Bill Kristol and Christopher Cadelago: Increasingly Unhinged
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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's Monday, August 12th. We've got a doubleheader. It's Bill Kristol, of course, on Monday. And up after that, Chris Cadillac, probably the best reporter on the Kamala beat for a couple of, I mean, a ridiculous story about Donald Trump. And then a little bit more background on Kamala and her team. But first up, Bill, what's going on, man?

Everything's fine. How about you? I'm doing very well. Your morning shots this morning was a six-month anniversary. Can you believe this? Six months. Time flies when you're having fun. Exactly. I was shocked this weekend when I discovered it was exactly six months, February 12th. And that was when I wrote my first morning shot. Andrew and I took over from the great Charlie Sykes. And my first one was calling on Joe Biden to step aside.

And it wasn't the most popular thing I've ever written, I'd say. I do think it's unlike some of the other things I've written, it stands up fairly well. So therefore, of course, I had to remind people of that in a hopefully not too obtrusive a way, you know. When you have a rare, correct insight, you need to kind of not let it be forgotten by history, you know.

Yeah, I'm going to lean on it. No, it seemed to have turned out okay. And, you know, somebody's unhappy about how right you were about that. And that's Donald Trump, who has seemed to completely lose his shit in Mar-a-Lago over the weekend. So I want to have a couple of

A couple of highlights about Crazy Donald before we get down to some real business, what's happening with the polls and some policy issues. Here he is on Truth Social. He bleated this out. And I'm just going to read it, if that's okay with you. I think it's important just to read it all rather than to characterize. Has anyone noticed that Kamala cheated, all caps, at the airport?

That's interesting. I wonder where he's going with that. She did at the airport. There was nobody at the plane and she quote a period. I period apostrophe deed it. AI did, I guess, and showed a massive quote crowd of so-called followers, all caps, but they didn't exist. Uh,

She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there. Later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror-like finish on the vice presidential plane. She's a cheater, all caps. She had nobody waiting. Election interference, all caps.

That is the person that is a lunatic. That person should not be anywhere near, that person shouldn't be managing a subway. Like, what is happening? I mean, he's retweeting kind of the kookiest conspiracy theories in the far fringes of truth social, I guess. But I mean, that wasn't a retweet. Those are his words. And he was retweeting someone else that...

That had like posted, busted. Yeah, that's his own words. You're right. But he's getting it from some kooky thing he read. I'm on the whole push back a little bit against the Trump is unhinged, Trump is a lunatic line of argument. It tends to lead one not to take him seriously enough and not to be alarmed enough. And he has a kind of lizard-like brain cunning, obviously, which we've seen many times. And he's an effective demagogue. But I have wondered over the last few days whether he really is losing it. I mean, he's old.

He's just more unhinged than he ever has been. The things about which he's unhinged don't seem to have any reasonable ground politically. At other times, he's said things that you and I found not just distasteful, but abhorrent and kind of crazy. But you could sort of see underneath it, there was a kind of cunning of trying to play the race card or whatever, drag some opponent down into the mud or whatever. Yeah, I think Biden's departure from the race and Harris's success

has unhinged him. And he's getting old. And don't you think it's slowing down and just seems losing it a little bit? Yeah. Axios says Trump advisors are deeply rattled by his meandering, mean, and often middling public performances. Now, I will say, meandering, mean, and middling is like Donald Trump in a nutshell. I don't know why his advisors are rattled by Donald Trump being Donald Trump. But there's underneath that a sense that they're worried that even within the kind of frame of

of Donald Trump, like within the band of his behavior, he's on the low end of, you know, which is, which is a category difference from like every other politician. Nobody else would be sending out tweets about,

crowds being faked. I mean, like weird false flag stuff. I mean, that would be a sign for a need for a psychiatric checkup on anybody else, but you do expect it from Trump. But yeah, even his advisors say that for him, he's behaving not that well. There's one, some evidence of this from his rally in Montana, which he did on Friday. It was his only event last week. His only event outside of Mar-a-Lago. He went there, I guess, because Ronnie Jackson, his quack doctor has a

bugaboo about John Tester and because John Tester called him a pill pusher or something. And so Ronnie convinced Donald to go to Montana to act out this vendetta. So that shows some lack of judgment on the one hand, but he gave an aside, an off teleprompter aside that I thought was quite revealing. Let's listen to that. We're going to get Joe Biden out of the White House. What's he doing now? Greg, what's he doing? You know,

