the House of Representatives, but two sets of electors from each state, some of these states show up, who then decides which one is to be recorded. So that's where it gets very complicated. Basically, this statute doesn't explain that it's up to Congress to suss it out. Oh, OK. So in this case, then Congress would just.

But basically, here's what would happen. Here's what would happen. I, my guess is by default, the electors appointed by the Democrat governor, you know, properly certified, those are the ones that would end up getting submitted to the the floor of Congress during the joint session on January 6th when they count the electoral votes. And then it would be up to the Republicans, one, at least one in the house, one in the Senate to object to those electors.

Then both houses, they separate and they they debate the objection. The objection for up to two hours. And then they vote on it. What complicates things, of course, is that no matter what happens in the Georgia special elections, Republicans will continue to control the Senate in that special session, because Mike Pence, you know, is still Vice President, he'll still preside over it. The open question is what happens if the House says, well, you know, no,

this is a frivolous objection. You know, we accept the Biden electors and the Senate says we accept the objection. Not there is there is no, you know, there's there's no guidance from either precedent or, you know, the letter of law, getting to that particular point, be like, basically, the legal strategy of Trump and his campaign, because don't they want more than anything, the Supreme Court to decide this? Basically, yeah, I mean, as much, you know, because he lost the election as a thing. So all he can really do is gum up the works and create as much chaos and,

you know, use the the the outmoded nature of this system, the the Byzantine nature of it to find entry points in which they could, you know, maybe tip the scales in their favor. But again, this is very, very extreme. It won't happen because this would require to actually get to this point would require a level of coordination. Yeah, that's just going to say this is definitely one of those things where, like, Trump's natural instinct to just, like, stay up for three straight days

complaining online, like, kind of almost looks like it could, like, like, militate towards a specific end that's, like, you know, reasoned and, like, has this, you know, sort of a linear process. But, like, it certainly does not, like, everything that we know about him is that, like, he just doesn't want to go to bed. That's, like, the bottom line. Yeah, he's fast. I'm thinking about the timeline of this, and it's like immediately after the

election, there was just radio silence from the National Republican Party. And people, a lot of people just interpreted it as them selling out Trump. But what I think it actually was was they were waiting for whatever dumb shit he was going to come up with that they would then run with. Yeah, that's been the whole, that's their job. I mean, that's what it's been for four years anyway. But, yeah, but that shows me, like, that makes me very not afraid of the prospect of this because it means it's like, oh, they had no plan for this.

They had no James Baker on deck. They had no, like, legal processes on deck. They were just like, okay, like, everything has been so whittled down and everything is such a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy that instead of a a plan that they were going to come up with three years ago for this, they were like, all right, let's see what he complains about. And then what he complains about, we'll agree with. And then hopefully the judge likes us.

All they could do, all they could do ever was hope to get an outcome that could be swayable by their intervention in it. And they were all imagining, like everybody does, every general fights the last war, they were imagining a Bush versus Gore situation where you've got one case, you've got one batch of votes, you've, and even better, you are, like, already declared the winner and, like, you're intervening to stop a winner from, like, being, that call for being reversed. And then that coming to one court case, this is, this is 15 fucking states or

whatever and state legislators and you're, this is a Rube Goldberg contraption and it's necessitated because he didn't have the, he didn't, he wasn't close enough. Yeah, he didn't do good enough. It's just that he didn't do good enough for them to have done. And so it doesn't, like a smart guy with self-respect would recognize that and not try anyway. But because Trump is just operating from pure basal instinct of I'm not

owned, he is going to activate it. He's going to hit the domino thing over and start the chain reaction of like, you know, among his flunkies and media suckers and dipshits who all are like working towards the furor and their little, you know, spathetic, uh, marquee level, marquee eating scheme, Ponzi ass way, but they're not going to actually be able to do anything because the position doesn't exist where they can intervene. Yeah, I think that's also like the reason that, I mean, the other thing that

we're leaving out of this is that, like, the reason that Bush v. Gore worked is that the Republicans had just like this fucking crack A team of vampires who like know how to win and know how to, like, go to court. And I think if this had been closer, it wouldn't have been a problem to get like Ted Olson or like somehow Jim Baker is still alive. Yeah. So like whatever, like that, whatever exquisite corpse, like wandering into a courtroom and like if they could have won it, those guys would have done

it. I don't think that it's like, they're not that offended by Trump that they're going to let right in, but it wasn't close enough. So they're not going to embarrass themselves from the Bush v. Gore people had an A team that, uh, grinded their skills in the bullpen of the Iran country cover up like the people that their generation produce. Trump has people who like tried to defraud a federal court in an Alistair class, which was so great to see after the election, too. And there was one story that was like Jared Kushner's looking around for

a Jim Baker type. And I just thought of him like being on LinkedIn, like searching for everybody that has Sven Gali and they're like, that's a job that they've had in the past. Like there's, you know, like they find you, man, like it's not somebody that's in your Rolodex that you could just call and be like, this was my dad's tax attorney and like he was so good at tennis. Yeah, the only guy they have like that, who was a deep state soldier

and Iran contra veteran is Bill Barr. And Bill Barr's entire job is to like, uh, unsealed testimony about Nellie Orr. Yeah, that's what they put him in charge of. There is a Felix tweet. This might have been from like a deleted account even from back in the day where you said that Trump's lawyers, like his response to everything is to like get mad and then have his lawyer write a letter saying that he's normal, like that is basically Bill Barr is now the guy writing the like

