The Chaser Report - Grandpa Biden's Not Going Anywhere | David Smith

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Assoc Prof David Smith from the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney (and the epic PEP podcast) joins Dom to assess the wreckage of Joe Biden. Plus Dave explains why the US Supreme Court chose to make the president effectively a king, and what a second Trump term might look like. 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. And without Charles today, we have upgraded once again. Today, it is Associate Professor David Smith at the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney, who is also co-host of what may well be the world's longest podcast not hosted by Joe Rogan. PEP with Chaz and Dr Dave, which generally clocks in a little under three. hours. Dave, welcome. I'm sorry we can't do the three hours, but I suspect you'll cope.

That's okay, Dom. I will try to recalibrate myself to this far more normal format. There's something about brevity being the sole of width that I might point out to Chaz. But no, I saw it during your recent absence. He's been resorting to recording three hours solo podcast. I don't know how anyone even maintains a stream of consciousness for three hours, let alone records it. Look, I'd be worried if he wasn't doing that, because I'd I'd be worried that he was gravely ill or something. Also, the pet listeners, I don't know what will happen to them if we go for two weeks without a three-hour podcast.

So more power to him. Yeah, and look, I hope he's glad to have you back and hasn't somehow convinced himself that you only get in the way of his three-hour monologues. I'm happy to be back. All right. Well, it will be very strange to find out what happens to Chaz when he's in his 80s if you makes it that far. The cognitive decline will be evident in podcast form.

And of course, that's our subject today, as well as some of the other flotsam and jetsam of the US election. We're in a moment with Dave Smith. Dave, I can't remember a time where there have been so many dramatic leaks from Democrats. It seems as though post-debate, I don't know, everyone's private fears have been coming out. The New York Times seems to have a non-stop stream of leaks from senior Democrats, well-placed Democrats, about what's going to happen? What's your read on it? So this has been a really intense contest, especially over the last week, between Biden and his allies and the Democrats who want him to drop out.

And it's a bad situation for everybody. What it basically is is Democrats realize the only way that Biden can be forced out is to accept it himself, is to actually step down. there's no way to blast him out. So they've been hoping that by putting more and more pressure on him, by voicing more and more doubts, in other words, by actively weakening his candidacy that they can persuade him to drop out.

And that's why we've seen such a ferocious level of leaking and people expressing doubts that they haven't expressed before. It's to try to put just as much pressure on him. It's to try to show him that he can't win. Now, that hasn't worked. Biden has not backed down. It looked like he might by about the end of the first week after the debate because he'd been relatively quiet about it.

There were reports that he was telling donors that he knew he only had a few days to salvage his candidacy. But since then, he himself has ramped up the intensity. He is sending signals as strong as possible saying that he's not going to back down. And Democrats, the only thing that you're achieving by trying to force me to back down is weakening my candidacy and increasing the chances of Donald Trump winning. So at the moment, you basically got a contest between two groups of people who are actively increasing Donald Trump's chances of winning in order to try to get the outcome that they

want. Now, at this point, so this podcast is being recorded on Wednesday morning, it looks like Biden is winning that. He may have actually won. There seems to be in the last 48 hours or so, There have been lots of meetings with congressional Democrats, more and more congressional Democrats coming out in Biden's corner, everyone from Chuck Schumer, the Senate leader, to AOC, who presumably will be a presidential candidate one day. At this point, I think, even though there have been some quite high-profile Democrats who have come out against Biden, I think that he is on top of the situation. But we'll have to see how it develops.

There's going to be a press conference held on third. Thursday, and everyone's going to be holding their breath for that one. So just checking the New York Times website, which just seems to constantly have details. I hadn't heard that AOC had come out. I was wondering if she might be one of those who would seek to speak truth to power, David. Yeah, well, I wouldn't have called it the most enthusiastic endorsement. She said, Biden is the candidate case closed. In other words, let's move on.

I suppose that's the reality of the DNC process. isn't it? So the current headline, if you go to the New York Times website, the top four stories are about this problem. The top one is on Capitol Hill, Democrats panic about Biden, but do nothing. It then has, for Kamala Harris, the challenge of getting ready without getting ready, if President Biden drops out what happens to his campaign money, and Trump and Harris both got on the offensive as their campaign Tuesday. Then they get, the next story is Biden at NATO, trying to pretend it's business as usual. Well, of course, I presume everyone at the summit is talking about

whether he's even going to be there. So, yeah, you're right. It is quite a high-stakes game, isn't it? whereby they, in order to try and get rid of Biden, they need to perhaps fatally wound him because the disunity is death in politics. There's another axiom you hear quite a lot. It is.

