The Press Box - What Will the Republican National Convention Look Like? Plus, Sports Announcer Disasters and Ben Jacobs on Kanye for President.

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

The Republican National Convention kicks off today. Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker break down what we can expect (2:58). Then, they discuss sports announcer meltdowns during the pandemic and weigh in on some of the racist, homophobic, misogynistic comments from some of the most popular announcers (20:55). Then political writer Ben Jacobs joins to discuss his journey covering the Kanye West campaign (30:30). Plus: The Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained Pun-Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David Turner announced today that it has reached a contract extension with former NBA player Shaquille O'Neal, a star of their NBA studio show. What I want to know is, is Shacton a fool a great strain pun or a terrible strain pun? Oh, man. Well, I think I have to. I'm leaning towards the ladder. The first few times that I heard it, I did not. I couldn't even register what the pun was playing off of. I mean, I know acting a fool, but like Shacton is such a weird thing that I wasn't quite sure

what I was looking at, but or hearing. But with time, every bad pun becomes a great pun, you know? I mean, with repetition, dads across the world can, can attest to this. With repetition, every bad joke, every bad pun becomes wonderful. And now it's just so, it's, there's, the fact that it doesn't, like sound like anything rolling off the tongue is part of what makes it so great. You're never going to hear the phrase shacked in a fool and think of anything except Shaquille O'Neal, like lazily laughing about somebody missing a dunk on inside the NBA.

He's, you know, he's good. He's good at branding himself, or at least he has been of late when he's taken over Papa John's and, and yeah. I didn't know until reading this press release that there was a Shaq podcast. I guess I should just assume everyone has a podcast at this point. Also did not know he was developing a show called the business of basketball with more details to be announced at a later date. I just think it's fantastic. I just think that if, you know, it's great that he's sticking around.

We all love Shaq. And Shaqton a Fool is a crazy name that really works. And he should really just go to the full nine yards with Papa Johns and just eat it on the air on Turner. That should be part of the deal. On that note, it's time for the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. With lots of stuff to get to today, we'll talk about announcer meltdowns of the pandemic,

which have spanned from racism to homophobia to misogyny. What's happening in America's broadcast booths? We'll be joined by political writer Ben Jacobs, who's covering the Kanye West for president campaign. How real is Kanye 2020? And what's it like to cover it? plus David guesses a strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, we're recording this on the first day

of the Republican National Convention. Democrats got to go last week. Now the Republicans get to try to answer. So let's do a little preview guide. We talked last week about how the Democrats traded an old style arena convention for a full-blown TV show. Well, this week marks the official launch

of Trump TV. Trump's not just going to give the traditional Thursday night acceptance speech. He's going to speak every night during this convention. And as we record this Monday morning, he has in fact already spoken hijacking the traditional roll call. Dave Weigel notes that his speech today was more than twice as long as Biden's DNC acceptance speech. So Trump's bonus speeches are longer than Biden's feature. speeches. Do we think this is sort of an obvious outcome. Do we think

this is going to portend good things for the Republican convention? I just wonder if it's the new normal. I mean, how great would it be if there's just like a a wizened and grade Scott Walker is like officially obligated to speak six times during the Republican convention for eight years

or whatever? I don't think this necessarily bodes well. You know, we talked to mentioned last broad last week, or last time, sorry, about how four years ago it seemed like they were just stretched so thin they had to have every Trump family member up there, you know,

in a prime time speaking slide. Now, I thought that that wouldn't be the case this time because rank and files were to lined up behind Trump, but instead it feels even more desperate, right, just to get the president up there every night. The flip side of that is he is their, you know, what do they call him, entertainer, talent, and chief? And he's...

That's right. He's, must see TV. I mean, don't tell me, there's nothing, there's nothing's going to keep you away from watching night one,

night two, night three or night four, right? I mean, even if the first three nights the most boring ones ever, you're going to keep tuning in. It's,

in that sense, it's smart, but, you know, people would tune in every night if there is a guarantee of like, you know,

someone's stripping their clothes off or committing a, committing a, you know, assault with a machete on TV. I mean, there's a lot of ways, to get people to tune in that aren't necessarily like,

they don't necessarily like bode well for the party. I was surprised he didn't speak all four nights in 2016, to be honest. Because at the time, as you point out, there were no quote unquote normal Republicans at that convention. It was basically Trump, Trump's kids, and like Chris Christie, and Ted Cruz, who was in fact not endorsing Trump from the stage. But I thought he was just going to go all the time.

And this is one of those norm breaking, things that you're sort of like, why did we, if we're having a convention that is devoted to one candidate, right? This is not the convention where we decide who the nominee is going to be anymore like we did in the old days. It is a TV show devoted to pumping up one candidate. Why wouldn't the candidate speak a bunch? Why wouldn't they do that? Now, maybe it's a particularly a Trump thing because he is so compelling in his odd and often upsetting way. But yeah, I think when you think of Trump, of course he's going to speak all four nights. The other part of this, David, that it becomes Trump TV that's so fascinating is the Republicans didn't even prepare a formal platform, which every party does at every convention is kind of an ideological superstructure for the party.

They basically put out something that says, we support what Trump does, send document. So when, you know, all the libs write about the cult of people. personality that the GOP has become. We couldn't even just copy paste, you know, something from four years ago. We just, we support Trump. Okay, we're great. That's what this convention is about. Yeah.

