The Chaser Report - Everything That Happened At The RNC | David Smith

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

Dom is joined yet again by David Smith, Associate Professor of the US Studies Centre and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, to get a full recap of the Republican National Convention at Milwaukee. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom again. Once again, we're joined by Associate Professor David Smith of the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney. To wrap up a huge week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with the Republican National Convention, finished, Donald Trump successfully anointed, and someone by the name of J.D. Vance in the Vice President's slot. And I must say, David, he does look a lot like Don Jr. Welcome a poor. He really does. Yes. And Donald Trump has described him as a very handsome man.

So actually, let's not try to unpack any of that at the moment, but well observed. Yeah, look, I wasn't the first to comment on it, but I've certainly enjoyed the resemblance. But let's talk about what happened this week in a moment and try and get a sense of what this means for the US race. And indeed, as we were discussing with Dr. Emma Shortus yesterday for the entire world. Okay. So lots of pageantry, David. One thing that really struck me about the RNC is how many unusual people there were speaking, how many people you wouldn't normally expect to be at an RNC? Who put this thing together and how on earth did they decide to invite, I don't know, the head of the Teamsters Union? Yeah, that was a really interesting choice on a number of levels because

it was only a few months ago that Sean O'Brien, the head of the Teamsters Union, was involved in this particularly heated discussion argument in a Senate committee hearing where Senator Mark Wayne Mullen from Oklahoma threatened to fight him. They were in the committee because Sean O'Brien had called Mark Wayne Mullen a greedy CEO. And Mark Wayne Mullen, who's a former cage fighter, was getting increasingly angry as he was reading out all these quotes about him from Sean O'Brien and then refuting them. And then he challenged him to a fight. He stood up, took off his wedding ring and challenged Sean O'Brien to a fight. Now he's been invited to the RNC.

So, yeah, very, I would say, unconventional choice. Very unconventional speech as well. Certainly he got big applause lines when he said, well, clearly Trump's won tough SOB after what's happened to him last week. But he wasn't endorsing either party. In fact, he was accusing both parties of being anti-union. He was talking in very fiery terms about the war that the ruling class is waging on. America. And even though you could definitely see echoes of that in J.D. Vance's speech,

Sean O'Brien clearly going a lot further in terms of putting organized labor at the center of things. And even though in recent years, Republicans have really wanted to court what they would term union workers. They haven't really tried to court unions themselves. And J.D. Vance in his speech actually said that, you know, Republicans will stand for workers, whether union or non-union. So it was a very unusual, very unusual speech, not very well received by anyone, I would have to say. So the crowd there, after cheering for his, Donald Trump is a tough SOB line, then was pretty much silent for the rest of the speech. And O'Brien has been roundly ripped by the union movement for turning up to the RNC, because unions, even though they've got

them as givings about Democrats and really have misgivings about Biden, they're still, you know, they've still been endorsing Biden and endorsing Democrats. So, yeah, very unusual choice. It was, I suppose, it a little awkward trying to put together four days' worth of talent, right, to book all of these people when just about everybody who worked in the last Trump White House hates the guy, has written a book about how much they hate the guy. In the case of Mike Pence, you know, the slightly awkward situation where the mob that Donald Trump called up at the Capitol.

wanted to kill him. So he wasn't there endorsing Trump. But they didn't manage to find enough people by going to the deep bench of the Trump family and getting up his 17-year-old granddaughter. I mean, is this a monarchy? Yeah. Which is probably not how most people would describe him.

There was one notable member, though, of the Trump administration who never turned against him, who actually went to jail for not turning against him, which was Peter Navarro. So Peter Navarro, who was a key appointment on trade for Trump because he was the most high-profile expert they could find on trade, who is completely against trade, he ended up going to jail because he wouldn't respond to congressional subpoenas. Now, Trump didn't do him any favours because he was saying that Trump had asserted executive

privilege over those communications that were being subpoenaed. And Trump and his lawyers said nothing. So Peter Navarro went to jail for a few months. I don't think he served his full sentence. I think he's only just got out. But he was there during this bizarre segment about, like, people who have gone to jail for Trump, essentially, and saying in a new Trump administration, no one's going to go to jail for their political beliefs. He said, I went to jail so that you wouldn't have to, which doesn't really square with all of Trump's promises to prosecute his enemies

and appoint real special prosecutors and things like that. Yeah, for the Biden crime family. Yeah, yeah, but as you say, you've got to fill four days. Quite extraordinary. Now, look, I guess the big question going into this, apart from, you know, what the fuck after the shooting was the vice president. Donald Trump really ramped this up. And it sounds as though he didn't decide on JD Vance until shortly before.

