Mehdi Hasan: Memory-Holing the Worst President
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Hey guys, we've got a good one for you today. And we spent so much time talking about these kind of anti-anti-Trump Nikki Haley voters and like what is it going to take to get them off the fence and how can I argue with people like Bret Stephens who finally came around to voting for Kamala despite reservations and we haven't spent a lot of time discussing

the kind of inverse of that group on the other side of the ideological spectrum. And I've been wanting to get Mediasan on to kind of have that conversation out. And so I think you're really going to enjoy it. But because that kind of took so long, I didn't get into some of the basic political stuff. There were some good polls out today from Marist that had Kamala Harris winning across the blue wall, narrowly, no doubt narrowly, but that's still encouraging. And the early vote stuff, my shorthand is,

You know, I don't like to overanalyze the early vote stuff, but I like the percentage of the early vote that's coming from women. I don't really like the percentage of early vote that's coming so far from white voters versus black voters, the share of the electorate, particularly in Georgia. But it's early, and so that's something we're going to be monitoring over the weekend. I did a YouTube video that goes deeper into the polls and the early vote numbers.

If you want to head over to YouTube and get a little bit more from me on that. On this topic of getting more from me and us, if you go to thebork.com, there's a post up there called Let's All Be Together. It goes over some of our plans, not even all of our plans for the next few days and nights. Me and Sarah and JVL are going to be popping on for some evening quick hits over on YouTube and in the Next Level feed over the weekend. We're going to have live streams. We're going to have chats.

rather than me telling it to you all now, just go to theborg.com, go to the Let's All Be Together feed and get more on how you can kind of get more from us in the last few days. We'll obviously have a live stream on Tuesday night on election night. And I'm going to be on MSNBC from 2 to 6 a.m. So there'll be no shortage of you being able to hear from us. All right. Up next, Mediasan.

Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. I'm delighted to be here today with the editor-in-chief of the new media company Zateo. He was host of the Mediasan show on MSNBC. His books include Win Every Argument. It's Mediasan. How you doing, man?

Hello, Tim. Thanks for having me. Happy to do it. You know, my logline for the pod was a gay capitalist neolib neocon and a Muslim DSA-ish progressive unite to stop fascism four days out. Does that sound good for you? It sounds, I mean, I'm not officially a member of the DSA, but I would call myself a socialist. Ish. That's why I said ish. That's why I gave you an ish. But I'm a socialist. I'm not officially a neocon anymore. We'll see. We can do capitalist versus socialist, Zateo versus Bulwark.

if we survive the near-term problem. I invited you because we spend a lot of time here talking about the Nikki Haley voters and how to reach them. And I spent a little bit of time, maybe not as much as I should have, talking about younger Black voters and talking to people in the Black community about turnout issues that were particularly important

you know, looking acute when Biden was a nominee. I've spent almost no time talking about the challenges that Harris may or may not have with progressive voters. So I wanted to do that with you before the election. But before we get to that, it is the Bulwark podcast and Liz Cheney's in the news. So we must start with Liz Cheney. Let's listen to Donald Trump talking about her last night with Tucker Carlson. And I don't blame him for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb.

She's a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face. For context, he previously called for war tribunals against her. J.D. Vance was asked about that recently, I think by Jake Tapper, and was like, no, that's not serious. I don't know. Sounds pretty clear to me. What say you?

I say that Donald Trump is a very violent, thin-skinned, narcissistic, insecure, petty man obsessed with personal grievances. He's obsessed with Liz Cheney and the Cheneys, obviously, for endorsing the Democrats. He's been mad about Liz Cheney since the January 6th commission. Let's not forget Liz Cheney

spent his presidential term backing Trump, right? She voted in line with Trump, I think more than 80, 90% of the time. It's not like she had any major disagreements with him on policy. I am no fan of the Cheneys. You'll be shocked to hear Tim Miller. You don't have a little Dick Cheney bust there in the Zateo HQ? I don't, weirdly. I don't. I don't have a portrait. We might have to send you a present.

I don't have a portrait of W and Dick on the walls of the studios. Look, I am not one of these people who's obsessed with getting former Bush administration people endorsements for the Democrats. I get why Harris has campaigned with Cheney. I personally wouldn't have done it in Michigan because it's pissed off a lot of people. I'm sure we're going to talk about that coming up. But in terms of Trump on Cheney, look,

This is a man, I know it's been reported as though a firing squad. Technically, he wasn't calling for a firing squad. You played the full context. He was talking about her being killed in battle because she's a whore, which I don't think is any better, given, as you said, he's obsessed with her and has called for a military tribunal. And given we live in a world where if a Democrat had said even anything vaguely similar about any member of the modern Republican Party, people would have lost their minds.

Right. There are people running around on Halloween dressed up as garbage because of Joe Biden. So the idea that he can get away to put it in wider context. And before we came on, Tim, I just had a quick look at the New York Times website. The story is about 15 stories down on the New York Times homepage. The Washington Post has it a little bit higher up. But by talking about Cheney, they're ignoring the fact that he also said.

that Kamala Harris is a sleazebag and Joe Biden is a stupid bastard. This is the wider context of nonstop abuse, including threats, which, where is the GOP civility police now? I don't see it anywhere. And yeah, the violence is nonstop. The fact that this guy dreams about inflicting violence on his opponents should worry us, separate to the politics, just the psychology of it.

Yeah, let's even widen the aperture out from that. The interviews with Tucker Carlson. Again, we're five days of the election. That's who he's giving access to. That is who spoke at his Madison Square Garden closing argument. Independent journalist, Tucker Carlson, Tim, I think you should refer to him.

in these final days, Tucker Carlson, someone that was advancing, you know, Holocaust revisionist theory, I guess would maybe be the best way that you could describe it, most generous way you could describe it. Yesterday, he was talking about how he was attacked by a demon in his own bed. And that is part of his rationale for pivoting to more Christian nationalism. I will note an irony that on text,

back during the Dominion lawsuit, he said that Donald Trump was a demonic force. So there could be like a through line there where Donald Trump was the one that attacked him in his bed, but I don't know if that's what he meant. And there's all kinds of horrible conspiracy theories. January 6th, we could go down the whole list of Tucker Carlson's ills. But again, when you just think about the imbalance, there is not really a Tucker Carlson figure on the left, but could you imagine Kamala Harris sitting down with some like

far left conspiracy theorist and what the reaction would be like on Fox. It'd be wall to wall. I mean, so there's been like this inuring to this, right? We're like, Liz Cheney is the 15th story down and it's bad enough, but look at all the other stuff that was part of that same event that doesn't even get noticed.