He wanted to debate. If we didn't have a debate, he'd still be there. Can you imagine if we didn't have a debate? Why the hell did I debate him? Maybe a Kinsley gaffe there, maybe an accidental reveal of a true thing. You know, maybe his unhinged behavior is about him, like recognizing how just like how he was on the right path. And that one decision, uh,

has now totally upended the race and might lead him to jail. And maybe that is deranging him a little bit. Do we think that's possible? Yeah, I think so. It's sort of, I think it's kind of unfair. Biden proposed this debate. He accepted it. He thinks he did well, but let's say he did adequately and Biden did horribly and Biden's out and now he's behind in the race. And this is the gods are being unfair to him. And that's not permissible if you're Donald Trump, I guess, you know? So when I heard that too, I also thought that, you know, we've sort of forgotten. We haven't forgotten. I had sort of forgotten that.

everything would be different if that debate hadn't happened. And that debate was kind of a fluke, right? I mean, the Biden people thought it was clever to have an early debate. It wouldn't, it's never happened that way before. If there hadn't been a June 27th debate, I'd be continuing to write things, I suppose, from morning shots about how Biden should try to get out. And I would be continued to be being ignored by the Biden campaign and by most of pro-Biden world, I would say, and pro-Biden pundits. So,

So, it is kind of amazing to have the whole campaign turn on this one debate. I will say, not to compare Donald Trump to Anita Dunn, because Anita Dunn is a much more morally upstanding and positive influence on our political life. Anita was one of Biden's top advisors, but she gave an interview with Ryan Lizzo over at Playbook this weekend about this that reveals the fact that, I'm raising my hand, including myself in this.

You can get into a bunker mentality and you can get into a little bubble and sometimes you can delude yourself and like the levels of self-delusion in that. Like the contrast between that and Trump like shows just how much everything changes

you know, basically fell on this one decision, right? Like she's not there being like, oh, well, we could have the dial tests or we're still showing people thought it was good. Well, she's attacking Nancy Pelosi who, you know, who saved probably the party from, from a pretty bad fate. And no, I was very struck by they needed to done the thing. It's one thing to be in the bunker when the war is going on. It's something to kind of be holding down the,

bunker when your side has surrendered three weeks ago. It is like the Japanese soldier in 1946 on some island in the Pacific. It is, but I think it's like my point is that I just think that this event was so jarring for people. Yeah. And I think that people that were deep inside of this and it's having a psychological effect. I guess that's the point I'm trying to get to. And, and Anita's is, is, you know, hopefully she, she will turn the corner, but the psychological effect that it's having on Donald Trump, I think is very real.

I agree with that. And just on the advisor side, Anita, I think she'll be better at some point pretty soon. But what about the Trump enablers and, you know, the responsible Republican types who've gone along with Trump? All their tweets and pieces, whether they're columnists or the billionaires tweeting or why can't Trump be running a better campaign? He should be focusing on this issue or that issue. And I'm really disappointed and shocked. And

Really? They didn't notice that in 2015-16 he didn't run a responsible campaign and in 2020 he wasn't too responsible in handling COVID and in fostering the big lie about the election which led to January 6th? They're just shocked once again. And there's no self-reflection. This is a point you've made many, many times, but it's so correct. I mean...

Could they look in the mirror for a minute? How did we get here? Why is Trump the nominee for the third straight time after January 6th? Did all these people being willing to go along have something to do with it? Maybe one of them should say, you know what? It's not too late for him to get out. I mean, he's old like Biden. He's crazy, which Biden isn't. And he's losing it, which Biden was doing a little bit. So, but no, none of them will say that because of course it wouldn't work with Trump. But also you think out of just self-respect, one or two would sort of do more than whine about

whine about how Trump's not quite doing it the way they would like him to do it, you know? Yeah, there's no self-respect. And there's such deep irresponsibility. You know, we used to at least go through the rig of a role of, are any Republicans going to express concern that the nominee of their party seems so deluded that he thinks that Kamala Harris's crowds are imaginary, or that like his insurrection was better than Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech? Like, we would at least have gone through that for a while. Now nobody even does because they've all succumbed to him so much. But

I mentioned this on a show last week. I did this interview and it was a more conservative podcast called Unheard about why conservatives, I think, should vote for Kamala. And I was like making the point in this interview that nobody even makes anymore, which is even if you're not a liberal, like if you are a conservative Republican and you're Mitch McConnell and you care about the interests of the Republican Party, you're not a liberal.

Even in that framework, taking aside all the moral, the ethical, everything, the right thing to do would have been to dump Donald Trump four years ago. It would have been better for the Republican Party. It would have been better for conservative policy governance after January 6th. And now, like, despite the fact that any day that they try to dump Trump would be better for them than waiting another day of sticking with him, like they've all given up. It's just a total towel throw. And on this point, one other thing to your advisor thing.

Trump also bleeded this weekend, all caps, it will be impossible for America to survive another four years of a Democrat in the White House. And that's the exact same rhetoric that all of these Republican advisors and pundit types were condemning three weeks ago and saying like that caused the attack on Trump, you know, this apocalyptic rhetoric, it's just bad faith all the way down.

