What to Make of Trump's Apprentice J.D. Vance With The Atlantic's Tim Alberta
42:21 Share

This is Bill Simmons. I am thrilled to announce our newest YouTube channel. It's called Ringer Movies. If you're a fan of our movie coverage here at The Ringer, then you're in luck because every episode of The Rewatchables and The Big Picture now on YouTube. Like Bill said, Ringer Movies will feature full episodes of my show, The Big Picture, The Rewatchables, as well as special live episodes, deep dives into movie history, and a bunch of other fun stuff featuring other movie-loving Ringer personalities. Search Ringer Movies on YouTube and experience the joy of Chris Ryan impersonating Wayne Jenkins on camera.

This episode is brought to you by Amazon Business. We all need more hours in the day, right? Well, Amazon Business gets it. They've got super smart business buying solutions that make the admin stuff a breeze. That means you can spend less time buried in paperwork and more time growing your business. That's pretty smart. Head over to amazonbusiness.com and see what smart business buying is all about.

- This episode is brought to you by Experian. I don't know if you've ever looked in your subscriptions on your phone and noticed that you had like four or five subscriptions. Maybe you didn't realize you were still paying for, or maybe you got some email or something and you're like, "I thought I canceled that." Well, this is what happens. These days anyone could be missing out on savings from subscriptions they've totally forgotten about. It's not just the ones you forgot to get rid of, it's the ones that they have better deals.

And that's where Experian comes in. It's like a personal assistant for your subscriptions. It can cancel over 200 plus subscriptions in categories like streaming services, meal kits, entertainment apps, and more. You could save an average of $270 per year

Plus, they'll even let you know if your provider offers you a better deal to stick around. Find out how much you could save by downloading the Experian app today. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed, $270 a year average. Estimated savings of one plus cancellation. Paid membership with connected payment accounts required. See Experian.com for details.

Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. Well, I've got a very special guest here at the Republican National Convention. It's Tim Alberta of The Atlantic. He just dropped another one of his pieces, one of those earthquake-type moments when Tim Alberta reveals that for the past three

Three months. He's been trailing the Trump campaign. He's been inside and he has all of the details. We'll get to that later. We'll get into the personalities, how they're feeling, how they were feeling around Super Tuesday and how they are feeling right now after the Biden debate. But first,

We have some breaking news. Donald Trump finally ended The Apprentice and decided on a nominee. But actually, J.D. Vance, the person he chose, is sort of like an Apprentice character. He's 39 years old. He's a much younger version of Donald Trump. He's seen as a standard bearer of the MAGA movement. He's a senator from Ohio. He's only served for two years.

Crucially, he's been pushed by Donald Trump Jr., his son, Tucker Carlson, some other right-wing activists like Charlie Kirk. He is the person that Rupert Murdoch did not want anybody but J.D. Vance because he's seen as an isolationist who believes that we should be out of all foreign wars. Again, he's only served for two years. And of course, if you know of him personally,

through the Hillbilly Elegy book. It was a bestselling novel, came out around the 2016 election. And he wrote about growing up in the Rust Belt, about being from a working class family and about really the deterioration of that area of the country. And it's a really vivid, beautiful memoir turned into a TV show. But he was a critic of Donald Trump at the time. At one point referred to him as America's Hitler. So this is quite the turnabout. And it took about

I don't know, six weeks for Trump to finally be persuaded to endorse him for the Senate in Ohio to be the nominee. So again, I've got Tim Alberta on the line. He's got lots of thoughts on this. He is, you know, one of the foremost chroniclers of the GOP. So we had to corner him here at the Republican National Convention. Oh, I do feel cornered.

Do you? Sort of. As we relax in the stands? Yes, you drag me across the street to the hockey arena. I mean, the Vance thing is really interesting on so many levels. I mean, I actually find myself thinking back to the sort of parallel in time in 2016 when Trump is running and he's forging this sort of almost...

metaphysical relationship with the white working class base of the Republican Party and really turning it into the base of the Republican Party. This is this is, you know, if you look at these counties along the spine of the Mississippi River that had been voting Democratic for generations and suddenly in 2016, they all flip. Right. And Trump in that campaign is sort of

establishing this identity, or I should say even reshaping the identity of the Republican Party as a party that will be no longer catering to the concerns of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, sort of forget about the old Heritage Foundation, sort of rolling back these notions of sort of

big tent elitist republicanism. He didn't understand them. No, and they didn't understand him. No, he was a New York Post guy. He was like a populist in the tri-state sense. In the tri-state sense. But like the Queens thing was, I think, sort of his window into that world, right? Like where, and there was a certain degree of...

