The Daily Beast Podcast - Joe Biden Can—and Should—Take Over the Texas National Guard

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

 If Greg Abbott is going to use his National Guard troops to flout the U.S. Constitution, the president should do as Dwight D. Eisenhower once did and nationalize the state agency entirely, The New Abnormal hosts argue. Plus! A conversation with Josh from the Substack political newsletter called Ettingermentum, who joins the podcast to discuss Biden’s bad poll numbers and his path to victory in 2024. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

What an excellent show we have today. Jared Holt, who's a senior researcher of extremism and hate in the United States, is here to give us the lowdown on the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and impossible democratic response. Then Josh from the newsletter Entinger Mentum joins us to talk about winners and losers of 2023, Biden's bad polling, and how he can win 2024. But first, let's have some fun. So, Danielle, it's 2024, but it's starting to feel a little mid-18th century around here. And by that, I am referring to what's going on down in Texas, where the governor, Greg Abbott, has decided that apparently he can ignore Supreme Court rulings and keep building razor wire barriers on the border between Texas and Mexico and stopping the border patrol from.

doing its job. And he is claiming that he can do this because he has the authority to fight what he calls an invasion of his state and that that authority supersedes federal law. And this is bad enough, but he is now being backed by several other Republican governors, including Ron DeSantis, Christy Noem in the border state of South Dakota, Glenn Yonkin, in the border state of of Virginia and Brian Kemp of the border state of Georgia. This is starting to feel a lot like we're leading up to a Fort Sumter situation. Yeah, I guess they have all become legal scholars, right? Because somehow they all come back with the same bullshit line that states rights supersede everything else. But it only seems that state rights supersedes so long as there's a

Democrat that is president of the United States because then when it's a Republican that is president of the United States, then it's the executive branch that supersedes everything. So it isn't about logic. So we need to just stop right there. This is about exactly what you're saying. I believe, and we've talked about this before, I believe that the Republicans want a civil war. I believe in Donald Trump has said it on the campaign trail that he wants things to get quote unquote as bad as they can be so that he can use it as a talking point on the campaign trail to boost up his support. The reality is they don't give a fuck about the border. They don't care about solving this crisis because if they did,

then the bipartisan deal that was being worked through in the Senate wouldn't be dead in the water after Donald Trump has just said that he doesn't want it. Unless it's perfect, I don't want it. Perfect like his skin and his weight. Anyway, look at what Ron DeSand, said in response, and I'm just like, I don't know why he's still speaking and why anybody's listening to him. But this is what Ronda Santis said, quote, if the Constitution really made states powerless to defend themselves against an invasion, it wouldn't have been ratified in the first place

and Texas would have never joined the union when it did. Texas is upholding the law while Biden is flouting it. So the law of the land is to maim, harm, and kill people seeking asylum in this country. Did you see that in the fine print on the Statue of Liberty? I don't know. Am I misreading it? No. I mean, look, it's only a matter of time, particularly if we get a second Trump administration when the Statue of Liberty is bombed under Trump's orders because everything it says on there is not what they believe at all. And Abbott, you know, he puts out a statement. and he talks about, this is according to the hill.com, not just some random. Not just some random hump of dirt?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, thank you. He's using language. The language he's using is he's saying that the federal government has, quote, unquote, broken the compact with the states, and that that's why he can flout federal law and flout the Supreme Court. This was exactly the argument used by the secessionist states, again, back in the mid-1800. hundreds. I've always been sort of, you know, just yet another thing that has changed about me. I've

always been sort of a roll my eyes guy at the notion of a second civil war or of just, you know, a bloodless breaking up of the country, if such a thing is possible. But I've got to say, the more and more that we go down these paths and these paths that have been chosen by Republican governors and Republican legislators, at a certain point, you just get to where it's like, I don't know what we have in common. And the problem is, of course, that Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis and people like that do not speak for everyone in their states. And so you can't sit here and say, you know, well, fuck Texas. Let them secede if that's what they want.

Because you've got a bunch of people in Texas who are sitting there going, well, hold up. I didn't vote for Abbott. I don't like this asshole. You can't just shrug your shoulders at it. You can't just say, hey, if you want to leave, leave. Because we're talking in a lot of cases about people of color. We're talking about people who don't have. lot of money and can't just pick up and move. And so it gets really hairy. But it really does seem

every day or every week, it's a further step towards this whole notion of we are not a union. I don't know. This seems particularly egregious just to be invoking the compact theory and for all these other Republican governors to jump on board with it. It's a little scary what's going on here. So here's what my recommendation is, if anybody's asking. My recommendation is that Joe Biden buck the entire fuck up and start handling these people and their desire for war and start treating them like the criminals that they are. Because if you're going against the Constitution, you're going against the Supreme Court ruling, what else could you possibly be other than a criminal? You're not doing this for the betterment of anybody and damn sure not your constituents. So at the end of the day, he has said that he wants to shoot these people, but he can't really do that.

So instead he'll maim them or allow them to drown. He should be hauled in. And Joe Biden needs to start saying, if these governors don't want to abide by the Constitution, don't want to abide by the rule of law, we got something for you. And stop trying to believe that there is going to be some refusion of these people wanting to be a part of the United States of America.

They do not. They want a Christo-Fascist country that is ruled by their king, Donald Trump. That's what the fuck they want. and anything short of that, they're not coming to the table for. So you have to treat them the way that they are showing you that they need to be treated, like the treasonous criminals that they are. There's no soft tone. There's no soft speaking.

There's no like, oh, well, maybe we'll let the U.S. Army do or the guards do what it is that they have to do. The Border Patrol do what it is that they have to do. No. So meet force with force. Those are my thoughts. Yeah. And look, there are ways that Biden can act.

