Civil war gaffes and robotic smiles: can anyone beat Trump?
2024-01-05 00:30:20
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
This is The Guardian.
Happy New Year to you all, though. There is little opportunity to ease yourself gently into 2024 if you're following American politics.
Republican presidential candidates are in their final push ahead of the Iowa caucuses.
This week, the remaining six Republican candidates started their final tour of Iowa in the hopes of persuading caucus goers there to pick them on January, the 15th.
Poll shows former President Donald Trump still has a commanding 36 point lead in Iowa, but the race in New Hampshire has suddenly become much closer.
Donald Trump is predicted to be the runaway winner in Iowa, but candidates are hoping for a better result in the New Hampshire primary just a week later. Nikki, Haley, Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy and the other Guy who few know about. They're all still putting on a brave face and trying to convince Republicans there'd be a better president than their beloved Donald Trump. But with civil war gaffes, robotic smiles and pleas from fellow Republicans to drop out, what chance do any of their campaigns really have? I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.
Great to be back with you and happy New year. Is it a happy new year? Well, we will say that it's a happy New year even, and then hold our breaths that maybe it will be one.
Bill Kristol was the chief of staff to the Republican vice president, Dan Quayle. More than three decades ago. He went on to found the conservative weekly Standard Magazine, and is now the editor-at-large of The Bulwark, a never Trump opinion website. The last time he was on this podcast, he told us he'd vote for Joe Biden in November if Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee.
And what's most startling is that this is not 2016 when no one really knew what he would do and maybe he would grow an office. And of course, he's a little bit of a. He's obstreperous, but you know, he would have people around him who would check him, which incidentally did happen to some degree in the first term. Of course, this isn't 2020 when he's running for re-election as an incumbent, and you could tell yourself if you wish that well. He's done some good things and so forth, and he's the incumbent. And again, some of those same people would still be there. Now it's post-January 6th. Post any thought that any of those Republicans who care about our institutions or our norms would serve in a second Trump term? Post the recent rhetoric of promising retribution? And really just scornful about any notion of the rule of law or anything like that. And yet there he is, the front runner, and being supported by a ton of not just Republican voters, but elected Republican officials.
I mean, these primaries, they're not national, they are state by state, and first up is Iowa, which is just a matter of, you know, 10 days away or so. Again, absolutely dominant lead.
The former president, boasting a 30 point lead over his closest rivals in the Hawkeye state, gaining strength despite growing legal challenges, 91 criminal counts against him.
Why would a state like Iowa, given everything we've seen, be so enamored of Donald Trump that he's got that kind of lead? What accounts for that?
Well, he has a massive lead among the Republican electorate in the national polls. Iowa's actually a little closer, and New Hampshire a little closer. Yet, which does suggest that maybe when voters face the real choice, those are the only two states most of these candidates have really campaigned in. And where the voters are really seeing advertisements and paying attention as it were. Yet when they realize they've got to vote, you know, this month, and Iowa and New Hampshire, it's a little closer.
So maybe that suggests a little bit of. When they focus, there's a sort of second thought of, oh my God, are we going to go down this road again? But he is way ahead in Iowa, and that vote is on Monday, January 15th. It's a conservative state, it used to be more of a swing state.
Republicans? It's so striking. When you listen to the focus groups, you know they know him, they like what he did. They're not alarmed about a second term. The more rabid Trump supporters love the fact that he's going to, you know, drain the swamp and blow everything up, the more, let's call it acquiescent Trump supporters just have the sense. Well, he was president for four years, we kind of liked what he did.
He kind of says some things that are a little silly, but you know, nothing super disastrous happened in the first term, they would say, and some good things happened. And let's give him another one.
And the good things would be what the economy was doing. OK pre-Covid.
The economy, and if you're a conservative, yeah, pre-Covid not better than it's done under Biden. Actually, post-Covid sort of. The U.S. economy turns out to be pretty resilient to presidents of various parties. But people thought it was doing well, and people liked. Some of the even the less rabid Trump supporters, some of the culture war, so to speak fights. They were on Trump's side. Supreme Court appointments.
And then it's very striking when you listen to my colleague Sarah Longwell does all these focus groups. You know, the world was at peace. None of these people would cause trouble when Trump was president. And then you say, Well, let's go through each case. I mean, is Biden somehow to blame for Putin's invasion in 2022 of Ukraine?
