The Press Box - Biden Wins Reaction Edition

Episode Date: November 8, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker unpack the 2020 presidential election that resulted in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris being elected as President and Vice-President. They weigh in on the week-long process, Trump refusing to concede, and celebratory parades across the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here. David Joe Biden just gave his victory speech in Wilmington, Delaware. He will become the next president of the United States. And I got just one thing to say to you. The old guy still got it. Oh, yeah, I'm glad we got there so quickly. Yeah, it was a hell of a speech. It was a hell of a speech.

Vice President-elect Harris gave a very good, albeit brief speech, to open things up. You know, everybody who's listening to this podcast, I'm sure has been doing the same thing we've been doing for the past, what, five days, which is just sitting in increasingly uncomfortable positions on our furniture watching a flip back and forth between all the cable channels to see, you know,

who's going to call Pennsylvania first? We all know that this was a speech they had tentatively planned for last night, and there was a speech, and this felt like the one they, you know, they had planned on giving. Last night turned out to be sort of a holding note. but however long they had this one in the you know in the hopper it was a as an incredible performance and just an incredible night can i say the thing that struck me most about joe biden tonight is that he was for the first time i can

remember in this campaign truly joyful he has had to be such a heavy presence throughout this campaign talking about coronavirus talking about threats to democracy talking about threats to democracy, talking about the economy. Tonight, he seemed happy. He seemed like that sort of joyous Uncle Joe character that we knew during the Obama years. Yeah. And I've missed that, Joe Biden.

And it was great to hear that tonight. Yeah, I mean, we saw some of that in his campaigns with Obama, but, you know, there's a lot to be said for relief and for the amount of pressure that he was, you know, obviously under. This is a, and also the stakes. I mean, that's, that goes to the pressure too. The stakes of this election were really high. Kamala Harris didn't hesitate at all to brand it, to, you know, to, I mean, this was not a reconciliation speech by, by Harris, right? I mean, she was just like, we were on the verge of losing democracy. I'm glad you guys voted, you know. And there's a lot of relief that comes with being on the, on the other side of that. Couple of interesting parts of Biden speech tonight. He said that his mandate that he got from the American people was for Democrats and Republicans to cooperate, which I read as Joe Biden cleverly trying to navigate the results of the election that put him in the White House probably has denied the Democrats of Senate and lost Democrats seats in the House. Is that the proper reading of that little. maneuver there in the speech?

I mean, I don't know if, I don't disagree, but I don't know if that kind of breakdown is even necessary. This has been Joe Biden's sort of position for the entire campaign, right? He's going to bring people together. He's going to bring us back to old Washington. I mean, listen,

the world does not need me to stand up and say how unrealistic that feels, especially the people kind of of our demographic and certainly the generation below us, right? I mean, there's been so much written about it. Brian Boiler from Crooked Media wrote an incredibly incredible essay about it. How long ago was that now? Two weeks ago, three weeks ago?

I don't even know. But he's not the first. And, you know, I mean, probably won't be the last to talk about the bad faith politics of the Republican Party and how much the Obama years suffered from having to deal with that. you know it's a little bit disheartening i think for some people that that joe biden seems less aware of that than those of us sitting you know in the eucresites but maybe he knows better he you know he was there for everything and certainly there is an argument to be made and this is a little bit separate from mandate but you can make an

argument that you just have to change the political stakes right that like but that that working across the aisle is not necessarily a non-starter if there's a political advantage to being seen as bipartisan. And that just somehow has to be conveyed to a Republican party that seems to be only steered at least from Washington by, you know, tax cuts and misinformation. I think the interesting question for me is how much does Joe Biden believe we are going to work together type rhetoric? And how much does Joe Biden think that Americans who've been through the coronavirus for months,

who've been through four years of the craziest presidency imaginable, want to hear we will work together rhetoric? I think it's incredibly compelling now, and I think that he probably does believe it. I mean, I don't think we have any reason to believe that he doesn't fully believe it, but regardless, I think it's a good political message right now. I think it's what, I mean, listen, healing, for the first time in political history, healing is not strictly metaphorical, right?

Yes. Our country actually needs to heal from a pandemic that has been exacerbated by the terrible policies of the current slash former president, however you want to label Trump. Soon to be former. Soon to be former. Healing is not just a cliche. But it's a bigger issue than that because Trump, by virtue of the way he decided to conduct himself in office allows Biden, not just in terms of coronavirus, but across the board. He allows

him the chance. He's given him the chance to actually lead in broad strokes or to lead in metaphors, right? I mean, it's not one issue. It's these big ideas. Unity. It's not a red America and blue America. It's one America. You know, the United States of America. The renewed faith, just notes like you know, renewed faith in tomorrow, these real vagaries that are obvious, obviously they pepper every grand, grand political speech that you can remember. But in 2020, President-elect Joe Biden says these things,

and they have so much, like it feels like they have practical meaning because we're coming out of a four-year stretch in which you could not have found a grandiose word that could have fit into any description of any moment in the Trump presidency. You know? Totally, totally, totally right.