That is key, Tim, and you and I are among those people who spent the last nine years screaming this from the rooftops, which is that they have mastered the art of what Steve Bannon called flooding the zone with shit, which is whereby even you and I, as critics of Trump, cannot devote sufficient time in this conversation to going through everything that was said in this one interview or one rally in the last 24 hours. Because do we talk about Cheney and the killing of Cheney, or do we talk about stupid bastard Joe Biden, which I...

I cannot imagine Barack Obama or John McCain in 2008 calling each other stupid bastards and it dominating the headlines for days and weeks. But we are inured to this stuff. You just go down the list. It was only, what, five days ago that there was the hate rally in New York. We've all just moved on. I was a comedian, Puerto Rico. Okay, next. Garbage truck. Like they've mastered that with days to go to the election. You simply cannot cover Trump in the way he should be covered. Even those of us who are trying and don't even get me started on the New York Times and the rest of the liberal media, which aren't even trying.

All right. Well, while we're going to do a brief aside for media criticism, we should throw CNN into the mix. You were on CNN earlier this week. Was I? No, I have no recollection. You don't? Yeah. They're doing this thing now. And look, I had Caitlin Collins on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. I love Caitlin. Jake is a good journalist. This is not to impugn CNN, probably. They've now done this thing where they have these

little five-person panels where they kind of bring on these like it's usually like pretty credible democrats and like these random gadflies from from mega world because it's like they got to find someone who's willing to defend this stuff and i'm not sure the value of that but but one of the outcomes of it was this clip of you and ryan james jadursky let's listen to that

You don't want to be called Nazis. Stop doing it. You've been called an anti-Semite more than a homeless table. And people will sit there and... No, by me. I've never called you an anti-Semite. I mean, I'm not sitting here saying... I'm a supporter of the Palestinians. I'm used to it. Well, I hope your beeper doesn't go off. The thing is, is that... Did you just say I should die? You should not. No. Did you just say I should be killed? No, I did not say that. Hold on. Did your guest just say I should be killed? No, I didn't do that. On live TV? I said I hope you're... Guys, let me just stop. You said you hope my beeper doesn't go off. Stop that right now.

- Of the Palestinian Hamas? - Guys, let me- - I said Palestinian, are you? - Guys, guys. I mean, I guess I'll give the broader context after, but first, like, what was your react? Like, what was that like? - That was one of the most insane moments

in my media career, and I talked about this yesterday on my show on Zateo, that I have debated Tim, as you know, with some weird people from around the world. I have debated MAGA folks. I've debated far-right Israelis. I've interviewed spokespersons for Hamas. I've gone head-to-head with a lot of people in a lot of places, but never have I had to walk off set. I mean, I walked out of that show in the ad break because I'm not going to sit live on air and

and have somebody suggest that I should be killed and I'm a terrorist. That is new life. You were supposed to be back for the next segment. I was there for the whole hour. I traveled to New York to do Abby Phillips one hour show. And this was in the first A Block segment where this guy obviously came with a pre-prepared line to try and take me down. And as I pointed out on my show yesterday, think of

about how unselfaware these folks are. They think that they can go on live TV and make this quote unquote joke, racist, violent remark and get away with it. We could just all carry on and move to the B block and talk about climate change or Jeff Bezos or whatever was next on the agenda. I was like, no effing way am I going to sit here and carry on pretending this is a normal discussion and shout out to Ashley Allison, who also joined me on the panel, calling him out as this is unacceptable. I left, they then kicked him off and

asked me to come back, I said, I'd rather not. I'm not in the right head space. This is not a show I can continue on. Look, I think, Tim, it's fair to say I'm not known to be a shrinking violent. I'm not someone who's ever been accused of being thin-skinned. I wrote a book literally about arguing and debating. That's how much I enjoy it. But there's a line for everyone. And I think suggesting on live national television that I'm a terrorist who could be blown up by Israel, I think is the line's crossed. Yeah. And to me, I mean, look, I think that in the actual moment,

I can understand how you are shook. It's like, this guy is such a D-list. He's just this random troll. He's a Twitter troll who's one of these anti-immigrant nationalist types that has pushed the party to move more towards Catholic integralism. It was a very Catholic comment, by the way. It was something that is of deep religious belief and values life. It's certainly in line. The even more alarming thing, which is not surprising but is alarming, is not that he said it. It's that

And in my feeds of MAGA people that I follow online, they were defending him. I saw several people that, several prominent people, said the only thing that he did wrong was apologize to you, which he did later on. And then he withdrew the apology, of course, by going home and tweeting about how he stood by it. Yeah, and then he has gone on and done several interviews. They are now platforming on these MAGA outlets. The sick part of all this about where we are is it'll probably help them.

and balance. Like he's not gonna go back on CNN anymore, but like now you can do that. I've been canceled tour. And I didn't, I didn't say that I wanted him to die. I said, I didn't want him to die. Like, were you not listening to my point? You know, I'm glad you're laughing about it, but it's pretty dark, right? No, it's, it's,

It's dark, but I'm laughing at the irony of the situation. And I certainly wasn't laughing on Monday night, but looking back on it, yes, everything you're saying is 100% true. You can predict every move of this. And you know how you can predict it, Tim? You're not some shaman, you know,

Soothsayer. It's happened before, right? They've done this with Jeffrey Lord. They did this with Rick Santorum. You know, what is the Einstein? I mean, Einstein never said it, but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again, expecting different results. It is insane to keep booking MAGA extremists, seeing how long you could keep them on air, edgelord style. And then they say something where even CNN has to say, sorry, it's too much for us.

Then they go away and they slag CNN, and then CNN does it all over again with someone else. It just makes no sense. But actually, it does make sense because Chris Slick started this under the CNN, under his watch wave. We're going to win back Republicans. We're going to woo Republicans back onto the shows. You saw Republicans who had kind of disappeared from the networks in 2020, 2021 start coming back on. Mark Thompson's taken over, ex-BBC, ex-New York Times boss, who's all about balance, both sides. So they are obsessed with that. And Tim, you know this better than most.

They're scraping around the internet looking for someone who's not openly neo-Nazi on air. And therefore, as you say, they find someone who's a gadfly, sounds semi-intelligent. By the way, I think we should point out to your viewers and listeners, yes, he's fringe. But the whole point of the modern Republican body is the fringe is now the mainstream. He's also very close to J.B. Vance.

So that's one of the reasons how I'm sure CNN Booker would have justified having him on is that, well, he speaks for J.D. Vance, who's the vice presidential running mate to Donald Trump. And that's part of the problem, right? That the fringe does represent the mainstream and media networks, because they won't openly say that the Republican Party is insane, unhinged and white supremacist adjacent, have to play this fake game of balance whereby we're trying to desperately always trying to find slots

to put a Republican on, to be fair, without telling our audience, we can't put this person on because they're unhinged. They're racist. They're nuts. People say, why doesn't the New York Times op-ed page have a MAGA person to represent 70 million people? Because you wouldn't be able to run the piece, right? You wouldn't get through any basic fact check or editing.

