Tim Walz: Is Harris's VP pick really so great? — plus, Project 2025 madness explained
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Hello and welcome to American Friction, the weekly US politics podcast out every Friday from the makers of Oh God, What Now?, The Bunker and Papercuts. I'm Jacob Jarvis. That's right, you are. And I'm Chris Jones. Every week in the run up to November's US presidential election, we'll be unpacking everything you need to know about the vote. And helping to guide us through is Rolling Stone magazine politics reporter Nikki McCann-Ramirez. Hello, Nikki. Hello, boys. Hello, Nikki. How much do you like Slipknot?

I love Slipknot. Hell yeah. Love Slipknot. It used to be a big metalhead when I was in middle school and my mother was concerned about it. Well, mate, we're not concerned. We're all metalheads here. Any metalheads listening in,

Fuck yeah. Anyway, in this episode, we'll be discussing Harris's VP pick, Tim Walz. Walz, I believe, not Waltz, Walz, but I will say it wrong. Sorry to anyone who is annoyed by that, who seems to have stormed the race by being fairly likable and straightforwardly quite good at politics. Plus, Nikki, Chris and I will be speaking to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump.

to discuss what the hell Project 2025 is and what that's telling us about the race and so on and so forth. That's right, we will, Geoff. Welcome back, you're listening to American Friction. Kamala Harris has picked the running mate she's deemed hot to go. And while she hasn't gone all in on the feminine hominem and picked an all-woman ticket, she's gone for a reasonably left-field choice. Very, very well done on the same feminine hominem. Very well done. I'm not sure. It's tough. It's a feminine hominem.

I was really hoping for you to get it wrong, but you didn't. So fair enough. So Tim Walls, governor of Minnesota, he wasn't really among the big names at the start of the race with the likes of Josh Shapiro, Mark Kelly, an astronaut, and Gavin Newsom, initial favorites. But now the man described as everybody's favorite uncle by London's very own Evening Standard or America's Midwestern dad by American outlets who, you know, use...

American metaphors and so forth, is the pick. So Nikki, what's his vibe? Who is he? And is he the big scary commie that Donald Trump says that he is? Yeah. So Tim Walz is the governor of Minnesota. He's a two-term governor. Before that, he served six terms as a representative in Congress in the House. And his vibe is really like...

very happy white guy who religiously mows his lawns on Sunday morning. The like Midwestern dad nails it. He's been described, I think he's described himself as like a joyful warrior. He's like those white New Balance trainers if they were a human being. That's Tim Walz. He's like, the jokes have been great. Like, oh, Tim Walz is the kind of guy who walks outside, sniffs the air and says, it's going to rain today. He's one of those warriors.

aside from being just like a very positive guy, which these days is pretty rare in politics, he's also been an incredibly effective legislator and governor. He, in Minnesota, presided over the first state legislature in the state where Democrats controlled both chambers of the legislature and the governorship. So they passed a

a ton of progressive legislation that has made him really popular in Minnesota is really being hyped up now that he's the vice presidential pick. But it's things like free school lunches for every public school student in the state, child tax credits, gun control reform, things like enhanced background checks and red flag laws. He really has governed on this message of like equalization.

economic populism, community building, infrastructure building. One of the things he talks about constantly is the idea of like neighborliness, that the people in your country, in your communities, in your neighborhoods aren't your political enemies. They're your neighbors. And it's our job as Americans to like lift each other up and

And I think one of the reasons everyone is so excited about this pick, well, Democrats are so excited about this pick. Republicans are doing their own thing as usual. But it's because that's kind of a rare message in politics these days, in American politics, where things are often so adversarial and it's so often focused on like taking shots at the other side and presenting this messaging of like doom and gloom and the existential threat to democracy, which is very real.