They even, I understand, changed the rules of the RNC to allow Donald Trump to make the decision at the very last minute. Let's talk about who J.D. Vance is. Yep. And why he managed to get ahead at the last. minute against apparently the wishes of people like Rupert Murdoch? Yeah, so J.D. Vance, the first thing to note about him is he's young. He's not just handsome, he's young, especially by the standards of this race. He's 39 years old, which makes him

exactly half Trump's age and quite a bit less than half of Biden's age. He has been one of the senators from Ohio for 18 months, but he's been in the public spotlight for a lot longer than that because he wrote this book in 2016, Hillbilly Elegie. Now, Hillbilly Elegie, you may remember after Trump won the race, there was this scramble by liberals to find any explanation that they could for why all of these people were voting for Trump, which was a bit weird in the first place because it was like, why are all these people who voted Republican now for more than a generation?

Why are they voting for Trump? But anyway, there was a scramble to find a book. And J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy kind of became the one. And I was one of those who read the book back on in November 2016. And you know what? Ivan, Sam, our mutual friend reminded me yesterday that I wrote a little review of it on Facebook, which I found. I said at the time, the only reason you should read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is so you'll be familiar with the one book about white poverty that thousands of people will read in order to turn themselves into instant experts on the subject. There is not a lot to recognize. recommend it. And then I recommended Kathy Kramer's The Politics of Resentment instead. Now, I stand by this review. What's really interesting is, even though the book is largely remembered for being this quite moving memoir of his parents and his grandparents, and he highlighted all of this in his speech yesterday, there was actually a very distinct political vision in this book. His argument, which he makes from page one onwards, is that Horwites in places like Kentucky and

Southern Ohio. They're not poor because of economic forces. They are poor because of their culture. He even has this anecdote in the first few pages about a friend of his who was offered a job, but he didn't take it because he was too lazy. So saying that it's basically the fault of poor whites because their culture sucks, rather than of economic forces that have hollowed out industry in places like Southern Ohio, that's very, very different from what he is saying now. Where he is very anti, you know, anti the kind of trade forces that people have held responsible for this, very much against economic elites, despite the fact that he's been one for about the last 10 years. And what I find really interesting is even though commentators have seized on all of these past comments that he made about Trump, you know, describing him as cultural heroin, texting a friend that he's either a cynical asshole or he's America's Hitler, describing himself as an ever-Trump guy. What amazes me is how few commentators have picked up on this actually very profound political shift that he has had.

And you know what that indicates to me that despite all of these liberal dickheads who were waving the book around in 2016 saying, guys, this is the explanation. You don't need to talk about racism. This is the explanation. None of them actually read it. They did not read the fucking book because that's on page one. I've got to admit, my Kindle shows me the exact point where I stopped reading it. It was after a chapter that he had written, which was a tribute to the payday loan industry saying, well, you know, people who think they're too, you know, who know what's best for us, they don't know how important the payday loan industry is for us. Then I saw that there was a chapter about, then he started talking about his romance with Usher. And by that point, I thought, no, I don't want to read any romances. I was traumatized when I was at the tender age of 21 by reading Fred 9. Miles autobiography. And when I got up to the romance chapter about him and Elaine Nile,

I think that that convinced me forever that I shouldn't be reading that. So yeah, that's the background of JD. That's so actually. So it turns out that in America, if you're poor and white and you grow up in Ohio and claim that you grew up in Appalachia, which apparently he didn't, I gather, what you do is you put you lift yourself out of poverty by writing a New York Times bestseller shitting on everyone else like you. Is that basically the way to it? And then you're going and work, by the way, for Peter Thiel, who turned him into a proper Republican, you know, the sort of venture capital guy who's quite the demon for those on the left of politics. He'd already been conclusively lifted out of politics, out of poverty by the time he wrote that book. Yeah.