Didn't Trump, in some ways, solidify Putin's hold and make him more confident he could get away with it? Israel-HaMAS Obviously, very, you know. Hard to see that that's Trump or Biden specific. But people have the sense that the country is in bad shape, the world is in chaos. Trump was a strong leader.
That really permeates, I'd say, Republican and conservative rhetoric, and has an effect. Voters like strong leaders, and hopefully they well, in a healthy democracy, they would like strong democratic leaders, you know, but I think that can veer into liking strong semi-authoritarian leaders, too.
Well, let's talk about the people who at one point looked set to overtake or defeat Trump on the Republican side. And straight after those midterm results in November 22. I think the New York Post had Ron DeSantis on the front page with the word de future, and they believe that he was, you know, Trump and Trump back candidates had done so badly in those midterms. Ron DESantis had been reelected with a thumping majority as governor of Florida. It looked all set for him.
And what we've seen instead is his national polling numbers just fall and fall and fall.
At the start of 23, Ron DESantis was running pretty close in the poll average to Donald Trump. And then look what happened, it just exploded here for Trump and went the other way for DeSantis.
He's second in Iowa, third in New Hampshire on those polls. What went wrong for Ron DeSantis?
This often happens. You know, you could be a good candidate for governor, and people want to see one set of attributes in a governor and then a very different set in a president. You know, there's a kind of personal relationship with the president that people don't really feel with the governor. They want someone who'll keep taxes down and keep crime down, and, you know, govern the state competently, but presidents, it's a whole different, for better or worse.
Honestly, it's a kind of whole different relationship, I would say. And DeSantis didn't click on that level. Made all kinds of tactical mistakes, I would say, mostly by trying to out Trump Trump instead of being the respectable, if Trump adjacent alternative to Trump. So he peaked early.
Trump's numbers have gone up, some Desantis numbers have gone down a lot, and I think now Nikki Haley is the former governor of South Carolina. Trump's U.N. ambassador is the one Republican who has a chance, an outside chance.
We'll come back to Nikki Haley in a moment. But John Ron DESantis is it possible to define what his campaign was actually about, what he wanted to be president for?
I mean, he made it sound as if he wanted to be president so he could litigate the culture war even more aggressively than Trump. So this is in Florida is where Woke went to die, and he was going to, I guess, kill wokeness. We fight the woke in the legislature.
We fight the woke in the schools, we fight the woke in the corporations.
We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.
The irony is, if he had simply said, Look, I was a very competent governor of Florida. Trump messed up a lot of things and now Desantis is saying things a little more like this. But I know how to govern. I can bring about those conservative, in many cases quite conservative, results, but I can do it competently and in a tough minded way.
I think that wouldn't have been a bad message. I'm not sure it would have worked. But he forgot his main calling card was that he was a competent and popular reelected with Democratic votes as well governor of Florida. And he sort of forgot to remind people of that in the first six nine months of 2023..
Yeah, and he was a culture warrior instead, and forgot that he was up against the best culture warrior in the business.
And Trump is a very good demagogue. This is something people really have never appreciated enough about him, I would say, and never feared enough about him. And it's easy to mock him in so many ways. And God knows, my allies, many of my allies here have done so, and even I've done so occasionally.
But he's a skillful demagogue, he reads the crowd, but also reads the broader. He's done this for 50 years. He's someone who's depended on sort of knowing what people want and adjusting when he sees what people want. And it does suggest that Trumpism is, unfortunately, I think, now, a deep strain in the American body politic.
And it's out there, so it's not going away. But it also shows how much the success of Trump and Trumpism depended on Trump personally. That is DeSantis. If it were just the ideas, the message, even just the grievances, surely Desantis could have, you know, competed with Trump? But Trump has some abilities that do seem somewhat unique. I'd say the combination of the grievance mongering, taking advantage of people's anger, but also, in some ways, reassuring them a little bit.
He's been president, he knows what he's doing. You know, he's going to be funny on the stump if you like that kind of humor. But you know the kind of comic side of him, I mean, he is an unusual mix of qualities.
