The Daily Beast Podcast - Here's the Proof Trump Knows He's Doomed: Rothkopf

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

David Rothkopf joins Joanna Coles to break down the Trump administration’s strategy to protect itself ahead of the midterms. From the surreal RFK Jr. and Kid Rock government video spectacle to Donald Trump’s grip on evangelicals, Rothkopf, The Daily Beast’s unmissable columnist, explains why Trump’s obsession with election legitimacy is less about confidence and more about self-preservation. With foreign allies unsettled and domestic chaos mounting, he lays out how both parties are quietly planning for life after Trump—and what the fallout could mean for American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, how seriously do you think we should take the various threats to the election in 2026 to the midterms? Very serious. The reality is that they realize they're going to lose. And so they're using every conceivable tool in order to put their thumb on the scale. I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast. Today we're talking to David Rothkopf about what else but are FK Jr. and Kid Rock's insane. video. They're topless, they're riding mysteriously a bicycle in a sauna, which I'm no doctor, but neither is RFK Jr. who runs our Department of Health. But I'm pretty sure that riding a

stationary bike and getting your heart up in a sauna is not a recipe for long life. Anyway, we'll be discussing that. We'll be discussing the madness of Trump with David Rothkopf, who is a former Clinton person. He worked in the Commerce Department. He was the editor of Foreign Policy Magazine. He is the founder of the brilliant Deep State Radio, David Rothkoff. I wanted to start with the spectacular video that our Secretary of Health and Human Services has put out there of himself with Kid Rock, doing all sorts of things. And we will get into it. You've been watching all night, I have. I've been, I've had it on replay. I've had it on replay. You know, I thought about coming on here shirtless. Well, you could still take your shirt off. It's not too late, David. I could. It's not too late.

I don't want to scare what you. Well, I want to get into that. And I also want to get into the Democrats that you've handicapped for the 2028 list, which I think is super interesting, that you've handicapped for the 2028 election. But before we do, you are a man who is, in true liberal form, blowing up blue sky this morning. A flippant blue sky from you about Andy Beshear and the world, the world has arrived at your door. Just explain for those who aren't on blue sky yet what exactly you said. I, Jesus. I said, he's come out.

He was on morning Joe this morning. He's got a book. Andy Bashir, we're talking about the Kentucky governor. The governor of Kentucky, right. Lovely guy. popular governor, and he's got a book out that talks all about how important faith is to him. Now, you know, there's nothing wrong with faith. Faith's a good thing. If you like faith, great. But, you know, he's obviously running for president. And he is, in my view, you know,

he's wearing his faith in his sleep. And I've got a real problem with that in American politics. It's like if your faith is foundational to you, great. If it provides you with moral guidance, great. If it helps you be a better person, great. It gives you a sense of community, great. But there's a reason that we have separation of church and state in this country. And it's not because faith is bad. It's because the entire history of mankind is about wars and bloodshed.

and unhappiness that comes when people who are in positions of political power embrace faith in ways that could seem exclusionary to people. And I also mentioned in this skeet James Talariko who's like super popular. He was on Stephen Colbert. He's a young guy promising doing well in democratic politics. So let's just remind people who, he is. He's in the state Senate in Texas. He's running

against Jasmine Crockett to be selected for the Democrats to run for the Senate seat in Texas. Right. And you know, he's one of these guys who people think gets Texas really well because he talks about religion. He also talks about, and I think he went to a

seminar. He talked about... Yeah, he did. He went to, I think, an Episcopalian seminary. Right. He's about to finish it. Right. And he's he talks about separation of church and state and inclusion and all this other great stuff. But, you know, throughout my life, what I've watched is candidate after candidate who feels they have to invoke the Bible, you know, they're like Morning Joe, they're always talking

about scripture. Well, you know, whose scripture? Right. No matter what you do, no matter how open-minded you are, no matter how inclusive you are, there's a code there that we get this right and you may not or you may not be part of this. And when it's in the context of a country where there is this kind of thrust, particularly on the right, that we're a Christian nation, that makes people super uncomfortable. But isn't this simply signaling, isn't this Democrats in conservative areas signaling to partly Maga and former republics, who don't know what they are, so some independent voters, that they have values, as it were.

Yeah, of course it is. Of course it is. And they're, you know, in fairly conservative communities, and they're trying to signal that. I just am uncomfortable with it because, you know, as a historian, I've sort of seen what it leads to as the son of a Holocaust survivor. I've seen what it leads to. And I, you know, so, you know, my view is practice whatever you want. Let's be tolerant, you know, but let's try to minimize the influence of religion and politics. And I put it, I guess, you know, the problem with when you skied something is it's short and you, the nuance is lost. But I've gotten beaten up a lot by people who said, well, the Democratic Party has founded on, you know, know, the black church and, oh, so you don't like Reverend Martin Luther King or you don't

like Reverend Raphael. No, I love everybody. You know, it's like, no, that's not the point. The point is that it's becoming like the price of entry, you know, and, you know, Joe Biden did it and Barack Obama did it and Bill Clinton did it and they're all like out there and I'm going to go and we have national prayer breakfast and stuff like that. And I have to tell you, as much as I love God and religion and spirituality and all of that kind of stuff, the idea that every year the president goes to a national prayer breakfast, particularly given the hypocrisy that's practiced there recently, it just makes me a little uncomfortable.