Trump is normal letters. Yeah. So Biden won by Biden won the electoral college by 36 electoral votes. So for Trump to prevail, he would have to overturn the, you know, actual results in at least three of the closest states. And granted, these states were very close, you know, by his margin of victory in these states, less than 1%. This was a pretty close election actually in terms of the states, much

like 2016 was. Uh, and like one of the things that's hindering the Trump campaign overall is they, there's no coherent legal arguments being made. And there's no, you know, soul remedy being requested from the courts. In Bush v Gore, Bush had a very simple legal strategy. Stop the count, stop the recount. I want to stop the recount. That's it.

Run out the clock, which they did this time around. It's no, no, no, do the recount in Georgia, do the recount in Arizona, but stop counting in Pennsylvania throughout these votes in Wisconsin and throughout these votes. And it's like, what, what would that even do? You know, if, if all those cases were merged and just dumped at the Supreme Court, what would they even do with it? Just say, Oh yeah, fine, you win.

The reason you have a guy like John Roberts in the position he is in is to recognize the lay of the land and realize what is a crucial goal and what is a short term one that can be sacrificed. And there would be no clear fucking example of when to cut bait than on that and to try to force that through on behalf of a guy who is only representative of a personal cult. Like these guys, there's no Trump project beyond his ego. Like that in a real sense, he is not ideological.

It is purely about his own ego gratification and his own self dealing. And it's like that corresponds to a lot of Republican strategies for many reasons. But if there's a conflict and the conflict between keeping this guy at the expense of like having to break an entire like, you know, uh, uh, legal framework that has allowed for the relatively safe, uh, exulsion of social pressures away from political action for the entirety of American history. We're just going to junk that on behalf of this guy. Who is the crying fat man?

Yeah. I'll have to devote ourselves to just anticipating every colicky fart he comes out of his mouth or else we're going to get fired and, and everyone is in all of his hooting idiot fans are going to think that we're pedophiles. Yeah, because he, because we like had a fucking gravy stain on our tie once when he, we saw he saw us at lunch. Yeah. And you also have to imagine that the Senate results are also impacting the,

you know, the, the conservative justices views on this matter, uh, because a, a 50, 50 Senate, which is the best the Democrats could do where Joe Manchin holds the, uh, uh, balance of power there under a Biden administration. That's no threat to the conservative judiciary at all. That's, that's fine. They're not going to, they're not going to pack the court. Maybe if it had been, you know, like, I don't know, Democrats just went 58 seats and they say, fuck, yeah, we're doing court packing the day after the election.

Maybe that would change the calculus. Oh my God. They're on a glide path to wiping out, uh, to expanding that massively expanding their Senate lead and retaking the house in 2022 and then easily defeating the Democrats in 2024. Yeah. Why the hell would they do this on Trump's behalf? Yeah.

If you, if they stole the election for Trump now, that makes it, that is the most difficult path to a Republican being in power 10 years from now. Yeah. Right. That's, that's it. Why would you destabilize anything? Why would you risk anything for this result when you can hold back and maybe get something that's less of a pain in the ass to deal with?

Cause like Trump had his benefits, but he also was a fucking, he was, he is because of his personal psychosis, a actual impediment to like the smooth functioning of systems and the, the people who try to like squinted Trump and see him as like a threat to capitalism, they are recognizing that his specific neuroses and the way that it color his approach to governing means that he actually can get in the way of business as usual sometimes. But what that means is that the Republican party has no personal loyalty to him and will spit him out at the first convenience.

I think they will. I mean, I wonder in some ways if they're not afraid of him enough at this point, because I think he's going to be very annoying for them over the next few elections. Oh yeah. And, and I think that that, you know, whatever he's an unstable and like, you know, in his way, a very dangerous guy, like it's hard to predict what he's going to do.

But I definitely do get the sense that they're like, they absolutely would have gone to the wall for him if he had given them a chance to do it. But in this case, it's like it's throwing good money after bad. Like, yeah. And he's still going to be, you know, I mean, like whatever, this is who he is. He's going to be a bitch about it. And he's going to complain and he's going to identify people he thought weren't loyal enough.

And then he's going to show up in some city in their state and tell a story about like the time that he and Jimmy Connors were like flirting with Suzanne Summers at the same time or something like that. And that'll be him. That's what he does. Yeah. And he might very well, you know, like candidates that are more like him might wind up primarying people that weren't loyal enough to him. And I'm sure that would be very annoying for everybody,

but like not as annoying as having to sublimate your entire project to this guy's gratification, which they did. There wasn't even a fucking platform. Yep. No, no platform. It was just we support Trump's agenda. Like even if if Trump in exile is like a media figure who, yes, becomes a center for political gravity and creates like like many people who like run in primaries against establishment Republicans.

