The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Mike Murphy and Joe Machi

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

To impeach or Not to Impeach

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the table, on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Comedy Cellar Show here on Sirius XM Channel 99. My name is Noam Dwarman. I'm the owner of the Comedy Cellar. Today, we do not have Mr. Dan Natterman. But in his stead, I guess we have Mr. Joe Mackey. Thank you, Noam. One of the greatest comedians and smartest people in the world.

I actually do think you may be extremely, you know what your IQ is? I do. It's high, right? It is. Do you want to tell us what it is? I better not. I don't want to make anyone feel bad. You won't make me feel bad.

No. Why are you looking at me? Because you might feel bad. You can tell me. I'll tell you after the show. Is it upwards of 140? Ask. Wow, Joe.

That's a 160 answer there, so I think I... Are you as smart as Donald Trump? Anyway. Second, also we have Perrielle Ashenbrand is our producer and co-host. And our guest of honor today, Mike Murphy.

Mike Murphy has run campaigns for Republicans, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Jeb Bush. He's an NBC News analyst, a writer and producer in Hollywood, and co-host The Hacks. The Hacks on Tap. Sorry, joke. Whenever I say hacks, Joe cringes. And co-host The Hacks on Tap, Sorry, joke. Whenever I say hacks, Joe cringes. And co-host the Hacks on Tap podcast with David Axelrod.

Thank you for having me. This is great. Well, thank you for coming. This is fantastic. Can I tell you something before we get into the politics? So just this second, like I'm actually literally having a little like anxiety attack. Because just this second, somebody sent me an article. The title of the article is Dumb Doorman, even though I'm Dwarman.

And this is somebody trying to blow the lid off our podcast, which is something I've been worried about for a long time. Now, they quote me at length here, but I think it's okay. They quote me complaining about those historians that took down the 1619 Project a few weeks ago. And me talking about that, me talking about my daughter coming home. My daughter's mixed race. My daughter coming home and asking Daddy. My daughter came home and said, Daddy, you're white.

You treat people badly and I, she was first grade, I objected to that and I guess that makes me racist adjacent for even talking about that but it's so long I didn't even read the whole thing Jesus Christ, look at that can I see that, you send that to me?

yeah I'll send it to you afterwards so we have to really, really rethink this podcast. Anyway, because that's all I need is to get taken down for something stupid that I say. This is a subject we could talk about forever. But I actually think, and maybe I'll start here before we get into the other stuff. I think this is the great issue of our time. More than any other political issue, more than any national security issue, we're losing our ability to speak freely.

And the mob is set up to, to use the word, cancel us, but to punish us in a way that no court ever could, just for saying something that is not the acceptable thing to say of the day. Do you worry about that stuff? I do. I do. It's one of these things where the motive for it has high moral authority, but that doesn't mean a dictatorship where there is no speech. There's got to be equilibrium to it,

and it feels like the pressure is to overshoot. I'm a big Mark Lilla fan. I don't know if you've read it. You ought to have mine. He's at Columbia. Tenured professor, so he's still there, but he wrote The Once and Future Liberal, I think two years ago, a year ago, which is kind of an attack on identity politics, and it's a lot about the environment on campuses where now there are no arguments often, there's

a power statement, speaking as a refrigerator, you know nothing about vegetables, so therefore you can't talk, and how that corrosive thing has started to take over the academy and intellectual discourse, and it's wrong. You know, we have to be respectful of each other. There are norms. But this idea that because of my gene code I have to shut the hell up all the time is, you know, ridiculous. And it's counter to the values that built the country.

Now, we've gone way over and i i'm a right-wing republican but i uh i give our president credit for some of this the civility that used to kind of glue everything together is being torn apart and that is a problem because it creates an attitude or an environment where people can err on all sides and then it just becomes tribal warfare which is the the whole idea of America is not to have that. But it does also predate him because some of the reason he was elected, I think, was people objecting to this straightjacket of political correctness. What do you think, Joe?

Because you're a comedian. You suffer from this, especially with your high IQ. You're liable to say something and get yourself in trouble. Yeah, I'm actually, a lot of my new act is kind of trying to have fun with this by raising the tension and the lowering it about this stuff. But yeah, the melting pot, even suggesting that it's a good thing is now considered racist. And even the term white supremacist is thrown around so commonly now that it almost has no meaning. Even what we saw in Jersey City just a couple of nights ago where people who belong

to a group called the Black Israelites attacked a Jewish grocery store. And what happened a few months back with the Covington kids is there were members of that group shouting racist stuff at these kids at a pro-life march in Washington, D.C., and the kids really handled it pretty well. But the media, and social media especially, ran with the narrative that these kids were the problem. And when we found out that wasn't true, instead of focusing a light on this other group, we just ignored it because that didn't fit the narrative.

And I think that's what you see. It's like some racism is acceptable depending on who's doing it. There's identity politics in what's acceptable racism. But also they put landmines around the most interesting issues to talk about, whether it's, when I say most interesting, I mean I'm saying the things that we ought to be talking about the most, whether it's racism, whether it's just a sexuality and sexism, I mean, you name it. They set it up so one side is all can say whatever they want, including attacking you or attacking me for the fact that it came out of a white skin. And the other side, if you're struggling.

There's so many other ways to attack, you know, that's the thing that makes it illegitimate. Gnome doorman, that's a good one. I mean, I always say that, but I used to think this even as a kid, that you should be able to read the arguments on the page and you shouldn't even have to know the color. It shouldn't matter to you who said it. But you have Nicole Hannah-Jones.

I always want to say Nicole Hannah-Smith because it's Nicole Smith. Hannah Nicole Smith. Nicole Hannah-Jones, who when she was criticized by these historians, she said, well, what do you expect from white people? And this is New York Times. And that's okay.

I'm going to sound like the old Cold Warrior I am, but that's and that's okay. Well, that's it's you know, I'm gonna sound like the old Cold Warrior I am but that's an old old Communist trick basically to say your economic or whatever background makes you incapable of knowing truth You're inherently biased and the problem with this it's all a power dynamic We go from a fair argument where facts count into this thing Well, it's my tribe versus your tribe and my tribe has higher moral standing because of the past, so therefore you're automatically wrong. Therefore, I'm right, you're evil.

Right. And if you're evil, I can do anything to stop you. That's right. So there's no argument anymore. It's just a power deal. Well, that might be a good entree into the Donald Trump stuff. Because I think if you're evil, I think I can stop you. Might be behind a lot of what's gone on.

I had said for a long time that I thought the explanation in the end would be analogous to the ticking time bomb scenario in torture. When you think there's a nuclear bomb in Times Square, you will torture. And you know that. Right. To find out the torture. And you know that. Right. To find out the information. If you do, there's a lot of evidence that you'll be looking in the wrong subway tunnel, but there will be no, in that situation, the government tends to try anything.

Yeah. And I think that if you think that the president is actually Vladimir Putin, if you think the president is now a Russian asset, the rule book is not sufficient for that scenario. And therefore, you feel perfectly righteous about bending the rules in any way that you can in order to address it. And that's why I didn't think,

and you know I said this, I didn't think it was about deep state political bias. I think it was patriotism. And I told you right when I met you that I think a good analogy is that police usually plant evidence on people they think are guilty. But where they go wrong

is that the reason they think they're guilty is easy to believe they're guilty because they're black. And I think that's what happened with Trump and all this FISA stuff, which I think is very serious. But what's your read on that? Well, the FISA process we now know, I mean, this thing,

whenever you put the electron microscope on something, you generally find trouble. And the FISA process, it's kind of a benefit. We've taken a hard look at it, and it's screwed up. They're going to have to reform it. So I will, and I'm, you know, rabidly anti-Trump. I've hated him since 93. I don't know where all the Johnny come lately came from, but...

Tell a little bit, why did you hate him in 93? Well, I work for, you know, I'm a political consultant in my, at least my former life. I worked for a lot of candidates and I was a consultant for Christine Todd Whitman for two terms, ran the campaign, governor of New Jersey. Trump was in Atlantic City, wanted like a, you know, a parkway exit to his, he was Trump. So you can imagine the high-toned discourse. So I disliked him from his behavior back then. But the point on the FISA thing and all that is you can find, and I agree with your cop analogy,

you can find a deal where somebody is on other dimensions and contacts guilty as hell, but on the speeding ticket you don't quite have them. But there's a tendency to have, well, confirmation, but, you know, the guy's an asshole, so guess what? Put the cuffs on him close enough, you know, we're going to get rid of him. And there is a little of that momentum to all this. The problem is, from my point of view, they are erring on the side of a bad guy having the weight of government against him,

which is a mistake I can kind of half-live with. I would like it to be perfect. I think Trump might have an argument here. He's kind of like, on the way to the mass murder, yes, he ran a red light, but it was really yellow. Maybe he's okay. But I still don't have a lot of sympathy for him. I thought today opened up FISA a little bit.

