The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - "Axe" On Smoke, Mirrors And The Truth -- A Special Guest Joins Us To Talk Trump, Biden and US Politics.

Episode Date: December 16, 2020

David Axelrod has seen it all and shares his take on America with Bruce and me on a special edition of the podcast within a podcast.

and all right hello there it's peter mansbridge this is the bridge daily with our special wednesday edition of the podcast within a podcast. That, of course, is called Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. Bruce is in Ottawa, ready to jump in here at any moment. And our special guest is joining us from Buchanan, Michigan, which is about an hour and a half or so outside of Chicago. You'll know this name as soon as I mention it. David Axelrod is joining us, senior political commentator for CNN.

He's known as that. He's known as that. He's known as one of the hosts of Hacks on Tap, a very popular American podcast that we get here in Canada, of course. But perhaps best known as the former senior advisor to President Barack Obama. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for inviting me. Hey, no problem. Let me start by actually quoting you a question that you had a couple of nights ago. Always a scary premise.

Well, it was actually on one of your podcasts where you said, what the hell is Trump up to? Now, I know we all kind of say that, and I've all been saying it over the past, I don't know, few weeks, if not the last few months. But I detected in your voice that it was more than just the usual, you know, he's delusional, and so whatever he does is kind of crazy. But I suspected that you think there's actually more to it than that that when you're trying to figure out what's he really up to. So what's your answer to that question? Well, first of all, let's establish the premise here, which is Trump is a complicated piece of business. There are a lot of elements. One is, you know, he cannot accept the fact that he's a loser. That is the worst thing that you could say about someone in

his world, in his mindset. His father told him once that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are killers and there are losers, and you have to be a killer. And one of the things he took away from that is that there are no rules or laws or norms or institutions you need to respect. You do what is in your own self-interest. And the only thing that you can do wrong is that which is not in your self-interest. And that's the way he's behaved in his business life. That's the way he's behaved in politics. So on the one hand, I think that this is an emotional reaction. You know, I said long before the election that there were only two outcomes for Donald Trump. Either he wins or the election is stolen. There's no third option. There's no

concession. And that we've seen. But I think there are other elements to this. First of all, he's raised a boatload of money off of this phony sham claim of vote fraud. probably by this time, $300 to $400 million. They presented it as raising money for legal expenses to fight the fraud. But three quarters, if you look at the fine print, three quarters of it goes into a PAC, a political action committee that he will control. So he will leave the White House with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in political funds that he can use for many, many purposes, you know, travel and other things, but also to advance his own media and political agenda. The second thing is, you know, there's not a trivial chance that he'll be indicted by authorities, particularly in New York, who are well along in an investigation of the Trump organization, his business interests on issues like tax fraud and other kinds of fraudulent representations of their finances and other things that we may not know.

That is he is in a better position if he is if he sets himself up as the aggrieved loser who had the election stolen from him, who is going to come back in 2024 and avenge the loss. That way, if he's indicted, he can claim that this is all about trying to stop him and stop his supporters from retaking the presidency. And then the third thing is, you know, he has at least $425 million in debt, personal and business debt that we know of. He can't get conventional funding. And a very smart person on Wall Street said to me, you know, if these foreign actors think that he could be president again, and that he's still a force in American politics, they're going to make it easy for him to get the money that he needs. They're going to consider that an investment. And so, you know, I think there are a lot of motivations.

And, you know, one thing you need to know about Donald Trump, he has all these emotional issues that play out for sure. His craving for attention, his unwillingness to accept loss. But he also has a kind of feral genius, you know, for how to scam money and how to manipulate the modern media environment. I think all of that is at play right here. I know Bruce wants to get at least a couple of those things. So let me just ask one quick last one that dovetails off that. Whatever he's up to, you know, he's not giving up. And so, you know, he, he's not giving up. And so you, you, you know, everybody else seems to be giving up. He's not giving up, or at least he's giving the, leaving that appearance for any number

