The Bulwark Podcast - Brian Beutler: Vibe Shift

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Swapping out Biden for Kamala has been such a big mood boost that consumer confidence among Dems and independents is suddenly surging. Meanwhile, Trump keeps having Potemkin press conferences as a ploy to reclaim the narrative. Plus, Bond-style villains have made hating Project 2025 so easy, and the 'suckers and losers' guy again shows that he doesn't respect the troops.  Brian Beutler joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes: Brian's piece on mass psychology Tim's playlist

Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Welcoming back the co-host of the Politics Pod with Matt Iglesias, the author of Off Message on Substack, a former editor of mine, Brian Boitler. What's happening, Brian? Not a whole lot. Podcasting with you, which is fun. I kind of forgot that you'd edited me until I was looking at our text history. You're a good editor. I'm easy to edit because I like editors that make things better and you like to make things better. I don't like editors to make things worse, you know? There's a lot of editors in my line of work, our line of work now, I guess. this is actually true across professions and vocations.

It's like, my job is this, ergo when confronted with something, that's what I'm going to do. And sometimes it's just not necessary, right? Or like maybe only a little bit. Don't take out my Pulp Fiction references. Don't take them out. They're in there for a fucking reason.

Don't try to turn me into Richard Cohen. Now I can't even remember, but there was somebody who made like an oblique reference to something that happened in the TV show 24 in the piece and I'm like I know I'm I know I'm like of a certain age and don't get a lot of pop culture references but that's a reference I should get and the fact that I don't means that nobody's gonna and so I had to cut that one but yeah whatever man if you're if you're trying to signal to your nerdy Simpsons friends and want to throw a reference to that in there, I'm good with it. Yeah, come on. All right.

You had a column in your subsect this week. You're like the chief vibesologist out there arguing that the Democrats should focus more about making the vibes good and a little less on policy, despite the fact that you are significantly to my left policy wise. So we're gonna argue about policy, we're gonna argue about vibes. But before that, you know, we got to talk about the news. Donald Trump last night, in all of his genius, had some remarks in front of a group that included Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson's late wife, who's a huge donor. The late Sheldon Adelson's wife. What did I say?

You said Sheldon Adelson's late wife. Late wife. What do you mean? No, leave it in. Maybe she's behind, like Cleopatra. I don't need to set it up. Let's just listen. I have to say, Miriam, I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That's the highest award you can get as a civilian. It's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It's actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor. That's soldiers. They're either in very bad shape

because they've been hit so many times by bullets or they're dead. She gets it and she's a healthy beautiful woman it's fair and they're rated equal they're rated equal they're rated equal but not really actually the medal of freedom that you get for being a rich person that gives money to donald trump is actually superior to the medal of honor because you don't have war injuries and you're not dead you're not a sucker or a loser what do you think about that yeah you just need to have billions of dollars of your own or your inheritance needs to be large and donald trump will give you the highest civilian honor in the land it's wonderful like what did she ever do to deserve a medal of any kind i don't think anything she was a doctor maybe she did some good doctoring uh some good doctoring before she started donating to really noxious causes.

Interestingly, Bill Kristol wrote about it at length in Morning Shots this morning. Folks haven't signed up for our newsletter. There's the John Kelly controversy, right? Where John Kelly says that Donald Trump told him that the people that died, they're visiting the soldiers' gravestones. They were suckers and losers. What did they get out of this? And, you know, John Kelly's son was a veteran who died in war. And so, you know, it was maybe an insensitive comment in the micro and in the macro in that instance. But Trump's been denying this, right, for years. He also, John Kelly also reported that trump did not want to have amputees people

that had been injured in war to be photographed with him because you know it messes with the juju people don't want to like to look at that we have to you know make those people lepers and put them far away and so trump has been denying this for years he denied it i believe in the first debate it was one of the overshadowed moments of the first debate but he denied it and said he never said that that's a lie and here he is honoring miriam adelson basically saying that right like you can get that you can get the medals that these losers get but without the injuries you know as long as you're just nice to the president and give them money yeah he did this in public with john mccain in 2015 or 2016 when he

said like i'd like people who weren't shot down right i mean that's why when john kelly came forward with this one john kelly has more credibility than donald trump which is like very low bar to clear but b he was saying something that was consistent with what we knew about donald trump already at that point and so now it's like re reconfirmed. And, you know, I think that this, this works in two ways,

or like we're seeing the immediate effect, which is that everyone's kind of desensitized to it. And so it's not like generating front page headlines or leading the board podcast. Well, yeah, but it's going to be out of the news cycle in a day or two, probably right.

