The Daily Beast Podcast - Sep. 27 Member Bonus: Is Trump or Biden More Likely to Keel Over on Debate Night?

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

This members-only episode was originally published on September 27, 2020 and moved to this feed for full member access. “People are dying, tens of thousands of people are out of work, he’s embarrassing,” is not only the quote of the year from Philippe Reines but also sums up how he, Rick Wilson, Molly Jong-Fast, and Mike Madrid feel about Donald Trump’s dwindling support among his own base. To make matters worse for the president, he is set to debate Joe Biden for the first time Tuesday night, and he doesn’t have that same 2016 anger and energy he drummed up to defeat Hillary Clinton. In this new members-only bonus episode of The New Abnormal, Rick, Molly, Philippe and Mike discuss what Joe Biden should say, word for word, when he gets on that stage with Trump and the one thing that could sink the president without Joe’s help. Two words: no crowds. “That is where Trump is at his worst,” says Mike. “Without that he’s going to be like a goat in the wilderness.” There’s also the whole painting-Biden-as-senile by the Trump campaign thing, and it just won’t work, Mike says: “They’re tried to convince people that he’s senile and will drool on people while at the same time trying to convince people he’s some mastermind of the left that’s going to being about socialism.” It is quite ironic. “If one of those guys is more likely to keel over Tuesday night on stage, it’s not Joe Biden,” adds Philippe. Then, the group switches gears to talk about Trump losing support among a few of his core voter demographics: senior citizens and non-college educated men. (“COVID has broken the Trump fever") Plus! Rick gives a dramatic reading of one of Trump’s rally quotes and it’s just a bogus as you’d expect. And the group discusses that awkward moment when the crowd booed Trump at Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s funeral: “This is the only time he’s worn his mask when we desperately needed to see his face.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Folks on a very special pre-debate episode of the New Abnormal, Molly and I are joined by Mike Madrid, political director and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, and by Philippe Rydis, all-time returning guest champion of the New Abnormal. Just two more visits to the New Abnormal, and he gets his official bedazzled members-only jacket with a giant five on the back. I think the swag list may have to include this, Molly. So anyway, folks, thank you so much for joining us. We know that the debate is going to be the big focus this week, unless Donald Trump

you know, shits the bed in some other ridiculous way. We know the debate's going to be a big focus. We want to talk a little bit about that, a little bit about what's going on to the campaign, and give you guys a special weekend episode. With that, Mike, welcome, Philippe, welcome, Molly. I hope you're having a fine Friday afternoon while we are recording this. I'm going to jump right into it. We'll start with you, Philipp.

What are the stakes for Joe Biden? And how do you think this thing is going to turn out when they enter the ring together on Tuesday? Well, you know, there's a lot to unpack there. I think in simplest terms, you've got to start from the place. that there are some people who ask the question, do debates matter? Or they straight out say that debates don't matter. And I can't imagine that anyone on this podcast right now agrees with that. If you were to screw up a debate, I think you'd find out pretty quickly how much they matter. First off, it's just a very strange, you don't even realize what you're seeing.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump have not been together, possibly as long as since inauguration date 2017. Maybe Barbara Bush's or H.W's funerals, I'm not sure. In 2016, we couldn't even remember the last time Hillary was with Trump. She thought it might have been as late as his wedding in 2006. So as much as we talk about these two all the time, and we see them on TV all the time, they've actually never been together. And there's something about that moment when it comes on that you're finally seeing these two people side by side that we have been trying to process side by side.

And of course, that is going to have a huge. effect. And there's no point in the campaign where either of them will be talking to anywhere near as large of an audience. They're probably talking to two, maybe three times as many people as they did their convention speeches. I heard it was going to be about the estimates are around 70 million. Wow. That is, I mean, it's not Super Bowl, but that's Super Bowl-ish. It's an opportunity, more than anything. I mean, like if I did it, and I did, kind of, you go out there and you just, I don't want to screw up, I don't want to screw up, I don't screw up, but it's an opportunity. And it's an opportunity to do what you do every day.

