The Trump vs Biden TV debates are GO – Plus “Satire IS the opposition,” says boss of The Onion
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Hello and welcome to American Friction, the new weekly US politics podcast out every Friday from the makers of Oh God What Now, The Bunker and Papercuts. Each week in the run up to November's US presidential election, we'll be unpacking everything you need to know about the vote in plain English, speaking to leading experts about the bizarre twists and turns US politics has to offer. And there's a lot.

I'm Chris Jones and usually I'm joined by Podmasters Managing Editor and former Newsweek journalist Jacob Jarvis, but he selfishly decided that he needs a holiday. Pathetic. But don't be afraid because ready and raring to go as she is every week on this podcast is Rolling Stone Magazine politics reporter Nikki McCann-Ramirez. Hello Nikki. Hello Chris and only Chris.

Hello. You must be all politics out already this week with everything that's been going on, but all good to go? Oh my God, absolutely. There is a ton to unpack this week. We have more court news. Trump's ex-fixer, Michael Cohen, has been testifying in the Manhattan hush money trial, and it is not looking good for the former president.

That's right, and it's also game on. Biden and Trump agree to one-on-one debates on CNN and ABC. What are the rules? What can we expect? And could these debates completely alter the course of the election race? And later on, we're also joined by CEO of The Onion, Ben Collins. We'll ask him why American politics and satire are a match made in heaven.

And in the final part of this episode, we'll be unpacking two important issues that we think should be getting more airtime leading up to November's election. All that plus, is Nigel Farage really back off to America? It's 24 weeks until the U.S. election. You're listening to American Friction.

First up, Biden and Trump have agreed to live televised debates. The first will take place next month on June 27th, hosted by CNN, and the other by ABC on September the 10th. We weren't really sure that there would be any debates at all between the two in the build-up to this election. Nikki, how important will these broadcasts actually be? Oh, they're huge. They are going to be huge. The presidential debates in American elections...

are some of the most consequential public appearances presidential candidates can give ahead of the November vote.

The reality is that a lot of American voters are not super tuned in to the day-to-day machinations of American politics. They come in every once in a while when there's major events. So the moments in time when you have the two candidates meeting face-to-face on a stage, talking to each other directly, those are hugely informative to voters, particularly undecided voters. Yeah.

And what are the rules for these debates that are coming up? I think, isn't there a five minute cutoff on the microphone? So basically Trump just can't go on and on and on and on. Yeah, in the past.

given networks experience with Trump and the fact that he likes to ramble on and interrupt people. It also became a pretty big problem in the Republican and Democratic primaries in the past couple cycles when there were a ton of presidential candidates and you really needed to limit how much airtime each person got. Networks have basically implemented a mute button where like,

if you're interrupting too much or talking too much, they'll literally just cut out your microphone. Yeah. I think the biggest thing that came out of these debates is that to qualify for

The candidate will need to be registered in enough states to win the electoral college. Essentially, third-party candidate RFK Jr., who we've discussed a couple times on the pod, will probably not qualify for this. And that is saving grace for everyone, really. He just spurs conspiracy theories. Yeah, it's also just a matter of...

I think the reality is at this point that Trump and Biden are the two de facto nominees. Yeah. One key difference here is that these two debates were...

will be debates hosted by television networks in the United States. Typically, there is a commission called the Presidential Debate Commission, which hosts a series of debates leading up to the election. Biden stated yesterday that he would not be participating in debates related to the Presidential Debate Commission. He's only going to do these two network debates. So that also...

Kind of speaks to the reality that when network debates are negotiated, the two candidates will come in and be kind of like, this is our list of demands. Right. And they'll negotiate it out. And I'm sure there are talks behind the scenes from both candidates about how much they do not want RFK Jr. to be on that stage. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Just on Biden, why has he accepted to do these debates? Is it a case of he feels like maybe he has to because it is much closer than potentially it really should be? Yes. And also, I don't think there's a way that Biden can avoid these debates, given all the discussion about his age and cognitive fitness.

It's a little bit of a between a rock and a hard place. Obviously, if you do the debate, you're exposing yourself to attacks. You could have a moment where you stumble and your opponent gets a really good jab in. That'll go viral. People will see it.