And just before we leave Ron DeSantis, and maybe the American electorate is going to leave Ron Desantis, but before we do. I mean, you mentioned that he was not a good candidate, he was just personally very awkward. I noticed myself speaking about him in the past tense, but this inability to smile, he couldn't sort of deliver a line.
And then you see in his campaign the campaign team fighting each other. His Super PAC chief executive quit, the board chairman resigned, three top officials fired and his chief strategist changing. All of those things. Are they symptoms or cause for why Ron DESantis never really happened?
I mean, both, I would say, but I think probably more symptoms, certainly the shakeups of the team. There wasn't much personal loyalty there. I think that's because he's not the kind of person who engenders personal loyalty and has been skinned and therefore gets annoyed. If things aren't going well and so forth. So it just turned out you can get away.
This happens a lot in American politics. As I said, you can get away with certain flaws. As it were limitations at the local level or the state level, the national level is a real, it's a real. An unsparing spotlight on politicians.
So let's talk about Nikki Haley, who has overtaken. It seems. Ron DeSantis, certainly in terms of media attention as the alternative to Donald Trump, and she's polling ahead of Ron DeSantis. Still some way behind Donald Trump in New Hampshire, although some of those polls have really tightened in that particular state. What do you put that relative success? I mean, it is relative down to, in Nikki Haley's case.
She's a pretty good candidate, I'd say, in a field in which everyone else turned out to be either really bad candidates. Or just totally unacceptable to the Republican electorate. Which would be the case, I'd say, with Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and Pence, ironically, former Vice President Pence, who, because he didn't let Trump steal the election, was just too. But had worked with Trump side by side for four years was unacceptable to both people who wanted to move on from Trump and people who liked Trump. So, in a way, Nikki Haley by being Trump acquiescent, not taking on Trump much, but by not sounding like Trump. And having a record. That's quite different from Trump. And just being a different type of person than Trump obviously was able, I think, to be the last person standing in a way as the alternative to Trump. She now has a pretty broad coalition of Republicans, ranging from really anti-Trump Republicans, the few that are left to non-trump Republicans, to Trump. Sort of acquiescent Republicans who voted for him twice. Certainly, but who kind of sense that maybe it's better to move on, and maybe Trump has vulnerabilities that will come out in the general election, even though he's doing decently in the polls now. And so Haley has some chance. I think, by a certain shrewdness and a certain just being sort of a more normal Republican candidate, the term people use now is, Are you a normie Republican or a Trumpy Republican?
She's a normie Republican who worked in the Trump administration, and that appeals to some chunk of the Republican electorate.
Just to clarify what she's about, can you define a purpose, an aim, a cause that motivates her? As a politician? Or are we looking at essentially a kind of trial run for presidential ambition, perhaps for 2028?
Well, no, I think she probably senses this is her time to do it, if she's going to do it. She was a popular governor of South Carolina after the killing of many people in a Black church in South Carolina.
A federal jury has now convicted Dylan Roof in the racially motivated killings of nine Black church members in South Carolina.
She responded Well, and that was a huge national story in 2015, I think it was. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has called for the Confederate Battle flag to be removed from the state's Capitol. Following last Wednesday's church shooting, which killed nine people, there have been renewed demands to take down the controversial symbol, which critics have called a symbol.
Of intolerance.
She ended up taking down the Confederate flag from the State Capitol in South Carolina, which I think, and she convinced the South Carolinians that that was the right thing to do. As well as getting a lot of national applause for that. And so I think she would genuinely be judged as sort of a successful governor. Then she was U.N. ambassador for a couple of years and again, I think, was successful and committed. No great gaffes and so forth. So she has a reasonable career, you might say in public office. That was, I wouldn't say, was wildly distinguished, but was competent and respectable.
So that's, yeah, I think that's the appeal.
And people had said about her that she's pretty good on her feet. And, you know, Mike Murphy, former Republican operative consultant, says, You know, she's a pretty good political athlete. And yet she did have a pretty awful moment in a town hall debate in New Hampshire. I mean, I can summarize it, but I'm quite keen to hear how you capture what happened there.
So a young person actually asked her about what was the cause of the Civil War? I mean, she said, she gave an answer that was just incomprehensible and sort of never mentioned slavery. I mean, I think the cause of the Civil war was basically how government was going to run the freedoms and what people could and couldn't do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was? She knows that slavery was the main cause of the Civil war.