He had a law degree from Yale, decided that the career path that everyone else was on at Yale was a dead end because Peter Thiel came and gave a talk at Yale saying, you all suck. you know your your careers are all useless you should be a venture capitalist instead so j d vans is like sign me up yep wow that's been his career ever since so but this is the thing david that's so interesting about this man is that he does seem to be uh in the words in the famous words of tony abbott on climate he seems to be quite the weather vein right like absolutely condemned trump and those words i i hear and all these great leaks from inside you can't confirm but certainly the talk that I've been reading is that Trump really vacillated over whether to pick him or not at the last minute because of those comments. And as we know in Trump land, disloyalty is death

with Donald. But then Don Jr., his doppelganger wanted him, a bunch of other senior Republicans wanted him. And he's been crowned as heir apparent of the MAGA movement, both I suppose literally, but also everyone says that he is now. What does he add? What's the, I mean, Emma Schultes mentioned that he was in tight with the Heritage Foundation and was across all the plans for Project 2025, but of the possible people, I mean, generally they pick VPs based on electoral math. So what is, what's the point of Jadie Vance being the VP? He actually reminds me of back in 2012, when Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate, and the same observation was made. Like, he's not, you know, he's not adding any electoral appeal. Why was he chosen?

I think it's because at this point, Trump is pretty confident of winning. Romney was also very confident of winning. But that was back in the weird halcyon days of unskewing polls. Trump's actually got good reasons to believe that he'll win. And if he does, he wants the vice president who is going to loyally carry out his agenda, which he might not have expected from someone like Marco Rubio, for example. So I think that this is very much he is expecting to win, or at least he's got a reasonable degree of confidence that he'll win. And if he does, this is who he actually wants as the vice president. You know, Trump is not interested in every policy issue, but he knows that whatever Vance does on policy issues is going to be pretty much aligned with what he wants.

Vance in many ways, I think he's carved out this very effective niche in the Republican Party. And this is why he was greeted with such huge applause and why people like Don Jr. like him is that, you know, Trumpism has often been described as essentially it's a collection of Trump's impulses. It's really kind of held together by Trump as personality. J.D. Vance has made more serious attempts than anyone to seriously put the flesh of ideas and policies on the bones of Trumpism. Really? So they picked him on the basis of intellectual heft. That's not what I was expecting. Yeah, yeah. No, like he, J.D. Vance is by far the, I would say, the most intellectual of all of the people who could have been up for. I mean, he wrote a book. He came to prominence because he wrote a book that was a New York Times bestseller.

So did Donald Trump. Unlike a lot of other populists, he doesn't actually play down his academic pedigree or his intelligence. He actually, he, one thing about him that hasn't changed is he has always seen himself as someone, you know, as an ideas man, as a serious political thinker. Trump is not going to live forever, assuming that he abides by the Constitution if he becomes president. there's only another four years, there will be plenty of people in Maga World who do, you know, who are thinking about what comes next. And J.D. Vance would definitely have been the pick that they want. Now, the flip side of that is that a lot of things about J.D. Vans potentially make him far too extreme for the average American voter. So not only did he support a national

abortion ban, he was in favor of using the Comstock Act to suppress the Mypha Pristone. Sorry, can you explain a bit about what that is? Yeah, so Mypha Pristone is the abortion pill, the medical abortion pill. 8486, yeah? Yeah, yeah, I think, constitutes the majority of abortions in the United States, especially in states where abortion has been effectively banned, but that pill is still available by mail. For a lot of conservatives, the next front in the war, is to ban that pill by mail so that

so that people can't have abortions in states where they're effectively banned. Now, that's going to be a very unpopular position. And given that one of the few things Democrats really have left at this point is a big advantage on the abortion issue, that immediately gives them a lot of attack material. They still have the majority of Americans on side when it comes to Ukraine, not that I think that's going to be a very important issue. That's also something that, yeah, where J.D. Vance is really in step with the Republican Party, but probably out of step with the broader electorate.

The other interesting thing about this Vance pick, and as you said, Trump was vacillating over this because of things that Vance and said in the past, we are still in this post-shooting period where there's actually a bit of a taboo on directly criticizing Trump as a threat to democracy. What the Vance pick has done is to now give everybody a license

to refer to Trump as America's Hitler in the context of actually quoting him. Yeah. I've seen it everyone. Yeah, yeah. So Vance is, you know, he, sure, he may turn out to be the person who actually, you know, creates the MAGA future of America. In the short term, he is a bit of an electoral gift to Democrats at a time where they really don't have many electoral gifts coming their way. In a moment, let's wrap up the RNC and just take a look at the state of the race here hitting into the weekend. The Chaser Report, news, news, you know. You know you can't trust.

Look, the big promise was that the RNC would be a moment of national unity that, you know, they'd come together and the Republicans would unilaterally heal the wounded land, just as Donald Trump's presumably ear cells and knitting, took themselves together and he's getting better. Clearly, it didn't affect him enormously. He's had a pretty grueling schedule this week. What do you make of that? I mean, there's certainly seem to be some triumphalism around in Milwaukee.