Not neglect, but like the chip on your shoulder. He sounds like my dad, who's from Hoboken. There you go. And he's like a working class guy and electrician. And he feels like the world has moved on without him. Yes. You know, globalism has left them behind. And it has in a lot of ways. And that's the story of J.D. Vance. And that's exactly the parallel, right? Because as Trump is delivering this message...

J.D. Vance at that same time is delivering it in a very different way, but it's in many ways the same message. But they were very different messengers. And Vance, I think, almost took umbrage at Trump in part because it was the same message. But Trump was so flamboyant, so derogatory, so divisive in delivering that message that I think Vance...

who, if you read his book, it's a very tender book in a lot of ways, right? It's a very feeling, searching, emotional story. Oh, I bawled my eyes out reading it. And I think that he almost took offense. That was my read on it anyway, that he almost took offense at how Trump had taken the beating heart of this

of this really empathetic message and weaponized it in sort of a cruel way. Like he turned their plight into a political message. That's exactly right. And that he was tricking them into thinking that he would save them from globalism and from the end of their, you know, industrial times. And that he alone could do it. Exactly. That he could deliver them. Exactly. Yeah, no, I think you're right.

It is interesting. He was almost like an MSNBC commentator at the time. It's quite the revolution. And that's the thing. It's not like these were sort of mild criticisms. He was all in. I mean, he was over... If you even go back and read... So my colleague at The Atlantic, David Frum, had written this piece about a year ago about how J.D. had actually worked for him on this blog that he used to run. And he was writing under a pseudonym for a couple of years at David Frum's blog. And these posts that he was writing...

And then his comments on cable news, some of the other interviews he gave around Trump. These were this was not half hearted. This was from a place of like real deep conviction when he went when. And I'm not saying that nobody can ever change their minds about anything. Obviously, they can. But you just get the sense that what Vance was saying now is so fundamentally incompatible with what he has come to say about Trump in recent years that it does leave people sort of scratching their heads.

Right. What he says now is that he did not believe that Trump was the right messenger. But then after seeing him and his work as president, he now believes that he is he was actually able to fix the issues that he wrote about. I don't know. Do you think that he's actually been able to take action to the message that he's brought to these people or just rile them up? I mean, the answer can be both. Right. I mean, like I am at some level.

to the argument that some people who were really cold towards Trump, or at least cautious about Trump in 2016, that they will make that on certain policy matters, just in the sort of macro sense, that he delivered on his promises and he delivered as well or better than any other Republican president could have done, the courts, everything else. Sure, like I can buy that to some degree, but the very specific diagnoses that Vance was making at that time

have we seen Trump deliver really prescriptive solutions for those people that he was writing about? I haven't seen that. I mean, and I would be interested and I don't mean to sound snide in saying that. I mean, I live in the middle of the country. Like I cut my own four or five acres of grass. I live in Michigan, Michigan, which, you know, the part of the reason I'm being so hard on JD Vance is Ohio. We don't like Ohioans in Michigan. They're the redheaded stepchildren of the Midwest. So, um,

That's part of my issue with J.D. Vance here, just being a little like regionally catty. But they think that he represents the Rust Belt, which includes Michigan, some parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, maybe. Yeah, yeah. And so like and I'm not being snide when I say that I don't know that Trump has delivered on any of that. I would actually be really interested to hear Vance say.

talk about that in some depth. And I don't think he really has. I mean, they think that he is the new messenger of the MAGA movement. They see him as the person who is carrying the mantle forward for Trump. So clearly they think that he is supporting these claims. Totally. And

And, you know, look, I think at a biographical level, this makes a lot of sense. And I also think that the biographical piece of it sort of dovetails nicely with the political piece of it, because the Trump folks truly believe, and I wrote about this, I'm sure we'll talk about it a bit, that there is a significant untapped portion of the electorate that is

at least sympathetic to the MAGA movement, if not sort of on board with the MAGA movement, but they've been politically disengaged. And the Trump people believe that they can find those people, they can identify them, they can mobilize them, turn them out, and that that is going to be a potential...

game changer this fall. They really do believe that they left votes on the table in 2020 and that they can see a significant uptick in turnout among those blue collar, non-college educated voters who, for whatever reason, maybe they've just been hard to find, hard to contact, but they didn't vote for

four years ago, they're going to vote this fall. That's the Trump campaign's belief. And if that is their sort of core operational belief about the campaign, then Vance makes a lot of sense because he can help reach those people. The one interesting part in your piece that you just wrote for The Atlantic, you said that they're willing to put suburban women out

to the side and focus on young men of color. Are these the people you're talking about? Not necessarily, although I think that they are sort of adjacent to the people I'm talking about, because I think if you zoom way out, Tara, what the Trump campaign really believes that this election is going to accomplish is...