And I was trying to express that. And I am paying, if you're... Well, I think it's the most... I think it's the most excitement that there's ever been on blue sky, actually. Who knew that that's what it would take to have blue sky blow up? You'll get blue sky completely wrong. Blue sky is all about liberals beating up each other. And liberals like nothing better.

Exactly. When they should be focused on the Republicans. And also my favorite moment, I think, is still, well, two moments. Donald Trump being asked what his... his favorite book is in the Bible or his favorite passage from the Bible and him just saying there were too many to choose from. And then him holding the Bible upside down when he was using it as some kind of prop. He's obviously never read the Bible. Obviously, he's tried to sell his own version of the Bible. But how anybody could think that he was a religious man at this

point. And yet he has the evangelical vote. So, but I will say, there is no, there is no religious text in the world that has any guidance for life in it that he has not violated. And and and and and and that, but I just saw a poll this morning. I think it may have been on on morning Cho that shows that, you know, although he's losing a little support, evangelicals, you know, only 45% of evangelicals of 40% think that he behaves ethically all the time. The vast majority of them still support him. Well, but that's because they don't have anyone else to support yet, right? And that will bring us to your handicapping the people that you think are going to run in 2028 for the Democrats.

But before we do that, I must, I must debrief with you on the video that dropped yesterday and set Twitter on fire with RFK and K Jr. and Kid Rock doing a strange workout together, which involved a lot of, RFK Jr. doing his favorite thing, which is parading around in his jeans with no top, and plunging into pools of freezing water and then cycling. I think it was Kid Rock who was cycling on a bicycle in a sauna, which cannot be advised. Whatever your age, that cannot be advised. Look, first of all, it was just insane. I felt bad for Olivia Nutsi. I was like, is she sitting somewhere looking longingly at this video?

You know, his former digital relationship. Somebody mentioned that also on Blue Sky, that she's on her fainting couch looking at this over and over again. But, you know, first of all, this was the most weirdly geriatric, homoerotic display that we have ever seen, right? And the thing that makes it weird is that it was released by the Department of Health and Human Services. I know. It was their official, it was their official video.

On their official site, Kid Rock, flip the bird to everybody. Yeah, that was also kind of strange. Why did he have to be so aggressive? That was unnecessary. I thought maybe he was having a sauna to re-recuprate from his Super Bowl performance. He may have had some aching joints after that. Well, exactly.

And then, you know, there are the two of them together, shirtless, working out. And RFK Jr. does this weird thing of wearing his jeans no matter what. I mean, he wore the jeans in the sauna. He wore the jeans while getting into the tub. You know, it's like, okay. Well, maybe he does that to shrink the jeans back to fit him. I mean, I think, didn't we all do that when we were 16? We would get jeans and then sit as long as we could in a cold bath to make them fit properly.

Talk to us about that, Joanna. That's what you did. He's seven, I think I did that. He's 72. He's 72. Well, that's great. And it's fantastic. Look, my wife told me that the way you don't wash jeans, the way you disinfect genes is you put them in the freezer.

Well, there you go. So he's putting them in freezing water. Maybe, maybe. Look, how weird is this? I mean, what would they have done if Kid Rock peddling away in a sauna, which really, I just want to issue a statement, I am not the health and human services secretary, but I'm pretty confident that cycling on a stationary bike in a sauna is not good for your heart. What would they have done if one of them had keeled over? Would they have still put the video out? I was wondering about that. Oh, I mean, if it was Kid Rock that killed over, R.K. Jr. might have eaten him right there because he's big. He wants meat. He's kind of big on roadkill.

But, you know, this was so strange. The thing is, it's coming. The weirdness is so relentless these days that I feel like we've all like, I don't know, did this happen? where we all collectively dropped on our head? Well, and also, it's a eye slot because the other thing is, you look at anything, it can't possibly be real. I was like, obviously, this is not real. And then I was like, oh, my God, it is real.

It is. And it's like, you know, the day after we had to hear the story about Christy Nome's lover who works for the Department of Health and Human, the DHS. Homeland Security, I think, yeah. who works for them, who also on the side is a consultant who hooks people up with DHS and he's on a plane and she doesn't get her blankie? Yeah, we need to go into that because that's very important. So they fly around a lot at the back of one of the DHS planes.

They are, though they both deny it, apparently in a long-term relationship with each other and married to other people. So there you go. That's a lot of people in their lives. We're open-minded here. Fine. Okay. Whatever, whatever keeps you focused. But she had a special blanket, a bit like a child has a special blanket. She had a special blanket, which when one of their planes broke down and they got transferred to another plane, the pilot, foolishly, and I say foolishly, left behind. Because when Corey Lowndowski found out the special advisor to Christy.

name that the pilot had left the blanket, Christie's famous security blanket, on the plane, he then fired the pilot. And just said, you have to fly yourself home. He tried to fire the pilot. He actually doesn't have the power to fire

the pilot. And the Coast Guard, which is already pissed off at her, because she's doing things like, say, use Coast Guard airplanes to deport people. Instead, she took them away from a mission where they were searching for a lost service member.