Where if, you know, Kamala Harris said something like this, it would dominate the news cycle for a long time. And that's frustrating because there should be one standard for everyone who wants to be president, right? But I think separately, I think we're seeing Joe Biden's theory of the election being vindicated. And he was basically like, when people remember the things they didn't like about Trump, I will pull ahead and then Democrats will win the election. And it just required Joe Biden to drop out so that he and his baggage could get out of the way. That was just one flaw with that theory of the election. So that people could be reminded of the Trump they hated instead of only seeing the Trump that they could kind of like hold their nose and tolerate. And so because we're not going to get days and days and days of like roadblock news coverage

of this event, I don't think it's going to have an enormous impact on his polling. Like in the bottom basically never falls out from under Trump's approval. I guess maybe after January 6th, it dipped a lot and then he was out of office. So people stopped measuring approval ratings. But even absent an insurrection, he can get both like plum 4039 38% on the basis of just being an asshole. He's at what, like 4645. Now, it's kind of like the high watermark for him. You know, he's got room to go down. It was interesting that New York Times Siena poll that phrase is right. He was at his high watermark in the New York Times Siena poll history. It was the highest favorability rating he'd had. Yeah. And these are the sorts of things where like, you know, you'd like to think that he says something like this and it's over. The Trump problem is solved because he just discredited

himself. And everyone's like, wait, what a gross person. How could I have ever supported him? It doesn't work like that, unfortunately. But these are the sorts of things that add up. And that you could imagine dragging Trump from an August high of 45 46% approval, down to a hopefully like a November, you know, reversion to the mean of 40 41%. And that's where he needs to be to really be creamed in this election. And obviously, that would be good for the country. What'd you think about his press conference yesterday? Take it any way you want or the media coverage of it. And the media show CNN showed about 30 minutes of him rambling before cutting away and then coming back to the questions that most of the questions are from like MAGA media outlets. So it wasn't exactly like he was taking any hard questions yesterday either.

But he drives no message. He's rambling. He's obviously aggrieved about Kamala. I have some notes here. He made fun of the fact that people don't know her last name. He's still obsessed over how she looked too pretty on the time cover. He said she complains too much. Just a little bit of projection maybe. He said very strong communist lean and then said way beyond socialism. He's mad she called him weird. I think the Trump theory of the case is that he wants attention back from her. And so he's going to have these rambling things and get attention. But to what end, I guess? First, it's interesting to me because I tuned out after those 30 minutes and everyone started cutting away. And I'm just like, what's the point of this? Is his

new thing now that he holds quote unquote press conferences but he makes sure that maga media outlets are among the press pool and then he just selects them so that he can pretend he had a like a real press conference but it's really just like okay that's clever i guess there were one or two hard questions if we're going to just be fair that we were you know we call it straight here brian i think that garrett hake got a question in there were one or two normals they got questions but there was also okay why has god chosen you i believe was a question and um and you know there are a couple on why the biden harris economy is so terrible yeah but like no questions about did you take a 10 million dollar bribe from egypt and cover it up or that wasn't yeah that didn't make

the cut i i think the the higher purpose like the thing that allows him and Chris Lasavita, and maybe now Corey Lewandowski to be of one mind about this is that Trump wants the attention. Trump wants to reassert control over the narrative of the election because he's been unable to do it since Harris got in. They want Harris to have more media scrutiny. And so putting Trump out there to do a quote unquote press conference allows him to say, Donald Trump's done two press conferences in two weeks. Where's Kamala? Right. Is any of that working though? No, it's not working. Like she keeps going up in the polls. I think eventually she will do a regular press conference. Like there's no template for this. She took over a campaign with little notice in July and had to pick a choose running mate and, and,

and redesign the whole convention that's next week. So it's like, it's 21 days. Well, the last time this happened, it was 19 days. No, there was no last time, right? Like we're just making this up on the fly, but I think that they think, or they hope at least that the caricature they've drawn of harris as somebody who can only be articulate and compelling when on teleprompter she'll be forced to do an interview or a press conference or both and she'll melt down and then they'll be able to like reset the narrative of the race again in a place that's more favorable to them or less favorable to her i feel like she through campaign aids or whoever could easily just explain like all this stuff happened kind of out of nowhere. We need to run the campaign,

get it set up and prepared for September and October. As soon as that's done, we'll do a press conference. But also like when we do the press conference, you can take my answers to the bank. It is easy for somebody who doesn't care about being honest or factual or whether he misleads people to have a press conference every day of the week because there's no preparation is required. There won't be no, there won't be a long rant about how I didn't jail Hillary Clinton when I could have, because it's, you know, for some reason, I believe that the president is indistinguishable from the dictator of Belarus. And I can just jail political opponents or not based on my mercy and whims. You know, that was like an eight minute aside during yesterday's quote unquote press conference about his imaginary jailing powers that he didn't use. Well, and like, you know, she is not going to just make wild assertions about him that aren't true, or about her record that aren't true. You know, she will spin because

she's a politician, right? But the the casual slander that comes with Trump and his campaign just isn't a part of democratic politics, at least not at the level of presidential elections. And so it will be a substantive press conference, like the people who attended or who cover it will be able to mine her answers for whatever they're interested in and have at least some confidence of what she says is corresponds to reality in some way. If I were her, I would just want that idea out there in the discourse that like what you're getting from Donald Trump or sort of Potemkin press conferences, everyone kind of rolls their eyes at the lies he tells and the random bizarre things that he says,

and they pluck the one kind of normal thing that he set out. And that becomes the headline to like my eternal frustration. And she should want in the discourse, like, if you want me to hold a press conference to do that, I'm happy to do it. I could do that every day of the week. But I think what you really want is honest, informed answers from somebody who can be entrusted to the presidency. And I will fit that into my schedule when I can. Yeah, right. One other related to Donald Trump giving answers that do not correspond with the real reality of his plans. There was a secret video. I'm of mixed views about secret audios, and I get a little weak-kneed sometimes about the secret audio, but we do have some secret audio of Russ Vought,