But if Biden skipped the debates, then it hands Trump this line of attack that is, he's afraid of me. He can't do it. He's not capable. So this back and forth has been actually going on for a while now. There's a lot of discussion about whether these two would debate. Trump pretty notoriously at this point did not debate any of his Republican rivals in the primary. But as soon as Nikki Haley dropped out, challenged Biden to a debate,

Last week, Biden told Howard Stern that he would be happy to debate Trump at any time. Trump's camp agreed. And I think Biden really intelligently kind of seized the moment and issued a very public challenge that was...

distributed across all his social media, basically being like, I'll do it not only once, but twice, name your date. And then he made fun of Trump for being in court every day of the week, except Wednesday. It was a good move because while this discussion had been going on in the background, it was the kind of thing that only people who are really in tune

with sort of the day-to-day speeches and the tweets and truth social posts that these candidates are making would have known about. Whereas Biden took the opportunity to put out sort of a widespread announcement, like, hey, I'm down to debate, and just immediately put Trump in a position where he was the one that looked like he was responding, even though this conversation has been ongoing.

Yeah. And interestingly, I saw that Trump announced a date that they would debate on Fox News without there being any agreement at all from the Biden camp. That's not going ahead as we record, as far as I'm aware. But do you think there's a world where Biden would ever agree to debate Donald Trump on Fox News?

I mean, it's plausible. Fox News has definitely hosted debates before. I think the campaign would definitely try and shy away from that, especially if they're only doing network debates. But, I mean, I think the reality is that they're probably going to try and stick to this line of, we've agreed to two debates. That's all we're giving it. I also think...

On CNN versus a Fox News, the Biden campaign already knows that CNN has a network of anchors and journalists who are very willing to publicly push back on misinformation that Trump might say in the campaign, whereas Fox News is not going to do that for Trump. So I think it's just to their advantage to avoid that.

Away from the debates now and onto something else that's been going on for ages and we really wish it'd go away, but it won't. And that's the hush money trial in Manhattan because Michael Cohen has taken a break from TikTok and he's taking the stand instead. What's he said so far? And give me a bit of backstory as well. Why is he there? Absolutely. So Michael Cohen was Trump's former attorney and a like, quote unquote, fixer.

He worked for Trump for more than a decade. And we call this the hush money case. But in reality, what Trump is accused of is the falsification of business documents. What Manhattan prosecutors are alleging is that in 2016, weeks before the election, the Trump campaign got wind that Stormy Daniels, this porn star...

was shopping out a story to various tabloid publications about an alleged affair she had with the president in 2006. The campaign, what they stand accused of is that Cohen paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence, to get her to sign an NDA, to not talk about it, and basically to make the story go away. That in itself is not illegal.

What they are accused of doing is masking that payment as legal fees because Trump would end up making payments to Michael Cohen, reimbursing him for the money he paid to Stormy Daniels. Yeah. Masking that as legal fees when what prosecutors allege is that in reality, that was an unlawful campaign contribution by Michael Cohen to the Trump campaign.

So what we've heard throughout this trial is a lot of witnesses who come up to the stand to talk about

and talk about Michael Cohen's role in the case. A lot of people say that Michael Cohen was the person they were dealing with when they were organizing hush money payments because Stormy Daniels was not the only one. There were two others that were handled by the National Enquirer. The former head of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, also testified that he was dealing with Michael Cohen directly, that he had had a meeting with Trump and Cohen in 2015 before Trump announced that he was running for president, where they discussed how...

how the National Enquirer and Pecker's other tabloid publications could help the Trump campaign. So you had a lot of people talking about Cohen's role in this, but Cohen had a really close relationship with Donald Trump. He's testified that they basically communicated every day, that he did virtually nothing without Trump's approval. So by putting him on the stand, prosecutors are making that final link

between this conspiracy to silence Stormy Daniels, the way the payment was organized to Donald Trump, because Cohen has now testified that he made Trump aware of the Stormy Daniels allegations, that Trump approved Cohen's payment to Daniels, and that then Trump was involved in setting up the payments to reimburse Cohen that were put in the records for the Trump Organization as legal fees.

even though Cohen himself admitted on the stand that he was doing very little legal work for Trump in this year. When we look at this case...

I watched Fox News and I was watching Jesse Waters. Why would you do that? Sorry, everyone. I know, I know, I just was. But there was a point that he made that suggested that perhaps this is some kind of revenge tour for Cohen by taking the stand and talking against Trump in this case, because obviously Michael Cohen went to prison in 2018 for bank fraud and campaign finance violations.