There are problems. It was pretty clear. But the IG process is important. The problems, it's actually much more serious than that. It was pretty clear. But the IG process is important. When you say problems, it's actually much more serious than that. It's fixable, though. The whole thing in a democracy where the balance between wiretapping and who you

investigate and who you don't is tricky. Because the more freedom you have, the more opportunity for terror and everything. You turn into Singapore, fine. You really have the terrorist thing under pretty good control, but you spit, next thing you know you're getting whipped. So, you know, that is a

living, breathing thing where that line is, and we now know FISA's pretty screwed up. So it's definitely fixable. I think so, without perfection, but it can be improved, it has to be. But I just mean that the actual stuff that went on was not minor violations of rights and of

kind of oaths. This was the most serious, like people who do this sort of thing. I always thought that a prosecutor who lies about a defendant or doesn't turn over exculpatory evidence, this is like one of the, I don't know if it's the lowest or highest rungs of Dante's Inferno.

They're right there with like pedophile priests. And you hear these stories about the guy who put somebody in jail for murder and he knew he had the exculpatory information. It takes a special kind of person to do that. And when you have people forging emails and hiding information and renewing warrants, and it seems like Comey did this, renewing warrants after finding out that the guy was known to be unreliable. You know, the truth is, I don't know.

I've spent very little time today looking at this. You know, I'm obsessed with the Ukraine thing. The Mueller report kind of fizzled out on all this. So now we're investigating the investigation of the investigation. So let's finish the IG and then go on to Ukraine. Yeah. But anyway, so I just think it's quite serious. But I do want to ask for one thought experiment because I think this is –

I've never approached this from the partisan point of view. I try to approach it from what's best for the country and what kind of damage is it doing to the country. And I think that the two years that we went through where people like Perrielle and other high IQ – no, people like Periel and other high IQ individuals, people like Periel. I do actually have a very high IQ. I was tested.

All right. People like Periel really believed that the president was a Russian asset. And people like Rachel Maddow are saying this, that this is tremendously damaging to the country. So my question is, if not for this deal dossier, would there have been a Mueller report? Would there have been a special counsel? Probably not. Probably not. And is there any brighter side? Like, is there anything good that came out of that two years? Like, any silver linings to that cloud? Well, from my point of view, what we did learn is Trump's as bad as I

think he is, just in behavior. Not direct law-breaking in the Mueller thing, but behaving in a way where his self-interest was put way ahead of the national interest. It was all about survival. Oh, if I was in a presidential campaign, and people representing a foreign government came to me with a file, first called me to the FBI. I think any grown-up campaign for president would do that.

Because when you work in a presidential campaign, you're not doing a Baltimore ward healer's race. You understand the importance of it. And there are certain rules you play by to respect the institution of the presidency, and that meant nothing to Trump. Well, this is interesting to me, because you worked with John McCain. I did, in 2000. And he seems like the type of guy who would have had no part of that. Well, he was involved in the Steele thing.

You know, it came to him and he moved it on. No, I mean, if he was taking that, if he got that call for a meeting at Trump Tower, McCain would have gone to the FBI. In a New York minute. Yeah. I actually would have taken the meeting. Well, that's why you're in the nightclub business and not running for president, you know. Because I feel like I have the same rights as any journalist who would definitely have taken. No journalist would have gone to the FBI.

And then depending on what I got in the meeting, I would have decided to go to the FBI or decided to do whatever. But do you think that my feeling is that, like, Bill Clinton would have been smart enough not to take the meeting, but he certainly would have had Sid Blumenthal take the meeting. I don't think it would have gone to the FBI. I think Sid would have taken the meeting and then leaked it and not told anybody to get headlines about Sid Blumenthal, and then the Clintons would have dropped him like a stone. But it's hypothetical.

Napoleon had nuclear subs. We'd all be speaking French. I mean, you're talking about it all bleeds together, but all bleeds together, but like, you know, abuse of power. Well, what was the Mark Rich part? Like, you know. Well, no, no, look, this is what my other conservative friends say. Hey, you anti-Trump idiot. The Clintons were just as bad.

No, I don't think they're just as bad. Well, okay, Mussolini was bad. Okay, but that doesn't make Stalin good, you know, even if they were enemies. So you've got to judge Trump on Trump. I was a very harsh Clinton critic. You know, I if they were enemies. So you've got to judge Trump on Trump. I was a very harsh Clinton critic. You know, I'm no fan. I know it's crazy. I actually think it's okay to take that meeting.

And the thing is that if they had, in that meeting, turned over, like, a canceled check to Hillary Clinton that was corrupt, nobody could say, well, I wish we hadn't gotten that meeting. And that could dry up if you go to the FBI. The culture of, at least until now, had been of people, and I've worked on, I think, five Republican presidential campaigns. The culture is that at the presidential level, you're taking custody of an institution in some ways.

And so if a bunch of foreigners show up trying to put spin on the election or give one side a weapon, you have a visceral reaction to that. And the first reaction is not, I can see a percentage for me here, it's fuck them. And that's the way it used to be. I grew up in the Jim Baker Republican Party. We're squeezing Russians when we did every day. Now, because we've got a guy who's originally a wheeler dealer from real estate where everything's transactional, he's got cataracts on that kind of stuff. And what worries me is he's going to teach the Democrats to follow their own worst instincts, which are pretty bad, and now we're in some world of equivalence. For how long in history were we operating on that better level?

We know Lyndon Johnson was having the CIA and the FBI do his spying. Oh, Bobby Kennedy, king of wiretaps. Bobby Kennedy. Ted Kennedy went to meet with not Gorbachev, who was the other Russian dictator for a short while? Andropov, I think. To make some deal about

Reagan. There's one thing about diplomacy. We've got to deal with them. It's another thing to get campaign help. No, this was political. You don't know that story? I'll send it to you. It was in Forbes magazine where he met and he said, listen, I'll push for this.

If you do this, it'll help me beat Reagan or something like that. You know, there's always been this kind of shady stuff. And then, yeah, I think that George Bush was a pretty honorable guy. I think Obama was a pretty honorable guy. Yeah, foreigners is a line. I mean, there's always been using the administrative resources. I've worked in the former Soviet Union. That's their line for it. We were

doing a campaign once in Republican Georgia. We introduced a negative campaign ad to the Republic of Georgia. Luckily, nobody got killed. You know, the Americans show up and we take it right to hell. But we were making progress in one area 10 days before the election. They turned off the power to 2 million people so their TVs wouldn't work for 10 days. Oh, my God.

I'd never seen that fastball. That was the administrative resource. Well, in our politics, it's not uncommon in October the new bridge comes through. You're going to see Trump doing a lot of this next year. Things the government does to help one side look good. But that's domestic. It's not directly engaged with foreigners like that. So let me counter with the talking point that I think has some logical weight,

which is that the Steele dossier was, after all, Hillary hiring somebody to go to get information from foreigners, including people active within the Kremlin. Yeah, I think that's the stretch. Hillary hired some former Wall Street Journal reporters who were legit people, who talked to a legit former, you know, MI6 operative to, you know. Because he had manned the Russia desk. Yeah, yeah. Basically, he knew a lot of drunk Russian colonels who were ready to talk,

one of whom's been killed by Putin since then, by the way, and a GRU general. You know, it's a rough game over there. Remember, they got two CIS that hate each other and aren't afraid of killing each other. And so there's a line of oppo research, like a candidate goes on a foreign trip, takes foreign donations. That's all legit. But it's when government agents are moving information that could be linked to a cyber attack where they were hacking. I'm talking about the Trump Tower meeting.

Yeah. That wasn't any government agent. They were running for office. Look, to me, it's like, okay, well, if you hire somebody to go talk to the drunk colonel, that's okay. But if the drunk colonel just sends you an email and wants to tell you something, now you've crossed some line. And to me, I think it's the hiring. Like Donald Trump, was it Donald Trump Jr.? Donald Trump Jr., from what we know, just got this email and says,

sure, if it's what you say, I love it. Yeah, but Russian sources have dirt on our opponent. Let's talk to him. From the inner circle of the campaign. That is a step that campaigns tilt Trump. But isn't that what Steele was hired to find out, the same type of stuff? No, I think Steel, what people were looking for. I'm the idiot who ran the Jeb Bush super PAC.

