The Press Box - Picture Me Pollin’ | The Press Box

Episode Date: July 9, 2019

The importance (or lack thereof) of polling (02:00), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (18:00), the USWNT's World Cup win (18:15), Trump’s Fourth of July parade (33:15) and feud with Fox News (40:00), and the end of Mad magazine (44:45). Host: David Shoemaker Guest: Justin Charity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer podcast network. Our rewatchable spin-off show on Luminary called Rewatchables 1999 is taking a little summer break, but we'll be back in the fall with more movies including eyes wide shut, never been kissed, and more. In the meantime, we're launching a new show on Luminary about another influential moment in 1999 called Breakstuff, the story of Woodstock 99. The pod will dive deep on the iconic music festival and how its success and failures left its mark on history. The series begins on Tuesday, July 9th, and will be coming to you every Tuesday for eight weeks. So make sure to check out

Breakstaff, the story of Woodstock 99 on Luminary. Hi, media consumers. Welcome to the press box. I am David Chewaker of the Ringer. Brian Curtis is out on assignment. I am joined today in studio by Justin Charity, Ringer staff writer, and host presently of Sound Only

a Neon Genesis Evangelion. Evangelion podcast. And also by our esteemed researcher, Chris Hameda. Even in Brian's absence, we have media news to discuss this week. We're going to talk about the U.S. World Cup win,

the end of Mad Magazine, and, wait, Trump versus Fox News, but up first, the scourge of polling. Now, I know what you're thinking. It's only been one debate, well, two debates, but they make up one debate. And polls can't possibly matter this far out, right? I mean, every article on the subject

takes excessive pains to tell us that Carly Fiorena, Carly Fiorena got a big bump in the polls. four years ago after taking on then candidate Trump in a debate, and we saw how that worked out. And yet, those caveats are there buried in countless poll quoting articles, and TV news can't stop talking about the polls. They're everywhere. Now, Charity, I know that you care about polling as much as I do. I'm so hypocritical on this because, one, I am an obsessive listener of the 538 podcast, but otherwise I do hate polling culture.

The existence of them as care about, it's terrible. I'm going to run through, uh, a few of these stories that are touching on polls just to make sure that we get our hands dirty. Here's one. Kamala Harris got a sizey bump

after her debate showdown with Joe Biden. According to CNN, quote, all told, it's probably safest to say that Biden is still out in front nationally. His lead, though,

has been sliced in half. Following Biden, it's essentially a three-way race between Harris Sanders and Warren for second place. Buttigieg, though, should no longer be considered part of anything

close to the top tier. That's some harsh stuff. His polling is closer to candidates like Cory Booker. and better O'Rourke at 2%. Which is all good news for Kamala Harris, except Biden's still in the lead. Again, this is CNN.

According to a poll, Biden is the only Democrat with a wide lead over Trump in a hypothetical matchup. I love hypothetical matchups. Biden beat Trump, according to this Washington Post ABC News poll, but he pulled about even with a bunch of other people like Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and even Pete Buttigieg. But wait, didn't we just hear that Pete Buttigieg is definitely not in the top tier? What are he supposed to do with this, Justin?

That's the, I mean, that's the problem with this stuff, though, right? Is that I feel like the way that media and punits talk about polls, they're presented as if they are actually indicative of, like, the nation having a change of opinion from like week to week. Right. And realistically, it's just, I don't know, it's July, right? So that means that a lot of people have soft opinions about 20 different presidential candidates. and you watch a TV debate and you go, oh, I think, oh, you know, Kamala Harris, I didn't know a lot about her. You maybe sort of have a soft shift in your favorability. Yeah.

That's not, I feel like in media, these things are presented as if everyone's decided that, you know, Budigigig is over and Biden is, you know, in trouble. And Kamala is the new shit. And it's just like the sort of person who's going to change their mind after watching a TV debate. is also the sort of person who's going to change their mind a week later in poll. And, you know, I just feel like it's July. And also nobody, I mean, we had a lot of people watch those Democratic debates, but it was a tiny, teeny, infinitesimal fraction of the number of people who are going to vote in the primary, is let alone vote in the general election.

And the idea that like, the only, I mean, I really believe, and maybe this is the conspiracy theorist in me. But I really believe that the most, that the only, that the way that, the, the way that, the, the, the, the way that these polls are most valuable is that they actually affect public opinion. Is it hearing people are in the lead, it makes you feel like they're a frontrunner. Okay, I think that that part's true, but I otherwise think that they're mostly just useful to the campaigns themselves. I mean, they have their own internal polling, but that's the thing.