And the billionaires, you'd think, might notice that they've done pretty well in the Biden-Harris economy. And it's Kamala Harris who said a couple of days ago that we shouldn't interfere with the independence of the Fed. We shouldn't threaten to fire the Fed chairman, as Trump and Vance have done. And I pointed this out on Twitter, but as a single center-right, respectable, Republican-ish type, say, you know what? I give Harris credit. She's done exactly what people like us always say politicians should do, which is keep hands off the Fed.

And I criticize Trump in advance. I haven't seen it. Maybe they have. Maybe there's one, someone, some think tank somewhere, some Wall Street Journal contributor somewhere who's actually got out of his way to point out that, in this respect, Vice President Harris is doing the responsible thing. Does it have anything to do with the broader question of the fact that the economy's been pretty good for four years? But they say they want to call balls and strikes. Here's a ball and strike. Oh, no, can't call balls and strikes because, I mean, God, who knows what will happen under four years of Harris and Wallace? It could just be the end of the world, you know?

All right. We get this once a month. You know, we get a pass once a month. We get to just rant about how pathetic the Republican commentator and strategist class is and just how embarrassing and shameful they are. We just get to do this once a month. Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better clean in cold water? Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it, even in cold. Butter? Yep. Chocolate ice cream? Sure thing. Barbecue sauce? Tide.

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So another reason why Donald Trump is getting increasingly unhinged, we have the New York Times-Siena poll. It's important to remember that this was maybe the most bearish mainstream poll for the Democrats as recently as like six weeks ago. And it was after the Biden debate where they had nationally Biden down six among likelies and eight among registered. It might have been nine, but he was down six among likely voters. And here we got the swing state polls of the blue wall, upper Midwest states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

We have Harris at 50 in all three, Trump at 46 in all three among likely voters. And then if you go to registered voters, Trump does, Trump actually leads in Michigan and Harris maintains her lead in Pennsylvania, a little smaller in Pennsylvania, a little larger in Wisconsin. So, I mean, that is just a dramatic turnaround from being down six nationally in five weeks to now being up four among likely voters across all the swing states.

And very consistent with the several polls now that have shown Harris up three or four nationally. If she's up three or four nationally, she's presumably up something like that in the swing states. That's why the swing states are swing states. Yeah. I mean, if Pennsylvania is the tipping point state, she should be around somewhere. So I guess what does that mean? Harris is made up basically...

probably about eight points in three weeks. I mean, don't you think? She was down probably four when she took over, so to speak. I mean, Biden was down more like six. Harris took over, maybe started off more like three or four. So that's pretty impressive. That's a little more movement among... There are either more swing voters or a much higher percentage of them have moved in one direction than one thought was likely to happen, I think. Yeah, and it's even better than I would have thought, for sure. And to me, you just look at the numbers, and it's pretty clear...

Like the main thing that has happened, which is, you know, our friend Sarah Longwell was obsessed with talking about double haters. You know, like she was analyzing the double haters, focus grouping the double haters, talking to double haters, you

And they just aren't any anymore. It's like this whole campaign, like it was the key group was it was going to be a record number of people who are unhappy with both candidates. You know, there was a Wall Street Journal poll that had 28% as still undecided before the debate. Now it's down to 15% or not undecided, but not fully decided rather. And these Times polls are

you know, the double haters were up in the high teens, low twenties, you know, over the course of the year, people that had an unfavorable view of both candidates. Now it's down to like four and now it's down to just basically, you know, Bush carry like, again, just like a straight, you know, partisan switch where people that are Democrats like their candidate, people that are Republicans like their candidate for the most part, small percentage of Republicans who are Haley people that don't and the independents prefer one over the other. And so,

She gobbled up almost all the double haters while Trump has stayed static. And that's like essentially what's happened in these polls. It turns out the double haters hated having to choose between a 78 year old and an 81 year old. And as Nikki Haley actually said months ago, whichever party gets rid of its 75 plus

plus-year-old candidate first is going to get a huge benefit. And in fact, that happened. It's a little unfair. Biden's not like Trump. I would spend a lot of time arguing that this shouldn't be the case, but it's very clear for those who were still undecided between Biden and Trump after all that we knew by spring that the age issue was just, they just did not want that choice. And the Democrats-

are giving them that choice now and and to be fair they're also giving them sort of an attractive choice i'd say so far in harris walls and so they've all moved you know one you know potential observation on this nate cone who is the you know sort of wonk nerd at the time said that oversees these polls you know said that harris is running basically as generic democrat and like another thing we were saying all year is that you know bob casey was winning in pennsylvania

Tammy Baldwin was winning in Wisconsin. She's essentially running as generic Democrat. And so maybe, you know, it's a little artificially high, maybe as the attack ads come in and some of those voters are reminded about things they don't like about Harris, that might change.