Yeah.

his focus bettering small communities, bettering the very conservative community that he came from. I think that's incredibly refreshing for people. So I'm not surprised that Democrats are very hype about this. Yeah, he seems really straightforward in a lot of ways. I saw this supercut and I know I'm going to sound like just a, you know, North London liberal, but

that has fallen in love with Tim Walls, which does seem to have happened. But this video where he said, you know, rights aren't like, they're not a pie. If someone gets more rights, it doesn't mean you get less rights or there's less rights to go around. And that just felt like a really straightforward, teacherly way of putting things across. And it's also quite interesting to see someone being able to communicate ideas, which is

do feel quite left wing, but is able to do it in such a straightforward way that goes, how could anyone possibly call me extreme for this? It's just a really simple proposition. Yeah. He has a line that's been going viral lately. Of course, Republicans are calling him a socialist and a Marxist.

And his reply was, if socialism is making sure that kids in school get lunch every day, then yeah, I'm a socialist. Like, sure. Like, if my policies, which are about making life better for people, are socialism, then like, whatever, call me whatever you want. The people I serve are happy. Yeah.

We're going to move on to some other details of Tim Wadsworth. I'm going to put forward a challenge for both you, Chris, and you, Nicky. We've got to say one bad thing about this guy on this pod, all right? So just think about it when we're thinking of the next questions because I'm sure, you know, I'm bringing the balance here. He can't be perfect, can he? Or maybe he is perfect. He's got more hair than me. That's a bad thing. For me, anyway. Yeah, fuck him for that. That's really harsh on Chris, to be honest. How dare he?

Anyway, Nikki, all those things are positive and I'm sure great, but there are obviously positive things about the other candidates. Why in particular him over someone, I don't know, the Kennedy hair of Gavin Newsom and that sort of slickness? Why Tim Walls? Because it just didn't seem to be the case for a long time. He came out of nowhere. I did a podcast speaking about the VP picks and he wasn't even on the list I spoke about. And then it's him. So why him? How did he come out of nowhere and just take it?

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. He was a dark horse. I think Newsom has ambitions for the presidency. I don't think Newsom, I think he made it very clear, along with like Gretchen Whitmer, Big Gretch, we love her. She spoke at the rally yesterday. They kind of made it clear that they did not want the VP slot.

When Newsom in particular, he's from California, Harris is from California, they run into some constitutional issues with that. But then that also would have opened up the ticket to a lot of attacks about them being like California elites who don't understand the country. I think in the end, it came down to Walsh and Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania. And there's a lot of things that go into picking the VP. We've talked about like the electoral calculus, swing states, all that.

But it's also really about how well you get along with that person and what that person is going to do for your campaign and your message. And the vice president, it's sort of seen as a dead-end job in American politics. You're always going to be second to the president. There's a very mixed record of vice presidents who try to run for the presidency in terms of, like, their success. And I think Harris, who is running to be the first, not only the first woman president, but the first Black woman president, she needed someone who...

is going to be willing to take the backseat to her. Not only just someone who's going to be willing to like put aside their own political ambitions and be like, I am all in on your project, but someone that she can be in a room with in every single major meeting that she takes. Someone that she has to have lunch with every week because the president and the vice president have a standing lunch every week. Someone that she jives well with, who's not going to be a sycophant, who's going to give her like good feedback, but also be enthusiastic about her mission and her goals.

And from the reporting we're getting, she clicked with Walsh. Whereas Shapiro, from what we're getting, the meeting was a little more cool. I think there were some concerns raised that Shapiro does have like higher ambitions and they kind of got the impression that he wasn't as willing to fall into that sort of secondary role. I also think there were some concerns about the opposition research that came out about Shapiro, right?

how he had handled sexual harassment complaints directed at one of his aides. There is a suicide case that is also alleged to be a murder that has been really controversial from his time as attorney general of the state. There were just some like skeletons floating around there that especially when you're like speed running the VP vetting process the way Harris was, I think raised a lot of red flags. And critically, there also wasn't really a lot of polling evidence for

showing that picking Shapiro would have like guaranteed Pennsylvania. And then the question becomes, okay, if these candidates aren't going to guarantee me a win in a swing state, who is going to be better?