And in fact, a couple of Texas representatives, Joaquin Castro and Greg Kassar, are calling on Biden to federalize the Texas National Guard because what, you know, Abbott is using the Texas National Guard to block the border patrol from, you know, doing its job. And there are mechanisms by which state national guards can be federalized and put at the direct disposal of the president. So he can do it, as Newsweek points out, back in 19. The Eisenhower administration did this with the Arkansas National Guard because the governor of Arkansas had ordered the guard to stop black students from attending Little Rock Central High School. So Eisenhower said, well, we're not going to let you do that. We're going to put the Texas National Guard directly under my command. And then they will help ensure that the students can go to school. So that mechanism can be used.

And it's of note that two Texas representatives are actually calling on him to do that. Yeah. I mean, it needs to get done. I think that what this administration needs to understand is that these governors, these maga supremacists, they do not believe in the rule of law. They do not believe in the equitable, you know, powers that the branches of government have. It's either they're going to abide by what Donald Trump says if he happens to become president again, or they're going to do whatever the fuck they want.

And so you have to meet that kind of overt disrespect. and disregard with the strength and force that it needs. Yeah. And speaking of not having the strength and force that is needed, I think we need to talk about you boy, Tim Scott. First of all, let me, let me, first of all. So what we're not going to do, Andy, is call him my boy. You've changed your mind on him?

Oh my God. So Tim Scott, the listeners, you may have. seen or heard this, but it's just so cringy that there was no way we could not talk about it. After Trump won the New Hampshire primary, oh yeah, I guess we should mention that, by the way. Trump won the New Hampshire primary. Surprising literally no one. So he was giving a speech afterwards, and Tim Scott was there with him, Tim Scott, who has endorsed Donald Trump and pointedly not endorsed Nikki Haley, though they are both from South Carolina. And in fact, Nikki Haley is the one who originally appointed Tim Scott to his Senate seat.

So Tim Scott was standing behind Trump and Trump said, did you ever think that she actually appointed you, Tim, and you're the senator of her state, and you endorsed me. You must really hate her. And Scott walked up to the mic and said, I just love you. And it was just so pathetic, but just so emblematic of the abasement that the Republican Party,

has put itself through to kowtow to Trump. Even given that we know that people like Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham and so many others that I could name, J.D. Vance, who started out being anti-Trump and now kisses the ring every chance he gets. Even by those standards, Danielle, this was unreal. I don't know what to say. I honestly, I don't know what to say that wouldn't get me fired or in trouble. So people, I want you to look into my heart and imagine what I want to say about Tim Scott, but I'm not going to say about Tim Scott. But I have never seen someone debase themselves in such a open way. And by the way, nobody fucking asked him to. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, you're doing this of your own free will.

Nobody said, hey, Tim, come up to the mic. He was like, hey boss. Hey boss. Look at me, boss. With the fucking grin on his face. It was embarrassing. Him and Vivek standing behind Donald Trump, this man that has called you everything but a child of God, this man has insinuated, all sorts of things about Tim Scott, as well as the Republicans who didn't want him in the race in the first place. I mean, I don't know who his constituency was to begin with, but I digress. To offer up yourself in such a way is so degrading. How is this man a senator? I don't know. know. I honestly don't know, but I was so disgusting because I said, you know, between him and Clarence Thomas. Between him and Clarence Thomas, I said to myself, you know what? At least Clarence

Thomas gets paid from his sugar daddies. Do you know what I'm saying? At least he gets a fucking allowance that's been keeping him afloat for 25 fucking years. What the fuck is Tim Scott getting? Yeah. I mean, Trump is going to have to take him out on a yacht and, you know, pay for a mobile home and stuff like that. I mean, it's only fair. Mm-mm-mm. Tim Scott is a guy who is actually very well-liked by his Senate colleagues in both parties and sort of at least used to have a reputation as being, you know, kind of a decent guy.

You might disagree with him on a whole host of things, but he's a decent guy and whatever. And the only reason I bring that up is to show, you know, look how far he has fallen. And you say to yourself, do you want to be vice president that badly? And then I think, you know what? I think about Donald Trump's last vice president. And I think about the gallows that were built by people shouting hang Mike Pence. And I realize that someone like Tim Scott doesn't say to himself, yeah, it'd be crazy to be this guy's vice president. What they say to themselves is, oh, well, Pence fucked up by not just doing whatever Donald Trump wants.

And I won't make that same mistake. and it's pathetic. It's honestly just beyond. I don't understand it. And it's like all the, this song that comes to my head, he put a spell on me. He's the song. Like he's like playing like a broken record in my head. When I look at these men who fall to their knees in front of Donald Trump, I just, I don't understand it.

I'm like, you have, this man has talked about. people's wives. He's insinuated that, you know, DeSantis was a pedophile. He insinuated like all types of things and outwardly degrades these people. And then with the grins on their face, they go in and just step and fetch it. It is wild. It's wild. Yeah. And then think about exactly who they're debasing themselves for. Because that's like of all the people on the planet who you're going to sit there and just sort of pledge your abject fealty to. Donald Trump, a guy who, first of all, has absolutely not a loyal bone in his body and will, no matter how much you debase yourself in front of him, no matter how much you kneel before him and kiss the ring, he will not just

throw you under the, but he will fire you out of a cannon under the bus or through the bus or into the bus in a heartbeat if he thinks it will benefit him or even if he's just in a mood. Beyond the fact that he's just a truly horrible person, like you are pledging your loyalty to someone who is not going to give it to you in return. I cannot think of a more embarrassing and pathetic thing to do than to pledge your loyalty to Donald Trump. I would never be able to have a one-on-one conversation with these people, let alone Tim Scott, because I just could not.