And she said, you know, no, we have to do some deportations here. You know, they're already deeply angered by her. And, you know, in comes this guy who is this terrible track record. I mean, Washington, people hate this guy. He's gotten into fist fights. How she ended up with him. I mean, just everything you've heard about her must be true, but worse. Well, he's almost like sort of cosplay advisor.

she's always dressing up as a coast guard or as a member of ice. I think we actually started the nickname Ice Barbie for her, and now he's her candle. I guess better Ice Barbie than Klaus Barbie, but they're close. And, you know, the reality is that this was just another bit of weirdness. And every day there's, you know, weirdness. But we have to point out that he fired the pilot

and then realized there was no one to fly them to their next destination. So he had to rehire the pilot. pilot. Yeah, but again, he doesn't have the power to do that. He's a consultant for the Department of Homeland Security. I wonder if he was a consultant on the video that RFK Jr. did with Kid Rock. He might have been, who put that together? Who shot that video? That must have been his line of work. And, you know, how are they reviewing this over at the White House Communications Office, which does some of the weirdest stuff out there? But, you know, did this get run by You know, Stephen Chung.

Thank God that it was not him with his shirt off, by the way. So because you're referring to the fact that Stephen Chung is a larger, is a larger member of staff, of the White House staff. That he's morbidly obese? And Donald Trump is always saying to him, you need to go on the fat shot, the fat shot. Take your physical training advice from Trump. I once wrote a book, I've written a couple books that are sort of histories of how the White

House works. And one of the, how it used to work, about how it used to work. And, and I, you know, I talked to all the people in these White Houses, and it was a great privilege to be able to do that. And I remember talking to a bunch of people who are in the Ronald Reagan White House about Ronald Reagan, right? And particularly during the last couple of years, where he had been shot, and there were already signs that he was in mental decline. And I remember speaking to Frank Carlucci and Colin Powell and some of the people, George Schultz, who are around him. And they said after a certain point, they just didn't involve him in the conversations. Because they just didn't feel it was value added, including, by the way, after 5 p.m. at night.

God forbid anything happened at night because he would sundown. He just, he wasn't the middle of that. And, you know, this is what's happened in this administration too. You know, John Bolden in the first administration literally told his staff, you cannot bring up Russia in front of Trump. He just reacts to strongly, he thinks it's always a criticism of him. If it ever has to come up, I'll handle it. But please do not use the word Russia in front of Trump. Wow.

And, you know, this is just, this is how it is when you're dealing with a guy who's a freaking lunatic. And who, you know, it, you know, goes, off in the middle area over this weekend. He went off again about not getting the Nobel Prize, which he will never ever get. Or he, you know, he goes off on these attacks on, I don't know, you know, bad bunny or, you know, I mean, whoever's, you know, he's, he's literally out of control. And I think, you know, they realize they're going to get their clocks cleaned in November. and they're like, well, how do we possibly minimize that? Well, let's get our crack tea from the cabinet.

Let's get the cabinet out there because, you know, if you have Christenome and Pete Hagseth and Marco and J.T. fans, that's going to, and Scott Bessett, that's going to really, and Howard Lutnik. Right, Howard Lutnik. Here's, they want to talk about affordability. So who do you call you? call the Secretary of Commerce because he's the Secretary of Commerce. Howard Lutnik will go everywhere.

And in front of any audience, Howard Lutnik, whatever words come out of his mouth, the subtitle, like in Annie Hall, you remember the scene in Annie Hall with Woody Allen and Dine Keaton, where they talk but they're subtitles. Right. The subtitle out of Lutnik is Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. He cannot be seen in public without being tied to Epstein. And so how are they going to talk about affordability with Jeffrey Epstein's next-door neighbor and buddy, you know, being their point man?

Well, and how can he talk about affordability when he's a billionaire? Scott Bessent also extraordinarily wealthy. He's also a billionaire. They're 13 billionaires in this cabinet. So who's going to go out? You know, the secretary of WWE, who's blowing up our education department? Linda McMahon.

Linda McMahon, who's a centa millionaire, at least, I think. Yeah, but, you know, they don't, you know, right. As a middle class member of this cabinet, who only has a few hundred million dollars, I feel you're paying. Right, right, you know. I know about the price of milk. I know about the price of gas. Right.

But, you know, the point is they just can't do it. And so they're going to get their clocks cleaned, and they're desperately frightened of it. And I think I will make a prediction here that you can take straight to the joint venture. You should set up with Kalshi. Yeah, I'm just, yeah, totally, I'm taking it straight to Kalshi or Polly Market,

the predictions market. No, no, it should be, it should be there. You know, there should be like a little, like, logo at the bottom of your podcast so people can bet immediately, and then a chunk of that goes to the Daily Beast. Completely right. Yes, that's the future of journalism, right? It's the future.

You should be able to monetize anything you read. Well, we should be able to monetize David Rothkopf's opinion is what we should be able to do. Well, that's right. Go for it. Go against, you know, if you don't like Rothkoff so much, bet against his opinion. It doesn't matter. Monetize it. But I will make a prediction here.

I don't think Christyneau will be the Secretary of Homeland Security at the end of this year. At the end of this year, that's still... Well, I think she will go... Ten months to go. At some point over the summer, I just don't think she can survive this. And they need to have a scapegoat because everybody hates their... immigration policy, with the exception of some small Nazi cells across America. And, you know, I think other people, I think they're going to have a bit of a house

cleaning. Okay, hold on. All right. What else are we going to talk about? So, okay. So you think Kristy Noem is going to be out. Do you think RFK Jr.'s video, which I know. I keep coming back to because it's just the image of him in his jeans.