I spent $100 million on the unstoppable Jeb Bush campaign. Yeah, I want to talk to you about a dishwasher job later. I'm looking for work now. The minimum wage went up recently, so. Good. And so I understand the murky argument, but official government action is a little different than sniffing around offshore money that might be coming to Trump, which is why Kremlin. And I just can't see the difference. I just, I don't know. I'll tell you my one story about the Steele dossier, a little bit redacted.

Before any of it came public, I was, and I'm going to protect the hopefully innocent here, a retired general level military intelligence guy walked up to me in an elevator who I knew, was very it served in Moscow, very much in the Russian thing, and came up to me and handed me a piece of paper that I opened up, and it was, have you heard about it was half the steel stuff, months before steel

a lot of stuff was rattling around the intelligence community this is a super legit guy up to his neck in Russian sources, retired generals and stuff like that. So I don't know. I don't know. It does not surprise me that a guy like Trump, who has a lot of trouble borrowing any money in the U.S., would not have some money that the oligarch world has loaned him because they use those oligarchs,

the Kremlin does, as part of their foreign policy. It's a pretty good way. Yeah, but he won't disclose any of that. So, look, we don't know. But I think it would be okay for Hillary to take the meeting to find out someone who did know. Okay, well, you know, we disagree on that one. And any Russians who are listening, no one is looking for dirt on the Gotham Club. So get over here and pass the envelope.

We're open for business. I think that's what I think about. So, I don't know, Joe, do you have any comment on all that you want to get to? Right all the way back to the beginning of the FISA debate, I think that Trump's going allowed people to spy at the highest levels of America, a presidential candidate, with basically a fake court. Because you can't have a court without two sides. It's basically a Harlem Globetrotter game of a court. It's not a real basketball game.

And the only reason we even found out about all these abuses is because it was at such a high level. But this could be happening all the time, and we wouldn't know about it. And a lot of those FISA court judges, it's a rubber stamp for whatever the government wants. And we had this system that worked until 1978 when we had to pass that law. For some reason, we made it that far without being allowed to spy on anyone we wanted. See, that's the issue there. The intelligence community has been this whipsaw.

We have the first Iraqi war. The CIA, they've been wrong before, a lot. We go rolling into Iraq, first time, open a few doors, and we're like, holy shit, he's closer to a nuke than anybody thought. All the intelligence estimates were wrong.

They go back and they recalibrate the dial, and the second time they see in a satellite a crumpled up piece of aluminum. Oh, my God, that's a trigger unit. Woo, woo, woo, woo. And then they, you know, he's got nukes. Now we get there and he doesn't. But the whole security apparatus, which is a bureaucracy of an inertia, likes to use its stuff.

And so the FISA thing, there was a lot of pressure because, God forbid, a bus bomb goes off in New York City. It's not a mistake that it's hard to drive a car by all those crowds near the Christmas tree right now. You know, we have a massive... Most American cities have uranium sniffers up on a building in the government because of a dirty bomb. There's a lot going on, and those guys use their tools

because they think if something gets by, it's on us. And pushing back on that, which was a lot easier before the modern Internet communication, terrorism, all the things we have now, is hard. It's hard to know where to land. So we can see the Pfizer thing's broken now. There will be a better fix, and you're right, because it happened at the highest level. That's scary a little bit that some bureaucrats can say, hey, on some cause, let's take a listen. On the other hand, Trump is, in my view, an incredibly unsympathetic hero on that cause,

but you can make the argument. Impeachment. Yeah. I get the feeling you want him impeached and removed. Well, look, I think the Ukrainian thing to me is pretty cut and simple. I think he's probably going to lose the election unless they nominate a socialist wackadoodle, which is a – Which is every candidate but Biden. Well, you know, I like Michael Bennett.

He's probably going to drop out in an hour because he's got no money. Mayor Pete. I like Mayor Pete. Yeah, I think – I know him, and we add your two genius IQs together, and we're getting in the Mayor Pete level. Ideologically, he's a little left to me, so I can argue the candidates. But if it's Warren or somebody like that that Trump can work with to take the election from firing him, look at that.

It's a little bit risky. But impeachment, the question is, did he put his own interest way ahead of the country's? Yeah, not supposed to do that. And he did obstruct too. So if I were a Republican Senator, it'd be my last day in office because some guy in a three-corner hat would beat me in the primary the next day. Fox News would explode, but I'd vote to impeach. Joe, I wouldn't, but for, I mean, you want to go first? I wouldn't either just because in every hearing there was no direct evidence. It was, I heard this and we all knew, we all knew this, and we're getting the third-person view of someone else's conjecture.

And you couldn't prove anything in a court a lot like that. So to me it's a whole bunch of people who, for the most part, there's, I mean, there's some people who are probably on Trump's side on this. But for the most part, it seems like nothing. They have got no evidence of anything. Wait, can I ask a question, though? What's the verdict here of, so you know this guy has killed three people, but you don't have any direct evidence of a crime, so it's okay to get him on the traffic light and it's okay to plant some evidence on him because you know that he's murdered other people?

No, no, it's never okay to subvert the law, which is what Trump did, which is why I want to impeach him. So here's the problem, the criminal standard and the impeachment standard are not the same thing. The impeachment standard, so yes, question is, would a reasonable person conclude from a whole bunch of people who are in the decision-making loop that the president made it pretty clear to the president of Ukraine, who was very vulnerable, he's got Russian tanks in his territory,

desperate for anti-tank missiles, and in that environment where they held it up, something the Senate passed, by the way, not really even Trump's power to hold up. That's a whole other issue in exchange for what was clearly expressed, at least to the people in the administration who Trump put in charge of dealing with Ukraine, to shake this guy down to create an investigation on Biden for domestic politics. Now, it's true, there's no handwritten receipt.

Dear Ukrainian president, no fucking missiles without an investigation. But everybody who was empowered on behalf of the government, our tax money, our secret badges to deal with the Ukrainians was in, and they all say they were in, on this pressure campaign driven by the president. So to me, I think they got them. So let me run down the things that come to mind when I'm trying to decide how I feel about this. First thing that comes to mind is, is the country better? Will the country be better off for it? I worry, with an election 10 or 11 months away,

that given everything that Joe said, which is true, carries less weight with you, but he's not spinning. It's true. No, if it were a criminal court, Trump would probably walk, probably. So it's dangerous to create a political martyr out of a figure as cult-like as Donald Trump. So that's the first thing that worries me. Do we really think the day after he's impeached, we're going to have a brighter political future? No, I think that he can do a lot of permanent damage to the political.

A lot of people are going to say they took him down. Yeah. They took him down. I agree. The best argument against impeachment is paying for the country, and everybody is a juror. We got an election in 10, 12 months, whatever. And that is both the best political spin,

and it is a legitimate argument on the institutions. The problem is Trump's already put a beating on him. There's a point where you have to draw the line on rule of law. That's the counter. Well, but he didn't break the law. Well, he... They didn't even charge him with breaking the law. Well, the Southern District of New York may have their own ideas later, but for the time being...

No, it's about the impeachment hearing. Yeah. The articles of impeachment... But again, it's not really about... it's not the break the law standard. It's did he behave in a way to put himself in front of the national interest. The American presidency is held together not by a rule book. On Thursday, you can't call the Ukrainians. It's held together by this idea.

See, the founding fathers thought that we, other than maybe payola from foreign powers, we wouldn't have a president who behaved dishonorably. So they didn't build an honor... Nixon had shame. Trump's remarkable thing is there's no shame. You can't shame him out of office. I feel like this is like a really important point, too, that

this guy is just like, he's not accountable for anything to anyone. He doesn't care. He's accountable to the voters in 11 months. He doesn't give a shit, though. He says whatever he wants. He doesn't give a shit, though. I mean, I don't think he does. He'll say anything.

The actions ought to have a consequence at this level because when you start lowering the standard of behavior, you ruin the institution. I was against impeachment on the Mueller thing, but this Ukraine thing to me, and I'm a foreign policy nerd, so I care about this stuff. It really has debased the currency of the presidency. So, you know, look, he's not going to be impeached, by the way.

