The Dispatch Podcast - Yikes | Roundtable

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Sarah, Kevin, Steve and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle discuss Joe Biden’s hard-to-watch debate performance. Is anyone really surprised? The Agenda: —Will Joe still the be Democratic nominee? —Who would let Biden step on that stage? —Trump’s veepstakes —Oh yeah, Trump was awful too —Looking forward to September Show Notes: —Cole Murphy's explainer on the residency issue —Our post-debate Dispatch Live —Today's Morning Dispatch The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgir, and we are joined today by Kevin Williamson, Steve Hayes, and Washington Post columnist Megan McCartle. Yeah, you guys are whatever, but hi, Megan, good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good to see. you Sarah. Oh, so excited you're here. I mean, there's not a lot to talk about. So I just feel like the two of us should just, um, you know, hope you have a good nice rest. Some happy dreams. Well, I just set up dad's aura frames. So, you know, yeah. I'm so glad that you got that from

advisory opinions. I, I did. I get that from advisory opinions. And, uh, it's my, my, my, my, my, my, my, I lost my father last month, but it was, we got it for him for Christmas, and he literally just, every time I called him, he would just talk about how great the frame was. Well, I'm glad we've done our ads for this podcast then already. Okay, so there was a presidential debate last night. You know, I felt like we were watching history. It felt like a sort of historic moment for the country. It was very unlike any presidential debate we'd seen so far to me.

But I guess I want to start with sort of taking the counter. of this. And I'm going to start with you, Steve. Every incumbent for the last 30 plus years has had a bad first debate. I mean, I think Barack Obama's 2012 debate is sort of the most memorable bad first debate. And most of those incumbents have gone on to win again. It hasn't been as catastrophic despite people panicking. Is this just an overreaction? Was this actually what should have been expected, a bad debate performance that actually in the grand scheme of things was only a debate performance? It's not in any way an overreaction, but yes, this is exactly what we should have expected. Joe Biden had a disastrous night. I mean, it's not even, you know,

I remember the Obama debate. I went back and I rewatched some of the debate in 2020 when Donald Trump was thought to have lost to Joe Biden in the first debate and performed poorly. None of these are even in the same discussion. I mean, this is just something totally different altogether. You've seen in the sort of post-debat analysis, people describe Biden's performance as halting as uneven. It was, I mean, it was those things, but it was something far, far worse.

He looked like somebody who didn't belong at the debate stage. Depending on your perspective, it was either sort of infuriating because it was clear, I think it was clear before the debate, but it was clear for everybody to see last night that the kinds of things that the American public had seen glimpses of over the past, not just the past couple months, but the past couple years,

that Joe Biden was not fit to have this discussion were things that his campaign had actively sought to hide from the American people. They have shortened his schedule. They didn't put him in front of, they didn't have meetings in world leaders he was doing most of his work around the middle of the day he wasn't doing things when he traveled he was put out briefly then brought back in they have done everything that they could to disguise who joe biden really was and it should make

people angry and angry at those democrats and the people around him who allowed this to happen But beyond that, for anybody who's dealt with an aging relative or somebody who's struggling with mental acuity or dementia issues, what we saw from Biden, particularly on the split screen when he wasn't talking, was sort of heartbreakingly familiar. This was somebody with that distant sort of empty gaze and the dark dead eyes that suggested he just wasn't all there. And, you know, we've talked about this a bunch here before. We took some grief for talking about this. Some people thought it was inappropriate for us to be saying the things that we were saying. But it was very obvious that that was the case. It was obvious beforehand.

And if you go back even to Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns' book, which I think was published in the spring of 2022, as I recall, they had extensive reporting about Democrats who had worked with and dealt with Joe Biden on a regular. basis and said he was not up to this. That's a year and a half ago. It's absolutely outrageous that we're at this point, particularly when the other candidate is Donald Trump, where we have somebody like Joe Biden at this point in his career. Megan, I guess what struck me is that when you think back to those other debates, they were about politics. They were about performance. Who performed better? You know, not in a like high school scoring debate way. But, But in fine, a presidential debate way, but it was still show. And I guess what made this different is that I don't think anyone's really saying

that this was a bad performance that he didn't perform well politically. This went to his competence as the current president of the United States, which is a far, a really different thing. You know, I'm used to presidential debates where you sit online and there's a lot of jokes. your friends are sending you memes. That wasn't the mood last night. Certainly not among my sort of friends, but not among my coworkers,

not among people I follow on Twitter. This wasn't a funny, ha, ha, what a bad debate performance. People, I think, were genuinely sad, shocked, stunned. Yeah, my primary emotion. And look, I have also been taking a lot of grief because I have been saying this now. for over a year is

there are, you know, does he have dementia? I don't think that's probably not. But he clearly has age-related cognitive decline and that has been visible for a while. Right? And the ecstatic response to the State of the Union

address where like the ability to read aloud is one of the last things that goes cognitively. And the fact that people were celebrating the fact that the president could stand upright and read aloud for 90 minutes was not a sign that everything was okay. It was a sign that something was drastically wrong that that was the hurdle he had to clear. And I think that I didn't

see, even Republicans, people, I mean, there was a little like victory lap taking, whatever, mostly people were just sad. I was just sad. I was not like, yay, I've been triumphantly vindicated. This is, it was heartbreaking to watch. And then I think the next thing was that, like, you Steve, I was angry, right? Because this has been visible for a while. And people around him obviously know that this is the case, right? Again, if you have dealt with an aging parent or grandparent, you can be in a certain amount of denial. Families will put off decisions like taking away dad's car keys longer than they should. But like, you know what's there. They knew. And not only did they lie to their fellow party members so that they could not talk

about replacing him. They lied to the public. And then they put him up on that stage. What did they think was going to happen? Were they hoping that maybe he would have an amazing day? It was obvious, like, I just think looking at his performance elsewhere. It was, I knew this going in. And the funny thing was that I, at the back of my mind, I only realized this while I was in the middle of watching. At the back of my mind, I have like, I must be wrong because it's obviously crazy to put someone who looks like what I think Joe Biden looks like on the debate stage. So I guess maybe he can pull this out. And then he couldn't.