I couldn't stomach it. But I just don't understand, Andy, what they think that they're getting from it. Like, we always pontificate on this. Is it the fear? Is it the proximity to power? Is it, you know, and somebody had said the other day on cable news, you know, you don't want to be the last person to pledge your allegiance to an authoritarian. You don't want to be known as the last person to fall in line.

Is it that? Is it, you know, that you can say, I was one of the first. I've always been here for you so that when he's turning you into a target that somehow you have some ground to stand on, I really don't understand. I don't think that we ever will, to be honest. Yeah. And I guess I was just raised differently or whatever, because my feeling is you don't want to be the first person to pledge your allegiance to an authoritarian, or any person who pledges your allegiance to an authoritarian for that matter. Yeah. I understand the idea of not wanting to be last, because it's sort of like, you know, last hired, first fired. Or first poisoned.

Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But the idea of doing it at all, And Nikki Haley served in the Trump administration. She was his ambassador to the U.N. And he repays her now because she has the nerve to run against him in a primary. And all he's doing is attacking her. And I don't mean attacking her policy positions or anything like that because we're talking about Trump here. He's attacking her personally. He's using fucked up versions of her name to get at the fact that she's not white.

He is threatening, I guess, basically to excommunicate anyone who gives money to her. And he's just going after her in all the horrible Trump ways that we've sadly become used to since 2015, 2016. And this is someone who served in his administration. So why in the world would you think you would be treated any differently? Again, it doesn't make sense. First of all, I think that Nikki Haley thinks she's tan. So there's that, right? So I'm not quite sure she knows who the fuck she.

is, but that aside, why are any of these people shocked when Donald Trump uses the same tactics that he is used on every single opponent, that he's used on every single person that has crossed him, that all of a sudden he's going to use it on you? And the fact, you know, too, is that we in the media have just kind of shrugged this off as like, oh, this is just how politics is now. No, actually it's not. Like, you didn't attack your opponent. on their like physical appearance, on their ethnicity, on their race, on any of those things. You attack them on their policy stances or lack thereof. So the idea that Donald Trump is outwardly saying, I'm going to excommunicate or blackmail

or, you know, blacklist any of the donors that she has and I'm going to make sure that, you know, she feels pain and hurts. Like, so again, this is actions of a president in the making to you? or what I said the other day, a bloated king. Because presidents don't act like this. Presidents in democracies allow for there to be dissent, allow for there to be critical thinking. And Donald Trump is telling every single person around him,

if you are not in lockstep with me, if you dare step out of line, I will make an example of you and I will make it hurt. And yet, these people always act surprised. when he comes out guns blazing directed towards them. So I don't, you know, I don't get it. But I know that Nikki Haley is rich. I know that she got rich off of her ambassador gig, which is what it was.

And that as long as the money is still flowing in from these billionaires that, you know, have nothing to lose, she'll stay in the race. So at the end of the day, I think that it will bode well for Joe Biden if Nikki Haley stays in the race because then you just watch Trump do Trump to her and see what, you know, these quote unquote independence that people still say exists. I haven't seen one, you know, just like I haven't seen a fucking unicorn. But like maybe they're real. I don't know.

Danielle, you know, you say this is not how presidents act. And I think what you're forgetting is this is the new abnormal. Oh, my God. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal senior researcher of extremism and hate in the United States, Jared Holt. Jared, one, that's a hell of a title. And I hope that you do some type of meditation after your day at work because swimming in hate can't possibly feel good. But talk to us about what we've talked about on this show, but what seems to be percolating up into Maine. news is the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, well, Project, yeah, 2025, that is backed by

billions, that is to make what we are going to assume is a Trump administration ready to roll into authoritarianism on day one. Talk to us about this. Yeah, so Project 2025 is led by the Heritage Foundation and is being done sort of in tandem with a place called America First Policy Institute. They don't always get along, but they've gotten along well enough to put this together and to get pretty much every conservative think tank worth their spit to sign on to it. And what Project 2025 is is a policy mandate is the bulk of it, a list of different policy prescriptions on everything from immigration to foreign policy to social issues and policing. And to try to get this policy mandate enacted, essentially the bargain is that they are going

to build up this database of individuals. They have Oracle, a giant tech firm, I believe, building this for them. And what this database is going to be is a place where, where Trump loyalist can go submit their information, basically like a LinkedIn to try to get into a Trump administration. From there, promising candidates are vetted. Then they receive a training curriculum to teach them sort of how to function in government and how to accomplish some of these things in government. And then, you know, if everything works out,

the Trump administration would be able to put these people in positions from day one. And Project 2025 came out of this idea that, you know, what was really wrong with the Trump administration is that it couldn't accomplish everything that it sought out to do. Because if it did, boy, that would have been awesome, you know, in the eyes of these people. Instead, you know, the general turmoil we saw during the Trump administration of White House staff circling in and out different agencies and agency policies budding against these mandates that Trump was trying to order down regarding. policy. The plan is to essentially get rid of that, to reschedule a bunch of federal workers so that

they are kind of pushed out of positions where they might provide friction to Trump. And then to stock what's left of these agencies with people who are down with the plan and, you know, essentially will echo what is coming from the Oval Office. So in a structural sense, this is like, I guess it's like perfectly legal to do all of this and within a president's authority, because presidents just have grown the amount of power that they've had over the last many decades. But this would essentially allow Trump to operate from the Oval Office with a more absolute control over the federal government. Or at the very least, you know, the most generous way to put it would be that he would be able to do what he wants and enact the policies that he wants with as little friction as possible. Essentially, all of the guardrails that we perceive to be holding our democracy in place during the four years of the Donald Trump administration would be gone.