And there's just evidence by this of try to find a good faith MAGA defender. Like you just, you can't, right? Like, and so that's why they always have to do the, they remove themselves. They do meta commentary and look at how Ross doubt that, like how Hugh Hewitt does it, right? It's like you criticize the left, you deflect. Anti-anti-Trumpism, Tim. Don't forget anti-anti-Trumpism. Yeah, anti, like that's the only way to do it and pass the basic standards. Okay, one last thing about Jadersky, because your point is,

about how it is the mainstream of the party is insightful. But for the second time, I want to say it's actually even a little worse than you said. So I first met him or became aware of him. I've never met him. I don't think a person when I was working for either Huntsman or Romney, one of the more moderate Republicans, and he would troll me that like he was a total just nobody. Like he was trolling me on Twitter about how, oh, the party needs to be more anti-immigrant and more, you know, devoutly religious, blah, blah, blah.

And I'm just like, who is this fucking weirdo trolling me? And that was my reaction. Well, how did he get involved with J.D. Vance? Do you know? Do you know how he got involved with J.D. Vance? No. J.D. Vance DM'd him.

JD Ants called the MDM. So he saw this kind of material online that I was like, who's this weirdo? And the VP nominee is like, oh, no, that's the dude who's getting it right. Like, he's who we need to bring in to the system. Right. So it wasn't like it's like this accident, right? Like where, oh, you hired somebody and they were in a pseudonym posting on 4chan. No, no, no, no. It was like, this is what they want. And this is where the part is.

party is going. And you make such a good point about the DMing because Vance, there's a whole story to be written about who Vance follows on Twitter, who he shared, who he's amplified, who he likes. And, you know, the Curtis Yarvins, we don't talk much about some of the real new right freaks that Vance is obsessed with and brings to the party. But interestingly on Godusky that the argument they're using is he was entitled to say, you know, I'm a terrorist who might get killed because I called him a Nazi and called half of the country Nazi, which is this classic

thing where they're always like, we're speaking for everyone. No, what I said, let's just be clear, is that the people at the rally, if you, you as in one, don't want to sound like a Nazi, don't speak like a Nazi, which I think is a fairly straightforward point. And the irony is I didn't call him a Nazi, but after the show, I discovered that Richard Spencer says he used to write for him. So the writers of 2024 can't make this stuff up. The guy got outraged that I called him a Nazi when I didn't call him a Nazi, apparently

apparently a Nazi says he used to write. So this is where we are right now. You have to laugh to keep him crying. Make this shit up. File it under. Can't make this shit up. Yeah. Okay. One more before we get to the progressive side of things.

I'm in LA for Bill Maher. Pray for me. I'm here tonight. So, you know, I do what I rarely do. I'm at a hotel and they have the newspapers out. So I have the hard copies of the newspaper and then the Wall Street Journal down there. And I was like, you know, I want to see what's in the Wall Street Journal editorial page today. So I have my coffee before I see Maddie. I flip back to it and they don't do endorsement. They haven't done endorsements for like 100 years or something. It's not a Bezos situation. But they do write an editorial right before the election making an argument.

for one side or the other. And they wrote the very, very nasty one about Kamala Harris yesterday. Today is the Donald Trump one. The Donald Trump one was offered some compliments, some criticisms. It was mixed, but it was, you know, it wasn't hard to read between the lines on who they preferred. But it included this case. So this is the Wall Street Journal making a case for not directly endorsing Trump, but like basically making a case for Trump. And they include this line in it.

Mr. Trump was too undisciplined and his attention span too short to stay on message, much less stage a coup. So like that is where these guys are. Like that is where the enablers are, right? That they're like the J.D. Vance and Trump are going out there with Tucker and Jadersky and like these are our people. And over here, the respectable, educated Republicans are like too stupid to coup. Too stupid to coup Trump 2024. Right?

That is the thing, I guess, I come to you with your win every argument hat on. How do you break that? How do you get the people that are listening to that argument, shake them free of the shackles of,

voting for somebody they think is only not cooing because he's too stupid to pull it off. Well, I think there's two things and they're interlinked. And I think your answer is it's too late to win that argument, Tim. I think we're speaking on Friday before the election. I said this recently and I'll say it again. I do believe that Trump's poll numbers and this race will look very different if he had seen the inside of a courtroom for January the 6th.

I have no doubt in my mind that would have had an effect. I'm not one of these cynical nihilists. Nothing matters. Nothing would change things. Not true, right? We know that Trump's most unpopular moment since he came down that golden escalator in 2015 was the morning after January 6th. We know it's indisputable. We know the polling. We know the media coverage. We know the Republican Party's reaction. Universally visceral anti-Trump. We know his own freaking kids were texting him saying, stop this shit.

Right. That's how extreme it was. And Laura Ingram, Sean Hannity, Don Jr. were begging him to stop cooing on January the 6th. On January the 7th, 8th, 9th, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell and everyone said this is wrong. He's to blame. So I do believe that period in modern American history was the most damaging period to Donald Trump. And the Democrats made the mistake of not picking that up on the 21st of January, appointing the worst attorney general from the Democratic side of my lifetime. And I think that is what's contributed to the Wall Street Journal escalating.

doing this rewriting of history, suggesting he's too stupid to coup, when actually Jack Smith has a very long indictment explaining how they were. There was a very clear plan, and Donald Trump was at the center of that plan and knew exactly what he was doing when he was telling his acting AG and deputy AG, just say it's a problem and we'll deal with the rest. When he was doing the fake electors, when he was trying to throw it to the House by pressuring Pence, there was no stupidity there. And had Vice President Pence been Vice President someone else?

Who knows? He would have pulled it off. He wouldn't have been too stupid to coup. He would have been the evil genius who pulled it off. So I think that's fundamentally at the core of this, right? We moved on from January 6th. You have people like David Sachs, right? And Elon Musk, right?

who called him out for January the 6th. David Sachs said he's no longer qualified to be president. Bill Ackman said he should not be president anymore. Piers Morgan, who I've just interviewed for my show that's going out tomorrow, Piers said on January the 7th he should not be allowed to be president again. He's disqualified himself. All these folks now just allowed the passage of time to go past and then go, he's fine. Look at Kamala Harris. Look over there. Garbage, blah, blah, blah. That

That is a problem, right? We live in a country of amnesiacs, Tim. I'm an American citizen, but let me take off my American hat, put on my British immigrant hat, be an outsider for a second and say, you people are fucking amnesiacs, right? You're like fucking goldfish. Americans cannot remember what happened last week, let alone four years ago. So we needed that Jack Smith trial. We needed that Florida documents trial.