Is this complete, you know, Fox News, what we've come to expect? This is spinning the story in a way that isn't true. Or is there a little bit of truth to this, do you think? I think there is a little bit of truth to it. And Michael Cohen has admitted it on the witness stand. I don't think anyone can say that Cohen doesn't feel that he deserves some sort of retribution. Cohen, like a lot of people in Trump's orbit, became a fall guy.

There are so many people, Rudy Giuliani, like Boris Epstein, so many of the lawyers who helped Trump's team in 2020,

who are under indictment, who are facing criminal penalties, who did face criminal penalties. We'll talk about Steve Bannon later for cases and incidents related to Donald Trump. And Trump has yet to face any accountability. The people around him are typically the ones that end up in hot water. So Cohen admitted on the stand Thursday, literally right before we sat down to record this,

that he does feel that the trial has a personal impact on him. I think a really important thing to remember here is that Michael Cohen was convicted of perjury. He lied to federal investigators attempting to cover up information related to the Russia investigation on behalf of Trump. Cohen likely does not want to go back to prison, and this is an incredibly public trial. Every single word that is being said on the stand is being heavily scrutinized by

And I don't think Cohen would voluntarily put himself in a position where he would once again be charged with perjury. Because he's also entered a cooperation agreement with Manhattan prosecutors to kind of protect himself a little bit from any further charges related to this case. You mentioned Cohen might not want to go to prison, which I'm sure he doesn't go back to prison again, I should add. But

Someone who might be on their way to prison that you've just mentioned, Steve Bannon, another former aide to Donald Trump who...

He's not having a good time at the moment. A bit of backstory. He was convicted back in 2022 of two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to respond or comply with a subpoena request issued by the January 6th House Select Committee. He appealed that decision, but now he's lost it. It's four months that he could be serving behind bars. If he serves that soon, he'll obviously be out of play soon.

for the upcoming election. And he's been a massive player in right-wing, I want to say conspiracy theory, really, because he is. He's a massive player in that with his War Room podcast, for example, and also spinning stories in favor of Trump. So if he does get locked away and locked away in time for the presidential election, then

How big of a blow is that for the GOP? I think it's middling. And I'll explain why. So obviously, Bannon convicted in 2022 of contempt of Congress. The key thing here is that the judge allowed him to defer actually serving out the sentence until the appeals process was over. As you said, he lost a major appeal in D.C.,

His two options at this point, or three options, we'll say, are to serve the sentence, request that the D.C. Appeals Court completely rehear the case, which they are very unlikely to do because they were very firm in their ruling, or appeal to the Supreme Court. And it's pretty unlikely the Supreme Court would take up a case of this nature. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that Congress has the right to enforce subpoenas. And this is what happens when Congress enforces a subpoena. What I will say...

is that Bannon's influence, direct influence with Trump, has waned considerably since the aftermath of the 2020 election. He's still definitely in the orbit. He's still a major player. But he's no longer like the chief advisor, the confidant that he once was to Donald Trump. What he does still have a lot of influence with is lawmakers in Congress, right?

People like Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, regular guests on his podcast. His podcast, his radio show, is fundamentally a safe space where conservatives can say pretty much whatever the fuck they want about their plans for a potential future Trump administration, whatever heinous views they hold, with little repercussion. It's not like a major network where they're sort of the owners to push back on things.

Oh, like a week or two ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene went on Steve Bannon's podcast and like heavily criticized Fox News on being like too friendly in their coverage of Biden. And one, that's not true. Fox News hates Joe Biden. But Fox News, after the Dominion like election fraud lawsuit, has been in a position where they need to be really careful about what they say about the 2020 election because they could risk another lawsuit.

Yeah. Steve Bannon doesn't have to worry about that. Steve Bannon is the place where all the true believers can go to espouse whatever sort of rhetoric they would like with little fear of consequence, little fear of being banned from the show. And...

I think while it would absolutely have an impact because he does have a massive program and it has a really widespread reach and he is an important figure within Magaland whose absence would likely be felt. I think it's also important to remember that the right has built up such a widespread network of like independent media apparatuses that host their own radio shows, their own podcast. There's networks like OAN and Newsmax, right?