to sort of realign the electorate along lines of class. So in so many ways, the electorate has been bifurcated over the last couple of decades, at least, along- By identity, right? Yeah, by racial identity. And then even more recently, in the past decade or so, along the diploma divide, as we've called it, right? Education, right. Now what the Trump people are doing, I think, is they're trying to really harden the sort of class divide and make it a working class democracy.

coalition that transcends those old fault lines around racial identity. And so that's why, like when they're targeting 18 to 34 year old black men, when they're targeting Latino men under 40 without college degrees, like some of the micro-targeting that they're doing here. And I don't think that they're ignoring minority women necessarily, but they're much more focused on men because they believe that those people are just more receptive to

at a fundamental level to the Trump campaign's messaging. And they do seem to be, just in my experience, talking to men of color, just asking them, you know, either they're disengaged and they're not going to vote, or they're considering Trump. They don't seem to have any sort of connection to Joe Biden. And it's probably because Joe Biden just appeared to be older and feeble and does not have a lot of, you know, he doesn't appear strong.

I think that's a big part of it, right? It's like the machismo element of this. I mean, this entire RNC lineup is the most macho lineup I've ever seen in my life. Don't they have the UFC chairman? The UFC chairman's coming. And Trump goes to UFC fights. Right. It almost feels like CPAC to me, honestly. It does feel a little bit like CPAC. Well, like part CPAC,

Part WWF. Right. Or, well, WWE. I don't really know much about that world, to be fair. Oh, we should do a new podcast just on WWE. You can explain it to me. I'd be terrified to even watch it. Oh, it's... Well, and Trump, in so many ways, was, like, shaped by that world. We don't need to go down the rabbit hole. But it's really interesting. Like, all the performance stuff...

the like the made for TV melodrama actually, which is so surprising that Trump didn't come out tonight on stage with Vance and surprise everybody. Well, not surprise them, but you know what I mean? Like make a whole production. I thought he'd come out at prime time. I did too. And I thought he would say something and I thought he was going to upstage Biden's interview, but maybe that was a decision to let Biden have another moment to have a ton of gas with Lester Holt.

tonight, but I thought they would have at least some theatrics involved in it, a truth social tweet. But then again, that goes back to something that people have been telling me inside of Trump's camp, which is that like, he really doesn't care about who he picks. He's not really that invested in the VP. He doesn't think it makes that big of a difference. And he personally doesn't like the story to stray from him for too long. I think that that's probably all true.

And I also think that these have been a pretty weird couple of days. That's true. As we were talking about earlier, that was going to be the top of the show. Whoa. Whoa. But there's so much. How do you... Like the top of the show could be any... Could be one of like 20 different things. Do you stop at any moment and think, okay, so 2016 was nuts and we had...

Access Hollywood. You know, we had Hillary's emails. We had the investigation closed and then reopened. All the... Like, 2016 was insane. And then 2020 is COVID. Right. And it's, like, arguably even more insane. And Trump is, you know, giving these crazy press conferences and then he tests positive and then he goes to Walter Reed and he's, like, on death's doorstep. And, like...

And we now, we're like, we've almost, I think... We've become desensitized. Yeah, and like now 2024 could be even crazier, right? Like maybe this is just what we're in for every four years. I mean, we literally had a president almost assassinated. An assassination attempt. I know. And we're like, and here we are. We're just recording.

Looking out on media row. I mean, this is crazy. Okay. So I just want to go over something that we sort of talked about for a minute, which was the idea that perhaps this brush with death literally may have changed the tone of the campaign and it might be coming from the top.

that perhaps Trump realizes that this Tempest pot is boiling over and he caused it and he needs to turn it down. But how long does it really last for? How long has it been since he was 72 hours, maybe? We know that a memo came out from the campaign manager, Suzie Wiles, saying, you know, no more inflammatory remarks. We've got to tone it down.

But how long does that really last for? It's Trump after all, right? Here's the thing. I think it's easier to give that sort of a message that, hey, let's tone things down. Let's preach unity and harmony and try to bring this country together when you are ahead.

Because right now they're ahead. Oh, they're massively ahead at this point, don't you think? Right. And so, and that's why, honestly, Tara, like my, okay, so we've been here at the convention for just a matter of hours, right? And just in these hours that I've walked around talking with people, like I've covered the Republican Party very closely over the past, you know, 12 to 15 years.

And this convention is unlike anything I've ever been to. This feels like an early election night victory party. The 2016 convention was very strange for so many ways. The party was still in the throes of this like anti-Trump revolt. They were shocked that Trump was even being nominated. You had sitting U.S. senators trying to rig the rules of the convention so that they can dump Trump on the floor of the convention. Which is essentially what they're doing on the Democratic side right now. I was going to say, they're like studying the blueprint. Right.