We needed Georgia in the phone call to remind people that he's not too stupid to coup, that he called Raffensperger and said, give me 11,000 votes. And we all heard him do it. And that goes to the core of the rehabilitation, the whitewashing, sane washing comeback of Donald J. Trump. If you had said on January 7th to even the most hardcore Republican, Donald Trump will be the candidate neck and neck in the polls the Friday before the election. They would have laughed in your face.

America is for amnesiacs and amnesiacs only, Mehdi. So I'm sorry. This is why we should not have let you in, according to Stephen Miller. Yeah, sorry to be the guy who has to remind you of things. On a quick side note, I know you're doing Bill Martin. I don't know if you've seen the reporting about how the National Archives now is preemptively taking out things from their exhibition about slavery and about indigenous people because they don't want to offend Republican visitors and Republican members of Congress by reminding them about the dark parts of American history. So I know Bill's a big

anti-canceled culture free speech guy. This is what the right's up to. Before we get into the progressive world, particularly among progressive Arab Americans, but also progressives of kind of all stripes and their views on Harris and the war in Israel, I just want to give you one little teaser of the other side of the equation. Are you familiar with Rahim Kassam?

fellow Brit. Unfortunately, Tim, I've been unfamiliar with him longer than you have from my UK days. Okay, great. Well, then you'll be excited for this clip. I was listening to Steve Bannon's first podcast after he got out of the clink to prepare for the press conference that I was going to question him at earlier this week. Rahim shared this little nugget that I was like, I want to make sure Matty gets a chance to go off on this. So let's give that a listen. As Muslim men go, Muslim women go.

You have to understand how that community operates in terms of how the votes

tend to split up. Muslim women might be telling pollsters X, Y, Z. But you're not buying that. No, but on the day, as Muslim men go, Muslim women will go at the polling booth. I mean, we've seen this in ghettoized communities and in tight-knit communities, in Arab communities all across Europe for the last two decades now. And so I think that you have to consider that too. Michigan is much worse than she thinks. And you think Michigan is our target? Michigan is the target even more than...

Pennsylvania. We've got to focus on all three. Pennsylvania, I think we can win and win big because it's a phony populism, Biden, and she's not a populist at all. Neither is he. He comes from the credit card state. But Wisconsin's in play. But in Michigan, you can see it all coming together. There you go. What do you think about that? Muslim women are just going to do what the Muslim men want. What do you think about Raheem's analysis there?

So Rahim Kassam knows as much about the views of the Muslim population as I know about the internal views of the war room folks, right? The guy knows not, the guy disowned Islam many years ago. He's a far right freak who failed in the UK, tried to become leader of the UK Independence Party, was a literal bag carrier for Nigel Farage, was mocked universally in the UK by the media and the political elites, left the country, came to the US and tried to

do well here and failed here as well. He knows nothing about Muslim communities. That's not to say that Michigan isn't in trouble. We could talk about the fact that Kamala Harris is certainly in trouble in Michigan. But he is a bit of a joke figure. And let's just talk about the rank Islamophobia in that comment, the idea that Muslim women do whatever their husbands tell them. It takes us back, does it not, Tim, to 2016, when a pair of Gold Star parents stood on stage at DNC to talk about the sacrifice of their son and the Khans.

And Donald Trump said, well, the wife didn't speak because that's what they do in their culture. She has to listen to her husband. She was actually very upset about her son's death that night on stage. She then wrote a very stinging Washington Post op-ed, making it very clear what she thought of Donald Trump. So look, this racism and misogyny is built into MAGA. It's built into the Trump movement. We know that.

Having said that, unfortunately, and this is where I'm stuck the Friday before the election, is that Donald Trump and the MAGA folks, Tim, I don't know if you're noticing, are running a very, very strong, disingenuous, dishonest, shameless, cynical, hypocritical, but very strong campaign to try and win over some Muslim and Arab American voters in Michigan. And they're able to do that because Democrats left that lane wide open.

Thank you for mentioning Kazir Khan. I had a chance to meet him at a debate a couple months ago, and what a nice man, an honorable man, and good for him that he had spoke out. I wish that the country had done him better in 2016. Okay, to the question of that sophisticated campaign, reaching out to every Americans, I want to play for you a little bit of my friend Peter Hamby over at Snapchat has been going to college campuses, interviewing college students. He went to Wayne State in Michigan. And

and talked a lot to some Muslim, some non-Muslim young progressives who are concerned about the war and deciding about Jill Stein or Kamala Harris or not voting or Donald Trump for that matter. And I want to play a bit from some of his interviews.

Who are you guys going to vote for? Third party for sure. Third party, Jill Stein. You're both voting for Jill Stein voters? Yeah. Why Jill Stein? Perhaps why not Kamala Harris? Because she's supporting a genocide. I can't make that decision to give either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump my vote. My main thing, at least this election cycle, is noticing how both parties will support Israel either way. And me as a Muslim American, I'd rather not support a party that would still give money to...

you know, something that politically I'm opposed to. - Do you want her to lose my chance? - Honestly, yeah. - My personal stance will always be with Palestine until my last breath. But I do think that in order to help the rest of the world, we have to start where we are. And I think that Kamala Harris is our best bet as of now. - So there's a week.

until the election. What do you think will get you to go out and vote for Kamala Harris? - If I can guarantee that the situation in Gaza will improve under her presidency, then I can guarantee her my vote. - I don't know if you're gonna figure that out in the next week. - That's the issue, it's like, I most likely will not. - Every ad that I see on YouTube these days, they're like, "Kamala Harris, the only pro-Israel candidate." And they always show her and her Zionist husband

And it's just, I would never like... Do you know who's running those ads? They're everywhere. Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. Do you think like a Republican group would run those ads targeting you guys to get you to not support Kamala? I would not be surprised. I don't know. I mean, I'm interested in your take on all of it. But that last little bit, that interview, that they volunteered that and then that they were just so casual about how those ads are everywhere featuring Doug Emhoff. Open floor to discuss any of that. We'll just kind of take it all one point at a time.

I mean, it's really depressing for me to hear that. It's not surprising for me. I've been hearing that everywhere I go. I've been to Philly. I've been to Georgia. I've been to swing states, non-swing states. I've spoken to big Muslim audiences, lefty audiences. I hear that everywhere. I hear that in the comments section of Zateo. I've had subscribers cancel their subscriptions at Zateo in the last couple of weeks because I'm too pro-Karmel, even though, to be clear to your viewers and to Zateo folks watching, Zateo is a great place to be.

I haven't actually endorsed Kamala Harris for many reasons, right? You haven't? No, I think the endorsement business is a bit of a joke. I don't think I need to come out and say, vote Kamala Harris. I've made clear that I think Donald Trump should not be president of the United States again. That is my position. You ask me, my position on this election is Donald Trump cannot be allowed near nuclear weapons for a second time.

