No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Dismal Biden-Trump debate shakes up presidential race

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

The first Trump-Biden debate ends in disaster. Brian interviews FOX LA anchor Elex Michaelson about his take on the debate and what it means for the election more broadly.Pre-order Shameless: https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/shamelessShop merch: https://briantylercohen.com/shopYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/briantylercohenTwitter: https://twitter.com/briantylercohenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/briantylercohenInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/briantylercohenPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/briantylercohenNewsletter: https://www.briantylercohen.com/sign-upWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to talk about the first Biden-Trump debate and what happens moving forward. And I interview Fox L.A. anchor Alex Michelson about his take on that debate and what it means for the election more broadly. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen and you're listening to No Lie. Okay, let's have an honest conversation. The first presidential debate was bad. I want to talk about both Trump and Biden. I'll start with Joe. His job was to reassure the country that he was physically up for the job.

His biggest vulnerability in this election is his age. He needed to show people that his age isn't a problem. He didn't do that. And that makes all of our lives more difficult. It's why I'm sure that my phone looked the way that all your phones looked, which is to say a lot of text from people who are scared and upset and panicked. I don't know what's going to happen with Biden. Obviously, there's talk among the pundit class about him staying in and fighting.

There's talk about him dropping out. I'm not concerned about that. I have no control over it. It's not my priority right now. But here's what I do know as far as Joe Biden is concerned. I'm worried about the campaign and about Biden's ability to be a candidate, but I'm not worried about his ability to be president. I know he can do the job because he is doing the job and doing it more effectively than

anyone else in our lifetimes. And I'm not just blowing smoke up his ass. The things that Joe Biden has accomplished defy all odds in the world. If you'd have told me in January of 2021 that in the aftermath of Donald Trump, in the aftermath of the insurrection and COVID, that we would have a Democratic president, who could get the government to negotiate health care, that we would have record climate spending, that we would have capped out-of-pocket costs,

an insulin cost, an inhaler cost, a gun safety bill, an infrastructure bill, veteran health care, a clean energy revolution with 800,000 manufacturing jobs, 15 million total jobs, a record high stock market, wages outpacing inflation. You could have knocked me over with a gust of wind. So let's not pretend for a second

that for all of his issues as a candidate, that Joe Biden as president is not up for the job, because we would be hard-pressed to find anyone, literally, anyone, who could do it better and actually get it done. And I say get it done, because that's owed in large part to his ability as a long-time centrist Democrat to even make progressive agenda items seem more moderate just by virtue of the fact that they're being embraced and pushed and passed by Joe Biden. That means that Joe Biden could do what a president Bernie Sanders might not be able to do just because of who Joe Biden is. And look, no matter how left you, you know,

you are. You cannot deny that Joe Biden has governed more progressively than we could have asked for. This is a man who's made his career, again, as a mostly centrist Democrat who has brought in the left, who's aligned himself with folks like Bernie Sanders, who became a voice for young people. He took, frankly, unbelievable action on climate, on student loan relief, on gun safety, on marijuana, on health care, all of which is to say, if it's Joe Biden on the ballot in November, which all signs are pointing to right now, then I will enthusiastically support him because I know he is capable, I know that the people around him are capable, and I know that the results he's delivered are undeniable. And the second part of why I will enthusiastically

support him is because his opponent in this election is Donald Trump. So let's get to that part. Donald Trump stood on that stage for 90 minutes and lied his fucking face off, which by the way, he always does. Did he sound more in control? Did he seem stronger? Yes, but that's a question of style. The substance of Trump's performance was a disaster. And yes, that is even relative to Joe Biden. Trump lied about abortion, claiming that the whole country wanted Roe to be overturned. He lied about his affair with Stormy Daniels. He lied about his climate agenda, claiming that he wants clean air and water when he just asked for a billion dollars from oil and gas CEOs in exchange for whatever they want. He lied that he called veterans, suckers, and losers,

which was revealed by his own general, John Kelly. He lied about accepting the results of a free and fair election. He lied virtually every time he opened his mouth. The danger posed by Donald Trump cannot be overstated. The guy is a criminal, a narcissist, a serial liar, and an aspiring dictator. If Donald Trump becomes president, that will mean the end of abortion rights, of contraception, IVF, climate protections, clean energy, LGBT rights, gun safety, same-sex marriage, and democracy itself. And that's clear, clear enough that I think Americans will turn out, if for nothing else, than to ensure that Donald Trump stays as far away from the levers of power as humanly possible.

So my job, our job, stays the same. We're not here as the Joe Biden fan club. We're not in a cult. We don't pray to Joe Biden. We're not married to Joe Biden. He is not our deity. We are here to protect democracy. That's our job.