You can't get it out of your mind. I can't get it out of my mind. Do you think that that is him throwing down the gauntlet for 2028? No. No, I don't. You mean you think RFK Jr thinks he can run for president? Michael Wolf, my co-host on inside Trump's head, is convinced that RFK Jr. is going to be running for 2028 for president. He's convinced. It, really? Yeah, he's convinced of it. Good. Well, you should have a range of opinion on your podcast.

I'm not, he's not saying he should be president. He's just saying he's definitely going to run. Look, he is crazy enough to do anything. I mean, that brain-eating worm has finished. He's sitting there, there's nothing left to eat. There's nothing going on. He's looking around an empty shell. Exactly.

And so RFK Jr., he could conceivably do anything. Is he a serious candidate? No, because his policies are terrible, and by then millions or tens of thousands of people will have suffered, lost their insurance, died, whatever. And you could see, by the way, even the White House is a little uncomfortable. And you saw that even today, it's a little small thing where the HHS said that they weren't, or FDA was not going to review this MRNA-based Moderna vaccine for flu, and today they reversed it. Oh, okay.

You know, they realized that they're a little bit out ahead of their skis on a lot of this stuff. No, I think, you know, on the Republican side, you're going to end up with, you know, Rubio. I'm going to put a caveat here. If there are free and fair elections this November, and that means there will be something like that in 2028, then you're going to end up with things like the Rubio J.D. Vance choice. If the Republicans can put their thumb on the scale and the main thing that Trump is looking for is somebody to cover his ass in 2028 to make sure he's not prosecuted, then you're going to have Pam Bondi and Stephen

Miller is the ticket. Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller, really, I hadn't considered that. They seem unlikely to have enough popular appeal. Right. I mean, people really don't like... If the elections are rigged,

if they can rig the elections, the person Trump wants covering his butt is Pam Bondi. Because she has completely debased herself taken the entire Department of Justice, turned it into a Department of Obstruction of Justice and Retribution. And, you know, in his book, that's a winner. So, David, how seriously do you think we should take the various threats to the election in 2026 to the midterms?

Very serious. Go on. Go on. Just talk us through the points that are most concerning. Well, the reality is that they realize they're going to lose, and so they're using every conceivable tool in order to put their thumb on the scale, right? So you had the raid in Fulton County to claim the voter rolls. This is part of a broader effort to get voter rolls, whether it's Pam Bondi saying to Governor Walts in Neapolis, we'll leave if you give us the voter rolls, or some of the, other cases where they're trying to get them, why do they want the voter rolls so they can disqualify people? Why do they want to pursue the conspiracy theories about Fulton County? So they can say, well, we need to impound these machines. There's a potential problem.

And you will never see the votes again. You will never see what comes out of that. They are trying also, however, to win by gerrymandering. They're trying also to win by the SAVE Act, which has passed through the House and is now going to make its way to the Senate, which is an act that essentially says you need to have a federally issued piece of identification, which a lot of people don't have in order to vote. Will that get through the Senate, though? I mean, my understanding was it passed the House, but it won't get through the Senate. There's some doubt that it'll get through the Senate.

But what I'm saying is they're trying everything. You know, they're trying gerrymandering. They're trying to claim voter rolls. They're trying to cast doubt on the elections. They are, you know, Trump repeatedly. Repeatedly, why would he repeat about 2020 over and over again? It doesn't benefit him except if he can say, these elections are rigged. They're not reliable.

They want to undermine the reliability of the elections, which authoritarianists do all the time. But and just to so confusion too, I think, right? So you don't have to undermine an election by saying it's completely untrue. You can undermine an election by sowing enough doubt that people aren't sure. Well, and then you can challenge the results in court and you cannot seat people who win in certain kinds of things. Then, of course, on top of all of this, you have them sending troops into the cities. And Steve Bannon saying, we're going to have troops around polling areas

so that what they want, I mean, even him saying that is going to scare certain people from going because they don't just arrest illegal immigrants. They arrest brown people. They arrest people who have accents and so forth. And you have Christy Gnome, we returned to Christy Gnome again, saying a few days ago that they are going to make sure

that only the right people get to vote in the elections. And so, you know, so what have I named? Just six different ways to get to this thing. And you have the director of the intelligence services, Tulsi Gabbard, overseeing the raid in Georgia. And then you have this strange, and I wanted to ask you what you were hearing about, about this, this strange intelligence whistleblower that's been buried in the intelligence department. that has suddenly surfaced, was supposed to have been shown to Congress that wasn't,

that appears to be fingering Jared Kushner? Well, I mean, by fingering Jared Kushner, what he appears to be saying is that there is an intercept that the NSA heard between two foreign nationals that suggested that perhaps Jared Kushner was a source of influence for them, perhaps, and again, we don't know the details, acting outside of Farah, the act by which you have to register as a foreign agent. And, you know, there is some doubt about the credibility of all of that.

The more worrisome thing with Tulsi Gabbard being in Fulton County is that all she has to do is invoke the idea of foreign meddling. and say it's a national security issue. And then say, I can't tell you everything, it would reveal our sources and methods. And then say, therefore, we have to impound these voting machines. We have to investigate these people. We have to postpone this election, et cetera, et cetera.