Yes, that's annoying. And it would it would be a hindrance, but it would be absorbed the same way that Tea Party was like the Tea Party took over the party really. But then that's just because they merged at the top and like it's stabilized. And you like a guy like Marco Rubio came in as a Tea Party firebrand. It's like they didn't sell out the party did move right. You know, like it is doing the capillary action of pushing the party to the right and the Trump Trump, like I think on cultural grounds,

certainly would push the party right in that direction. But other than that, it would just be absorbing it would be absorbed into the Republican Party in general. And you know, their benefit is going to be stylistic because there's no ideology to speak of. And you can see the stylistic element already. It's just like what you're going to get is more like of the like Madison Cawthorne, like these like really mutant creatures, right? Because the alternative

is like all these like 75 year old former attorneys that are like in the Senate having to go up there and be like Crom or Libs. And like just like they can't do that. They have no they don't have they don't have swag. Yeah. And like the thing is like it's easy to say, oh, you lost. You suck. And it is funny that the God Emperor lost to probably the most

mentally decimated Democrat. It is insanely fun. It's said I will remind myself of it every day. It's like it's like if Woodrow Wilson had run for re-election in 1920. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But but the other thing that Democrats should take note of. And yes, oh, he won by three million votes.

That's a lot. Um, this was record turnout and Donald Trump made it within three million votes. Yeah. That's not supposed to happen with Republicans. No, more turnout is supposed to kill them. That's what I thought. But it turns out his appeal, it's transcended of all the narrow categories that you're imposing on people who aren't you and assuming exist in them the way they do in you.

And I know a lot of people myself included have said that if it wasn't for COVID, Trump would have easily won re-election, which is absolutely saying, you know, how was how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? I mean, COVID did happen. So it's a little hard to. But an addendum to that should be, I totally believe if Trump had just managed to cut one more check before the election. Yes.

And maybe not guaranteed to have won, but would have been gotten way close. I mean, it would have been way, way, way, this year. For sure. If all. Yeah. The Biden coalition is one of the most fragile, shitty coalition. Oh my God, such dog shit. I wouldn't win with.

Awful. It's incredibly fragile. It's fragile to the point that if you had somebody who got the Trump seal of approval, who people hated 10% less, they stomp him. Yep. They fucking stomp him. These Biden's voters, the people that swayed the election for Biden, these hoes are not loyal. Yeah, I mean, they split their tickets.

They split their tickets and they voted Republican down ticket because they want to keep their taxes low. They haven't bought into any, any notions beyond propriety. Yeah. So as soon as Trump isn't there, that was it. And no, that was the idea. They, they got the coalition they wanted. It's just that what they want is it's suicide.

They just don't realize. Yeah. I mean, like half of Biden voters voted against Trump, not for Biden. And without Trump there, I mean, within politics, like he'll be there as a carnival Parker from the sideline, but that'll give them permission to ignore him if they want to. And then within like the parameters of respectable politics, there's not going to be a Trump there to discipline them and they're going to reassert their class interests. And that means, and, and, and the Democrats will have nothing to show for their, their

lurch towards the suburban voters. And if, I mean, like an example of how, how fragile the Biden coalition is, is that like it didn't take, it took about an hour after the networks officially called it for Biden for every part of that coalition to immediately start fucking yelling at each other about who gets to take credit for him winning. I'm sorry. If you're on the left or the progressive side of the Democratic party, I'd fucking pipe down. I mean, I understand like there's a certain fairness or hypocrisy to the way

you're being attacked, but I'd pipe down about taking credit for this one. Because I mean, think about where the next four years are going to go. Are you really going to want, if you're from like the Justice Democrats side of the party, do you really want the narrative to be right now that we were the decisive factor in electing Joe Biden and installing Joe Biden? The story that they want to tell now is, you know, about what's next, right? About the idea of the famous moving him left idea or, I mean, I think that like ideologically, Joe Biden is not moving because ideologically, Joe Biden is like, it's like when like Homer

Simpson has like a dream sequence and it's just like a cow playing like a song on a jug. You know, the image, it's not a podcast or a visual medium. I'm struggling here, but the, we all, all our listeners immediately know that image, David. Oh, we're talking about why we love them. But the, so like that's not, there's no idea, ideology to speak of. I think that if you push Biden in the direction of like some version of material politics, like obviously we're not going to, he's not going to do Medicare for all or whatever,

because he's scared of it. And he's just a whip dog after 45 years of being a Democrat in a Republican dominated political scene. I do think that stuff like the, you know, canceling student debt and the raising the minimum wage, it's not perfect. Obviously there's like, but I think that that's the sort of politics that you can maybe nudge Biden on because of the fact that it's like, it's simple. You can take credit for it.

And it can be spun in the ways, these like losing ways that Democrats have always pitched stuff like that, which is like, you know, like kitchen table families or whatever, just some, one of those junior jumble phrases. I was like, how's that going to happen with the Republican Senate or a 50, 50? I mean, the student debt is executive order. Yeah, but he's not going to buy in has no appetite. To go around Congress. He's, even if he does have the prerogative to do that, he's not going to.

He's going to say, you know what? We got to work out a deal. If we're going to do something like that, I would be sure. I'm not writing it down. For an acceptable amount. Yeah. I'm not writing it off, but I think it's a pretty slim chance. I would be, I would be surprised.