And when you think about it, with that in mind, our job is actually quite simple. It is to elect Democrats up and down the ballot because this MAGA Republican Party is promising to tear it down. If Joe Biden is at the top of the ticket, we enthusiastically vote for him because he will protect democracy. and Trump won't. The same goes for the Senate and the House and state legislatures. We are in this fight. Again, not because we're part of the Joe Biden fan club. We are in this fight because our rights are being taken away. Our democracy is in peril and there is one party and only one party that's willing to protect it. And our candidates are not perfect and they don't claim to be.

But the choice in front of us is clear. And it is a binary choice. So this is my advice to myself, just as much as it is to the rest of you. Take a deep breath. remember what we're fighting for and recognize that for the 81 million Americans who showed up in November of 2020 to vote for Joe Biden and against Donald Trump, that they understood the stakes of another Trump term then and they will presumably understand them now. And for those who don't, it's our job to remind them. It's our democracy. We're not absolved from doing the work here. We all have agency. So we keep making the argument that this election is a referendum on the kind

of country we want to live in moving forward. Is that a country that respects women's reproductive rights or one that seeks to strip them away? Is it a country that respects LGBT rights or one that doesn't? Is it a country that takes seriously the existential threat of climate or one that panders to fossil fuel companies? Is it a country that seeks to curb gun violence or one that will allow for the proliferation of weapons of war? Is it a country that wants to make health care more affordable or one that will entrench the status quo? I know the kind of country that I want to live in next year and 10 years down the line and the one that I want my kids and grandkids to inherit. And there's only one party that will get us there. And that's the message from now until November.

We're going to get to my interview with Alex Michelson in just a moment, but just a reminder for listening right now, my new book, Shameless is available for pre-order. If you haven't yet pre-ordered it, I'm really proud of the way it turned out. I think you'll really enjoy it. It's got a foreword written by Jamie Raskin. It features interviews and insights by total pros, including Pete Buttigieg, Jen Saki, Al Franken, Mark Elias, Heather Cox Richardson, and so many more. So, again, if you haven't yet preordered, it would be a huge help and a great way to support the work that I do. You can click the link in the show notes of this episode, or you can go to Brian Tyler Cohen.com slash book. Or you can just search for shameless wherever you get your books, including independent bookstores.

That's a great option as well. Okay, here's my interview with Alex Michelson. Now you've got the anchor at Fox L.A. and the host of The Issue is also on Fox L.A., Alex, Michaelson. Alex, thanks for coming back on. Hey, Brian, good to be back with you. What a week. What a week. All right. Well, the dust has settled a bit since the Biden Trump debate. It looks like Biden's closest confidants in the last, you know, day since the debate has happened. I'm talking about Clyburn, Obama, Pelosi. They've all rallied to his side. There aren't really any overt calls, at least not within the Democratic Party for him to step down by any major figures. Do you think that Biden got away with a bad debate performance relatively unscathed? Well, here's what we don't know so far is what does the polling say? Because usually it takes

several days to really get a sense, maybe a week of where polls are at. If the polls show not that much of a drop or maybe he drops a point or two, then he probably does get away with it. If the polls show just a huge drop off and all of a sudden Donald Trump is ahead by like 10, 15 points and in a lot of these swing states, and it looks dire, then maybe some of that public support that you're seeing today may not last as long. And there may be more of an intervention. We just don't know. I mean, it's interesting because you're in a situation right now where the opinion columnists, the commentators on cable news, a lot of voters are saying, we want somebody else, but the Democratic Party has been afraid to make the move.

And I think there's people in the party that are afraid to be the one to make that move. I think the only people that could really do that, you mentioned some of the names of Jim Clyburn and Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, maybe Chuck Schumer, people that are not potential candidates themselves and people that are well respected by a big crop of the party. Well, do you think we ascribe too much significance to these debate? I mean, it's not like people don't know who Joe Biden and Donald Trump are at this point. So, you know, at this point, like, yes, Joe Biden had a bad debate performance. But, I mean, we know both of these guys so well to the point where do you really think that we should be surprised if Joe Biden did have a bad debate performance or if Donald Trump had a bad debate performance, that it might not, at least on the surface right now, have some overt impact, given how entrenched our opinions are of these two guys?