who is the guy that has been bestowed upon as the policy heavyweight of MAGA World, and he's the person that's like i guess everybody points to that is in charge of backfilling donald trump's rambling rants and creating some kind of policy apparatus around them bannon always talks about russ vaut as you know kind of the intellectual heavyweight of mega he was deeply involved in project 2025 he got tricked by some brits. And here he is talking about Trump and abortion policy. The president's actually come up with a strategy

that works so long as you are giving people like me in government the ability to block funding for Planned Parenthood, block funding for fetal tissue research. But what I've told people is he had the most pro-life record ever. I've never seen him take it to stand in the way of a pro-life initiative that actually was real, politically

and with momentum. It's a great plan, as long as you just don't say it out loud. She's like, let Donald Trump pretend he's basically pro-choice. Yeah. And then put a bunch of weirdo Russ Vaught people in HHS and let them use every arcane lever possible to block any access to women's reproductive care. I love how this whole Project 2025 thing has played out. It's not that much different from how Republicans assemble their agenda in more normal times. It's just been outsourced to think tanks and stuff.

It's never been uncommon for Republicans to have a policy guidebook that's several hundred pages long, filled with stuff that they really rather not talk about that much. And then Democrats say, oh, look, this is your plan to push granny off a cliff or whatever. And Republicans say, no, no, no, that's not really what we're about. And then it's this kind of tussle like the trump's main insight was if you outsource that to to heritage then you can create some distance from it his insight was in 2020 it didn't work in the end but the insight was like why do we have a platform at all that was the right thing right we'll just say that it's whatever donald trump was right and but i love that like so democrats and liberals and just anyone who like has the correct read on trump's character is like this is bullshit this this is your transition and governing plan you don't have

anything else that you can work with and so it's obviously going to be this and trump says no no no and then russell fought like gets a camera in front of me was like no that's actually literally the plan yeah that's the plan. What the lives have been saying, what the media has been saying, like that's the truth. Yeah, that's right.

And it's actually really smart. It's actually really smart that we're like, you know, they have been so ham handed about this because like, I feel like there's two viable options. If this is your agenda and it's so unpopular, one is to just own it and just be like, these principles are important and we are not going to just own it and just be like,

these principles are important and we are not going to run away from them. And like, even if you don't agree with them, at least you can trust us to do what we say and say, well, whatever things were great. Or just say it as like, what are you talking about? All of that stuff is why things were so great when I was president,

you know, do all of that and why things have gone so Joe Biden and like that. And you know, we'll take care of it. But if you're not going to do that, then I think the thing to do is to just completely lie. Like if Donald Trump says, I reject the proposals of project 2025,

except for like these handful that I think are okay. And like, these are them. They're not nothing to be scared of there. And I will not appoint to my administration, anyone who participated in the con job that is project 2025 period. And then he wins the election. He just does it anyways, like psych, right? I mean, he doesn't care about the truth. So why wouldn't you do that? That would at least fool a lot of people into thinking that he actually had like found this

agenda to be alarming. And then he could just spring the reality on people after it was too late. At least that would throw more people off the scent. Instead, they're doing this Streisand effect thing where he's like, Project 2025, never heard of it. It's like everyone in your administration works for Project 2025. And then these secret videos come out and the Trump campaign spokesperson who's denying that there's any affiliation between the Trump campaign and Project 2025. Worked for Project 2025. She's in those videos too. And the method that they've chosen to try to dodge political heat for this thing just forces people who work in ambush journalism and traditional journalism and activism and

whatever to relay the whole thing there. And it's just dragging it out so much longer and so much more painfully than it would be if he either just owned it or completely lied about it like completely lied about it we always talk about the benefit of luck and i just you almost don't want to jinx these things because trump had this insane run of good luck and then it does feel like that you know the horseshoes flipped a little bit on this stuff. The whole Project 2025 thing, I was deeply skeptical was going to be a successful political strategy. Because at the beginning, the Democrats, or rightly, and not less the Democrats, like journalists, were rightly talking about the fact that the biggest threat here is the Schedule F. And kind of the way that he wants to put his own goombas into what used to

be career government jobs for experts like that's like the thrust of this thing and that's like a very arcane thing to run on in a campaign right most people think that presidents can just pick whoever they want right so i guess you have to educate people before you tell them why it's bad and then what happens is biden has this disastrous debate and the biden team is just like grasping around for anything to talk about and it's like don't talk about the debate talk about project 2025 you know talk about project 2025 and it was it was kind of a desperate ploy let's just be honest but it worked because you know that's how you get stuff into the news environment as campaigns this is a Brian this is a Brian Boitler hobby horse by talking about things a lot and so they get it into the given the news environment and then donald trump and chris lasavita just fucking

walk right into the trap by being like oh that's not us and then brian leaves anyway and now harris comes in to this environment where she can like run on hey this is their extreme policy book that you all have heard about now because we talked about it the last three weeks and like things just really fell into place like this was not a master plan it's just like things just fell into place on the point about homing in on the project 2025 schedule f plan yeah i like i agree with you that like most people aren't going to schedule f what the fuck is that who cares it is i think a good way to get elites on the broad center left, people who have worked in government, who do work in government, and just like they know that that's important. And that gets them really concerned about what's going to happen if Trump wins, and then they go out and scare up votes however they can. The heads of all these various activist groups and like, you know, yeah, right.

