America This Week, August 25, 2023: "Normie Politics is Dead"

And glad to be I'm on.

But we have a lot to talk about this week. At some point, we're gonna have to divulge the secrets of your investigation. I guess it's not time yet to do that. Yeah, it's for the newspaper I'm.

We're recording on a Thursday morning, which means that last night we had two dueling events. Which in themselves, sort of demonstrated a great deal about the current realities of American politics. There was the first GOP debate, and then there was preceding it, a an interview of Donald Trump on X by Tucker Carlson that massively outdrew ratings was the debate. And there's a lot to say about just that core fact alone. But do you have numbers on that, Matt? We don't know exactly what the numbers were.

We can, we can start by saying. In 2016, the first GOP debate was one of the most watched political events in American history. It had 24 million views. That was when Donald Trump was on stage, you remember the fanfare that, you know, that was that was attended with? This time around, Trump does a an interview with Tucker Carlson, and I believe it gets 184 million impressions, something along those lines.

We don't have the numbers yet as of this moment for the debate on Fox. And by the way, Trump took a shot at Fox in his interview with with Tucker and had some interesting things to say about the dynamics of that. But we'll get to that. But I think we can be reasonably assured that, whatever the whatever numbers they did, it was pretty anemic compared to what happened on the Tucker Carlson interview. So did you have any thoughts, just first of all, on what? What that ends up looking like for the Republican Party and for people like Ron DeSantis?

Donald Trump went up against the entire field and he won in in the sense that he garnered, you know, vastly more attention. What does it say about the people on stage in Milwaukee that they, you know, lost to a Twitter interview? I mean, maybe it says something about media forums. But it also says that the whole group of them doesn't hold a candle. In terms of the intensity of its appeal to Donald Trump. And that's reflected in the polls. I mean, the whole thing is kind of weird.

You know, rarely have we had a guy in a non-incumbent year who's been this far ahead of his rivals.

And yet we're still acting, I guess, because Trump is in legal peril, as though the whole thing is still in play.

It doesn't seem to be that in play to me. Unless Trump, you know, stumbles badly the debate, and you know, I'm not original in saying they aren't debates, they're terrible. I don't know what they are.

They're not speeches, they're not shuffled speeches, they're certainly not, you know, debates or arguments. They feel like beauty pageants in which people compete to say, you know, boring things in a perky way. And it was hard to watch, to be honest.

I mean, the debate, besides being tedious, it just kind of gave me a stomachache. Because they were falling back on rhetoric and formulas that I thought we were past. As Americans, you know, it was like a bad time travel thing.

And the only thing that mattered in the debate, in the entire debate, was that one of the candidates essentially said he didn't belong on that stage. And we got a couple of clips.

Former President Trump has been indicted in four different states on 91 counts. He will be processed tomorrow in Georgia at the Fulton County jail for charges relating to the 2020 election loss. You all signed a pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee. If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party's choice? Please raise your hand if you would.

Just hold on. So, just to be clear, Governor Christie, you were kind of late to the game.

What's new?

Here's the bottom line someone's got to stop normalizing this conduct. OK, now and now. Whether or not. Whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the Office of President of the United States.

And.

And and you know, this is the great thing about this country. Booing is allowed, but it doesn't change the truth, it doesn't change the truth.

The behavior is bad, blah blah, and basically everybody on the stage, but one agrees with him and now he has a confrontation.

And that got a tremendous reaction in the crowd. And I think there's a little bit of truth to that, but I'd be curious to hear your reaction.

Like any of these people that I think they Nikki Haley. They would be treated in a certain way in the media. And they need to say certain words in order to get that treatment. And Ramaswamy was the one person who was not willing to do that, and he was, I don't know, I'm curious to hear.

So the rest of them are competing for. It's like the regular Republican Party is a third party now, it should have third party status. They're talking about a kind of politics that, in the scope of American opinion, now, is a very niche matter. That everybody live up to standards and be conservative. And you know, Trump doesn't even posture as a conservative really anymore, in some ways.