I mean, this is a, in some sense, it's sort of this, this, you know, platform thing is a little bit in the weeds. The RNC for their part has, uh, passed a resolution accusing the media of outrageously misrepresenting the implications of the RNC not adopting a new platform. Usually that's in the platform, not the response to the non-platform. But go ahead. Exactly. But it's, you know, I'm not sure.

I mean, yeah, it is a, it's going to be portrayed as a cult of personality move. And justifiably so. I mean, they, obviously, this is a weird year, you know, it's a weird time for, for getting all your ducks in a row and counting all your, crossing your T's and dotting all your eyes or whatever. But this is, again, kind of in the weeds, but this is like intrinsically. explicitly like what the what the convention is for right i mean this is it might feel a little bit like a bygone thing but this is like what it's like this is the point of a convention these are the ideas we stand for as a party going for to be revised in two or four years but these are this is what we stand for and this is what we're going to run on do you think they were just worried that they were

going to be the more like you know trump people sneaking stuff into the platform like it happened four years ago. Like they had all the Republicans would have to answer for whatever, you know, whatever nonsense. So they like, you know, put pushed in under the wire. Maybe that was, yes, that, that certainly would have would have made things less complicated if you're running for re-election in the Senate as a Republican. But it is his platform just like it's any presidential candidate's platform. So I don't know. Let's talk a little bit about the production of this thing, which is fascinating. You and I agreed that the Democratic convention was VEP meets a PBS telegram. I think the Republican convention is going to be Fox News meets the celebrity apprentice meets Miss Universe.

Wait, wait one more time. Fox News meets the celebrity apprentice plus Miss Universe. Just in terms of the grandeur. I don't know that we're necessarily going to get the talent portion of the competition, but just in terms of the kind of like, you know, CD network grandeur of the thing. Trump has mandated that his convention is going to be a half hour longer in prime. prime time than the Democratic convention. So you have to tune in at 8.30 Eastern time rather than 9 o'clock. We're going to have more of it live than they did.

Trump boasted to Fox News. Okay. How is this a boast? Only the biggest time slots. Only the grandest speaking. Yeah. Only live shots that may go down at any moment because of some production glitch, making us, you know, have like 10 minutes of nothing on the air.

Trump wants a less gloomy convention than the Democrats per political. Let it goes Alex Eisenstadt. So Trump's critique of last week, and I saw lots of Republicans saying this, was this was all about the gloom and doom of the coronavirus and mass unemployment. We want something a little more upbeat here at the Republican convention. Happy days are here again in the United States with everybody staying home and not sending their kids to school. Some things we could have predicted, Dave. You know that nerdy roll call of the states we so enjoyed last week or everybody enjoyed? Well, that's been, that's not a prime time thing anymore because that's actually already happened this morning.

That was the thing that Trump interrupted. Trump was so bored with that idea that he just interrupted it. So that, that ain't happening in prime time. I think the, I think this all comes back to this idea you and I touched on last week, which is the Democrats when they were making that convention certainly wanted to make it watchable. But they were also concerned about things like making it sensitive to various people and various groups and also going only so. far, right? Julie Louise Dreyfus can make a joke about Trump, but she can only go to here, right? We don't want to offend anybody or offend too many people. The Republicans don't have seatbelts in the same way. So a convention could be much worse as a television show, but on the other hand,

more sort of gripping and watchable, I guess, as a TV show than the Democratic version. Yeah, I think, I think that's right. I think I said last time that they can, I mean, the show could be, you know, 50%, you know, of the technical value or whatever. It could be half as good as the Democratic convention, but still sort of seem about 90% as good because, you know, people aren't really in it for the details, but also because of what you're talking about. I mean, it can be, I mean, they're, they are programming a car crash. And, you know, that's going, that has value.

People are going to tune in to watch it, you know? And certainly, you know, Trump is, if Trump's the big draw, all of his supporters are going to be tuning in. That's a lot. That's not, maybe not enough to get somebody elected. And I'm not making any predictions. But, you know, the core, the base of the base will all be tuning in. And, you know, probably everybody listening to this podcast will be tuning in too. It's going to be must see TV one way or the other. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's kind of the Fox News aesthetic. right, which is we're not doing this for TV critics. We're not doing this so this gets a good review in the New York Times.

We're doing it so just people will watch and react to it. And that's just a completely different set of values than the Democratic convention. By the way, the New York Times reports that the RNC will be overseen by two former apprentice producers, one of whom also worked on the comedy central roast of Donald Trump, often on your on your LinkedIn page before you get to produce. true. This is absolutely true. I'm not making this up. Trump, according to Politico, also considered Gettysburg and Mount Rushmore for his speech on Thursday, the final of his many speeches during the Republic. Eventually, he's

settled on the White House South Lawn. But I would be shocked if there's not some giant panoramic kind of chisily Americana portion of this convention. and that is absolutely in the Trump aesthetic, right? And like Trump, to me, I'm the president, right? I'm taking advantage of the power of the office. There's got to be something like Mount Rushmore, Gettysburg happening in this convention that we have just not. The waving flag ghosted over like the, you know, eagle flying ghosted over Mount Rushmore. The bird of prey lands on Trump's arm, like from the takes off from a perch.

I like that Gettysburg and Gettysburg and Mount Rushmore. I mean, do you think it's just going to be like, you should speak every night from one of the four places in American history he's aware of? You know, it's just like, can we get a camera, can we set up a stage at the Boston Tea Party? Is that possible?