In 2012, at the Tampa convention, Romney was going to lose. Everybody knew he was going to lose. I'm just saying, this is very weird to be here in this moment. And they're winning and that they know that they're winning. And I think that they think they're winning big. And so I think they can almost afford to take their foot off the gas a little bit and try to say, try to sort of,

broaden their appeal soften their message try to keep everybody let Nikki Haley speak at the last minute yep as I reported on Thursday she was not invited and she had not asked it was Trump's decision to offer her a spot that's a big deal Donald Olive Branch Trump that's what we're gonna start calling him did that happen though after he was shot at I'm not sure oh no I think it was before it was before just before wow I think we know what happened this weekend regardless yeah

So he may be feeling magnanimous as he's feeling like he's closer to winning. I mean, in your piece, Chris LaCivita, who's essentially the number two, right, on the campaign, he said that he thought he was going to win as many as 320 electorate votes. And this was before the debate? Yeah, to be clear, I don't think 320 is their ceiling at all. But they were saying that heading into the debate, they felt like the modeling suggested that they were going to win 320 electoral votes. But if you look at where we are now,

Post-debate, post-Donald Trump shooting,

And if you believe some of the polls you see on the ground, if you believe some of the chatter about, you know, Virginia coming into play, New Mexico coming into play. New Hampshire. New Hampshire coming into play. Maybe even Colorado, New Jersey. I mean. New Jersey. I mean, really. They're talking about that. They're actually talking about that. Well, I grew up in a red district in New Jersey because Italian Americans were one of like the first ethnic groups to come out for Trump. And they, like I said, my dad and the hillbilly elegy. I read that book and I thought a lot about my own family. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, look, and by the way, to be clear for anybody who's listening right now, who's like these two idiots have drunk on the Kool-Aid. We have not had the Kool-Aid, but I think like Trump's not going to win New Jersey probably. Okay. Or New York, even though he was just 10 points down from Biden before the debate. He doesn't need to win those places. He doesn't need to. If he's pushing outward from the core battleground states, and if he is forcing Democrats to play defense in what have been very safe blue states for the last two, three, four presidential elections,

then you are deep into landslide territory at that point. Well, it also reflects Congress because if Biden's only up by 10 points in New York and basically the House rests in New York, right? In California. In California, but four seats is all you need. There are about four tough seats in New York that the Democrats could ostensibly win back. But if they're all running ahead of Biden, it's really hard.

Way ahead of Biden. And like even here, I mean, we're in Wisconsin, obviously. They're spending $30 million in New York alone, the Democrats. And that's the thing, right, is that they're going to have to start triaging their resources. And if the Biden campaign wants to win, they've got to win here in Wisconsin. They've got to win Michigan and they've got to win Pennsylvania. Those are going to be three really difficult states. And Trump only lost by a point in 2020 in Pennsylvania. And in Wisconsin, he lost by 20,000 votes here.

He lost by around 80,000 in Pennsylvania. He lost by about 155,000 in Michigan. And listen, like what people don't recognize, I think, is if you think about the fundamentals of this campaign,

You know, Biden's the president. The election's a referendum on him. The economy has been up and down. Inflation has been a huge problem. The southern border has been a total disaster and has been handled terribly by the administration every step of the way. There are so many things...

that are just working against Biden at this point. - Right. - Even before you get into his age, his faculties, the debate. - Yeah. - He looks like he's got a foot in the grave half the time. Like these are huge political liabilities. - He's another test tonight. He's going on Lester Holt. - And that's the thing, like he just, his margin for error is zero, right? - Yeah. - Like it's just, it's very, it's already hard to see him climbing out of this hole. But if you think about all the advantages, all the tailwinds that the Trump campaign has,

You can understand, I think, going back to your previous question, why they are now softening up a little bit, trying to broaden. Hey, Nikki, you want to come speak? Come on. We'd like to have you. Bring her voters over. 20% of the Republican Party, I mean, primary voters voted for her. Yep. And all these suburban women who the campaign says they don't

necessarily care about as much, that they're not prioritizing. Well, hold on a second. What if suddenly you start to bring some of those women back into the fold? That's what, again, I guess there are layers to what is a blowout election, what is a landslide election. But if Trump is winning

15 to 20% of the black vote and he's winning a decent chunk of suburban women, then that is a blowout. I mean, that's, that is a, that's going to be a route at the ballot box. Yeah. How does that change his mandate? He might have the house. He'll definitely have the Senate. I mean, that's pretty much foregone conclusion. Don't you think at this point? Yes.