He's, you know, soared past that old designation. They all were using the word who's conservative, who's the most conservative, like it's the 1980s or something, and so they're all competing for. I don't know commentator status or something on it, like you say.

You know, are they wanting to be the analyst for the real election? Maybe that, you know, if Ramaswamy is either going to try to be vice president or should Trump fail? The person who comes in and picks up the torch. The rest of them are just looking to be on a panel on CNN on election night, talking about the election.

You know, appearing for the right, it's, you know, it's not Pat Buchanan anymore, it's Ron DeSantis debating with, you know, Jen Psaki, or, you know, I don't know.

It feels like they were after something else other than votes in their performances. A lot of them were angry, too.

I could not tell why did they have something in their seat? Yeah, that was causing them to erupt in cheers for absolutely anything and the opposite things. They seemed to cheer, you know one thing? They cheered Pence standing up for the Constitution by not, you know, helping Trump with his, you know, novel elector theory, but then they'd cheer somebody else for standing up for Trump.

And it's to the ear of the listener. It was all the applause and hooting was coming from the same audience. It was very distracting, but that's just a sort of production note on the thing.

Yeah, Ramswami stepped out, he was unapologetic. There was a one of those terrible questions where they get a kid to come out and talk about climate change. You know some young Republican guy who came out to say that young people today have one great overriding issue, and how concerned are you about climate change? And Ramswami was just like, it's made up.

You know, I mean, there isn't any climate change and it's destroying the economy. And to think that there is. And even Trump, I think, might not have been so assertive and contrarian on that topic, and so he did. I think we actually have the answer, I think we have that.

As Republicans, I'm the only person on the stage who isn't bought and paid for, so I can say this. The climate change agenda is a hoax, the climate change agenda is a hoax and we have to declare independence for it.

And the reality is, the anti-carbon agenda is the wet blanket on our economy. And so the reality is, more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change. Hold on, hold on.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

And this is one of the reasons, by the way, that he ended up. It wasn't him, actually. It was Rubio that this happened to. He got Rubio out of the race in 2016 because Rubio was doing that kind of line.

Over and over again, something that he had rehearsed. But then this whole thing, like the last time we had a skinny guy with a funny sounding last name was Barack Obama. You know, man, I don't know about that line. Like, I don't agree, and I'm actually not in agreement with Ramaswamy on the climate stuff.

But whoa, like, what's that about? Let's just stop, let's just stop here for a moment.

Can ramaswamy?

Does that open the rules to say you fat, you know, you fat, old ball?

I mean, you started it right, you brought weight into it.

Unnoticed whopper joke of the night. Let's talk about the other elephant not in the room. What the hell are you mean? that that's the elephant you're talking to? I mean, he didn't do it on purpose. It was some horrible, Freudian thing that comes out of the tension of having, you know, one huge guy on stage.

But well, I mean, that was that was a callback to the.

It was very controversial at the time. Christie kind of reveled in it because it made him. Because the point of the piece was that he was the. He was the big comer for for 2016, right? But it was kind of.

It was kind of a low blow, right? And for Baer, maybe he did, maybe he did just go there unconsciously. I think it was a.

Well, what, what? what immediately comes to your mind when Chris Christie says the word?

Chris Christie Not being skinny, right exactly? I mean?

He got the best of most of their jousting as far as I can judge. You know, he really, like you say, was the one person who distinguished himself from the pack ideologically, politically.

And you've got to remember, he's a businessman like Trump, you know? What he does have in common with Trump is that they both made their money before they got into politics. Which is a rarity these days. In politics, well, not a rarity. We have a lot of rich senators and so on, but in presidential politics, rich businessmen are a new thing.

We had meg Whitman, I guess, a few years ago, trying, but.

So I'll just generalization, I'll just say that, you know, Ram Swami is somebody who did something. Okay, he had these high tech companies, he made a lot of money.

I read that he's worth between a half and a billion dollars, half a billion and a billion dollars at his young age.

