The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Senior Home Showdown: Delusional Biden vs. Demented Trump || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

If you watched the presidential debate last week, I'm sure you're really, really excited for the election this year! Since so many of you wanted me to talk about this fever dream we're living in, I figured we'd do it on Independence Day. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-senior-home-showdown-delusional-biden-vs-demented-trump

Hey, everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from the lost wilderness in Colorado, just outside of Devil's Playground. I was backpacking in New Mexico last week when the presidential debate happened on purpose, because I didn't want to watch it live because I still have a hangover from one four years ago. Anyway, I've since watched it, and I have, how should I charitly put this, received a river of requests for an update and what this means to my forecast for the election. Some of you have been really, really rude about it, and you guys can stuff it. But for everybody else.

Joe Biden obviously did not have a good day. He appeared confused, a little lost. It wasn't clear that he knew exactly where he was. A lot of his responses, especially in the early half of the debate, were just almost nonsensical. The term for what is happening to Joe Biden is that his mind is diluting. He's losing control of the contact between the context of his memories and his life and the reality about him.

And this makes him slow and confused. And for anyone who has been watching him for the last year, you'll notice that this is not a new thing. This has been happening with greater repeatedly. It's been happening in press conferences and the Oval Office and briefings. It's getting bad. Now, I'm sure there are a lot of us out there who have parents or grandparents who are diluting. And it's painful and it's awkward and eventually you get forgotten. It's, there are good days and there are bad days.

But that's not what you need for a president, because as you get older and Joe Biden is already 81, the number of bad days eventually tends to overwhelm the number of good days, and he is no longer fit for office. He shouldn't be running for president. He shouldn't be president, and a vote for him is a vote against national stability in the United States. Let's talk about the other guy now. In the debate, I'd argue that 75 to 80% of everything that came out of Donald Trump's mouth was a bald-faced lie. Most of those lies have been proven wrong in court on multiple occasions. He did have a few new ones that he brought out. Most of those were from Vivek

Rebiswani. If you remember back to the Republican primaries earlier this year, Robin Swani was clearly the candidate who was most detached from reality. The term for what's going on with Donald Trump is that his mind is dementing. He's very sure of where he is because he just made it up. He lives in a bubble of his own mental creation. And when you're like that and somebody pokes into your bubble, you're very, very, very angry. This is something we've seen out of Donald Trump for some time, but it's really accelerated since he lost the presidential re-election three years ago. And he definitely doubled and tripled down on that in the debate. We all know someone who's going through this, either themselves or caring for them.

Caring for somebody with dementia is awful because you get yelled out a lot. and it's difficult to reconcile, you know, a loved one's broken view of the world with who they used to be. There are good days and there are bad days, but I think we all agree that as you get older and Donald Trump is now 79, significantly older than Hillary Clinton was when he said that she was too old to run for president. As you get older, eventually the bad days outnumber the good days. And Donald Trump is no longer fit to be president. and a vote for him is a vote against national stability in the United States. And these are our choices.

And so on the next part, I'm going to tell you how this is going to go. But we'll do that from a different vest. So where does this take us? I see two paths forward. The first is the path I identified a year and a half ago now, and we will include a link to that original video in this one, and in the written supporting materials. all of the things that I pointed out at that point still remain true.

I will pull out one that is even more relevant now, and that's independence. Now, when I say independence, I'm not talking about the roughly 30 to 40 percent of Americans who are not registered as a Republican or a Democrat. No. Of that 30 to 40 percent, almost all of them vote with one party or the other 90 percent of the time. They're not independents. I'm talking about the true vote spliters, the 10 percent in the middle that have decided every American election in modern history. They don't like either candidate.

I'm one of those independents. It makes me a little sick to my stomach myself. Biden may have gotten a decent start, but he's clearly not there anymore. He may have an okay team, but that's not enough. You need the person at the top to be capable and conscious and cognizant. That's not Biden anymore. However, on the other side,

we have Donald Trump, who part of his dementia is that his insistence that the election was stolen from him, despite the fact that members of his own administration who were in charge of election integrity say that it was the cleanest election ever. His particular dementia threatens independence because he's telling people that the general election doesn't matter and everything should be decided in primaries where he does well.