Another thing is maybe her performance in more unscripted environments is not as good. And that takes me to, this has been the big Republican talking point over the weekend, that Harris hasn't really done any sit-down interviews. She's done a couple of gaggles where she's taken questions from the press. Gaggle is kind of an industry term for a small press conference. But she hasn't really done any interviews.

And the Republicans have been banging her on this. Bill Kristol over the weekend said, maybe she should keep on avoiding interviews because why mess with the winning formula? And if only to further drive MAGA world crazy. Was that tongue in cheek, Bill Kristol, or is that serious advice to the Harris team?

I mean, semi-serious advice. I've given advice over these three weeks where I'm worried about defending yourself a little more against some of these possible attacks. And there needs to be a policy agenda. And I believe all that. And I was actually about to write something today on Ukraine, which is an issue that I think is a good issue for Harris. They've done a pretty good job. They split the Republicans. So why not advance it more and make clear that Trump vance is really going to a place on Ukraine that even a lot of Republicans, maybe half Republicans,

don't want to go. So I had all this stuff in my mind and I thought, what am I doing? I mean, they seem to be doing fine, you know, and maybe they should just keep doing what they're doing and let all the smart alecks on Twitter say, oh, they're running on vibes. There's no substance and let the media or Republicans complain that she's not giving interviews. And you know what? As long as it works, it's fine. A friend of mine had

texted me overnight, you know, it'd be good if Harris just raced the Olympics even more than she has. She's done a little of this, I think. She was in a USA jacket getting off the plane last night. I know. Did she? Okay. So, but I didn't say that. So, but you know, call them up. I don't know, have them to the vice president's presence and different ones, you know, whatever. And just bask in that good mood for another week. I mean, I I'm basically for whatever works at this point. And if the vibes are working and the good mood is working and the happy warrior stuff is working,

And also the interview thing is so tedious, as you know, the kind of media self-importance plus the Republican disingenuous character of their attack. So I agree with 90% of that. Yes, let's go on good vibes. Keep rolling. Keep going until it works. Bask yourself in patriotism and optimism. Yes, the Republican attacks are bullshit. The journalists are self-important. All that I agree with. That said...

Are we sure that there's not an issue? Right? Like, I guess that's my only point. I don't really understand why, you know, she couldn't just do a couple of easy ones. Like, are we sure that there's not something else happening behind the scenes here? It's just a little nagging bird in the back of my brain. I'd say just be ready to pivot to do the interviews and also to put out, I think she's going to put out some economic policy stuff. I mean, on that, I think it just needs to be the economic agenda while she's

watching this and listening to us. I mean, it needs to be forward-looking. I did this morning. It's understandable. The convention, you know, putting out that, well, we're going to be having former President Obama speak and former President Clinton speak and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speak and current President Biden speak, which is all messed up. Can't the Clintons speak together? Yeah, can't they all four speak? Can they all four speak?

like one or two afternoons. And we could actually have current Democratic governors who were wildly successful in swing states and current Democratic members of Congress like Abigail Spanberger and Mikey Sherrill and stuff. Can we have some of those people featured a little more? And some Republicans like Adam Kinzinger featured a little more. I'm sure they're aware of this. And I think they have to, of course, pay appropriate respect to their predecessors as Democratic presidents and big shot candidates. But

I'm a little worried that this happens, as you know, with a party, right? They like the former Democratic presidents. They respect them. They don't want to in any way diminish their importance historically and so forth. But actually, for the voters they need to get to, much better to see Abigail Spanberger and Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer than, with all due respect, the Clintons and even President Obama and President Biden, to be honest. Yeah.

Maybe some West do respect to some of them and to others, but certainly sure. Well, I'll do respect to Obama. The policy thing. There's one I do. We have to pick a net. All right. You wrote about this in morning shots. We have to say something or we're not. We're not doing our obligation here. Kamala is in Nevada at the end of her swing and adds one line to the stump speech, stealing from Trump's.

I guess, quote unquote policy, if you want to call it that, that we're going to eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers. This is a ridiculous policy. And it's a gimmick. And Donald Trump already did it. Do they really feel like they have to neutralize that? So it's that popular of a thing with tipped workers? Like, is there not another way with a more serious policy proposal to get to them? I hate to be the annoying, you know, person at the party here, but this is kind of silly.

Yeah, and on this, I will now modify my earlier phrase that they're doing everything right and they should just keep on doing it. But this, I do think, is silly. I mean, they can propose tax reforms. They believe in various tax reforms. They have proposed various tax reforms in the Biden-Harris administration. And they can attack, God knows, Trump on tax policy, all the tax breaks, incredible tax cuts for the wealthy. That's a good issue for them, taxes. And in a way, by –

leaving aside the silliness of not taxing one kind of income rather than another, because it's tip income instead of salary income, I suppose. But leaving that aside, it's also in a way legitimizing Trump. Yes, yes. Thank you. Which is bad. His tax proposals are either gimmicks or handouts to the wealthy. Yes. That should be the line. Our tax proposal is a serious attempt to strengthen working class and middle class families, blah, blah. This is a pretty simple thing to do. And she sort of blew it a little bit, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. Good news though, for only fans employees, if they want to kind of change their, their system, if you're kind of, if you're into only fans, so it's only tipping, then that might be, that might be a way for you to save money. I don't know if that's a key demo, maybe in, maybe in Vegas.