And I don't understand how that happened. It was, you know, there are a lot of, it was, there was no way that it was not going to be sad and hurtful to ask him to step aside. But the worst possible way for that to happen is for him to go up on the debate stage and humiliate himself with a couple of months to the convention. What were they thinking? Why do they do this to their party? And why did they do this to the country?

And why did they do this to their boss? Okay. So, Kevin, I'm going to once again try to take the other side here a little bit, which is I feel like Joe Biden's debate performance was bad. And bad in the not political way. But I also feel like to make. point, I felt very angry at his team and as a former campaign operative and someone who's prepared people for debates, there were things that were unacceptable that they did that made

this much, much worse than it needed to be. So to start, his voice from the get-go was clearly not even Joe Biden's regular voice. It was much weaker than what we've heard from two weeks ago, they never set expectations that his voice was raspy, that he'd lost his voice. After a week of preparing at Camp David, I'm not stunned that he lost his voice, but why weren't they out there with that? This, you know, yesterday morning, sort of spinning some of that. And speaking of spin, why weren't they setting expectations differently? Why were they not saying ahead of time, it's not about the debate? It's about not Donald Trump, right? You know who's not Donald Trump? anyone um and this is maybe the the dumbest thing it's clear from the watch party that he attended

right after the debate that his debate performance was actually worse than if they had not prepared him they massively overprepared him they were having him memorize things and so in the debate you know what's really bad for someone who's having some you know halting speech and memory issues trying to constantly remember these things that you've crammed into his head and three talking points for every single answer. And so he was far worse in the debate than he was 10 minutes later on live television. That's his team's fault. Now, that's not to say that there was ever going to be to Megan's point,

some amazing debate performance, why you would send him out there to do that. again, I just think is inexcusable if you claim to care about your principal. And again, I have to say, as someone who's used to do this for a living, you always care about your principal. Yes, it's your job. And yes, there's very cynical things that we can say about like, well, they just want to make money or they just want to stay in the White House. No, you grow to deeply care about these people. I don't understand how you can do that to someone who at this point would be considered part of your family. So, Kevin, how much of this was the team failing him?

Well, I think that they have long been counting on something you just mentioned, which is him not being Donald Trump. So, you know, the most important bias in journalism isn't viewpoint bias. It isn't this guy's liberal, this guy's Democratic. It's biased toward a good story. So we're all spent last night talking about, you know, the possibility of Biden being replaced on the ticket and all the drama and kind of literary and cinematic qualities

to go along with that. But what Democrats are actually saying this morning is the thing they've been thinking all along, which is that this isn't election about Joe Biden. It's about electing an administration and a party and keeping these other people out of power. And I think that they have wildly overestimated how valuable that is politically.

Not Donald Trump was a fine campaign position to be in last time around. It's not going to carry it for Joe Biden this time around. And because Donald Trump isn't the president. And Joe Biden is. And so they made this by the way they presented themselves and the way they put this together. They made it the one thing they didn't want it to be, which is a referendum on whether Joe Biden can do this job. Because if that's the question that people go to the polls to answer, he doesn't really have much of a good chance. I don't have you ever spend much time

around people who are drug addicts. But one of the interesting thing about drug addicts is they have a really poor ability to assess risk in their own lives. They tell themselves, these stories about how things are going to go and they expect things to come out that way. And when things go opposite way for 99% of the people they know, they say, hmm, I wonder what it is about me that causes me to be special on this stuff not to be the problem. And I think you've got an element of that kind of thinking right now where they took this guy who obviously was not going to do a good job who had been probably worn out and exhausted by preparation. It wasn't actually, as you say, doing him any good. They would have been better doing whatever

one said they were going to do, which is, you know, give him a shot of caffeine. or something, and throw him out there on the stage and let him do his thing. But instead, they looked at this guy who was, you know, talking like he hadn't slept in a week and looking even worse than he normally does and scoot him out there and just expect things to go okay because the universe and fate and the cosmos and God and the angels and whoever doesn't want Donald Trump to be president. That's really their underlying thinking and strategy. And I think you're right. Politically speaking, it's malpractice. Sarah, can I jump in and ask you a question, actually,

based on something that I saw you tweet out last night? And I think it's a serious, I think it's a serious question. I think Biden's performance last night was so bad and suggested he's so ill-equipped to serve a second term. It had a lot of people, I think, wondering, and you wondering aloud, whether he should continue to serve the remaining seven months in his turn.

He was that bad. You sent that out as a tweet. I guess I'd like to understand where you're coming from what led you to send that. And what kind of feedback did you get? So I sent that out about 10 minutes into the debate.

I couldn't believe what I was watching. I was watching it in the ABC Green Room. And again, it quickly shifted, even as he walked onto the stage from this is not a good debate performance who were witnessing something else entirely. I happened to have known just from background sources that they had practiced his walk onto the stage many, many, many times.