That would very easily fill in that gap. Quite frankly, I think if I were Steve Bannon, which thank God I'm not, and I was looking back at this and thinking if I could have done anything differently, I would have just probably served the four months immediately after the sentencing because now...

He risks being completely sidelined in election season when Trump and his team are brainstorming and figuring out who's going to come into the administration or a potential administration, who they're going to hire, where all the players that have been waiting in the wings for four years would fit in if Trump wins. And if Bannon is absent for that, that could hurt him in the long term.

Do you think there will ever be an episode where we don't mention Marjorie Taylor Greene? God, no. I really hope so. She occupies too much space in my brain. It's really just wild how, especially in the post-Kevin McCarthy era of this Congress, she's really just thrust herself into the spotlight. She's everywhere. She really is everywhere. She really is everywhere. I wish she wasn't. Yeah. Yeah.

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Satire has been a force in American politics since the 1700s, when many were still fighting for independence from Britain. Then it took the form of scribbled down cartoons. Flash forward to today and satire is still very much around. Late night talk show hosts pave the way in more modern times. Saturday Night Live, for example, is as popular as ever and has been for more than 50 years.

So how has political satire and dirt evolved and how impactful is it to this very day? Well, to answer that, we're delighted to say that we're now joined by Ben Collins, who's CEO of The Onion, a long running media company that has been taking the piss out of American politics since 1988. Hi, Ben. Hey, how's it going?

All good. Thank you very much. Very simple first question. Why are politics and satire in America so closely integrated? Oh, especially right now because nothing is true. Therefore, anything can be true. Like we're in a good spot right now where one guy completely wrecked the idea that things can just be happening. Like it can be raining outside or something. And that happened about 10 years ago. I don't know if you've heard of this guy. He sucks shit. His name is Donald Trump.

You guys heard of him? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've heard of that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's no good. Anyways, we are a country that's based on incredibly large myths and big, ridiculous lies. And sometimes the best way to tell the truth in these moments, especially when everyone is pretending to be the only people who, you know, have access to the real truth, is to actively pretend like you have no accordance to it whatsoever. And that's what we're doing at The Onion. For example, our motto is to stultus es, which in Latin means you are stupid. So.

So we are dealing with people at the level they deserve. You mentioned, you know, lots of stupid people around there. Is it just the stupid people that get satire kind of directed at them? Or is it quite a broad, broad spectrum as in everyone's fair game? Oh, everyone's fair game. Absolutely. Trust me. I don't think anybody's more angry at us right now than people. I didn't know this existed, but people who like love Joe Biden, right?

Like, there are people who love Joe Biden. I didn't even know these people were around. But those people are very angry at us. And I am not going to pretend he is anywhere near the threat to democracy that Donald Trump is. But they're all fair game. If you are out there being a caricature, I think it is reasonable to go after that person, including me. So the second you start going after one thing and not another is when you start really losing the plot about what's supposed to be funny. So tell me about what's going on with Biden. You're saying you're getting loads of backlash.

What's that over and what are these people saying? Oh, yeah. I mean, for example, we've been doing this thing in America called beating our college students with clubs. I don't recommend this. I think it's a bad way to gain support for your candidate, but they have different ideas. And we've been pretty clear eyed about this. You know, the Onion started as a campus publication in Madison, Wisconsin.

And it would be kind of weird for us to be like, ah, yeah, beat those college kids with clubs, please. Fair enough. Yeah. You say you do this for, you know, everyone's fair game. So does that mean you just never have a break from any of this? There's just backlash constantly? Or is the amount of support that you get for the type of stuff you do also, is it even? Oh, no, it's definitely even. It's sort of like how, you know, when people are like, ah, rock music hasn't been good since I was 19 and before I knew what taxes were.

There's a lot of that going on with The Onion. If you go to Twitter where 15 different guys named Stephen Miller tell you that The Onion hasn't been funny since they were a junior in high school, that's probably true for them, but it's also not really true for almost everybody else. If you go to our TikTok, the kids really like us. We still sort of speak to the more empathetic people.

on planet Earth who are not hardened by the whims of politicians. And I also want to say, like, we have a standard and pretty ritualized adherence to being good to those young people. And we've maintained this editorial status for 30 years because our editor-in-chief has been here for 27 years. And our voice and cadence and our giant alumni network

You know, they're committed to the same exact fight, which is make fun of people who are trying to beat you down. I'd love to talk a little bit about just how satire, things like SNL, late night shows, even The Onion can often feel like they're responding to sort of immediate political and cultural trends.