But the point is, it's belts and suspenders with them. They are using every available trick to try to win this thing. And of course, you know, Trump's been pretty explicit about why he's doing it, right? He's said he's doing it because he believes they will impeach him almost immediately.

And guess what? They will. And Steve Bannon has said, if they don't win, he'll end up going to jail. Lots of them will go to jail. And they should. You know, I think that, you know, one of the things that I find particularly interesting

is, you know, Trump is accused of a lot of corruption and enriching himself and enriching his family in the course of this first year of the presidency to the tune of $5 billion, maybe more. We don't know because crypto's involved. And crypto could mean that it's billions and billions more than that. It's untraceable. And we will never know anything about it except that Trump became a big advocate for crypto as he came into office because, you know, it's a way to conduct essentially.

criminal transactions. But here's the thing about all of that. Trump thinks he has immunity, because the Supreme Court has said presidents acting on official acts have immunity. Well, being corrupt, forcing foreign governments to pay, shaking them down, that can't be an official act, because it's explicitly barred by the Constitution in not one but two emoluments clauses. And so there will be an opportunity to prosecute Trump on that front. And frankly, I'm a little surprised people aren't making more of it because it's ugly and it's offensive. But it is also a real point of vulnerability, I think, for Trump. Well, and as he's pointed out, if the Republicans don't get their act together, he'll be impeached.

and that's why they need to do everything they can to sow anxiety and doubt around the elections. It's an extraordinary turn of events, really. Perhaps it could have been predicted, but here we are. So, David, let's have some opium in the conversation in terms of you handicapping the leaders that you think the Democrats might put forward that might lead us to a better place.

Well, first of all, any leader would lead us to a better place. I have a dog. He's a rescue. He's a mud. He's part great Pyrenees. He's part, you know. I'm voting for your dog.

I'm voting for your dog. Exactly. Anybody would vote for my dog. Grizzly for president. Grizzly would be an excellent president compared to Trump, right? So that's, you know, if there are free and fair elections or even, and I think this is the best we can hope for, moderately free and more. moderately fair elections, then you could get a change in leadership of the United States,

which, you know, the world, you know, we just had the Munich Security Conference last week. The world is desperate for a change in leadership of the United States. The problem is it's three years out. And, you know, we're already starting to see people, you know, I mean, you know, Gavin Newsom is out there, and he went to Davos, and he went to the Munich Security Conference, and he's writing books, and he's doing podcasts, and he's like full-on. campaigning. And I know for fact, he's hiring people. He's friends that might have been called by the Newsom campaign and said, will you work with us? They've also, by the way, been asked if by or told,

if you work with us, you can't work with any other campaigns, which I think is, you know, it's a little premature for that. But, you know, Gavin Newsom is out there three years ahead of this. Now, AOC, the Congresswoman was also out in Munich. Let me get to her in a second. But my point beginning with Gavin Newsom is it almost assuredly means being the frontrunner three years out that you will not be the candidate. You know, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, three years out, they were not going to be the candidate.

They were not leading the field. Democrats, you know, are strange that way, but also American politics moves in certain ways and the zeitgeist chains, and you need somebody who's going to speak to that, particularly given the fact that we're in a very social media-driven environment. So I think Gavin Newsom, who's currently the frontrunner, there's some real questions about whether he can maintain that status. Now, was AOC in Munich to burnish or potential? presidential prospects? I don't know, maybe. AOC's 36 years old. She's only been eligible to run for

president for a year. She's only been in Congress for a few terms. The fact that she was there, I think, is the beginning of her foreign policy and national security education, not her effort to deliver a finished product and move to the front of the field. Will she be important in the election as a progressive leader, yes. Might she be a candidate? Might somebody be saying you can be the mom, Donnie? Maybe. But I wouldn't, you know,

I think she's going to be a big figure in American politics for the next 20 years. I don't know whether, you know, this round, she's going to be there. Should she be considered on the list? Yeah, she should be. There are other people who, you know, are a little more dry,

or less lightning rods than those two. Well, Andy Beshear, you mentioned. Andy Bashir, you know, a lot of people like him. He's very popular in Kentucky. He's been a very good governor. He's managed to be a Democrat and a red state. And a lot of people say that's how he's going to win. He's also so dry, so stiff.

He really speaks in policy paragraphs, doesn't he? I mean, he's got no kind of, I mean, even his jokes feel very rehearsed. Yeah, no, no, I saw some videos on social media of him and his wife, and I was like, oh, my God, somebody watched a Mom Dani video and said, oh, no, yuck it up, Andy. And, you know, he's just not a guy to yuck it up. Might he have the secret formula?

Lots of people I know think very highly of him. He might. He might have the secret formula. I don't think so. He seems low energy, too. I mean, I think when you see him on television, he's just, he's so milk toast. And to your point about social media,

you need to bring more, I think. Right. And there are always candidates that look good on paper. Now, by the way, sometimes they become a candidate. An exact identical one is Al Gore, right? It was a senator from Tennessee.

He was also vice president. Super stiff. Looked great on paper. I actually think he won the 2000 election. But, you know, most of the time those candidates don't make it through. J.B. Pritzker's losing a lot of weight. People are like, hey, J.B. you look pretty good. He's like Newsom's speaking out.