Like, if they're like holy shit they're gonna use the the comstock act is that what it's called right that's motivating to a class of people who have a lot of influence and so then you get the vox videos with three million views like what's the comstock act right like this is this is this is something that really works on the center left much more than on the center right here's where project 2025 really does validate vibesology or vibes theory whatever you want to call it, is that they called it Project 2025. Like when you were working in Republican politics, the Paul Ryan budgets were called things like the pathway to prosperity and the roadmap to America's future. You know, like cliched, hackneyed, like lame, but-

The Inflation Reduction Act. That sounds pleasant. Contract with America. I like the idea of an American future. I love prosperity. Like who's going to look askance at this? But they're like, let's call it Project 2025. And it's like, it sounds sinister, you know, like intelligence agencies and military. They made merch, you know, it's like the videos people are like pictures of people at Reagan Airport,

like these center left people you're talking about. They're like, look at this. This guy's got a Project 2025 briefcase. They made videos that were basically like under Project 2025, don't write any emails. Go meet in private to discuss your plans to do illegal things and then just do them so that there is no paper trail. That's Project 2025. And it's like, of course, that's going to and it's like of course that's going to go viral of course it's going to go right and like i honestly feel like

this election could look a lot different i mean probably by one or two points or something but that's the ball game maybe if they had called it you know something that like a replacement level republican operative working in mike johnson's office could have come up with roadmap to his success done you know yeah but now they called it like this like bond bond villain thing and now now they're fucked and it is like the weirdest people there is this this is like something that i try to educate my lefty friends about uh you know because there's a theory of the case it's like all these republicans are all have always been weird and crazy and extreme and there's you know whatever there's something to all that but like there's this self-seselecting Adam Smith nature of what's happening now nine years into the Trump world.

Right. Where like the type of person that would be in the room, they'd be like, let's call this, you know, project to prosperity. Like they've self-selected out. It's our buddy Brendan Buck. You know, he works at a corporate pr firm now doing public affairs like these guys my buddy michael steel these guys are smart operative types they've sold over nine years they've been like we've self-selected out and the weirdest people in the entire you know conservative ecosystem have now risen to the top right because they're like hell yeah like they

can either get more power now because all the smart people are gone or because they were always extremists and like now i can get my like race science hobby horse into the document right like and so that is another thing that happened like the project 2025 crew is very strange the new the new republican like operative class like they love cosplaying they're like from from the internet, right? Do you remember when the Snowden disclosures started rolling out and they detailed like NSA programs, like PRISM, you know? And like, you know, when you get into the details, you can like or dislike the plans, you can question their legal footing, you can think that they represent some shady activity that the US government is up to. But like PRISM was just was just you know some internal term to describe a program if they were devising that plan or designing that plan for public release they would have called it

something normal like protecting america from whatever and so it it leaks and it's called prism and it sounds super cloak and dagger and the people who run republican messaging now think that that shit is cool you know they're like they want to pretend like they're in some sort of like scheme yeah right to to you know to dismantle the administrative state like a final death blow

unironically like without any without they don't do the doctor evil finger when they say it like that's just kind of what they say it's like the JD Vance video we played yesterday with Mikey Sherrill of him and that guy they're on the podcast and instead of just being like hey we love when our in-laws come and help with the kids it's like it has to be about how like post-menstrual women of indian descent are particularly well suited to this task you know it's like that guy that jd vance was interviewing with he's in the you know he's the type of person that's in project 2025 yeah i mean i i could do a whole episode with you about like

like how jd vance is like what you get when the republican party tent poles are like low taxes no no money for social services christian conservatism and then the third one instead of being like military stuff national defense spending stuff it's anti-immigration stuff right when you assemble all that you get somebody like jd vance who's like we need to replenish american population after we kick out the immigrants by turning like women into baby makers but we don't want the wrong kinds of people having babies so there's not going to be any money for them. And you're going to have to bring your grandma in to help raise the kids. Right?

Like that's the, that's the vision, but like, but it attracts people like Vance who believe in all of it. And then they have a really weird way of talking about it because it's gross. Like the, the vision for the country that it represents is unappealing,

but like, it turns out it's also very hard to talk about in a way that is attractive to to people who aren't already bought in yeah let's get to your vibesology theory of the case i want to just set the table for people who are not deep listeners of your podcast with matt iglesias politics which which they should be you are on this vibe side of politics that the democrats should care more about trying to control the media battle space. Matt is more on the side of actually no, policy positions really matter. Voter behavior is a lot based on policy positions. You wrote earlier this week, Kamala Harris's rise refutes an influential democratic theory of politics, which is the Matt theory. You highlight in particular, what we can

now see clearly is that economic sentiment among voters, to some important extent, forms downstream of political optimism, which in turn is a function of mass psychology. So the argument is that the polling showing not just that Kamala Harris is doing better, but that people feel better about the economy, despite the fact that she hasn't actually changed any policy views on anything, is evidence that it's more about vibes than policy. Is that a good summary? Yeah, that's a good summary. I would say like two small things, not really as correctives, but just as addenda. As Matt and I have done the show for longer, we don't exactly disagree with each other. It's just a question of emphasis. Like, I think that the right policy approach