I mean, And that's the irony of this campaign, isn't it? Joe Biden's very, very basic idea of politics turned out to be the right idea of politics. This is where Joe Biden was going to be no matter what. All those cliches you just rattled off, that was going to be part of the Joe Biden pitch in this election, no matter what the political situation was, no matter what the public health situation was. And somehow we wound up at this moment in American life where the cliches sounded fantastic. Yeah. The cliches won him the election.

I mean, again, I saw a couple of people point this out on CNN tonight. This guy has been saying the same things for a year and a half. Other candidates got tangled up in all these issued positions and all these little vagaries of the left versus the left center. Joe Biden just kept saying the same thing over. over again. And it was, I'm going to heal the nation. We can come together as a people. America can do better than this. Boom. Here he is tonight. Taking a victory lap as the next president of the United States. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, you know, we'll wait for the campaign books to be written, I guess. But I feel like to a large degree, we've seen a lot of it play out in real time in

front of us. The Biden campaign was, you know, was in many ways. I mean, it was going to be read, whichever, I mean, whether he won or lost, I think the Biden campaign would get all the credit or all the blame, right? It was a very conservative campaign in a lot of ways. Yes. But, you know, the way that it actually played out seems like just a brilliant boxing match game plan, right?

I'm going to let my opponent punch himself out. You know, I'm going to, I'm just going to, like, stand here and play defense. And, I mean, and, you know, no matter what happens, I'm not going to make, I'm not going to let the judges think that I'm hurt. And, and then at the end, I'm going to get, I'm going to get a lot of points from that, right? I mean, it's, I'm going to barely campaign. Exactly. And I'm never going to come out of the corner. And Trump's just going to be staying in the middle of the ring hitting himself in the face.

Exactly. It is one of the most interesting questions, I think, over the next. couple of weeks is all the campaign post-mortems get written and then the eventual books that we'll get about this campaign is how much credit will the media give Joe Biden for this strategy? How much will be tactical brilliance and how much will just be the circumstances that Joe Biden was handed, which every presidential candidate gets handed. I don't have the right answer to the mix of that question, but I am fascinated to see where reporters end up on the question. of how brilliant was the Joe Biden campaign in 2020.

It feels like it's going to skew towards brilliant, at least at the beginning. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, but I'm very interested to see where that goes to. But another thing he did, David, tonight that was so interesting is we'll get to the just absolute weirdness of the last three days, this slow motion awarding of the presidency. But I thought one thing Biden did so well tonight was, He actually reminded Democrats that this is a joyous occasion because we've Democrats have been in, you know, oh my God, the Senate, oh my God, the House.

What is taking so long? How did Donald Trump come this close to getting reelected after what he has done over the last four years and especially the last year? And then Joe Biden and I, just by his tone was like, by the way, kicking Donald Trump out of office, that's a great thing. that's a great night. You can remember to be happy. And I felt like he was almost body surfing on all those crowds we saw, like in Philadelphia and Brooklyn and New York and Chicago and all those other places today. And it was like getting rid of Trump at some level was always the goal.

And you can remember to be happy. Even as you do the recriminations and the, you know, I know the conservative house members are mad at the squad and all the stuff. It's okay. something really, really big just happened. Yeah, I mean, it definitely felt today like the excruciating slow drip of the past week made the final calls

that much sweeter today, right? That the crowds got, I mean, certainly there would have been a public celebration in some cities on some level had the election been clear on Tuesday. But the love, but the release of today, I thought was in some part or in large part, due to how long it had taken to get to this point, even just this week.

This week felt longer than months or years in the Trump presidency at times. Oh, my God. But yeah, I mean, and Biden crowd-surfed on that energy to continue your, to make a metaphor out of your non-metaphor. But it was, there was a joyousness. There was such life, you know. I mean, we're not, a million people have already pointed out. He jogged to the podium, you know, down like a long ramp.

He yelled, he yelled most of the speech, you know, and sometimes you get the kind of volume of people. We saw this at, I mean, let this be the last time I ever say the name Kimberly Gilfoyle, but we saw this at the Republican National Convention when she was screaming as if there was a crowd, you know, as if over a crowd that wasn't there. Sometimes the acoustics are dependent on the environment, but, no, he was, he was, it was a conciliatory in a lot of ways, the words of the speech. You know, there's a lot of, as we've already said, there was a lot of, you know, let's work together.

