CAMPAIGN 2024 PREVIEW: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

But last night I decided I'd have a little bit of coffee for some reason. And it was so overstimulating that I slept exactly zero hours. I mean, just completely.

Yeah, the coffee came back, the return of the repressed type energy, and I just sat up all night. I'll try again to purify.

I've done a lot of sort of ancient stuff lately. I went to an ancient Native American stone circle at the top of a mountain and I bathed in a ceremonial hot spring. And so it's kind of been a vision quest for me since I saw you last, actually.

And your cloudy visage from whatever motel you're staying in is proof of that.

So I've never followed one of these cases all the way up. I think it would be it should be kind of an interesting thing, so we'll see what happens.

I'm going to do a little write up on the site of what happens today. I don't think there's going to be a lot of national media, so we'll see what happens in the hearing. But I thought, you know, this week was kind of an interesting week. I wrote a piece earlier this week just because I around this time of year, I start getting ready to go out and do campaign stories. And started to read the polls. Which is sort of a ritual at this stage of the presidential election.

And it's just such total chaos compared to previous cycles. And I thought it would be fun if we both sort of went through the whole scenario and the whole table slate of candidates. And maybe even made a few predictions about how this might all turn out. I thought that might be fun. Are you up for that?

They have the HAL computer down in some basement and they run down and consult it. And they're kind of, you know, there's kind of a relay race where they pass the feed from the computer, you know, and run up to the press conference. Maybe it's able to speak right into the ears of the human humanoids. But yeah, well, the first thing I think about the election, besides the fact that, you know, Biden may be too old, or, you know, legally compromised, Trump may be in jail.

Desantis, the heir apparent on the Republican side, may be so unpopular by the time anything happens. I mean, he seems almost headed for a kind of parabolic subzero polling status. His donors, I guess, will still be with him, maybe some of them, but not many people. At the rate he's going, I doubt Chris Christie will make his move.

Chris Christie is the turtle in the race and I expect that he will. In this case, patience won't pay off, he'll still be the turtle at the end.

And the other guys on the Republican side to me are, you know, they could just switch heads. Pence isn't going anywhere with the Republican base. Well, maybe he is, you tell me, man, or maybe it's possible. It seems impossible to me.

Tim Scott is Tim Scott. I have Republican friends who were all in for Tim Scott early on. I mean, I didn't quite know why they're still that way on the Democratic side, just to set this all up. Bobby Kennedy in the polls, at least, seems to be flattening, if not trending slightly down. He's the only alternative that we're aware of, though there are lots of rumors about who might be wheeled in should the president be wheeled off.

And so there it stands.

I've got to say, in terms of press, in terms of attention, Trump stands head and shoulders above all the others. Whereas he may be imprisoned, there's a strong sense that Biden may not be even capable, imprisoned or not.

So where does that leave us?

There was one for the lesser candidates and one for the major candidates. And this was an all-consuming story that captivated America, going back to probably May of that year. Remember there were all those clown car stories that got tons of attention? At the time, people were really enthralled by the novelty of Donald Trump. Coming into the election, there was the John McCain story, which obviously got a lot of publicity.

And this is very different because we're just not seeing a lot of coverage of Iowa, New Hampshire, any of those places. And the campaign is almost an afterthought for the news media, maybe because there's been other stuff in the press. But it's just unusual because the campaign had been steadily going backwards in terms of how early we start covering all the madness. And now I think it's starting to reverse course. But anyway, right now it's looking sort of like a two-horse race. Because on the Democratic side, you basically have Biden at around 62 to 65..

And then Kennedy, who was around 20 in April, is now down around 13.

And on the Republican side, it's even crazier Donald Trump is at 53 right now. But the more salient point is that Ron DeSantis, who was looking like an actual contender in April. His graph is just disastrous and headed towards the single digits. Kind of a Jeb Bush-like phenomenon for him. Beneath him, as you say, there's a pile of candidates, unlike on the Democratic side.

I think there's one interesting one down there, which is Vivek Ramaswamy. We can talk about him just because he has some traits that tend to do well in campaigns. But right now, would you agree? It's essentially a two-horse race. Until the force majeure happens, until Biden drops out and is replaced, or Trump is put in jail and disqualified.