I think that, so they're useful in terms of setting this meta-narrative, and they're useful to people actually working on campaigns trying to get a sense of how they ought to react. But I know, I think they're definitely useful in that sense. I just mean, I mean, we live it. It's just a strange world that will, because we have well-to-well coverage on all these news networks because everybody has to keep cranking out articles. They're covering these polls as if they're meaningful, but they're not, at least not in a way, with the exception of outlets like 538, they're not meaningful in a way that warrant that sort

of coverage. Yeah, or it's like they're not meaningful. You're not going to look at the, you're not going to look at a post-debate poll and have really any substantial information about whether Kamala Harris is going to win the Democratic nomination. It's just, I just don't, I have a hard time looking at polls that way and engaging with polling culture that way. It's ephemeral. It's just all ephemeral. And much less that she's going to do well or poorly in a general, right? Like on 538, they would always call this a bad use of polling. It's totally feasible that we look back on, I mean, we were just talking about Carly Fiorina, and I would not, I, it makes me uncomfortable in any number of ways to put her and Kamala Harris in the same category. But we very well may look back in a

year at that, at the last debate as being Kamala Harris' biggest moment in the entire campaign. Yes. It has nothing to say, nothing to do with her as a candidate, but that's totally feasible, right? Yeah. That could have just been the moment that she exploded and then nothing else ever quite reached that same, that same level again. A couple more things on polls. All of this that like the only Democratic candidate who is, who stomps Trump in the polls,

that's got to be good news for the president, right? The only, and there's other good polling news for the president, according to, according to, I I think it's the same Wall Street Journal, I mean, the same Washington Post poll. Trump's approval rating is at 44%. This is the highest it's ever been. And people love how he's handled the economy. They don't like some other things. But they love how he's handling the economy.

This should be good news all around for our president. However, according to Newsweek, Trump's favorite polling company, that of course is Rasmussen reports, finds Biden comfortably ahead in their head-to-head matchup. Even when even Rasmussen is saying that Biden's going to beat you in the general, that's got to be bad news, right? But you don't think that I just, I look at the, let's start with the presidential approval, right? It's sort of Trump's highest approval rating is still any other president's worst approval rating. You know what I mean?

It's like great. He's going to top out at 43% approval. 43 may be good enough, though, in the modern era. I mean, who know, approval ratings might just keep going down and down for the rest of our lives. That's also quite feasible and true. But it also, okay, but then to that point. It's July. Call me when it's November of next year. I think that's exactly right.

The piece on the Rasmussen report from Newsweek said, quoted the report's authors. And it said, Joe Biden may be finding the going a little rougher in his own party, but he's still the most successful Democrat in a hypothetical 2020 matchup with President Trump. This is, I think, in a very small way, characterizes the meaninglessness of all this stuff. That Joe Biden is going to continue to get hit. over the head with a two by four by everybody who's running for president on the on the democratic side and yet he's ahead but he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's

because of name recognition I mean that's it this is still a name recognition poll we're so far away from any of these things having any I'm not saying they're not meaningful because we've talked about how they are in their own ways meaningful but having any having having we're so far away from any of the polls reflecting any kind of knowledge of the present political atmosphere. I think that's true. Right. So you have a lot of these candidates who are sort of like O'Rourke and Buttigieg who are sort of overnight people. But I also think that apart from there being some unknowns and being some marginal candidates, it's also like you need some people to drop out before I need some people to drop out before I start really thinking about polls super serious.

I'm glad you said that because you're not alone. The voters of Iowa agree with you. I was on the Obama campaign in Iowa in 2007. I know the people of Iowa, and I know I've been in tune with the people of Iowa. According to Politico, quote, the pressure on low-performing candidates to bow out is already bubbling up from the grassroots. Democratic voters have repeatedly signaled.

They're tired of the dizzyingly dishingly large field. Nearly three quarters of Democratic and independent left-leaning voters told a recent Hill Harris-X poll that, quote, too many, end quote, that too many is the only thing in quotes there in Canada. are running for president. The Iowa poll conducted last month found 47% of respondents saying they wished several candidates would drop out

and another 27% saying they hoped that most of the candidates would relinquish their slim hopes. Is it time? Is it time to get out for people to start getting out? Or is this just a normal human reaction of like, this is too complicated, make my decision easier?

Maybe by the end of the summer it is time. It's just think of, okay, so you're a voter. right? And let's assume you're a Democratic voter. And you're trying to be, you're taking advantage of the opportunity that you have this long primary season. And you're saying, okay, I will humor the idea of an alternative to Joe Biden, right? Joe Biden being the frontrunner. It's one thing to humor an alternative to Joe Biden when the alternative is this menu of just 20 people. Yeah. Some of whom you really can't even tell a part versus maybe later in the year, right? And when it's getting a little colder when I think that choice becomes less frustrating because you're probably

by that point you've shaved off hope. I mean, look, hopefully you've shaved off six candidates, seven candidates, and the idea of alternatives to Biden becomes a sort of more sensible question. And you don't have to, you don't have to consider that question by watching two different nights of debates because they couldn't fit all the candidates on one stage. Well, it's also a really sally an issue for people who are in the camp of anybody except for Joe Biden, right? Because the non-Joe Biden vote is being fractured in a million different ways right now. And especially for the people in like the better work tier that we were discussing earlier, or the Cory Booker tier. Right.