What's going to happen is the Dems are going to pass impeachment. And the Republicans, maybe three or four will vote, which will be the Democrats will be able to say a majority in the Senate. But there's no way they're going to get 20 of those guys. The new Republican Party, we used to have what we called the Jack Frost elephant. That was the logo, that 70s elephant. It now ought to be just a white guy duct-taped in a chair looking terrified. Because most of these senators, they hate him. They hate his ass.

Mitch McConnell, you turned out the lights and Mitch was alone, Trump for an hour, there'd be an ax murder. Yeah. But they know. I'll tell you what a senator told me. I've worked for a lot of these guys. I was barking like a mad dog on, you know, NBC or whatever, and the phone rings, you know, it's foghorn and leghorn,

and the senator says, you know, I'd love to do that. I was in the Oval the other day with this guy, and he can't work the TV remote. You know, they had to bring in the military aid. I was afraid he'd reach for the football and push the wrong damn button. He's unfit. But I go back to my state and I say, this guy's an idiot, blah, blah, blah, unfit, blah, blah, blah. My wife will speak to me again, but I will have a guy in a three-cornered hat and an aluminum Uncle Sam suit running against me in the primary. He'll be all over Fox News. I'll be getting killed.

And Trump won't change at all. Nothing will change. I'm dead. And all the little legislation I passed that nobody cares about that saved the Velcro industry or whatever I've got in my state, none of that will happen anymore. And I always say, great, what if 10 of you do it? And then they always say, you're right. Call me when you have the first three. And so, you know, the Republican primary voters, it is a democracy, are with Trump.

Two-thirds of them are. And that means the politics don't change. Who doesn't favor Clinton on impeachment? I would say that it's not because they love Trump so much. It's because they hate the left. Oh, yeah. I call it the Boston Red Sox thing. Let's say you're a Red Sox fan. Here in New York, we would use them as our

petri dish. And your pitcher pitches a no-hitter the night before and the next morning punches out a nun, gets drunk, pisses all over the street, and drives a car into a school bus. What you're going to say is, guy's kind of an asshole, but I'm not a Yankees fan. I'm not putting on the blue cap. That's right.

That's exactly right. And here we are. Well, tribal is part of it. I like to think that I'm not tribal. No, you're a contrarian. I've listened to this enough that you take, you know, you take the no side on almost anything. You know, it's Juan Peron. Okay, come on. There are two sides to every story. I said to a famous law professor one time, I don't want to say her name, and we were talking about bias. This story is going to fall flat, but we were talking about bias, and I said, listen, everybody's biased. Bush versus Gore, the Supreme Court case, split five to four along party lines

with no conceivable liberal conservative issue to separate them, and I'm sure none of them thought they were biased. And she said, yes, but somebody still has to be right yeah yeah and and so yeah we may you could hate the left because you're biased or because you're tribal or you could hate the left because you're right you know like that they are actually things to detest trump has two kinds of voters yeah he has conservatives who hate the left and he's got people who in a time when real wages have not gone up until very recently in the country, what you actually earn, are thinking, I'm watching Wall Street. And those guys, when it works out, they get millions. When it doesn't work out, we bail them out. And I'm sitting here and I'm being told because I'm an old white guy I have to shut the hell up on every topic.

And I see the fancy people all kind of snarling at me. I'm sitting here, and I'm being told because I'm an old white guy, I have to shut the hell up on every topic. And I see the fancy people all kind of snarling at me. I'm uncool. So guess what? I'm not going to burn anything down. I'm going to vote for a guy to burn everything down. Right. And that's what happened. If you look at Trump's vote, he did worse than Romney in most suburbs.

But there were some counties in my hometown of Detroit, north of there, Macomb, other places, where he did better than Reagan. He blew the roof off of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Luzerne County. He won by more than twice what Reagan did at his peak in that county. That's a county Obama ran narrowly when he ran. So in a few places, for voters like that who felt totally disconnected, Trump was a grievance candidate. You saw me fire Gilbert Gottfried on TV.

I'm a can-do guy. I'm going to go shake the thing up and drain the swamp. And they said, sign me up. And it worked. We were all wrong on election night. It worked. So I want to get into impeachment. So let me make the devil's advocate argument why they shouldn't impeach him on the merits.

You should do a special episode called Conventional Wisdom where you have to make the argument that's not the devil's argument. Well, the thing about it is you probably have the experience. When you do that kind of thing, very often you convince yourself that you're right. Like in law school, you're assigned to take one side or the other side, and then you kind of lose perspective. Well, it's fun to be the devil's advocate because it's fun to be the devil, period. It's fun to be the devil's advocate and also that when there's a lot of momentum on one side, they always overshoot. They always do. Everybody spins.

So, first of all, Charles Black, I recommend at home. Charles Black is considered to be the leading impeachment expert. Neil Kachal says he's the most important expert. Sam Koppelman, who wrote that book with him, he's the one who referred me to it. And Kachal says that, I mean, Charles Black says that while impeachment doesn't have to be a crime, the further you get away from a crime, the less certain you can be that this is just not a, I'm paraphrasing, this is just not a political decision. And so people like Kachyal have made the argument, well, you know, if a president were to nuke Canada because he doesn't like hockey,

of course you could impeach him. So then once you've established that, then they reach all the way down to this phone call and say, well, now we can impeach for this abuse of power. I think abuse of power is a totally nebulous term. And if Congress thinks this is an abuse, they could outlaw it. I don't know if they could. And then if he does it again, they could impeach him. But I think that it's very dangerous to set the bar this low on this phone call where nothing happened and call that an abuse of power. See, I think in the policy of which the phone call was a cornerstone, something did happen.

I think something happened, too. So let me ask you this. And then there's a technical aspect, which maybe this is not going to be convincing. But, well, here's the question. The Hunter Biden thing. That's clearly dirty. You agree with that right dirty is a tricky phrase because you can take it to infinity and then say that's a crime well

no not a crime i don't think it's a crime i i think it's like i think it's like i think he was a mediocre investment banker who got european clients because he had a famous father i don't believe joe knew and i don't't believe Joe been any influence for him, but he traded like Billy Carter opening a beer line based on the family name. Not uncommon with leading politicians. This is what I think. I think he was like Frankie Pentangeli's brother showing up at the hearing in Godfather 2. That was the intention.

It's over. Okay, Joe, you beat Burisma. And I beat Hunter Biden. Why are you hiring me? I don't speak Ukrainian. I don't know anything about gas. Why are you hiring me? We're looking for an outsider who doesn't know anything about our business. In reality, what would be the reason that you would hire me?

You're Joe Biden's son. Okay, now I'm Hunter Biden. Now I'm Hunter Biden. What am I communicating by taking the job? This, I think, is a key question. I think I'm communicating, yeah, I'll be able to deliver my debt. Now, maybe I'm not going to do it, but I don't see, there's no way I don't know that that's why you're hiring me. And if I'm going to take your money, I have to be implying

to you you're going to get something for your money. Now I'm Joe Biden, and I know that this has gone on, and I play golf with the board members. Yeah, let's do it again, and I'm Burisma. Okay, you go ahead. Because I've worked in a lot of places. I worked for an oligarch once, and lived to tell about it. You're going to do better than I did.

Yeah, it's first, you want hooker? That's generally how oligarch conversations open up. Mine was followed by, I said than I did. First, you want hooker? That's generally how oligarch conversations open up. Mine was followed by, I said, no thank you. Oh, you want boy? No, no, I don't want that either. Okay, so you are Hunter Biden, big American. I am oligarch.

I am powerful and rich, but I get no respect. You are Ben Studio 54, you big deal Biden's son. I have enemies. Here, enemies kill me. I want them to know I have friends with big American. Nobody fuck with me. Here's some money. Show up. Wear suit. Well, this is interesting. So you're saying it's coincidence, and I don't, I sound like I'm being sarcastic, but I'm not, that it's coincidence that Biden was the guy in charge of Ukraine policy. Yeah, I don't believe quid pro quo.

I've been around that way, and I can't guarantee this was it. But their internal politics are fierce. I've seen this in Latin America. I've seen it in the former Soviet Union, where they want to hire a flashy American, so in their internal politics they look more wired. And their rivals say, this guy's got connections. Now, they assume the worst, because their culture is all payola, but it doesn't mean there's payola.