It was something that Joe Biden cared very deeply about was getting that walk onto the stage right. And so when you saw him walk onto the stage, and that was the choice, that was the best, that was the practice thing. That was very concerning. And I guess when you sort of play out the politics of what happens next, there's two paths. One is similar actually to kind of what happened after January 6th.

There's this sense of panic among Democrats right now, but the status quo is an incredibly powerful force. And in the end, nothing will happen. They will hurdle toward the convention. And remember Democrats this time, the convention is actually not where they're going to technically pick Joe Biden as their nominee. They're planning to have the vote by phone the day or too early. So it's not like there's going to be some big dramatic moment. It will have already happened by the time we get to the convention. So if the status quo takes over again in sort of

this post-January 6th path where, yep, there's a lot of panic. Yep, we don't want this. But who's going to bell the cat? Who's really going to go out there and be the Barry Goldwater to Nixon who says it's over. And if that person doesn't exist, everyone's just going to sort of move forward with time. And that will be that. And you know, they'll tell themselves that maybe it's like Donald Trump's Access Hollywood tape or something and that you never know what can happen in the next four months or what Donald Trump could do to disqualify himself. And fingers crossed, we'll see. That's one path. It's probably even the most likely path at this point. because we've seen it play out so many times.

But there is this other path, which is there is going to be a Barry Goldwater moment. We saw that from Claire McCaskill last night on CNN. Claire McCaskill, former senator from Missouri, but also well-known, you know, high-level senior Democrat, who said, you know, I'm here as a surrogate. And I take that job really seriously. Joe Biden had one job tonight at the debate, and he failed at it to reassure the American people that he's up to this job. And she laid the groundwork for it's time for Democrats to start talking about what to do now. Okay. So if that ball starts rolling and there's serious public discussions

about replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, the reasons to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee is because he is not able to serve as president based on that debate performance. And if that is true, it clearly implicates him serving as president right now. Under the 25th Amendment, you not only need a majority of the cabinet that Joe Biden himself picked, but you would of course need the vice president as well, whose political future is tied up in this whole mess to begin with. Like the convention, that's not going to happen unless Joe Biden chooses this. So Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee, no matter what Claire McCaskill or even vice president Harris says that should happen, unless Joe Biden himself steps aside.

The only way that happens is not Joe Biden tomorrow coming out and saying, I've decided not to, you know, accept the nomination and to release my delegates. It will happen because there's enough pressure privately and publicly on him to do so. Again, that sort of Barry Goldwater example. That's the only way he's not the Democratic nominee. And I think that similarly, that's actually the only way that he steps aside as president. I don't think that anyone's going to invoke the 25th Amendment. It would be so catastrophic for the Democratic Party. But frankly, this whole thing, if they follow this path,

is catastrophic for the Democratic Party. The idea of sort of the chaos that goes forward, Megan, I don't know how much you've thought about this. But, you know, the political choices faced by the Democrats now on sort of that status quo, how do you spin this path? because we're just going to move forward with this. Or, okay, we put pressure on him. He releases his delegates.

We start thinking about another nominee. I just think then you get to that next step and it's just a black panic wall, OMG. How do you think they're thinking about those two paths this morning? I mean, look, first of all, I think that, yes, black panic wall is now a better choice than Joe Biden, right? that's where they are. Realistically, that man is not going to be president in 2025.

The man we saw on stage is not going to be the president of the United States in six months. So it is now time to figure out what you're going to do because that's not it. And I think that as they're thinking about this, if they are attempted to choose the status quo over the black wall of panic, I think the 25th Amendment is actually really important here. because as anyone who's dealt with an aging parent knows, like this isn't the terminal state. He's not getting better and he's not going to plateau for four years. And that means that to me,

the likelihood that he makes it through four years is low. And I've had this conversation with people and they're like, well, that's fine. We've got a good vice president. Yeah, she's not a great candidate, but she'll be fine as president. And it's like, uh-uh, uh-uh, 25th Amendment, way harder to invoke than you think.

It is designed for a president who has been shot in the head and is unconscious. It was enacted after Kennedy. It is designed for someone who cannot contest or is like literally just not in shape to contest. What you could end up with is you're in a world crisis. All of a sudden it becomes clear that Biden can't do the job. That's the moment at which his cabinet just kind of has to because, you know, there's also a fantasy of like, oh, well, they'll just route around him. And that doesn't work. Someone has to be in charge. And everyone, he is the president of the United States, everyone has to know who is in charge. And that was actually the kind of

the motivation for the 25th Amendment is that Johnson did not want to step in until Kennedy died because he was afraid that it would look like a coup if Kennedy recovered, right? You have to, when you're the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, there has to always be someone clearly in charge. And so the thing is, his cabinet can remove him for four days, but then Congress has to ratify it. And it is really difficult, especially if it's a split Congress. Can you imagine, like, the various permutations of, oh, is Mike Johnson going to be in line

for VP or Democrats going to do that? There's just, it's a nightmare to contemplate if we get to a point. And you are now in the middle of a world crisis and no one knows who's going to be president in four days. This cannot happen. It is like we are now, I have said this to Republicans about Donald Trump. You know, I am like, ironically, I am still voting for him because he's not Donald Trump, right? I mean, I will vote for the 25th Amendment crisis if and when it comes because Donald Trump

is a danger to the republic. He is fundamentally at war with democracy in a way that is unacceptable in a president of the United States. That said, I have been saying to Republicans, you have a patriotic duty that goes above. your partisan interest and it even goes above what voters know because you know more the you were Republican politicians know more about how the system works you know what the responsibilities are you have an obligation to do the right thing even if it means you lose office this was not a popular position no one listened to me right like a lot of people have been

saying this too no one listened to any of us um but that's for democrats too you cannot put someone in office who could trigger that kind of massive crisis when we can leave afford it. You cannot do this to the country. And may I add, it's not even good for your party. It's not good for anyone. Just don't do it. Black Wall of Panic. Like, choose. It's sort of like the version of there was an old election in Louisiana where David Duke was running and his opponent had been indicted. And there were a bunch of bumper stickers that said, vote for the crook. It's important. At this point, Democratic Party leaders, vote for the black wall of panic. It's important.