Like, if Cory Booker wants to be, or Pete Buttigieg wants to be the dark horse candidate, it's harder to be the dark horse candidate when there's 12 dark horse candidates. Right. Right. But that's the paradox of this whole election is that you have 25 people who all think that they're the dark horse candidate. Yeah. Which is why we have these as many choices in the first place. Sure. I mean, this is just going to be one of those cycles, I feel like, where the longer, the less likely someone's candidacy is, the more likely it is that they stay in. Because what do they, what do they have to lose? All they have to do is show up for debate every now and then. Counterpoint. Running for president is exhausting. But that's the thing that makes me have a hard time with this.

It's exhausting. Campaigning is exhausting and it costs money and that's an underrated factor in all of this. And I would drop out, certainly. I would have dropped out. I would have given up. That tour bus life, man. I know. Who wants to do that, though?

You're eating like crappy food and you have to just be in Iowa? Yeah. I mean, you get that, you get the fairground food whenever you want it, man? No, you get the fairground food when there's a fair. You're otherwise eating Captain D's and Subway. I know. I'm telling you, I've lived that life. DeCora Iowa, shouts out.

I mean, to go further on this point, Dave Weigel pointed out on Twitter that the three presidential candidates, Clobuchar Delaney and Moulton, who appeared on the Sunday talk shows this week. Combined, combined for 4% in the Iowa polls and less than 2% in the national polls. Now, Iowa, I get the people of Iowa

wanting people to drop out. As someone who does a podcast that touches on politics on a fairly regular basis, I would love for some people to drop out. But isn't Iowa supposed to be where all of these competing dark risk candidates get a chance to get national recognition? Yeah, but the politics in Iowa, right? This whole, the Iowa caucus process is so much about this like glad, glad handing. You're supposed to really spend several months getting to know these different campaigns really well.

And it's just hard. I can imagine that being really hard at a local grassroots level to do that when you, ostensibly are supposed to be taking more than 20 presidential campaigns seriously simultaneously as opposed to something like you know I remember when I was out there in 2008 and

you know the major campaigns on the ground were obviously Edwards, Clinton, Obama and then you had the Biden and the Dodd people but it was not no Dodd, that's how I forgot about it. Yeah, but think about the candidates you forget from 2008 and even then that field

was still half the size of the 2020. So on that level, just the level of campaign events, meeting campaign staffers, robocalls. Like, you're getting robocalls from more than 20 campaigns. Yeah. Maybe this is too early, but, you know, if the current number of people are still in the race, again, by the end of the summer, like the amount of Iowans who are going to all day be

getting calls from 20 different presidential campaigns, it's just overload after a point I could see why, especially at that local level, people are like, you can't do this to us. You can't do this to us for several months. We cannot take this. And I think if there's anybody who is agitating or who is firmly in the camp that the more people in, the better it is to bring this full circle, the people doing the polls, because that makes their jobs more important to have more people involved. I'm going to close out this segment by touching on a Paul Waldman op-ed from the Washington Post that came out. on the third, right? I mean, closer to the debates than now, he says,

this is, it was a really, it was a very interesting piece. But to quote it, it may sound like I'm kind of making fun of it. You can decide on your own. It's not really true that the polls today are meaningless. They may not be able to tell you who's going to win the Democratic Party nomination, but they can tell you a good deal about what people are thinking so far, even as those opinions are bound to change, which I'm not quite sure what the point is there. And then at the end, he says,

this is after going through all these polls and all of the potential implications for it can mean. He says, what does all this tell us? Most voters haven't been paying close attention to the race and lack impressions of most of the candidates. So you warned that it might sound like you're making fun of that conclusion.

And why aren't you making fun of that conclusion? There's a lot of good stuff in there. But I think the point is that as good as this piece could possibly be, if this were a Pulitzer Prize winning off-ed column, that there's nothing meaningful. There's nothing even meaningful to say about what these polls say. And we just did a

whole segment about it. Right. I want to close out with a little bit of audio from this week, the Great Sunday Show, discussing how the polling is going. Can the other candidates, Matthew, the other Democratic candidates, really chip away at Biden at this point? Well, it shows that in the aftermath of the debate, they can because Joe Biden was sitting at 28 or 30 percent in our poll and other polls. He's now down to a quarter or 20% of it. I mean, I think we're in the round. This is soccer go women today. They're playing in the Netherlands, so hope the women win. We're in this sort of group stage, and we're about to go into the knockout stage soon, probably in the advance of the ABC debate in September, is I think Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are the two weakest

sort of front-running candidates that we've had in a party in a long, long time. And I think once other candidates sort of demonstrate, get name ID, do well in debates, that's when I think those two are really in trouble. Has one ever heard of the 2004 presidential, Democratic presidential memory where no one was a frontrunner for a year? Yeah, no. I mean, nothing makes somebody look arguably weaker. And I mean, arguably, in a very archway, than to have to be on stage with nine other people

or low 19 other people. It lowers all of the candidates. That was the stunning thing to me about the second debate was that as much as that was billed as the sort of the first night was the kids table and the Biden Bernie night was the real adult debate. And even with their placement on stage, right? Like Biden and Bernie were together. They're in the front of the stage. But it's just there's so many people and they're on the second night of a debate. And just everything about it, everything about the staging, everything about just the medium of television made them look so marginal and interchangeable.

and small and just like just two random guys who might win or might lose. I don't know. I think you're absolutely right. And I think that that's going to be something that their campaigns are going to be staring down to something that we as voters are going to be exhausted by

and the weeks and months to come. Now, even in Brian's absence, we have to do the overworked Twitter joke of the week. As you all certainly know, there were two earthquakes last week in Southern California, which is sad and terrifying. As with all sad, terrifying things, Twitter made jokes about it.