But the pitch was excitement. It was, it was, you know, he was ready to, you know, to lead the army. And it was, like you said, it was joyous, and it was energetic and it was, you know, hopeful. And I think anybody who had forgotten the joy of such a moment was reminded when Van Jones had that reaction that he did on CNN earlier today.

And then again, cut to those photos of people literally dancing in the streets. I love this tweet from Mother Jones's Clara Jeffrey. It's like the end of the Star Wars movies where we see all the planets and everybody's celebrating because the empire was defeated. That is kind of what a miracle looked like today. Yeah.

I saw how Peter Kafka had this tweet and it was from Brooklyn and everybody's in the streets celebrating. and a mail truck comes through a U.S. Postal Service truck, and everybody starts cheering. Yeah, we get the postal service back. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Truly, truly, truly. Also, this line, David, from his speech, Biden mentioned the role of black voters in this election. He said, you always had my back, even in the lowest moments of this campaign, and I will always have yours.

Talked a little bit with Jamel Hill about this earlier in the week. Yeah, and she tweeted. immediately in response to that, to that line in the speech, too. But go ahead. Yeah, but it's just, I mean, let us not forget, right? I mean, if anybody understands the role black voters played in this election, it was Joe Biden, going back to the South Carolina primary, where Joe Biden had won exactly zero primaries and caucuses. His campaign was on the verge of death, going all the way to the the incredible support he got from black voters in the general election. I'll put him over the top.

That was, that line really, really stood out to me. Well, I mean, and listen, emotions are high. You know, Biden's always going to look like a saint compared to, you know, his predecessor in the White House. But again, there's just so, it's, it is not a normal thing to hear a president. or a president-elect say, you'll always have my back and I'll have yours and have it sound true.

Mm-hmm. And part of that is, I mean, that was specifically about the African-American community, but just in general, you know, from the beginning of the speech, all the way down to seeing his family together on stage

with the Harris family, or with Kamala Harris' family, I don't know. There was just a set, there was a, there was a sort of honesty. There was a, there is a believability. There was a humanity, I guess, to the whole thing that just seemed sort of breathtaking.

The line I wrote down from Harris's speech, she said something like this, well, I'm the first woman to have this job. I won't be the last. And I almost, I mean, again, the week has been so turbulent. The last month has been so turbulent that it was easy, at least for me to just forget the history that was being made there on so many levels. And I was so happy that we were reminded of that tonight with her speech that, that was really a speech on its own before it became an introduction of Joe Biden. By the way, I'm sure a lot of people knew this. Today was the day that I learned that, that Hoover, Her, Hoover's VP was technically a person of color, Charles Curtis.

Were you, were you aware of this like evolving, uh, elements of style sort of thing today? that they very deliberately called Kamala Harris the first female person of color in the White House because I think NPR was the first to point out that Charles Curtis identified or was a member of a Native American nation. I did not miss that. It was a great day for learning about American history

on the fly. But yeah, Kamala Harris was, I mean, both Biden and Harris, I mean, we talked about the relief aspect with Joe Biden. I don't know it was a matter of relief with Kamala Harris, but we, I mean,

throughout the campaign from her bid for the presidency to the time that she was the VP, I think I've said this before. There's a little bit of a front runner in her, and I mean it in the best possible way, that the amount of confidence she gets as the spotlight gets brighter.

Like her confidence grows. Her skills grow and grow and grow. And to put her on a stage with 12 other people, it's not the place where she's going to excel. But tonight was in such a brief speech was one of just the most compelling moments of her public career. And I'm sure there's only more to come. Yeah. And, you know, after Biden chose her as his running mate, you know, she went out and wiped the floor with Mike Pence in a debate one-on-one.

And, you know, that was a big moment in this campaign. Again, with a point where they had the lead, the only thing. thing they didn't want to do was relinquish momentum, make a mistake. She went out and delivered a fantastic performance. I totally agree on her speech tonight. We've got to talk about the current occupant of the White House. Who was... Wait, can I make a brief aside? Because you mentioned

the U.S. Postal Service before? Before we get out of this, in a future episode, we have to rank the villains of the Trump administration. Louis de Joy, it could just just an incredible man who we should definitely spend some time on the future. We need the biggest arch villains and the goofiest villains of the Trump administration. Louis DeJoy may actually be on both lists.

Congratulations. Donald Trump, David, was golfing today when the network's called Pennsylvania. Yeah. I guess the idea was, hey, I don't need to pay attention to the network's officially coming to the conclusion that I'm not going to be the president anymore. Yeah, absolute dagger from Paula Reid at CBS News. I think she might have been the one to break. She said breaking while President Trump is on his 209th golf outing. CBS News projects former VP Joe Biden elected president.