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The people who were voting for Joe Biden knew this was a possibility. Maybe they didn't know how bad it was. But they're really just there to not vote for Donald Trump. And there's not a lot of movable voters. Everyone knew who these two guys were going in. And so this was already baked into the polls. So, yep, Democrats are going to panic. But actually, when the polls come back and there isn't a whole lot of movement,

again, status quo takes over because people are happy to vote for the D. they figure he's surrounded by people in his administration who will take care of the problem that Megan suggests that if it really, really, you know, he has a debilitating stroke. That's what Vice President Harris is for. Maybe not your first choice. But again, she has this incredible quality of not being Donald Trump. Yeah, I mean, I think it's entirely possible that if nothing were to happen the rest of the summer and Joe Biden is the nominee, you'd have people, people who are.

are, you know, independents who are concerned about the future of the public, Democrats who either for partisan reasons or other reasons would end up voting for Joe Biden along the lines of Megan's reasoning. The problem for Joe Biden is there's an alternative, right? You don't have to do that at this point. And I think the fact that we're hearing from so many Democrats, so many partisans, so many in the media who have been Joe Biden's water carriers that this is too much, that this can't happen. The pressure is not going to diminish over the next few days. It's not like people are going to say, oh, you know what, on reflection, maybe that wasn't that bad. I mean, you had, you know, we've spoken on this podcast a number of different times

about Joe Scarborough and his incessant, unbelievable, literally incredible shilling for Joe Biden. It was not two months ago that Joe Scarborough, based on a conversation he had with Joe Biden behind the scenes, said, this is the best Joe Biden ever. He savaged people who had the temerity to suggest that Joe Biden had problems. absolutely ripped on camera, on his show, on a daily basis.

Anybody who would question Joe Biden when after people who said there was an age issue, defended Joe Biden, talked about him as one of the best presidents in recent memory, no problems with mental acuity. And Joe Scarborough today opened Morning Joe by saying basically something has to change. You had Democratic elected officials, Claire McCaskill who I think, by the way, you kind of say, like, deserves a ton of respect for being that honest. That's not an easy thing to do. If your job is to be a partisan surrogate, which was part of her job, as she admitted,

and she's a surrogate for Joe Biden. She's also a paid contributor to MSNBC and NBC News, and I think had an obligation to tell the truth and went on TV and told the truth in a way that I think is courageous and doesn't get enough for respect. But, you know, Claire McCaskill, Julian Castro. you have Democratic elected officials who are speaking out now. You had a chorus of writers for the New York Times editorial page, including Tom Friedman, who's a friend of Joe Biden and has been, let's say, very, very generous to Joe Biden over the past four years. All of these people saying this can't happen. I just don't see a scenario where everybody sort of looks at that and says, yeah, people are overreacting. We're just going to move on. You have to assume that, At some point in the next couple of days, there will be this sit-down moment with, I would think, with Joe Biden, with Valerie Biden, Joe's sister, maybe with some of his top advisors, where they say, hey, we have to take into a cut. We have to at least listen to and consider the things that these people who have been supporters of ours are saying. It's not like they're reacting here to Sean Hannity. These are people who have carried water for Joe Biden. And they have to sit down. and say, we have to think about what this means and what our options are, it's just hard to come up

with a scenario in which they say, yeah, the best option is to move forward. Oh, Steve. Even as difficult, I mean, Megan's right. Even as difficult. No, even as difficult as, I mean, I think Megan's right, is difficult. They're also a problem with it. There are structural problems. As you point out, Sarah, there are a lot of challenges here. But the alternative is seeing the guy that people saw last night on stage stand for president against Donald Trump, who, by the way, did not have a great night. He was more disciplined than usual. We can, we can spend some time on some of the claims that he made. But Joe Biden, this Joe Biden, I think, would lose to Donald Trump in a Reagan-style landslide. So, Kevin, I want to talk about Donald Trump and just to sort of show where we're going

here. We also need to get to Donald Trump will be picking his vice presidential candidate soon. and there is another debate scheduled for September, and there's a lot of discussion over whether that debate will happen. So let's first discuss Donald Trump's performance. Kevin, I've got to tell you, and I've said this many, many times about Donald Trump. I've said it, you know, when Fannie Willis turned out to be having an affair with her coworker, whatever God Donald Trump praised to, He gets the best opponents in law, in life, in politics.