Yes, I do. And that's the thing that Democrats are worried about, to be clear. Like, again, I live in Michigan. I travel around the Midwest constantly. I know a lot of elected officials, D and R. And when I talk to Democrats over the past couple of months, again, most of this predating the horrible debate and then predating the shooting, the assassination attempt, what Democrats have been saying is, look,

It's one thing if Biden wants to go down and just not listen to the people around him and wants to ignore the polling, all that. But he would be taking us down too. Oh, yeah. They're all playing the violin on the Titanic whenever I speak to Democrats. Ranking Democrats are like great. And some of them won't come back. No. They're in swing district. No, and you can't recover from... I mean, look, put it this way. You've probably got 18 to 20 House races where...

even if the Democrat outruns Biden by a healthy three and a half, four points, that's still not going to be enough. Yeah. And you're going to have a handful of Senate races that are like that too. Like the Wisconsin polling here last week showed Tammy Baldwin running. Five points. Yeah. I thought it was five or six. No. Yeah. I thought AARP had a poll like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, that's what it's going to have to be.

Trump is five points ahead of Biden right now in Wisconsin, according to AARP. And Baldwin was, I think, six ahead of where Biden was. I don't remember. She was still running ahead of her challenger. But that's what it's going to have to be. You're going to have to have Democrats running five, six,

six, six and a half, seven points ahead of Biden in order to survive in those districts. And like, we just don't see that very often. We don't see people out running the top of the ticket by that much. You have to be such a spectacular candidate. Yes. And even then. And even if you are like. You could be like John Tester who literally looks like a farmer from Montana. Right. He probably will not win his Senate race. Well, think about

like, okay, so if you go back, I don't have all these numbers off the top of my head. So give me a little bit of slack here. But like, if you go back and think about 2022 and then 2020, what you saw from some of the, some of the house Democrats who ran well ahead of the top of ticket in their States, not just presidential and 20, but then in 22 as well, you had certain Democrats who were running pretty significantly ahead of, uh,

who were not as talented, let's say. Like Kathy Hochul in New York. Yes. Like Pat Ryan. Yes, exactly. She didn't do well. No, that's a perfect. And so what was that number though? My guess is it wasn't more than five. No, it wasn't. It was probably like three and a half or four. Yeah. Right. So it's really unusual. You're potentially entering a territory where it's not just Trump as president. It's Trump with huge House majority, huge Senate majority. And by the way, the Supreme Court just said that he can kind of do what he wants.

- This episode is brought to you by Experian. I don't know if you've ever looked in your subscriptions on your phone and noticed that you had like four or five subscriptions. Maybe you didn't realize you were still paying for, or maybe you got some email for something and you're like, "I thought I canceled that." Well, this is what happens. These days anyone could be missing out on savings from subscriptions they've totally forgotten about. It's not just the ones you forgot to get rid of, it's the ones that they have better deals.

And that's where Experian comes in. It's like a personal assistant for your subscriptions. It can cancel over 200 plus subscriptions in categories like streaming services, meal kits, entertainment apps, and more. You could save an average of $270 per year

Plus, they'll even let you know if your provider offers you a better deal to stick around. Find out how much you could save by downloading the Experian app today. Results will vary, not all subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed, $207 a year average. Estimated savings with OnePlus cancellation. Paid membership with connected payment accounts required. See Experian.com for details.

This episode is brought to you by Vitamin Water. So much of what the world is obsessed with starts out in New York City. It's a place full of style and character that has something for everyone. With a range of flavors to meet any kind of taste, it's no wonder Vitamin Water was born there. Colorful, flavorful, anything but boring, Vitamin Water injects a daily dose of vibrancy into a watered-down life. Grab a Vitamin Water today. Vitamin Water is a registered trademark of Glasso.

This episode is brought to you by Vitamin Water. Food, entertainment, sports teams. New York City is one of those places that oozes choice. It's got something for every taste. So it's fitting that Vitamin Water was born there. It's a product of its environment. Colorful,

That's where I want to go with you to Project 2025 because people ask me about this all the time. And just for, you know, top line,

In Project 2025, they say we want to have a federal mandate to ban abortion, do it through Congress, right, to make it an actual law across the country. They want to basically gut the bureaucracy and put their own new civil servants in there. And total, you know, immigration ban, basically mass deportation. There's a lot of other shocking policy prescriptions in a 900-page document that most people have read but don't really understand, and it's coming from the Heritage Foundation.

So I'm wondering, what do you think of this document? What do you think of Project 2025? I know the Trump team is distancing themselves from it. Trump says, I don't know anything about this. He obviously believes it's politically toxic. But do you think at the end of the day he will end up using it? And it's not that far off from what he said in the past.