to deliver the message that I'm trying to deliver with my campaign? One of optimism, one of the promise of prosperity, of populist economic policies from the democratic lens. Who's going to be best able to deliver the message that the government still cares about people, that the government is still working for people in a time when

As we've discussed before, through like Chris's fantastic poll digging, most people in this country don't feel that the government works for them. And I think Walsh has shown himself to be such an effective vehicle for that messaging that he really seemed like the natural pick. I imagine he's got really good taste in restaurants, too. So if I had to go lunch with him, I'd trust him to pick.

You could order my food. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine so. Yeah. Yeah. Fair play. What I was going to say, though, is that you only have to look really as far as his performance in the rallies to see why Harris has picked him because he is full of energy. And also there's that video that I saw of him trying to get water out to the crowd as well. People were, I can't remember where that rally was, but he was trying to get water to the people. It was in Wisconsin. Wisconsin. Yeah.

which is very Taylor Swift of him, if you know what I mean. She does concerts as well, and she's also liked. But another thing that I was going to add to what Nikki said is that Tim Morse is also former chair of the Democratic Governors Association. So he's really well known within the party in helping with election and directing funds and support to other parts of the party. So as

As Nikki says, he's someone who is powerful, well-liked within the party, but is also willing to not overstep that mark and step on Harris's toes. He, when he was reelected to his congressional seat in 2016, I think, he won as a Democrat in a district that voted for Trump for the presidency. So he's also really good at speaking to Republican communities, undecided communities, moderate communities, and he's great at

attacking the Republican message from a position that almost feels like empathetic. Sometimes he's great at like dismantling them and taking them to task. His like feud with J.D. Vance is iconic, but he's very good at like pitching a message to voters who wouldn't necessarily agree with a Democrat. On that then where he can he can really help the

Where is he going to be popular and who with in terms of the geography of the election? And we had a question on Twitter from listener Chris Smith. Chris Smith, if you're listening, thank you very much. But suggesting there's this polling which was showing that Harris has gone ahead in Arizona. So maybe he could help in areas such as the Sun Belt and stuff like that. Does he open up more routes to that road to 271 electoral college votes? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important to remember here that

We talked in our last episode about the geography of swing states. But one of the things that makes a swing state a swing state is that there'll be a very big split between rural parts of the state and then cities. And oftentimes in swing states, the election is decided in the suburbs of those major cities. Walls?

The enthusiasm he's generating, I think already we're seeing a lot from like white suburbanites, suburbanites who like kind of toe that line between like hard Republican communities and hard liberal communities. So I think he's going to be a great weapon throughout all these swing states and just in general across the country to not only generate enthusiasm, which was lacking when Biden was the candidate, but

But also to talk to those like belts of people who are maybe thinking of sitting out the election, who are kind of split between or in communities where like some people are voting for Trump, some people are voting for Harris. And in these critical swing states like Arizona, like Wisconsin, like Pennsylvania, like

The strategy isn't to make inroads in like hard plus 10 Trump districts. It's to go to those purple areas that kind of flip flop either way every election and make your pitch there. And this is why I brought up the point about Wallace having run in a Republican district, a district that has typically supported Trump in a state where if you look at like the county map of Minnesota, you know,

Most of the state looks red. It's like the twin cities are the two big, like, Democratic enclaves in that state, and

And he is he's a two term governor. He was a six term congressman. He's really good at pitching to those purple regions. And I think that's an extremely valuable asset for the Harris campaign because Harris has been in politics for a while and she is already seen as like a hard liberal. Yeah, I feel like he could positively guilt trip me into voting if I was not thinking of voting for.