Absent that, that's kind of the field. Oh, and I guess we should mention, and must mention, Cornel West, whose campaign is being assiduously non-reported but is pulling pretty good numbers for a third-party candidate.

I've seen everywhere, from four to six.

But we all know it's not going to turn out that way.

At this stage of the campaign, it felt like an amusing place to start to look at the whole picture. Because they're basically at the same place in the starting blocks. Obviously, things change very quickly, especially with Trump in any race, but right now, yeah, it looks dead even.

And that's worth following in our new media atmosphere to see whether with all these control mechanisms they've put in and all this lockstep in the mainstream media, they can actually make Cornell a non-person. My daughter really likes him, she was an undergraduate at Harvard when he was there, and he took a lot of time with her. Even though she's not a politics person, and she just sort of regularly would report to me, Oh, I bumped into Cornell. We had an interesting conversation.

And that kindly disposed me toward him as a father, and I think he's got things to say. And Lord knows the left doesn't have much left left to it. And so to hear that voice a little bit more unfiltered is interesting.

So I dare them to keep him quiet, to keep him in the back as it were.

And so there's that. Now, let's talk about Vivek for a sec. because he interests me. Is he not virtually tied with DESantis for second place?

DESantis is now. We saw this with Jeb Bush kind of a presumptive contender who starts dropping to the low double digits. And then there's no signs of life in terms of popular groundswell, and then people start rising out of the second or third tier of candidates to overtake him. That looks like what the pattern is.

DESantis Can, you know, they contrast their personalities and their sort of efficiency as thinkers and managers? They do that too. But the big abiding claim for Desantis is that in a national election, he could win. But how in the hell do you get there from here if you can't win the primary?

And now you're starting to see stories about his, you know, should Trump go down legally? strategy. He plans to just sort of still be around if they take, if they give the big hook to Donald Trump. But he's so gleeful in that respect. You know, Vivek is playing the exact opposite game, saying, You know, I'm going to be outraged if they take Trump out. I want a fair fight.

I want to beat him in this primary, but I don't want to win by default because he's gone. And he makes a lot of pro-Trump and sort of Trump friendly statements, such that people wonder if he's campaigning for vice president on a Trump ticket.

He went to Harvard, he has a lot of money, but actually, that might be novel, too. We're used to presidents making a lot of money after they leave office, but other than Donald Trump, we're not used to them having a lot beforehand.

And he's anywhere, according to The Financial Press, between 600 million dollars and one billion dollars in net worth. He's 38 years old and he made that money in a series of business deals, mostly involving biotech and pharma. It, it appears to me, from my, from my reading. He's a big investor and a kind of player in this new world of, you know, high IQ, high stakes, high technology, and.

As such he is, he's new on the scene. He, he would kind of represent not only a new generation, but a new way of making money and moving and shaking in the American establishment.

He's very good on TV and he does a lot of free media, and most of his exposure has been through free media, as has Bobby Kennedy's. They both, you know, they've both been great for the podcasting world. And so, you know, I'd like to hear more from him, see more of him, see how this plays, no one's, no one's boasting. The first Hindu is running, but that's meaningful in the sense that a Republican usually has to kowtow to the Christian, right.

And I don't know that he, he can in a plausible way, even though he's a supposed monotheistic Hindu, at least according to Wikipedia. I'm not sure what that is, frankly, I guess you have to choose between Shiva and Ganesh or something or someone else. But but anyway, then, as far as all those other Republicans. You know this clown car, Redux, you know, there's some of the people that were in the last clown car, like, you know, like Christie.

Tim ScOTT Whatever, he doesn't seem to stick, you know. The problem about the problem when you have Trump out there is that it raises the bar on stickiness. To be sticky when there's Donald Trump in the race is very difficult to show up and be sticky as it were. To gain and keep attention alongside Donald Trump is a proven labor. It's really tough.

And I don't know how any of these people are going to get much attention, except in maybe the primary states themselves with this, you know, epic Trump movie going on.

Marketing because the campaign isn't being covered in the traditional way. And as you say that, essentially, you're right, coverage of Trump's indictment is essentially replacing campaign coverage right now. So we're not getting the, you know, the stump speeches and ribbon cuttings and all those other things that usually happen at this stage of the campaign. So we get a glimpse of what these people look and sound like. I'm very impressed, just just in terms of the superficial characteristics of a candidate. You know, having done campaign reporting, which I'm sure you've done some of it, you know, you learn after a while to look for certain things.