It's like a trophy wife thing. So it never even occurred to me that they might have hired Biden without regard to the fact that Joe Biden was now in charge of Ukraine policy, just like when he was doing China. Most of those oligarchs don't really want policy. They want respect. I had an oligarchs don't really want policy, they want respect. I had an oligarch come to me, I had a crazy experience. We drive up to this Disney World castle in the middle of the place

that he'd taken over. This guy, along with Bear Barazovsky, his partner, had basically stolen the General Motors of Russia. They had a very interesting way to do it. They didn't pay any bills, they kept selling cars. For two years, they just pocketed everything. And they were in business with Putin. Then it's a fight.

Anyway, so we go to see the guy, metal detectors, Spetsnaz guards, scary stuff. And it was clearly all about I want to be respectable. The ambassador was in another meeting with him. He said, I really want to see New York City. And the ambassador said, well, you know, the problem is

we'd pick you up at the airport. There's an Interpol warrant on your pal. But I am for democracy. I clean up, you know. And it was, he wanted classy American consultant. He was backing the good guy campaign, probably secretly backing every campaign. But advertly, he was for the reformers who I was working for. But it was all about cleaning himself up so he'd get a visa and go see, you know, Empire State Building.

So don't underestimate their local politics, where having a flashy American around is helpful to them and their street cred with their guys. And the flashy American may not even meet their guys. So there's a trophy girlfriend aspect to this. Could be. Could totally be. You know, sometimes things are not as they appear, and sometimes there are these weird coincidences.

It's quite a coincidence. I do believe that Biden, and I don't believe Biden's inherently corrupt. I don't believe he talks to his son about this stuff. And they have a weird relationship because he's got a lot of dead kids and he's psychologically damaged about it, which is every time, you know, I understand that and I feel bad for him. Every time he gets a question about Hunter Biden, he kind of vibrates he's not

good at. He has to talk. I mean... Oh, they talk, but they don't talk about hey, dad, can you bend your Ukrainian policy and ruin your chances of being president because I need a quick 50 grand this month. I don't believe that. I can't believe, they talk, but they don't talk about, hey, Dad, can you bend your Ukrainian policy and ruin your chances of being president because I need a quick 50 grand this month. No, but I can't believe, especially since we know it did come up in the Obama administration, I can't believe at some point Joe Biden didn't say to his son,

what the fuck are you doing? This is making me look bad. Yeah. Well, he should have. I can't believe that he didn't. But instead of doing that, we know he went to play golf with these guys. If she were on the other foot, if it was one of Trump's kids doing the exact same thing.

Of course. You can infer whatever you want, even third person. Right. I mean, there wasn't even someone with first person information on this testifying. So you could say whatever you want about him. But with Biden, well, we got to defend it. We got to look at the. Now, here's the next question.

Is this something that an American president has the right to look into? And before I answer, I'll say this. I think that half the country would say, yeah, we want to know what happened with this Hunter Biden thing. We think that is the national interest. Is it something the American president— Well, we have authorities domestically to investigate what foreign agents do if you represent a foreign government here we have investigated and prosecuted guys who like to payola overseas for contractors yeah you know trying to get an ace in the hole tanker yeah yeah you know i mean up against the french and airbus try to try to sell

an airline or up against them can i give you my ace in the hole yeah nobody's making this argument i'm the only one maybe it must be a reason i because I'm stupid, but I think this is a direct answer. Do you recall what Trump said to Zelensky when he said, I have a favor. I want you to look into this Hunter Biden, this Joe Biden thing, whatever he said. Verbatim, no. He said, I want to put you in touch with the attorney general. Which, now you can believe whatever you want to believe about the reality, but nobody's talked about it.

In other words, he didn't say, I'm going to put you in touch with Rudy. We'll have some rogue organization. He said, I'm going to put you in touch with the Attorney General. Presumably an above-board arrangement. Well, I think two flaws in that. One, that might have been the rhetoric, but he sent his personal lawyer over there to do all the deals, who was

not shy about kind of flashing the badge I'm Trump's man you know it was pretty clear and he had a good point I'm making yeah it's all right but he had it's a little soft cystic actually because he had all his proxies who were the people represent the president abroad on the plan you know you're never gonna get Trump on tape saying hey you give me this or that because I'm corrupt. And I'm Donald Trump. Everybody got that? I'm Donald Trump and I'm corrupt. It just doesn't work like that.

There are 18 people looking at the transcript every time a president talks. But you understand, you're now making an argument for impeachment, which is really based on, and you could be right. You're not going to be able to demonstrate it to the American people. You say, listen, you don't know how the world works. And this is, I know, been there a works, and I know what was going on there. So take my word for it, and we need to impeach him. But I don't think that's enough. You have to be able to show somebody dead to rights doing something that is overriding.

I think we got him. I mean, you're not going to move me on this. I think it was pretty obvious he had his whole team shake down a very vulnerable Ukrainian president, who's a comic, by the way, just to add a little Comcast queerness. I want to get him on here after. You can see the show on Netflix. Really? Yeah, it's a sitcom where a regular guy, a teacher, gets pissed off and runs for president.

He wins, and then he's got all his corrupt family to deal with. Anyway, I think he clearly took aid they needed, aid the Senate passed, and he screwed with it in order to get a political investigation to have them help him as a proxy playing American politics. I think clear as day. I think that opportunistic is not the same thing as illegal, and I think that if, logically now, if I can say that this is something that an American president has the right to look into,

then as opportunistic as it might be, he's within his rights to do it. And I don't know if you can answer this question, but I know there's the concept out there of wagging the dog. Is that a real concept? I don't quite understand what the analogy is. The movie? No, the concept is that the presidents will do something militarily in order to benefit

themselves politically, right? They say that Clinton bombed Sudan. Well, okay, I get it. Clinton sends a cruise missile the week before the elections to crack down a little bit. Is that any different than what you're describing? You know, I guess it's... Except that people die? Well, no, it's not the moral loading.

It's the fact that they have a policy, they do something in that policy, and that might have a political benefit, and that's part of the calculation. I'd say the strong argument is the president doesn't send troops, because that would be unpopular and give his opponent or her opponent an advantage, and by denying that, the political considerations are part of the foreign policy decision. That's, I get it, they're grown-ups. Nixon to China, he was trying to, the second time, save his election. But taking the policy that the Senate voted unanimously to fund these weapons,

that was American policy, and subverting it because he wanted a political favor in American domestic politics, not how his action would play being judged by the electorate, but he wanted them to create a news story to screw his opponent. That's a big step in a direction. That's the line that was crossed. Do you think the aide was actually ever in jeopardy or he was just bluffing, trying to squeeze something out of the deal? You know, knowing how Trump operates, we can't know. But he was, my guess is he was bluffing to get what he wants. Does that matter to the case?

Yeah, I think it does. Because as far as the Ukrainians are concerned, it's the lifeblood, and they're cutting it off. And so, you know, if you're the Ukrainian president, you know, you can't, well, he's only bluffing, let's let the Russians take 10 more kilometers. You know, it's life and death for them. Because what's his name, Trump's chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, is that his name? Mulvaney, yeah.

He made it in one of those interviews. He said, well, we knew by September, whatever it is, we were going to have to release it no matter what because that was the day the Congressional thing. I walked into a bank the other day. I held a gun at the teller's head. She started to sob and cry. And then I left because the cops were coming. But I was just kidding.

It had the same effect. Right. But I don't know. It just seems like removing a president on something. Well, again, it's not going to happen because it's unlikely the Republicans will take the plea for doing it, so we're taking it to the jurors in the election. Okay. It's going to be weird, by the way, because they have to sit as a jury.

The senators do. And a couple of them are going to be dying to be in Iowa for the caucus, which is at the end of February. They're going to be glued to their seat. And so I think they're literally going to be holding up iPads with like thought bubbles trying to find a camera, because these highly caffeinated, you know, the Klobuchar's and the Warren's

are going to be just gnawing the chains to get back to Iowa, because Biden and Buttigieg will be running wild there all by themselves. Will Biden have to testify? to Iowa because Biden and Buttigieg will be running wild there all by themselves. Will Biden have to testify? Will they call Biden? You know, so here's kind of the behind the scenes, best guess on the theater of this. One of the problems, what I think Mitch and the Republicans would like to do to wiggle out of this thing for their own domestic political reasons is pass a censure bill, which is like,

you were very bad, you shouldn't have done it, but it's not impeachment, shame on you, bad dog. Pass that so you can go back home and say, hey, we censored the guy, now you voters are the jury, you figure it out. Pretty good political move to let the steam out. Trump, however, being Trump, is like, no, no, no, no, no, I want you to call Sean Hannity, I want you to call Hunter Biden, I want you to say the Democrats ought to all resign for having the, you know, timidity to attack me, me, the Sun guy.