The Alamo. We've got all kinds of things here. Other thing I'm looking for this week are lines of attack on Joe Biden. One thing about Trump's convention in 2016, it was completely off the rails in all respects. But Chris Christie was standing up there in front of a microphone. phone just saying over and over again, Hillary Clinton is corrupt. Yeah.

Lock her up, which when handily gifted with James Comey and the but her emails press coverage became the formula that narrowly helped Trump win the election. We have seen Trump be all over the place on his attacks on Biden. So is he going to go with one that was mouthed by New York GOP chairman Nick Langworthy already today at the GOP convention? We have crime ravaging our streets. That is what America will see if a Biden-Harris regime runs our country. Or will he go with this Rudy Giuliani tweet, Rudy also speaking at the R&C, by the way,

I finally succeeded in getting the number of words in my convention speech below the number of small-time marijuana smokers, Comrade Kamala, put in prison. That is a real Rudy Giuliani tweet. So I'm sorry, this is both Kamala is a cop and Kamala is a comely. communist, right? Like, Comrade Kamala. Still working on that message discipline. That's amazing.

Also from the Speakers Gallery, David, this is a, a bunch of people know this last week, a very online group of speakers at the RNC. Charlie Kirk. In a certain sense, yes. Yeah, Charlie Kirk is on the bill. Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who were they waving the guns at the Black Lives Matter protesters. They may not actually be online themselves, but they are certainly an object of

fascination online. Nicholas Sandman, the kid who was videotaped with a MAGA hat, having the encounter with the Native American activist in Washington, later sued the Washington Post and other media outlets. And settled with the Post and it would see, at least two of them for, I think, very large amounts of money. Yeah, we don't quite know, but he definitely settled with him. If he wasn't a Republican before, now that he's got a few million in the bank, you know. So we don't know that.

Ken Vogel of the New York Times also notes that the Trump campaign has. just announced Mary Ann Mendoza, an angel mom. An angel mom is a person often cited by Trump whose child was killed by an undocumented immigrant. She is going to be at the convention. Mendoza, by the way, is also on the advisory board of We Build the Wall, which was the organization at the center of the alleged Steve Bannon fraud, Vogel rights on Twitter. Mike Pompeo, the rare secretary of state to speak at a convention, will be speaking from

Jerusalem, which is something else. Also, we have looking at the speaker list, David, a lot of jockeying for 2024. I mean, that's going to be a theme of this convention, whether Trump wins or whether he loses. The obvious names from this list, Mike Pence on Wednesday. Nikki Haley, almost certainly going to run for president in four years. Christine Nome from South Dakota is another one. Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas on Thursday. So I think as you and I watch this, there needs to be a little bit of a not only election preview in the next form.

couple of months coming up, but an election preview of 2024. Yeah. And who has sort of made it through the Trump test, who will, if not getting his endorsement for 2024, will actually just not make him mad and potentially succeed him in office. Yeah. I mean, the fine line of sort of getting his endorsement, but not getting his endorsement, it's going to be a very interesting, I mean, just depending on how the next four years go, obviously. It's going to be a very interesting line to walk. And finally this, remember the name Clifford Sims? He was the White House aide who wrote Team of Vipers.

Remember that? Of all those Trump tell-alls, that was kind of one of the vaguer ones that came out. Sims wound up suing Donald Trump shortly after the book's publication. Well, according to ABC's John Carl, quote, Sims is overseeing speechwriting for the Republican convention. So we wrote the tell-all memoir about the, the White House. We sued the president. And now according to John Carl, you are overseeing these speeches at the convention. I'm so, I'm so perplexed by all this. It's a perfect Trump story,

right? Yeah. Like everybody, everybody is, you know, embraced by Trump, cast out by Trump, and then often reembraced by Trump. Oh, yeah. This is actually now all happened in one term. My God. It's gone from best, from author, to out to now writing the convention. All right, David, let's do the overwork Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time.

Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. David, we mentioned that the R&C speaker lineup would include Nicholas Sandman, the high school student. Well, it was an overwork Twitter joke to write Enter Sandman. But it was also the lead of a New York Daily News story. Do you think Metallica is

are like put in as preemptively put in a cease and desist on using their music at the convention? You know, one of the underrated things about the convention four years ago is that they had this house band that would just play all the time and it was headed by GE Smith

who was the leader of the Saturday Night Live band I was about to say his name as a joke and then I caught myself because I vaguely remembered him actually being the truth. He was the host of the convention band, or he was the leader of the convention band. He was. And I literally, at one point, I was there and I literally walked up to another

reporter and I said, you know who that, that guy looks just like G.E. Smith. Remember the guy from Saturday? And the guy goes, no, Brian, that is G.E. Smith. Saturday Night Live fame. David, remember the controversy from the 2016 R&C. Speaking of which, Maloney a Trump speech had passages that were suspiciously similar to passages from Michelle Obama's speech. Oh, that's right. At the 2008 Democratic convention. Well, Michelle Obama gave a great speech last week and it was an overworked Twitter

joke to write. They're saying no Republican can do what Michelle just did, but Maloney can give that exact same speech next week. Thanks to Scott Porch, DRN 3030, and Gabe Hernandez for that. And finally, David, the Kanye West for president campaign, such as it is, is running into some procedural hurdles. Wisconsin, the Wisconsin elections commission said West cannot be on the ballot in that swing state. West will also not be on the ballot in Ohio because of, quote, petition irregularities.