And I mean, I'm sure that in a few years or maybe next year, we're going to be reading some really interesting memoirs and insider accounts of this two-week period and how it was that maybe Biden actually managed to stare down his opponents. For me, one of the factors that I think must be playing into this, surprisingly, is the polls, which is that Biden has suffered a hit in the polls, but probably not as big as most people would have been expecting. Now, even though immediately after the debate, New York Times, Siena poll said that Trump's lead has stretched from three to six, the overall shift has been about two points. In the context of this race, that's pretty big, but it's not normally something that you'd consider fatal. That's about the same shift that there was to Biden after Trump's conviction.

And I'm sure that Biden and his allies are looking at these and saying, these are not so bad, we can recover from this. There was even a Bloomberg poll that showed Biden ahead by Substantial Martin in Michigan, Wisconsin. So, you know, if they take the most optimistic view possible of the polls, they'll be saying at this point, well, all we've got to do is overcome this deficit in Pennsylvania and we can still win the race. Get John Federman out there, another man who managed to get elected despite having serious problems articulating himself after a stroke. So from their point of view, if the polls had been really bad, if it had been like a nine or ten point shift to Trump, that probably would have forced him out of the race. But we're living through an era of American politics where it's so tightly polarized that nothing can shift the polls that much in one go. Like maybe if Biden died, he would have a bit more of a poll hit. How close has he got to get, David, because who knows how much more?

cognitive decline is on the way between now and November. Yeah, and this is why I think it's a, you know, I think despite the fact that the poll erosion has been pretty small, I still think that his debate performance makes it very, very difficult for him to win, because voters are thinking not just in terms of what they see at one point in time, they can remember what Biden was like four years ago. They can remember what he was like one year ago. they can remember what he was like at the state of the union and what they would be seeing is a rapid decline. Biden and his team will be hoping that they can write this off as a bad

day. But when somebody is that age and when this is, you know, to be fair, not actually an isolated incident, it's not like we're never going to see that debate version of Biden again. We'd be expecting it to, you know, to see it more and more frequently. And I think it is a of a tall order to ask the voters to elect this guy president until he's age 86 when this is how he is at age 81. I think that, I mean, this adds a huge degree of difficulty. I think that it now means that the Biden vote is largely just an anti-Trump vote. He's the one option that's anti-Trump.

Yeah. And will that be enough, though? I don't know. I don't like the odds. I think that everybody was saying prior to this race that there had to be an affirmative vote for Biden, that Biden really had to give something for people to vote for. Part of the problem with the debate is that

as much as Biden's allies have been trying to pump up his record, not with a huge amount of success. But nonetheless, I've been trying to pump it up. His record doesn't matter if voters are looking forward to the next, you know, to the next four years. And so I think that there's very little for them to vote for at this point. It's all going to be about the vote against. And I think the poll averages that are consistently now showing this two or three point gap

between Trump and Biden are going to be very difficult to bridge if it is just a vote against Trump. Because on Trump's side, there are actually, you know, large numbers of people voting affirmatively for him, as well as voting against Biden. It's very hard to predict because we're in very unprecedented territory. And I won't say that Biden can't win at this point, just looking at those polls, showing him ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin. But this adds a real degree of difficulty. People are not going to forget about the debate performance in the way that they often

forget about other events during the campaign. Yeah, although I suppose one thing is we know. know that low expectations can work well in this sort of situation. And the thing about Joe Biden is that when he came out and said, oh, only the Almighty himself could stop me from running. That's what people are worried about. He's trying. The Almighty's doing his level best at this point, I feel.

That's the Almighty emailing now, I think. But basically, his whole brand has been this hard scrabble. Everyone underestimates me. I thought I couldn't do it. The polls said it. in 2020 that I'd lose. In 2022, there was going to be a red wave. There's no data set that could potentially convince him that it wasn't just another, you know, honorary, hard-scrabble thing he could overcome through force of personality. And I guess if the next debate, I imagine Trump will be

salivating for as many debates as possible, maybe they should have a third one. But if, if the next debate has something more like the state of the union, Biden, if, and cognitive decline ebbs and flows, if he has a good night, then perhaps it will help him enormously. If grandpa's, you know, really, there's all the rumours about him getting juiced up. If he does actually get juiced up, and if we've been speculating about the possibility of Hunter getting involved in helping to medicate the old man, maybe there's a possibility. I don't know.