All right. We have to pick on JD Vance a little bit first before I lose you. He did the Sunday shows. I will say he did better than he's been doing. He went and made the rounds and, you know, was on message, at least pivoting back to criticism of the Harris-Walls ticket for the most part. That said, at times he just can't help himself. And he's so personally unappealing. I just don't know that it matters if he's on his talking points. But let's listen to just one clip that stood out to me.

Okay, one last question. Please. And I can't believe I have to ask you this, but I do because Donald Trump has been attacking Kamala Harris's racial identity. He has not been, but ask your question. Well, he questioned her racial identity. He said a number of years ago, she happened to turn black.

I believe that Kamala Harris is whatever she says she is, but I believe importantly that President Trump is right that she's a chameleon. She pretends to be one thing in front of one audience. She pretends to be something different in front of another audience. Look, Dana, she's not running a political campaign. She's running a movie.

She only speaks to voters behind a teleprompter. Everything is scripted. She doesn't have her policy positions out there. She hasn't answered why she wanted to ban fracking, but now she doesn't. She wanted to fund police, but now she doesn't. She wanted to open the border, but now she doesn't. She should have to answer for why she presents a different set of policies to one audience and a different set of policies to another audience. And I think that's what President Trump is getting at. This is a fundamentally fake person. She's different depending on who she's in front of.

Oh, I just hate always that this is what Trump is getting at thing like we're going to try to sanitize his racist attacks, which is like, how did you live with yourself? And he literally has kids that are mixed race. Like they're going to be able to watch this clip. You know, he does the awkward laugh thing. The flip flopping message gets lost when you can't just be like, yeah, Kamala is black, and she's Indian. She's both. She's mixed race.

Yeah, and then follow with the pretty standard attacks. I generally thought, though, as you said, that he – I didn't watch much of it, but the clips I saw were adequate, I would say, and given that he has to continue to suck up to Trump, I suppose, you know, maybe as well as he could do. And also with Wallace speaking, I kind of felt like the VP stage of the race is kind of over.

We've had our Vance, what's the opposite of a boomlet, you know, downtip or whatever that is, anti-boomlet. And we've had our Wallace boomlet. And I think it did hurt the Republicans a little bit and helped Harris considerably, actually, I'd say, for that first introductory week. I kind of think now we go back to having Trump v. Harris, don't you think? And I feel like the VP stuff is mostly exhausted kind of itself. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. Though I do think that the childless cat lady thing is going to continue to be a little bit of an anchor for them with women voters. And, you know, I guess the best spin we can have for J.D. Vance is that he chose to join a guy that, you know, propagates racist bigotry for the ticket so that he's obligated to spin the racist bigotry rather than just being like, hey, no, my kids are mixed race, too. They're white and Indian. That's pretty easy answer. And moving forward. But he has to

is to keep doing that. And that's part of the deal with the devil. I guess that's the best JD can do. Bill Crystal, any final thoughts for us? I thought you'd be spending 15, 20 minutes on JD's drag photo there from what is that thing? Is it real? I guess it's real. Maybe I'm oversensitive. I'm open to the fact that I'm oversensitive. But I do not like the liberals on Twitter doing the JD Vance is wearing eyeliner, JD Vance wore drag thing. It's like, is there something wrong with wearing eyeliner? I just, you know, maybe this is just me

but it's like, it feels like it's liberals doing suddenly these anti-gay anti-effeminate attacks. Like it's bad to be effeminate, but they get to do it because they're nice to gay people. And I don't know. Some of it just rubs me the wrong way a little bit. JD, JD fucking sucks in a lot of ways. And you know, I thought he looked like,

I thought he looked nice. I thought he looked nicer in drag. Yeah, it's not effective politically to make the point that, you know what? He was once a more normal, if I can put it that way, and better human being, more tolerant, more easygoing, less crazed. And now he's turned himself into this robotic and creepy version of whatever he is. But you want to emphasize the current creepy version of what he is. Yeah, not that he was once a, you know, whatever he was, right? I like that. Yeah, if you're framing it in that way, I'm with you. Like he's turned to the dark side. That's fine.

Yeah, you can guys, you can see it on Twitter. I thought, I thought JD fans look pretty good in drag. I guess that's the nicest thing I'll say about JD on the podcast this week. Bill Crystal. Thank you so much. We'll see you next Monday. Up next, Chris Catalago. Let's go.