I'm very, very clear on that. Okay, but what is your position to somebody who calls you from Michigan and they're like, I don't know what to do? Who should I vote for? Yeah, so people have done that. People keep saying, how should I vote? What I do is I'm not telling people how to vote. I'm certainly not telling Arab Americans in Michigan how to vote because I'll tell you what, Tim, I've met a lot of people. I have a lot of friends in Dearborn. I know people who've lost not one, not two, not three, not 10, but 20, 30, 40 members of their family in Gaza, right? Yeah.

in Gaza to bombs supplied by the United States, supplied by the Biden-Harris administration. So I would be a sociopath if I was to go and heck to someone who's lost family members in Gaza and say, but you must vote for the people. I'm not saying Hector, though. I'm not saying Hector, but advise. What if they're calling you for advice? Yeah, that's different. If they're asking me for advice, and I've done Q&As with big crowds of Muslim people in some of these places, they're

And people do ask me that. In fact, wherever I've gone since January of this year when I left MSNBC, the first question at any Muslim event is, who do we vote for, the fascist or the genocider, right? We're stuck.

And a lot of people say neither of them, Jill Stein, which I think is a bad move in a swing state. If you're not in a swing state, by the way, Tim, again, sorry to be like the guy who's come to the United States 10 years ago and be like, do you guys not teach civics in school? Like nobody understands how the elections works here. I have to go around and like do the whole thing again and be like, because there's an electoral college. If you live in Texas, nobody cares how you vote. If you live in California, do whatever the hell you want, right? Texas is borderline. You should vote for Kamala in Texas. I'm just saying if you're less better. Let me rephrase it. Let me rephrase it. If you're in Alabama or Mississippi-

or California or Massachusetts, do whatever the hell you want, right? Certainly in Texas, Ted Cruz should be on your target list to take from the Senate. But my point being, right, if you're in a safe state in this ridiculous electoral college that we have in this country, do whatever the hell you want. If you're in a swing state,

Donald Trump says it very openly that Jill Stein, I love her. She takes them all from the other side. Those are Trump's words. I just point them out. Trump says Jill Stein is very good for him. The Green Party is, by the way, of Europe, Tim, the day we're speaking, put out a joint statement, all of the Green Party in Europe saying, please, Jill Stein, step aside and let Harris win. Right. It's too important election. Trump is too dangerous. Interesting. Green parties were actually in government in Europe who are serious forces in Europe, unlike our own Green Party. But I'll come to Green Party in a moment. Just on this kind of you said somebody calls you from Michigan. What do you think?

What I would say is I would lay out the choice. The problem that we're getting, Tim, is because people are understandably angry and upset about what Biden and Harris have done this year and their refusal to budge, right? Everyone gave Harris a pass in July. Tim, I was in Muslim WhatsApp groups where people were like, all right, let's give her a chance. You know, fresh face, new person, VP. She didn't sit behind Netanyahu in Congress. This could be a change.

And then the DNC happened and the Palestinian-American was denied a spot on the stage and they bragged about it. And then she said, you know, her people went out of their way to say. I even think that was a mistake. It was insane. They could have had a hijab wearing Palestinian-American Democratic lawmaker from the swing state of Georgia on primetime endorse Harris. But they didn't do it because they were so worried about the left madness.

Then she went out of her way to say no change in policy. She went on The View and suddenly said, any change with Biden, anything you would have done differently, nothing I would have done differently from Biden. So this insanity upon insanity really pissed a lot of people off, understandably. So what I say to people is, I get your anger at Biden and Harris. I share it. I am outraged at what our government has done in our name with our taxes to kill 16,000 kids in Gaza.

What I want people to remember, it's a choice, right? If this was a referendum on Tuesday, if this was a Brexit referendum, we're going, do you like Harris or not? Hi, Harris. Do you think she ran a good campaign? I'm in the negative. I'd say, no, I'm not a fan of what she said. I'm not a fan of her campaign. I disapprove of Kamala Harris because she won't switch on Gaza. Big issue for me.

It is not a referendum. It is a choice between Harris and the other guy. And what I find so disingenuous amongst some leftist commentators, I've called them out, is they talk about Harris as if she's operating in a vacuum, as if there is not someone else coming down the line. So I hear Muslims and lefties say to me, we must punish Harris. And I get that, Tim, that's what elections are for. Throw the people out when they do stuff you don't like.

The problem is people are not being honest with the choice. If you want to say that, the sentence has to be punish Harris by electing Trump. And you'll notice they don't say that because they know there's not a big constituency for Trump, even amongst Muslims, even amongst the voters you just heard. They said we're voting Stein.

And I think Jill Stein also does this disingenuous thing where she's like, you don't have to vote for either of them. Vote for me and keep your hands clean, which is bullshit. There are no clean hands in this election, especially in a swing state. So this is my problem right now. You go back to your question. I don't have a good answer for someone who rings me from Michigan. I say,

all I can do is offer up the evidence I have. I did a video on my show last week saying, here's what Donald Trump thinks about Palestine because Trump has got a pass, right? Because everyone's so understandably focused on the incumbents who are sending weapons right now to Gaza. It's easy for people to say, well, we don't know what Trump would be like. Well, maybe Trump wouldn't be as bad as Biden. Well, can you get worse than a genocide? And I'm the guy saying, yeah, it can get worse. It can always get worse. Uh,

80% of Muslims voted for George Bush in 2000, thinking, well, it can't be worse than Gore and Lieberman. And George W. Bush gave us a million dead Iraqis. So again, amnesia. I'm the guy who has to remind people of what happened 24 years ago. And I didn't even live in the US then. So I think the big issue now is laying out the choice. That is what I have been doing. I, as a journalist, will lay out the choice. I can say why I think Donald Trump is an existential threat to the United States, why I think he's an existential threat to Muslims. I interviewed a Michigan imam who endorsed Trump.

on my show this week. And I said to him, I said, how can you endorse a man who said Islam hates us? How can you endorse a man who says he wants Netanyahu to go further than what Biden's even allowed him to do? How can you endorse a man who's got a son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who wants to build beachfront property in Gaza and kick the Palestinians out? How can you vote for a man who is being found liable for rape and you call him the candidate of family values? Is that what you teach in the mosque as family values? I asked all those questions. I put this guy on the spot.

And that is what I'm trying to do, Tim, is just to remind people of the choice because we have amnesiacs, including on the left and in Muslim communities. People say, well, Donald Trump didn't start a new war. Well, actually, he escalated every war he inherited from Obama.

Okay, so I hear that. I guess I want to get into the politics of it, but just on the choice. I don't see it as as hard of a choice as you're kind of making it out to be. I mean, I think about a conversation I had with Dan Savage, right, who is a gay sex advice columnist. He's a little bit older than me, you know, and he has a little more credibility on this as being a lifelong liberal. So I'm going to have a little stolen gay valor from Dan on this question for a second. But we were talking about this and he was like, I lived through AIDS.