Now, as you also probably know, because you're listening to a podcast produced by The Ringer, Kwai Leonard shocked the world this weekend by signing with the LA Clippers. If you combine those two things into one tweet, well, wait, let's just go to listener Cameron Wilson here. He has a great video of, let me go through some of these. Tevin says, when you realize that the earthquake was Kawhi Leonard signing with the L.A. Clippers. First, the earthquake. Now, Kauai. Let's see. How do... So Kauai just going to upstage an earthquake like that. Sheesh, another earthquake. Thanks, Kauai. If you made any of those jokes, you're in the running. That's a really,

that's a pretty obvious thing. This is that good shit. This is what I miss about Twitter. You're off Twitter. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm mostly off Twitter, but I get to look back on it some time. This segment is how I experience Twitter at this point. You're experienced the best and worst of Twitter. Next, next subject. If you blink these days, it's very easy to miss a mind-blowing Trump gaff. I didn't know about this until my partner told me in the car offhandedly. But on this 4th of July, during his 4th of July speech, our president, Donald Trump said,

in reference to the fighting force created by the Continental Congress in 1775, quote, our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports. Now, what about this as a guy? I'm not sure I should. For the record, there were no airports in 1775. Now, if there were a lot of good jokes about this, it was good source material, after all. Jason Kander, a quote tweeted USA Today's story

about Trump saying this with a quote, with a joke, strong clarification by USA Today regarding the Continental Air Corps. Many people photoshopped airplanes into old paintings of George Washington, which is both funny and very impressive and a little bit personally alarming for my career as a art director

that everyone can just like toss out Photoshop's, like the Photoshop work like that. But if you listen to Trump's mistake, Gaff, whatever you want to call it, and you tweeted something to the tune of three if by air, then you made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. I feel like the main mistake in the tweet, though,

is that he clearly meant to refer to the air force and not the army. Otherwise, I don't see a problem with this. I mean, it's a colorful interpretation of U.S. history, but... I think that the problem is that Trump, someone wrote a rather florid line for our president.

And they just really got out of hand with it. The air and the sea, and the space force is somehow involved in the continental contracts. Our president's not known as one who speaks in metaphor. I think that's the problem. Thank you for all your submissions. As always, guys. We're moving on now to the notebook dump. I think the

biggest news coming into today on the national stage was that the U.S. women's national team won the women's World Cup. And immediately upon them winning, I jumped online. And here are some of the reactions that I saw. The Atlantic, the U.S. just won the women's World Cup. Now they have to win equal pay. SB Nation, why the U.S. W&T's open queerness matters. The L.A. Times, Megan Rapino quotes nipsy hustle while celebrating U.S. Women's Fourth World Cup win. there's a little bit of politics built into that. You'd have to read to find out. Yahoo goes the other way.

Alex Morgan twerks after Women's World Cup victory. Okay, that's not as significant as the other ones. Here's ESPN, though. USW&T star Megan Rapino makes loud statement to silence critics. Now, these critics that they mention the piece are not of the traditional athletic rivalry variety. Yeah. This is from the ESPN piece.

After the match, a block of neon orange fans remained in the stadium, continued to cheer the women, breaking up a sea of red, white, and blue, although their passion for the sport has just begun to blossom. They have been as visible and passionate as any at this tournament. When the U.S. fans started as chant of equal pay

during the trophy celebration, the Dutch fans joined in, a united show of support for the women's game at large. I hope this is a turning point where Pino's set of the chance. Everyone is asking what's next and what do we want to come out of this, and it's to stop having the conversation about equal pay and being asked to be worth it.

It should be, what are we going to do about it? how do we continue to push this forward in this moment, in this movement, Rapino does not stand alone. I guess my question going into this was, first of all, judging by the way it's covered, there's no doubt that the women's team is as significant, as important,

as as as as big a, biggest story as the men's team has ever been. And Chris, I know you've covered this some, so feel free to jump in. Sure. I guess my question is like, like, should we be shocked by the fact, that every gamer has become a thinkpiece. That when it comes to the women's national team,

there's not, you can't write about them winning a game without writing about the politics that surrounds it. Well, this is kind of the first cycle that we've had of, the quadrenual, is that the word for it, national competition popping up in the Trump era. Right. I feel like if the last Olympics had been in this same climate, then you would have had a lot more.