And I think, I think it was sussed out that Newt Gingrich was in his golfing party, which might explain why Gingrich was going over and above to defend. Trump's, all of Trump's spurious accusations of voter fraud over the past several days. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, whatever. Dude's, he's golfed a lot. He's golfed a lot. And of course, you know, I'm glad that we're going to, that we're moving on beyond that there's a Trump tweet for everything. But, I mean, it is just sort of fit. There are so many, so many fitting things, so many perfect little, little metaphorical flourishes. Bowes were tied on today and we'll get to a lot of them, I'm sure.

Well, why would just do the list right now? I was going to say, but, but him after everything, after all the shit, he talked about Obama golfing and saying you wouldn't have time to golf with all the importance of the things he'd have to do as president. That's great. That he was on his 209th golf trip, uh, with the, with the, you know, all of our tax dollars, just like, just shooting money out of like a, like a, like a, one of those money guns you see at a sporting event into the, into the Trump Foundation's coffers.

yeah anyway let's run through the rest of them let's go metaphorical flourishes that you can't make up ranked okay number one trump golfing when he loses the election trump what's a trump trump golfed while they uh while his campaign burned is that the right way to phrase then i think that's right uh to coin a phrase number two trump watching over three days while the mail-in and absentee ballots that he trashed, that he tried to make radioactive, delivered the presidency to Joe Biden. Wow. Wow. And David, number three, and maybe even better, today after Trump was declared the loser,

people in Washington, D.C. celebrated in the same square where Trump had them tear gassed the summer. Fantastic line from CNN's Jim Acosta who said that this may be the world's most satisfying how it started, how it's going tweet. There were a lot of them today. There were a lot of them today.

Yeah. I mean, listen, there were other ones too. The press conference at the four seasons, what was it, the four seasons like lawn care service instead of the four seasons hotel? Oh my God. I mean, there was just no better encapsulation of the

from someone who is in the hotel business who should know the difference unbelievable by the way I heard everybody calling the people in the streets today protesters is that is that the right word now that Donald Trump has been defeated

aren't everyone everybody today a reveler yeah like a celebrant yeah yeah I do want to talk to you about the slow motion quality of Don Joe Biden's victory. Oh, do they have to live through this again?

Last time you and I were holding these mics was Wednesday night. Everybody in America seemed to know where this was going. Well, yeah. The last time we held them was Wednesday night. I polished mine off at every evening since then. I made sure the dust was off. We were about ready to go. And then nobody would make the call.

Yeah, we kept texting each other. Do we do it now? Is it, is it? I kept saying, I don't know, David, doesn't Joe Biden actually need to win the presidency? we can't do like another Joe Biden is on the brink of the presidency podcast. And by the way, didn't you love the media's language of near victory? Biden is on the verge of the presidency.

Biden is on the cusp of the presidency, the New York Times said today. MSNBC last night said he was poised to win. And I noticed at some point CNN just changed the quiron to Biden close to victory. Yeah. We're just going to simplify this. That was amazing. Yeah.

it was like Adrian Wojnarowski on that first draft where he wasn't allowed to project picks, right? It was all like every, it was like every turn or phrase he could use, and then he just started making up random sentences with the team and the player. And I'm, it was pretty, it was pretty amazing. And listen, I'm happy that it happened because it was, that was the comfort that we were all afforded, right? I mean, there was sort of like, for whatever comfort that we, that, that we or anybody on either side, whatever, got from polls leading up to it, got from the, you know, aggregators, got from everybody else. There was a little bit of, you know, there was a little bit masturbatory the whole thing, right?

I mean, you don't, you don't, whether or not they're true, and obviously we can, we'll talk more about how true they ended up being, you're looking for confirmation, right? When you look at these things before, before the event. But as the, as the week wore on, there was a, there was an incredible amount of comfort. And even the hedging that, like, like Nate Silver and Nate Cohen did, right? I mean, because it was just like, listen, I have a hard time imagining that Pennsylvania could go could possibly end up with Trump, but I'm not going to say anything, you know, for a certain. And then when you saw that, but you saw that,

we talked about this on Wednesday, the confidence that the Biden campaign projected. And then the confidence, getting back to your point, that every news outlet projected. I mean, you could see it on Fox News, starting on Wednesday morning. You know, they were already making plans to move on. And even though nobody was saying it out loud,

the more bizarre the verbiage got, the more confident you sort of felt and how the future was going to go. Did you also notice the language that the Trump campaign was employing during the time you're talking about? Bill Steppian, who is the campaign manager, came out Thursday and said,

Donald Trump is alive and well. Probably not something you say if you're winning. By Friday, Axios is just, Jonathan Swan had a Trump official saying the campaign's goal was to keep Trump optically alive. Optically alive. Yeah. Is that the best euphemism for dead you've ever heard? Yeah.