of reasons, some of which you, you just mentioned. But the question becomes how much real damage is being caused to American democracy as a result of that. I mean, there's, I say real damage because there's damage that, you know, will go away in a couple of weeks or at worst a couple of months, and it'll sort of become a part of the past. And then there's real damage that can have a long-term impact. What are we looking at? Well, look, first of all, I've said from the beginning of the Trump presidency that, you know, I've lived with many presidents with whom I've disagreed on some fundamental things, but never have we had a president before him, you know,

with the possible exception of Nixon in my lifetime, who was so blatant about running down the institutions of democracy, about creating doubt about the institutions of democracy, the rule of law, the role of the media. And he has spent four years taking hammer blows to the pillars of our democracy. And the most important pillar is this one, free and fair elections, and that we observe the results of those elections. And so when 90, you know, 80, 90, whatever the number is right now, he says 92% of us, I haven't seen that poll, but certainly 70 to 80 percent of Republicans say they think the election was fraudulent. That is a real problem. And the things that he's doing now are a problem because they establish a precedent. And here's the thing

about norms. Once you shatter them, they're very hard to reassemble. And that is my concern, that, you know, this becomes the norm, that if people don't like elections, that they simply cry fraud and try and invalidate them. And, you know, we were saved by a lot of conscientious people, Republicans and Democrats, who did their duty, who observed their oath. A lot of the Republicans, the secretary of state in Georgia, the governors of Georgia and Arizona, I think they'd rather have cut off their left arm than, you know, not be able to proclaim Donald Trump the winner in their states. But they couldn't because that's not what their states decided. And they stuck to their responsibilities and their duties. You know, there were lower level election officials around the country who were, you know,

had their lives threatened because they did their duty. You know, but if a few of those, if a few of those people weakened, we may have had a much bigger problem here. And this was an election that wasn't particularly close. I mean, it was close in the three, in a handful of states that delivered the Electoral College to Biden. But, you know, he won by 7 million votes. And even in those states, you know, he won by margins that far exceeded anything that would be, you know, contestable in a real sense. So what happens if we have a truly close election? And now, you know, we've dignified 126 members of the House of Representatives signed onto a petition to the Supreme Court, making false allegations that have

been thrown out by dozens and dozens of courts, including many judges who Trump appointed, basically alleging fraud because they were fearful of him and their base. That is worrisome. That is worrisome. David, if I can just jump in, Peter, I wanted to, first of all, thank you for doing this. I feel like I know you really well. And you still invited me, huh? We in our household, and I think a lot of people in Canada, it's Thursday, I'm a pollster, and Trump and American politics has been the dominant story since Trump was elected. We always pay a lot of attention to American politics, but we've been hyper attentive in the Trump years. And he's been a kind of an inflection point in some of the political discussion here. But there are some other things that I think we're starting to wonder whether they're they're broken in your country and whether they're on their way to being broken in our country.

And you use the term norms. I sometimes think about guardrails in the way that we carry on our conversations about public policy and politics. And for me, Trump set about dismantling the guardrails. It was his Twitter and the way that he campaigned for the nomination and the name calling and all that kind of stuff, which some of it, you know, you look back at it and you can kind of go, well, it was immature and it was stupid and it was, you know, wrong. But was it really that important? So where you can kind of look at it and say, he just started the process of removing all of the guardrails that surround the conversation so that people don't know what's fact anymore. They don't know what's reasonable or an unreasonable

thing to say to or about an opponent anymore. And where I want to go with that is that obviously the question of whether or not we're going to see the restoration of some guardrails in how people conduct themselves who are in politics. That's one part of my question, I guess. Or whether we're going to see a continued escalation of that, say anything about your opponent and people will shrug it off or they'll be titillated by it or whatever. But it'll have some positive effect for the person who's doing it. But the other question is about media. You used to be a journalist, I think, at an earlier point in your career. I'm kind of halfway back there again, yeah.