The people that were inside that we found out after the fact, after they released books where they said that, you know, they were standing between Donald Trump and complete destruction of our Constitution will be gone. that those that are career employees inside of government agencies who have sworn oaths to the Constitution will be gone. And what will be in its place are people that have sworn loyalty to Donald Trump and Donald Trump alone that are ready to go on day one in dismantling what is left of federal agencies that they haven't deemed as an enemy of the state. Am I right? Yeah, I mean, the people that are putting Project 2025 together, of course, apply their own window dressing, right? This is about giving power back to the people. Oh, I read the New York Times article.

Oh, yeah, yeah, big load of bullshit right there. Yeah, I mean, I think the way you summarized it is pretty much correct. It's a total disregard. And, I mean, ultimately what this is is a power grab. This is a way for the Trump administration and the conservative project in Washington overall to effectively quash dissent. That is the ultimate goal, is to root out any sort of people in government that aren't in total alignment with them, a la McCarthyism, and to show them the door.

And if this is successful, it could have really grave consequences. for all the preaching and soapboxing that the conservative movement has done over cancel culture and intellectual freedom and such and such. I mean, this is a plan and it is Washington's main plan. If you look at who's signed onto this and how much money is involved. And the whole premise is, you know, eradicating the government of people that don't agree with you. And I mean, if you're able to do that, if you're able to squash dissent, if you're able to create a government of loyalists, paint a picture for us because you study extremism and hate.

What does America look like in the first 100 days of a Trump administration 2.0 backed by the Heritage Foundation in America first? I mean, it certainly doesn't look pretty. When I sort of chat with my buddies and stuff, you know, if we think about January 6th or the Trump administration, I think the saving grace of like a lot of that is that. that the people that tried to do it were kind of incompetent. You know, Trump certainly had all these different policy ideas,

whether that's deploying the military to the border, to, you know, I guess presumably shoot and kill migrants trying to come through, whether that is, you know, using the power of the federal government to remove education curriculum about LGBTQ lifestyles or history that gives adequate voice to the suffering of, minority communities in the U.S. Those kind of things were attempted, but sort of failed. And if you have a government of loyalness, I think some of the most radical policies that we

hear today on the campaign trail or some of this, you know, just really vicious rhetoric that surrounds these movements, I think it kind of gives us cause, you know, thinking that if this is the plan, we should maybe start to take some of that stuff a little bit more literally, because there won't be a guardrail in place to slow it down or to force it to moderate out to whatever degree would have been able to. It's certainly not good. I'll say that. But this is the thing, Jared, that makes me incredibly concerned, which is why us here on this show are trying to bring attention to what's happening, that this isn't just rhetoric. This isn't just bluster anymore. That they're putting billions of,

of dollars into dismantling America and democracy and the Constitution and the rule of law as we know it, so that their loyalists, Christophascist, whomever, can be in charge of how this country works and then wield the kind of power that can create the more distinct separate classes in this country to bring us back to what I have said before, which is pre-1954, it's 1953, in this country before the Civil Rights Act with Jim Crow but worse. And they've been able to do this so far with the overturning of affirmative action, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the black robes, the unelected body in the Supreme Court, is continuing their rampage of dismantling rights that have been fought and won over the last 60 years. Right. I also think it's

worth pointing out that the Supreme Court, you know, is expected to rule eventually on this argument of whether the president has immunity to do whatever it is they please. I don't think it takes a crystal ball to predict how the Supreme Court might rule on that when Trump is the subject of it. If Project 2025 is opening the door, I think that just kind of runs and kicks it off the hinges. And I just wonder, like, are we in your mind as somebody that has been studying this for quite some time, are we taking it as seriously as it is? I feel like people survived four years of Donald Trump. And in their minds, they're like, well, if he's elected, it'll be bad,

but it'll just be bad for four years. And then we'll get another bite at the apple. We'll get another turn at the wheel. Yeah. I mean, I think what has been hard, if you look at polling or, you know, different interviews that media places will do with reporters, or even just like conversations with friends, right? I think a lot of people don't really understand the stakes of what is happening or what could happen.

And, you know, I keep going back to it, but this is supported by some of the richest people in this country. And by, like I said, any conservative think tank worth anything in D.C. is signed up for this. You know, I'm sure there are, you know, Republicans that don't support this stuff. Of course there are. But they don't have the power right. right now. All of the institutional power has been molded around this vision that is, you know, outlined so vividly in Project 2025, which I should add is not a secret. You can buy it as a book printed out. They're quite proud of it. I think people just don't really understand like what is

lurking beneath the horse race coverage that they might see in the media of, you know, Trump is up and oh, Trump said this crazy thing. But there are these, you know, mechanisms and systems. And if it wasn't printed out in a book if they weren't giving interviews to the New York Times and bragging about how effective they think it's going to be, it would sound like a crazy conspiracy theory. But this is unfortunately like a very kind of sobering reality to face and contemplate. I just don't know that a lot of people really truly understand. I mean, I think listeners to podcasts like these, you know, hopefully are learning some things or we'll look into this or talk to people they know about it.