I mean, the whole thing was so bizarre. Even the specifics that language they were using when it came to, you know, as they were trying to dispute the election results, the suppression polls. and we should talk about suppression polls. Oh, my. In just a second. But everybody just sort of like using this weird, all this weird phraseology, Kali and Conway at some point,

and there might have been others used, actually accused the Democrats of moving election day. Like that was a concise phrase, moving election day by like extending, I guess, the deadline for balance. The whole thing was so bizarre. And it all, I mean, talk about metaphorical bows. This whole thing came to the entire Trump

resistance or whatever came down to Trump telling us he was going to take this all the way to the Supreme Court ahead of time and you know shit talking the mail-in balloting process for the past several months obviously leaks from days before the election this was going to the courts they had their whole thing they were going to call they were going to stop the the vote counting as soon as Trump had a

lead and they were going to blah blah blah and it all amounts to nothing. Trump sitting in the white house complaining that his attorneys aren't killers. But it's like they had this giant plan and nobody figured out the plan part of it. Right. It's like, what are you actually suing anybody about? Like, what is the complaint? It's like, Trump really, I think, thinks that it's like, I mean, that Michael Scott meme got a lot of traction over the past couple weeks. I file, I declare bankruptcy. But it really is what it's come down to, right? The Trump just thinks you just say like, you like ring the Supreme Court bell. And then these people who have appointed get to decide with the election results.

It's like this is such it's so just well it's just perfect. It's perfect. Yes. And Rudy being involved, you know, again, talk about coming all the way around the circle. But you're right. There was this thing where there was a report was it.

And then in the New York Times where they said that Trump was seeking his own James Baker, James Baker, who presided over the 2000 recount and helped George W. I think Jared particularly was the one leading the search for the new James Baker. And yet that's kind of late in the game to go. go hunting for James Baker. Okay, well, we're three days after the election. Anybody we can pick

here? Like, now you're thinking of this? Yeah. And in 2000, I mean, I was not, you know, co-hosting a political and media podcast at the time, but I'm fairly certain, Bush and Carl Rove weren't just like,

is there, can we get to a great statesman and they invited James Baker and they're like, all right, well, we're losing and we don't know what to do. Any ideas? like no i mean obviously at that point the florida recount was like i mean there was there there was there there were i mean history could have gone a couple of different ways i think we all agree on that but uh there was a there was a purpose to james baker's involvement he knew he was there for a reason he wasn't just there to like be james oh he was there to be james baker yeah he kind of was

but but but he knew what he was fighting about but that involved actual skills i'm like he also wasn't a man in search of a cause right i mean he wasn't there just like what like what are all the minor grievances that we can somehow ball up into a, into a you know, meme war, into meme war ammunition. I mean, there's, this is, you can't just, you don't just walk into the Supreme Court and get him to flip the election.

Well, he did, but anyway. The, um, for Democrats, the fact that this was drawn out over several days when we knew what the result was going to be, was satisfying on some level, right? Trump was binge watching his own demise on television.

On the considerable down, side, as Nate Silver and other people pointed out, it gave a ton of time for Trump to tell lies about the elections, about the elections. Excuse me, you mentioned the speech he gave the other night. Apparently this was all, by the way, preceded by Trump apparently just wanting to get on TV because he kept seeing Biden go out and be a statesman. Yeah. And Trump said, I've got to get out there and do something. So on Thursday night, Trump spoke from the White House, talking about voter fraud, how he had won the election. All not true, by the way. Shenanigans. Shenanigans. Yes, shenanigans. There's the word I'm looking for. And then

it was the suppression, the suppression polls. So the idea was when the media showed you a bad Trump poll that all the Trump people were going to stay home, was that was that Trump's theory of the case? That was the argument, yeah. Yeah, that if there, that if, if, if, it's so ridiculous that the the the pollsters all got together he he singled out uh quinopeiac which is yeah i'm sure great for their brand um but he but the idea is that that they all that they got together and decided if we make it look like joe biden's running 10 points ahead then all the trump voters will be disheartened and they'll stay home and they won't cast votes there's a couple of problems with that one is that trump got more votes than he did last time and more votes than

anybody except for Joe Biden this time has ever received. History, yes. Also, there's like, there's this, I mean, I know there's a little disconnect is probably not even worth going over. But is the idea that the media succeeded in swaying the election, or did they not succeed in it because no one believes them, right? I mean, the idea, like nobody has any faith in the, in the media, supposedly, right? I mean, but somehow they all, this one thing, the trick polls actually worked.

And I know this is taking it too seriously. But if this is really what was going on, you know, the Trump campaign, the RNC, were free to release their internal polls at any point in any point in time, you know, I mean, if it was just like, if it was just the nefarious evil of Quinnipiac and of, you know, all the other pollsters that are out there, there's ways you could have fought back against that in real time.