I'm just sort of curious as to what you make of Project 2025, because people ask me about it all the time. And I really, I just don't know what to say, because I don't know if the Trump team is trying to throw us off by saying, oh, don't pay attention to them. We don't bless this when there are so many Trump people there. So a couple of things. I think part of the reason that Trump...

and Trump himself have been kind of lashing out at Project 2025 lately is not just because it's politically toxic, which I think in its own way it is and will be. And Democrats are, I think you've just seen in the last few weeks, really, a lot of Democrats have really started to incorporate it into their messaging and are trying to talk about Project 2025 as much as they can. Handmaid's tale kind of stuff. Yes, totally, right? I think the other piece of it though, Tara, that I've picked up on is that the Trump people are just genuinely annoyed

They're annoyed that the folks at Project 2025... Have hijacked their agenda. And they've been sort of running around, puffing their chests out, being like, oh, we're going to run the second Trump administration. They're collecting resumes. They're collecting resumes and they're also telling people, like they're running around town telling anybody who will listen that like we're driving the bus in a second Trump administration. We are going to gut the FDA and put our people in there. Yeah. And if we know one thing about Donald J. Trump, it's that the second he...

catches any whiff of someone trying to sort of upstage him, he does not take kindly to it. And so I think that in a lot of ways, the Project 2025 guys have gotten too big for their britches and that has hurt them. But to your question, ultimately, do some of these prescriptions find their way into the priority set of a second Trump administration? I think they do. Sure. Banning Mifepristone?

This is the abortion pill. So that one, I don't think so. And I'll tell you why. Do you remember, this is, I mean, so much has gone down the memory hole over the last eight years, but do you remember one of the moments in 16 that I still think about sometimes and sort of chuckle? Like, how did we get to this point? Trump defended Planned Parenthood on stage during one of the Republican debates. And that was a moment where, I mean, Planned Parenthood is like

one of the boogeymen to the Republican party going back decades and decades. So for Donald Trump to stand on the stage and defend Planned Parenthood, I think that that was something that was like an honest, raw insight into who he is as a guy who spent most of his life as a New York playboy, pro-choice, outspoken pro-choice advocate, right?

And I think that- Former Democrat. Former Democrat. Gave money to the Clintons. By the way, Sam Numburg, who worked for him, said that he taught him his abortion policy stance, saying, using the words L-I-R-R, like the Long Island Railroad, because that was the only way he would remember it, life, incest, and rape. Yeah. As the exceptions. That's good. That was how they had to teach him how to have a more conservative stance on abortion. That's so amazing. Yes. Sam told you that? Yes. Was it on this podcast? Yes. Really? Yes.

Oh my gosh. Sorry, I wasn't listening. Or maybe he told me off the record. No, he did say it on the pod. And so like, are we surprised that they've watered down the platform here and that they've stamped out some of the core social conservative, you know, principles that had been sort of animating the platform for so long? Not really, because I think Trump in his heart of hearts, as much signaling as Trump has done to the pro-life community. And yes, he put, you know, judges on the bench. He has taken credit.

for overturning Roe v. Wade. But I think to his core, Trump is not ever going to be a sort of culture warrior on the abortion issue, right? And so- He'll take credit for it in the right crowds. But he's not going to go out of his way to ban the abortion pill. Like, I would be shocked. Right. Well, I mean, he does call abortion the A word.

But here's the thing. He's only got one term. He's not running for reelection. But there are two ways to interpret that, right? Way number one is that he's going to give the base everything they ever wanted because he doesn't have to worry about reelection. Way number two, and I've had a couple of people, independent of one another, talk to me about this. Way number two is that this is a guy who is desperate to be liked, desperate to be loved. He wants to leave with a high approval rating. He does not want to be remembered as the guy who half of America disliked.

despised, right? He wants to be like Berlusconi where they just keep him coming back for more and more. And as foolish as that may sound, like somebody could be listening to this and they're like, do we really think Trump is going to use a second term to try to broaden his legacy and to appeal to the masses? I'm not saying that that's likely, but I like,

Is there, especially after the events of the last 72 hours, is there a world in which Donald Trump does govern somewhat differently in a second term and basically now has a political latitude to stiff arm the evangelical base, to stiff arm the Heritage Foundation on certain things that are priorities for them, but not for him? I can't.

Sure, I could conceive of that. Interesting. Yeah, like don't go to Vegas on it or anything, but like- Do you think he'll try to run again? Can we get through this convention first before I answer that question? I'm going too far. I'm going too far ahead. Oh my gosh. Well, La Cevita certainly had a laugh with me when, you know, because I said to him, I said, well, this is Trump's last campaign, right? Win or lose.

And Chris LaCivita said, well, I don't know. He might just run again, right? Isn't that what you guys are talking about? I don't... Listen, guy's gonna be pretty old. He'll be Biden's age if he wants to run again. He'll be Biden's age. And, you know, maybe at that point he's had enough of this. And look, the J.D. Vance pick. He has chosen, for all intents and purposes, he has chosen his heir apparent to the MAGA empire. So why would he need to run again? I think it's so interesting that he chose Don Jr. because of all...