I mean, if you're doing this right, what Joe Biden says on Tuesday night in Cleveland isn't any different than what he will say on Thursday in Miami or last Monday in New York or a month from now in Miami because you have a message and you're saying it. This is just a bigger audience. And you've got this numb nut 10 feet away who is trying to, you know, the way I think it is imagine yo-yo-ma trying to perform with a guy on stage with an air horn. That's pretty difficult. And, you know, everyone's going to end up leaving pretty unhappy, including the audience. Let's put it this way. If the presidential debate commission were to announce that they were

canceling all the presidential debates, I think that that Biden can be like, oh, okay, would have been nice. But so what? The Trump campaign would have been shit. We need these debates. Because from their perspective, it's strange. They somehow think that Donald Trump, more people seeing more of Donald Trump is helpful, even though that hasn't really been the case. But they also have this weird and very passive strategy that Joe Biden is just going to hand the election to them by having some kind of catastrophic moment where he might quite literally keel over. And they've, they've pinned their entire hopes on this idea that the more that Joe Biden is out there, and the more people are watching him, that he's just going to have some kind of off-the-chart self-employing moment

that is more likely to happen to Donald Trump than it is to Joe Biden. Right. I think you're right. And Mike, we were talking about this morning. Part of this, it's going to be a problem for Trump is they've spent so long trying to turn Biden into the image of a babbling idiot, right? Look, there's no question about that part. And I think Philippa is exactly right.

The expectations game is just so out of whack, not just because they've set the bar at so many different levels, but they've set it in so many different arenas. They've tried to convince people that at first he's, you know, borderline senile who's probably going to drool on himself in the middle of this thing. Well, at the same time, trying to convince themselves, he's some sort of Che Guevara mastermind of the left who's going to bring about international socialism at the same time. Can we also talk about one other thing about Trump, which he seems even less, if this is possible, less sharp than he was four years ago? No, you're 100% right. And I, you know, I was going to say, I can't say Donald Trump is different because if you do, then you get bombarded with, well,

if you think Donald Trump is different than you haven't been paying attention. You know what? I'm paying attention. I'm paying too close attention. Paying attention longer than you fucking happens. But that said, Donald Trump is not different, but the circumstances are different. And while I think everyone on this call probably subscribes to the idea that he's got something, you know, psychological going on, decompensating. I agree with you, Molly, and I think because of this, and let me try to state it quickly clearly. He can't control what he says, but in 2016, what he would regurgitate was really simple. I mean, he had his four pillars, immigration, Obamacare, trade, and the swamp. He had a very honed attack on Hillary, crooked Hillard. He never spent any time himself defending, even acts

as Hollywood, locker room talk, he would dispense so that he'd move on. So his debate performance this debate answers were very simple. It was always one, I'm great, two, you're terrible, three, I'm going to mumble some kind of digression that is probably not involved in anything whatsoever. Fast forward for a year. Same guy. He's no smarter. He's probably dumber. He's definitely less healthy. But he does not have his four pillars. It is unclear what it is that he, his home base messages. Two, he does not have a coherent attack on Joe Biden. He continues to throw spaghetti at the wall and nothing is really sticking. Three, all he does is defend himself. He is a human grievance machine. So whereas three years, four years ago, he'd have his kind of answer. Now his answer is, well, if you

asked him about China in 2016, he would say, oh, the Chinese, I love the China. China is great. I do, I have hundreds of deals in China. China, they know me. The biggest bank in China, they're in my building. My building is great, beautiful building. But Chinese, they don't respect her. They don't respect here. So you have the, I'm great, you're terrible and some nonsense about a bank being in my building. Mr. Trump, it's 2020. What do you think of China? Well, look, I went down that ramp and it was slippery. And I, the last 10 feet, I ran. And my, look at the transcript with the Ukraine, beautiful, perfect transcript to the Ukrainian. Just such a perfect transcript. He's got his just his grievance list and he can't control himself. So what you, and I think it's a very long way of Molly of saying,

his language has really gone from being never particularly Shakespearean, but it's gone from a series of digressions to really one long non-sequit. And it is very hard to process what he's saying because he doesn't use proper nouns interrupting himself. And it sounds silly. But while we're all watching him, whether it's during the day at a press conference or at the debate, and we start looking at each other and say, what did he just say? Poor Joe Biden is standing on stage 10 feet away. And he's got to not only understand it, but respond to it. And I think the language is a really big deal because he's got so many thoughts in his head that are all trying to rush for the exit.