But I think The Onion, since it's been around so long, also has a lot of pieces that are just incredibly enduring and incredibly poignant commentaries on the state of American society. The one that always comes to mind is the mass shooting article, which the title is No Way to Prevent This, says only nation where this regularly happens.

So I'm curious from your perspective, how you strike that balance between sort of the like day-to-day funny political commentary and those pieces that are really meant to endure, like the mass shooting article that gets brought up every time there's a mass shooting in the United States, which is pretty much a daily occurrence.

And things like the 9-11 issue, which at the time was really controversial, but now is seen as sort of this gem of public healing that came from a satire publication in a time when everyone was distraught and incredibly afraid of what was going to happen to this country. Yeah.

Yeah, our first issue in New York City was the one after 9-11. It came out a couple weeks after 9-11. And people were very afraid to make jokes about anything. It was just pitch perfect. It really was. I recommend you guys go look back at it. It truly deserved a Pulitzer Prize. It's kind of weird it didn't get one. I agree. But it's a really remarkable piece of work. And the onion is best when they say the unsaid thing, sort of like,

bubbling up in the country that is inhibited by much louder lobbies or fear. Like the mass shooting article, you're not going to get that from anywhere else, right? If you were to get it in the New York Times, they would have somebody else on the other side being like, I don't know, maybe we should shoot more kids. Like there's just, there has to be some equal opposite thing. Whereas like there was a pretty standard moral baseline here, which is it's bad for

I think people getting shot in the head is bad. And that's what the Indian does well at, is that they don't have to equivocate in these things because they're not really beholden to anybody. And then we touched on this a little bit about this idea that you don't pull punches. You say the hard thing. You say the thing that no one is saying. I'm also curious...

In recent years, there's been a bit of a development where conservatives are very intentionally trying to create sort of like counter commentary to outlets like The Onion. The quintessential example these days is The Babylon Bee. It's basically a conservative publication. It's a satirical publication that tries to do what The Onion does. But more oftentimes than not, it comes across as just like

right-wing griping. They've recently had a couple instances where they'd said something critical of Nazis and then a bunch of their fans were like, why the fuck would you criticize Nazis? So I think my question for you is just like, how do you strike that line of being like actually funny versus just like a cruel publication punching down at people that you don't like politically? Yeah.

Well, first and foremost, I do want to say I've never heard of that publication. But the number one thing that they think about is we don't punch down, especially right now. There's such incredible, immense cruelty in American life and American politics that is funneled by big money. You know, I used to cover this for a living. I was a disinformation reporter and I saw people take over the pipes because they were angry about their own personal failings.

Some of them own car companies, you know, big car companies that make cars that look like a

toasters, for example. The cruelty is abundance. Making trans people feel bad about themselves is very easy, cheap, and stupid humor that isn't funny. There are better jokes to be made than that one over and over again. And I think we're in the business of doing that sort of thing. We're in the business of doing actually funny things, not just like random childhood cruelty.

And also, I want to stress, I'm not making any of these fucking jokes. I just, I go to meetings with people and I try to explain to them what our old show Sex House is. I try to get, like, the people at Roku to do a Sex House season two. I don't write any fucking jokes. I don't assign any. They know what they're doing. I do not. Do you want to explain to me what the show Sex House is? Oh, yeah. I do. I don't know what it is either. Sex House is one of my favorite things in the world. Back, like, ten years ago in, like, the zero interest rate economy, a company gave The Onion, like,

I don't know, $100 million or something to basically make whatever they wanted to. So one of the things they made was a series called Sex House. I'm not going to really ruin the plot for you, but it is supposed to be like a Love Island kind of thing that goes very awry. I really recommend it. No, not if it's anything like Love Island. No, yes, I am so pro Love Island. I'm sorry. Love Island is the best export Great Britain has created in the last decade. Right.