But it's, you know, you're run-of-the-mill person. You're a normal person who engages in politics, you know, once every four years. And, you know, kind of decides who they think they want to vote for maybe like a month ahead of time. I think the challenge will be clearly, you know, getting them to understand what is at stake here and what can be lost here in the amount of damage that could be done if there isn't some sort of resistance to it both from our elected officials and wanting to to demand elected officials, you know, people in Congress and stuff to provide resistance there, but also popular resistance, you know, that clear messages from society that this isn't going to fly. I mean, it's concerning

to me what it looks like if that doesn't happen. I don't want to be like a total doomsayer and say that, oh, there's going to be irreparable damage, but I mean, there's going to be a hell of a lot, I think. Let me be the doomsday, say, are for you. The damage that will happen to this country will take generations if ever it is repaired. If Donald Trump and I say, or any Republican, becomes president of the United States because they have the stage set for authoritarian rule. And I don't know what it's going to take, Jared, for people to wake up to this fact and this reality, like maybe it is, just such a large pill to swallow that the way that you've been living and existing inside of

this country, your family has lived and existed inside of this country for generations, is going to end because what comes next, if Donald Trump or any Republican becomes president of the United States will be like nothing you've ever seen before. So maybe it's difficult to wrap your mind around. But the question I have for you is what I see, and maybe, you know, you can tell me differently, is that I don't see a project 2025 on the left. I don't know what the plan is in order to combat and put people in place that are going to realize that we're at war with authoritarianism and fascism in this country

and that we can't just pretend that this election is like any other election and the next administration is going to be like any other administration. If there are efforts like this on the left, I'm certainly not aware of them. Not aware of anything close, really. I don't know that the left has really taken the time on the whole to consider what is going to happen this year, which is that this movement that has coalesced around Trump and once all these, you know, different far right policies, you know, all these extremist movements that have aligned themselves with this project. And then all the institutional backers with deep, deep pockets and resources like the Heritage Foundation

that have aligned with this project. They've spent the last four years organizing, planning, fundraising. They are approaching 2024 like a rematch. And they've spent all this time getting themselves together, running all kinds of various propaganda or making all these statements and heightening all these issues and using all. this crazy rhetoric to try to change the landscape to like best favor them in this rematch. It's almost a question of like who wants it worse. From the seat that I'm sitting in, I'm not getting, I mean, it's not nice, but like,

I'm not getting the sense that the left really wants this thing. You know, they certainly think that the alternative is bad, but that really sort of positive vision of like, we want this because we want to accomplish XYZ and we're going to do whatever we have to do and use whatever power we're given to make it happen, that kind of vigor just doesn't seem to exist. And it can be hard for me to wrap my head around that sometimes. Yeah, I think that the reality is that we are 10 months, close to nine months away from the most consequential election of modern history of our lifetime. It is not just about what happens to us here in the United States, but also what happens globally when America falls. And

It is shocking to me the coverage that I continue to see that is just treating this as a horse race as if it is something that is normal when it is anything but normal what the Republicans are doing and what mechanisms and what money they have put in place in order to destroy this country and hold power indefinitely. Jared, I thank you so much for taking the time to join the new abnormal and raise necessary alarms. Really appreciate you. Well, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Joining me now is Josh from Eddinger Mentum, which is an absolutely fantastic political newsletter that is published at Eddingermentum. News. Josh, for people who don't know, tell us a little bit about yourself. Basically, to introduce myself, first and foremost, I am a poster. I am posted on Twitter, like starting a couple of years ago posting about politics. And my big thing that I did was that I was one of the, like, kind of the most prominent people who got the 2022 midterms right. That fall, my big thing that I pushed was that I thought Democrats would do well that year. I, like, was very kind of vocal in saying that I thought the arguments for a red wave that were overrated, that I thought they were going to keep the Senate and probably maybe even

keep the House. And that ended up being right. And like not many people got that correctly, not many people were willing to predict that. So I got a lot of attention after that and I started writing about politics, like, kind of just to see what it would be like shortly after. And I've been doing that for a year now. It's gotten a big response. I'm currently in the top 25 U.S. political newsletters on Substack. I call it a newsletter on politics and history because I like kind of talking about

history as much as I do about like the current politics. I think that adds a lot to how you can kind of understand things. It's not like a particularly novel approach, but it's not a very novel approach. how I like doing it. I've written about mostly national politics for the past year or so. I got a lot of attention because I made another prediction sort of at the start of 2023, looking back on the past couple of years of election saying that the anti-woke, anti-trans stuff was also overblown. And that ended up being proven pretty correct by the election results and the Santis's campaign doing poorly. So I'm coming into this year off of a pretty good record. And I'll see how that continues for this

election, which will be my first presidential election, but I have a lot of ideas for that that we'll go into. Excellent. And yeah, I can't vouch for this newsletter enough. It's just, like you said, it's fairly new. It's only like you are so old, but it's one of those things that it's a fantastic read and it's kind of indispensable. And so I want to start. My first question is at what point will the media stop pretending there's a Republican primary? Like, I know for a lot of them, their jobs kind of depend on it. But come on, man. It's just embarrassing at this point. I understand it, personally, I get it. Well, I kind of went back and I looked back throughout the last elections. The last time we've had a presidential nomination, like, period, this uncompetitive across

both primaries was 1824. Wow. There is no roadmap for how the sheer boringness of this year, there is no precedent for it. You have to, like in the terms of like modern elections, there is literally no comparison whatsoever. This is easily the most like, on the rails election like that we've seen in maybe the history of this country. So I can sympathize with people trying to find content wherever they can. There's been a lot of articles recently about like how cable news hasn't seen like the bump that they expected they would from the election. But at the same time, you have to be kind of honest about it, which is why I haven't

covered it too much. I was a bit surprised the way that like the New Hampshire was covered because I thought Haley getting to 45% would be like something they try to ring. stuff out of, but no, all the headlines are just like, oh, this is over. Trump won. He's going to win the nomination. Like, let's get this over with, like, it's realistic, but I thought they would try to, like, be a bit more clever there. Yeah, absolutely. We are in sort of a weird position where, as numerous people have pointed out, it's almost like both parties are running an incumbent. Yeah, that hasn't happened since, like, I think, 1892. Yeah. So, you know, it's not really a