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All right, we are back with Chris Catalago, California Bureau Chief for Politico based out of Sacramento. I used to see him out there when I was in Oak Town and maybe the best guy on the Kamala Harris beat, probably the best guy. Chris, how you doing, man? Good. How are you? Thank you for that. Yeah. We miss you in the Bay. Yeah, I know. It was a chapter of my life. It was one I reflect on fondly, but I don't know. Life's pretty good in New Orleans.

So there's two stories I want to talk about. The first one is this crazy Donald Trump story. Let me set the scene for people. There was this insane press conference he did. There was rambling, dissembling at Mar-a-Lago. It was the one where he rolled out the idea that his insurrection was better than the Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. But he made a one-aside comment about how he was in a helicopter with San Francisco, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, and how he was down-talking Kamala.

And the helicopter had a crash landing. And, you know, that flew by me. I was like, I don't that sounds weird. But, you know, there are other weird stuff happening. Then a few hours later, I saw you on the beach going like this did not happen. He was only ever an helicopter with Jerry Brown. And the story ended up getting weirder from there. So give us the backstory. How did that perk your ears? Yeah, I'll take some blame for the floating the the Jerry thing.

you know, you throw it out there, a possibility. I had no idea when we were kind of just almost throwing stuff at the wall that that was going to like take on, you know, that that was going to be like the central piece of actual news stories, which kind of tells you something about where we're at right now. Yeah, Brown's folks almost immediately were like, no, definitely didn't happen on our flight, which was in 2018 with Gavin Newsom, where they were in Marine One, basically, and then some other

They were checking out the fires. That was the context of that one. It was like Trump. Yeah. And the funny thing about that that people mentioned was this was paradise and Trump kept referring to it as pleasure, which was really the only thing that Newsom and Brown remembered about that flight. The idea that some of these people in private, let alone with Trump, would be trashing Kamala Harris is just insane.

It just kind of strains any kind of reality that you would see. And kind of same thing when I heard the Willie Brown part, it was like, you know, Willie Brown says a lot of things and can kind of riff with the best of them.

But he's not someone who has a history of speaking ill of or disparaging Kamala Harris. So that part just didn't make sense either. The timelines didn't really add up. People found some clips about Willie Brown, who had been in a rough helicopter landing in LA, but there was no sign that Trump had anything to do with that. And then Trump just doubled and tripled down on this. He said he would sue the Times for this, basically said that

this had been written about in books, which, you know, that doesn't make it true. He called Maggie Haverman, apparently, and she said that he was ranting at her in like a little childish voice, like, you're wrong, I'm right, which is, you know, a sign somebody's a mature and stable candidate for president. But anyway, it's always hard to make sense of these things. But it felt like the whole reason for that anecdote was to say that there were Democrats who were

who were trashing Harris. And that, I guess, fell through pretty quickly. And then it just became a question of like, did this ever happen at all? Like, did this have anything to do with anything? And a lot of people were calling Willie Brown. He's getting a lot of media, a lot of attention, which anyone who knows Willie Brown knows clearly is something he loves. And from that kind of came this idea of like, well, who else could it be? And there was a lot of kind of chatter on the ground about potentially somebody else,

This man who we found out was on a hard landing with Trump, Nate Holden, who's 95 years old now and was an elected official in L.A. with Mayor Bradley back then. So this is way back in the day.

He was someone who got to know Trump, kind of a classic elected official where Trump is trying to do a big project in their city. And he's trying to show off and show them like, you got to come to the Taj. You got to come see some of this stuff I built. So he's trying to redevelop the Ambassador Hotel, which, of course, has history.

its own incredible history. That's where RFK Sr. was killed. Yeah, and there was basically these competing proposals back in the day. Should this be a school? Should this be several schools? Interestingly enough, there were some elected officials in LA at the time to kind of paint a picture here who wanted it to be a school because they opposed busing for desegregation out to other schools outside of kind of Koreatown where this is, kind of downtown LA.

And so Holden was very much behind this Trump project, this redevelopment. It was going to be, this will not shock you at all, one of, if not the tallest buildings in the world when it was being proposed. And so it was kind of a scramble, had just kind of heard through the grapevine this name Holden come up as someone who possibly could have been on the helicopter with Trump.

And then by chance, we found out in talking to Holden that he has these kind of regular calls. He's an older guy with Barbara Rez, who's an old Trump executive who's written books about Trump, obviously been critical of Trump in these later years. And she was able to confirm this. There's actually a passage in her book.