Right? You do a lot of work in journalism right now. There's Fox News, there's OAN, there's Newsmax, there's Breitbart. And now we're, it kind of feels like we're watching a, a kind of an arms race develop where progressive voters feel like they need their own media. And I'm kind of wondering, is that the future that the arms race is going to escalate? Or is there some way and a better argument to be made for trying to step back from that a little bit and try to find some ground in the media? And probably CNN is one of the best positioned organizations to sort of figure out. Do we want to be on the side of that progressive kind of thought process because the republicanism has become so hard for us to really validate? Or do we want to be that broadcast version of, I don't want to say the New York Times, but you know what I mean,

that more of the news that's fit to report on? Where do you see that going? Well, those are two very meaty questions. So let me tackle them in sequence in terms of norms. And as you, I think guardrails is a wonderful word for them. You know, what Trump set out to do from the beginning, I mean, if it were just about name calling, that'd be one thing. But what Trump set out to do is invalidate any institution that could be a challenge to him. It was classic authoritarian stuff. So, you know, his view of the media, obviously, and he told Leslie Stahl this in an interview before he even took office or in an aside at an interview where she asked him why he was attacking the press all the time. He said, because when they wrote, when they, when you guys say bad stuff about me, I don't want people to believe it.

I mean, he was very open about that. It was a strategy, and it was pretty effective, at least with his base. But, you know, turning the U.S. Justice Department essentially into a political organ, or trying to, was shocking, disregarding the authority of Congress to provide oversight, and just flouting that, and kicking everything to the courts, and kicking it down the field, and basically saying, no, we're not going to, we're just not going to do that. I mean, think back, we're not that far removed from the summer of 2019 when we learned that the president had called the president of another country and tried to enlist him in the exercise of trying to impeach one of his opponents, Joe Biden, which, by the way, tells you how much he feared Biden then for reasons you as a pollster can appreciate. Biden was an inconvenient opponent for Trump to demonize.

But I mean, that was that was appalling. And the fact that Republicans almost to a person rallied to his side and defended them tells you just how much things have eroded. I think that what we've learned, first of all, is that democracy depends on the sensibilities of the people we elect and their commitment to the precepts of democracy. It's not a self-perpetuating thing. It requires commitment on the part of people who hold office and on the part of voters to demand it. But this bleeds into your second question, Bruce, which is how the media States Congress, representatives of QAnon, which is this that was out to destroy Trump and that was involved in a global pedophilia ring and that, you know, Democrats were all part of it and so on. And, you know, he was well, he welcomed them into the White House and he refused to criticize them.

So, you know, this is a, we live in a media environment that makes this problem so much worse, because it's one thing if we have a set of facts upon which we all agree and then we can disagree on what we do about them. But if if people can just make stuff up and millions of people believe it and politicians sort of weaponize that, that is a real challenge to democracy. And I don't have a ready answer for it. In terms of the media, you know, I've always said that one of the challenges for news organizations is that the news media is both a trust and a business. And the trust is obvious and it's the one you speak of. And when I take very seriously as someone Trump's great inspirations is that if you are willing to light yourself on fire, people will come. And, you know, he is, it turns out, made of asbestos and can light himself on fire on a daily basis. But, you know, it's hard if you are in the clicks business, if you're in the eyeball business, not to cover the fire.

And so I think this is something, you know, I don't have a ready answer for it. It's something that we have to work out. But I think we need to redouble our commitment to truth and facts. And we have to, you know, we can blame it on the news media, we can blame it on the politicians, but citizens have an obligation as well to question what they see, to step outside their media silo and see what the discussion is outside of there, to not treat people who live outside that media silo as alien. I mean, there is more of a responsibility on citizens of a democracy to meet their responsibilities. So we'll see. But it's an unsettling time. You know, David, it says something that we're almost 20 minutes into this discussion. There's a new president elected six weeks ago, whenever that was,

and will be inaugurated in 30 days or so. Yes. And yet we've only mentioned his name once, and that was in reference to something Trump did a year and a half ago. That's the feral genius of Trump I was talking about. Exactly. Although when you said we were at 20 minutes in, I thought this was going to be a commentary on my wordy answers.