Wrong podcast. Let's get back to satire. You touched on it briefly, but you were for a very long time a disinformation reporter at NBC News. I would love to know a little more about what you were seeing in your final years there within American media, within journalism, that motivated you to move toward The Onion. Because I feel for a lot of people, The Onion nowadays...

is kind of an antidote to the really frustrating trends we see in American journalism. Yeah, there was like a nice time period during...

the Trump years where the interests of capital aligned with the interests of telling the truth about stuff. Like, it was just a coincidence. Donald Trump had hated all of these network executives and vice versa. And like being able to be like, this guy sucks because X, Y, Z. And like, most importantly, he's just simply not telling the truth. We were able to say that without equivocating. And then time went on.

And a lot of these American media execs at their, you know, when they went to their chalets or whatever the fuck, they're like,

They started talking to people who were upset about cancel culture or they were upset about, you know, the wokeness in part because they were out of touch. You know, they're 60 year old white guys in a fucking ski lodge. So they started to like come around to the idea that maybe, maybe Donald Trump was right about all these things. And therefore maybe what he was saying about there being no objective truth was also true. And I saw over the course of the last two or three years, my bosses and,

all these other people start to side with people like Jim Jordan, who were conducting these campaigns to delegitimize the very premise that things can be true or false. And actively going after, for example, university professors who were teaching things like information studies and stuff. They would subpoena these professors for just like looking at how information flows on the internet. And instead of this being a crisis in American journalism and a crisis in how the truth is presented,

They just sided with these like weird Republican hate campaigns that were against the truth. You know, the American far right completely won this game. They started a game where there could be no objective reality.

And yeah, our bosses just capitulated. So, you know, last year I decided like midway through the year that I simply was not going to do this job anymore. Like I was unprotected. I got suspended from my job for being too mean to Elon Musk, apparently. I found out I was too mean to Elon Musk in the Daily Mail where they leaked a bunch of text messages. Right. And I realized like these people are not my side.

And then I was out once a couple months ago with my friend and he was like, what would you do if you were to like have, if you could run one thing right now? I'd be like, I said I would run The Onion. Like they have been incredible in the last year and a half about every moral panic that the news has failed. Like AI and trans rights and all of these things that they just got hoodwinked by powerful people. And then I read an ad week a few weeks after that, that The Onion was for sale and

And then I had to, like, learn how to, like, buy something with somebody else's money. Yeah. So, like, that's what happened there. I think, like, the onion is...

a better way of processing the news right now than like traditional cable or even... Better than watching Fox. Yeah. Oh my God. Oh my God. Yes. Like so much better than watching Fox. Are you kidding me? Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. So basically you've gone from disinformation over to satire now. Yeah.

Is there kind of a link between the two, especially when you look at the GOP, for example, when they use disinformation and they get called out on it, they often say, ah, it was just a joke. So could satire in a way not be a little bit dangerous as well in some ways, if you know what I mean? Oh, yeah, totally. But that's the thing is, like, if you are...

Saying something and then saying actually that was just a joke. That means you're like a weird charlatan doesn't know what he's doing But if you're saying it's just a joke and it like rings of something that's true That means you're fucking good at what you're doing as the satirist, right? so, you know coming at it from that point of view is helpful and again through the whole destruction of the truth that has happened over the last ten years and

The best way to get people to accept the truth is to come at it from the inverse. Like, for example, one of my favorite things from The Onion in the last year, and this is after The New York Times has spent the last year completely trying to destroy any bit of medical science that has been proffered by anyone about the issue of trans rights because they find trans people icky.

The Onion published this. It is journalism's sacred duty to endanger the lives of as many trans people as possible. It was an editorial from then. And first of all, that spoke to something that you would not be able to read in traditional media, even though it is aligned with the medical consensus on this. Right.

That sort of satire where you just call it out for what it is, which is like hatred and bigotry, but without pulling any punches, that is more important right now than any other kind of news media that I can think of. Yeah. So we've got a fair few weeks, but not that many weeks until the election now. What can we expect from The Onion? Or what do you think is coming up

that has the potential to be taken by the union and spun into satire that could be impactful? Well, the DNC is in Chicago and the onion is in Chicago. And also, you know, the RNC is in Milwaukee, which is not even as much Chicago. It's in

where the onion's from. I don't think either of them are going to be joyous occasions, so that'll be interesting as it is. But we're just going to be along for the ride. It's going to be a fun time over here. Again, I think that we are in a spot where we're allowed to do stuff that other places aren't allowed to do. Right. And we're going to be

we're just really well positioned right now. I would rather, I really do mean this, I would rather be us than the New York Times if I was trying to reach a 22-year-old with a good brain who has a college degree. And any predictions for how the presidential election might go? Are you steering away from that completely with it so close right now in the polls? Fucking... My prediction is that I may die of a pain thinner overdose by then, so I don't really know. I don't...