think pieces about athletes who are making political statements after victories there. Obviously, like, you see this pop up with the NBA, with the NFL nowadays, but because the on-court, on-field activity, there is so much more constant. The politics of it, Trump getting into feuds with LeBron James or Colin Kaepernick or Steph Curry or whoever it may be, that is mixed into. more coverage here, you know, there are five games. It pops up once every four years and you have to talk about everything at once. And so then it kind of is inevitable when, you know, the player that wins the golden ball, the golden boot, scores the go-head goal in the championship game when she's, you know,

openly feuding with the president, when her girlfriend is writing, you know, op-eds in the Players Tribune, that that's what you've got to talk about. as well, right? You can't ignore that. Well, you mentioned, you mentioned Megan Rapino there. About a week or so ago, she was asked if she if they were going to visit the White House if they won and she said, I'm not going to the fucking

White House. No, not going to the White House. We're not going to be invited. You're not going to be invited? I doubt it. Trump, of course, responded to your tweet. He said, I am a big fan of the American team in women's soccer, but Megan should win first before she talks finished the job. We haven't

invited Megan or the team, but I am not inviting the team win or lose, which is his prerogative, I guess. Later, this is according to the Huffington Post. The president was asked by reporters about the gender pay gap, which, of course, the women's team has been a central issue, a political issue of the women's team this year. And Trump said, I would like to see that, but you've got to, but you've also got to look at the numbers. You've got to look at who's taking in what. He did congratulate the team after their win, saying America's proud of you all and not to outdo him

but I think in the lesson in the how to do it right department or former president Barack Obama tweeted out a message yes fourth star back to back congrats to the record breakers on the USW&T an incredible team that's always pushing themselves

and the rest of us to be even better love this team now charity I know soccer's not your wheelhouse listen I may not be a professional athlete but I am a gamer what's the difference I'm accustomed to to political things

theater in competitive gaming of a sort. Yeah. In the modern era in the 2010s. What do you, what do we do? Should we be paying attention to our president going back and forth with the women's national team? Should we, should we be just acknowledging, appreciating their victory? Or is there, is there, is there room in our brains to, to accommodate both?

Well, I mean, it's funny because obviously, like the history of sports and politics and activism and the intersection of all those things is like pretty rich. And the main exception here, right, is the way that Trump chooses to engage with that phenomenon. But I also think that he just, he always chooses to engage with athletes and activism in such a, it's like a very surface level, very sort of theatrical way.

And yeah, I do think it's safe to ignore him because he's not really going to, he's not going to make a meaningful contribution to the element of this that's about equal pay, right? He's really just sort of, the only political element of the women's team that he's interested in

is the element that's about him and that's just sort of vaguely opposed to him. In which case, I don't know, doesn't Obama work out of a Wii work at this point? They're just going to go visit Obama and a Wii work and take a photo with him

instead of going to the White House. Yeah, I mean, this is just the same thing that we see pop up every time, every time it's not a baseball team, right? Yeah, you're right. And a lot of ways Trump has like called everybody who is like a service level sports fan who just wants to talk big in a bar kind of out

because we now know exactly what that person sounds like and it sounds like the tweets that come out of the president's Twitter account you know, it's just like it's, I feel like if you really love a sport or if you even watch you, if you engage with a sport, you don't have to love it. Then you end up coming out sounding like Obama's tweet, right? I mean, it's hard to not be, it's not hard to not be like a baseline compassionate if you've actually, if you're actually a sports fan. Right.

I don't know. It's kind of crazy. The pay gap thing is a real, just wild issue. And I think a lot of people listening to this probably know, but this is again going back to the Atlantic. FIFA is going to pay the champion U.S. female team this year, $30 million for winning. The next men's championship team will win $440 million. The women's team have also had to play on turf.

There's been a lot of kind of relative indignities are a little bit hard, I think, for the average sports fan to really wrap their heads around, why it's, you know, what the significance is. But that monetary distinction is pretty insane. Yeah. So the sport that I engage with the most, at least on the ringer.com, is tennis. And that's the one sport that I think has really addressed this, you know, the pushes for equal pay at Grand Slam tournaments and events where the men and the women overlap. You know, that's all been addressed.

I think every major tournament now pays the women and the men the same amount. And I think that it's interesting that you're seeing it come to a head here because this is pretty much the only other sport in the United States. This also goes to show how much the conversation is driven by what is deemed important by Americans, right? Within the United States, this is the one sport where you have a bit, like a similar visibility for men and women besides tennis, right? In basketball, the women's team wins pretty much every Olympics. The men's team wins pretty much every Olympics. But because the WMBA and the NBA are so separated, because, you know, that kind of visibility gap exists, it's harder to get a lot of people behind an equal pay movement. But here, because, you know, for a lot of reasons, the women's team is so much more successful, it gets so many more eyeballs here.

And then you have to really come to grips with the fact that at least domestically, this team is much, much more important than the men's team. I think the financial thing has a weird resident, a particular resonance for the World Cup, one because there's a little bit of an Olympics-esque vibe to it. I mean, it seems like more of a, like a, it seems like it seems like the reward should not be based, it should not be based on just strict numbers in the way that maybe. the world series should be. I mean, I guess that's a non-conensation doesn't work the same way. Because you can, so much goes into marketing these things, right?