You know, and he's like, and so when he said, I get lefties come up to me and say, how can you vote for, but this was, we were talking during the Biden time, how can you vote for Biden given what's happening? And he's like,

I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, who was for don't ask, don't tell. You know, I voted for Mondale in 84, even though he wasn't for gay marriage, you know, even though there wasn't like a big movement to deal with the AIDS crisis at the time. Like, that's just voting. Like, we have 330 million people and they're going to

Sometimes be two candidates and there's one issue that you're fundamentally at odds with them on, but that doesn't mean that there's not one that's obviously better than the other one. It seems like you're saying one's obviously better than the other one, so I just don't know why we have to do the rigmarole about how hard of a choice it is.

To me, one is obviously better than the other one because the other one is so bad. That doesn't mean I think Harris has done a good campaign on Gaza. Let me say two things. Number one, you have to ask the question, Tim. And, you know, we get into this thing about vote shaming. Like, you're this voters debate. If I did a video saying, you know, if if she loses Michigan, don't you dare blame Muslim voters. That's on you. You've run a shitty campaign in Michigan. They sent Bill Clinton to lecture Muslims and tell them that, by the way, the Jews were there first.

And that's not an argument you should be having on the eve of election in a state where people are upset with you. That's insane to send Bill Clinton there to just really poke, poke. Send Richie Torres there, a man who's advocated horrible anti-Palestinian positions. Liz Cheney, somebody who's very unpopular with the Arab American community because of her role in Iraq. Right. Those are the people you're sending to Michigan. That's not great. Right. That is people are feeling insulted on top of the choice. So I don't think they're running a very good campaign. I think they need to own that.

right? You know, there's one member of Congress, one Democratic member of Congress texted me, Tim, saying it's almost like they want to lose Michigan. We've got to recognize the campaign here. And the point about you saying, you know, voting for two, I get that. But you and I are in a position of privilege. If my family had been killed in Gaza by American made bombs that Biden and Harris keep sending, and you said to me, you've got to vote for the people who helped kill your family, I would say, fuck you. I mean, I mean, that's just the reality of

Well, but that was that was what I used the Dan Savage example. There are plenty of examples of people who are not in positions of privilege. I just I was using him because it came to mind because you're interviewing him. But there are plenty of people who are. Could you do that, though, Tim? If somebody if your family had been wiped out by bombs that Kamala Harris said, could you vote for Kamala Harris? I'm just it's a serious question. It's not a gotcha. It's a serious question.

It's a serious question that people are grappling with. It's a hard hypothetical. I think it's a very complicated situation, which we could go into in more detail if you wanted. I guess my answer to that would be the choices would still be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. I get it, but they'll say the choices, we're going to stay at home. It isn't a close choice. If it was one of those things where if it was like,

Kamala Harris or this is easy for me because I'm a former Republican but Tim, Tim, hold on, Tim, Tim, you and I you and I get that because we've spent eight years following Donald Trump. Average voters do not do that, right? Average voters say stuff like, well, Donald Trump They've been alive. They can watch through YouTube. Come on, Tim, you and I I mean, he started with the Muslim ban. His first thing was there were Arab Americans in airport cells in airport cells. That's the first thing he did.

Tim, that's the worst argument you can make. Do you know what someone will say to you in Dearborn if you say Muslim ban? They'll say, I prefer a Muslim ban to being genocided. That's what they'll say to you. So the only argument that works is to say, actually, he'll be worse. He'll be worse for Palestinians. I don't think Trump would have been on Bibi's side. I agree with you, Tim. But that's what I'm saying. It's all of these arguments are like... Tim, don't shoot the messenger. I'm not shooting

the messenger. I agree with you. I'm trying to say like, it's not that close though. Like it isn't that close of a call. Hold on. I agree with you that Donald Trump would have been worse for Palestine and he's made it. The point, the only argument that actually gets through to a lot of Palestinian friends of mine is I say to them, Netanyahu and Ben-Gavir want Trump.

Why would you want the candidate? Who are the Israeli pharaohs? Of course. And I haven't heard a good answer to that question. And I think that gets through. But I think, look, you're missing the point, Tim. A lot of people are low information voters. That's not an insult. That's just a reality of life. People are hearing Donald Trump. You know what Donald Trump posted this week, Tim? I'm going to be the peace president. Cheney's a warmonger. And Muslims should vote for me because I'm going to end wars in the Middle East. You and I know that's ridiculous. But I'm sorry to say that. So isn't that why it's important for you to tell them that it's the truth? I am. I am.

I'm just saying that it's actually not close choice. But let me ask you this, Tim. Why is Donald Trump meeting with Muslim leaders and Kamala Harris is not? Why is Donald Trump saying things about peace in a way that Harris is not? Why is Donald Trump? He's full of shit, but they've allowed him. This is where I have to criticize the Democrats. They've allowed him to occupy that space. Apologize to me for criticizing Democrats.

By not budging from Netanyahu's side, right? Look, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have said some very vicious things about Netanyahu. All I'm asking Biden and Harris is, why can't you say what Schumer and Pelosi said? I'm not asking Kamala Harris to become Bernie Sanders. I'm not asking her to become AOC. I'm saying just say what fucking Nancy Pelosi has said about Netanyahu. They won't do it. You find me a critical comment from Harris or Biden about Benjamin Netanyahu. Just do that much. Don't even do an arms embargo. Just criticize Bibi. They will not do it.

Do you worry about the other side of the political equation, though? There's a little bit of a strategy here. I was listening to AOC on, she was on with John Lovett after me earlier this week. And I was the bad cop and she was the good cop on their listeners on this question.

And her point was that she made a parallel to the Puerto Rican island and kind of coalition politics and how sometimes you have to be in coalition with people and how it's a risk actually to say, okay, we're going to boycott this.

and we're not going to be involved. And then Kamala Harris wins Michigan. Kamala Harris wins the presidency. And then it's like, actually, we don't need you. And you know who was actually campaigning for us was Liz Cheney, who has real disagreements. Let's just say, and they certainly are not as personal as Gaza. So I'm not trying to create an equivalency. But Liz Cheney has real policy disagreements that she's putting aside to campaign with Kamala because she's the better choice.

So as a strategic matter, if you want to move the party your direction, shouldn't they be campaigning with her to say that, okay, we got on board, you have to listen to us? So I 100% agree with what you're saying about the choice. I've been saying this to a lot of Muslim friends of mine in recent weeks that

In many ways, Muslims are screwed based on this strategy of trying to punish Harris politically. Right. I get the emotional feeling behind it. But what I try and say to Muslim voters is the punishment strategy will backfire. It'll backfire for two reasons. Number one, either it works and you kick out Harris and you go, yeah, we showed our leverage. We showed Muslim voters matter. We showed genocide matters. Oh, wait, Donald Trump's president. Now we're screwed for the next four, maybe eight years. Right. So you're screwed if you succeed in ejecting Harris because Trump's coming down the track.