And this indeed. She spoke somewhat eloquently about that when she took down the Confederate flag in South Carolina, or even in her inaugural speech as governor of South Carolina way back in 2011.
Someone pulled this up recently and I looked at it where she talked about the very mixed. We're proud to be South Carolinians, but we have to acknowledge the really dark side of our heritage. And, you know, and mentioned slavery explicitly.
And she has said since that incident, actually, to be fair, that she should have said the civil war was about slavery.
Yes, but she somehow froze up. I think the little political computer, you know, in her brain went, Oh, this is tricky, I'm being tripped up. What's the follow up question? If I say slavery, do I then get attacked from the right for sounding like some woke liberal?
And she thought she could, I don't know if she thought, but her instinct was to sort of just run away from the question as opposed to just answer. It does say a lot that you think you can get in trouble in a Republican primary or in the Republican Party. By just saying that slavery was the cause of the civil war. I mean, that, I think, is, for me, one of the big. And she's not because she's not unintelligent, and she's a good, pretty good politician. As Mike Murphy said, in a way, it's more revealing that she kind of made that instant calculation, isn't it? But people are kind of used to these gaffes, and it's not really a gaffe in this case, because it's more than a gaffe. But I don't know that at the end of the day, if you don't want Trump, you probably have to vote for Haley.
And I think people are going to probably go ahead and do that regardless of what she said in New Hampshire about or didn't say about slavery.
What people have been waiting for? And I remember people saying this back in 2016 as well. We need the anti-trump or non-trump field to consolidate behind one individual. In fact, a lot of people thought that Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016. Partly because he always fought against a split field and there was never a one-on-one contest. Do you sense? I mean, there's lots of predictions out there, there's lots of polling and people will be analyzing all the numbers that come. But what do you think, do you think either of these other two people that we've talked about, Rhonda Santis or Nikki Haley? First of all, can they get to in time before it's too late? A point where they are fighting one-on-one against Donald Trump.
So it's just him versus them, one in one of them. And if they do, is it, you know, in the real outside science fiction? Is it possible they could actually overtake Donald Trump and win this Republican nomination?
I think the consolidation has happened, certainly more than it did in 2016.
Pence is out, Tim Scott is out. I think the key is Haley running second in Iowa if she can clearly beat Ron DeSantis for second in Iowa. I think Desantis has almost. You know, he's invested so much in Iowa that if he runs third, he's going to do much worse in New Hampshire. Very hard to see how that campaign survives that.
And then I think we get pretty close to one-on-one. Actually, I'm less pessimistic about that than some of the people who are still dwelling on the lessons of 2016. Now, when it's one-on-one, the odds are that Trump beats Haley. I mean, pretty much every national poll and almost every state poll shows that, but, you know, one-on-one races have a different character than Trump against the big field.
The advantage of being he's the only former president, he's the only person who's been nominated twice, he's the person tens of millions of Republicans have voted for most. You know, a couple of times, suddenly, that advantage becomes a little less dominant, you might say, I think, and noticeable compared to the rest of the field, who look like a whole bunch of people scrambling against, kind of the big guy, you know, suddenly it's okay.
It's one-on-one. If she could nip Trump in New Hampshire, then I think she says, What do you mean? We're not having a debate. You won one primary, I won one primary.
Are you scared to debate? You can sort of imagine things happening that shake the race up some. You can imagine him losing his temper and saying things that might not. That anything seems to hurt him, but maybe something would hurt him. It's about four or five weeks till South Carolina, the next primary, next big primary, then.
Home state for her as well.
Yeah, though, he's very strong there, so that's the scenario. I'd say it's an outside chance, but I think not an impossible one.
I mean, that's obviously a remote scenario, but at least plausible for that to happen. She has to win either Iowa or New Hampshire, so I don't think it's going to be Iowa. She can't do this without winning somewhere or coming very close.
I think that's right. I mean, maybe very, very close would be good enough in New Hampshire, but yeah, if Trump wins Iowa, New Hampshire, I mean, he will have won the first two primaries where he was most contested, where the most money was spent against him. Where voters had a chance to hear the case against them articulated such as not that most of these candidates make the case against them. But they certainly presented themselves as an alternative to him. At least. Maybe stuff could happen on the legal front and all that would weaken him during February. It's a little hard to see what it would be, though.