But, I mean, did they make it here? pitch to undecided voters in the swing states who are going to decide this thing? Yeah, it looks good now, but there's still months to go. Yeah, look, we'll see. Certainly the way that the polling has gone over the last few weeks, well, it's hard to say. The New York Times is a summary of the way that polling has gone from today since the debate is that all of the swing states, which were already showing slight majorities for Trump, have moved two or three points towards Trump. Yeah. So, I mean, that's, there's, there's a number of factors going on there. That's the debate. That's probably the shooting that, you know, whatever has been absorbed from the,

from the convention. I would imagine we could expect to see that number drifting a few more points that way over the next couple of weeks. This is really the Republicans' time at the moment, given everything that has happened. Interestingly, I think there are a couple of national polls that can give us fairly clean identification on the effect of the shooting. So Morning Consult and Ipsos both had calls that were conducted fairly close to before the shooting and afterwards. And it was interesting what they showed. So Ipsos had been 43 to 42 to Trump. That went 43 to 41 to Trump. And Morning Consult had been 46 to 45 to Trump, went from 46 to 42 to Trump. Okay, so why am I barraging you with numbers like this? What this shows is if there was

any effect from the shooting, it was actually primarily on making Biden looking worse. And this is something that we talked about last, well, seems like last week, but it was actually only a few days ago. The physical contrast that the shooting created between Trump and Biden is just more pressure on Biden's absolute weakest point. Certainly Republicans are in a very strong position at the moment. We'll have to see how much the convention actually helped. There's over the last few years, conventions which used to create these big bounces are creating smaller and smaller bounces.

And there's a sense that, you know, people already have a fairly good idea about what the parties stand for. They certainly already know what the candidates stand for. Was not the introduction of Trump as a new candidate like, right? It's the reintroduction of the single most familiar person in the political landscape. I mean, there's never been a choice between two candidates or better known to the American voter. David, we're recording this on Friday morning. Donald Trump hasn't given his speech yet.

It's probably going to be more of the same. If there are any new developments, we'll either put something else up here. Or you can certainly go to the pep with Chas and Dr. Dave in your podcast feed, and there'll be arguably too much analysis of whatever Donald Trump says. Planet America, I'm sure we'll focus on that as well. But as I look at 538, David, I'm somewhat mystified to see that as of now, they say, and they said this yesterday as well, Biden wins 52 times out of 100, Trump wins 48 times out of 100. What is going on?

That's a perception found nowhere else, isn't it? Yeah, so that's because of the model that 538 uses, which first of all, they, so with 538, they keep old polls in for a certain number of time, a certain amount of time, and they drop them out. So over the last week, over the last two weeks, there have been quite a few polls moving in Trump's favour. The full impact of that wouldn't have been felt yet on 538. That will register later. The other thing is that 538 bases its forecasts on fundamentals, which it sees as favourable to Biden. Things like the state of the economy. Oh, okay. Things in the competency advantage. And it's quite controversial because there's a lot of

question now about how much were these factors that were traditionally very important in presidential race is now important. Yeah, particularly given the age factor, which presumably they're not managing. I should just say that every single poll they list is having contributed to their calculations recently is going trumped, some by big margins. I mean, Emerson, SoCal are both plus six. So, yeah. Yeah.

The other thing is, so Nate Silver no longer works for 538. If that's the person that you associate with 538, he's got his own operation now. And last I saw, he was giving Biden a 30% chance of winning, which I think is, that's a lot closer to the kinds of, uh, kind of predictions that people have been making if Biden actually stays in the race. I suppose the most that you can say, uh, for Biden at this point is basically everything that you can imagine has broken Trump's way in the last three weeks or so. Now, certainly nobody wants to be shot at, and no one would ever plan getting shot at as a, you know, as a, as part of their campaign. But the fact is that that shooting created huge momentum for the, for the Trump campaign, the pictures that it created, the story of survival. All of this just fed into a narrative that Trump supporters really are motivated by. So when you combine that with what is widely being categorized as a disastrous performance for Biden in the debates,