for Democrats to take when trying to win campaigns is don't do stupid shit. It's like the old Obama line about foreign policy. It's like, as long as you are not touching third rails constantly, you're fine. People are not going to delve into the details that much. They want to know what your values are and what direction that points policy-wise in a vague sense. You can say you support a higher minimum wage, and then that can mean literally the minimum wage goes up, or you support various other full employment to pressure wages up, whatever. You don't need to write it all down. And if you do write it all down, it's not going to change your polling because people are just not tuned in at that level in general. This is the anti... Let's just say,

because I'm sure you like your policies and I don't. So this is nothing about the policies, but this is the anti Elizabeth Warren, right? This is the anti, I have a plan for that theory. Well, I think it's the anti 2008 primary.

Like in 2008, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, all and others, all trying to outcompete each other for policy detail and to outflank each other in ambition and it was demanded by people like matt like they wanted to see these details and now i think that like it was true the only thing that mattered was that barack obama was

hopey changey and he seemed cool and it was like that was that that's what really matters yes it got reinterpreted as like good policies good politics therefore really like master your policy be super detailed about it and the good politics will follow. And I think that that's basically wrong. Yeah, it's like quick quiz. Who is for the individual mandate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? Like only people. I mean, I know the answer.

Only people that were in the blogosphere in 2008 know the answer to that. But that was like the prime debate question. And it ended up mattering like basically zero and did not actually impact the policy that obamacare ended up being and on the flip side of that like obviously matt agrees that controlling the information space with things that are favorable to your side like donald trump's corruption or whatever are better than the you know the alternative so like we it's not like we think that each other has directionally incorrect views about this stuff just that like what should democrats be spending their efforts on to maximize that and i think it's this like aesthetic stuff this like like the impressions people form right so the the second caveat i want to offer is that

the michigan consumer sentiment index should be updated today and And it will either like, I'll either have a little bit of egg on my face, or I will be I'll be vindicated. I think it's the expectations are it's not going to come in too hot. And if it comes in, if it spikes, I think it's it's another data point in my favor. But before you talk about the data that might not turn out in your favor, what was the data that premised the article? Yes. So Kamala Harris takes over from Biden. Economic policy does not change. The underlying economy does not change. It does maybe a little bit, like it seems like it's weakening a little bit. So you would expect that to correlate, if anything, to Democrats doing worse.

But then she takes over and she gets an immediate spike in the polls based on just being a different person. And then another thing happens. She overtakes Donald Trump in the Financial Times survey of who do you trust more in the economy? And Biden had been trailing the whole way through his campaign. Nobody knew what changes she was going to make to the Biden policy agenda. And Biden had not changed policy from the White House and the underlying economy hadn't changed. People just were like, I am more comfortable with this lady than I was with the other old guy. And I'm more comfortable with her than I am with the alternative, the orange faced old guy, right? Like, that was it. And then there was a separate consumer sentiment index that it's one month of data, but it spiked faster in perception on the part of a subset of the population about the economy where they had been saying that their sentiment was weak, and now they're saying it's strong. And I just feel like you don't need to be

a super empathic person to imagine why that might be right. Like, like, you are, I'm guessing, familiar with being in a bad mood. Yeah, right. Like? And it could be the environment is making you in a bad mood and you can't quite put your finger on it. Or it could be like something in particular that it's just been a bad day of individual things happening that suck. But it can make everything seem worse, right? Like you're in a bad mood and your food tastes worse, even if it's the same food. If like 20 or 30 or 50% of Democratic voters are despondent about Biden probably losing the election and maybe being too old to be president. And now suddenly you swap him out for Harris and she's young and exciting and they're excited. That could easily make lots of people feel better

about all kinds of things, right? Like people's relationships with their families might've gotten better because they're less depressed about politics. I have no psychological training, but I've been a human for 41 years. And I know how seemingly disconnected things can change my perspective on totally different things. And that's why, like, when I noticed her overtake Trump and I noticed this consumer sentiment index spike, I'm like, it's that. That's what's happening. Now, is it also just possible that that this is an outlier my pushback to you is this is that this is an outlier situation that the democrat doesn't really do anything besides like she gave a couple good speeches

and really what was happening was there was a some subset of people maybe 10 maybe 30 of the country and i'm not talking about the mega people like some subset of either soft republicans soft democrats independents some subset of people that just looked at joe biden and was like this guy can't be in charge of anything effectively i refuse to believe that he is and so when i'm getting asked if things are going well in the country i am just saying no because i just don't believe that this person is capable of making things go well in the country i'm just saying no because i just don't believe that this person is capable of making things go well in the country that might be irrational or whatever but like might have just have been that as simple as that an outlier they're just those just people reflecting like i do not trust that the government is being run well right now i mean that is a vibes

theory that you just articulated but in a really extreme one i guess is what i'm saying yeah well look like i what i would say is that an incumbent president winning a basically uncontested primary and then declining the nomination after that's all over because he's losing and people have lost confidence in him and offering his support to his much younger vice president is such an extreme development. Never seen it before and we'll probably never see it again in our lifetimes, right? And so it takes something of that magnitude to create this abrupt difference. You know, shooting up six to 8% in polls doesn't typically happen in a campaign and consumer sentiment spiking this fast doesn't typically happen except in periods of like serious economic turmoil, right? But there was just this radical change. And what happened is how you described it. 10%, 20% of the population came off the sidelines,

stopped being double haters, and just started feeling better about the direction of things, where before they were using any question about whether they approved of Biden or how they felt about the economy as a proxy for, are things with this president going well? And like their impression was no, because he's so old, he can't campaign. But it was not a material assessment of economic reality, right? They weren't like, man, you know, I like I do feel pinched. I am pinched. I can't afford my shit anymore. That wasn't what was happening.