And so, yes, I think it'd be a very safe bet that if Trump wins Iowa, New Hampshire, he will pretty much run the table and be the nominee. After March 5th, after Super Tuesday.
Let's talk very briefly about some of the other candidates who are still on the ballot paper in these states. You mentioned Chris Christie, would you call on him to drop out so that he gives Nikki Haley the very best chance of being one on one against Trump?
If Haley runs second in Iowa, I don't think he has to drop out now. And in fact, now you can make the case that it's good to have someone in there making the strongest arguments against Trump.
I believe that those folks are right. Willie, what you mentioned in your question, which is that someone's got to be one on one against Trump, but they actually have to be against Trump.
Having Christie in there, I would say, is fine. For now, he's barely competing in Iowa, but I think it will be important that he get out and I think he understands this actually after Iowa. If Haley looks like she really has a shot, if Haley doesn't have a shot, and if it's just going to be a Trump nomination. I suppose Christie can tell himself, and I wouldn't even quarrel with this, that he should stay in and just be on the ballot in as many states as possible and attack Trump.
And ultimately, Christie's not going to support Trump in the general election. So, from the point of view of people like me who don't want Trump to be president, it might be good to have him in. But I think the key moment will be that week. It's eight days between Iowa and New Hampshire, January 15th to January 23rd, and I think Christie will get out if Haley has a shot in New Hampshire.
And there is a view that actually Haley should want from DESantis to stay in for New Hampshire, even if he loses badly in Iowa. Because if he does drop out some of those voters, DESantis voters could go to Trump and enable Trump to actually edge ahead of Nikki Haley.
Could be, but I think even whether he stays in or not, his vote is already low in New Hampshire and I just think it'll collapse. I mean, voters tend to in the first primary or two. If there are many candidates, and if there are many candidates who stay in and some of them win different primaries, as happened in 2016, voters will, you know, keep voting for a bunch of candidates. But you do also get a natural kind of consolidation. If there are just two that are only two of them really has a chance to be the nominee.
And I think, in that respect, whatever DESantis wants to do, he's not going to get any of the appreciable number of votes in New Hampshire. Unless he does surprisingly well in Iowa. But it looks like Haley has some momentum there and I think she has a decent shot at second in Iowa.
And Vivek Ramaswamy, A lot of people say he's the most irritating candidate in the field. He was the first to promise to pardon Trump. He's been, you know, essentially duplicating Trump's message on all the issues. But last week, his campaign announced they would stop spending money on TV ads, which often is the sign that something is winding up. Is this a real campaign or something less than that?
You know, he had a moment where he did quote well in the debate, he was even Trumpier than Trump and some people like that. But he's at five, six, seven percent and so I assume he'll get out and support Trump, and most of those votes will go to Trump.
Though, I will say both about the Ramaswamy and DeSantis votes, if you're still for one of them at this point, it does show some resistance to being for Trump. I'm not quite as convinced as other people that because Ramaswamy and DeSantis sound like Trump, which they do that, all their voters will go to Trump. You know, that's a kind of funny thing about politics, right? I mean, people don't necessarily follow these kind of ideological pathways quite as much as one might expect.
And I do feel that if you haven't gone to Trump yet, after a year of him being the front runner, you probably have some aversion to him. So I think that vote, you know, could fracture more evenly between Haley and Trump. But if you just do the math and assume Haley gets the Christie vote, and then the other vote fractures. Trump is still considerably at way ahead nationally, and considerably ahead even in New Hampshire, but considerably meaning 10 or 15 percentage points, not 30 or 40. And there are cases, actually several cases where second place candidates have surged in that last week in New Hampshire, so New Hampshire is the second. In Iowa is kind of the predicate.
But then New Hampshire is the key moment if Trump is to be tripped up.
Before we close out, you know, if it does go the way that the numbers indicate, it will. And Donald Trump is the nominee, and we have to write the history of this Republican primary campaign. Would we say that, you know, there were a whole lot of individual failures by the individual candidates, Ron DESantis or Chris Christie, or whoever? Or would we rather say that this? They just never stood a chance that Donald Trump was, and the re-nomination of him was just foretold from the very get go. And everything they tried in 2023 was always going to be doomed.