He chose Don Jr. over Melania because Melania wanted Doug Burgum. She liked his wife, Catherine. They did some initiatives together in the White House. Then again, Melania also encouraged him to endorse Dr. Oz, and that didn't work out so well in Pennsylvania. Then, you know, Sean Hannity was pushing him for Marco Rubio. Susie Wiles, his campaign manager, liked Marco Rubio. Then you had Tucker, who talks to him all the time. And Don Jr., his son, pushing for J.D. Vance. Yeah.

And Murdoch has been calling him and he said anyone but J.D. Vance. And I wonder if that sort of tipped the scales towards J.D. because he hates Murdoch. That probably sealed the deal, right? If Murdoch knew it was good for him, he would not have weighed in. Yeah, and Murdoch's like pushing Glenn Youngkin at the last minute. He's like, but if not Doug Burgum or Marco Rubio, because he's worried about an isolationist on the world stage. I mean, like, how does this change things, J.D. Vance? Do you think...

We will pull completely out of Ukraine in terms of like our support. I mean, I know we're not actually in there, but we're giving millions and billions of dollars of monetary support. You do wonder, like, does Trump deputize Vance, assuming they win, of course, with a sort of

sweeping portfolio on foreign policy or even more to the point, because the foreign policy bit of it, I think, is inextricable from the sort of populist let's rebuild home first argument that you hear from people like Vance. Right. And I think if J.D. Vance had his druthers, he would every penny that's going to Ukraine would be pumped back into Ukraine.

you know, rural Ohio and places like it. And so if that's his policy portfolio, either side of that equation, whether it's the sort of domestic, you know, their version of build back better or whatever the heck they would call it, or if it's the foreign policy thing or whether it's both, I actually think that Vance could be far more influential than Pence was. Because Pence basically did all the foreign travel for Trump, at least towards the end. And also Pence was really, really,

really influential with the court picks. Pence was really influential with a lot of this sort of domestic Hill portfolio, you know. Legislative. He knew how to work the Hill. Taxes. Yeah. I mean, but I don't think Vance is anybody's idea of like a horse trader on Capitol Hill, right? No. I mean, he's been there for two years. He's been there for two years. He's still trying to find the men's room. He doesn't even really have a lot of friends.

I mean, he's too busy going on Fox News to make friends. Yeah. What is the natural role for a guy who's, you know, when Obama runs and wins, he picks Biden because he's the veteran. You know, the guy's been on the Hill for decades and he's got all the relationships. The stable Washington hand, the older white gentleman. Yes. And Biden obviously didn't need that with Harris. So he picked Harris for a different set of reasons, which have now come back to bite him, we might add.

And so does Trump view Vance as a genuine governing partner or more as a sort of signal to the masses of this is what we're doing now? Yeah. This is who we are now. I mean, Viktor Orban came back and in an interview said that he believes that if Trump is elected, that the U.S. will cease all engagement with Ukraine, will stop providing weapons, artillery, and will essentially let

the war be handled and essentially let Russia win. And he believes that the, you know, NATO will not step up without the U.S. Or do you think that's a warning? I don't know. Like, if you listen to Trump, I noticed that a couple of times in the last few months, he's sort of said, vis-a-vis Ukraine, he's sort of said, like, well, nobody knows what I'm really thinking on this. Like, basically, he was, I think, pushing back on the notion that he would, day one, like, just

you know, shut off the spigot and Ukraine wouldn't get another dime from a president, Donald Trump. Like, I think Trump has tried to make it known that like, he's his own man on this issue. And he's, he's not with the neocons, but he's also not with the isolationists. Like he's going to take a sort of a more nuanced approach to it. Maybe he will. I, it's hard to say. I mean, he considered Marco Rubio, who is not,

an isolationist. He is considered a neocon by many. Totally. I think it would like almost self-identify as a neocon. Yeah, he would. And so I think that tells you something, right? I just had that same thought. And also like some of the people who Trump,

maintained decent relationships with throughout his administration on the foreign policy front. People who, like in some cases, we're talking about not political appointees to DOD or DHS, but like some of the officials there. Like Mike Pompeo? I mean, has he stayed in touch with him or not? Well, I don't know that he and Pompeo are like buds, but I guess, and this is the part that is going to make a lot of the...

sort of the true believers, the MAGA diehards a little bit nervous because you can't simultaneously carry out on the wishes of the Project 2025 platform and lean on some of the expertise of the deep state. But I think that that's going to be the needle that a second Trump administration would constantly be trying to thread. In other words,

Whatever Trump says about the bureaucrats who are sort of sabotaging him behind the scenes and all of that, if you talk to people around Trump,

During his presidency, after his presidency, in this campaign, they actually talk about how he learned a lot from his experience being in government and how and he did recognize the value of experience and expertise. And I actually had a couple of people tell me that like he's even at times sort of voiced a little bit of regret, like a little bit of remorse about the way that he handled some of those things.