I think she said like the publisher wasn't even crazy about the passage because they were like, who really cares about this? But glad she put it in there because it allowed us to confirm that this hard landing did in fact happen. And even after the story came out, we had Trump spokespeople and folks who continued to

Send us these statements, send us these true social posts where he's he's basically quadrupled down on the idea that he was in this helicopter with Willie Brown. He doesn't want to let go. So we've got the stubbornness there. But then there's the other side of it, which is, I guess, is it stubbornness and lying? Or is it possible that Trump has just, you know, mixed up his his black politicians from California because Nate Olden is also black?

It's definitely possible he mixed them up. This is a time where

You got to remember when Trump is reaching out to elected officials, trying to kind of sweet talk folks about his projects. Willie Brown, I don't know if as early as 1990, he was really in the mix, but Willie Brown was someone that he like consulted, someone that he would reach out to as kind of a primary contact to say like, who do I need to hit up about this? Who are some of the local officials who I can meet with? And so there was like, to his credit, and I know some folks

probably don't want to hear this. There was some overlap in these worlds. It's not totally out of the question that Willie Brown would sort of surface, but that's not what he's doing here. He's insisting that this was Willie Brown on this helicopter with him. And that just so far does not seem to be true. Does Holden say that he was critical of Kamala Harris? Is that possible?

If that's also so long ago, like that was before she was DA, right? Kamala Harris would really not have been on many people's radars at all in 1990. I mean, she was like, I think, finishing law school and becoming kind of a frontline prosecutor in Alameda County at the time. And so this idea that anybody would be trashing her for any reason back then just doesn't make any sense.

To sum up, Trump is either hallucinating the story, mixing up his black people, or just like creating a pernicious lie because he wants to resurface the kind of Willie Brown-Kamala-Harris relationship accusation. So an L either way you put it. I do want to, well, I got you. I wanted to have you on for that little enjoyable nugget. But I've been wanting to kind of pick your brain about the Harris campaign. You had another story over the weekend about how there's a little bit of tension between

between some of the new people that have come in, mostly from Obama world and the Biden people that were sticking around. I'm a little less interested in that because that's going to be a natural tension and more interested in

Like whether there's any kind of red flags here about the vice president's management style. I mean, you wrote about the 2020 campaign, which had a pretty enjoyable phrase was the multi headed structure. Harris installed at the top for 2020 campaign was a disaster, chaotic, creating choke points that nearly ground the operations to a halt. Decisions took forever to make.

So that was brought in 2020. But even going back further, like she just had a lot of turnover with her team. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but outside of her family, she doesn't like really have anybody that's been around since before the AG days or the original Senate campaign that she relies upon. Right. I've made this comparison before, and I don't know that people have really thought about this before, but.

So in this time where Biden has picked her as his VP, she was going through kind of another turnover of staff. There were folks who were around her and had stuck closely by her, both from California in the Senate office,

through the 2019 primary and then into the veep stake. So there was like somewhat of a kind of core, at least a few people who were around. Like who would make up that core? There was a few people who were close staffers. There's a woman named Ruhini, who's a top policy advisor, who stuck with her pretty closely kind of through that period. There weren't a lot of people during the veep stakes, but

she was certainly kind of a main person who had been in that Senate office. And the reason this is kind of critical is when they're doing things on the fly and they have to figure out like, okay, where was she on this thing? What had she said on this particular piece? You kind of need to be able to marshal that institutional memory and just like move really quickly. And so people have mentioned, as you know, probably better than a lot of people on campaigns. That's a key thing. The reason I did bring up Trump is because

for all his insecurities, like Mike Pence had a core group of advisors who were able to stay with him, who were close by. He even was able to have a super PAC open after getting picked as VP, which nobody really remembers because he didn't really do anything with that super PAC. But Compton,

Kamala, on the other hand, was like her data, all of her stuff was just like thrown into the DNC. It was thrown into the Biden campaign. There was like less of a autonomy that she had. And she understood that. That was like something we wrote about early in the VP process where she knew that like to win the Biden team's trust, she would need to kind of set aside...

clearly her own ambition in that moment and set aside these relationships that she had. Some of her advisors who ran the Senate race, who ran her 2019 campaign, did not move out to D.C., did not work with her at that time. And so she's kind of needed to reinvent that inner circle aside from her own family with whether it be chiefs of staff. She had a first chief of staff who did not work out

And then she came and got Lorraine Volz, who was someone from the Gore era, Clinton Gore era, who knew Ron Klain, knew folks in the White House. And the thought behind that was to really kind of get these two offices in better sync.

And that was something that she did and just try to kind of settle the turnover among her staff. There's always going to be turnover in the White House in these high profile offices, no matter who it is. But because of this history, people were looking at it and saying, oh, man, she can't keep the staff. She can't do these things.