I do think the debate matters because, you know, aging doesn't stop. Joe Biden in 2024 is not the same Joe Biden that we saw in 2020, and certainly not the same Joe Biden we saw in 2008 or 2012. And you're talking about electing a president four years from now. You know, we're talking about electing a president in January of 29 when Joe Biden would be 86 years old. And so for a lot of folks, based off of the polls, the biggest issue with Biden, is not his policies. The biggest issue with Biden is his age. And that debate was set up early, set up with those rules, with the intent to show the country that Joe Biden is not the Fox News channel caricature. He's not the old guy who can't put a sentence together. He's not the guy

who doesn't know where to walk in the room. He's not the guy who's falling over. He's not what they have been telling you. He's strong. He's the guy that they keep talking. talking about in all of the press conferences of how great he is behind the scenes. And that was the opportunity to showcase that to a wide swast of America at a time when we all live in our echo chambers. This is one of the only events where you get 50, 60, 70 million people all watching at the same time, Republicans, Democrats, independents, first 10, 15 minutes, most important part. And what do they see? They see somebody who looks really old. And he doesn't look like Joe Biden looked in 2020.

And so I do think politically that that is damaging, that that's the image that a lot of people see. And even when Donald Trump was speaking and saying a lot of stuff that most times would be the headline, the two shot was so damaging of Joe Biden's face that people couldn't think about what Donald Trump was saying. Does that mean that Joe Biden is going to lose the election, not necessarily? Does that mean that he's not going to be the nominee? Not necessarily. Does that mean that this whole thing is over? Not necessarily. People's attention spans are short.

A lot can happen in politics. But I do think that this was more significant than most debates. And also in the other debates, there were other debates shortly afterwards. And the fact that you have this long period of several months is not good for Joe Biden. Biden. Yeah, I guess what remains to be seen is whether the bad debate performance, and even if Joe Biden does live up to the caricature that Fox News created about him, that Republicans created about him, what remains to be seen is whether any of that supersedes the actual policy positions of both of these guys, because they couldn't be more different

on their face. I mean, one is running basically to entrench the same anti-abortion policies that the rest of his party is pushing right now. The other is running to protect Roe. One is focused on combating climate change. The other is offering a billion dollars to oil and gas CEOs. I mean, the list goes on and on. And these guys could not be more different on their face as far as policy is concerned. So whether somebody is going to focus on those, you know, issues of style, so to speak, above those policy issues, I guess remains to be seen. And that'll bear itself out in the polling, I presume, in the coming weeks here. Yeah, but Brian, here's the challenge. Joe Biden was behind going into this debate. It wasn't like he was

ahead and he had, you know, room to let some people go, he was behind in every single swing state. Now, maybe all of the polls for several months are wrong. And we have seen polls in the past be wrong. We've seen Democrats do better on election day than on some of the polls. But if those polls are right, he was behind. And it is hard to imagine, maybe he will, in picking up much support after that debate. And so that's part of the challenge. I agree with you that if somebody is anti-Donald Trump and don't like his Trump's policies and hate him, they don't care that Joe Biden had a bad night. They'll vote for anybody or anything other than Trump.

Yeah. But there is a small portion of this country in the swing states, the people that actually decide this stuff, that don't pay that close of attention to this stuff, that aren't superpartisan, that don't read the New York Times every day, that aren't that up on a lot of the policy stuff and that have a visual reaction to looking at a screen and do a vibe check. And that does matter. Most Americans want a president to be strong. Bill Clinton famously said it's better to be strong and wrong than weak and right in American politics. And if they can't pass that test, there are people that don't care that much about policy. They don't just say,

I can't. And we'll see. We don't know yet, but that is the danger. And that is why the New York Times, basically every single article in the New York Times right now is Joe Biden, you need to step down for the good of the country. Which, ironically, is going to do nothing other than push him even harder to stay in this race. Because when the New York Times tells Joe Biden he can't do something, he's going to do the polar opposite. I mean, you remember how they refused to endorse him. him in 2020, instead opting to endorse Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, and here we are, you know.

Yeah. And look, it's smart that the Biden campaign came out the day after the debate with the argument of basically, I know how to do a comeback. Everybody that's kept me down, you know, I know how to keep going. And that is sort of a smart way to spin it. And Joe Biden has beat expectations in every aspect of his life for 50 years. He's been dragged down, dealt with so many personal tragedies, dealt with so many professional setbacks, and every time he has come back from the proverbial dead. And so maybe this is that on the grandest scale we've ever seen. So, you know, that's, that right there is the part that I'm going to clip for this episode.

Alex, you have talked to a lot of people today. We're recording this on Friday. You've spoken to people across the political spectrum. What seems to be, I mean, you mentioned, you know, vibes before. What seems to be the vibe check in the aftermath of yesterday's debate? Real concern and fear. You know, the stakes are high. Yeah.

You know, if you're a Democrat, which I assume most of your audience is, or leaning towards Joe Biden. I'm sure we got some hate listeners in here, but yeah. And you genuine believe. that Donald Trump is a threat to the country itself, that democracy itself is at stake in this whole thing. And that's what's on the line, not marginal tax rates, but the concept of America itself. If that's what you believe, you want the strongest son of a bitch fighter to take him down possible. You want somebody when he's talking about January 6th that throws it back in his face. You want somebody to call out all what you perceive as his lies over and over again.