Like what was happening is they were despondent about Biden's vibe, his likelihood of winning, his ability to serve four terms, and it bled into their economic sentiment. And I wish the world worked in the sort of mechanistic way that my co-host and many other Democratic people who work in Democratic strategy do. It would make winning elections easy and meritorious. You just do a good job and you win. But it's not how anything really works. By the way, I should have answered my own hypothetical for listeners who are annoyed. It was Hillary Clinton that was for the individual mandate. Barack Obama was for a public option. Obama did it right. Obama did it right. Obama did what I'm saying Trump should do. He said, we don't need an individual mandate, and I don't support one, all the way through

the election, and then won the presidency and was like, psych. Okay. Well, I can't approve of that. I'd test my finger at you, Barack Obama. No, it's bad, but he won. Yeah, but he won. So, okay. My other pushback to you on this vibes theory is, again, this is kind of like why I got

annoyed at Alan Lichtman with the 13 keys and i'm like like dude the n here is like two right of times where presidents left right so the n here is like one right what is happening right now might support your theory but it might not right like household incomes are up gas prices are down mortgage rates are going down people always said you know i've had economic experts on this podcast for months so they're gonna be lagging people are gonna have a lagging reaction to inflation coming down they're not gonna realize it for a while it takes time for people to get used to their prices so like that happens that is happening at the same

time that there's this dramatic shift in the presidential race like i don't you know if biden had switched to harris at a time when that one day stock market tank had actually been persistent for three weeks or gas prices are skyrocketing the vibes probably couldn't have been able to overcome that right well maybe not i mean like he flunked a debate in front of 50 million people right like it was It was a very traumatic episode. It was. Look, I think that what happens is, in liberal political analysis, is there's a change in public opinion. Joe Biden's approval rating is going down.

When it should be going up based on fundamentals. Economy's been growing for a long time, et cetera. And so then people go back, sift through the data, and try to look for how to make the curve fit. And so they're like, oh, gas prices were up a little bit or real estate. Inflation was persistently a little higher. That was then the target number. Even this idea that there's a lag effect where people remain mad about inflation is like, it's just a assertion. It's a way to try to make sense of something on the basis of intuition about how people might think about the economy but basically you're

you're trying to after the fact reformulate what the fundamental yeah backfill like reformulate what the fundamentals are to match what biden's approval rating is and i just think that like that's a bad approach and and the and alan lichman stuff even though it it sounds like vi it's prescriptivist right it's like if these 12 things fall into place the incumbent party candidate wins or something like that and like that's prescriptivist in much the same way that good policies good politics theory is prescriptivist it's just like do these things right and the politics will fall into place the elections will fall into place and a cornerstone of vibes theory is that there's no set of things that you can predictably do that will predictably deliver you election victories you gotta either

try to make your vibes better or their vibes worse it's's the year 2024. People have rumor mills in their pockets and that they check dozens of times a day for updates on what's happening in the world. And you need to fill that rumor mill with stuff that's good for you so that they feel a way that makes them inclined to vote for you. And I can't tell you day by day what the right way to do that is, let alone like write up a plan that's going to work election after election. And like nothing that I'm saying here should make like mislead anyone listening into thinking that I don't care about whether policy is well implemented or well designed. I do. And like, if you are, if you are really bad at policy and governing, you are going to suffer politically from it. You should like, but those are like the table stakes. You should get into

politics because you want to govern well. And then you should govern well because it's the right thing to do. And because if you govern poorly, you'll lose. But that's that. That's governing. And then separately over here, there's politics. And it's like trying to figure out whether Trump took a bribe from Sisi is good for accountability. There's a substantive reason to do it. But it's because if people are thinking about Donald Trump takes bribes fromulf state dictators or arab dictators like that's valuable politics for democrats and they shouldn't sit on stuff like that but they choose to i agree well the one thing we won't go into this because it's boring because we agree which is both of us are like leading the flag waving of where is the Democratic Senate investigative and oversight committees?

What the fuck are they doing? Why are not like random Egyptian intelligence officials being called before our Congress so that we can have news about this? We totally agree on this. I think it's I think it's been a total abdication of Democrats on this point, like across 20 verticals. Let's just talk about governing for one second though because we have to let's just be serious for one second because con was rolling out her econ policy today it includes nicaraguan style price controls apparently we'll see we'll see what the details are it also includes giving people cash to buy a home as if really the right solution to our housing crisis and the high cost of homes is to give people more money that they can then use to pay for homes.