But anyway, go ahead. Your answers are no more wordy than Bruce's questions. But that's fine. That's good because this is great stuff. But let me ask, let me bring 46, the next president of the United States, into this discussion for a bit because this is the landscape that he lands on that we've been discussing here for 20 minutes. And so the question, I mean, you've been there before, you know what those first days are like when you came in and after the 2008 election with president Obama, there was great expectation and great promise and a big crisis, none of which is easy to deliver on, not only in the short term, but even in the long term.

So what kind of a situation is Joe Biden facing as he prepares to take over? I mean, he's looked pretty good in these past weeks, not falling for the bait often, uh, working on putting his team together. And, and, and for the most part, it looks like a pretty impressive team, but everything starts January 20th when he has to start delivering on great expectation, great hope on the part of the American people and people outside of your country. So what does that task look like from someone who's witnessed something similar in the past? Yeah, difficult. I mean, look, I used to say that Obama arrived under the most challenging

set of circumstances of any president since Franklin Roosevelt, because there were two wars wars, raging 180,000 or so troops in active war zones, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. But in some ways, Biden has a more difficult task because he's arriving in the midst of a raging pandemic. And yes, we have vaccines. And yes, that holds out great hope that by the end of the year, things will be better. But in the interim, there's been a lot of pain, suffering and loss and concomitant economic issues that have touched millions and millions of lives. And that's on top of, you know, long term trends that have touched millions and millions of lives. And that's on top of, you know, long-term trends that have exacerbated the inequality in our economy and have divided the country between people who work with their hands and people who work at computers, at computer screens. And so, you know, and on top of that, he has this environment that

we just discussed. He has a divided Congress. We'll see on January 5th if he can win two seats in Georgia and take control of the Senate. That's an uphill battle for him. But I can attest to the fact that when, you know, you're a Democratic president with Mitch McConnell running the Senate, it's a difficult, it's a difficult task. We had 58 senators and it wasn't easy. You know, we had more than a majority. So, yeah, he's got a lot of issues. Joe Biden is my friend. I think he's handled himself incredibly well. I think in some ways he is the the right person for this moment, not in some ways. In many ways, he's the right person for this moment because of his temperament and his approach to politics.

But I can't help thinking that he's a little bit like the dog who caught the car. You know, I mean, it's not going to be easy. And the one thing that I will say he has going for him is if if they can land this vaccine project and and it comes off literally and figuratively to the country and to the economy, which will be helpful to him. He will have delivered some things that are fundamental. So that is working in his favor, but it is going to be a real minefield. And by the way, you sitting in another country, you can also appreciate rebuilding the alliances that have been shredded by Trump. It's not just domestic institutions that he has sundered. It's also global institutions and global alliances. And Biden's going to have to spend some time on that. So, yeah, he's got his he's got a full plate here. That's sort of where I wanted to go next, David, is that the whole subject of American exceptionalism is you may or may not know.

Polls in our country always show that Canadians think Americans are their best friends. There's a lot of admiration for the country. And historically, I think the reverse has also been true. Yeah, absolutely. You know, Trump was obviously very disruptive to that sense of, well, are we friends or are we allies? Are we trading partners? Do we do we share the same values? And but separating that out, because Trump was obviously an anomaly in many ways. And here, I think you probably know this, but if we were a state, we would have been the bluest state in terms of how many people wouldn't have voted for Trump had they had an option to here. The number is about 80%. But hearing Americans talk about American exceptionalism

through the last four or five years, maybe even a little bit longer than that, has become a little bit more challenging for Canadians to kind of wrap their heads around and understand where is that really going. I think the, you know, it's one thing for, I think people can say technology, financial market developments, political leadership, military leadership, diplomatic leadership over many years. America earned the right to say we are that country in the world that does this.