Like, hopefully I'm not around for it. That's my prediction. No, Ben. Ben, we hope you don't die of that and that you're very much with us by the end of the presidential election. But we've appreciated having you on the podcast and thanks so much for your time. Yeah, thanks so much, guys. I really appreciate it.

Right, on to the final section then. And here we bring you slightly more obscure stories and topics. Well, this week, Nicky and I thought we'd discuss two national issues that don't necessarily get the same airtime as abortion or economy, for example, but could still impact the way that people vote in November. And I'll start. I

I decided to pick the water crisis in America for what I want to talk about because it's a massive issue. And I don't think it really translates too much over to the UK or it certainly I didn't know too much about it when I went over to America and was a video journalist there for a little while. Around 46%

million Americans suffer with water insecurity in America. Essentially, what that means is they either don't have access to clean running water or they just don't have access to clean water at all. This is something that I saw in Jackson, which is the capital of Mississippi. I went to a mother's flat and she showed me her taps and they ran brown. It was disgusting.

And that was the same for a lot of the city. Their water was just not fit for human consumption. And so they use bottled water for almost everything, but also they have to boil their water if they want to use it from the tap. This also stretches to Navajo, which is between New Mexico and Arizona. Arizona, remember, a swing state, about 170,000 population around that area, a lot of those Native Americans.

they often don't have access to water for tens of miles. So they'll have to drive to go and get their water or they have to get a tank installed underground, which is really expensive. And a lot of them just can't afford to do that. So they don't have access to water there. And that's all before we get to the Colorado Basin, which basically supplies water to seven different states. None of them can decide basically who has access to what and if

The water is depleting. You can actually see in the Colorado Basin where the water has receded. I think it's called bath sublines where you can see in the rock where the water has actually reduced. And this is massive because it fuels agriculture, but also everyday life. And you have to live with water. And at the moment, that's disappearing. And this has become a massive political issue, not just in those states, but also right across Florida.

the length of the country. And I actually looked at some polling that was done by the US Water Alliance, and they found that 63% of all voters would view an elected official who supported additional investment in water infrastructure more favorably. So even if this isn't going to be one of the main issues right now, it very much could be going into future elections

if the water infrastructure in the US, the problems aren't solved and people have better access to water right across the US. So this could be a real vote issue, not just now, but in the years to come. Oh, absolutely. And in the vein of natural resources, climate and energy policy

is going to continue to be a major issue in 2024, especially amongst young voters. I am by no means a polling guru, but polling in the United States has consistently shown that concern about the climate

is a major priority for young Americans between the ages of 18 and 29, 18 being the earliest age at which a person can vote in this country. And while talk of 2024 is typically dominated by like discussions of Trump and this election and the deep consequences for democracy, this is,

election is also going to have incredibly intense consequences for American climate and energy policy. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that last month at Mar-a-Lago that

Former President Trump promised oil executives who he was trying to court for donations that he would roll back dozens of President Biden's environmental measures and the new regulations he's instituted in his term. And his ask was like, if you give me a billion dollars to help me win back the White House...

that would be nothing compared to the amount of profit that you would make with the way I'm going to deregulate oil and gas in this country. Biden has received a lot of criticism for not taking a firmer stance on climate and energy policy. There was the big UN climate summit that was held in December where it sort of felt like

Countries like the U.S., a couple other of the Western powers were sort of negotiating with the Gulf states on how to slow down the phase out of fossil fuels as much as possible. They eventually ended up reaching an agreement, but pretty much every nation that has large coastal populations, island populations, indigenous populations said, this is not good enough. It's not fast enough. And these countries like the United States, the Gulf states,

are not going to feel the effects of climate change as intensely as we are. But like you pointed out in your discussion of the Colorado River Basin, the effects of climate change are absolutely being felt in the United States. And under Trump, not only would there be a rollback of any new climate policies that were implemented under Biden,

Trump is promising a radical gutting of government organizations tasked with safeguarding America's natural resources, including the elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency. So it would basically be a complete restructuring of the way the United States handles its climate legislation, handles its production of things like coal, oil, and gas. And as we've seen historically with Republican administrations,

They'll move forward with deregulation while giving little to no thought about what that deregulation means in terms of consequences for the American public and the people who depend on these resources and these like natural spaces for their livelihood and survival.