But J.B. Pritzker has a big advantage. Newsom's from California. J.B. Pritzker is from Illinois. The center of the country, the rust belt of the country. You know, the heartland of the country is going to be important. But there are other people from the heartland, you know, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan or Alyssa Slotkin in Michigan, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, are all people who are likely to be in the mix as people consider it. Another one who's not from the heartland, but is from

the West and kind of a purple area, who I think, you know, people should not underestimate, despite the fact that he too is a little boring, is Senator Mark Kelly. Mark Kelly is... He's becoming less boring. I mean, he shouldn't be boring. He's an astronaut. He took on, he's taken on Pete Hagserth.

His wife, obviously, Gabby Giffords, who got shot in her line of duties as a congresswoman. Right. And he's been a, you know, they are profiles in courage. His life has been a profile of courage. And, you know, he was concerned. as a vice presidential candidate back when Kamala Harris was running. He is seen as somebody who could appeal to a broad audience.

And frankly, you know, it's like Trump threw him a lifeline and made him less boring by having Hegsseth go after him, right? Because all of a sudden now he's fighting and winning against the administration. So he's a, he's somebody who, you know, is going to potentially be in the mix. But this fact that, you know, there's this. kerfuffle around these congressmen and senators who said don't follow illegal orders illustrate something else, which is we don't know what the story is going to be come the primaries. Right.

We don't know what the thing that's going to be dominating the headlines. And, you know, it could be, you know, a war with China over Taiwan or failing to go to war. It could be a Trump scandal. Or it could be. It could be Iran. Iran. It could be some more Epstein thing or some other kind of thing. Or Stephen Chung, as you know, you guys called him up.

I meant nobody. He did that. That's right. That's exactly what Stephen Chung said about you. Why waste their good ammunition on me? But so you don't know what the story is. And you also don't know it's going to catch fire. You know, two weeks ago, John Assoff, who's running to be reelected as the senator in Georgia,

started talking about the Epstein class. and you watched him and you said, gee, this guy's got a little bit of that mom, Donny vibe, you know, he's, he's young and he's smart and so forth. Jasmine Crockett's another candidate who, you know, might figure in that. Somebody who did the last time around

who's now going to come at this, having been a cabinet secretary, super articulate, gets how the media works, is another, I would say, front runner, if you had five or seven frontrunners, And that's Pete Buttigieg, who, you know, is perhaps the best communicator the Democrats have, even when he goes on Fox, on issues like this. He certainly – but I will – so he gets – I checked your – you've written a very good column about this sort of handicapping everybody. I checked it against Polly Market.

And, you know, some of the people you've mentioned, including Mark Kelly and Andy Beshear, aren't even figuring at this point. Gavin Newsom's around 20%. They're handicapping him right now, 20%. AOC at 4%. Carmala Harris at 4%. We need to discuss whether or not you think Carmel should run again. Josh Shapiro at 3 and Pete Buttigieg creeping in at 2%. Do you think Kamala should run?

I think Kamala will seriously think about running. I know she will seriously. I know there are a lot of people around her saying she should run. And I think she will be underestimated. Because, look, she was vice president. She ran. She had a 107-day campaign where she very nearly won, the shortest campaign. She had a miraculous growth in that campaign.

She knows what doesn't work. and the albatross around her neck the last time she run is gone. She doesn't have to be the Biden administration spokesperson on all of these issues. She can distance herself from Joe Biden and be more of herself. The question for people who know Kamala Harris and who admire her is whether she will be comfortable being herself, whether she can get to the point where she will do that. But, you know, should she be on the list? She certainly should.

But, you know, what does Polly Market reflect? Does it reflect the, you know, polling and the thoughtful opinion of political analysts and some inside special sauce that they've, no, it's like what's in the news. And it's, you know, Polly Market is a reflection of the conventional wisdom as filtered through the minds of people who are stupid enough to bet on this shit. Well, I think it reflects people's visibility, doesn't it? Yeah, that's right. Name recognition is incredibly important. It's what Donald Trump brought to the table, even more so than Jeb Bush. And it can't be underestimated as something that people find helpful. Because a lot of people don't follow this very closely until the week before. And then they're like, oh, I've heard of that guy.

Right. But in, you know, the think where we are in this election, three years before 2016 election, when Trump was elected, he was considered a non-factor. He was under a percent. Nobody thought that he had any possibility. He started when he started running more seriously, which was 2015, which was a year ahead of it, moving up a little bit. But there is something else associated with that, which is Donald Trump recognized. I hate articles that give Trump credit for having some secret genius or something because he doesn't. But he is a creature of the media and he recognized that the media was changing and that social media was going to drive things and traditional media were not going to drive things. And if he had the backing of some people in social media plus the right wing communications ecosystem, he could make it work,

particularly because he wasn't running a campaign based on policy. He was running a campaign based on making headlines, being an entertainment figure, being a celebrity. And I think that's changed presidential politics a lot. And so one of the questions is, you know, there are people out there. And, you know, Andy Beshear is Mark Kelly where Taylor made for Meet the Press. I don't even know if Meet the Press is going to be on the air in 2020. I don't think people care about that stuff anymore. And the things that are, you know, they're political candidates right now running campaigns

on Twitch because that's where the rising voters are. And so, you know, again, we're three years out. Everything is going to change dramatically in terms of what the media environment is, what works in that environment. And, you know, we haven't, we haven't had a campaign in which, for example, AI is a huge factor. And, you know, you get AI slop and you get people making shit up with AI and you get documents being dropped that are made with AI and all this other kind of stuff. And you've got AI-driven robocalling and AI-driven, you know, that's super customized or AI-driven. We had a little bit of that at the last election when people were calling someone had put someone who was an AI version of Biden. Perhaps we get an AI candidate.