combined with two very important court cases, one of which says that Trump enjoys quite a lot of immunity for what he did, another which has thrown out the documents case altogether. Those two decisions between and really undermine the foundations of just about every legal case Trump is facing. Combine that with a Republican convention that most people seem to think has gone reasonably well in a pick that's excited at the base. All of these, you know, all of these factors combined at the moment should really create a huge boost for Republicans. He couldn't have had a better week, really. So quite apart from being shot, but just in terms of the electoral math, he's on an absolute high. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or a better three weeks. And, you know, going back to what the New York Times has said, what you've got are electoral shifts of two or three, you know, shifts in the voting of two or three points. Now, that's not nothing. That makes an already difficult task much more difficult. But with three and a half months to go, I would have thought that any campaign that is worth at salt wouldn't be looking at those numbers and saying, well, that's it, it's over. Especially since, you know, if you look at that 538 polling average, we're talking about 42% versus 40%. Even with, or 43% versus 40%, even with the 10% at the maximum that might go to Kennedy,

that still leaves a huge number of undecided voters. out there. That's true. Which, you know, which, and I know that the conventional wisdom is undecided voters tend to break late towards the challenger. But as we said, you know, Trump is really not a new figure. And as good, I think, as the media has made him look this week, people aren't easily going to forget everything that they know about Trump. And I think that's, that's one of the reasons why we haven't seen huge. shifts towards it. I think we've seen significant shifts away from Biden, but we haven't seen really big shifts towards Trump. So I would say that it's not lost for Democrats yet,

although they're clearly in a very difficult position at the moment. So yeah, on your point about Nate Silver no longer working for 538, yes, I totally forgotten. He set up a thing called the Silver Bulletin, which has, what a pun. It's got Trump 43, Biden, 41, and the top article right now on his substack page is why I don't buy the new 538 model. So there you go. So that's going on. But then finally, David, look, as we say this, everything's going up in the air again in this campaign of endless twists.

The top story on the New York Times website is people close to Biden say he appears to accept he may have to leave the race. Doesn't get much more qualified than that. And the Washington Post at the same time, Pelosi has told House Democrats that Biden may soon be convinced to exit race, but also Obama tells allies Biden's path to winning re-election has diminished. So the notion that Biden cannot be shifted seems to be very much in a state of flux. And the article that I read, David says that if he pulls out, unsurprisingly, he would explicitly endorse Kamala Harris. Yeah. And I think that that would be

the only real path forward. I don't think they've got time to do a lightning round primary, as much as some donors are celebrating over the idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, when I saw the, when I saw the word Obama, I thought, ah, that's, I thought from the beginning, it would have to be Obama who would actually tell Biden that it's time to go. I think apart from his own family, Obama is probably the only person that Biden would listen to. He's recognizably someone who has exercised authority over Biden in the past. So, I mean, that with Hillary, particularly. Yeah.

Yeah, we had not seen that from him before. And, I mean, it's now actually getting to the point where after the debate, people were speculating, okay, who would need to tell Biden to stand aside? Who's going to tell him? The kinds of names that were coming up were people like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, James Clyburn, like all of these people, not really James Clyburn, but like just about everyone that people have suggested as someone who should tell him to stand aside has now suggested that he should stand aside, even if they haven't told him that directly.

Of course, it may well still be the case that only his family can actually shift him in the end. But the fact that, you know, this always looked like it was going to be a contest between who would force the other side to back down. And the fact that they are still not backing down after three weeks, the fact that the anti-Biden momentum is now increasing. And even though there was a sort of break immediately after the shooting, in some ways there was a suspension of nearly all nearly, all normal political activities so there were like two days when no one was talking about forcing Biden out then it just really began in earnest

you're starting to get a lot of members of Congress now actually actually coming out I just don't I just don't see them backing down I'm sure there's going to be a lot of talk about Biden's got COVID is this the beginning of the end with that play role I don't even think it's the COVID

I think it's the it's just this relentless weight of Democrats turning against him You've got to feel sorry for the guy in one sense, David. It's not easy when every internal voice must be saying, look, you've done a good job. Why is everyone saying this? In terms of his legislative achievements and so on and certainly stability, you know, he seems to have done a pretty solid job as president. But the man we see on the TV, unfortunately, does not inspire confidence.

And that is a very big part of the job. You've got to go on TV at a time when, I don't know, there's just been an assassination attempt on one of the major party candidates and reassure the nation. and his speech, despite the best efforts in the world, it sounded like a sort of word salad of hackneyed phrases. It didn't sound like someone in command. Yeah, and this is the problem of trying to elevate Biden's record.

His record doesn't matter at this point. Most progressives would actually say that his record was a lot better than they expected it to be. This was one of the reasons why people like AOC were actually standing behind him. But it's not about his record. You're electing him for the next four years. Sure, usually a president can run on their record because you expect them to be basically the same person in the next four years.