Bill Clinton's lover is to the front row of the debate. Trump will not play ball and he won't give the Senators any room to wiggle and move to their own interests, which is no reason they all hate him. So, God knows who they're trying to call and it'll be interesting. Not Bill Clinton's lovers, Bill Clinton's victims.

But, yeah, I think look, I think they're going to I don't know if he'll have to appear, I don't know what the law is, but I think if Joe Biden were forced to take the stand, poor guy, he's not that on top of it. He's going to look bad. I think he's pretty sharp. The problem is he has a

thing about the Hunter thing. He has not in normal political rules, he could have used this to go on offense, which is, all right, Trump, you wanted a political hit job on me, picking on my kid, let's talk about your two idiots, the one who was selling American passports for cash. Let's on, the general election's on,

let's have it now, you and me. And the party would have started falling in behind him, because, oh Christ, he's on the kill. Instead, he rolled up in a ball and didn't handle it well, which leads to the doubts of can he perform as a candidate. I've been short Biden for a year. I don't think he's going to get nominated. He's having a little comeback now, we'll see. But this Hunter thing, for I think understandable reasons, is a thing with him, and he's never been able to get on the go on. So if he has to talk about Hunter, my guess is it won't be particularly good.

Yeah, I don't think he could answer the questions I put to you. Why did they hire your son? Doesn't it mean that he was going to deliver? Didn't you know that? Why didn't you tell him not to do it? Yeah, but he's got an answer to that, which I believe is the truth. What's the answer? They hired my son because he's an investment banker and they probably liked him because

he has my last name, but we've never talked about any of this and I've never made a single policy decision to benefit anybody my son has hired. I get the appearance is bad, but the reality is no. Yeah, but why didn't you tell him not to do it? In the White House, we know that this was discussed. In the impeachment hearings, the people who were blasting Trump said, no, that looked bad. We were worried about the conflict of interest there. The optics are bad, but the optics don't always mean guilt. I mean... Knowing all this, why did you play golf with these people? I play golf with everybody. No, but when you

know... No, no, it's all optics. I see the point. Bad optics. I don't see corruption. And I'm not even a Biden fan. It's not optics, and I think you might agree with me. When you know that these guys have hired your son because they feel that maybe he can influence the vice president

and you want to keep an arm's distance from that, you also know that if you go and play golf with those people, you are complicit in leading them to believe that this is all happening. Maybe. I think if you play golf with them and and you you don't in your actions break anything you don't affect policy you don't make calls you just play golf with a couple of guys not illegal not corrupt bad optics i agree not corrupt well it is corrupt maybe not illegal it is corrupt well i don't know it it has the appearance of being bad but that is that the

presumption there is that it wasn't a golf game. It was some secret meeting about bending Ukraine. Would you agree with this? If you were Joe Biden or John McCain were in that situation, there's no way this would have happened to you or to John. Well, he didn't play golf because the Vietnamese beat him up with crowbars and he couldn't swing his arms that way. But, you know, you would tell your son no fucking way. Yeah, though McCain had an oligarch meeting with Manafort guys. And there was a big fight in the campaign. How the fuck did this happen?

Not publicly, internally. But no, McCain would not have. McCain was very pro-Utrain, and he would have blasted off. He'd be voting, I believe, on the impeachment side now, along with maybe Romney and a few others. Dan left us some questions, and I'm sorry. Oh, Natterman did? Yes.

Where is Natterman? What happened to him? He's either in Aruba or Atlantic City. Oh, Bagman. Okay, I got it. I always knew Dan was in the family. Who will be nominated in 2020? Democrat.

You know, we don't know yet. I would say this. There are two candidates who've gone from low to high, which means they sell tickets. They have an act. They can fill rooms. And that's Buttigieg more recently and Warren from the beginning. Biden has declined.

Smaller theaters, still selling tickets. Those are the big three. Bernie is still in his 20%. Never goes down. Often doesn't go up. Might have a ceiling. Bernie has the money to keep going, and money keeps you going. Money lets you take a punch and keep going.

Buttigieg has money. Warren has some money. Biden may not have that much money. If Biden loses early, Iowa, New Hampshire, February 2 through 9, that's Superman can't fly, and then he's probably done. And then what happens? No Bloomberg. Well, Bloomberg is hanging back if there's a train wreck, see if he can muscle

his way in. Traditionally, it's very hard to start late. Others have tried graveyards full of them because you missed a big show. You know, it's like showing up the day after the Montreal Comedy Festival to get discovered. To use a tortured analogy for the... No, that was good.

That's right on. So was the selling tickets. That was good, too. Yeah. No, no. I worked in show business and politics. What did you do in show business? Oh, first job I had in show business, I was a writer for Dennis Miller.

I didn't know that. Yeah. Went to confession the other day. I said, you first. It's a solid joke. It's not mine. It's my shortest dentist joke. I could write the rants.

Get your tin beak wet. On paper, Leslie, I don't know about Joe Biden. Hillary Clinton is, in my opinion, closer to Donald Trump on the political spectrum than she is to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. How averse are the Biden voters to Elizabeth Warren and that wing of the party? Well, I want to address the premise first. I got yelled at on the air by Keith Oberman, an NBC hit, at the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton convention. Because I sat on the air, he went nuts.

Get this guy off! You know, just his head unscrewed. Snakes came out. Because I said, I think in the privacy of the voting booth, because all the talk was Barack won, Hillary people are mad, Hillary's showing up with Bill that night to do her speech. I said, in the privacy of the voting booth, I would bet money that Hillary will vote for John McCain,

who was the Republican nominee in 2008. Because they were buddies. They had a famous drinking contest in, I think, Latvia, where she drank him and half the bodyguards under the table. That's amazing. He liked her. She's tough.

Everyone couldn't imagine that. But the truth is, politicians who are in primaries tend to hate each other afterward. And so, they're people. They get to do whatever the hell they want in the secret battle. So, I don't thinkary's that close to trump because trump's a populist wackadoodle in my view but you're right she is not on team warren or team bernie and if it comes down to it's quite possible it'll be warren or maybe bern Bernie as the thing narrows, like the final four, versus either Biden or Pete, or maybe, maybe Amy Klobuchar,

if she can get a little magic going very soon in Iowa, which she needs badly. She's got a little, but she needs more. And that is the schism between the progressive left and the more moderate center left. Hillary might weigh in, because she is no communist, believe it or not, compared to them. I mean, Elizabeth Warren has chosen to be right out there. Now, she's backing off a little. She's leaving little breadcrumbs to be able to back off this Medicare for all thing, which is death on a stick politically. I don't think she can come back.

I think that just this constant backtracking. Warren. It's hard, you know, because she believes her crazy stuff. The other mistake she's making is kind of amusing to me watching the show, is she's constantly invoking Bloomberg, the big bad billionaire. You know, it's a cheap applause line, gets her a little clapped, as my friend Donna used to say in the rallies. But Mike Bloomberg's sitting up on Madison there with a big wallet,

and if he gets pissed off enough, there's a red button he can push on the desk and $20 million of TV ads show up saying, let me tell you about Medicare for All. You're in a union? Cut your blue cross card in half. It's going away. You work for a corporation? You got a pretty good health plan for your family? Not anymore. You're going on welfare health care. He can clobber her. And so I'd be careful about the insults with a guy who literally has unlimited funds in the campaign. I think you're right.

Who do you think is going to win, Joe? I don't even want to make a prediction because six months before the primary in 08, I wouldn't have predicted Obama was going to win. I wouldn't have predicted Trump was going to win. I wouldn't have predicted Trump was going to win in 2016. But the candidate I really like a lot is Tulsi Gabbard, and she's barely hanging on. What did Barry Wise call it, a Syrian toady? She's an apologist for Assad, allegedly. I'll give you a little air there.

Right. I mean, I'm pretty far conservative. It's hard for me to know who people are going to vote for. I do think you're right. I think that people are going to worry about electability. They don't want Trump, so they're probably going to go with a moderate. But those Bernie Sanders fans are passionate. Yeah.

I think it happens. Bernie has money. He can go forever. I think Trump is going to win again. I really do. The best thing Trump has done is this amazing Rasputin mindfuck on the Democrats. Because the week before 2016, everybody's reading Nate Silver in New York Times. Oh, we're going to win. It's in the bag.