I mean, they might be able to make better decisions. You just feed everything into one of the, you know, chat GPT or Claude or perplexity. You sound like Peter Thiel, you know. I do sound like Peter Thiel, don't I? Just leave university. I'll pay you $100,000. If you either elect the AI as president or the answer, or the ANI as president or the ANI. Antichrist will they go.

Or, or Grizzly Rothkopf. It's a dog, it's an AI robot, or it's the Antichrist. Well, I'm voting for Grizzly. We could build an AI assistant for Grizzly that had the combined wisdom of all presidents and all commentators. Honestly, we could. We could. We could do that. It's pretty easy.

I was talking to somebody this and they were, they'd give him some presentation on something. And they said, no, we did a great job. And I said, oh, did you do this alone? So, well, no, I did it with chatty. And I was like, what? Right. It was chatty. Chaddy.

The chatty, their sidekick. But the point is, you know, we have known about AI as a factor for precisely 18 months as a society. Yep, you're right. we have to go two complete cycles of that to get to the next election. We don't know. Why is it that we're all so fascinated by it? Is it because it just seems so urgent right now with Trump in the White House? It's partly that he keeps raising the specter of it all the time, too.

He's constantly talking about the election, constantly talking about how he won, really, in 2020. It's too much of our information stimuli in the world, are Trump-centric. Too much of it is politics. Politics is now so much part of our entertainment system. We cover it like it's sports. I mean, look, you're one of the most thoughtful people I know.

For sure, you get up in the morning, and within 20 minutes of getting up, you pick up your phone and you scroll through it. Within 20 minutes, what do you think I am? The minute I wake up. by reaching my phone. I have my phone by my bed the minute I wake up by reach my minute. 20 minutes would seem like. I was being polite. I was being polite. 20 minutes would seem like forever. I wouldn't know what to do with myself for 20 minutes. Exactly. Exactly. And everybody does that.

They get up. Is it because they're looking for information? No. They're looking for endorphins. They're looking for a little shot of something to wake them up in the morning. Ideally, most of them are like, is he still alive, his Trumps are alive, right? That's, you know, did something happen last night? And, you know, but I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, there's a there's a scandal. Well, there's always a scandal. There's always a scandal. I mean, it's an incredible scandal this morning about, uh, a congressman whose aid committed suicide. It's a terrible scandal. There's, there, there's always something and it becomes, it's not politics anymore. It's your breakfast. You know, it's your morning cup of coffee.

But isn't it better that we think about politicians like this than we used to think about movie stars? I mean, what I'm fascinated by is that the whole nature of celebrity has changed. And Donald Trump sort of single-handedly has been responsible for that. He's turned the people around him into a cast of characters. And we're as interested in Pete Heggseth's up and down personal life or Corey Landowski and Christine Ome's social life as we are in Brad Pitt and Angelina. And that might be a better use of our faculties. I don't know if I would give credit to Donald Trump. And I'll give you a couple of examples.

Homer, not Homer Simpson, but the Iliad. And, you know, talking about kings and heroes. You mean that old writer? That old blind guy, yeah. But saying them all weird, but he did. Or Shakespeare. you know, come let us sit up on the ground and tell sad stories of kings long dead, right? That was, you know, that was, you know, his schick, right?

We were into that. And you may recall back in your youth in the United Kingdom, the royal family. And the royal family is just, why did you even have the royal family? I have no idea. Why did we have the royal family? The same reason you have Christmas pandemones. Entertainment. Right.

It's entertainment. Entertainment. You could talk about it. You could say, oh, yeah, Princess Margaret, she did. Or, oh, yeah, Camilla Parker Bowles and did this thing with this. And so this idea of politicians as celebrity has been with us a long time. The thing is that we consume it differently now. We consume it constantly.

We consume it not just at a distance, pick up the morning paper and read dry words about what's going on. but to actually provide more chemicals inside our brain to make our days more interesting. And that's, I don't know if that's the way, I don't know if that's the way we should be picking leaders, you know, but it is. And that's why, you know, Zoran Mamdani won because he, he ran the most complete social media campaign

that has ever been conducted in the United States, States, speaking to core voters in little one-and-two-minute increments in a way that got them viscerally. Yeah, but he also ran against two candidates, one of whom had been, well, one of whom lives with 19 cats, Curtis Slewa. So he was not going to get the vote. And the other, his other opponent was Andrew Cuomo, yeah, who was exhausted, who looked angry and exhausted and had been forced to resign from office after being accused of harassment by 11 women. No, no. So, I mean, the Democratic field, the Democratic field, if you think of Curtis Sleba, who lives with 19 cats, and he's not even the third weirdest guy in the field.