One of the things I think that freaks Democrats out the most, and this is why even when polls continue to show a very close race, they kept saying he can't win, it was because given how much he seems to have deteriorated, frankly, between the state of the union speech and now, there's still three and a half months to go to the election. What state is he even going to be in then? It's a fair question.

Let alone in four years' time. I think a lot of us do have very warm feelings towards Joe Biden, but at the same time, it's just impossible to imagine him as president for the next four years in any effective way. And I think it's a tall order to ask voters to imagine him, even if so many of them were sticking with him out of sheer fear of Trump. Yeah, the New York Times has an article as well just published, looking at Nancy Pelosi in particular and how she's coming back to him with electoral maths. It says she's the party's most ruthless tactician. She's in no mood to lose.

And she's older than him. I think she's 84, isn't she? Yeah, yeah. So that's, you know, ageism isn't going to wash with this one. So very interesting to see how this plays out. This could give us candidate Kamala Harris. Some have suggested perhaps even that he might step down entirely and swear her in, which I'm not entirely sure I see, but I mean, certainly would make history.

I see that as unlikely. I think that that would be too great a blow to his pride. It would be humiliating. But also just imagining Kamala Harris, who, for the many flaws that she had in her candidacy last time around, sure. But her work in the Senate in committees, her kind of prosecutorial incision up against Donald Trump could be absolute dynamite. I mean, that's the kind of race, particularly with abortion on the ballot. Yeah.

She's been very vocal on in recent years. I could imagine her really cutting through in a way that Biden probably didn't manage to even do last time, except when he told Donald Trump to shut up that time, which we'll never forget. Certainly one of the arguments that pro-Biden forces have had is that polls don't really, at the moment don't really show any advantage from Harris. And I've looked at quite a lot of polls. I would say basically 50% of them would say that Harris does about two points better than Biden and about 50% say that she does one or two points worse than him.

They're not conclusive at this point. But I think Democrats would expect that to change if she was the actual candidate. And I think at this point, Democratic activists from the grassroots up all the way to Democratic donors would certainly have a new jolt of energy if they had a new candidate, even if it is one who has been a bit flawed. By the way, I've got to say, and I've said this publicly before, I think one of the reasons why Kamala Harris has had a fairly low profile and a low approval rating as Vice President, that is partly Biden's fault. Biden has really, it's really been a very Biden-centric administration. Most other presidencies, you

can really remember the role that other prominent people played in it. You know, even Donald Trump had people like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, who by the end of it, were fairly significant other voices. You know, Barack Obama had people like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. And Joe Biden, who was given a lot more to do. And Joe Biden, you know, but when you look at the Biden administration, it's going to be very hard to remember anything significant, not just that Carmel Harris did, but that Anthony Blinken or Jake Sullivan did. You know, the people, often in presidential administrations, it's the

foreign policy people who have the most kind of publicly prominent roles. Condoleezza Rice. Yeah. Yeah. These people were just, they were just mouthpieces for Biden. It was almost as it. Because he had had this experience in the Obama administration of being the major voice of opposition to the Afghanistan surge being overridden and as a result, seeing the occupation of Afghanistan go on for another 10 years, I think that traumatized it. That was what made him absolutely determined that especially in foreign policy, nobody else was going to override him. Nobody else was going to be an independent voice in foreign policy other than him. He had lost all faith in the US military to do something.

an occupation of Afghanistan. That's one of the reasons why he got out when he did. And even though that has now looked back on as one of the absolute lowest points of his presidency, I can understand for him personally where that was actually coming from. But I think there was this pathological element to his president, already describing it in the past tense, but there was this pathological element of he was really the only voice and the only face of his own presidency. Yeah. And it's certainly not working out for him. now that is a real problem and it did a great disservice to carmala harris and i think that you can hold biden responsible for not sticking to what his promise had been which was to be a transitional

president which is what he should yeah and he could have he could have said from the off i'm going to do one term yeah no one would have held that against him all right david well there more twists on the way we'll see how we go thanks for talking us through this one and uh if it's harris who's the VP. Oh, I was thinking about that this morning. That is a very, very tough one because all of the people who've been mentioned as possible replacement, so like Gavin Newsom, Gretchen, they're not going to want to move out of their governor roles. They're going to want to position themselves for 2028. So I honestly do not know who it would be. I don't want to make a prediction. Donald Trump Jr. could be interesting. Hunter Biden, so Harris Biden could be, or perhaps

Perhaps Jill Biden, I don't know. Look, who can predict this race? It's been extraordinary. Thanks, David. We'll catch you next time. My pleasure.