Some combination of those, but no, I think the big story, the big, big story of the last few years, is it's Trump's party. Maybe there was a moment it could have been, he could have been derailed, but that moment was right after January 6th, and that moment was passed over. WAS. Republicans refused to take that opportunity when 90 plus percent of House Republicans voted against impeaching him. The week after January 6th, the week after January 6th, after he incited everything that he incited, and then the Senate, Republicans refused to convict him a month after January 6th.
Once that had happened, Trump was back on the path to remaining the leader of the party. Much got harder and harder to dislodge him from that, in a sense. As that went on as he continued to spread the big lie, as other people were scared to quarrel with the big lie. As Liz Cheney got expelled from the party, etc. Etc. So I think when, when one steps back, I think one will look at that moment. Those moments in January and February of 2021, as the moments when Trump had to be discredited. Basically, if you were OK with Trump by I don't know, early mid 2023, hard to see why you wouldn't still be OK with him now. So the chance to derail.
Trump was was early was in 2021.
Yeah, I think I always go back to that speech of Mitch McConnell on the floor of the Senate, when he had really Trump's fate in his hands. And said, effectively, we're going to let this go. And that's very striking to hear you say that in a way, it was foretold at that moment. Bill, you know that we always like to ask our guests a what else? question on the podcast, something different, in a way not that different. It is the third anniversary since January, the 6th looming Joe Biden will make a speech on that day very deliberately and pointedly.
Republican leaders Will they even acknowledge this anniversary? And I'm just looking back over what's happened. And you think about the state capitals evacuated over bomb threats in Kentucky and in Michigan and in Georgia. We sort of end in some ways where we began. How? What do you think?
The state of American democracy is three years on, from January the 6th and as we head into 2024.
I think very few Republicans are going to even address January 6th, maybe some perfunctory comment, but on January 6th, three years ago, they were upset. They had a moment of clarity, you might say. And many of them stepped up that day and the next day or so, and that faded pretty quickly.
And I think it's not just faded by now, which it certainly has. There'll be a roaring silence among Republicans about on the anniversary of January 6th, but it's worse than that. It's one thing if they were sort of at least ashamed of it and kind of trying to hide it away. But there's a ton of rationalization and of lying about it.
And it was an FBI setup and these people are being persecuted, who were arrested, I'm going to, they should be pardoned. The degree to which January 6th, if I could put it this way, has been normalized, is really, for me, very scary, really, very.
We began by talking about a sense of foreboding, That's really why I have a sense of foreboding. Not just that Trump personally is very likely to be the nominee, but that the party that's nominating Trump has internalized and rationalized wishing for a second Trump administration. That is not going to sort of say, Gee, we made some mistakes the first time, we're going to be more sensible this time, quite the opposite.
I mean, literally the opposite, you know, it's sort of the only mistakes you made. The first time were being constrained by some of the institutions and guardrails and norms and laws. And we're blasting through them next time. That's what Trump has said.
And that's what the people around Trump has said. And that, unfortunately, I think, is where Republican voters at this point, it looks like most of them will be voting for.
BILL CrYStAL A sobering thought, but thanks so much for speaking with me on Politics Weekly America.
My pleasure Jonathan.
And that is all from me for this week. On Wednesday's episode of our sister podcast Today in Focus, I spoke to Michael Safi about what's shaping up to be an explosive year in politics with, and this is rare, an election both in the U.S. and in the UK. Whenever Prime Minister Rishi Sunak eventually calls one. We discussed what 1964 and 1992 tell us about what we can expect this year. They had elections in both countries back then, too. So do make sure to search for Today in Focus wherever you get your podcast.
And a heads up that in two weeks time, we'll be kicking off a three-part primary election special series. From January the 19th, I'll be reporting myself from New Hampshire, looking at the historical importance of the state in presidential politics. Queuing up for campaign rallies and town hall meetings, speaking to voters and analyzing those all-important results on election night on January the 23rd. But for now, it's goodbye. The producer is Daniel Stevens, the executive producer, Max Sanderson.
I'm Jonathan Friedland, thanks as always for listening.
v1.0.0.260408-1-a910ba6_os