He'd just come along and go, oh man, you know, you're just letting us down if you don't. Vote for whoever you like. Like the dad line? Yeah, I'm not angry, I'm disappointed. I'm not mad, I'm disappointed. Yeah, and I feel like he'd give me that vibe and I'd go, okay, I'm going to turn out. Tim was, you know, I don't want him to be sad, basically. That's right.

I've given us the challenge to say a bad thing about Tim Walz and I'm not getting the vibe that we're going to say anything particularly bad, but let's talk about the ways that they're saying bad stuff about him then. So the attack lines really feels like

They haven't got a fucking thing. It's just slinging whatever they can and just nonsense and just kind of some culture war bullshit and then nothing else very much. Is that a fair assessment? I think there are some things that he's going to have to address. Don't give me them. Give me drag Tim Walls right now. Drag him. I'm not going to drag Tim Walls. No, so the big thing, obviously there's...

Like the tampon Tim thing where Republicans are trying to attack him for a bill he passed, which basically required public schools to have sanitary products like pads and tampons in all restrooms that serve like menstruating students, which included boys restrooms because there are transgender people in the state of Minnesota. And they're like, oh, he's putting tampons in boys restrooms. And it's like a tampon.

Why the fuck do you care? But be like a great that he's doing this for trans students. But also there are a myriad of other reasons why someone in a men's restroom might need a tampon, like low income students who might not their families might not have access to sanitary products. A parent who comes to the school and has a child who is like, oh, my God, I got my period. Like, oh, I'll go into the bathroom. I'll get you something like don't worry about it.

Boys can also get tampons for their friends who are girls. It's not a big deal. Also, as popularized by the classic movie She's the Man, they're great for nosebleeds. Boys also get nosebleeds. Yeah.

But yeah, the tampon thing was really fucking stupid. They've tried to hit him with a bunch of other attacks. The big one that's going around right now that I think is getting a lot of focus is accusations that he ditched his National Guard unit before they were deployed to Iraq.

I wrote about it. I don't give it credence. I think it's kind of bullshit. He enlisted in the National Guard, in the Army National Guard, when he was 17 years old and served for 24 years. He left in 2005 to pursue his first run for Congress. And if you look at the actual timeline of when he left...

His unit didn't get the notice that they were going to be deployed until two months after he had retired. And retirement in the military is like a pretty long process. I have friends in the military. If you're going to retire, it's like a months-long thing. You have to like submit it in advance. There's approvals you have to go through. He retired honorably.

The claim of like, oh, he abandoned the unit because he didn't want to be deployed to Iraq, blah, blah, blah, is coming from two guys who used to serve with him, who published like an open letter that then the Daily Wire picked up. At least one of them, I've seen like very solid evidence that they're like a hardcore Trump supporter. So it's like, how objective is your take on this?

And then the other thing is they're trying to shit on him because he's used his past military service as an inroad to talk about gun control. And they're claiming that he is falsely saying that he was like deployed to Afghanistan and blah, blah, blah.

He was never deployed to Afghanistan, and I can't find any specific instance of him saying that. He was deployed to Italy as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, which was the first phase of the war on terror. And he was doing like support stuff for troops that were being deployed to Afghanistan.

He's also an expert in, like, artillery and, like, a prolific sharpshooter. So a lot of what he did in the military was training other people on how to handle heavy artillery, shooting, all that. So when he talks about handling his guns and he mentions, like, guns that were used in war, guns that I, like, handled that were then used in war, people are trying to say that he's stealing valor and pretended he had, like, combat experience. It's all really disingenuous.

This whole idea that his service doesn't count because he wasn't shooting bullets at people, J.D. Vance also never saw active combat. He was a Marine. He was deployed in Iraq. He worked for, like, the Marines PR outfit. He himself says he never saw active combat. That doesn't make his service any less valid. And so it's just been a really disingenuous attack line against a guy who spent 24 years, like, voluntarily serving his country. Yeah.