More recently, I think people have said. or found themselves in this country kind of going, guns are out of control. Climate change is not being taken seriously. Alliances are being busted up or threatened or challenged. The idea of free trade is not something that there's a kind of a consistent level of enthusiasm or support for. And yet there still is almost a reflex, and it's the opposite of the humility reflex in Canada, where we say, well, we're good, but we're not going to say we're the best. And it's very common for Canadians to hear Americans say, we're the only country in the world that could do X or Y,

the only country in the world where this could happen. And usually the sense of pride around that is something that I think we kind of admire, but also wonder, is it shaken? Where is it? What's the next chapter of that story? Well, look, I am a big believer in American exceptionalism. In part, I'm the son of an immigrant who, by the way, spent a year in Canada before he came to the U.S. But, and, you know, my father came with nothing.

And I ended up as a senior advisor to the President of the United States, and with all kinds of opportunity. And, you know, I and I believe in in in that I believe in American exceptionalism. And I think one of the things that's made America exceptional is America's ability to turn the lens on itself at times and self-correct. And, you know, one hopes we will see that again. But against that, and this isn't just common to America, you know, I don't think that we have fully gotten our arms around the sort of the social and political implications of rapid change that technology has brought, that mass migration has brought. And, you know, I'm thinking a lot about this lately because I don't think the Democratic Party will ever be a strong governing

party if it cedes 80% of the counties in this country to the Republicans as they did in this election. And, you know, the Democratic Party right now is a metropolitan party and it dominates big cities and now the suburbs, which has given gave Biden the chance to win. But you get outside of those and it's very, very bleak. And I started thinking a lot about, I've been thinking a lot about why that is. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the Democratic Party has become sort of an alliance of college-educated voters and minority voters,

college-educated voters and college-educated politicians, and we tend to moralize about issues. I believe more deeply, I believe as deeply as anyone that we have a climate crisis that we need to address, and the U.S. has to play a role given the nature of our contribution to that problem, but we can see the effects of it all over our country. And yet this has been a divisive issue. Why? Because while I may feel that way, and that may be the fact, it's also true that there are a lot of people in this country who make their living by extracting energy from the ground, by building pipeline, by doing things, by working at energy plants. And their feeling is, what happens to me? What does this mean to me? That's a fault line.

This whole issue, we have a terrible legacy in this country on race that goes back 400 years that we have never fully confronted. We act as if it's in the past. Well, it's not entirely in the past. Systemic racism is a reality and we need to address it. And that's become painfully clear all over again this summer, this past summer. But there are wide swaths of this country in rural and small town communities that have been devastated by economic change, where people are struggling to make a living, where drug use has now overrun communities and so on. And those people, they don't see, they hear these discussions and they say, well, why are we taking care of those people and not us? Why are we on our own? And they, you know, they say we give handouts to poor minorities and we give bailouts to Wall Street and we're left to struggle for ourselves.

And they've become radicalized and that's Trump's constituency. So the real answer is to address the concerns of people in those communities and resist the easy chance to weaponize these issues and turn them into wedge issues. And that's going to take a lot of discipline and a lot of focus. But that's what needs to be done. Or we're going to be, we're just going to, this thing, we're going to wallow in the same divides. And American exceptionalism will be threatened by that. Yeah. Yeah. Let me, let me bring up the, the six letter word that is sort of dominant and probably will remain so over the next few weeks. And that's pardon. Yeah. And I want to get. I would call it a seven letter word. Pardon. Yeah. Right. I don't think it's just going to be a pardon.