That's somehow going to lower the price of housing for people. Unclear exactly how that works. Why are we doing this? Like, why do we have to do this? Can you explain to me the progressive mind that forces us to do this? Can't we just do? She has a couple of good things in there, I should say. Three million more housing units. Awesome. Can you explain to me the progressive mind that forces us to do this? Can't we just do... She has a couple good things in there, I should say.

Three million more housing units. Awesome. Child tax credit. Awesome. Why do we have to do the socialist stuff? I think you should see this as a recognition from the Democratic brain trust. Yeah. That the stakes of the election are too great to get bogged down in like

internecine policy spats because if this if she put out these plans during a primary a democratic primary somebody else in the primary would be like the the economics don't work or like these are bad ideas and then she'd have to defend them and whatever i think what she's done and i i'm cribbing from julian sanchez who's now on substack. It's called Non-Content is the name of his newsletter. But he analogized what she's doing to vaccination, where you take a tiny amount of something that's harmful and you inoculate a body against it. And so it doesn't do any harm itself, but it's protective, is that these are not full socialism plans. These are like carefully selected policy nostrums that are very popular, but designed in a way not to do any damage so that you gain all of the popular appeal of doing

things that poll well, without committing yourself to a course of action that's going to actually cause a lot of damage. You know what else is really popular? That's never going to happen, balancing the budget. So why don't we do that too why don't you throw the paul ryan you know atlanta suburbs voters a little something we'll do a little popular socialism we'll do some price controls we'll do some balance budgeting and whatever i mean like where where's the end game to this because because kamala harris isn't a republican right like if she's going to if she's going to lock herself is she a socialist no but what she like i think what she wants to signal is i have some policy ideas that will help bring costs of stuff down and then she's going to put herself onto a trajectory to do those in ways that are

acceptable to liberals people on the from the center to the left and she doesn't want to lock herself into something like i support a balanced budget that will get her locked into a policy direction that's like well now I've got to cut Medicare and also raise taxes. But we're not really going to have price controls. We're not like, there's not going to be somebody at the FTC, like calling the Kroger, letting them know that their oatmeal is a little overpriced. Like that's not happening.

Even if she tried, like she is not going to pack that Supreme Court fast enough to do anything like what you're talking about, right? It would be great if elections were really just like contests of ideas. And then Harris put out a detailed plan and Trump put out a detailed plan. And you just showed that to voters and you let them pick. But that's not obviously a model that works. I don't think you're going to see a whole infrastructure of like liberal or left wing economists and policymakers developing new think tanks and stuff so that they can talk about how wonderful these ideas are and how they fit into a philosophy called Harrisism, right? You are going to have plenty of elite liberals like us kind of saying, yeah, these are not like super well-crafted ideas, but they're also devised in a way to do little harm and they're popular.

So let's just give her space to run her campaign because at the moment, Picayune's spats about policy are just not that important. She needs to win because Trump needs to be stopped because democracy needs to be saved. And the fact that this is basically going to get a thumbs up or a thumbs sideways from everyone in the liberal elite is just a testament to the fact that we all are on, I think, the same page about that. because there are things more important right now than whether your housing policy design is going to cause prices to be warped by subsidizing blah, blah, you know, like, who cares? Subsidized, we're just going to subsidize demand, subsidize demand, subsidize demand, subsidize demand, subsidize demand, it'll keep working, just keep doing it, eventually it'll work. Okay, it's fine. It's fine. I'm just I'm going to take a deep breath today during your speech. It's fine. I will say that this is like, not ideal. And it may not even be an optimal way to go about policy under these extremely weird circumstances. But I think it's closer to the mark than the approach we talked about a few minutes ago, where Democrats essentially alone are expected to offer insane levels of specificity about things that they can't credibly promise because the details are Congress's job. I agree with that. And so like, I think it's fine to

gesture in the direction of the things you want to do and to be clear about your values and then say that the details will be sorted out with your elected representatives. And like, ideally, the starting point of that are values and ideas where we're not talking about, well, this sounds like price controls and that's bad. It's like, it's ideas that from the, from the kernel we can, we can get behind. It's fine. We're just going after the gougers. We're just, we don't know who they are. We're not saying who they are. We're just saying, if you're gouging top cop Kamala is coming for you. It is sort of like an economic populist version of saying of what Republicans are doing with like, we're going to illegalize immigrants from voting. It's like, that's already illegal, but they're just, you know, like, it's just a, it's just a way of

signaling that this is something that you care about. Unfortunately, what they're doing is signaling that you should try to overturn the 2024 election if Trump loses. But like that is as a template for where policy fits into the elections firmament. It's like, just give them a morsel that tells them what your values are and like, let them persuade you that they're credible people who aren't trying to mislead you. And if they give you those things and, and you know, you support that direction, then that's your candidate. It's not much more than that. I don't think. Well, I'm not going to make too big of a stink out of it, but I've got a side eye on it. Okay. Last thing before I i lose you amanda carpenter was talking on this podcast on tuesday about how