Woo. He's never wrong. And then Trump wins. And it's like he's got some magic flyover state hypnotic redneck voodoo. No, he's just a criminal. I live in L.A. I hear it every day. He's got some trick he uses.

And if you market to market, like Wall Street guys say, if you had to sell this building tomorrow, you say, no, I want to wait three years. It's only going to be worth it. No, no, you've got to sell it tomorrow. What could you get? Cash and 24 hours, you get that bottom value. And in politics, everything is bullshit and pundits and polling except election day. That's where we come. That's where everybody was wrong. I was wrong. I said Hillary would win by three and a half votes. That was enough for the

Electoral College to go. But it didn't happen because Hillary got most of her votes in 170 counties. There were 3,300 counties. So Hillary would run San Francisco up to 95, but was doing nothing in Michigan. And we've only had five of these elections where the Electoral College was different than the popular vote, which is why all the pollsters did the popular vote and thought 3 to 4 million, it's done. And it didn't happen at all in the 20th century. It's happened twice in the 21st century, it's done. And it didn't happen all in the 20th century. It's happened twice in the 21st century, 2000 and 2016. And here's the trivia question.

Who invented the electoral college that liberals are so pissed about? Alexander Hamilton. That is the song that did not make the musical. Oh, really? Yeah, what the hell was I thinking? Cha-cha-cha. Oh, it's a joke. No, no, it's a half joke. But the point is, it always amuses me that, you know,

the great villain was, of course, the great hero. So the point is, a lot of this thing is not about the popular vote anymore. It's about distribution because you run it up in the city. So a woke candidate is going to take New York or San Francisco. Up five points does nothing to win. One pissed-off autoworker in north of Michigan, in Mount Clemens, Michigan, is worth 25,000 people in California or 10,000 in New York. Which brings me to a question I keep wondering about.

These journalists who clearly, like an NBC, they're clearly polling for the Democrat. Why do they keep feeding us national polls? Why aren't they out there saying the national polls don't matter? The only polls that matter are these four states. Democrats, focus on these four states. Nominate somebody who can win these four states. Well, with the exception of my paymasters at NBC

News, who I love, the cable business, all three of them, every day is the Hindenburg. It's got to be the biggest day for clicks and ratings. So, trivia gets elevated every day, the Hindenburg. It's got to be the biggest day for clicks and ratings. So trivia gets elevated every day, and sirens go off, everything's breaking news. And polls are one of the few things where the media will create a story by taking a poll and then report on it. There's a thing called the Milk-Gortzman rule that old political consultants like me talk about.

There was a guy named Milk-Gortzman. He was an old Kennedy political operator, very smart lawyer. He's dead now, but he was in the 70s, a real wizard, delegate counter. And he had the Gortzman rule, which was don't follow any national poll until after the first voting contest. And it's true. The national polls are a noise meter for what was on cable TV 10 days ago. But, just not to make too much of it, but four years ago you could forgive it

because, as you said, we used to think that if he's going to win by that much in a popular vote. In October of the general election, I'm talking about primaries. But if he's going to win by that much, if she was going to win by that much in a popular vote, you figure the rest will fall in line. Yeah, Gore was half a million votes. This time it was almost three million and it still happened. But now we know that's not true.

As a matter of fact, we know that whether Trump wins or loses, he's going to lose the popular vote. Probably. If it's Warren, who knows? But probably. No, I can't. Probably. But here's Trump's biggest problem other than the mark-to-market thing where he's stuck at 42%. Every election in the mark-to-market deal that we've had since he was sworn in, Republicans have done poorly.

The only question is how poorly. We lost 10 governorships since Trump. We've lost a ton of congressional seats, worse since Watergate. So every time the country votes, they screw the Republicans. Now, maybe that'll all change, but that pattern is pretty clear. Trump's biggest problem is demography, and the number of white voters is shrinking in the electorate. If you go to the life insurance computer

and you get the actuaries out and pay them off and you just adjust population for who's died, Trump probably loses Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and loses Michigan. Just in the trend since the last election. Mitt Romney carried voters over 65. If you're old, you know, we're the president of old people. When the Republican Army's on the march, you know, we're slow but steady. So I pretended I have a walker here.

Let the record show. Yeah, yeah. The tag joke is if they ever outlaw use tennis balls, the party will cease to exist. So the problem for Trump is he has to do a little better than last time. And we've seen the act. You know, how many people go to see Gallagher five times? You know, we're seeing. Well, yeah, you're a connoisseur.

So anyway, we're seeing. Well, you're a connoisseur. So anyway, we'll see. Headwinds. But if they nominate somebody that Trump can work with to change the topic of the election, yeah, he could win. Anything, Joe? We're just about ready to wrap it up. Yes, I wanted to clarify. I said I'm far conservative. I meant I'm far out of the Democratic electorate.

But I'm rather moderate, I think. I don't want people to lump me in with someone, so in the next article about the podcast, I'm going to let it go. Alt-right God, Joe Macchi, was on. No, no, no. The old politician hack line is, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, it left me.

Right, and that's interesting, too. There's truth to that, no? Oh, totally. It was such a close election that who didn't show up that showed up for Obama that didn't show up for Clinton. There's even polls that are controversial about the approval rating among African-Americans for Trump that we don't know if they're true because one of the sample sizes, how many Democrats are they asking? It's pretty bad. I've seen private polling. I would imagine it is. Explain this madness to me. Trump won largely because he touched a nerve on immigration. asking but can you explain it's pretty bad i've seen i would imagine it is i mean explain this

madness to me trump won largely because he touched the nerve on immigration right yeah i would say a lot of what i would call grievance politics but yeah so what if it was so you would think that the democrats would come back and say okay listen this wall idea is ridiculous but this is how i'm gonna to handle it. That's what I would say. Okay, I'm listening. Yeah, I don't particularly support a wall, but I would like to see the border controlled. Show me how you'll control the border.

No, they say this wall idea is ridiculous, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to decriminalize illegal immigration such that you can come over here on an airplane as a tourist, and if you stay, we'll pay for it. No, I get it i've spent 30 years running campaigns against democrats they always tend to go to the bad corner but it's about politics the center of gravity in a political party are the base voters that you have to appease in the primary so the republicans go run one direction the democrats run the other and then you get to a general election, and both sides tally up the weapons the others have given them.

Remember one of the early debates, Castro raised his hand, how about open borders? And all the hands went up. Don't think the RNC video recorders went rolling on that. But in the Democratic primary, they're afraid not to be for that. You talk about demographics changing. Other things that have been changing subtly is that every day a dollar buys you less and less in campaigns.

You talk about Bloomberg spending all these commercials and I'm thinking who even watches commercials anymore? A lot of people do, but I get your point. And what was the last thing? I lost my train of thought now. But there's money's worth less and something else. I totally lost it. Alright, whatever. Things are's worth less and something else.

I totally lost it. Alright, whatever. Things are getting more fragmented and extreme. Old-fashioned campaign is harder with digital. I mean, what's really changed in everything is digital ability to send a message for free to millions of people. Witness Trump. He barely had any TVAs. I remember the other thing. And the ability to do anything

under the radar is gone. Years ago, I remember they talked about how, was it Clinton, Dick Morris, bought all these commercials in these small towns and nobody even knew about it. And when he came, he was going to, like, they think that they can work their way back to the center like they used to. Can you even do that anymore? I'm right. Your evil politics has locked both sides into their nuclear core. And if you're a traitor, here's the ugliest secret about the U.S. Congress.

You see them all fighting on TV and everything? A bunch of them are friends, but it's secret. It's like an affair because they don't want to get caught. The members-only gym, which nobody can go in but members, they're playing basketball and then they're out killing each other on cable and back. It used to be more that way, but there's still a lot of it because they're caught in this weird kabuki theater that they're in. Because the party base punishes compromise. It used to be, and I'm going to be off on the numbers a little, 435 congressmen. There are roughly 100 members of Congress between the most liberal Republican and the most

conservative Democrat, overlapping. Because you'd have New England liberal Republican and the most conservative Democrat. Overlapping, because you'd have New England liberal Republicans and you'd have conservative Democrats from the South. Now there are about four. Really? Yeah. So everybody's in a corner, and you're a traitor if you, like, make a deal. And that's what they're there to do is make deals. But the political incentives have changed.