I mean, it does seem so tight. But as we said before, David, it does come down to the swing states. It does come down to a handful of voters who are genuinely undecided. And probably there's even fewer of those now than there were before. What are those numbers looking like? Do we have any sense? Because certainly a lot of the swings by state polls did seem to favour Trump in recent times. Yeah.

So if we have a look at the, I'll have a look at the New York Times poll averages currently. So 538 used to be the only shop in town poll averages. Now there are a few of them. They're showing that on average Trump has a two-point lead in Michigan, a two-point lead in Wisconsin, and a four-point lead in Pennsylvania. Now, the Biden campaign will be thinking that none of those leads are insurmountable. Remember that in all of those states, they've got very effective Democratic governors who can serve as campaign surrogates for Biden. They do too, don't they?

Very popular. So Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer's in Michigan. Josh Shapiro is in Pennsylvania. They are both really popular governors. Tony Evers, not quite so popular in Wisconsin, but nonetheless, you know, potentially a pretty effective surrogate. Yeah, Wittmers and Shapiro have been on the list, everyone's list of possible replacements. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yes. Yeah, now, if I were either of them, I would not want to take on that task this year if it was offered.

And I think both of them actually said that they had no interest in it. But now, looking at the other state, so that's the, that's the Midwestern states, looking at the Sun Belt, it's a much more difficult task. So North Carolina, five point difference, Arizona, five point difference, Nevada, six point difference, Georgia, six point difference. And a lot of these went Biden last time from memory. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of those went, a lot of those went Biden. A lot of these have not looked like going Biden at any point during this election campaign, which means. So it's those three Midwestern states.

If he can win those plus the one of the Nebraska congressional districts, then he gets over the line. But there's another element here, which is that in two states that haven't been polled that much, which is Virginia and Minnesota, they show alarmingly small leads for Biden. Last time I checked, it was, I think it's only 538 that's doing averages of these. It was 2% in Minnesota and 4.4% in Virginia or something like that. In other words, these were actually closer than a lot of the states that were being identified as swing states. You have to say Biden loses one of them. It's going to be almost impossible for him to win.

So, yeah, look at the moment, they're going all in on an inside straight in poker terms. He's very straight. I think he can't bend. Isn't that one of his medical conditions? Okay, more in a second. I want to ask about the Supreme Court as well after this. No, it's a risky strategy, but every strategy is a risky strategy at this point. With an 81-year-old candidate showing clear signs of decline.

None of the medical advice contained in the Chaser Report should legally be considered medical advice. The Chaser Report. So, David, we do know some things now that we're in doubt. We know that Donald Trump is a convicted felon with 34 convictions. We know that it's unlikely that any of the other cases. cases, isn't it right at this stage, are likely to get anywhere very much before the trial, although there will be the sentencing, I think, in September for the case where he has been convicted. And the Supreme Court has effectively said that presidents are above prosecution for potentially

even the most loosely defined official act, which does offer the tantalizing opportunity for Joe Biden to either kill or imprison Donald Trump at this point without necessarily any repercussions. Let's put this to the test Supreme Court. Yeah, I know a lot of people are fantasizing about that. I want to say about the Supreme Court's immunity case. This has been something that has been building since the 1980s. So really, during the Reagan presidency, and even before that, even with going back quite a few presidencies before that,

there was this increasing concentration of power in the executive that during the Reagan period basically developed into a full-blown cult of the executive, a cult of the presidency and the president's ability to do whatever it takes to protect the country. Now, part of this is because in the constitution, it suggests that there are powers not enumerated by the constitution. In the president's oath of office, it says that the president has to, you know, do whatever possible to keep the country safe and to safeguard the Constitution. Those two things together lead to what's known as the prerogative school in executive jurisprudence,

which is the idea that the president can take extraordinary actions in order to defend the Constitution. Now, Republicans ever since Reagan have generally been, big fans of this idea. George W. Bush was a huge fan of this idea constantly invoking these prerogative powers to do things like having secret military trials for terror suspects and things like that. Yeah, yeah, black sites and all that sort of stuff.