The problem is they believed it. They had the same polls in front of them, too. And as somebody pointed out, or several people pointed out, the media's nefarious plan was to suppress the Trump vote, but the media did not suppress like the Tom Tillis vote. Well, of course. Because Trump took credit, right, for all the victories down the ballot.

But if the media was trying to suppress Republicans, why did they just do Trump? Why didn't, why not give the Senate to the Democrats, too? No, there were, he had an actual line, going back to the pollster thing, where he said, postures got it knowingly wrong for suppression reasons. and then sort of trail off saying, you know, that's been properly acknowledged by the media, actually. I think I missed that piece. Are you, do you continue to be amazed during that speech

how much of the media hit the mute button on Trump? Yeah, so I actually flipped the Fox during the speech. And when I flip back to whatever CNN or MSNBC was kind of like caught off guard by the fact that it was totally gone because I missed even the cutoff where they said this president's lying. having no transition, I was just like, wow, it felt really kind of unnerving. But yeah, I mean, what are you going to do? It's weird that the, I don't know if it's that on Tuesday, like we said, all the people that

work at the channels knew where everything was going to go, regardless of, you know, the vote counting and how long that would take. But it would be nice. I mean, they're not nice. It's actually kind of sad, but I guess there's a certain way. of looking at it where you would, you might speculate that people finally just kind of got up

the gumption to like stand up to Trump. I think it's probably more that they all knew that there wasn't any reason not to stand up to him anymore, but. Ding, ding, ding. But yeah.

They don't do that if they think is going to be the president before more years. I don't think so. Yeah, I mean, but they finally do what people have been begging them to do for over four years.

You know, since the beginning of the Trump candidacy for, you know, in the four years ago. And, and, you know, Twitter did the same thing. You could really see, I mean,

you could really imagine Trump's physical deflation, but you could kind of see in real time how whatever the plan was going to be lost one million percent of its steam as Twitter just started muting Trump tweets, right? As long as soon as every time Trump would lie, Twitter was just like, again,

doing something that Trump, I mean, that people have been asking of Twitter for four plus years. When he's full of shit, when he's, you know, attacking whatever, you just get, you have to point it out. And I was texting back and forth with Justin Charity of the Ringer, and who's been on this podcast several times.

But there was, I just saw a picture of, I just looked at Trump's timeline and it was four tweets in a row. Three of them were totally, like, were labeled by Twitter as some of this content shared in this tweet as disputed, blah, blah, blah. So three of them you couldn't see. And the fourth one just said news conference at 6.30 p.m. Right.

That was the state of his Twitter feed before that speech that we were just talking about. And I just said, this is what the end looks like, right? I mean, this is like, at that point, it just, there was no hope. Even if Trump had been reelected, there was no hope of a comeback at that point. It was just going to be four years of just old man yells at clouds. I mean, and like we just said, the networks, everybody could feel it. And they treated them that way. Yeah, it was like redacted, redacted.

Minor scheduling matter. Redacted, redacted. I think, you know, this has been the problem, right, for four years of Trump, is how much do you run his comments? He's the president of the United States. So how much do you, you know, why would, why would you, how can you turn off the president of the United States? You can fact check him. You can do all those things. But turning him off is a pretty dramatic act, even when it's Donald Trump.

So do not, do not sleep on how dramatic an act it was for the networks to turn Donald Trump off. Twice on election night and then on Thursday night and say, we can't cover this. We can't just let this run because he's lying. That's pretty incredible. Well, I mean, not for nothing. But, I mean, Donald Trump's been a shitty president for, you know, the entirety of his presidency.

But we've talked a lot on this podcast about all he had, like from the beginning of coronavirus at a bare minimum, all you have to do is act presidential. All you have to do is just like pretend to be a president for five minutes. Go out there and give a speech and you will do, you'll be doing good for the country and probably good for your candidacy as well. If he just went out there, he could have gone out there every day this week and just said,

America is a country of important values. And I stand by those values and the fight will continue. You know, just speak in platitudes. And they would have left the camera on you. And it would have done a lot more for your public image and probably more for whatever imaginary battle you're waging. than what he did on Wednesday, right? But he's never going to learn that lesson.

He's never going to learn that. Like, if he just read the speech Joe Biden gave tonight, you know, they just put that in the blender and spit it back out and said, and did it himself. He would, he'd still be president right now if he'd been giving that speech for four years, you know? Well, as we, as so many people are finding out, if he did those things, he would not be Donald Trump.

True. And he would not have been elected or won the Republican nomination in the first place. I did love the word shenanigans. Isn't that the word when you see like two of your high school friends that are on some trip to like New Orleans or Vegas and they post a picture on social media and just one of them writes shenanigans underneath it? Is that where Donald? I don't think Donald Trump is like a big Facebook user or at least, you know, in non-campaign. Is that where he got that word? No.