And if you fail to reject Harris, yes, the Democratic Party will say, ha ha ha, you made so much noise in Michigan, all you Muslim activists. We don't need you. See you later. Bye bye. So I do think there's a danger where this argument that this is an election about Muslim voters showing their strength actually will lead to a great deal of weakness, regardless of the outcome. So I agree with you on that. I'm glad you mentioned AOC. I interviewed her on the day we launched Zateo back in April. And I asked her the question, what would you say? I

I asked her the question you asked me, what would you say to a leftist or a Muslim or an Arab American who says, I can't vote for Joe Biden because of the genocide? And she gave still what I think is one of the better answers, which is it's not about who you like more, who's going to be better. It's about what can we do better as protesters, activists, journalists, commentators under which president? She said, I'm an organizer. As an organizer, who can I organize under for Palestinians or for climate change? Clearly, it's under Biden, not Trump.

And my friend, Michael Mann, the climate scientist, also made a very good point in the context of climate, which I would apply to Gaza, which is, and this is again, something I say to leftists and Muslim voters, which is under Harris, you have a chance of changing things. Under Trump, you have none. It's game over. And I think that applies to climate change. I think it applies to Gaza, applies to a whole host of issues across the board. I know. I just, I don't know what's happened to me, but I was listening to AOC on that pod and I was like, she's great. I mean, at times she like dips into the lefty organizer speak

She's using these words that make me want to roll my eyes a little bit. My old muscle memory kicks in. But for the most part, she's very practical. And I guess that's really what it fundamentally comes down to me. And I'm usually having this argument on the opposite side. But I guess I also just reject the notion of like,

that voting is about self-actualization. And I think that AOC used the phrase, like your vote is an extension of yourself. It's not. - Yes, I've been trying to explain that again, both to leftists and Muslims. This is not a declaration of faith, right? We've fetishized this idea that voting is, as you say, extension of yourself. I can't bring myself to do this. My hands will be clean. I won't go into that ballot box and pick out. It's not about you, right? It is about what is the outcome? I'm utilitarian when it comes to, what is the outcome?

Right. And I don't need to get into lesser of two evils. People hate that language. I get it. But it is about the outcomes. What is the outcome that you can tolerate? And I'm very clear I can't tolerate a Trump presidency. And this goes back to what we talked about earlier, which is a fundamental problem with all of this, whether you're a Muslim, a leftist, a Haley voter, a MAGA voter, independent, all comes back to one thing. We memory hold the Trump presidency.

We memory hold the Trump presidency, which allows whether it's a MAGA voter or David Sachs or the Wall Street Journal editorial board or an Arab American dude in Detroit to say, well, would it be that bad if Trump was bad? The fact that people can ask that question tells me we just memory hold the worst presidency, not just of our lifetimes, but in the history of Western democratic politics. Don't sell Andrew Johnson short. That was pretty bad. I think Andrew Johnson would have handled the pandemic better.

Possibly. All right. Just to like a little cleanup. Can I just very quickly throw out the most annoying line of all when people say to me, well, if Trump comes back and I hear people say this, we survived him the first time. No, we didn't. No, we fucking didn't. At least 200,000 people died who didn't need to die, according to a Lancet study on Donald Trump's watch. We did not all survive the first Trump term. Yeah. And neither did Brian Sicknick, by the way.

Just two quick cleanup things from that conversation, because you mentioned earlier, I just wanted, it was worth mentioning the green party and what the European parties did. Just want to talk about that really quick. So Jill Stein runs every four years. Well, she didn't run in 2020, she ran in 2016. She's running again now. I interviewed her. We had a very,

messy conversation where she wouldn't call Assad or Putin war criminals. She and her running mate left the conversation perfectly fine with it and have spent the last few weeks attacking me to make up for the fact that they kind of car crashed on a TV interview. It's not serious people. And don't take my word for it. Literally, the Green Party's of Europe, who are serious people, who are in government in places like Germany and France and Britain,

in Parliament and Britain are saying, please, the choice is too tight for you to be coming along here and risking it all in Michigan. As I say, there are now phone calls going out, according to CNN, Tim, I just saw this morning from the KFAL folks that there are robocalls going out in places like Michigan telling people to vote Jill Stein and they're funded, I believe, this is what I'm seeing on CNN, by Republican groups. So the fact that the Republican Party are pushing Stein tells you everything you need to know about her spoiler role in the race. People hate the word spoiler. And I just think, look, I...

I'm all for the Green Party's goals, right? If I leave, Tim, when I read the Green Party website, I'm a left, I love it. I'm like, yeah, that's me, me, me, me, me. Love it, right? But if you're going to do that, you've got to do it from the grassroots up. You've got to run and win local office, state office. They have no state legislators. Forget federal officials. Forget Congress and Senate.

Where's the governors? Where are the mayors? Work to build your party. Don't just turn up every four years and go, make me president. It's insane. You have to do the work in between elections. I don't know who referred to Jill Stein as a cicada who turns up every four years to be annoying, but I share the goals. I share the policy platforms. But this is not a serious campaign. This is just simply a spoiler attempt that will bring Donald Trump back to the White House.

And you said the European Green Party has all said not to support her. Yes. Okay, one last thing on this. In the very end of the Hamby clip, they talk about how all those ads show Kamala's Zionist husband, Doug. There have been some anti-Semitic attacks on the vice president's husband. I think the preponderance of them from Republican cutouts, but also some from leftists. I just wanted to give you a chance to talk about that since that was in the clip.

So we should be clear to people who aren't following this. As Peter Hamby pointed out, a lot of these ads that are going out in Michigan, what the Republicans are doing, which is a reminder of how cynical and nihilistic your old party is, Tim, is that they're putting ads out at the same time to Jewish areas saying, hey, guys, Kamala Harris is pro-Palestinian leftist radical who doesn't support Israel. And they're putting out ads to Muslim and Arab areas saying, hey, she's super pro-Netanyahu and her husband is super Zionist.

So they are playing a very cynical game. Let's just be clear about that. Very nihilistic. And then say, why don't people trust politics? And an anti-Semitic, straight anti-Semitic. Yeah, so actually I'm going to go further. I'm going to say the ads are anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and misogynistic all in one. But let's just be clear about that. They're anti-Semitic because they're drawing attention to her husband, right? And his faith background and say he's Zionist and Jewish, etc.