And if you do get it, very focused and very astute, and I have never seen him be either of those things. I don't think I definitely, I don't see him taking the Schumer suggestion of writing off $50,000. Everyone's student debt. And if there was a debt right off, I feel like it would be like $10,000 and come with all these weird Kamala Harris type of qualifications about today that it was that it was initially going to be 10, like 50.

And now he's like more comfortable with 10 because it's going to be some kind of negotiating with yourself and losing coupons. It's going to be, you know, he never promised this off your next $50 off your next college. Correct me if I'm wrong, but correct me if I'm wrong, but he did not promise this. This was not something in their agenda before the election. Floating. Anytime I see stuff like that, I just think about how cool it would be to be there for the moment when Joe Biden finds out that people are talking about this.

Because I feel like he doesn't necessarily know, but at some point this is going to land and he's going to be like, I'm sorry, you told people I would do what? Once Joe Biden realizes those sounds he's hearing are people around him talking. Yeah, it's going to be real fascinating. I would say that if he does it, if he does do any significant student loan forgiveness, it is going to be not because of any pressure from below, but because it is the agreed upon choice among whatever gaggle of technocrat ghouls that he surrounds himself with, that it's the most effective form of economic stimulus that they can short apply quickly

to the economy. Because everyone recognizes that this is an unsustainable economic system right now. And there has to be some massive injection of money into the demand sector or this entire thing is going to fucking spin off the wheels. So there's going to have to be a huge, huge amount of Keynesian stimulus into the fucking economy. And that's a quick way to do a lot of it. Or at least that's what they're going to think.

Well, they're going to do it the Democrat way, I feel like. It's not genuinely like a redistricted view, and it's not something that has to go through Congress, it's something that they could turn a key and do the way that all the stuff in fucking the AMA or the first bailout from Obama, like two thirds of that was fucking tax cuts. They designed it for that, too. They wanted it to be clever so people wouldn't know that they were getting more money back. And this feels like that, because the easy answer to how do you do Keynesian stimulus

in the system is just give people a ton of money, but give everybody money. I don't know. Yeah. Skin in the game. Hey, Matt, a lot of those people. And this gets into the way like the Biden coalition is cutting each other's strokes right now. The problem with giving everyone money is that some of those everybody's are bad people

who voted for Trump. It's true. They're bad people. And then as we've talked about before in the past, politics is about who has to suffer. And for a good chunk of the Biden coalition, the idea that the suffering of racist white Trump voting people would be ameliorated in any way rather than actively increased is anathema to you want to give you want to you want to give everyone money. Don't you really?

Some people are ne'er-do-wells. Yeah. Instead of like you're literally never going to do well. Why would you give them money? Yeah. You're going to you want to get roused about some money. Yeah. Instead, how about you reward the people who did the the self-improving act of like going

to college maybe and figuring out how to be good people? Maybe they should be rewarded for that. Well, I do wonder if I don't think that they could possibly do it as badly as they did in 2008 and 2009, though, or 2009 stimulus. Well, I want to get into that. Really difficult. If anyone could, like it's these guys. Yes.

But the idea of burying that stimulus in such a way that people don't even know. I mean, it's like you don't want to aspire to anything Trump like, but him sending people like a fucking debit card with a note that says, like, don't spend it all in one place. Donald J. Well, it all depends on what the economic picture is going to be in February. It depends on what COVID is going to look like in February because we know that what needs to happen right now, what should have happened, you know, fucking yesterday or six months ago is you just have to give people people money to fucking stay home.

That's it. Period. End of sense. That's the only thing you can possibly do. Forget not even thinking about not even thinking about, you know, trying to keep the economy flow, not even thinking about it as a Kenzian injection as helicopter body, but just straight up. No, this has to happen or else deaths.

Yeah. That's the thing. It's like these are not mere calculations. It's like keeping people home literally is a first order solution to the problem of rampaging pandemic disease. I mean, I want to, I want to, I want to specifically, I mean, because we are talking about like looking forward to a Biden administration and what the Democrats are going to be like. And, you know, we, we've talked before, we've discussed earlier on in this show that like

the Republican Party is now basically a personality cult about Donald Trump. Like the Republican voters are in the bag for Trump 100%. Trump is probably never going to concede. He is most likely going to become some sort of TV personality or anti-president who will just sort of like give his own state of the union address or fucking, you know, be sworn in at Mar-a-Lago and he'll just be sort of this alternate presidency. And that like, you know, the Republican, the Republican Party is going to have to indulge that because their voters love Donald Trump and trust him more than any other politician

who's maybe ever lived. The Democrats, however, if that is the case with the Republican Party, we've said it before, I'll say it again now, are free to live their dream, which is govern as a Republican Party of maybe 10 or 20 years ago would be. And to that end, I just want to give just, just, just check in briefly on this interview that Barack Obama gave to Jeffrey Goldberg, because let's be honest, the Democratic Party is Barack Obama's party. He's in charge of it.

He's in charge of it. It's not Biden's party. Barack Obama is the guy. He's the embodiment of everything that like they now stand for believe it. It's right. Barf Sacco Crumbo. It's a wrap. It's a wrap rocks party.