surprise, I guess, that both races are completely uncompetitive. But, okay, so I want to to talk about a piece that I got a real kick out of that you published a few weeks ago, and it was a piece that listed the five biggest political winners and losers of 2023. And I particularly got a big kick out of at the end, instead of just putting Ron DeSantis on your losers list, you kind of set him apart and actually named him the winner of the 2023 Ron DeSantis Award and said that his campaign is the kind of thing that only happens once in a lifetime. And I know you've got a new piece out, I think just today, talking about just how historically bad of a primary campaign, Iran. Yeah, it was really something to behold. I think like last summer I said this was

the collapse you only see once in a generation. And the piece I just put out was kind of investigation into that. Like, is that actually true? I went back through like 40 years of primaries. And the answer is yes. The only comparisons I could really find for him were Hillary in 2016, who won. So that's not really like even a direct comparison. Giuliani maybe in 2008, which I think DeSantis was still worse. And Gary Hart in 1988, who just straight up dropped out during the election primary efforts, for sure. He's easily, I think, the worst Republican in history, at least the modern history of primaries. I don't know about, like, Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. I kind of tried to do like the past 50 years or so.

But it was really something. I was, like, everybody wants to say, like, oh, I knew he was terrible from the beginning. He was always bad. Like, people pointed that one moment in the debate to say that they were always ahead of it. I was always a bit bewildered by why it was happening then, but I got the idea of DeSantis having the appeal he did a year ago, like the idea of him being a pen of a Trump, like there was something going on there that made sense. And he just totally butchered that. He lost everything. Like not even that, like, he didn't beat Trump or come even close, but he's not even

Trump's main competitor in like the way people will look back on the primary in the future. Like, he lost that. Like, he's just nothing now. He's a slightly more popular Vivek in terms of how the race went. No, it really is unreal how far his stock has just plummeted. Also, in that winners and losers piece, you had Donald Trump on both lists as a winner and a loser. Show your work. The idea there is that for as much as people have looked at Trump's rise in the polls as a consequence of Biden, like saying, oh, people are just convinced the economy's bad because of TikTok or whatever, or it's because of the wars. I think there have been some things Trump has done, mostly inadvertently, that actually have kind of improved his position.

his campaign looks a little more put together than it had before. Specifically, that was just staying out of the spotlight. He's siphoned himself off to truth social, which I think has been a really big benefit to him because it allows him to remain kind of as an abstract concept in people's minds instead of like what he actually is, which people really hate. So we've seen his like favorability pulling kind of intups slightly over the year. He obviously totally locked down the Republican primary, which you could take for granted, but I think was still a pretty big achievement.

Like, that's a big thing to accomplish. The loser thing is that he has 91 criminal indictments. If you could probably go to prison by the end of the year, I felt like it would be a bit incomplete to leave that part of the story off. Yeah, no, that makes sense. All right, shifting gears a little bit. Let's talk about Joe Biden. Start with his polling.

Why is he polling so badly? Yeah, well, it's very simple in my mind. Politics is as much about leadership as it is about ideology or policies or even partisanship. And people do not have faith in. as a leader to a tremendous degree that I don't think people have really come to terms with. The one thing that has always stuck with me when I'm trying to kind of understand, like, well, Democrats did very well in 2022. They're doing very well in special elections. Why is Biden so uniquely poor? It's that a supermajorie of the country flat out thinks he's too

old to serve as president, which is a big thing to say. Absolutely. That is not like a small kind of consideration. Like, oh, on one hand, he's old. On the other hand, this, like, which is how people kind of think about it. If people think he's too old to serve as president, you're kind of done under most circumstances. That's not like a small consideration. That's like a fatal blow to how people think of you as a viable candidate. And in that light, people are just looking for any alternative, which I think that Trump is only leading by small margin speaks to how toxic he is. But people should really take seriously that Biden is like because of his age, because of perceptions have come up under his presidency, whether it fair or not, that he's, like, the world has gone to

hell over him. Like, the economy's been bad. Things just, like, the idea of him as an elder statesman that existed in 2020, it was a very big part of his appeal, is kind of shot. There's just not really any compelling, like, sense of purpose for his candidacy beyond inertia. And people are just not rallying to that, even against Trump. Like, I don't think you can dismiss that, like, someone like RFK is polling at 20% entirely. It reflects a huge dissatisfaction. People just cannot get it cited or hopeful about these candidates in any way, shape, or form. What the Democrats are hoping is that people will say, yeah, Biden's really old, but, and then they'll list a bunch of things. But what we're seeing is people may list a bunch of things, and then they're saying, but he's really old,

because that's their focus. Yeah, that's the, like saying that he's just straight up too old the serve as president. Like, that's not like a superficial judgment. Like, this is somebody who has to run wars. Like, it's a national security thing in people's minds. There's the, like, kind of the more abstract concepts, like representing the country where people are kind of embarrassed by being this like very old, like kind of uncharismatic person. But that's like a huge, tremendous thing. And that's the thing that kind of squares the circle for me the most because we know that like kind of the way thing is a generic Democrat is far more popular than a Trump or Republican. And if Biden had his, like, the reputation he did back in 2020, I think he would be doing

extremely well right now. He just doesn't. The presidency has really taken a toll on him. Events have taken a toll on him. People disapprove how he's handled practically every issue besides abortion. And Trump has an interesting role here where he's not really being considered like this outsider candidate, but his appeal is kind of as like the competence candidate, which it's hard for people to think about him in that light, but compared to somebody who people think is literally, the dementia level senior citizen, maybe like I wouldn't phrase it exactly that way. But somebody they think is just like doesn't have it to actually have the job. Like he's just not up for the job in a fundamental capacity. And I think that Trump is at least with it enough to manage the

presidency. He gets kind of a more pragmatic appeal in that way that I don't think a lot of people have recognized. People are still kind of viewing it very linearly in terms of he's the outsider, Biden is the insider. He's chaos. Biden's competence. That appeal has been reversed a little bit. And I don't think the Biden campaign's really aware of that. Man, that's really interesting. And this sort of leads me to a piece you wrote a few months ago about how you think Biden can win. And I want to run through some of the things you list. And I love the first one, which is, as you phrased it, it's abortion stupid. And you say that Biden needs to get over whatever personal qualms he has about this issue. and in your words, grow up?