And fast forward to today, there is like a necessity besides her political chief of staff. I already mentioned Sheila Nix and I already mentioned Lorraine Volz. And of course, she's brought in folks who a lot of these listeners probably know, like Brian Fallon, who's doing high level comms for her. She has a few other people who have been around for a while. And then, of course,

You go from an office, I mean, this is what people on the Biden campaign said, is you go from an office of, what, 20, 25 people, including a handful of those who are close to her, and then you have to build out very, very quickly and bring in folks who she can rely on. And I think there's kind of some kitchen cabinet level advice she's getting from her brother-in-law, Tony West, from some others there. But this is kind of

A necessity of people talk about like building the plane while they're flying it. There's all these kind of analogies that they're using. But a lot of it traces back to this idea that unlike someone like Biden, who had this like core group of Biden folks who had been with him for decades, she needed to kind of bring new folks in. And so that's the process where we're seeing like right now in real time.

There is two sides of that coin, right? Like it's balance in all things. We saw some of the downsides of Biden relying only on people that he's known for 40 years and maybe were a little less clear eyed than they could have been, to say the least, about the political situation he was in. On the other side, though, you do.

I guess it's just a little nagging worry that I have. I mean, there's the institutional knowledge side of things that you mentioned. And on the Jeb campaign, for example, we had Sally Bradshaw around who'd been with them forever. But even still, I was like always trying to interview all the past comms people to just figure out like, where was he on all this stuff? You know, like that, that stuff sometimes can put you behind the eight ball. But less than that, it's just kind of the

the reliable advisor side of it. Like that's the thing that I just think about. Like you gave a couple of those names and Brian Fallon, who I've known for a while, who's a top level comms guy, really smart. And he joined her like five months ago, right? Like he's just been there for not, not long. And so it's like when push is coming to shove on tough questions, who is she talking to? And it's kind of not really clear, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I think this is, you know, to get outside advice, to get this kind of unvarnished sense of where she's at. I mean, there are some names you could throw out from the past, some advisors. There's some crossover right now, folks helping out. And, you know, there's others listeners might know who have given her advice in the past, political professionals. Aside from all these folks they mentioned, there's like the Jim Bargolises of the world,

a well-known ad guy. And of course, you know, we mentioned some of these people coming in now, their titles might be associated with like, you know, Jen Palmieri is the second gentleman. Jen Palmieri is coming in who I was with on the circus, like long time, good advisor with David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager. Mitch Stewart is a long time. Stephanie Cutter. It's like all these people are great, but again, they're, they came in a week ago, you know? So there's just like a trust building period of,

you know, that maybe could lead to some, some issues. I know I'm, I'm thrilled that she's bringing in a list people, but it's, I guess it's just something that's notable that there were not any of those kinds of people around already. Here's kind of the thing I heard, which is it potentially like a best case scenario is it's,

Everybody, including her, and this is people you talk to who have known her for a long time, are very much dialed in and know what the challenge is. They're on a very, very tight timeline. There isn't necessarily, now this doesn't mean this won't happen at times, but there really isn't time for the kind of

getting your sea legs, figuring things out, you know, backbiting, back and forth, infighting. Like they're just, and I think this is part of what General Malley Dillon, the campaign chair who was obviously with Biden and before that had gotten brought into the Biden campaign when he was trying to win that primary. I think it was after Nevada campaign.

Her point on this was like each of these people have like a defined portfolio that they can fall back on. Like the worst thing you hear sometimes from folks on campaigns is this kind of roving senior advisor with no portfolio who's just going to like, you know, pop in whenever they want and throw out some advice and then go talk to reporters on the side. And so that's very much like what they're trying to avoid. They don't want these people.

these folks without portfolios wandering around throwing advice at her when she doesn't take it, going to their favorite reporter and saying, oh my God, I can't believe she didn't listen to me on that thing. They are very much hoping that that does not happen, that these people are all very much plugged in, that they all understand the mission, that they get that this is bigger than them. And so...

Like you say, we have to see how this works out, how they interact with her chiefs here, how in sync this operation in Wilmington, which is still in Wilmington, is with her core folks who are on the road and who are traveling with her. And can they stay very much in sync, which we know on kind of a quick news cycle they have to do. And so there's a lot of challenges with getting this organization organized.

off the ground for a new candidate. And that's again, what we're seeing right now. And they're hopeful that everybody knows the assignment and, you know, we just have to see. It's working so far, but that's just something to continue to monitor, man. I appreciate your reporting. You're doing great work over there. Everybody go follow Chris.

to keep up to speed on the day-to-day with the Kamala campaign. And I guess any other future time that Donald Trump mixes up black California politicians, he'd be a good person to go to on that. Chris, thank you so much for the time, brother. Of course. Anytime. Thank you. All right. We'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the Bullard Podcast. See y'all then. Peace.

So I fly high if I have to, I take the train. Living away from home on the boat all the time, all the time. No reason, all right, yeah, you guessed right. Makes a grown man confront his fears, consider options, get normally declined. I'm gonna find my attitude fly, I'm gonna fly.

Yeah.

The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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