Yes, yeah, yeah. So basically every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan, you've had lawyers and legal thinkers and members of the president's staff and the president themselves who've been pushing this idea that the president needs to have this latitude to do things that might not be specifically enumerated by the Constitution in order to protect the Constitution. Now, the obvious problem with that is presidents take an incredibly wide interpretation of what they need to do to protect the Constitution and protect the country. So for George W. Bush, it's putting non-combatant detainees in secret military

trials. Ronald Reagan, it's selling weapons to the Iranians in order to fund a bunch of mercenaries in Central America. Anything can be interpreted as, oh, this is really vital to, you know, to protect the country, protect the constitution. So even though this kind of looks like the Supreme Court bending to Trump's will on this issue, really this is something that's been building for a very long time. Yeah. I remember the discussion before the, I mean, a lot of people were shocked by the ruling, but I do remember all the discussions for a number of years about saying that there's certainly a long-standing tradition that the Justice Department simply won't investigate official acts and so on. So there was a kind of de facto rule there already.

Yes, yeah, yeah. No, they're absolutely word. Now, so, you know, the concerning elements of this obviously go far beyond Trump, even though, I mean, Trump raises plenty of concerns because of his constant avowals that he would do things that have otherwise been considered illegal to this point. It's more worrying than that, I think, just in general, the more and more power concentrated in the presidency. And I found it very telling.

When the Supreme Court was hearing arguments about this back in April, I think it was, Supreme Court justices kept raising these examples of, oh, wouldn't it have been terrible if presidents could have been prosecuted for these things, like Operation Mungoose, You know, the plots to kill Fidel Castro, internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. They all raised examples of Democratic presidents and saying, yeah, wouldn't it, you know, what about this?

Presidents could have been prosecuted for this. And my response is that would have been a good thing. It would have been a good thing if presidents had been afraid of being prosecuted for things like detaining American citizens on the basis of their race or attempting to kill foreign leaders through extrajudicial processes. So, yeah, I think that the cult of the presidency is a very worrying thing in the United States in general. I mean, I'm not...

And specifically, potentially with a second Trump administration. But it's the broader issue with the rule of law, isn't it? I mean, this is the whole thing. And it seems as though no inconsistency was detected between those two things by the Supreme Court. But certainly when... I studied law a million years ago. There was the notion that everybody, even the rulers,

needed to be bound by a code that was written out. And they weren't given carte blanche. That's the difference, the literal difference between a king who sits outside the law and determines what the law is and an elected government that actually, you know, exercises power according to a particular code. I don't want to get all nerdy and legalistic on this. But yeah, the whole idea of whether the president is a king or not,

Doesn't that go back to Alexander Hamilton, if I remember, you know, Hamilton the musical correctly? My main historical source for all this. Yeah, it's a really worrying thing. And certainly the founders of the US Constitution, they thought that basic norms around honour would prevent people from Trump actually holding office in the first place. Oh, how quaint. Yeah. But I think, you know, we are looking at a very, very old system. at this point, one that is under constant strain.

Part of the concentration of presidential power is to do with the fact that it's increasingly difficult to get anything done through the legislature anymore because of decades of gridlock. We've also seen it's really interesting to remember that when the United States was founded, the founders originally thought that Congress should be equally important

in United States foreign policy, as the executive is. The powers of foreign policy were divided between the executive and Congress. That's really something that ever since World War II, all of that has become far more concentrated

in the presidency because of both Democratic and Republican presidents, just moving more and more really important functions of foreign policy into the White House. Yeah, including even Obama, right? Like Obama very much all the drones and everything that was very much off the books and no Congress involvement.

Yeah, yeah. And basically every president complains that they can't get anything done on foreign policy. So Franklin Roosevelt said that trying to reform the Navy was like punching a mattress. You know, as soon as you remove your fist, it would just go back to its original form. Obama and his people referred to the foreign policy establishment as the blob. And very similar metaphor. Like you try to make a dent in it and just immediately goes back. to what it was. The deep state, David.

Trump's language for this was the deep state. What we've seen with Biden is that he surrounded himself in foreign policy terms with people who really just seem to be mouthpieces for him. Usually in just about any presidential administration, you have some kind of strong, publicly well-known figure who is actually, if not a counterweight to the president, at least another voice in what's going on. So like in Obama's administration. He had Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State.

George W. Bush had Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Chath, I mean, arguably, who were more important. Well, Condi Rice, who actually seemed to know what she's doing on certain occasions. Absolutely. You know, and one of the most sort of retrospectively celebrated recent presidents in foreign policy terms, who was George H.W. Bush, you know, he had Caspar Weinberger. Bill Clinton had Warren Christopher. You know, all, and Madeline Albright, these are all people that you can remember. Now, five minutes after the Biden administration ends, I don't know if anyone's going to remember Jake Sullivan.