That's the only place I see that word in American life. I call dibs on shenanigans for for a campaign book titles. write our campaign book. Oh. Shenanigans might be the way to go. Sorry, Ryan Liz and Olivia Nuzzi just beat you to it. I just saw something on Twitter. We could go on and on, David.

I want to save a little bit to unpack next week. Okay. A few things, though, that before we leave, one is all of us pretending to be campaign experts for the last three days, pretending that we know the differences between. all these counties in Pennsylvania. Yeah. Yeah, well, listen, I mean, that was going to happen with the amount of time that we spent with it.

And it happens every four years that people, you know, start figuring this stuff out as they watch over the course of the night. One of the really good things, I think, about the amount of time it took to count the ballots, is that whatever failure, maybe not their fault, but whatever failure that networked, the media at large, our government had

and explaining how the process works, but whatever failures they had prior to the election, I had a whole lot of time to explain it as the week went on, right? I watched a lot of, you know, I talked about it last time we were on the show, but watched a lot of Cornacki at the beginning of the week, but watch a lot of John King, the second half of the week, because he was, he spoke to in sort of, in sort of bigger, like bigger terms, right?

I mean, he explained the way he did, kind of snidly sometimes, the way that like elections go in this country and and kind of explained and made it really clear that like if you didn't understand that you're an idiot but um there was a lot of times that learn in how these elections go but you're right we all by the end of the week think we know everything about certain congressional districts in pennsylvania that uh you know we'll probably forget about in 36 hours um 36 have we already forgotten i already forgot that's why everybody's out in the streets drinking and parting right now. We're just washing that part of our brain. We're just cleansing it

away. I'm willing to be honest. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, I no longer have any idea where that is. I did yesterday afternoon. I no longer remember where that is. By the way, I did love the John King disclaimer that every time John King would go to explain why the absentee votes and the mail-in ballots were coming in late, he would say, now, got to give Donald Trump credit. He turned out his vote. He turned out his election day vote. That's why all this is read. But what is happening now is the mail-in balance. With Donald Trump discouraged his...

He just gave the same spiel like 900 times. And you're right, it was useful. I mean, it was obviously done as an amulet to ward off all the Trump disinformation at some level. But it was kind of useful to hear that like 900 times. This is what I'm watching. And now I understand this anew. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, and listen, everybody pointed it out. I mean, the reason why the Pennsylvania votes were taking forever is because the Republican legislature refused to let them count the votes early. And like many other states did, most other states did. And we wouldn't have had the misery of waiting had they not done that. And wouldn't have really affected the outcome at all. And that's the last thing I wanted to talk to you about or the last big thing, which is that, David, we had this three and a half day made for TV drama that was completely randomly determined by the order in which they counted the votes. Joe Biden was not coming back in Pennsylvania because in fact, the votes he was using to come back in Pennsylvania in many cases had been sent in before the votes that put him behind. It was merely this drama created because they counted votes in certain ways.

You saw in Arizona, they counted it in the opposite way. So Joe Biden's lead went down over the course of the week. But I just thought that was a strangest thing. It was like it was written as this multi-day drama. Again, it was this, it was completely, and again, I don't want to leave out GOP legislatures, which were part of the reason they counted in the order that they did. But it was completely chance. Yeah.

Well, it was really weird. It was. I mean, and listen, the votes that we were counting at the very end, despite, yeah, I mean, all the, well, shenanigans that led up to that point, I mean, these are incredibly small margins, right? I mean, the one thing that I think it was John King that pointed out that I kind of wish they'd said they'd pointed out more frequently was that every other state, was also today at 96 or 97%, right?

Nobody's sitting there at 100% just like kicking their feet up. It's just that their final 5% don't matter, right? I mean, the states have already been won statistically. And this, I mean, these states that we were watching at the end were, I mean, swing state doesn't do it justice. It was down to a couple hundred, a couple thousand, a couple 10,000, whatever votes in some of these states.

It was amazing. I mean, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, talk too much about it feeling like a movie but man this whole week felt like a movie didn't it i mean it was just it was like one of those it was like the ending of every football game in friday night lights where you're just like i don't know how we're down to like the one yard line again for the 16th game this season um but it was i mean i it's kind of hard to believe kind of hard to believe two final media highlights do we want to hear anderson cooper's reaction to Trump's speech on Thursday night, Erica,

do we have Anderson Cooper reacting to Trump's lies and untruths about the election process? It's the United States. That is the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over. Now, remember when we played that audio a couple weeks ago

of Anderson Cooper calling Trump obesely immoral? and now he's the obese turtle. I can't put my finger on it, David, but I'm sensing a theme in the way Anderson Cooper talks about Donald Trump. You think he just figured out

that that's the one way to get the thing that really gets to him? I don't know. Maybe that word just came to him. He just reaching for an adjective both times. Obesce turtle. And then the final one, I don't know if you're watching CNN tonight, but they played the

Biden speech and then Biden is sitting on the stage doing the stuff winning candidates to do after they deliver their big victory speech and a number of songs came on. So they let the songs play and they finally came back to Wolf Blitzer and Willzzer said something like I'm not making this up.