I just want to read you a little bit from this interview. You know, he's talking to Jeffrey Goldberg and he's going on here and he says, I certainly don't watch reality shows and sometimes I'd miss things that were a phenomena, but I thought there was a shift there. I write about it to some degree. I actually have great admiration for a lot of those traditions, what you were ascribed to be masculine qualities. When you think about the greatest generation, you think about sacrifice, to which Jeffrey

Goldberg says, a colleague of mine says that in some ways you're a never Trump conservative. Obama, rather than saying, who is this asshole and what the fuck is he talking about, says, I understand that there's this sense of probity, honesty, responsibility of homespun values that I admire. That's the Kansas side of me. My grandmother's a stand in for that. The folks we celebrated at Normandy, including my uncle Charlie, who was a member of the units that liberated parts of Buchenwald, those were men who, whatever their limits,

whatever their constraints in terms of their emotions, because they were told they couldn't feel, they couldn't and couldn't feel as be seen as men. However, their relationship with women was skewed by all this. They sacrificed for others and they never bragged. And he's going on like this, blah, blah, blah. And then Goldberg says- This is a fucking Tony Soprano model. Yeah.

What happened to them? What happened to them? What happened to them? What happened to them? What happened to them? What happened to them? What happened to them? What happened to them?

What happened to them? What happened to them? What happened to them? What happened to them? You were just surprised by the horse populism wrote in on. And he goes, yes. And it's this indication of parts of the popular culture that I've missed. So he's saying like, I've been so busy being president.

I've missed these disturbing trends in popular culture. I don't even have a TV. Doesn't Obama write a list every year that he's like, all right guys, here's my 15 favorite drinks. Yeah, like a fucking ringer podcast like ranking Ozark episode. It's like, this is not what you watch on TV, man. Are reality television. That's an oxymoron.

He's talking to fucking Bill Simmons about like doing the sweet 16 bracket of the best wire characters. And he goes, oh, let me be clear. Brother Muzon would defeat Proposition Joe. One thing I'll have to be clear about. No, but he goes on here and this is very telling here. He says, it's interesting. People are writing about the fact that Trump increased his support

among black men in the 2020 presidential election. And the occasional rapper who supported Trump. I have to remind myself that if you listen to rap music, it's all about the bling, the women, the money. A lot of rap videos are using the same measures of what it means to be successful as Donald Trump is. Everything is gold plated. That insinuates itself and seeps into the culture.

And what I love about this is I guess he is out of touch with popular culture. Because I mean, he's talking about the rap music of 15 years ago. Like if Barack Obama- In a way that you would do if you were trying to find common ground with like Bill O'Reilly 15 years ago. Or Bill Cosby. Yeah, seriously. Yeah, it's like, I mean, first of all,

all rap today is done by 19 year olds who have BPD. And it's about having BPD. Yeah, all rap music today is about taking so many pills. You can't feel anything. Or being a woman who's incredibly horny. Yeah, those are the two things it's about. But I mean, it's like, no one voted for Democrats at the rate that black voters voted for.

But there was a completely statistically insignificant amount of black men who voted for Trump. And for whatever exit polls say, we don't know why. Maybe it was stimulus. Maybe it was something else. Who knows? But there's instantly this recrimination about how, oh, it's because they're rapists like Donald Trump

and they only care about bling. It's like, didn't 80% of black men still vote Democrat? How much is enough? How much is enough for Democrats who do nothing for these voters? This is the most entitled fucking bullshit I have ever. If I was someone who voted Democrat in every elections in 2008, this is how they treat me. But the thing is, is that that's the only response they can have.

They have to break, like they have to say, we're the Democrats. We're the good people. And then when it's like, well, some of these good people aren't being good anymore. It's like, well, that's because they're bad now. And you say, well, that's no way to fucking try to keep your coalition together.

The only way they can keep their coalition together is through fucking disciplining and shiting people. That's it. So like when things start going bad and someone, you see someone drifting away, you yell at them, presumably thinking that they'll come back. In material politics, what you're talking about is like, it's stylistic.

It's like, are you like the bombastic guy that's constantly up there talking about his dick and balls? Or are you up there being like reading one of those, like in this house, we do hugs. We do believe science posters. Like that stuff. To me, like if that's the alternative, like you're going to lose a lot.

Not just because you're not offering people stuff, but because it's fucking annoying. It's fucking lame. I'm sorry. I understand the appeal. But I mean, if you go... I understand why you would want to do it. If you go on in this Jeffrey Goldberg interview,

and I'm not because I don't want to kill myself, but like, you know, Barack Obama goes on to critique like sort of Trump's conception of masculinity. And he says, it's sort of surprising to me that Trump is considered sort of like the Gary Cooper character because, you know, correctly, as we've identified before, I mean, he's possibly the whiniest bitch in human history.

I mean, like Felix, like you just said, like his tweets now after losing the election are just, I won the election. And then the next tweet is like, if I kill myself, no one would care. It would be a fucking parade if I died right now. I have a headache. Did you see the one where he goes,

I hope the future historians remember that all this good COVID news happened under my term. Don't forget me. They made a vaccine under me. Donald got my spirit. Donald Trump, since the election, his message has been, don't abandon me. Are you abandoning me?