Well, in some ways, it's it's, you know, for the lack of a better word, the brilliance of Trump, that he's laid the groundwork for this for weeks, if not months, that it would be a shock to everyone if he didn't pardon or pardon a number of people at this point. So you kind of assume this is coming. Does he, like, how do you see the pardon story unfolding i mean he could do it he could pardon his family his friends himself he could do you know as some believe that that you know he'll step down with two days to go and pence will come in and pardon everybody including trump

um or he could surprise everybody and not do it. I, you know, it seems like unlikely that that's going to happen. I actually had, I had a theory the other day that it will sound very much off the wall, but in one way to get him around this whole family thing is that in light of Hunter Biden now being investigated on the accounting thing on the the tax evasion, that when Trump lays out all his pardons, he includes Hunter Biden. And he says, you know, we can't have the families of people who run for the highest office in the land tainted in such a way. And so, you know, he kind of gets around the whole sons and daughters

pardoning thing. Anyway, that's kind of off the wall. But that's so diabolical that I don't even think that he and I think he's so bitter that I don't think that he could allow, you know, consistency is not a real concern of his. So I'm not sure that that is a scenario, nor I think the Pence thing is unlikely only because Pence is going to be thinking about his own future, unless he believes that Trump is not going to run for president and that he can command the Republican primaries by being the guy who. But I mean, I just think that would be a terribly risky proposition for Pence. The thing that I've learned over time is that don't ever say, oh, he wouldn't do that. That is a losing bet with Donald Trump. I think he has been setting this up, not just for months, but for years, because, you know, when he said, you know, years ago that Paul Manafort had been treated very unfairly, that, you know, he gives you a tell.

And he's telling his constituents, his base, you know, this is all this is all fraudulent to these prosecutions. They're all political. Nothing's on the legit. So I'm just, you know, protecting. And in terms of the sort of prophylactic pardons of his family and Giuliani and so on, what he's going to say is, look, I know they're going to come after us. You know, they're crooked. They want a crooked election. They're going to come after my family and me and my associates and patriots who've been fighting on our side. And I'm just not going to allow it. And I mean, the thing, the script kind of writes itself. And I expect he'll do it. And one of the you know, the other night when the news broke that Bill Barr was leaving as attorney general, it occurred to me that he knows it's coming, too. And that, you know,

he's carried a lot of water for Trump, not enough for Trump's liking, but he's carried a ton of water for Trump. And I think he probably felt like, you know what, this is these last barrels somebody else can carry. I'm not going to carry those barrels of water for him. So, yeah, I think it's coming. I would be shocked if I think the most shocking outcome of all the scenarios you mentioned would be as if he decided not to do it. But I've always said the words that will never pass from Trump's lips are we could do it, but it would be wrong. The on Justin, you know, if he does the full slate except himself, because there's still some issue about whether he can pardon himself. Right, whether he can, yes.

Eventually that question is going to be leveled at Joe Biden. It hasn't been, at least that I've noticed, directly asked of the president-elect whether or not he would pardon donald trump um you know he's been asked about whether he'd authorize a doj investigation and all that and and he said no that's you know it's not up to me it's up to them but a presidential pardon would be up to him how does he handle that question it almost seems at times like a no win. Yeah. Well, you know, I was happy, you know, he sort of suggested in different venues that he did not that he did not want his administration to be consumed by prosecutions of Trump and his, you know, and other government officials there. You know, first of all, we know the history. Jerry Ford did pardon Richard Nixon, gave him a full pardon for all acts committed during his presidency and probably lost the, you know, he only lost by a point in the end to Jimmy Carter. He probably would have won had he not done that. It was a heroic thing to do, in my view, because he wanted to spare the country

the agony of a former president on trial. In this case, you have, this would be a former president on trial by dint of the Justice Department of an administration of a president who defeated him in a bitter election. And, you know, the concern is that it just it just consumes the country. And Trump would make sure it consumes the country. country, and whether with all the important business that has to be done and all the healing that Biden wants to do, whether that is the right way forward. The counter argument, and it has quite a bit of weight, is if we're a nation of laws, we're a nation of laws. And if he broke the law, if anybody breaks the law, whether it's a president or anyone else, should they be above the law? And will Trump have gotten away

with something? I think that the whole argument may be bypassed because if the local authorities in New York indict him, they would indict him on state crimes, not federal crimes. And any pardon would not apply. And that's the concern that the Trump family has to have right now. He can pardon them on federal crimes, but he can't pardon them for crimes that they committed through their businesses and before he was president. I mean, I guess he could before, but he can't do it for state crimes. So they're still subject to that. And that might be what what happens here. But I think Biden's instincts are right on this. You know, it would be really convulsive for the country. And there is a lot of pressure from Democrats and others who feel like Trump should not be above the law.