And you can always chalk up why people are watching or why they're not watching to so many factors besides the on-field performance. Right. I also just, just with regard to Trump, it's just funny to me because you could imagine an alternative world where having a president who's extremely online

and super into like engaging, almost as a side gig, engaging with sports, commerce, labor, culture could actually be a good thing and could maybe make people think of sports in a different way

and think of sort of like commercial dynamics and labor questions like this. It could be a good thing, but it's just that the way Trump chooses to engage with a lot of this stuff. And in fairness, the way a lot of the athletes choose to engage with Trump

means that instead we just sort of process something like this in terms of culture war dynamics. For sure. And that's way less, that's way less constructive than having an equal pay conversation, which, again, like Trump doesn't really want to have anything to do that. I don't think he's really equipped to the complexities of the machine.

I have a big surprise for you. In the next segment, we're actually going to say something nice about President Trump, or I'm going to try to. Before we get there, before we get away from sports altogether, I do want to mention, I mentioned in the overworked Twitter joke

that Kauai Leonard has signed with the L.A. Clippers. There was so much good journalism that surrounded this that we're going to touch on it on the next episode, mostly because we're waiting for a TikTok that hasn't dropped yet. And also Brian Curtis really wanted to have his hands in this. So tune in on Friday. We're going to talk about Kawhi Leonard and join the Clippers and how the biggest sports news story of the year somehow

eluded every single basketball journalist or journalist totally, you know, period in America. America, which is pretty stunning. But without, before we get away from that subject, I do want to give a shout out to listener Alex Lawson, who said that we should talk about the NBA media phenomenon where two guys become teammates. And this, by the way, is Kauai Leonard and Paul George of the Oklahoma City Thunder are now both members of the Clippers. Paul George got traded there, Kaui Leonard, signed there. Alex says, you should talk about the NBA media phenomenon where two guys become teammates. and then all the stories have to find photos

where they are guarding each other to lead in the pieces. And as an art director, we try to do our own collages most of the time to avoid this sort of thing on the ringer.com. But this is one of my favorite things. Going to search for just random pictures

of two basketball players as the only two players in the subject, I mean, in the photo. It is an incredible phenomenon, Alex. Thank you very much for pointing that out. I'm sure all of our listeners will appreciate it. All right.

Back to our president. This is a segment I a little bit I'd like to call the slow descent towards tyranny, continues a pace or not. We talked about Trump's gaff at the airport during the colonial period in America. By the way, he blamed the teleprompter for that error. I'm not exactly sure what that meant. But I do want to take a moment to revisit the event because when he announced this for the July parade. And actually leading last week at this time, I had this pencil in as our lead subject for this podcast

because I was like, well, something this people are going to flip out. He's going to do something crazy. he would ever. But it flopped. When he announces, everybody thought, oh, the U.S. President can't have a military parade. That's what, that's, that's a thing that, you know, the dictators do. Yeah, yeah.

And then he just kind of had a regular celebration and gave a very positive American speech. But I do want to give a lot of credit to the celebrities of the United States of America who led the charge in predicting that this was going to be the beginning of the Mussolini era of American politics. See, Alyssa Mulano said, these taxpayer dollars which should be used for much-needed park improvements are being used for Trump's vanity propaganda parade. Don Cheadle. Don Cheadle said President Trump's Fourth of July military parade is authoritarian performance art. That reads a little bit like he was quote tweeting a headline, but it didn't seem like he was.

Rob Reiner said, in the face of humanitarian crisis, that this malignant narcissist would steal taxpayer dollars to stage a partisan display of autocracy to massage his damaged psyche is nothing short of sociopathic. and Stephen King, the writer, not the congressman, said Trump's big military parade, this is what dictators do. Would have been a very different story if Steve King, the congressman said it. What went wrong or what went right for the president? How did he avoid this becoming a national news media catastrophe?

Well, because I feel like the actual expectations for this to be the Emperor Palpatine parade for tyranny and fascism. I feel like all of those expectations were invented by the internet, frankly. I don't know. I think we know Trump well enough at this point, right, to know that he just kind of probably wanted to have a tacky-ass DC parade and he wanted to involve tanks. And that was kind of weird.

But yeah. He saw the story goes that he was in France and Paris for Bastille Day. Am I getting this right? And he was so impressed by their little. First of, I mean, the logistics of like, rolling a couple of, you know, tanks down the main drag in Paris is different than, there's no, I mean, Washington D.C. is our capital. It's not the same as Paris. It's like the cultural and the political capital and a much smaller country and everything else. But

he was so impressed by this military parade that he saw there that he wanted to have one. He's been, you know, there is a certain kind of homage to, you know, his, his France, his favorite country. Amage to France. But also to Russia, to North Korea, to some of these other sort of strong man regimes that he seems to be a proponent of. But yeah, this turned out to just sort of be, I mean, to sort of look like a very low-key Washington military museum that they'd rolled out in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I mean, I think that's part of the problem, though, is that people, I think people rightfully, but without knowing how right they were, they sort of looked at this in advance. said. This is a vanity strongman display. But then the actual event happened and you're just sort of confronted with the fact that like, oh yeah, before Trump and now, like the presidency is