He's not a lightweight. In the sense that Obama might have been portrayed as one, you know, a young, youngish lawyer who, you know, served not for long in in the Senate. But I don't. I don't know what the whole knock was about, but Chris Christie, your complexes are showing.

Yeah, and let's not forget.

And Trump ended up playing him in in a very humorous manner, like they kept leading him to believe that, you know, one job after another was going to be open. And finally, I think they offered him the ambassadorship to the to the Vatican City, and then they even withdrew that in the end, and it was just really, really funny. So of course, he's, he's bitter about the whole thing.

And he wrote about all this in his in his book.

But he's a complete non factor in all this and the that debate, which I guess some people, some Democrats, watched, the sort of they kind of hate, watched it out of amusement. But it had no political relevance other than to brand all the other people on stage as sort of identical and interchangeable. And then Ramaswamy announces himself as being unlike the others. Because, I mean, he says this because he's not, he's not bought and paid for.

But the reality is, because he's, he's, he's gunning for the same pool of populist votes that Trump is. That RFK is that, that Cornel West is, that Marianne Williamson is. And he's an oppositional kind of figure with even within his own party, is his claim.

Legitimate? The knock on Ron DeSantis as being robotic truly is? You know, I've seen Desantis in press conferences, I guess, mostly as Florida governor. But up there, selling himself as a presidential candidate, he was devastatingly bad. I thought, I, you know. For the insiders, the political headline from that debate is Ramaswamy does well, and Desantis is toast.

And I thought, you know, I thought, until I saw this, that this whole, you know, Ron DeSantis is a robot. A meme was a little overplayed, but I thought it was underplayed after I saw the debate. He's just not a guy who can, you know, in the mythical way, that a president has to somehow grab some kind of primal interest in people? He just doesn't do that and so he's gone.

What? I always find these debates interesting because I like to examine the candidate who is maybe polling lowest, and that would be this North Dakota governor, Burgham or whatever. And I thought, Wow, the guy who probably shouldn't even be there is at least as good as all the other ones whose names I know. I mean, right, he, you know, he, he was. Actually. I thought, a kind of, if you want to go back to old style politics and old style Republicans. He was reasonable, he seemed quite intelligent.

He didn't get much time because of the way the debate was structured, but he was by no means less interesting. Or whatever, the Nikki Haley or Mike Pence, whatever, it's a bad field that they have. And now we're going to have more of these debates, or are we going to keep sorting this, you know, pile of chaff, see if perhaps there's some tiny glinting piece of metal in it?

I don't quite see the point.

Segment of the American voting population the Republican who does not vote for Ronald Trump.

You know, sort of the pro-establishment politician who is not a Democrat. I mean, that's the Venn diagram, right? It's a, it's a. It's a person who has some kind of.

Affection, and, you know, ties intellectually, emotionally, to norms and all these other things. But is not a Democrat and that. But that person obviously can't vote for Donald Trump. There's just not a lot of those votes out there. I mean, we saw this in in 2016, you know, they put $150 million behind Jeb Bush and that he ended up with three delegates in the end.

That slice of the American populace is really, really small. The people who are going to vote status quo are overwhelmingly now on the Democratic Party. So what are, what are these debates for? are they, are they competing to get, you know, those three delegates? I'm not really clear about what exactly is being achieved.

Most of them talked about spending and government being too big and all the Reagan themes. But it's been so long since the Republicans have in any way, challenged that stuff. Or, you know, they continue to talk about spending and small government. But they've participated in the giant growth of it in every way, so that it doesn't ring true anymore. Maybe if you hear it from somebody like Rand Paul, it rings a little true, but why vote for these guys? The Democrats have all the same bases covered, and they're, and they have their shit together, I mean.

As far as distinguishing themselves, there's still a little bit of cultural talk, that they a little culture war talk in there. You know, Nikki Haley saying she's pro-life, but we've made too much of the abortion issue, that was kind of her stance.

I hate it when they talk about looking into the eyes of their children and so on. And you know, that's how they, that's how they frame the abortion thing.

But.