It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, Yeezy come, yeezy go. We would have also accepted late registration. Thanks to our colleague, Zach Cram, David Fait, and Parker Amon. If you created the first bumper sticker for Kanye 2020, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke. of the week. All right, David, in the notebook dump, let us do some announcer embarrassments. There's an old journalism line that in order to write a trend store, you need three examples. Well, in the case of sports announcers having meltdowns during the pandemic, we now have four

examples. Oh, my God. So consider the piece assigned. Item one, Tom Brennaman, long time Fox sports announcer, was calling a Cincinnati Reds game last Wednesday. Brenneman didn't know he was back on the air and he used a homophobic slur. We're not going to play it and put that word back out into the universe, but it was shocking. I almost did not believe it was real the first time I saw it on Twitter. No. A few hours later, Brennaman squares up to the camera to apologize to viewers, and you've got to listen to this. I made a comment earlier tonight that I guess went out over the year that I am deeply ashamed of.

If I have hurt anyone out there, I can't tell you how much I say from the bottom of my heart, I'm so very, very sorry. I pride myself and think of myself as a man of faith as there's a drive in a deep left field by Castellanos. It will be a home run. And so that'll make it a 4-0 ballgame. Just stop it right there for a second, Erica. So the Reds Nick Castellanos comes up and hits a home run.

and Brennaman, out of sense of broadcasting duty or something, shuts down his apology for a second to call the home run. That just happened in the middle of the apology. Anyway, Erica, please continue. I don't know if I'm going to be putting on this headset again. I don't know if it's going to be for the Reds. I don't know if it's going to be for my bosses at Fox.

I want to apologize for the people who sign my paycheck for the Reds, for Fox Sports, Ohio, for the people I work with, for anybody that I've offended here tonight. I can't begin to tell you how deeply sorry I am. That is not who I am and never has been. And I'd like to think maybe I could have some people that can back that up. I am very, very sorry, and I beg for your forgiveness. Yeah.

He managed to not actually say anything about... you know, the gay community who he targeted deliberately or no with his slur. Sort of, you know, anybody I might have heard, it just seems like real weaksauce, considering what he said, even no matter where it came from, no matter how, whatever. It doesn't matter. Stopping to call the home run was just a sort of chef's kiss of, you know, this guy's just in the wrong place. the wrong era to be doing this job.

And, you know, it's hard, it's hard to imagine. I mean, it's hard to even like imagine there's any coming back from this, right? I mean, it's just like, what a, what a idiot. Yeah, certainly he's been suspended from, by Fox from their NFL coverage. He wrote a letter to the Cincinnati Inquirer, which he said, I used a word that is both offensive and insulting. And in the past 24 hours, I have read about its history. I had no idea it was so rooted in.

hate and violence and in particularly a shame that I, someone who makes his living by the use of words, could be so careless and insensitive. Now, there's a discussion about whether one moment should end a person's career or not, but I really don't buy that he did not understand the history and use of this word. I mean, this guy has been calling NFL games on Fox for 26, 27 years now. Yeah. And this idea that I just didn't know, I didn't understand how loaded this word was. was and how offensive and hurtful this word is. I just don't. I'm sorry.

I just don't believe that. There was another one of these last week, David. John Fokie, who calls Charlotte Hornets games, was at home watching last Monday's jazz nuggets game. Fokie is typing an anodyne tweet that's supposed to say shot making in this jazz nuggets game is awesome. Right? As the Charlotte Observer Scott Fowler writes.

he wrote exactly that, except instead of the word nuggets, he typed the plural form of the N word. And Foki has been suspended. Fokie said this was not an autocomplete thing. It's just that the two letters that separate those two extremely different words were right next to each other in his iPhone keypad. Right. And he said, I was trying to type it so fast so I could get it up on Twitter,

be part of the conversation. I didn't read it and I hit scent. And then, of course, he apologized and has also been, as I said, suspended by the Charlotte Hornet. So what do we make of that one? I mean, it seems believable. I mean, at first blush, it's, I mean, I don't know about you. I immediately assumed that it was, well, I assumed it was auto-completed first, which sort of isn't very, I mean, it's sort of an easy, you know, if it was indeed auto-complete, that's sort of like, you know, you made your bet, obviously, if we have any idea how that was. works but but yeah when you think about it that makes a lot of sense and listen i've certainly never

typed anything like that but i've definitely like hit send on some text messages or tweets that where i you know didn't do the proofreading i should have done um that's a pretty extreme example but um you know i mean it is it isn't an interesting conversation about whether one moment should should end your career and i and frankly i don't think i mean i don't think that you know, in a vacuum that one moment should really ever end your career. But it's a whole different thing when you're calling national sports games where, you know, millions of people don't have any choice but to listen to the person who they put on TV, right? This isn't like, you know, a cameraman on the show that she's going to be drummed out of the business and it can

never make a living again. Um, no one, there's room for redemption, I think for a lot, for, for, for, all these people. And certainly when you're talking about this, if one moment should ruin, should should end your career, when you're talking about any sort of, say, your punishment, you do have to sort of look at the person, right? And just, I mean, and if, if it is to all the people around them completely inconceived, well, I don't know this, but I, but I believe Scott Fowler, if it's inconceivable that he did that deliberately, you know, I think those are the sort of facts you have to look at before you fire somebody or something. Yeah, I think it was J.A. Adonda and Fowler's piece suggested, why doesn't he turn over his phone?

and they can see, you know, have you've ever texted this word to anybody before, right? So is this, was it actually auto-completing something or was this something, again, that just was an absolute bizarre, horrific mistype that then gets to Twitter and maybe you could sort of determine what you're talking about, the context of the person, at least of his life. Then there was a third meltdown, David, not a joke from NBC's Mike Milbury, who's covering the NHL playoffs. Listen to this riff during Thursday's Capitals Islanders game. Come here and play hockey. If you think about it, it's a terrific environment with regards to, if you enjoy playing and enjoy being with your teammates for long periods of time, it's a perfect place.