And you need to send a message that no one is above the law, even a president. But when you weigh all the equities, I think Biden's instincts are right. But you can get a hell of an argument in any parlor you find down here on that one. Yeah. Yeah. I have one last question, but I just wanted to. It does seem to me that the statement that Trump was fond of making. That if I did it, it had to be legal. That there is nothing that the president could do that could be illegal.

Is, you know, I guess for people who aren't students of the American Constitution, just a shocking statement on its face to imagine that. And when you put it together with how he treated Barr and the Justice Department through his presidency, it's even more shocking. But where I wanted to go with my last question is, Daniel Dale might become the most famous Canadian to cover American politics, and he did it with what maybe seemed like it started out as a party trick, like count the lies, and turned into a form of journalism that...

I want to know what you think. I kind of look at some days and I think, thank God he did that because he put a price on lying. And then other days I look at it and go, he put a price on lying, but did it matter in the end? Is there a license to lie that Trump has created and that Fox News may be supported and that the body politics, your point earlier, which I really agree with and think is important, which is that if voters don't demand better, they won't get better. Right. For all that we might, you know, load up on media criticism, that sort of thing. But this whole question of the relationship between Trump and the media and CNN did an awful lot of heavy lifting on this is a lie. This is a lie. Where is that going? Are we going to is there a price on lying now that that will make others less likely to lie? Or is Trump's experience going to make the opposite happen? I don't know the answer to that. I do think that there are, in fact, facts. There is truth.

And if news organizations, you know, it cast news organizations in what appeared at times to be an adversarial position. And there was some price for that. I think certainly on Trump's side of the world, you know, among his constituents, you know, these reports were dismissed. But, you know, he is an egregious liar and a shameless liar and an intentional liar. I mean, his view is, if you say, you know, we've seen it before, we saw it in Nazi Germany. If you repeat a big lie enough and put enough weight behind it, people will believe it. And so I do think it's incumbent on news organizations to say that simply isn't so. And that is true, not just for Donald Trump, but for people who, anybody else in public life. And, you know, I mean, I think Biden is a person of probity and

honesty. But if he says something that is factually not true, he'll be called on it as well. And he should be. I don't think, you know, I wouldn't blame Daniel Dale if he had checked into a sanitarium by now for the amount of work he's had to do. You know, sometimes I felt he was going to be like a jukebox or a pinball machine that went on tilt just from overwork. But I don't think he should retire. I think he should keep doing his work. And if only to show that the same standard should be applied to everyone in public life, not just a serial liar, but everyone.

And so I hope that he does. You can be sure that Daniel won't stop. I mean, don't forget, he cut his teeth here in Canada on the famous, if not infamous, former mayor of Toronto, the late Rob Ford. Mayor Ford, yes. So he basically transported his skills from doing that. Well, Ford was not Ford was not a completely dissimilar character. You know, he was a demagogic guy who, you know, shredded norms and tested the limits.

And so, yeah, that was good, good training, training ground. But we Americans, we've now adopted Daniel. Every once in a while, he'll mispronounce a word in ways that betray his Canadian roots. But we consider him one of ours now. I don't think he stopped cheering for the Leafs and the Blue Jays and the Raptors either. So that's all good. That's all right. We'll give him that. Yeah.

Listen, Dave, it's been great for you to join Bruce and I this weekend. You really helped enlighten us on some of the stuff that's up front and the deeper stuff. So listen, good luck in all your current ventures. And we're regular listeners to a couple of your podcasts. Thank you. So good luck in continuing with that. Thank you. Thank you.

Great to be with you guys. Wonderful conversation. Appreciate it. Thanks. And thank you, Bruce, as well. Thank you. Okay. Going to quickly sign off here.

And The Bridge Daily will be back again in 24 hours.