Deal is surrender. It's death. Because remember, in the equation of I'm right, you're evil, anything I do to you is good. I'm slaying a dragon. And so we're having, we're throwing acid. It's like having the Ohio State-Michigan game, and recently we Michigan fans have felt this way. At the end, we burn down the stadium

and murder all the refs. Because they're evil. I feel like that's why it's okay to get rid of Trump. Pardon? I feel like that's why it's okay to get rid of Trump. I do think he is bad for the... I mean, look, I'm a right-wing Republican. I hate rooting for Democrats. But I think he's got to go.

I'm a far left-wing liberal, and I think it's... I think that, you know, back to planting the evidence, I do feel like, you know, if you get rid of Trump, you are really getting rid of something that regardless of what party you identify with... I agree with that, but I've got to steal the great old Don Rickles joke, which is we can agree as Americans to get together and get rid of Trump, and after that we're going to get every one of you sons of bitches.

Because it'll be back to the war and the conservatives are right. But for now, yeah. Are you optimistic about the future of the country? I normally am. When I go to Silicon Valley where I do some consulting work, I get excited because good stuff's coming and we're great at it in America. But I see our institutions falling apart. I see stupid take over our politics. I see fighting for no reason why the Chinese graduate 50,000 engineers a year. We have more yoga instructors here than engineers.

I worry. I worry maybe it's Britain in 1910. And what about identity politics? How is that going to tear us apart? Do you worry about that? Well, here's the problem. That digital power that allows anybody with a hot message, good or bad. In the old days, you'd go to a congressional campaign. The campaign manager would have 20 old ladies sending letters.

There'd be a lockbox full of stamps, $10,000 in stamps. And that was kind of the communications thing. That, and you'd buy some radio or TV ads, a couple of billboards. Now the stamps are free. Donald Trump, a pre-aware title, as we say in Hollywood, can go out and blow out tweets. A Kardashian could run. So those rules are gone.

The next step of that is you're going to see you on a YouTube clip that's blown out on Facebook endorsing Louis C.K. for president. And it'll look completely real because it's a great fake. Deep, deep fake, yeah. And the problem with deep fakes is your body, the anthropology of it, we're wired that if all of a sudden a leopard jumps up here, we're not going to like, hey, wait a minute, you might not be, we're going to run out the frigging door in a nanosecond full of adrenaline.

So it is easy to hack the human brain with fake images, and they're getting good at that. Don't think the Russians aren't working on that stuff either. Our other enemies in cyber. So the technology is going to start hacking the biology, and that's a scary, dangerous thing. You're seeing some of that shit now in the Brit election, which is tomorrow. Who's going to win that one? Well, it's close and fast. There's a real, from my point of view, a real bad lefty there.

Corbin. Yeah, he makes Chairman Ma look like Goldwater. And I worry about him because they closed it, but I think Boris is going to pull it out. He's got his own problems, but I'm totally Torrey. All right, anything else? Yeah, when you told the story about Hillary and McCain having the drinking contest, that makes me feel good about the country's future.

Me too. It's nice to know that people do get along. And I know Noam and I are more on the right side of the spectrum, but most of the people that we work with are far left or moderate or liberal, and we get along great, and that's kind of lost in the way things go. You're actually more right than I am on certain things. Yeah and probably very left wing on a lot of economic issues but yeah you might be more left on economics i am i'm a business owner after i bring up something one thing real unrelated uh i just wanted to give a quick shout out to the family of chris cotton who passed away

he's a comedian and uh uh real real sorry to to have that tragedy and and God bless. We're all thinking of you. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm pessimistic that at a time when we're moving towards a majority nothing country, not white, not anything, that that's the time that we've picked to decide that we, I've said it, what happens when Pluribus doesn't want to become Unum. I totally agree. It's the biggest sociological threat we have that we've become fighting tribes. The American idea is always when you come here,

it doesn't matter what tribe you were for, and, you know, we can be better at the equal opportunity thing. We're making strides. We ought to. That's the moral cause that we all ought to agree on, and I think mostly have. But the idea we have to all break in teams based on our gene code. You know one of the interesting things about going off on a long time killing tangent about where the media totally got this campaign wrong? There was this presumption, which shows the bias built in. I don't think it's a Republican Democrat bias. It's a sociological bias.

That the polling has shown that one reason Kamala Harris didn't make it and one reason Cory Booker is in such trouble, even though the media kept saying, well, African-Americans are going to back an African-American candidate, they have chosen not to. They have chosen not to vote skin color, but to vote what they perceive as free-thinking voters, their interest is, which has been Biden, who, one, they have a connection to because he loyally worked with Obama, and two, he has looked like, to date, may change, the candidate who can beat Donald Trump, which is a priority. So people are showing free will against what they were expected to do.

Same with women. Half the population are women, yet there's one female candidate left in the race other than Tulsi Gabbard, who's barely getting arrested in the national polling anywhere but Iowa. And even in Iowa, her gender gap is not that big. So this presumption that people vote the gene code of the candidate is totally wrong. And that is a good thing that people feel free to choose and are not imprisoned by that. But the political correctness of the media says you ought to be, and it's going to happen, and it never did. So we've had another mark-to-market moment so far.

If Cory Booker soars and comes in second in New Hampshire, I think he will run the table of African-Americans because he will have proved he can win. It won't just be his skin color, which is a good thing about America. Yeah, people are criticizing it, but I took the same lesson. Like, well, it's kind of nice that they're not supporting the black candidate just because he's black. Well, automatically. You know, he's got to earn it like everybody else. And I'm actually surprised he hasn't done better. He's a pretty good candidate.

And I'm on the national board of the Public Charter School Association where we support that movement. And Corey, in a Democratic primary full of angry teacher unions, has been incredibly courageous. I would be more than delighted if Corey won the nomination because he's shown me political courage. He's also talked about growth, which is an important word, but in a Democratic primary these days, a dirty word. In the last debate, he was terrific. I'm going to send him a check. And he's a smart dude, too, right? Yes, he's a serious person.

He ought to be doing better. But the point is this presumption that everything is identity and race and gender not true. People choose things. Sometimes they make bad choices. Sometimes they make good. I'm not talking about the moral loading of what ought to be, but what is, and the media ought to learn that. Is it true that if we become a successful multi-ethnic

society, we will be the first one in the history of the world? And, I mean, everywhere else... Canada's pretty good, but yes. Canada? They talk about secession every 10 years? I've worked there a lot. It works pretty well.

The thing is, we were founded on a highly secular idea of you come here and you become an American. Yes. And that is our secret sauce. And if we give that up, it's not good for the next generation. You would think that smart people would be saying, secret sauce. And if we give that up, it's not good for the next generation. You would think that smart people would be saying, human nature is a dangerous thing here. What should we be doing to try to pull together as one people? What are the things we should be focusing on? It seems like we're doing exactly the opposite of all those things. But maybe it'll...

Well, McCain used to always say his campaign was about, and I think this should be the national cause, which is a mission and a cause greater than our self-interest. A big purpose. Kennedy was great. We're going to go to the moon. Can't be done. Yes, it can.

We're Americans. And there's a lot of things like that you could harness the whole country of. Here's the whole thing about people. You know, we've known anthropology for a long time. Humans generally want to create a team and do stuff together Kind of the instinct so We should lead the world in the next century and do great things a lot of great things we could do to make it a better Country on that note yes, you said I know you have a spot in 10 minutes you wait

But Mike said something really nice to me about Joe and since he's here I thought oh, I don't know what I said, hey, does he go out for pilot season? He's very castable. He's got a great TV face. A deadly comic. We should talk. Oh, someday. I hope so. He's a writer, producer, and show business. I would love to.

I'll make a connection. He is the best. He really is. He's the smartest. He's the funniest. And he is, forgive me, he's quirky enough to see him once and remember him. Well, we were talking about it before we came on about we were singing your praises. Oh, thank you so much. I want to go catch your set before I have to run to communist MSNBC in Dubai, Wyoming.

If this podcast ended with some opportunity opening up for Joe Mackey. Well, we'll see, but I'm a fan, so I want to see. It would be worth all the abuse I've taken. It would be worth getting canceled even. That would make me a cause greater than myself. And can I close on a plug? Because I promised Axelrod I would. We'll plug this too.

Hacks on tap with Murphy and Axelrod, two longtime opponents, close friends. We don't hate each other, but we talk about what's going on in the campaign every week. Do you guys hang out in New York at all? Yeah, once in a while. Can't you guys come down here one night sure yo he'd love it yeah yeah yeah he's a good guy i heard you and follow us on instagram live from the table and if you want to email podcast at comedytoll.com thank you everybody thank you thank you that was fantastic