You want somebody to take him on. And that's not what we saw. And so stakes are that high. You want somebody who you can count on in that situation. And that's why the feeling is not only fear of Trump, but genuine sadness. Because there is a lot of love for Joe Biden. he has been a beloved figure in democratic politics for 50 years i mean he's started in the senate in the early 70s and it is uh i think a feeling that you see among a lot of people

almost like your grandparent when they're up in age and that that's tough but then there also is you're starting to see this uh democrats that are rallying to his to his defense, that think that the media is overreacting, that want him to have that comeback story, and that think that he's the only option. But it does seem to be a bit of a debate right now because it is a different time of this happening in October when Democrats would just have to say he's our guy, let's go forward. And because the convention is still not happened yet, there are people that saying, guys, let's at least have a conversation about if this is the best way to go forward.

forward. Yeah. Is there any precedent for anything like this in our recent past? No. I mean, we haven't had an open convention in decades and decades. I mean, we haven't had a situation like this. I mean, I guess the closest thing you can think about maybe would be Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Yeah. He decided not to run when people, he was running. But that was earlier in the year. That was at the time of war, and that was when there was an active Democratic primary underway. Joe Biden's already won the primary. He's got all the delegates. Right. And so this is entirely up to him on whether he wants to do this or not. So we've never seen anything like this. But we've never seen a former president run against the current president and debate each other. And then

that former president be indicted and a convicted felon and winning. We've never seen anything. like that before. I mean, there are so many things in this race. We've never seen somebody running who's in their 80s like this before. I mean, so much about this race is unlike anything we've ever seen before. And I think the country is kind of struggling to process that. Yeah. I do think at the end of the day that this is going to be less about the specific personalities because the issues are so front and center. And I think, you know, with someone unlike Donald Trump and with his agenda that he's trying to put forward, I really don't think it matters as much who's on the ticket as much as it matters, you know, either making sure that

Donald Trump doesn't get close to the Oval Office again or making sure that his agenda doesn't pass. And so I really do think this is one of a rare moment in American history where the issues transcends the actual politicians who are espousing their positions on those issues. But again, you know, all of that remains to be seen. We'll see what happens not just with regard to the polling, especially with regard to where those independents land once they've, you know, kind of filtered back into the, into the, you know, political process here. In 2020, you were right that Biden was running as an ensemble. And I don't know if everybody was voting just for him.

They were voting for the issues. And they were voting to get rid of Trump. So far, the polling so far would indicate that the age thing does matter. and that this issue is important to people. And it's a big reason why Joe Biden is behind in the swing states. Whether it stays that way, whether he is able, I mean, we will see in a traditional campaign at this point to counter the narrative of what happened in this debate, you would put the president out all the time. And that's, I mean, that's what they did immediately in the aftermath of the debate. He had, he had, you know, objectively speaking, probably one of the best rallies he's ever.

had. He looked great. He sounded great. He was totally on. His energy was great. And of course, that prompted the question from the whole world. Where was this guy last night? Right. And so, but can that be sustained? Right. And to do that a few times a day for an entire summer and go all over the country to actually do interviews, to interact with the press, to do podcasts, to do funny videos, to communicate to people in all different ways. Is he capable of doing that? And is he the best guy to do that? That's the question that a lot of people are asking right now. If he is, then he can come back from this. Yeah. And he can win. Yeah. I think that's a great point, especially in terms of what you said earlier, which is, you know, this is the beginning of what I think

the Biden campaign hopes will be the comeback narrative. And it's worked for Joe Biden before. It's worked for him throughout the entirety of his career. And it would be a nice bookend to, you know, his 2020 campaign where he did the exact same thing. He looked dead in the water until after South Carolina and now, you know, was able to, you know, rescue our democracy from the grips of Donald Trump. And hopefully here he can do it again. But it would be, again, a nice bookend to, you know, with that same theme of a comeback. So we'll see what happens in the coming months here. In the meantime, Alex, thank you so much for your time here.

work in my viewers and listeners here and see more from you sure i encourage you to check out i have a podcast called the issue is uh so search for the issue is wherever you do your podcast you can also check me out on youtube youtube.com slash elix michelson that's ellics with an e e l-ex m i c h ael s on or watch me on tv if you're in los angeles on fox 11 at five six and 10 p m every night and the issue is uh airing across the state of california as well the issue is show dot com that's enough plugs for me That's enough plugs. Alex, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Brian. Hopefully next week is more optimistic. Thanks again to Elex. That's it for this episode. Talk to you next week. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera.

If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to bryantaylorcoen.com to learn more.