Not even if any woman had to disrupt their concentration. The NHL has released a statement condemning Milbury's remarks, and Milbury has now been removed from NBC's broadcast through at least the end of the playoffs. Katie Strang had a good piece in the athletic about this going down through all the other things Milbury has said over the years. But that was certainly a wild one. And by the way, David, if we go back a little bit in May, the NBA star Boogie Cousins appeared in the mentions of Sacramento Kings Broadcaster Grant Napier. Do you remember this?

Napier tweeted All Lives Matter in all caps at him. Napier winds up losing his job as a King's announcer and also his radio show. in Sacramento had a very similar explanation to Brennam and it makes me feel sick to my stomach because it is absolutely the opposite of who I am. He told The New York Post, I'm 60 years old. I'll let my track record of my life and what I've done for my community and what I've done. Dot, dot, dot. I wish, you know, when you write a trend piece, you're supposed to have a unified explanation for these. And, you know, I guess you could say these games are weird and sort of casual and there are no fans and maybe really that somehow is a, a,

way for something awful to happen in the broadcast booth, but I don't know, Milbury's been saying strange things for years. I don't have a through line here through all these things. No. I mean, I think there probably is a through law. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't know if it's a through line. I mean, there probably is some degree to which like the production teams have switched up and we know baseball is operating differently. And, you know, there's just people are, maybe the red, the on air light isn't coming on the same cadence as he used to or something. I think the real important through line is that, you know, the trend pieceiness of the whole thing allows us to do a segment about it. It makes people think about it. It may people are talking about this

now. And to the extent that like, this is a thing that's still going on in the world, in the booth, and anywhere else, you know, the through line is like, people still talk like that, you know, and we need to be wary of it. We need to be aware that this sort of stuff still going on. Absolutely. Absolutely. David, I don't know about you, but I've been reading a dozen or so news items about Kanye West for president. And most of them have been by Ben Jacobs. So I wanted to have been on to talk about that and other stuff about covering 2020. Ben Jacobs is a political reporter who has written about topics like Georgia becoming a 2020 battleground.

But during this year's campaign, Jacobs has also produced heroic service journalism to help us answer a question. what size air quotes should we put around the Kanye West for president campaign, which Jacobs writes is not serious, but it's not a joke either. Ben's here to talk Kanye 2020 and other stuff about election reporting. How are you, Ben? I'm doing great. Excited, excited for yet another Kanye ballot deadline. They're coming fast and furious, aren't they? It's the time to see whether, whether you know whether Kanye plays with the potato growers. There we go. So first off, we got to do

journalistic behind the scenes. Who or what got you on this story to begin with? So I originally like most sane people talk the Kanye thing is a total joke by you know, Kanye

of his own interesting thing. And you know, he had his tweet. He had an interview with Forbes where he said he wanted to run the country like Wakanda. the country from Blackmander. Whatever, Kanye Kanye. And then I got a call from someone who said that they knew someone who had been approached to work for Kanye in Florida.

They get paid $5 grand for the week to go down to Florida and make sure Kanye got the ballot. And I reached out to this person. I still was like, okay. It turned out the person had tape recorded these. So the recordings of it was for real. And then it's like, oh, you know, without the tape recordings, even then I might not have been able to work things. You think seriously.

And that got me down the rabbit hole. And I have not left since. So that's the moment when it goes from celebrity says something in an interview and tweet something to this at least has the partial machinery of an actual presidential campaign. Yeah. real money and doing at least a facsimile of the basic blocking and tackling. So in your political reporter brain, are you excited like, oh, this is going to be something that will stand out in the midst of all this campaign reportage? Or you say this was going to be a fun distraction for a day from Biden and Trump? I'm just curious what the heck's going on.

Like, you know, there's, I'm still not quite sure what's going on even at this point. But, you know, look, it's the type of thing where it's sort of a question of what's going going on because obviously Kanye West is not just very rich, but he also has a platform that enables him, if he so chose, which he really hasn't chose, to jump into the new cycle and has the potential to be disruptive and have an impact, even if I don't think anyone outside of perhaps Kanye anticipates him stepping into the Oval Office in January 20th, 2021. he's had one campaign event, such as it was. He's not going to be in the debates you've written because he's not on the ballot in enough states. And you also noted last night on Twitter that he has

not filed a federal election commission report, which is now somewhat overdue. So to what extent does his presidential campaign actually exist? That's a good question. That Kanye is doing ballot access and he's still trying to get on the ballot in places right now. There are elements of this that really feel like classic sort of quirky perennial Canada. There's, for example, a gentleman named Rocky Delafonte who ran for Senate of nine different states in 2018. And there's elements of that too.