If anyone out there listening has anything bad to say about Tim Walsh that stands up, please come on the podcast. Get in touch with us just because it can't be perfect. We're just crowdsourcing. Anyone, you're welcome. Chris, then, wrapping up this section. Polls, polls, polls. Any polling? Give us it. What's going on?

The numbers. Actually, I might be a little bit negative here. Drag him, hun.

I'll do my best. So some polling from YouGov actually shows that he is more liked than disliked. So that's not negative. That's actually quite good. About 3,000 people were surveyed in this. 17% had a favorable view of him compared to 13% who held a very unfavorable view of him. Very unfavorable is how that was listed. What is noticeable though, and

And I think this really rings true with most polling that is there for him at the moment is that no one knows who the fuck he is. No one knows who he is unless you're in Minnesota. Basically, no one knows who he is at all. And that was also portrayed in an ABC News Ipsos poll of 1,200 Americans.

They mostly didn't know who he was. Some more Uyghur polling asked Democratic, Independent, and Republican voters what they thought of him. And they all had one thing in common as well. Guess what that was? Didn't know who he was. They didn't know who he was. Democrats mostly approve of him, as you can probably guess, 55%. They think he's a good choice. Most Independent voters either approve or don't know enough about him. And Republicans just hate him for tampons and...

random stuff that they've made up pretty much. Yeah. Exactly. And they also don't like him because he was obviously the creator of the tagline that Republicans are weird as hell. So I think there's positives and negatives to this. The positive is that he is essentially a blank slate and there's nothing really to drag him about. Yeah. The negatives are no one really knows who he is. So he's going to have to really try and get himself across to the American public as quickly as possible.

Well, after this segment, you do kind of know who he is now then. So everyone's talking about him being a really favourite uncle figure. Would you like him to be your uncle, Chris? No, I'm all right, actually. But I think you would like him to be your uncle, maybe a little bit more. Yeah, that's basically because I aspire at some point in my life, maybe long term wise, to be a Nepo baby.

And I think if my uncle was the vice president, that'd be really handy for me. So if he wants to become my adoptive uncle in order to put me into the White House somewhere, some sort of press secretary role of some kind, I don't know. That'd be great. So, yeah, if I could eventually fulfill the role of being an Epo baby, I'd be very, very happy. There might be some citizenship issues there.

He can get around it. He can get around it. Nikki, what do you think? Would you have him in your uncle sphere? My uncle roster? Yeah. I have uncles of all shapes and sizes and proclivities. So what's another cool uncle? Would you like him to be your uncle, Simon? Sure, why not? Yeah. Yeah, he seems like a nice guy. Maybe we could hire him. Good. He's cool and chill. Cool and chill. Cool and chill.

Donald Trump doesn't have very many values or convictions of his own other than his own self-interest. And that can be reflected in his policy positions. They're scattergun and follow the whims of his base. That's where Project 2025 is somewhat filling the gap by handing over a ready-made policy platform for the next conservative president.

President. Created by the Heritage Foundation, the project reportedly has links with Trump, which Harris has been swift to highlight, though the former president rejects these. So here to discuss all of that and Project 2025 in general is Philip Bump. Hi, Philip. Hello, how are you?

Very good. Thank you, Philip. I hope you are too. Philip, when did Project 2025 first come across your radar then? And when did you begin to truly take it seriously? Because it feels like a massive thing now. Yeah, I would break that question out into two parts. The first is when I became aware of it and when I started to take it seriously. And the reason I'm going to do that is because I first became aware of it

At some point earlier this year, I'm not entirely sure when. It was prior to the John Oliver things. I remember being sort of stunned that John Oliver had picked up on it, which he did an entire show on it. When I started taking it seriously is a different question because I don't entirely take it seriously. And I don't mean that...