And they're bumping into each other. But I notice more than that, even just he has word retrieval issues that I did not see in 2016. Like, Yosemites, remember Yosemites? Yeah. Like, he's had a lot of problems with the language in a way that, again, Remember, he tweeted twice that he had not had any small strokes. But I'm just saying there does seem like the whole idea was that they would attack Biden for,

you know, because they, because of a cognitive deficit, which feels very much like a projection. Well, let's be clear. If one of those two guys is likely to keel over on Tuesday night on the stage, it's not Joe Biden. If Donald Trump goes there, I would, if I would Joe Biden say, look, you know, only one of us, is sneaking off to the hospital in the middle of the afternoon. So, you know, if you really want to go there, let's go. I've thought from the beginning that if Donald Trump said something to the effect about Joe Biden's health, Joe should just look at him and go, let's start doing push-ups,

bitch. Here we go. Because I guarantee you Donald has one in him. Yeah, Donald drop and give me one. A question for Mike Madrid and Rick Wilson here. Do you think Trump has done any debate prep? I concur. I second that motion from Rick Wilson.

No, clearly he hasn't. I'm sure they probably try it and schedule it, run a few things by him. He won't pay attention, and he'll move on. But look, here's what I think Trump's biggest weakness is going into the debates. The fact that you're not going to have an audience is really what is going to undestabilize him. And Trump doesn't need a big one. He just needs a handful of people that will get some sort of group cackling or some sort of group response. But without that is that is where Trump is at his worst. You'll recall in the past month or two when he's did these one-on-one interviews with journalists. He has literally no gauge when he's not getting some sort of feedback from others as to when he's going off the rails and whether what he's saying is smart or stupid or incoherent or whatever it is. He literally needs the feedback and the larger the crowd, the more comfortable he is than his PT Barnum persona. He needs that stagecraft.

And without that, I think he's going to be wandering around like a goat out in the wilderness just looking like prey with vultures circling around him because he's going to have literally no gauge on which way he's going and where he's heading. I mean, I think that's true. And you see that with, remember that interview he did with Laura Ingram where he was like comparing, right? He was talking about show. Remember that?

Where he was talking about what it's like to shoot someone and how it was like golf. And she kept saying, no, no. You don't want to say that. And he still didn't get it. And he kept saying it. Or the cognitive test. He just keeps going. He doesn't realize what he's saying is just assonine because there's literally no feedback.

And his personality requires that external reaction in order to give him a guidepost as to where he's heading. And barring that, he's just listless. He's fucked with Chris Wallace. Exactly. Oh, yes. Imagine the conversation would be having, if Steve Scully, who I love and respect, but God bless him, the reason I love and respect him is because he'd be and will be

probably a terrible debate moderator because he's not used to Trump. He's not used to really anything that's not human. It would be very different. You know, Chris Wallace isn't going to fact check every 30 seconds, but he's not going to let the dudes he's go by. And more importantly, to Molly's point, to Mike's point, his usual, Trump's usual safe word, you know, that he can say on Fox, he can say fake and, you know, everyone stops with the BDSM or whatever it is that they're, that they're doing. The safe word won't work in front of Chris Wallace. Right. That's true. It's interesting. there's one topic on the list, which I thought was like a Fox topic, which was like violence in radical city, you know, urban violence or something, which is like preposterous or crime in cities.