And just on that point as well, it always seems to be when you come to these issues, not always, but a lot. And I mentioned it with Navajo, for example, but also across the seven states of the Colorado Basin. There's a lot of minorities there, especially Latino Americans as well in the South.

And they are a massive voter group that Biden and Trump need to be looking at directing policies towards. And these are the groups that always seem to suffer when it comes to climate impacts as well. For example, I told you when I was in Jackson, it's mostly a black city.

but the effects that they're feeling there are catastrophic and nothing seems to be being done about it. And I think a lot of people feel that way as well. I looked at Pew Research Center, a poll that they did a while ago, and they said that 59% of people think that Biden could have done more on the environment in his time in office. Oh, absolutely. There's a running joke in American politics about quote unquote infrastructure week. Yeah.

Every couple years, I think it happened under Trump, it happened under Biden, like a big hoopla about how the administration is doing infrastructure week and holding all of these meetings and summits about how to improve water access and the power grades and investing more in transportation and nothing ever happens.

Nothing ever happened. So every time it's infrastructure week, people are just like, ah, we got a break. But yeah, I think Biden, especially we've talked on a couple episodes about the overtures he's making to young people. Young people in particular are voting with their future in mind. And the ongoing climate catastrophe is absolutely weighing on them as a motivating factor for this election. ♪

Right, enough of the serious stuff. And on to something that might actually be happening, I'm sad to say for you, maybe less so for me because it means we get rid of him.

But Nigel Farage says that he's got a firm job offer from his very good friend Donald Trump, who thinks he's a handsome man. That was awful when I heard him say that. What do you think of Nigel Farage? Are you just as sick of him as all of his Brits are? I mean, for someone who dislikes immigrants so much, I'm surprised Trump made a job offer. But look, much like this podcast is primarily geared toward...

Brits who don't know much about American politics. I do not know that much about Nigel Farage. Probably for the better. Probably for the best. I know he was the leader of the Brexit movement. And I know that sort of in the aftermath of the collapse of his political capital in the UK, he has made himself a very prominent figure within American politics as like a political commentator. I've seen him on Fox News fairly often.

He's doing something similar to like Piers Morgan, where, you know, they just like completely screwed themselves over in the UK. So now they're just like, oh, here's an unsuspecting audience of Americans who love conservative blowhards. Yeah.

Why don't I just try my luck out here? But yeah, quite frankly, I trust your judgment. If you don't want him, I don't want him either. Yeah, it's probably best neither of us have him, to be honest. I'm ashamed to say that I actually worked with him for one hour once, just me and him in a room. I produced a live shot for him. And don't shoot me, but it was for Newsmax. I worked for an agency, not Newsmax.

But yeah, produced a live shot for him. And that was very weird because he was just a normal bloke before the recording.

And then as soon as the camera was on him, as soon as we were rolling, he was really laying it on thick. I think he said at one point he hoped that Boris Johnson was dancing around the Stonehenge with the other hippies or something like that. His take on everything is just very strange. Honestly, Chris, I can't believe you're an undercover conservative. That's like really concerning to me. I think it's more like an accidental undercover conservative. Let's call it that.

And that brings us to the end of this episode of American Friction. Nikki, thanks so much for joining me. Always a pleasure, Chris. And a big thanks to Ben Collins for joining us too. And an even bigger thanks to you listeners. If you want more from us, we're out with a new episode every Friday early afternoon if you're in the UK and in the morning if you're stateside. You can also follow us on Twitter at American Frick.

And if you've got something you'd like us to answer on the podcast, why not send your question to AmericanFriction at podmasters.co.uk and we'll do our very best to answer as best as we can. You've been listening to American Friction. See you next week. American Friction was written and presented by Chris Jones, Jacob Jarvis and Nicky McCann-Ramirez.

Audio production was by me, Simon Williams. The group editor was Andrew Harrison and the executive producer was Martin Boitosch. Artwork was by James Parrott and music was by Orange Factory Music. American Friction is a Podmasters production.