It didn't really matter what Donald Trump's debate performance was last night. And the setup that the Biden team asked for, no live audience, having the mics cut off, this sort of very somber debate with no sort of antics involved, put the focus on Joe Biden. And it really helped Donald Trump, who, as Steve alludes to, it's not like Donald Trump was some master debater last night, although I would say overall it was a better debate performance than we've seen it other times from Donald Trump. Yeah, whatever God Donald Trump praised you,

Moloch gets results, apparently. You know, what the Biden people did in the way this debate was structured was they took a guy whose problem, his main political problem is, an inability to impose discipline on himself and impose discipline on him, on his behalf. They did the job for him. They would have been better off just taking the exact opposite approach, do it in front. Don't do it just in front of a live audience. Do it in front of a Fox News audience. You know, let the guy really shout at the Raptors and it would have been a very different sort of evening. You know, just one quick thing back to Megan's earlier

point. One of the frustrating things about this is watching people who don't seem to be able to calculate their own political self-interest. Harris is not only a person who's positioned to be able to be the one who does the political equivalent of leaving the revolver in the bottle of whiskey on Biden's desk and telling him to solve the problem, she's also the one who has the strongest incentive to do so, because she's worried about her political future. Her political risk isn't that she's going to try to do something and fail. It's that she rides this train right into the bus saw it's headed for. If these people put Donald Trump back in the White House. None of them has a political future. Harris right now

possibly could salvage some kind of career for the future. If Donald Trump is president in 2015, no, she doesn't. She'll be lucky to get that MSNBC job. And it probably left, even that probably won't happen. Interestingly, she was out there last night doing the shows. She went on with Anderson Cooper on CNN. She went on with Lindsay Davis on ABC as I was there. And, you know, she, she, had her line. She seemed flustered on television. Her line was, it was a slow start, but a strong finish. And for what it's worth, I did think that Joe Biden got better through the course of the debate. The beginning of debate was the worst part of it. Unfortunately, that's sort of how the tone gets set. But, you know, when Anderson Cooper was pressing her, Lindsay Davis pressed her

as well, you know, you'd been out there saying that he was fine. Is this the Joe Biden? You were also seeing behind closed doors. Is this what you were describing? There were obvious moments of sort of pause, hesitation in her answers. This is the worst part about being vice president. You're sent out there to do impossible jobs that can only hurt your political future. And there's no threading a needle. You just have to make a choice over what you're going to do. And I think that she did not, I watched her struggling with the joyist. And she made, this is actually why I think Democrats have been so eager to hang on to Biden, she made wrong choices continually, right? You could see her struggling with the decision whether to throw him overboard and just nakedly go

for his job or whether, you know, she wanted to spin for him. And what she ended up doing was she did one thing she did to, which was show that she could hit the talking points he failed to make. She did that, right? The thing she didn't do well was that she didn't spend for her boss in the obvious way, which is you just try the Jedi mon trick. Not because anyone believes it, but because that's what you do as a loyal Democrat. Well, you know, I thought Joe Biden, you know, this

answer, the one answer he gave that I liked, I thought that was really good. And I think, you know, she didn't do it. And I think this goes to, she's not good extemporaneously. She gets, she might be good at asking questions as a prosecutor. She's not good at answering them and never has been. And her political instincts

are bad. And I think that that has extended Joe Biden's life for quite a bit. And this just takes all the pressure off of Trump. You know, there are people out there like Megan and like me who think that a literally brain dead Joe Biden is less of a danger to the country than a vigorous and energetic and engaged Donald Trump with me. But there are many of those voters and their minds are already made up about things. What you have right now is that Joe Biden just went out there and he looks like a guy

who shouldn't be allowed to operate a Subaru, much less be, you know, a guy who is in the driver's seat of the country to torture the metaphor. And no one is talking about the question of whether Donald Trump can do this job, whether Donald Trump is temperamentally fit for it, all the questions that Donald Trump doesn't want to have answered because any sensible person who looks at this guy says, no, of course not. He was terrible at it last time around. He did try to overthrow the government on his way out the door. There's that little detail.

But no one's thinking about that right now. They're thinking, holy crap, does Biden know where his cars parked? So let's talk just a little bit about the VP stakes for a bit, because his Historically, Kevin, vice presidents haven't mattered. You know, there's plenty of academic studies on this, and I've mentioned this before. The one slight disagreement among the academic studies is whether John McCain's pick of Sarah Palin in 2008

had a slight negative impact, though not enough to change the outcome of the election. But overall, I mean, that's the biggest thing we can point to of vice presidents on the ticket, actually moving numbers in modern history. What I find interesting about 2024 is the sense from voters that maybe they're not picking who's going to be vice president, a job they don't know what it does because it doesn't have a real job description, and they don't really care.

That's why vice presidents haven't made a difference in the past, perhaps. This time, are they actually picking a vice president or are they picking the president in six months. And so I wonder whether the vice presidential candidates will make more of a difference. And again, going back to Donald Trump's performance, which I thought was overall, one of his better ones, but within the expectation, you know, bell curve, Donald Trump came off as, you know, quite vigorous, put to bed any sort of age-related concerns that one might have about Donald Trump. But nevertheless, sort of actuarially, he's only three years younger, you're still thinking four years, four and a half years is a long time.

So, Kevin, I'm curious what you think about Veep Stakes this time. We'll do it not worth your time on the front end here. Is Veep Stakes worth our time since they generally don't matter? Is it going to matter this time or probably still not? Vice presidents do matter. They just don't matter in the way the campaigns want them to. They don't help you get elected. They can be a real problem when you're president.

You know, Nixon was a real problem for Eisenhower. Dan Quayle was a problem for George H.W. Vice presidents can be a real pain. Kamala Harris obviously is a problem for Joe Biden and for the Democrats right now. So they do the calculation wrong of thinking this person's going to help me win Florida or Ohio or Michigan or some state like that when that normally isn't to exit case. I think it'll be interesting to see who Trump picks because it's going to give us a little more insight. into where he is in this push pull he's always got. You know, so Trump comes from someone who's always been rich and famous, but only adjacent to powerful elite society in New York, and he wants to be respected.