And I'm cutting my bangs. And I think next semester, I'm going to apply to RISD again, even though my ex who gaslighted me about giving me a UTI goes there. Yeah, I know. He's like, you follow. I just took a bunch of pills.

It's the vaccines that got small. Not me. I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Pfizer. I think he's trying to advise her. Stats with good COVID news is incredible. Like fucking Ricky Davis chasing a triple double and then he's losing my 30 points. Yeah, no.

But as Obama goes on, he just talks about how Trump actually is a parody of traditional masculinity. Because he never admits wrong. He never takes responsibility. He never stoically accepts responsibility for the fate of the world and the things that he's done. Am I responsible for that?

It's like, neither do you, asshole. You're out here blaming little Wayne for why fucking Democrats stand up and take off. He never did a goddamn thing wrong. Every choice he made was the right one. You think he would ever say, like, gee, maybe I should have billed out homeowners rather than fucking Goldman Sachs.

He said, I don't know if that was that interview or another one he did to remote his book, he said, when asked why you fucking put anyone from Wall Street in prison, he said, well, I didn't want to destabilize society. But I'll leave it to others to judge, whether that was smarter or not. Okay, okay.

I will. I'm judging him for that. Yeah, we judged him. It sucked. It sucked, dude. But I think this goes back to what we were saying about the stylistic differences between Trump and Obama. And that being what he's responding to here is that,

for him, it's like, when he capitulates or when he does something wrong, it's because he knows he has some reasoning in his head for why it was impossible for him to do anything else. And I think with Trump, there's not ever a reason why he does it beyond what the most obvious one is. And I think that if you're somebody who's dedicated

your whole life to this kind of like, wised up version of compromising and negotiating with yourself, as Obama does, I think a lot of leading Democrats have, you would be offended by this guy, like just openly cutting deals for his buddies or like sending someone a check, so they vote for him or whatever.

Like that just seems gauche. And that's not, regardless of whether it is or isn't, like you have to recognize that it is real, that it has impacts on people. And that also like, not everybody is going to be as impressed with your intellect as you are. Like you have to give them something to show them that it's working.

You can't just be like, trust me, I've read 100,000 books. You read all the posts. You read all the posts, dude. Just watch the wire, okay? Absorb some culture. Watch some of my Netflix specials and you will come to understand why you can be no other way. Like Biden, like Obama's post presidency thing,

it really is like, he got, like maybe he did believe in something one time in his life and he got the fucking, maybe it was right up until the moment he got elected president, I don't think so, but maybe then he got the fucking, the Ned Beatty speech. And it just cooked his brain and he decided, well, I got to do this

and now I'm going to spend the rest of my life convincing you all why I had to do it. I got to put my cultural tendrils out to massage your brain into thinking there is no other alternative than this because this is a fallen world and this is all we can handle. All we can scramble out of it.

But looking at it overall about like, you know, liberals and Democrats who are very disturbed by the prospect that Trump and his millions of supporters will essentially never, ever believe that this was a legitimate election or accept Joe Biden as president. Well, what the fuck did they do for the last four years?

Other than just obsess over that like Russia stole the election and that there are active measures and Trump's an asset and that Russian hacking actively changed voter rolls in states. And then like, you know, they had their pussy march. Now Trump has had his pussy march this weekend.

I mean, obviously like vastly more, significantly more sparsely attended than the original pussy march. With different energy. Yeah, yeah, different energy. You mean the women's march? Yeah. Yeah, you keep calling it the pussy.

The hats were the pussy hats. I'm not. I don't think they like it when you do that. Yeah. Yeah, the pussy march. Jesus. Like Jesus. Jesus, Will, you've got,

we've got full MGTOW. Wow. Yeah, Will, Will Corolla. You know, I had their pussy march. Hey, yeah. Do you remember the 2017 Femoid march? Hey, you, you, you felt, you felt, you fellas know what I'm talking about.

And hey, the MAGA guys are pussies too. Okay. And as long as we're talking about pussies, I mean, the one thing I really will revel in is all of the like conservative commentators and TV personalities who are using this moment now to be like the hate and mockery that supporters of Donald Trump

are feeling right now is really not okay. It's unfair to develop a political experience. We don't even get anything new in this culture because the Trump people are just doing what Democrats did. Like they're literally making posts where they're like, I have never been more disgusted with Joe Jorgensen.

Like it's literally the same shit. It's when Hillary voters were like, take some time to think about how the women in your life have been murdered. Like in 2016. Like they're Trump people are doing that. We're gonna relive the same four events for our entire lives.

But just like one year, the fucking conservatives will do it and then one year liberals will do it. It is frustrating that they didn't stick with their shit longer too. The idea that like somebody that's got like, like not flags on their boat because I don't know what people put on boats,

but flags on their car. When you've reached that level of being like just absolutely Trump brain that you've got like the fucking, like somehow don't tread on me, but also the blue lives matter flag flying from the back of your F-150. Like I'm not owed that that person

does not owed like some deference while they like remove their flags and replace them with different flags or like, you know, they like take down blue lives matter and put up Ohio State and they're like, well, this is it. This was difficult for me. Like I'm allowed to laugh at that shit.