And that one is like the only one that he's probably prepared for at all. And he's going to go on about, you know, how dangerous New York City is, which is kind of insane. I think that those stakes are even higher than Donald Trump's people realize. Because as Mike will tell you, this is the first time in this election, we, We started to see the top come off of some of his most important and central demographic support groups. This week, there's been a big shift, and Mike can give you more about it, but it is, there is a big moment happening right now in this campaign. Mike, tell us, I need to know what this moment is. Well, so for the first time, what the last three rounds of polling have showed, really in the last few days, culminating with the Fox News Bowl, is that there's an eating away.

there's a deterioration in Fox, I'm sorry, Donald Trump's base of support with non-college-educated white males. Whoa. Well, there you go, right? There's like this tectonic shift happening. Yeah. And it's not just one poll. It's not just an outlier. It's happened in the last three public polls. And it's happening. And it's why Ohio has come into play, which was really, I mean, candidly, frankly, it was a state that we had all kind of written off and just said, Ohio is going to be what it's going to be. It's Trumpy. There's a lot of ways to 270 for Biden around it. Let's find a number of different foot paths to get there. But Pennsylvania, again, is widening.

You're starting to see the floor in Wisconsin not only settle, but his upward trajectory, Biden I'm talking about, move upwards. And then there's outlier states like Nevada, New Hampshire, which are getting better for Biden. These are all states that have one thing in common. They've got large numbers of non-college educated whites, and the movement is happening with males. So this is the base that we never thought would ever, ever, ever move, right? These are the guys on Fifth Avenue that'll never leave them and bury the body when he shoots it. But we are seeing some movement there.

It's happening. Well, hold on. Mike, how do we know that they, in the last four years, didn't get a college education or maybe a GED? Fair enough. The polls are wrong. The polls are wrong. Mike, why?

Well, that's the question, right? I don't think it's because of the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. No, I don't think it's a Supreme Court that's turning them. Right. I think, look, what we are seeing is two things. and one is the COVID numbers are starting to pop in the Midwest and in the Rust Belt, and they have never hit that part of the state, I'm sorry, of the country before. So that is a new dynamic and local news is starting to be swamped with that.

The only other possible explanation is a cascading effect, and I'm not saying I subscribe to this, of all these things that have started to kind of unravel, everything from the Atlantic Monthly story on his comments towards veterans, to the Woodward book, to just this rallies he's having in these large settings while COVID's starting to pop up. Right. And he's getting his supporters sick. I mean, there's got to be some of that.

Like, I went to a Trump rally and got sick. I mean, it's so contagious. That's what the T-shirts are saying that they sell. To a Trump rally, all I got was sick in this crazy t-shirt. But yeah, look, this is one area. Look, he's moved a lot. COVID was the one thing that has broken the Trump fever with basically every part of the Republican coalition

at one time or another when it hits the stuff. state. Okay, we saw it with seniors. We saw it with faith-based voters. Evangelical voters were moving. But when we isolated it just for the non-college educated, you know, male vote, it has never moved until now. Now, it could be anomalous. It could be something peculiar at that part of the country at this moment in time. Maybe it moves back. But we have not seen this move in four years. And we are seeing noticeable, discernible movement across the last three public polls that have happened. So we know that it is something that is occurring for whatever reason. Do you think some of it is because of the enhanced unemployment expiring at the end of July and then never be a good theory, Molly.

I had not thought of that. That's a very good theory. Well, I just wondered, like, when it expired? When does this air? Because I'm going to steal that on Twitter. Like, I just felt like when it expired at the end of July, I thought people would, he'd start hemorrhaging votes because these people had gone from being able to keep their houses to not. And so this would be enough time. just sort of makes sense.

Mike and his team watch the COVID numbers and all the other economic underpinnings very, very closely. And you see there's, oh, I'll let Mike describe it. There's a pattern of the spike and the drop in support. We call it buying into the spike, which is a little bit macabre. I understand that. But we would be derelict in our duties if we weren't. You come to the right place.