And sometimes it's easy to pull him, it's easier to pull him in the right direction by appealing to that aspect of his character. He wants to be someone who's seen as being a good president. He was obsessed with that question last night. You know, if you put me back, I'll be the best one ever because, you know, Lincoln and Washington and whoever, never mind those guys. It's going to be, it's going to be Trump. So he may, you know, try to pick some sort of responsible person who's going to bring him some value in cachet with inside opinion and elite opinion, which he cares about tremendously. Or he may go with some maniac as an announcement that the retribution tour really is a real thing and that's where his heart is and that's where his mind is. So I think that that might give us some insight into what he's actually planning. I mean, if he's planning anything beyond, well, if I get to the president, then that takes all the federal charges off the day.

Steve, you know a lot about vice presidents. Yeah, I think this pickle really matter. Much more for government's questions. Just to be clear, I definitely thought you were about to talk about pickles. I was thinking the same thing. It was like, wow. And I was like, a pickle sounds really good right now. I love a good pickle.

Yeah. Okay. I mean, I don't even know what to say. I always love pickles. The spicier, the better. No, I think the choice will really matter here. Let me just pause for a moment if I can and talk a little bit about Trump's debate performance because the reasons that Kevin and Megan say that they're not going to vote for Trump were manifest last night on Trump's performance.

I mean, he was on his best behavior. sir, as you point out, he clearly, I think he listened to the people who prepared him for the debate. And he was much better behaved than the Donald Trump we've grown accustomed to, certainly different in terms of temperament and demeanor than he is during his rally speeches. But if you stop and pay attention to the words that he said, absolutely terrifying. I mean, this was not a better Donald Trump. At one point, he said, I mean, the number of times he lied throughout the debate, were consistent with the way that the man lies in every other part of his life. He can't really speak without lying, and he did it again and again and again last night.

He talked about the January 6th committee at one point and said that the Democrats, the two Republicans on the committee, destroyed and deleted all the information they found because they found out we were right. We were right, and they deleted and destroyed all the information. They should go to jail for that. There's Donald Trump calling for the jailing of Adam Kinsinger and Liz Cheney. But the thing that he said to tee up that argument was totally false. They didn't destroy all the information. They put out an 814 page report. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of testimony from Republicans about what Trump did on January 6th. It's true. Trump also said there was a small number of people who went to the Capitol on January 6th

as he attempted to downplay his attempt at a soft coup. There are 1,265 people who have been charged with crimes related to what happened at the Capitol. This was again and again and again. Donald Trump had several of these moments where he was just totally incoherent. It's not that he was lying, which he did a lot. It's just that he didn't make any sense whatsoever. ever. So, you know, this was a good Donald Trump performance if you're grading on, you know, Donald Trump's ability not to act like Donald Trump. But the things he said were horrible. So back to

the VP question, you know, I've actually done a fair amount of reporting on this this week. And, you know, this is Donald Trump, so anything could happen. I think it's basically down to two candidates. I think it's J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio. I still think Doug Bergman is possible. Apparently, Bergham has indicated a willingness in his conversations with Trump to spend a bunch of his quite considerable personal fortune on behalf of the ticket, which you can imagine might appeal to Donald Trump. But I, and so it's, you know, it's possible. I think it's still possible that he would pick Bergen. But according to people who are familiar with his thinking and who have talked to him about this stuff, I think he's focused on J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. And I do think

that choice has profound implications for the Republican Party and, you know, the future of the country. I think J.B. Vance is in effect sort of the avatar of the in-cell alt-right, angry, you know, populist conservative males. He's sort of, he represents a faction of the Republican Party and the populist right that thinks Donald Trump is a good first step to getting the country to where it needs to go. And I think would push Donald Trump in all sorts of very unhealthy directions bad for the country, bad for the Republican Party. Now, Marco Rubio is a much more confounding person. This is obviously somebody who in 2016, you know, had profound policy differences with Donald Trump when he ran against him. But, you know, really the thing that that I think sticks in people's minds when they think of

Marco Rubio were the tremendous objections he raised to Donald Trump's character. And particularly the one press conference where he seemed to almost, you know, come to tears because he was so upset. And Marco Rubio has told over the course of the past eight years a long and winding story about his evolution on policy. And, you know, I think if you're sympathetic to Marco Rubio, you can buy some of it. If you're not sympathetic to Marco Rubio, you can say the through line here is ambition. But what he hasn't done, at least he hasn't done to my satisfaction, is explain his change of views on character. And this is somebody who said Donald Trump

shouldn't be near the nuclear codes, who was a con man. And Rubio pledged to do everything you could to keep him from the White House to now Marco Rubio eight years later. And he did that all on character concerns. Now Marco Rubio eight years later is saying,

I would be honored to serve alongside this guy. Like either he was wrong about, in his assessments of Trump's character in 2016, And there's nothing to suggest that he was wrong about Trump's character in 2016. Or character doesn't matter to Marco Rubio today the way that it did then. And I don't think we have a very good explanation. I chased him around the spin room last night here in Atlanta and could not get him to answer any questions. He was sort of shuttle from one interview to the other before leaving.

But I think that's something that if he's chosen, he can expect to have to answer in some length. How does he handle the residency problem? Right, aren't they from the same state? Yeah, we had a very good explanation from Cole Murphy, an explainer the other day about the nitty-gritty details. No, no, no. I think it's a legitimate question. And you saw when this was a problem for Dick Cheney and George W. Bush that they tried to get ahead of the question Cheney changed registration to Wyoming. That was, in fact, how people discovered that Dick Cheney was going to be actually named George W. Bush.

is running mate after having led his VP search. I think there's some time here. But like Rubio can't move, right? He is the senator from Florida, which means Trump has to. He can't. Yeah, he can't move, but I believe, according to Coles, and I'm going off of memory here, so please correct me if you all have better information than I do.