she thinks donald trump has ptsd that's part of the reason why he's so grumpy and his press conferences so just putting aside all the insanity of the content just like as a close trump watcher his performance is as bad as it's ever been it's a low ebb it could be his old could be ptsd neither me nor amanda have ever been shot you have been shot and so i'm just wondering if you have any insights into what's happening in donald trump's brain i don't for two reasons um one is that maybe you should just tell people really quick what happened yeah yeah yeah it was it was like an aborted mugging like 2008 however many years ago that was 16 good lord so i ended up getting shot three times by like a street mugger who wanted to steal my phone and then they ran away i survived i lost my spleen but i basically made a full recovery do you need a spleen you don't need it

no um it confers some immunity to various encapsulated bacteria. It's a totally different conversation. So I have to get like pneumonia vaccines, but that's basically it. So it was such an out of sample event and it was so abrupt and I was young, I was 25 and so I recovered quickly. So it didn't traumatize me in the way that made me scared to just keep living my life. And I'm not like trying to say that i'm like super resilient or immune to ptsd nothing walking down the street i guess my i was kind of cheeky more specific questions the news is that today that he's going to start doing outdoor rallies again with bulletproof vests with bulletproof glass in front of him

he's been in his home weirdly for two weeks like he's only had like one event outside of one of his homes so i do wonder was that like a thing like walking down streets? Did you avoid certain street? Nothing. I definitely had like anger toward the kid who did it to me and his, he was with a friend and like, you know, I, like I would indulge these like revenge fantasies when I was feeling down, but I never, when I got out of the hospital, just like that was like being struck by lightning. And if you're struck by lightning, you can live the rest of your life in a Faraday cage, or you can just get back to it. And I resolved to get back to it. And I'd never had flashbacks or nightmares or anything like that. So I'm lucky in that regard. I would assume total armchair psychology, but like Trump is such a narcissistic sociopath that like, as

long as it didn't really hurt him let alone kill him you'd think he'd be like oh that was weird right and then he's just back to it because all that matters is like whether he's present and alive in the moment and yeah because he's the center of the world even though i have no personal experience with ptsd over my shooting and like the actual bullets pierced my body unlike whatever the fuck happened to donald trump but his ear was pierced scraped by a fragment i don't know who knows i'm gonna be a conspiracy theorist about this till till i see a report from his physicians but i am aware that people who go through what i went through it really does like force them to make major changes in how they live their lives and that's totally reasonable and maybe I'm wrong about like how that impacts somebody with Trump's weird

psychological disposition. But if, if it turns out that he really has been at home for the last month and a half because he's, he's traumatized by it, like would fit the facts very well. I think it's a good theory. The problem with Trump is that like,

he he'll never tell us. He thinks he's also brought in that. The final thing is he's brought in his buddies. You mentioned earlier, Corey Lewandowski, the bad breathed one that one time that bragged that he murdered two people when he was trying to pick up a married woman at an addiction awareness fundraiser at a Benihana. He likes to talk shop with Trump and Trump's brought him and a couple of other buddies in. I don't know, maybe they're trauma blankets. I blankets i just feel like look trump is never going to tell us because he thinks trump is weakness he's not transparent about any of his health issues and he also just doesn't understand how to appeal to like regular people on a soft basis everything

has to be aggression right and like if he was able to be honest with himself about what's happening and if he told himself i have trauma from this attempted assassination and went and talked publicly about it in human terms this has been really hard it's been harder than i expected i've been slow to get back on the campaign trail because i've wanted to be sure that i'm safe it'd probably help him that's the thing that people thought was going to happen. Like when people were like, oh, he got shot. He's going to be a martyr.

Like he's got, his polos are going to rise. Like the assumption was that people were going to have sympathy for him, but you, you have to be a sympathetic person and he's not. And like Corey Lewandowski, isn't going to tell him, Hey,

go tell people the truth about what's going on with you. Soften it up your feelings. And like, there will be a non-trivial number of middle-of-the-road voters who are just like man that guy is toughing it out and i respect that instead of whatever it is he's doing like i i don't want to give donald trump advice that he might follow that might help him in the election but like yeah no i don't think he's listening to the 58 minute mark of this podcast uh brian boyler you gotta i gotta let

you go thank you for you toughing it out 16 years ago i'm glad you're here and um you know thank you for being our head vibesologist thanks buddy we'll be back on the podcast soon all right all right man thanks to my friend brian boyler we will be back on monday it's dnc convention week next week we've got bill crystal on monday plus a ukraine update and then you know we're gonna have some democrats next week. So get ready for it. It's going to be great. Have a wonderful weekend.

We'll see you all then. Peace. Your body is pumped next to me You got that sensuality And oh I love what you do When you do what you do You got this funk in the groove When you move I'm in the funky way I'm I'm in the funky way

I'm I'm I'm in the funky way I'm Funny heart Ow! Yeah! Oh come on Funny horse! Ow! Yeah!

Oh, come on! Put me in a funky way I'll give me that Put me in a funky way I'll give me that vibe Put me in a funky way I'll give me that V, I mean it from your head I'll give you that... VIBOLOGY!

Vibology? Now you ask, what does it mean? Why, it's the study of the chemistry between you and me You got the VIBOLOGY, that's E-I-V-E-OLOGY Your body is hard, next to me You got that sensuality And oh I know what you do do When you do what you do You got this pull in the groove

When you move I'm in a funky way I'm in a funky way I'm in a funky way Funny heart The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.