This is not me buttering everybody up to believe that we're in for a new and improved Donald J. Trump, that he's going to be a completely different guy. I don't think that's at all true. But I also think that sometimes the sort of the meta narratives around the man get a little carried away. Well, they work, too. They work. Yeah. For political purposes. Yeah. And we sort of copy and paste and, you know, like that.

But I don't know. I guess my strong gut sense from a lot of time spent around his people is that we actually could get something different at some level. And it's hard to...

to sort of qualify this, but we could get something different than what we got in the first term. And it could be something different than what we're expecting. Will there be turmoil and leaking and chaos in the West Wing? Yeah, sure. Of course there will be. But I don't- I don't know though, because there's not a lot of turmoil and leaking coming out of this campaign. That's true. And I wanted to ask you about that. He's not the same Donald Trump. There isn't leaking out of the campaign-

What's going on? How is this new team able to manage him? Look, so Susie Wiles and Chris Lasavita are professionals. Trump has not always been surrounded by professionals, at least on the campaigns that he's run in the past. You mean like Corey Lewandowski? I'm not going to name names. I mean, listen, at the end of the day, Trump has two people running this operation who have convinced him at some critical junctures that he needs to

sort of grow up and become a, you know, one of them, somebody actually said to me at one point, and I thought this was really insightful. They said, look, he may never become like the professional president that everybody's been waiting for, but he actually sort of has become a professional political candidate. And that's interesting, right? Like he has, and I don't know that I totally agree with it. Although his truth socials are fucking nuts. His truth socials are still off the wall, but he's really speaking. But no one's paying attention. No, he's preaching to the choir over there. Yeah, it's like if a tree falls in the forest and no one covers it. Normies are not on truth social. But like, I think that there's some truth to the idea that

that Trump now, like if you look at his coming around on mail voting, if you look at some of the sort of key tactical decisions being made in the campaign... Although it feels a little late on the mail voting, but we can go to that another day. Yeah, we can another day. We'll have to do a follow-up. Yeah, damn it, Tim, you're going to have to come back. No, but like, you know, I think like he...

He has empowered people who he recognizes are really good at what they do. And they have not just operated in a silo. They have actively worked him to get him to a place where he is making better decisions, doing smarter things. And that has made a huge difference. We see a campaign that in many ways is sort of optimized and that is running, clicking on all cylinders, to use whatever cliche. And I think the question for me from your segue, Tara, is like,

Are there any implications from that that we could apply to a second Trump White House? I think it's way too soon to draw that conclusion because campaigning and governing are two very different things. But if anyone out there who is totally freaked out by Donald Trump and who hates the man is looking for any sort of a silver lining come November, if in fact he wins and if he wins big with a mandate and he's got the House and the Senate, like,

maybe there is a silver lining in the fact that he's run a pretty normal and professional political campaign. And maybe that has taught him some lesson about needing to have sophisticated, smart, experienced people around him. Or the other way to look at it is he has people around him who actually know how to get shit done. So whatever he wants to do won't be blocked by the people who are, you know, the alleged like adults in the room.

Right. Yes. Trying to stop his worst instincts. Perhaps now he has people around him who could effectuate his worst instincts. Yeah. Well, right. That's the other way to look at it. Paul Ryan's and the Mitch McConnell's out of the way. Yep. And now he can operate. Liz Cheney's goodbye. Liz Cheney. Right. And now he can operate. He's, he's, he's sort of unshackled with people who can actually make shit happen. Yes. And that's a second scenario that in a much darker scenario, uh, certainly for some of your listeners. And frankly, I think probably more likely scenario than the first one.

Okay. Well on that note, on that sunny note, Tim Alberta, thanks for coming on the show. My pleasure. It's been really fun. I got to say, I want to have you on again. We can do it whenever you want. We are looking out here at the media row RNC. We're both heading to media hits right now. I'm going on Sirius XM with my friend, Julie Mason, who is a regular on the show. Are you coming after me? Oh,

What time's your hit? 420. Mine's at 425. Oh my gosh, we better get down there. Okay, we better go. Bye. That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Christopher Sutton and Connor Nevins. If you like my show, please subscribe.

Please rate it, subscribe, share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, please go to puck.news slash Tara Palmieri and sign up for my newsletter, The Best and the Brightest. You can use the discount code Tara20. I'll be back again tomorrow because why not? I'm here at the RNC and you deserve all the scoops. I'm going to speak with a true Trump insider, his political director tomorrow, James Blair. See you then.