But they're spending the money to do ballot access. They're hiring lawyers. They had lawyers, for example, there's a hearing in Wisconsin about whether it could appear on the ballot. And they had a lawyer appearing on their behalf and they had a lawyer on their behalf in Illinois where you got kicked off the ballot.

They have people going around in places who are often Republican operatives or tied to Republican campaigns. That there's something going on here and that there's something real. They're spending money doing stuff. But it's a question of what the mechanics are outside of that.

And they're certainly not spending money on any basic press staff responding to inquiries. to get their message out. And it feels like it's just the idea that you spend money liberally to get on the ballot and let let things happen from there.

So there's no central Kanye for president entity that you can call for comment when you write one of these stories? Their email addresses you can go through. There's actually a prominent, well-connected Republican operative named Greg Keller who's working for Kanye, who has not commented on it. And occasionally, as I noted, tweeted just this more, morning that the election is a choice between Republicans or anarchy.

He did respond to my tweet by noting journalists has had a hard-on for my tweets for several weeks. You know, you're getting paid by one presidential account and you're promoting the party of another. What's going on? Right. Craig has not been responsive at all since he, you know, ended up having his name in files as listed as the point of contact with the Arkansas Secretary of State for the campaign about a month ago, which I get the feeling he didn't anticipate being public record. But this is hard. Now, you talked about ballot access a second ago. When someone runs for president, essentially they have to get on the ballot 51 times, 50 states plus Washington, D.C.

And I was amazed by the low threshold, which you've reported on to do this in some states. This is me being sort of a political novice here. Tennessee, you only have to have 275 valid signatures to run for president in that state? Yes. And keep in mind a valid signature is different than a signature that people normally screw up their signatures so that normally you're collecting two times or three times as many to be safe. But the range goes from their four states where you can just write a check. Tennessee, it's 275. And then it goes all the way up to California's 200,000. Signature thresholds are not correlated for size. That, for example, Wisconsin and South Dakota,

Dakota had the same deadline, but I think you needed twice as many signatures in South Dakota as you needed in Wisconsin, even though Wisconsin is a much larger state. It's all sort of state by state and very loosey-goosey, and of course thrown even another curveball by the pandemic. And then you submit a slate of electors, essentially. So like Virginia has 13 electoral votes. So Kanye picks 13 people in the extremely unlikely event he wins. the presidential election in Virginia, they are going to vote for Kanye West. The electoral votes for him because, of course, which is something many of the electors don't appreciate as sort of basic civics. We don't vote directly for president. We vote for people

to cast electoral votes in the electoral college and whoever gets the most electoral votes which is, of course, why Hillary Clinton got through a million more votes in 2016, but lost the election because Donald Trump, excuse me, one more state and more. Careful there. Yeah, Kanye West did not. Don't add yet another conspiracy theory to the 2016 election. I want to ask you about this. So you tried to contact those 13 people in the case of Virginia that the West campaign had put up to be electors. What happened when you do that? They were very surprised that I didn't get in contact with all of them, that they submit the forms of many of them. They thought they were just signing a petition for something. And there's a notary there. They didn't know what the elector was. Several of them said, you know, one of them said, you know, one of them.

that she knew she was an elector. She didn't know it was for Kanye West. She just thought it was, you know, maybe the libertarian or something. I said, I had no idea what they're saying, you know, with Kanye West, and one woman's response was, is this, ask me, is this a joke? Then when I said, no, I'm serious, this is, you know, and read out, you know, her address, her email address, all this information you put on the forum, like, to make sure her response was holy guacamole. And that people have been generally surprised that this was, and this is, and this is, something new that they've done because previously their elector slates in a number of states

had been Republican activists, that they had one elector in Vermont, who is literally a delegate to the RNC in Charlotte right now as a Trump thing. And my best read on that is they realize instead of working through the Republican networks that there's another state where Republican operatives sends an email saying, hey, folks, this is a little bit funny, but if you want to do this and just found random people in grocery stores where they're signing petitions and parking lots and just having the notary there and getting them to fill out a little bit more information

and covering their base that way. And at least one person said they were just asked would you like to be an elector? Yes. Without the name attached to it. And they said, well, that sounds fun. Sure. Where do I sign? And they are now an elector for Kanye West.

And can you get off that? Can you unelect her yourself? That's an interesting legal question. involving specific points of Virginia law. I believe is one of the states where electors have to be, you know, have to be bound for who they're voting for, which is not the case. You have faithless electors, excuse me. So I'm sure if they announce that they would not cast their electoral votes for Kanye West

if you want one, they could be stricken off. But the mechanics of that are relatively or something I'm not looked into. And frankly, are unusual because normally to be an elector, you support the candidate. You know what you're doing, that normally for Democratic and Republican activists, being electors a big deal with something, you know, activists fight over because they can say they got this honor. This is something that's, uh, that's, you know, unique, you know, special to do. And even for smaller parties, for greens and libertarians, you know, they know what they're doing. They're asking people want to do it. I know someone who was once a green elector and got asked and said,

sure, why not? But it was specifically to be a green elector. They didn't have a lot of people. Yeah. This is, this is where it's, just, you know, throwing stuff against the board. And, you know, I think part of it is also that I'm imagining that other small fry candidates do this, that when you see the random, you know, perennial candidate X, perennial candidate Y in the ballot that there's, you know, who's paying to do this through your Rocky Delaflente's, that it's the same thing, but no one ever calls up a Rocky Delafonte elector or thinks about Rocky Delafonte except in Kanye West podcasts. Yeah, absolutely. No, it reminds me when I used to live in New York and I'd walk through Times Square and someone would say, do you like comedy? Except this time, they just say, do you want to be an elector?