If you love Tina Turner Holland Oates and Coldplay and I do then you loved all that music you just heard. Did they give Wolf Blitzer a serious channel? And is it like the blend? What, what happened? What happened? We got Wolf Blitzer's musical, uh, musical loves.

Oh, man. I was not expecting the Biden campaign to like rival all of those like Biden, like Spotify. I mean, sorry, those, uh, Obama Spotify playlist from over the years, but the Biden, Biden, Biden playlist got a lot of positive press tonight. Um, yeah, that was an incredible, an incredible wolf blitzer moment. I mean, a good, a good way to cap it off for him. We don't, we, we don't spend a lot of time. with Wolf over the weekend. We all felt like we got to know him a little bit more as a human being, but that was certainly the most human moment of the whole night. Yeah. And the Cole play song, I understand, was one of Bo Biden's favorite song. So that was a tribute to Bo Biden, and all that stuff. But I just love, I just love after like four or five days where people have

been on television 24 hours a day, Wolf Blitzer is recommending Tina Turner and Holland Oates to America. By the way, since you mentioned Bo, we didn't really talk about the families much, but how great would it have been if Hunter Biden had just come out on the stage making it rain? Would there have been anything better in the world? And if he just came out

with just like a ton of money just throwing it around and joy? I did see some people online some of the just terrible, the evil right wingers who were like asking how he could, you know, bear it out of they could possibly

have him show his face up there when he's under FBI investigation. We'll get to this, I'm sure, when we talk on Monday. Yeah, the answer is Joe Biden loves his son. Yes, the people that were most, watching people who were the most burned, I mean, Trump was out there with some real low energy,

low energy, you know, just arguments over the week. But man, his sons, I don't know if it's because they know they're going to have to be the ones that fall on the sword when jail time starts coming around or something. But like they were going, the people that went bonkers this week were pretty fun to watch. Now, less fun to watch are the just utter pieces of shit. you'll pardon my not to put too fine a point on it no but people that are out there like

you know Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham and Josh Holly who were just like going out going on like Tucker Carlson to scream about vague or insignificant you know electoral hijinks or whatever just to boost their cue rating with the Trump crowd and and go go back and watch all those tapes

none of them said anything none of them had a single problem all they did was just pretend that there's a problem the election system which is like a greater sin than anything that happened during the electoral process. It was a really clean election, by the way. But even if some of those things that happened,

what they did is freaking evil. After they were ordered to by Don Jr. Yeah. They did not come out until Don Jr. Tweet shamed them and said, any 2024 contenders, why aren't you standing up for my dad? Yeah, it's good to know that they still believe that to be true.

Oh, and you have one more shout out to, please. To Chris Christie. What's the complete list? Chris Christy, Rick Santorum, Ari Fleischer, everybody that says we need to give Trump a little bit of space.

A little bit, we need to give a little time. Space. To get through this. I agree with everybody on Twitter who said, fuck your time and space. However, you know what? I think we can give them a little bit of time.

I think we can give him some time. I don't, like, I don't care. Like, I mean, he's going to do some probably terrible shit on the way out the door, but like, if he needs some time to get it through, listen, he can take all the time he needs. At some point, someone's going to have to come to him and just be like, no, you actually have to leave because, like, you know,

the Secret Service is now you're, now you're a problem to them. They're not, you know, you're, you're not an asset. At some point, you know, they're just going to have to shuffle them out the door at the end of the, you know, the bars closed, you got to go. But until, you know, for the next several days, for the next couple of weeks, we don't, I don't care how much time it takes him to get it through. There are fun stories here. I mean, I, you know, every, every little trickle that comes out of the White House is going to be sort of compelling in its own way. I say January 20th. He can have all the time he needs January 20th.

Got to go. Got to go. That's it. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida, production magic by Erica Servantes. Thank you so much press box listeners for hanging with us this week.

This was really fun, David. We're back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then. See you, Brian. The poll? Because they don't decide the election. The call for Joe Biden isn't, is it? What was it called by?

All the, oh my goodness, all the networks. Wow. All the networks. We have to forget about the law. Judges don't count. All the networks, all the networks, all the networks thought Biden was going to win by 10%. Gee, what happened?

Come on, don't be ridiculous. Networks don't get to decide elections. Courts do.