Yeah, absolutely. It's very kind of strange. There's like this kind of whininess and self-centeredness and narcissism from the White House. The best way I can describe it is that they don't want to be bailed out by this other issue that's not in their control. Like the Bidenomics thing, they were trying to push forward with their own legacy that was advertising themselves on their own terms. And it's like just viewing that stuff. It's like, why do you care? If it's a winning issue, you should just push forward with it anyways.

is the personal stuff about Biden being uncomfortable with the issue. I have no sympathy for. It's like, if you want to have this job, you have to actually not care about stuff like that. I think that they're messaging. I mean, we'll get to the other stuff later on. They have kind of improved a little bit, I think over the past couple weeks. It doesn't feel like as much as a five alarm fire as it did like in the summer and the fall when they were still trying to push the Bidonomic stuff. The speech about democracy, I think was fine. The abortion messaging, I think they're doing that pretty well. But they should have been doing that that six months ago. Probably it's better late than never, I think, but this is the one issue where Biden still polls better than Trump. We've seen it time and time again, like drive Democrats

to really spectacular kind of unbelievable overperformances. It's like it's not everything in politics is complicated. This is just like what he can win on straight up. Yeah, absolutely. And the second thing on your list is run as a Democrat, which I guess at first glance seems like, well, duh, except it's really not. Is it? And look, I'm old enough to remember. There was a long amount of time where Democrat was sort of a dirty word. Yeah, that's, I think, how people still view it. Yeah, but I do think you are very good in pointing this out. It's sort of, it's not anymore. Yeah, like the average state level Democrat in just a random state where they've elected a Democratic governor or senator is popular and has pulled extremely well. Like the kind of idea of the average

liberal candidate, which I think Biden also did represent in 2020 and did so successfully, is appealing the people after Trump. I think that was one of the big things that Trump's election did change. You kind of revitalized liberalism and a lot of states in that way. With Biden, I think that there was, like, if you look at the popularism stuff, people tried to push, the big kind of central underlying assumption with that was that Biden is more popular than the Democratic brand or liberalism will be. So we have to find a way to separate him from the rest of the party and make him his own thing. But the exact opposite is true. You're seeing now that like generic Democrats are pulling very, high against Trump in the polls. They're beating Trump-aligned candidates by extraordinary margins.

But the Biden campaign with the Bidenomics and economics messaging and trying to push him personally as this compelling figure is still acting in this mindset where the rest of the party is a drag on them and they need to break away from it and create their own brand. The exact opposite is true at this point. Biden is a drag on the rest of his party. The rest of his party is doing pretty well, especially after Roe has been overturned. This is a bit of a more subtle thing. I don't think it'll like really change stuff dramatically, but it just represents a shift in mindset that I think they need to adopt.

The other Democrats in the party are not the problem. They are the problem. And if they're going to insist on running, they don't need to reinvent the wheel here. Yeah, just all really, really good stuff. And I absolutely encourage our listeners to read the whole thing. But I just want to touch on two more and I'll lump them together. You say Biden and his people need to let Brandon be Brandon and also take the gloves off against Trump.

Yeah. The let Biden be Biden thing was a bit underhanded in a way. Like the implication there is that he actually is kind of too old to do this stuff. It's just saying, well, if you say that he's old enough to run, you should be getting him out there in public a lot and proving to people that he can do all these things. I think that the real answer there is that he can't. And if he can't, then the answer is that he shouldn't be running in the first place. But we're just working off the presumption there. Like obviously, if he really is capable of all this stuff, then there's no reason to keep them hidden as much as he had that creates a terrible perception. The take the gloves off against Trump thing, I felt like he should have been doing that from day one. The stuff where he called the former guy and didn't try to message around him, I thought it was a bit too clever. They stuck with that for a bit too long. They have been a lot more aggressive recently, which I think is smart. There is a bit of a dramatic break. I think that it'll work because Trump is always unpopular and kind of leaning back into that probably can help. The big thing is, I think, his indictments, they have kind of held off.

talking about those. But that is the main concern a lot of people have. People don't want a president who has been convicted of a felony and kind of pushing on that, I think. I mean, there's obviously some concerns like with his own Justice Department being the one to indict him. But, I mean, you can get surrogates to do that. It has to be part of the messaging because right now it's the biggest liability he has right now. Yeah, absolutely. We talk a lot about the possibility of Trump losing the popular vote and winning the electoral college. But you think this is also something Biden could do? Yeah, this is a really kind of wacky thing, and maybe I'm looking too much into it. But if you look at the polling right now, you can see Biden is down in the popular vote, and he's down by a lot in some of the Sunbelt swing states, like Georgia, Arizona, Nevada. He's not doing well there. He's like five points behind like you'd expect. But he's been remarkably kind of resilient in a lot of the Midwestern swing states. He's actually pulling ahead in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania right now, like even while he's down nationally, Michigan is kind of a weird spy room where he's pulling them. numbers have been really bad, but it's a small sample size.