Cole reported that nothing has to happen until December 17th. And at that point, they could sort of address this, which would obviously come after the election, and then they can, you know, move residency. I've heard that Rubio has potentially been open to taking up residency in Nevada, where he lived for a short time as a child, reestablishing residency there. But I think that there's a way to do it. It would be, you know, there would be all sorts of paperwork glitches, but I don't think it's enough of an obstacle to keep it from happening if that's what Trump wants to do. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place.

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Kevin, let me ask you about the VP search. When you look at the choices that Donald Trump faces, is there reason to think that, you know, Marco Rubio might be better than the J.D. Vance. You've written about J.D. Vance. You're not a fan.

Or Doug Bergam, the Wall Street Journal, had an editorial this week arguing in favor of Doug Bergam as the choice. Does any of this matter, or is it all just overshadowed by the fact that Donald Trump would be president again? Yeah, you've got J.D. Vance, who believes in bad things, Marco Rubio, who believes in nothing. And Bergam, who believes in some things, but maybe not very strong. Between those three, I guess Bergam is the one that seems less terrifying to me. This would be so in keeping with Trump's character. I have a little fantasy where he tells Rubio, you know, I wanted to be you, but I need you to go ahead and get out of the state and relocate to Nevada or wherever

so that we can get this out of the way. And Rubio does it, and then Trump changes his mom. And it says, remember 2016, you little weasel? And leaves him hanging out there. Now, that, of course, would never happen, but it would make a good movie. a good make for television movie. It's really hard for me to see Trump picking J.D. Vance. I understand why he would and why he likes him,

why he's interested in, and makes him feel smart, all that stuff. J.D. connects him with a kind of voter that Trump sees as being, you know, his people, the people of whom he is the Tribune. But, you know, J.D. has not been in the Senate very long. He's not someone who's had much of a political career before that. And I don't know. He just doesn't feel like someone to me.

me who is, you know, the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency, whereas Rubio is much more of a known quantity and has been around in this game for a long time and is someone you could plausibly see being president of the United States. But, you know, it's Donald Trump. So there's no need to apply reason or logic or, you know, anything like that. I mean, I would say this. I think this was also maybe a little true of Biden, but I think for Trump, you know, you might not want someone too presidential.

Because you don't want your party to be comfortable replacing you if you do something crazy again. And, I mean, the game theory of this is really kind of insane. He did mention Tim Scott last night. So I was surprised and hoping since I said Tim Scott was the obvious choice in our little Washington Post roundtable, I was hoping that that meant it was going to be him. So I would be Trump and feel vindicated. Also, because I kind of like the guy. But you're Trump's interesting, and that he cares a lot about how people look, and he respects people who made a lot of money.

So that seemed to point him toward Bergam in a lot of ways, but also it would point him toward looking at Bergam as a threat or someone he should be jealous of or envious of or feel insecure around. So it'll depend on, I think, you know, whether how he goes in that direction, whether he's, you know, willing to sublimate his own weird little ego things and do what he thinks is responsible or if he's just going to kind of, you know, continue. being what he is. One quick little aside, I think one of the things that might secretly have benefited Trump really was his time in court, that he has now had some practice sitting quietly listening to things he doesn't want to listen to and people say things about him without being able to jump up and say, you know, whatever, the first thing that comes into his head. And I kind of suspect that's, that's given him some practice that's been useful to him, at least it seemed it was last night, where, you know, his attempts to talk over the mics and stuff were really

relatively few. And he seemed much more in control of himself than we're used to. Maybe he should be thanking all these prosecutors and judges. I mean, I also think it might have taught him that when he just shuts up and acts kind of normal, his polls do better. And I mean, you say what you want about the man. He has a kind of low animal cunning that allows him to gravitate to a, you know, politically effective, even if distasteful tactics. And he may have belatedly discovered. that just not being insane is actually a surprisingly strong political tactic, especially when your opponent is kind of imploding.

Yeah, his cunning is so low, it's barely even animal. It's more like viral cunning. I don't know. You guys dismiss him at your peril. This is a guy who's done very, very well at every turn and everything else that would have killed another politician. Trump has not only survived, but thrived. And again, I'm thinking through 2016, through January 6th, through four criminal indictments,

you know, I don't think you can just chalk that up to, well, he just keeps accidentally stumbling into the right way to do this. And Steve, I felt like on the one hand, look, there were not many people tuning into the debate last night who had no opinion of these two guys heading in. That's just not going to be the case, given that they've been. both been president before, but we have seen evidence that people had, you know, some Trump amnesia. It's been a long time since he was president for a whole swath of voters. They were incredibly young when Donald Trump was president. And again, just taking Trump's debate performance,

he was making, I thought, the strongest case against Joe Biden, right? He was bringing it to immigration and the economy, the two issues that I think he's right, can actually, move voters and where Joe Biden has the most vulnerabilities. What was, of course, strange was, when abortion came up, something that is one of Donald Trump's vulnerabilities, Joe Biden turned the conversation to immigration, oddly enough. But, you know, I thought that Donald Trump actually prosecuted the case pretty well against Joe Biden on a bunch of these issues. Now, I think there's lots of fact checking to be done. as other people have mentioned.