Yes. My answer to both questions is yes. Why not? West, you have reported registered as a Republican in Wyoming. He was, of course, in the Oval Office with Donald Trump two years ago. He's had conversations with Jared Kushner over the last couple of weeks. Naturally, the question one thinks is, is this a very high profile rat fucking operation that is somehow tied to the GOP? What evidence is there of that? There are certainly elements of that, but Kanye, of course, keep in mind he registered to vote as a Republican after he announced his presidential bid. He tweeted on July 4th on running for president. And then on July 9th, he went to the Board of Elections in Wyoming where he registers a Republican after, say, he never registered to vote before. Right. That the campaign is sort of studded with these Republican operatives that in Wisconsin, the lawyer who filed his petitions for him, literally one week before. had signed a legal brief on behalf of her client, Donald J. Trump for president,

and that you have all these operatives studied in and all these connections. But this also is not just pure rat fucking. Like Kanye is a crazy third-party candidate running in weird states is not the most effective way to do this. But this feels, it's as I've described, it's a hybrid, that there are elements and stuff. There's elements of these vanity candidates there.

there's certainly someone who has had bipolar episodes and has delusions of his electoral ability getting taken advantage by consultants who see an easy payday. There is this Republican aspect of it here too. And it's sort of all of them combined. And what's very clear about not just how his ties, but the fact that Trump has spoken about Kanye's presidential campaign, even after it started and Kanye very warmly when he was asked about it. And that the typical Republican M.O. under Trump is that if you have any ties, you know, if you sniffed around Bill Weld, who was the former Massachusetts governor who had a sort of

quixotic primary attack against Trump, if you sniffed around him, you were dead to the world. But here you have Republicans with ties to Republicans signing on to Kanye without any repercussions. And that's sort of a sign that in the world of Donald Trump in which you're either with me or you're against me and anyone who's against me needs to be killed with fire and is my enemy, that you're not received as the enemy signing on with Kanye West is certainly interesting. And that, you know, none of this makes sense as one thing. It's not rat fucking. It's not a vanity campaign.

It's not, you know, Kanye suffering from whatever Sufie has. It's sort of a combination of all of them in a way that we never recognized before. And the analogy that sort of makes sense. It's like, I'm Captain Cook getting off the bone in Australia and seeing the kangaroo for the first time. Like it looks like about six different animals I know, but it's none of them in trying to figure out what exactly it is. Yeah, that certainly makes it unique. So it doesn't really matter if he's on the ballot in a state like Tennessee where Trump's going to win big anyway. But let's say he's on the ballot in Arizona and it's a super tight swing state. Do we have a sense of how Kanye would

affect the election? That's a good question. And no one has any hard data. The polling that's around shows that Kanye is far less popular with Democrats than he is with Republicans, that Kanye has viewed, you know, far more unfavorably than favorably among all demographics. But you're more likely to have a positive view of him if you're a Republican. And that raises question about what his appeal is that, you know, the theory of the case behind this is sort of the somewhat sort of not, not, you know, almost borderline racist idea that African American voters will just default and vote for an African-American regardless of why, you know, without taking to account that Kanye is, you know, the guy not just who appeared in a MAGA hat, who not just said crazy things about

Harry Tubman, who's, you know, who's released songs like, I am a god. Like, there are other issues in which were their concerns, but that all gets trumped by the, by his skin color, but that it really seems like the demographic for Kanye, and I've talked to folks about this from both parties, and it's figuring out is, you know, nihilists. It's the type of folks, you know, if you want to vote for a controversial celebrity who says wacky things and just want to blow everything up. And that demographic does not sound like a Biden voter. You know, it's going to be less politically engaged. The best demographic model that I afford is younger white, non-college educated man.

Who are just casting a nihilistic kind of, why not kind of vote. Yeah, that it's sort of, you know, that the type of thing that if you're a Kanye voter, your favorite Jay-Z song is his collaboration. with Lincoln Park. It's that sort of world. All right. Here's the mandatory question for any journalists who comes on this show. You start out in journalism. You went to law school.

You have that background. What did you want to be when you grew up as a journalist? What did I want to be when I grew up as a journalist? Yeah. You started the profession. What did you want to be when you grew up? I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I just wandered into it by a series of unique.

accidents after the illegal academy collapse. Knew a guy, knew a guy, knew a guy, and knew a guy. And, you know, I started writing editorials for the boss, couch surfing in Boston and writing editorials if they got published in the globe, it's 75 bucks a pop. Of course, ended up from there wandering into the, you know, to the Daily Beast as a weird, overworked kid, and the rest was history. What would have been the biggest difference about covering 2020 from the couch or largely from the couch versus being out on the road right now? No voters.

I mean, we're in the world we don't see voters. There's not the sense that you see so much as reliant among folks of the last big story that I did on the road was doing a story on, which gives you a sense of how long ago it was this Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign in North Carolina getting a sense of what was actually going on and like seeing stuff and seeing them. they put on a fake canvas for me. Like, and just seeing sort of the type of actual mechanical things were going on and what the office looks like and how people reacted to it. You know, you can get pundits, you can get politicians, but actually getting a sense of what things look like on the ground and how people react to this is what really, really matters.