I don't know if anybody's going to remember. Christ, I'm already blanking on his name, Secretary of Star Anthony Blinkett. I think, yeah, I think these are trivia questions, which now most Australians would struggle to answer. And just to circle back, David, very concerning. if you have simply mouthpieces for Biden when we've seen the kind of things that Biden thinks. I mean, I'm sure he's considered foreign policy positions are a bit more nuanced than what we heard on stage last week. But how sure can we be? Yeah, look, it comes back to this point that you just don't want any system, you know, any national political system, let alone some kind of global order, being dependent.

on the condition of one person. This is a perennial problem recently with American liberalism. How dependent liberals were on the health of Ruth Bader Ginsburg? How dependent they are now on the health of Joe Biden. Systems are not supposed to work like this. They're not supposed to be so dependent on single individuals, especially very old individuals with gigantic egos that are outpacing their abilities.

But that's what we're looking at at the moment. And of course, we would be looking at exactly the same thing with Trump if Trump were elected. This is not to say that Trump is a better alternative. Yeah, and just to briefly, I mean, we can go full circle really and look at how well the system for the PEP podcast worked when you were away. I think Richard Cook did one of them, our other good friend from Chaser history, but also then just has to talk about himself. What a good system that was.

Just very briefly, David, we've talked a lot about Joe Biden. We've talked a lot about the Supreme Court. Do we know anything more about what Donald Trump wants to do? I'm fascinated by the idea that he's been distancing himself from Project 2025. And Donald Trump doesn't get enough credit for this. He's often quite good at knowing what voters will consider toxic. He's moderated the language on abortion, I think, in the party. platform. And he's trying to pretend that the explicit blueprint being constructed for his second

term, something he's simply not across, has nothing to do with. What's that? I don't even know what that is, didn't he say? Yeah. Look, Trump is not complacent about his chances this time around because he can't afford to be complacent. At this point, it's not just about the presidency for him. It's, first of all, about his legal situation. You know, he's facing. He's face all kinds of legal jeopardy if he doesn't get elected. And second, just on a psychological level, for him, this is about redemption from 2020. It's catastrophic if he doesn't win this time around. So he is not taking any chances. He is taking these politically more palatable positions. But at the same time, it's quite difficult for him to say, yeah, we're not going to harshly

restrict abortion. We're not looking at turning back the clock on any other rights. I don't have anything to do with this 2025 crowd. When you have all of these increasingly kind of confident Yahoo's around Trump, saying this is what we're going to do when we win. So I think it is, you know, Trump's going to struggle against the record here in that he was the person who effectively, you know, who was responsible for overture. returning Roe versus Wade, it's hard to say what would happen during a Trump presidency because a lot of these issues that are being talked about now are things that Trump really has very little personal interest in.

Yeah. So it's very difficult to tell what would actually happen. Certainly he's trying to chart this sort of moderate path now and he might have learned a lesson possibly from the difference between 2016 and 2020. when surveys after the 2016 election showed that voters thought he was the moderate candidate. Surveys after 2020 did not show that voters thought he was the moderate candidate. Maybe he's trying to reestablish himself as the moderate again, or certainly more moderate than all of these people around him.

So, yeah, very, very hard to tell how people are going to respond to this. And look, it's entirely possible, I think, that Donald Trump's interest in the presidency at this point, simply doesn't go beyond, well, I want to actually win again to prove to everyone that I'm not a loser, and also I want to stay out of jail. And the rest of it, I'll figure out when I get there. Guy likes parades and having a button that brings Diet Coke. Beyond that, the rest is unclear. Well, David, I look forward to the six times longer version of this

with Chaz, you're back on the feed coming up this weekend. I am going, well, we'll be recording on Friday. So, yes, there'll be a fresh three hours of Pep waiting for you on Saturday morning. Thank you for delivering us the concise version and we'll wait to see if they managed to blast him out but at the moment it looks as though Grandpa's not going anywhere He's not

Thank you very much He's got the car keys in his hand And he's jingling them Subscribe to And putting on the way for the romance My goodness Make sure you subscribe to Pep with Chaz and Dr Dave

If you want the longer version of this We'll catch you in the feed next time And once again Gary is from Robb A part of the Icona Class Network Catch you tomorrow