But if again, and forgive me for saying this, but set aside the actual factual specifics, you know, exact numbers, things like that, the overall points that Donald Trump was making against Joe Biden, I thought were incredibly damaging on inflation and immigration. What about golf scores? I mean, let us not forget. At that point, I literally,

they did not really have a lot of food for us in the green room. And at that point, I got up, found a box of thin mince and just started chugging Girl Scout cookies into my mouth when they did the golf scores. That was the sign of how low we have sight. First of all, I don't play golf. I don't know what a golf handicap is. And the sight of two men quibbling over numbers. I didn't even understand. I was like, is this the content you think America wants? I didn't even understand it.

And I was like, huh? If I don't know what you're talking about and definitely don't care, it reminded me of the size discussion from the 2016 New Hampshire debate. At least that one I understood what they were talking about, though. Yeah. I mean, it was sort of a fitting way for the debate to end, right? These two old men just babbling on about shit, nobody even understands, didn't make any sense. They were talking over each other.

I mean, it was- And they just hate each other so much, but they have so much in common. Perfect moment. Exactly. Look, I think, I mean, Siri, your point is well taken. And I think for, you know, the hardcore partisans probably didn't have their minds change about any of this, right? The people who came in and, like, devoted to voting for Joe Biden, really like Joe Biden, you know, might be a little more concerned about Joe Biden after. the debate if they were sentient and awake, but probably were going to vote for Joe Biden. The people who love Donald Trump probably love Donald Trump, I think the people for whom

this could matter are people who are less committed to a candidate and probably paying less attention to the day-to-day campaign. And for those people, they hear Donald Trump and they do not know independent of what they're watching on television that so much of what he said is utter bullshit. Like the things he was saying, you know, in some cases he just made claims that were wild and crazy, like the January 6th committee has deleted all their information and has now gone because he was right about it all. Like, that's, that seems crazy. I think they, you know, they, I would hope that that sort of stuck with some people who brought at least any skepticism to the debate. But he said other things that were so utterly preposterous that I literally

haven't heard anyone else talk about this until this moment right now. And I, I stayed out, This is what I do every time I have these big nights and then I can't fall asleep. So I was up till 3.30 in the morning. I rewatched most of the debate, which is like who would do that. But I did. The hell's the matter with you. No, I know. It's really.

Thuffer. Suffer. You pick stuff up in a second watch that you wouldn't have necessarily picked up in a first watch. And Trump said some things that were so. like so totally preposterous that just kind of slipped by. And he's not going to be punished for them. The example, I mean, there were many of these examples. But one example was there was in the middle of this debate about whether Trump had called his generals or generals in the Second World War suckers and losers and said he didn't want to visit a cemetery.

That was a claim that was made by his former chief of staff. John Kelly, Trump says he never said it and that he fired John Kelly. and there's this big back and forth. I think Kelly said it. Trump has said things like that on the record in the past. It's not really a stretch to believe you would say it in private. But as he was defending himself on that, he talks about these other things that have been made up about him.

And he turned quickly to the allegations that Trump had been colluding with Russia. And he said, this is what he said. It was made up by him, Biden, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was made up, just like the 51 intelligence agents are made up, just like the new thing with the 16 economists are talking. What is that? I mean, that's just total gibberish. It doesn't make any sense.

But here's the worst part. He's talking later about Putin and Ukraine and about why Putin went into Ukraine, was this Joe Biden's fault, you know, what happened when Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan and how that was a signal to Putin to go in. This is what Trump said. I'm reading here. It's a direct quote. When Putin saw that, he said, speaking of the Afghanistan withdrawal, he said, you know what, I think we're going to go in and maybe take my, this was his dream. I talked to him about it. His dream. The difference is he never would have invaded Ukraine, never. So there you have the former president of the United States who's been alleged to have been in cahoots with Vladimir Putin, who has claimed that he can get Evan Gerskovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who's being detained by Putin out if he's elected

president, saying that he, Donald Trump, spoke directly to Vladimir Putin about his wanting to invade Ukraine after Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan. But I think there's no chance that that's true. If it's true, it's way more problematic than if he's lying. But nobody's talking about that. That's an insane thing to say. It's totally bonkers. Insane. He should be institutionalized for saying shit like that on a national debate stage. And nobody's talking about it. I thought he was saying that he had spoken to Putin about that while he was president. Even if so, I mean, he was saying that Putin said it was his dream because Putin watched Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal. So I don't think that's right. I think he was saying he had spoken about it with Putin after that. And

because there was a cause effect that Trump was suggesting from the Afghanistan withdrawal. But let's say, Kevin, giving Trump the greatest benefit of the doubt, that you are correct. Can you imagine Donald Trump having spoken with Vladimir Putin about the coming invasion of Ukraine? He didn't do it. Like, I mean, come on. That's a crazy thing to admit. It's like I'm saying that we lost land under Obama and Bush as if, like, Russia had annexed U.S. territory, which was, I flagged that last night.

It was extremely strange. Okay. We're going to go around the horn real quick. Does the debate happen in September? Kevin. No. Megan. Not with Joe Biden on this stage.

Steve. I think Trump will debate a different Democrat. John McLaughlin style. Wrong. Joe Biden has no choice but to show up to the debate in September. The status quo will win out. He will be the nominee. And by not showing up to that debate, they'd be conceding the election.

There will be a debate in September between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Thank you guys for joining this podcast. And see you again next week. And Megan, just such a treat, such a fan. Such a fan. I was glad to be here. Thank you for having me, as always. I'm sorry we had to have these two other guys in our conversation.

We had so much more to talk about the aura frames. I know. We could learn about golf handicaps each other. We could just teach each other. Yeah, we should go golfing. Okay, let's do it. Bye. You know,