kind of largely defined by a lot of vanity strongman, you know, broadly patriotic displays that again, Trump's version of it is a little weird, but it's not like, I kind of have a hard time splitting the difference between the ways in which this particular event was exception. and the ways in which it does just feel like a kind of boilerplate patriotic display that is familiar to a lot of Western political culture. I will say that even though no one in the United States media was overly alarmed by what actually the results of the festivities, the talking heads on Russian news channel, Rosia 24, were spent the day mocking the president and the military equipment that was on to

display, this is according to Slate, as laughably out of date and the parade itself as low energy and weak. I don't know why they just went in on President Trump, just decided to make fun of him throughout the entire thing. So that was a little bit shocking. At least they were there to pick up the slack. CNN did their best to mount some minor form of outrage. Former Admiral John Kirby appearing on the network said he was troubled about the militaristic tone of the whole thing and mocked Trump's speech as essentially eighth grade history that was fairly sepia toned in saccharin,

I could have gotten this off of watching schoolhouse rock. I wonder if the real story here, and listen, I don't want to count any chickens, but is the real story that we're actually a lot safer from totalitarianism that we thought if our president can't even mount

a military parade that's even like 1% of what people are fearing it's going to be? Maybe, but... If there's anything of strong-armed president it could do. Isn't it like let's spend some discretionary money on getting the army out here marching? Yeah, but you're neglecting

his real power, his more subtle power, which is to hijack every weekend and holiday in America for all of us to spend being mad about Trump as opposed to like not forcing ourselves to have to go through take cycles and have

deadlines we otherwise wouldn't have had. We could have just been grilling and instead we had to take peace. We had to think peace our way through the Fourth of July. And you know why? Because that's Trump's real power. Chris, what do you want to say? Didn't he want to do this for his inauguration or something about two years ago?

And everyone was so much pissier about it then. And I think everyone was just tired. Like, you know, the fifth time he mouths off about this. But also, they've seen Star Wars. They know the Palpatine. They know, you know what I mean? They know Darth Vader's March. It's just so much pot.

You know, it's sort of the resistance itself already has this. Or a lot of... Maybe the combined force of all the... celebrity pro clutching on Twitter is actually what deterred this from being worse than it was. Maybe I'm misjudging the real source of power here. All right, we got to move on because we don't have that much longer. One more little Trump though, before we get out. He's apparently feuding with Fox News right now.

This is a little bit surprising. All right, this is just yesterday. Trump took to Twitter and said, watching Fox News weekend anchors is worse than watching low ratings fake news on CNN or Lion Brian Williams Remember when he totally fabricated a war story trying to make himself under a hero and got fired a very dishonest journalist

And the crew of degenerate, next tweet, Comcast at NBC, MSNBC Trump haters who do whatever Brian and Steve tell them to do. Like CNN, NBC is, we're way down the rabbit hole in this tweet. Like CNN, NBC is also way down on the ratings. But Fox News, who failed to get the very boring dim debates is now loading up with Democrats and even using fake unsourced New York Times

as a source of information. Ask the times what they paid for the Boston Globe and what they sold it for, lost $1.5 billion, or their old headquarters building disaster or their unfunded liability. This is wild. Fox News is changing fast,

but they forgot the people who got them there. Impossible to believe that Fox News has hired Donna Brazell, the person fired by CNN, after they tried to hide the bad facts and failed for giving crooked Hillary Clinton the questions to a debate, something unimaginable.

Now she has all. over Fox, including Shep Smith, by far their lowest rated show, watch the Fox News Weekend daytime anchors who were terrible go after her big, go after her big time. That's what they want, but it's sure not what the audience wants. Now, this is, that was a lot. That was a wall of text. That was a critique.

That was a discourse. That was what we used to call a discourse. Yeah. On cable news. So Trump is mad. He was also previously upset that they were having these Democrat town, the town halls of Democratic candidates. why why why why would you give them any airtime at all when they might be facing off against me

right and the general on the one hand i feel like trump's i understand trump's anxiety do you though why explain it explain his anxiety i'm not saying that i think he's correct i'm just saying yes i mean they are if if a large percentage of i mean if i would say a blindingly large percentage of fox viewers are going to vote for trump if they just stay the course right sure and they're not and and I don't think there's going to do they're going to do anything to ostracize I mean the only the I think the only thing you can do by covering and oh okay the other thing that he's upset about is they are some of these shows have been covering some of the border crisis right some of the humanitarian crisis um at america southern border and that's what the new

or Times citation that he was talking about was because they said that, you know, they referenced food shortages, unclean living conditions and not, and just general, like a general humanitarian catastrophe. So they're covering things that he doesn't, I mean, they're covering things that make him look bad. They're also covering his competition. I'm glad that they are. I just think that like, I understand where Trump's, why Trump's pissed off that what he thought was his, you know, his news outlet.

Yeah. But Trump has a campaign infrastructure at this point. So, for instance, the town halls, right? If you're mad that Fox is doing, or you're mad at Fox is doing town halls with Bernie, right? I don't see how at some point no one in the Trump campaign thought, you know, we should just do a town hall. Like, it's relatively early for Trump who's running virtually uncontested in the primary. Like, the constructive thought to have is maybe we should be in conversations with Fox for Trump to get on air and do a town hall that's and get way more viewership than all of the...