Like there's not, it's not like their hopes and dreams were dashed. Their whole thing was that like somebody else would beat someone they don't like up for them. And I guess like now they have to wait a little while before that happens again. Like I'm sorry about it. And obviously like, you know,

and they'll get the complaint about it until that happens. And obviously like every outcome that's produced by the American political system is bad and getting worse. But like, you know, all these people, like the Republicans who were like, if we allow Joe Biden to win this election,

Republicans will literally never win an election again. And it's like, they said that shit about Obama. And then when Trump won everyone said it, like the Democrats will never win again. And it's just like, no, it like they'll just, you know, obviously everything will continue to get worse. The system is already vastly, vastly weighted in favor of the right wing

and of this country. But it's just like, you know, they're just going to trade off. Everything's going to, it's going to be the fucking same. It doesn't like calm down. When they do the most important election of our lifetime shit though, it's funnier to me when they do it.

When they're like, this is literally good versus evil. Like this fat guy who acts like a Broadway producer. And like it is a week for 80 hours of time. And then like the guy that wants to declare it national Mustang day every day. This is the most important election that we've ever faced. Yeah, it's like every election for the rest of our lives

will be called the most important election. And it's like, that stopped working on me when I turned 18. If this was the most important election of our lifetime, why is it Joe Biden? Yes, why don't you give him that job? How are these the two competitors for this office? If this office means what you say it does, it does not make sense, sir.

It does not add up. This is the most important election in our lifetimes. This is why we've selected a guy who gave himself brain damage in 1963 for combing his hair too hard. I can't get over it. It's also, it's so reckless. Like the idea of like if you take it as seriously as that,

shouldn't you try a lot harder, not just try harder than Biden, but try harder in terms of like what you're offering people. Like you shouldn't be instantly like, like sort of dampening expectations and like sort of like pre-running some recrimination monologues about like who didn't vote for you enough

so that you'd have a justification in case you lost. But that's because... But everything, everything now is outsourced. Everything that we have now, one of the reasons everything is so bad is that everything has been outsourced to the individual or private corporations. Like in the same way that, in the same way that like,

now if you're down on your luck, if you're underemployed or unemployed, instead of the state taking care of you, you have to get a job with Grubhub or Uber. It's your responsibility to look after yourself if you fall through the cracks. The most important election is not a reflection on what the Democrats or if you're Republican,

what the Republicans should have done. It's a reflection on you. It is more reason for you to accept what they give you. It's outsourced to you. The work of performing the most important election is your job. And that's why after every fucking election now, the liberal media's job is to try to trick all the races

into fighting each other over who's the best in voting for Democrats. Yeah, yeah. What have you done for us lately? It's like the fucking mafia out there. Well, I mean, because everything has been outsourced, all amelioration of misery has been outsourced, there can be no, when you're voting,

you're not voting to make good things happen. You're only voting to decide who bad things will happen to. Like that's it. And so all these things, all these elections do, is determine how you're gonna get your creepy political voyeuristic thrills the next four years. Or the aesthetics of how the same, more or less the same bad things are going to happen

in terms of this like what shape and what tone the compromises that whittle away at whatever agency and independence you have. And as long as we're talking about the fact that everyone's gonna be doing, driving for Lyft or delivering groceries or whatever. I mean, how many people mentioned either working on the Biden transition team or whose names

have been floated for possible cabinet positions have been directly working for Uber, Lyft, or Amazon over the last four years? Did you see that with Prop 30 in California, that the guy that ran Uber's communication thing there was like literally the head of the Department of Transportation under Obama? Yeah, he was a guy who was a layup.

And yeah, and like, I gotta say though, out of all the names being floated for a Biden cabinet, the one that I am fucking most excited for is fucking Meg Whitman to be Secretary of Congress. Hell yeah. And fucking a Republican. A Republican who's previous job, who's previous job like a line item

on her fucking LinkedIn profile, was CEO of QB, QB. It's not just even QB, it was QB. She ran Hewlett Packard into the ground and she spent like 10, 13, 30 million dollars of her own money eating shit in a gubernatorial election. Yeah, I mean, that means no more Department of Commerce after that.

I mean, just like the most failing upward loser you could imagine. There's not, even in business, it is very difficult to find somebody with that trajectory. Like it's basically college football coaches are the only people that are allowed to seriously fuck up jobs, leave with like massive golden parachutes,

and then just like get another one. There's one other. There's one other. Donald fucking Trump. Maybe that's the banking. It's like we need our own. And it was the closest we have. Meg Whitman.

Oh, it's just all the fail with none of the success. None of the win. Just the fail parts. I mean, Meg Whitman is, that's a good insight because what are the, the Democrats' only idea is what California is, which is the EU without a safety net. Yeah, yeah.

Their only designs for the future is a European Union as far as, you know, there will be hate speech laws that, you know, in America that means hate speeches, criticizing Israel or insulting cops. You'll have your favorite, you'll have your favorite vape flavors banned. You can't buy soda.