Because I always think about that with voters, because, you know, it's funny. There's this idea, right? We read a political story in the New York Times of Washington Post. It has all the kind of mechanical back and forth that the reporters got and then there's said, you know, Ben Jacobs, who was seen at the rally in Ohio. And I always find that as a kind of ornament on the Christmas tree of a political story, I'm like, well, this is just one person. But the idea is if you can talk to enough of them, you do get a true sense in some sense of what? You talk to enough and it depends on where you're talking and what the circumstances are that

obviously talking to voters at a general election event. You're not going to run into undecided voters at a Trump rally or a Biden rally. I mean, but certainly the best place to talk to voters at political events is in Iowa or New Hampshire, where you have undecided people showing up to see each candidate 12 times at poke and prod. And you actually get stuff. But that should of getting stuff in terms of events that there's still, there's less than I now, thank goodness, for like the Trump voter in the wild story. Yes.

But one most, which became a terrible cliche, but a useful thing that I did. And, you know, it's how you do it, you know, standing outside a supermarket and trying to grab people. If you pick the right place or the right time or going through and trying to make sure you're getting, getting a sense of folks. And even at events, if you're measuring different things and different enthusiasm, but just getting a feel for why people are there and what motivates them. But it's, you know, anything you can do to get a sense of what's actually happening outside

a little bit of the bubble is important. The weird thing is standing outside a grocery store, you might find yourself next to the Kanye signature collector who was asking people if they wanted to be an elector. You're asking for the mood of the electorate. They're saying, do you want to be at a electric? Yeah. Yeah. Which is their succumb. I haven't run into any of those folks when I've been out there.

It's all useful. But if you can go on with campaigns when they're door knocking and seeing how people react at the doors and just stepping back and also seeing, you know, that's always going to be a little bit of a put on too, but seeing, you know, what even they're giving you and what the show is. because you can also tell something by, you know, you're going to get fed what they want you to see. But if you know what you're looking for, what they want you to see can still be very revealing. For sure. All right. One more for you, Ben. Dave and I were talking about the DNC last week.

And we thought it was a combination of a PBS telethon, an episode of Veep and a Chevy truck commercial with those Bruce Springsteen bumpers we kept hearing. What is the R&C going to look like this week, do you think? The RNC is just going to look like Fox News. I'm really curious about the production values, and there's going to be the rush. But as of now, as we're speaking right now, President Donald Trump has interrupted the roll call where he's formally nominated and has gone on for an hour and counted. He started off by saying Democrats are trying to steal the election, but it's just going to be the Trump show. That so much of this is going to be base material built around Trump,

built around sort of the Fox News world. The facts, it's like the, you know, the Marvel extended universe. It's the Trump extended universe. This is going to be the type of world in which it's going to be laying out a universe of concerns that are going to be very familiar to a Fox News viewer. But like don't translate elsewhere than, you know, when you look at a lot of Trump's tweets,

they're sort of from a very particular world that these are not tweets about, you know, everyday concerns about the coronavirus or health care and employment. but it's, you know, Obama was spying on me and liberal cancel culture, that this is just going to be very much within the closed universe. It's going to be something that, you know, doesn't necessarily appeal to folks that Democrats got criticized for, you know, probably John Kasich speak and having too many Republicans speak and being too bipartisan. This is going to be the type of event in which if you're not watching Fox News primetime, you may need some cliff notes. Uh-oh. I'm going to need some cliff notes. I'm just going to put that out there right now.

You can read Ben Jacobs's continuing coverage of 2020 and the Kanye West campaign in particular at New York Magazine and many other places. Ben, thanks for doing this. Thanks for happening. All right, it's time for David Schuemaker. Guest is a strain pun headline. Yay. Thank you, sir. Thursday's pun, the title of Toronto coach Nick Nurse's memoir was Rapture. Rapture. We did have one vote for Rapture de Force, which has also a good memoir title.

This week's pun comes from Robert Hess. It's from the CBS weekend news. David, I want you to listen to the first couple of seconds of this urgent report. Okay, the idea of using a public bathroom with see-through walls may sound like the stuff of nightmares, but a famous Japanese architect is hoping to change that view. All right. A public bathroom with see-through walls. This feels really fake.

This feels like one of those stories you see on the bottom of the bottom of a web page and you click on it only to realize it was published like five years ago and it's just been sitting there like drawing traffic from idiots like you for the whole time. And it's a picture of a celebrity just like with a horror, look of horror on their face. It also feels like the headline that when you were in the cabs in New York City and the old day, it would just go by on the screen. You couldn't click it. It would just say like see-through bathroom in Japan. What?

What? You always saw a few of the words. Yeah, just trying to get it. Cannot back page on that. All right. So the headline we're looking for. Yeah. And it was the headline, so just because the Kiron,

the subject title there on the CBS weekend news. What was CBS's strained pun headline? God, just call with your pants down. Is it a going to the bathroom world? Like is it a toilet can? Getting there? John. How about a British?

word for bathroom. Lou or water quality. Lou, uh, Lou, uh, uh, looky Lou. Looky Loo's. Is that right? Looky lose. Yes, that is correct. Yeah. Yeah. Good for the CBS weekend. I've been a better, I've been our listeners are going to have a whole lot, a whole lot of good ideas on this one. Yeah. And even some of them will be printable. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida and production magic by Erica Servantes. Programming note, we're back Friday instead of Thursday so we can capture all the wonders of the Republican convention.

Please join us in our team of Vipers then. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.