Because don't forget Eric Adams. Well, but Eric Adams dropped out. Who is the weirdest, most correct. Yeah, I know, but he was the mayor and he was a Democrat. Well, he's the only man that wanted to fly to Paris via Istanbul so he could get upgraded to business class. Certainly the most popular mayor of New York in Turkey ever. But the point is, Mamdani got the fact that political discourse now is much more woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Trump got that fact.

I don't think you know I don't think that's going to be reversed and I just don't see Andy Bashir being woven into the fabric of our political lives you know at Gavin Newsom

you know he was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle he's a little cuckoo you know he does have a shot but frankly people are going to get a little tired of a guy who wants to be president so damn much

and and you You know, that's the vibe he's giving off now. But the vibe compared to Trump naming everything after himself and literally changing the face of Washington to reflect that. Gavin Newsom seems positively shy in comparison. I mean, now the latest is Trump is naming every transport hub. We've got Penn Station. We've got Dulles Airport.

Now we've got Palm Beach International. He's naming after himself. And also, and also this was, I was thinking of this earlier when we were talking about how weird things are. Trump. Trump has trademarked Trump International Airport. Of course, he's trademarked as it the way. And so he can own the intellectual property of the name of these airports or maybe the website or whatever the hell. But yeah, no, no, it's his obsession to name everything after himself is, I mean, it makes, you know, Nero look like a reckless.

Well, I take your point about Gavin Newsom wanting this very badly, but nobody is going to want it as badly as Donald Trump. So in comparison with Trump, people look fairly modest. Yeah, and I think the question, as it has always been the case, because I think everybody who has become president since George Washington has wanted the job too much. I think it takes a certain kind of psychopathology to want to be. the president and in the more modern era, more so. Because you have to be doing it your whole life. You have to be willing to sacrifice a lot to do it and so forth. And so the question could become like it has been in the past, which is who does that in a more healthy way? You know, who is psycho to become president in a more healthy way, you know? And, you know, I'm pretty sure Pete Buttigieg

who's wanted to be president since he was in high school. I mean, he really, you know. I think since he was in grade school or possibly kindergarten. Possibly. But also, also Mamdani, though he wasn't born here, so harder for him. I mean, all of these people are super ambitious. All of them are super ambitious. The question is when the ambition becomes psychotic,

as in the case of Trump, or when it's off-putting, as in the case of Newsom, or when it's under control, as in the case of, you know, Barack Obama. Anyway, David, as I approached this morning, I'm still recovering from my hip surgery and thank you to everybody. I actually feel fantastic.

Are you using a walker or are you using the cane? I've progressed to a cane, which is very exciting. But as we got on today, I thought, oh, goodness, what am I going to talk to David about? I feel I've been slightly out of the loop, but once again, we managed to have covered everything and still so much more to go. You know, yeah, because you, because I'm a little psycho, you know, I talked to you and I went to see the hip doctor. And I, because I was like, oh, my, you mean, you went to see the hip doctor because I had, I had a tissue.

No, not your hips. My, I was like, oh, well, she plays tennis. You need to. You need to. I. I'm going to the doctor. And I said to you, you know, I'm just going to. get PT and you were like, PT is for wimps. Have your hip replace. And so I went and I called the doctor and I went in the doctor and they like did all sorts of scans and they said, no, you're fine. Good. Good, good, good, good. All right. So I don't have to do that. When I'm back on the tennis court,

we'll be able to finally have a game. We can, we can do a game. We'll finally be able to have a game. And then split court side and and launch your latest Daily Bees podcast, Courtside. Oh, we could do courtside. We could do courtside. We could do courtside. We could do courts. We could actually be talking across the net. Nice idea. We could. Anyway, these are all ideas. If you have been, thank you for watching us.

David's got so many ideas and he's got so many opinions, more importantly, that you need to sign up for the Daily Beast to read his opinions, especially his handicapping of the 2028 Democratic wannabes, although, as you heard, some of them he thinks want it just too much, and that's off-putting. But you have to want it enough, David. you have to want it enough. It's all balance.

It's all. There is no balance. There is no balance. That's my feeling. There's zero balance. Trump has no balance. Trump has no balance. Well, that's why the Daily Beast is doing so well.

Because are you saying we're off balance? No, well, now that you mentioned it. But no, you're kind of the paper of record of excess and imbalance. Well, there's a lot of excess. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we try to be balanced in our reporting, though, or at least thorough. We overreport an undercomment,

but then we have commentators like you, which is the point. You have transformed the reporting of the Daily Beast. The reporting of the Daily Beast, particularly in the area I'm Washington reporting, in the past 12 months, it's a thousand percent better. Well, that's our team, David Gardner, Farah,

and Farah Thomasin and Sarah Yule Weiss, who are terrific, grown-up team. No, they're grown up. They're really reporting. And with, you know, the sinking of the Washington Post into a swamp someplace, it really fills a void. Good. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.

But your columns fill a void, too, of lively provocative opinions as you discovered on blue sky today. Right. And as I, you know, and when I'm burned at the stake, I hope you collect them into a volume, memorial volume. David, thank you. So the good news is we have so many B-Bee, beast tier members now. There are too many names to read out and we really appreciate your support. Thanks to our production team, Devon Rodgerino, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Pissarro, Neil Rosenhaus.