And then you make the Democrats look bad in comparison. Like, there are actually constructive, smart, strategic campaign ideas that Trump could have in response to this weird Fox News jealousy. And him choosing instead to just sort of whine about it on Twitter feels like it's not... It's not the best sign for his re-election judgment. I guess I was reminded of his feud with Megan Kelly. Yeah, yeah, totally. And how it seemed like Fox just sort of cowed to Trump when it came down to it, right?

Yeah, but the... And I guess why I wonder... if this is just the first volley in him making sure that Fox is going to stay in line for the next election cycle? Or to test, put a toe in the water and find out. That could be it. It's just, during the Megan Kelly feud,

it just seemed like at least for Trump and his chance at winning the nomination at that point, it just seemed like at least that came from a competitive sense, whereas here it feels like the opposite. He's whiting about Fox News from a sense that just feels kind of lazy and it's like if he's worried about Fox News,

if he's worried about sort of losing the plot with his cable news home base, there are actually constructive ways he can go about outsmarting the Democrats and Fox News. And it just doesn't seem like that's what he's actually doing. Well, we will keep an eye on the story as it evolves or fails to evolve. We have to get out of here. But one more thing I had to touch on, something near and dear to my heart. From the Department of Print is officially dead. Legendary satire rag, Mad Magazine appears to be really shutting down after 67 years in publication. This is from the San Jose Mercury News. Mad Magazine's fan aren't finding anything funny

about this week's announcement that the publication will no longer be sold on newsstands and that its creators won't be creating any new content. Apparently they're going to be

they're going to continue their subscription they've already I mean they've already you know have people have already subscribed they have like they owe people issues

they owe issues to the to the comic book shops and such they're going to be putting old material with new covers out and they're still going to do their year end issue with new stuff but they're basically shutting down as soon as all their obligations

are done I read a lot of Mad Magazine as a kid It was near and dear to my heart Now Justin As you know on the press box We cover this sort of thing all the time Magazine shutting down But I have a slightly more meta question to ask you

Was a younger person than me Yep, 22 years old Have you ever heard of Mad Magazine Before I sent you these links? Yeah, I've just never read MacMaghan Okay, that's where we go I'm old enough to have heard of Mad Magazine It's funny

It's a particularly poignant moment for Mad Magazine Because not long ago President Trump compared Pete Buttigieg to Alfredi Newman Mad Magazine's mascot and Buttigieg confessed I'll be honest I had to Google that I guess it's just a generational thing

Yeah I had no idea who that was So listen Mad Magazine is his magazine Where they just make fun of stuff And like every issue is like hey it's the Stranger Things parody issue Or like whatever and they'll do a big takeout feature But it's just like a cartoon like a comic book style parody And it's really funny Right but you haven't explained what a magazine

it? What is a magazine? Also a comic There's also like a million different things in every issue. I have a 10 year old. He gets, I give him Mad Magazines and he goes nuts because they last forever. He goes nuts because they last forever. He can get 50 hours of enjoyment out of this because you keep opening him back up and there's a different comic on every page and it's about a different subject and there's little mini like Easter eggs in every single panel and it's really good stuff. It's also seems incredibly uncost effective. So it's a bit shocking to me that it lasted as long as

it did. But it did launch some incredible illustrators and writers through the 70s and 80s and it was just

sort of like you know the junior version of the Harvard Lampoon forever before we even knew what the Harvard Lampoon was

there was Mad Magazine and it was incredible and it's sad to see it go. I'm not sure if the question here is

can humor survive outside of the internet if you know if it's just it's not just like a print magazine humor survives

on the internet I don't know it's all memes I know it's not funny. But, I mean, it's in the same way. But it does seem like this is a lot of invest, that this sort of this level of humor and this level of execution

is a kind of financial investment that's sort of impossible in 2019, no matter what. It's like it's, it's, it's, it's, Mad Magazine feels like paying your feature writers $15,000 to go to Japan, live there for a while and report out a feature story, right?

I mean, it's, it seems like a, a, a type of media that's just never going to exist again. but maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic. Listen, we've got to get out of here. There will be no David Shoemaker. Guess is the Strain pun headline.

As long as I'm in charge here, damn it. So expect that back on Friday when Brian is back in the studio. Thank you, Justin Charity. Thank you, Chris Omeda. Thank you to our producer, Jim Cunningham. And we'll see you back here later this week with Brian and me. See you later, guys. David?

I am David Shoemaker. Are you? Brian Curtis is out on a sign mental massage. his damaged psyche. Great. Nothing short of sociopathic. Yeah, but you're neglecting his real power, his more subtle power,

which is to hijack every weekend and holiday in America. That's got to be bad news, right? I wonder if the real story here is... And listen, I don't want to count any chicken. But is the real story that we're actually a lot safer from totalitarianism that we thought? If Brian Curtis is out of an assignment, it may sound like I'm kind of making fun of it.

You can decide on your own. I could have gotten this off of watching schoolhouse rock. Which I'm not quite sure what the point is there.