And of course he does well in primaries because the Magger crowd will do whatever he says and they will show up in force to the primaries even when he's not campaigning for them. His ability to sweep the primaries without lifting a finger this time around that was, actually really impressive. But if you're an independent, it means that your vote goes away.

So it's a choice between someone who's deluded or someone whose dementia will destroy your ability to vote from the future. And, you know, that's a no contest. Also, never forget that there are more Democrats than Republicans. So Joe Biden does not need to capture the independent vote to win. If the independents just don't show up because they're discussed with both, that's a victory for Biden. And so my general assessment that this is Biden's election, no matter what happens as long as he remains alive, stands. A little sick to my stomach. This is an ugly choice, but it's not a

particularly difficult one. There is one other way that this could go. Friends and families and colleagues of Joe Biden are now advising that he considers stepping down and let a more capable candidate run, which I think would be a great idea. Now, there have been people, on both sides, main lane Democrats and old school Republicans, people who are Republicans before Trump took over the party, who insist that if either side were able to float a better candidate, that they would just sweep because these two candidates are so broken. And I understand where they're coming from. The problem is the process of getting to that. The primaries are functionally over. And on the Democratic side, it's very weird for you to get a meaningful challenger for

the nomination when you have somebody who's already in office, and that this is no exception. The difference this time around is that Biden might willingly step down. And if he does that, we will have what's called an open convention. But that is not a slam dunk. And for this, I blame Barack Obama. One of the reasons why I think Barack Obama will go down in history is one of the bottom 10% of presidents we've ever had. One of the many reasons is he functionally destroyed the Democratic Party's ability to generate talent. When he ran for president, he formed his own organization and ran in parallel. And then when he got enough momentum, he basically co-opted the Democratic Party institution for his own purposes, something similar to what Donald Trump

did. In doing so, he made it all about him. And then for the next eight years, he sucked all the oxygen out of the room and prevented a new generation of political leaders from rising up within the party. And so that's why we have folks like Schumer and Pelosi, who are almost as old as Biden, who are the power brokers in Congress. And a new generation is really having a hard time getting going now. They have started, but it's probably too late, certainly too late for this cycle. And that means that the only people who are willing to run for president in the primary system are those ideological idiots like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders who can draw national support and kind of like Trump with MAGA

get people to show up in numbers to the primaries, even if people would normally not consider themselves Democrats. If we have an open convention, those ideological idiots will be there. But the advantage of an open convention is you might get normal politicians, God forbid, there. So I have always been a fan in the American political system. of the governors. Because they have to deal with day-in, day-out issues and actually make the trains run on time, and they have to govern across the aisle.

And we haven't had a meaningful governor run on the Democratic side for a bit. And on the Republican side, it's just been overwhelmed by Donald Trump. So for an open convention, we might actually, because it's just going to be for like a few weeks instead of this endless campaigning system that we seem to have normally, a governor could throw his or her hat in the ring not have to deal with all the shit of all the ideological wars and Mac actually get a good candidate. And that is a way that the Democrats could have a complete blowout

of the system of the election. It is possible. But it's also possible you could get Elizabeth Warren which is like one of three people on this planet that Donald Trump could beat. This can't happen on the Republican side. Donald Trump has destroyed the Republican Party. He's purged of anyone who is against him in the real,

breakpoint was back in March when he took over the Republican National Committee, and the first thing he did was purge anyone who had anything to do with polling or candidate selection or basically fact gathering, anyone who had any experience in politics, and basically replace them all with his flunkies. So Trump, even if he dies tomorrow, will probably still be the Republican nominee this round. His grip on what's left of the Republican Party is that firm. Okay, that's it for me today. I hope you enjoys today's episode of Delusion, versus dementia and its after effects. As always, with all of my domestic political videos,

I invite you to send outraged messages to the collection email spot, which is me at whatever.com. That's M-E-H-at-whatever.com, and I promise I will personally review and respond to each and every none of them. Until next time.