What's absolutely excluded is a candidate who doesn't project charisma or warmth in person. Those candidates just do not succeed, they don't, they don't go ahead. It was fatal for Kamala Harris, for instance. I always thought it was going to be a problem for John Kerry.

I remember going to a Mitt Romney event on his home turf in New Hampshire, where he he just couldn't fill a pretty small hall. And really had trouble getting people to focus on what he was saying. You know, he seemed to be everybody's third choice in that primary, even though he won. So this, I think, is a problem for DeSantis, it's not a problem for Ramaswamy. He's a very dynamic speaker.

I haven't seen him in person yet, but on television, he's very good on television.

Regardless of what you think of his positions or his ideas, he has the look and feel of somebody who is able to do the job of campaigning. Which requires a lot of effort, a lot of stamina. But is he going to get the exposure, which is not guaranteed in this environment, just quickly? I want to go back to Cornel West because he also, I think, is unusual on television. He doesn't give people soundbites in the same way that normal politicians do. But he's extremely quick on his feet. He speaks in these beautiful sentences, almost like he's writing extemporaneously.

But he has a quality that does very well in the post-trump environment, which is obvious. Sincerity, courage, and a willingness to say something that comes across like the unvarnished truth.

And West's bona fides there are strong.

He's gotten himself in trouble with the Democratic Party. Going back a long way with his criticism of Barack Obama for saying, I'll stand with Wall Street. And what are you going to do for poor people? And he took a lot of heat within Democratic Party circles, even way back then. So this is an act for him. I think that comes across with him the sincerity. There are positions of his that I'm not sure I agree with, but he's obviously sincere.

I think he's got a lot of beliefs that I think would resonate with people who have frustrations with establishment party politics. And he's getting the same treatment that Bernie got early in the 2016 race, which is he's got to step aside for the real candidates. And even some of Bernie's former handlers are saying that people like Jeff Weaver are making quotes like, This is very dangerous. What he's doing for Joe Biden, the groups that West pulls from are traditional Democrat groups, and that spells real trouble.

So I don't believe it. I think. In the post-Trump era, campaign reporters should never talk about spoiler candidates or fringe candidates, because anybody can win, that's been proven. I think about West and Ramaswamy and also even Bobby Kennedy as candidates who?

Under the right circumstances, with the right kind of media attention, or right ability to reach mass audiences, could draw a lot of votes.

But campaign reporters can't break out of the paradigm of thinking of them as fringe, which I think is a mistake at this stage.

He'll probably carry it better than the others for some reason. You know, you're right, no one should be ruled out. I hate it that they ever were. You know, I grew up in the era of the joke. Candidate, Okay?

Pat Paulson for president.

And the fact is that the joke candidate, you know, and what many thought was the latest joke candidate, Donald Trump, have gained office in this country. Jesse Ventura became a governor in Minnesota in a sort of, I think, precursor moment to Donald Trump. You know, they were even thinking of running together for the Reform Party nomination back in 2000, so we've had those precedents.

My general feeling about the about the Republican side is that we just won't have anything until the Trump issue is settled. And in a way, no one wants to pick second place, a candidate for second place. And right now he's so overwhelmingly in first place that I just don't think that process is going to start until there's some clarity about his situation. And and I don't still understand what happens if he's indicted, or, I mean, not just indicted or convicted, how that affects the race and his ability to run. It's also murky.

It's there's no real presidential race to report on either, because what's Biden going to do? I mean, he's not going to campaign. We'll be lucky if he campaigns in the general, let alone in the primaries. He might give a couple of speeches, but that's not going to amount to much.

So the press doesn't get a shot at him. Well, Biden went on a tour out west, and it's funny. If you run a search for Biden for Biden this week on Google News, you just found story after story about this trip out west. That was described as his victory lap. Or Biden touts economic achievements. It's just one story after another. And then they were talking about he was doing ribbon cuttings and all of these things.

And his aides were talking to the reporters, saying that Trump's indictment is taking taken away from the great achievements of Bidenomics. And it's interesting marketing what they're, I guess, what they're trying to. You're hearing this message, you're listening to the Free Version of America this week. To hear the full version and for more articles and content, please subscribe to Racket News at www..subs..com or Racket..news.