Yeah. Welcome. The new macab. McCob is really, we're pretty into macab over here. Okay, well, fair enough. Good place to be. So what happens is we literally, when we see counties and we track them all over the country, when a spike starts to occur and increase starts to occur, we know that within a 14-day period, we're going to start seeing numbers get to a point where they're dangerous and above the national average. And then we know shortly thereafter that hospitals are going to start getting overcrowded. And so we literally start targeting political messaging into those zip codes and into those counties as the spike goes up. We then know, because of the life cycle of the virus, that unfortunately fortunately, there's going to be a large number of deaths that will occur for about a week period. And then after that week, there's that commensurate fall off and then the economic consequences that occur as a result of these counties shutting down completely.

So what we do is we literally buy and message into each specific phase of the virus's life cycle. And it's one of the reasons why when you saw this thing tear through Arizona and Texas and Florida, the Sunbelt states through the summer, that you saw the floor levels of Donald Trump's support base fall. I'm not saying it's the only reason, but there's no question now that it was a part of it. And so what we do now is we track, as Rick said, all the virus cases that are happening county by county. And we can tell literally with a very high degree of accuracy what's going to happen to Donald Trump's polling numbers when a county reaches a certain infection rate. Wow. I have another question about the financial stuff with Trump.

You know, they're doing this $200 card to seniors. Right. And he couldn't get the pharma company. to agree on it. So he just did it with taxpayer money. I guess he's clearly, do you think that will move the needle at all for him? Not in the face of a coronavirus outbreak. Right. Which you're basically asking as a senior to take a $200 gift card, right, for your medication or your life. It's not a hard decision to make. And again, these numbers, there's no Republican president has ever won the White House without winning in the high single digits at least, or at worse, I should say, with

seniors with 65 plus voters. He's in a negative two position right now with Biden. Okay, so he's losing the senior citizen vote. That is never, I don't even know if, I'm not even sure a Republican candidate for president has lost the White House and lost the senior citizen vote. But that's where it's that. That's just where it's sitting. So what does Biden need to do on Tuesday night? Well, for my impression, I think he needs to come out very assertively and very aggressively. And again, keep the ball in Donald Trump's court. We do know one thing about it. Weed the Lincoln Project. The guy takes the bait. So bait the guy. Don't try to be the old, you know, the elder statesman here. Don't try to take the high road. Be Joe from Scranton, right?

Give him what they want. Give it to him what he wants and get into that fight and that back and forth with him. It's not going to bring Biden's support levels down. There's nobody in the United States that isn't convinced that Joe Biden isn't a better master of public policy that Donald Trump is. That's not why people are voting or making their own determinations. The more the focus is on Donald Trump, and the more they allow Donald Trump to be Trump, the better off Joe Biden is. So I think you can recast the frame by coming at him very aggressively, very assertively, and I think that combined with the fact that there's no external stimuli guiding a listless Donald Trump, he's got a pretty good roadmap to making Donald Trump look pretty bad because he does a good job of that by himself.

One strategy that Joe Biden should consider is coming out saying, I want to thank Ohio for hosting us. And Chris, thank you for moderating with that. I yield my 45 minutes of dollars. That's fantastic. It's right. I mean, the one specific thing, we all laugh about Trump's. Everybody knows.

People are saying, I didn't know until recently. It's called Paralyptus, which now that I've learned it, I can't stop repeating it. It's not ineffective. And I think if there was one tangible suggestion I would give to Joe Biden would be, you know, the first time you speak, whether, is it, are there opening statements on Tuesday? I believe they're all. Or they're just going right to questions. I believe they're on.

So I would, you know, I would say, hi, I'm Joe Biden. I think we want to build back better, vote for me. But you know what? Before we start, I got to say, I got to, I hate to do it, but I got to spoil the evening. I'm going to tell you right now what's going to happen. Because Donald Trump, we see him every day. And when he lies, it means that it's the truth. And when he says fake, it means it's real.

When he accuses someone or something, it means he's guilty of it. And I can't say that every time he opens his mouth. And Chris Wallace can't say it every time. But we all know it. 100 million people, everybody knows it. So, Mr. President, you know, you can do what you do every day. You can waste that time or we can have a conversation. But everyone's on to you.