Is there a safety net? No. Is there healthcare? No. Are there labor protections? No. This is the really perverse thing with this, too, is that, like, I think there's this idea,

and I mean, I certainly have written about it. Like, I've thought about it myself, like, that the main threat of the Trump presidency was to institutions. And we need institutions, and I think we do need institutions, but I think that there's also this sense that, like, what I take away from the four years most

is not that, like, these institutions survived or were destroyed or whatever, but just the extent to which, like, the rot of them and the way in which either they don't do their job or they've been co-opted to actively do the opposite of what was ostensibly their job, that, like, those things, they've survived, like, in the same way that, like,

the upper tier of, like, the Democratic Party decision makers have survived, like, into their 80s still doing the same shit, but that, like, that, like, that's more disheartening to me. The idea of, like, especially when you look at the way that Biden sort of codes what he's trying to do in this presidency, it's about undoing and restoring and whatever.

And, like, we wouldn't be here if these institutions worked, first of all, but second of all, like, the way that they work now, the idea of, like, turning the clock back four years or 10 years or whatever, like, it's not enough. Like, they haven't worked in so long, and it's so clear now

that it's very difficult to have faith even in those. Did I stop the conversation and do more? I know, I was just gonna, I just remembered that one of the people on Biden's transition team who's, like, vetting things was that woman who, I don't know if you remember the system like a long time ago, but she was one of these, like, Democratic Party think tank people

who went out of her way to defend to Elliot Abrams when people were like, oh, yeah. Oh, Kelly Magsman. Yeah, Kelly Magsman. Kelly Magsman. She was like, I worked for Elliot Abrams. Yeah, we have our differences, but he's a good man and a patriot.

I mean, you're talking about someone who is, like, personally responsible for unspeakable massacres. Unspeakable atrocities. The best book on the massacres that Elliot Abrams oversaw is, like, 120 pages long. It's so short that I have read it myself. The idea that, like, you could, like, it's two New Yorker stories.

Like, he's not a good man. He might be patriotic, but, like, you can't look at what that track record is and be like, because he was kind to you at Capitol Grill in 2012. He's somehow something other than the sum of his actions. Elliot Abrams is one of the best cases for the concept of prisons. But not necessarily their execution.

Certainly the concept. Well, there we go, guys. Yeah, the Biden administration coming up and the Trump anti-Biden administration also going to be very strong. Yes, looking forward to the Avignon Trumpesy. Yeah, and then you know what? And if you're not happy with Biden as president

and you're venting online about it, I would just suggest that maybe you get out of the intellectual bubble that you've cultivated for the last four years and maybe, like, understand that this is whining. All this whining is how you got Joe Biden as president. I can't wait to see the Republican Sarah Cooper Republican Chris Steens.

Oh, hell yes. That's me. All our buddies are coming back. This is going to be very exciting. The thing that it's going to be an exact copy. Like, who's the Republican equivalent to Josh Gad? Oh, God. John Boyd.

John Boyd. John Boyd. John Boyd is going to do a front-facing video where he's like, hey, it's OK to cry sometimes. Robert Dovey is doing it, but he's like just constantly plugging his new album of standards. The thing I'm really looking forward to if it happens,

which I don't think it will, is if Trump tries a cable channel. Because every time he's tried to make a TV show in the past, and it's like it's clear that that's the only thing that he reveres is television. And like every time he's done it, it's just played like an infomercial for like lawns or like just like just like I landscaped large properties.

I want to I want him to make it because like I am a man of many principles, but those principles run out when you give me five million dollars. And I would develop shows for the Trump network. High tier cable dramas. And we're talking Ray Donovan, but Ray Donovan is investigating Obamagate. That would everyone would watch that.

The I do feel like we're missing out on like Trump coded entertainment. Like that was emerging as like a parallel space where like Christy Swanson was getting the career she deserved all along. And I feel like that might be short circuited now. David, I'm just I'm imagining. I'm imagining Robert Davi lip syncing to Joe Biden speeches,

but then like breaking halfway into it, just just going in and out of lip syncing Biden speeches and lip syncing Mac the knife. Yeah, it's going to fly me to the moon. Like he's wearing a hat, but like somehow he's in a Mustang. That's the whole bit. It's hard to tell exactly what he's trying to communicate.

Well, I think about that. That's just about wraps it up for us today. I want to thank our guest, David Roth. Always a pleasure, David. Thanks for having me, man. People want more Roth in their life. Where should they go? Defector.com.

You can subscribe to it. Sorry, you have to subscribe to it, but I promise it's good. And then the distraction podcast I do with Drew McGarry. If you want to hear me stammering more because we record in the morning, that's I can't recommend that highly enough. And before we depart for today,

we have a holiday themed merch drop coming to you. Chris, speak on it, homie. Yes, we have a new merch up at shop.chapotraphouse.com. This is restocks of a bunch of old stuff and things that I've wanted to get in our shop for a long time, including finally baseball caps with the Reaper logo and some very cool enamel pins and new colorways of some of the old shirts that shop.chapotraphouse.com.

And we also wanted to say that we will be donating a portion of the proceeds through the end of the year to various homeless support services in New York and LA. So you can know that at least some of your purchase goes to a good cause and not our continued degeneracy. Although some of it will be contributing to that. Yes, just to be clear. That was the honest here, yes.

Just to be clear. All right, well, until next time, guys. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks. Bye. The thing I'm gonna tell myself cause a little suicide

stick around for a couple of days or what a scandal if I die. Yeah, I'm gonna tell myself get a little headline news. I like to see what the paper say on the state of teenage blues.