Number two, they're Islamophobic because the ad is based on the idea that Muslims all hate Jews. So this will work with Muslim voters. There's an Islamophobic trope behind that, right? The assumption that all Muslims are anti-Semites.

And number three, they're misogynistic because the idea that the candidate, the female candidate's husband is going to decide her policies is fundamentally misogynistic. We don't run ads about Melania's views separate to the fact Melania has no views other than rank racism and plagiarism. We don't run those ads, right? For a reason. So I think there's, it's, it's antisemitism, Islamophobia and misogyny all rolled into one ad. Will it work? I don't know that Republicans are so cynical that they're doing this targeting. I would say one thing.

If we're going to play the family game, and I would say this again to anybody who does believe this idea that Doug Emhoff is this kind of Zionist mastermind behind Harris, which does have, unfortunately, all sorts of tropes because she's our own woman. And by the way, Kamala Harris is pro-Israel on enough that I can criticize Harris's pro-Israel record in and of itself without having to bring Doug Emhoff into it. I would point out that Donald Trump not only has family members who are hardcore pro-Netanyahu, he put

them in positions of power, right? The guy who's actually going to run foreign policy for him is a man named Jared Kushner, who is his son-in-law. And I'm not going to criticize him because he's a Zionist or Jewish. I'm going to criticize him because when he was growing up, Netanyahu used to come to his house and sleep in his bed. Jared wasn't in the bed at the same time. Jared was in the basement, but he would sleep in Jared's room. Maybe the Kushners didn't have a guest room in their mansion, but that's how close Kushner is to Netanyahu.

And I don't hear people making that big of us. Emhoff is not going to run Middle East policy. We don't even know what Doug Emhoff's views are on the intricacies of Middle East policy. I'm sure he's very pro-Israel, just as Harris is pro-Israel. By the way, her stepdaughter apparently is very pro-Palestinian. The whole discussion is ridiculous that we're going through family members. But if we are going to do family members, let's talk about the ones that Donald Trump gave jobs to, Jared Kushner. Great. Okay. We both have one obsession I want to close this with. Well, I'm going to ask you to make a prediction as that very close, but so as our penultimate question.

Jeffrey Epstein, the left and the center went to the Never Trumpers. They've allowed MAGA to take all the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracies. Like Jeffrey Epstein was killed. Jeffrey Epstein was killed. It's always MAGA folks. And yet when he was killed, Bill Barr was running the Department of Justice. Donald Trump was the president. Alex Acosta was in there. And Donald Trump, and we have even another new story today about Donald Trump's potential relationships with Epstein. So I don't know what happened. I'm just saying that if Jeffrey Epstein was killed,

My top candidate is not the liberal deep state. Yep. Anyway, do you have anything to add to that? No, I 100% agree with this is classic Democrats just seeding all the conspiracy ground to the right. Like play the game. Go on the offense. Be like, yeah, let's talk about Jeffrey Epstein. Let's talk about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Like imagine, Tim, you and I, I think you and I would have cheered, would we not, if Kamala Harris at the debate had just unleashed on Trump and Epstein?

Had she just gone on a long tangent in the middle of the debate about Trump saying, oh, yeah, I'm great friends with him. And apparently he likes really young women. Remember that Trump quote from the 90s? If she'd just gone, she'd just gone off to Trump. Like, I'm the guy who if I ever ended up advising a presidential candidate,

You've had the privilege of advising presidential candidates. Nobody would be crazy enough to let me advise them. But if I ever advise a presidential candidate, I would say to Kamala Harris, she should have gone up on that debate stage and just whipped out a picture of Epstein and Trump and just been like, just shown it, dropped it, mic drop. Like play that game. The idea that, yeah, he died on Trump's watch, but Trump isn't to blame or Barr isn't to blame that he, you know, he's this guy who has this deep state island jet, but

But Trump is openly on camera. I don't need a jet list or an island list. I've got photos of Trump, videos of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein. So the whole thing is so absurd. And can I just make another unrelated but actually related point, which is why don't Democrats take Republican bullshit and throw it back at them? That is my fundamental complaint when it comes to it. Why doesn't Kamala Harris do a Sunday morning media tour right after J.D. Vance says, well, if I was Mike Pence, I wouldn't have certified the election. Harris should go on every show and play...

I am the fucking vice president, so I'm going to make myself president on January 6th. Are you all right with that? Any objections? Do that. They never say that. Hard agree here. All right, Matty.

Wednesday morning, Thursday morning, Friday morning. Are we waking up? Are we coming out into the light and seeing freedom? Or do we have the shackles of Donald Trump? What do you expect? I stopped doing predictions in 2016, Tim, because I thought Brexit wouldn't happen and I thought Hillary Clinton would win. So after that, I was like, what the fuck do I know? That's a good answer. So I can't really do predictions. All right. Well, how are you feeling now? I'm feeling not good. I said to someone yesterday on a WhatsApp group of concerned voters, I said, my...

says Trump, my heart says Harris. I think if I rationally look at the numbers and the polls and the way that the vibes and the momentum and the fact that, you know, Trump polling is understated and all that stuff and how close it should be is and it shouldn't be, then I think Trump has a very good chance of being president again. He shouldn't. It's insane that I'm saying this out loud, but he does. But in my heart, I think, will people do the right thing? Will people recognize

that he is the existential threat and the worst human being and a disaster for this country who will mess up not just America and the world, but our kind of mental, emotional health. And, you know, as someone who cares about Gaza, I think Brandon Friedman, I think his name is, a guy I follow on Twitter,

A guy I follow on Twitter made a very good point. He said, look, if Harris wins, you can carry on fighting over that one fire of Gaza and making the argument. If Trump wins, there'll be a hundred fires to put out. And actually Gaza will be just one amongst a hundred. So if you actually care about fighting for Gaza, fight for Gaza under a Harris presidency, not under a Trump presidency.

We'll leave it there. Mediasan, thank you so much for coming on to the Bulwark Podcast. I really appreciate it. Hopefully we can argue about some of this other stuff under the Harris presidency in 2025. And God willing, we'll have that opportunity. Everybody else, we'll be back Monday for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast.

Good luck. Have a wonderful weekend. Take some Xanax. Knock on doors. We'll see you back here on Monday. Peace. It's empty in the valley of your heart. The sun, it rises slowly as you walk away from all the fears and all the faults you've left behind.

The harvest left no food for you to eat. You cannibal, you meat-eater, you see. But I have seen the same, I know the shame in your defeat.

I will hold on hope and I won't let you choke on the noose around your neck. And I'll find strength in pain and I will change my ways. I'll know my name as it's cold again.

So come out of your cave walking on your hands And see the world hanging upside down You can understand dependence when you know the maker's line So make your sirens call and sing all you want I will not hear what you have to say 'Cause I need freedom now

I need to know how to live my life as it's meant to be. The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brough.