We all see through you. And I think it's something he just needs to jump out and say ahead of time. Because there's no other way to fact check. I mean, you could say, you've got to just not be subtle about it. You just need to say, ladies and gentlemen, everything this guy says is going to be some degree of bullshit or contrived or wrong or mean spirited. And don't ever forget that because you already know it. of which folks, it's Friday night while we're recording this. And I just want to say,

this is a quote from Donald Trump at his rally in Virginia. Trump on his standing with Latinos. We are polling at numbers that I guess no Republican has ever pulled before, perhaps Abraham Lincoln. But in those days, he wasn't big into the Hispanic movement, I think. Abraham had other things to think about, don't we think? He also recounted how he spoke to a black audience in Georgia and says, he likes to explain he likes to ask whether they want black or African American better. They usually say black. He asks again in Virginia. And a few people shout black. It's black, he says, satisfied. And you know, it's funny is that we listen to that. And then we spend a few minutes saying, well, why is it that people are showering on Donald Trump? I mean, it's possible. The question isn't why. It's why is it taken so long? I mean, there's no reason to not to stick with this guy. I mean, the people who finally cling to him. Yeah. He's crazy. People are dying. Tens of millions are out of work. He's embarrassing. I mean, there's nothing better than four years. ago. He's not even entertaining. I mean, but he also has no plan. I mean, he had, you know, there's no

plan to get these people enhanced unemployment to get them back to work. You realize that he and Jared, the wonder boy with this microdata, if all they had done is found someone to produce masks, if we each had 10 masks, I honestly believe this would be a neck and neck race. And it's logical to have taken this position. It's not like, I don't think about you was saying, if you give up your guns, you'll, you'll beat COVID. It was. But, but. But. But. But. Part of what's happened is that part of it is that he's dropped the ball, but part of it is that he ran, he was running against something. And now he, he's no longer an outsider. He has nothing to run against.

Well, it's worse than that. Well, it's not happening in 2016 talking about his language. He was angry and he spoke differently and he acted differently. And that was consistent with his, with his overall message. People now, yeah, I'm angry as fuck. I want him gone and people are angry. But people more than anything are scared and unnerved. And that's not the guy.

that's making them feel any more settled. You know, there really is no one who makes things harder for himself. I mean, he even could have said, look, I don't want a mask. My face is too beautiful. I'm not going to cover it up. You know, doctors don't like you. But I, you know, I'm healthy and people around me get tested. But you know what?

If you want to wear a mask, you don't want it, don't wear. I can't make you. But what's no harm? Wear a mask, take it off to drink the Drano and then put the mask back on. What's the worst that happened? You know, you can eject the... It's just science. Is that getting...

I feel like that's getting beeped. I think the question, though, is he has all this rage and you wanted to blow things up. He blew things up. They're blown up. I think there's a certain element of Trump fatigue syndrome that has set in and the novelty has worn off. And the problem with that is when you're a one trick pony and you keep selling the same stuff and people aren't buying it, you can't adjust. And so a lot of these, Philippe is right, these four messages that he was talking about in 2016, we're getting kind of a sad, stale version of like one of those, right? It's like it just doesn't work anymore. The environment has totally changed and the anger isn't at Washington.

It's at him. One of the most telling moments was, you know, when he and Melania showed up to pay their respects to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, right? That was great. So he shows up. Her body is lying, you know, RPT. Yeah, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I'm sorry, and repose outside of the Supreme Court before they move the cat. to lay in state the Capitol building. And he shows up and outside there are, there's the public, you know, at the base of the

steps. And this just colossal chorus of boo birds shows up and then spontaneously begins chanting, vote him out. While he's standing there, there's literally, it was like Ruth Bader Ginsburg's revenge, right? She's standing there just literally it's her bringing this guy down. Yeah, it was pretty great. The only thing that I, you know, regret.

about the whole thing was it was the only time he's worn his mask when we desperately needed to see his face at that moment. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and don't want you.

to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly JongFast, and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.