And Democrats have done very well there recently. So it should be decent ground for him. And the thing is, is that if he loses those three-stage, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, but he holds Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, he wins 270 to 268. And you could have other things happen, like his margins and blue states could go down a lot. He could get killed in red states by more than he has before. And that could end up with him winning 270 to 268 while losing the popular vote. Man, yeah, that honestly had never even entered my mind as a possibility, but, you know, hearing you describe it, it sounds unbelievably plausible.

Josh, I really, I really appreciate you coming on. And I got to tell you, folks, head over to eddingermentum.News and subscribe to this newsletter because it really is, it's absolutely fantastic. Josh, thanks again. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody. Andy Levy.

How are you closing out this guy? Godforsaken week with your fuck that guy. Well, I'm going to close this out with a guy who just visited a godforsaken place, that being the site of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. And I'm talking about Elon Musk. He went and paid Auschwitz a visit. And he said some bizarre things in an interview around that same time. He said, in the circles that I move, I see almost no anti-Semitism.

Two-thirds of my friends are Jewish. I have twice as many Jewish friends as non-Jewish friends. I'm like Jewish by association. And then he went on and said, I'm aspirationally Jewish. And I'm listening to this. And I'm like, okay, first of all, you're counting your Jewish friends. Doesn't everybody? Is that not?

Never a good sign. Oh, it's not a thing? Oh, okay. Weird. And in particular, when you're visiting Auschwitz, don't count Jews. Mm-hmm. Pro tip from someone who's actually Jewish. Not a good place to be keeping a headcount of Jews. And I'm aspirationally Jewish. What the fuck does that mean?

That to me sounds a lot like there's a word for them that I won't use, but like white people who like to quote unquote act black. Which, if you've ever been around that, it's very painful. He sits there and I have seen no anti-Semitism. Bro, have you looked on the site you own? I promise you, it will take you all of five. seconds to see anti-Semitism. You could look at your own tweets, by the way, and see anti-Semitism. So for him to sit there and say, I see almost no anti-Semitism, yeah, I suppose, in a sense, that's like a blind person saying I see no TV shows. You can't see it, but

it's there. And it's all around you, and you're contributing to it. In fact, a new report shows that Twitter is by far the most prominent purveyor of anti-Semitic content. This report shows that it's out of TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, Twitter was responsible for almost half of the anti-Semitic posts that were found that were used in the data said. It was 47.3%. So, yeah, you've never seen anti-Semitism, Elon. Again, you know, look at the site that you own and operate. And then Ben Shapiro was there with him, and they played some sort of video. I couldn't make it through this. whole thing. But Ben Shapiro basically, they played a video of what it would have been like if social

media had existed in the 1940s and how that would have helped prevent the Holocaust by alerting Jews that they should get out of Germany and Poland and all those areas. And it was just the most ahistoric thing in the world. And it was just so painful. And I just sit there and I'm like, really, Ben Shapiro, this is what you've come to? Because there was a point in time where Ben Shapiro was like a fairly intelligent standard conservative. And whether he's doing it for the power or because it's made him a very rich man, we talked earlier about Tim Scott and people like that debasing themselves. He has gone ahead and done the same thing.

And he's just turned himself into just an absolute shonda. For those reasons, and, you know, on any given day of the week, Elon Musk could be your fuck that guy. But I'm going to do it specifically for this reason. Fuck that guy, Daniel. Mm-mm-mm. Fuck that guy. I have no words for him. Every day of the week, I could find the fuck-that-guy for Elon Musk. All right. Danielle, get me out of this. Who's your fuck-that-guy? Oh, yeah. Let's just lift everybody up because mine is fucking abysmal. This is what I'll say to preface this. I'm going to say a very large number, folks, with regard to my fuck-that guy, which is Greg Abbott, the state of Texas.

and I want people to realize that these numbers are actual people. So it's an article in the Houston Chronicle that states that more than 26,000 rape-related pregnancies have been estimated after Texas outlawed abortions. 26,000 rape-related pregnancies. Okay? So during the 16 months after the state outlawed all abortions with no exceptions for survivors of rape or incest, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal of the American Medical Association. This is quoting directly. That's the highest estimate among the 14 states with total abortion bans, with Texas having the largest population according to the study. figure helps put the magnitude of the state's laws into perspective, especially for those that can't access abortion pills or travel at a state to receive abortion care. I want to now double

back to this motherfucker, Greg Abbott in 2022 following the reversal of Roe v. Wade. When he said that Texas would, quote, eliminate all rapists. So that there was going to be no need for abortion, no need for emergency abortions or anything like that. Particularly as it pertain to rape, we don't need to have exceptions for these horrific acts of violence against women and people with uteruses.

No, because Greg Abbott was going to eliminate it. How the fuck is that working for him? 26,000 forced births. So basically, if you are pregnant because you've been raped, the state of Texas, backed by Greg Abbott and Maga Supremis tell you that you have three choices, maybe. One, to raise your rapist child. Two, to try and seek out an abortion but end up in jail. Or end up trying to take care of matters yourself and end up.

end up losing your life. Those are the options for people in the state of Texas. And when I say that number, 26,000 rape-related pregnancies, these are people who now have basically no future except to be chained and linked to one of the most, if not the most horrific thing that has ever happened to them. That's what they want to nationalize. if Donald Trump or any Republican becomes president of these United States.

And for that reason, the entire state of Texas, Greg Abbott and all of the copycat governors out there, fuck that guy, fuck all of those guys. This is disgusting, horrific. There aren't enough words to describe these numbers. Yeah, I have nothing to add to that. Just fuck those guys straight to hell. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday.

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