I don't think that the authors of Project 2025 don't want to do those things. But the way in which I think it is best to look at Project 2025 is not as a set of policy prescriptions, but instead as

an articulation of a worldview by people who would likely serve in a Trump administration. So I don't look at Project 2025 as a document that once Donald Trump, should he win the election, gets to the White House, he's going to go through and use as a checklist. Instead, he's going to take the people who wrote that document and bring them with him. And he's going to install them into cabinet departments, and he's going to install them into the government, and he's not going to care what they do.

And so they've told us what they want to do. He's not really, you know, this isn't what Donald Trump wants to do. It is what the people who Donald Trump would bring with him to Washington want to do. And that, I think, is what is important about it.

It was created by the Heritage Foundation, then a right wing think tank. Could you tell me a little bit more about this group and why they've done this exactly, why they've put this list together? Is it to shape that direction of travel or is it, as you say, they're aware that this is for people who will be part of that next administration, should it be a Trump administration anyway?

Sure. So Heritage is a longstanding think tank in Washington. You know, it is it has been around long enough that it has like a big building in Washington that is, you know, the Heritage Foundation place. I mean, it is it is it is an institution in the sense of Washington institutions.

But it was for a long time just sort of a conservative think tank, and it was not subsumed into the MAGA world in the way that it became after Donald Trump became president. It sort of shifted, and it shifted under its new leader, Kevin Roberts, to be more of a reflection of the MAGA worldview and the MAGA approach to right-wing politics.

And I think that's notable. And I think that while Heritage has in the past put together documents that are articulations of what they want to see from a Republican president, the combination of they're doing that now and the shift they have made to be more responsive to the way in which Donald Trump looks at conservative politics, I think that's what makes this exceptional.

But that's also coupled, of course, with the fact that Donald Trump doesn't talk about what he actually wants to do. He does have on his website, you know, what he calls Agenda 47, which is this list of it's basically just a collection of videos in which he sort of rambles about whatever happened to be on Fox News that day. Right. And so he doesn't really have a robust policy delineation of his own. And so.

To some extent, the reason that Project 2025 has sort of captured the public's imagination is that it is an articulation of what these people want to do. And it is closely aligned with Trump in a way that the Heritage Foundation wouldn't have been, say, eight years ago. And as such, is a representation of what a

Trump presidency would look like in a way that Trump himself doesn't actually articulate. So in terms of what these people want to do, I think there's around about 922 recommendations as part of Project 2025, which seems ridiculous. Two parts to this question. What are

the main takeaways from these recommendations? What are the main things that the Heritage Foundation recommends for a Trump administration, if it were to get into power, to do? And also, is there anything in there that actually makes sense? Sure. So...

You know, the main takeaway sort of depends on your worldview, right? I mean, if you are someone whose primary concern is access to reproductive rights, you know, then that's going to be the thing you think is the main takeaway. I think the main takeaway is that it endorses, as Trump has in the past, a restructuring of what the federal government looks like and a shifting of power to the presidency and making it easier for the president to have control over how the federal government operates. You know, are there good ideas in there?

I mean, again, this also depends on sort of how you approach politics. You know, there are some, what I would say are sort of more run-of-the-mill conservative ideas and presentations in Project 2025, the sorts of things that, were they not part of this package, wouldn't necessarily be considered unusual or outrageous. But because they are part of this package, which includes

all sorts of things, includes a lot of like culture war stuff, includes, you know, reconsideration of how America approaches divorce. I mean, there are all these things in there that are just, that are sort of so extreme that even the more mainstream conservative policies that are included in it sort of get dragged along. And it's just, and I think probably are detrimental to the long-term, even more normal conservative policy simply by virtue of association with the rest of the package.

Absolutely. And obviously, Project 2025 has kind of exploded into public awareness in the last couple of months. And as a result of that, it seems that the Trump campaign have really tried to distance themselves from this project. There's been just like a lot of like source reporting that they're concerned it might be like kryptonite to the campaign, things like that. How seriously should we be taking this distancing? How seriously should we be taking these like disavowals that, oh, we have nothing to do with it?

Well, I mean, to some extent, you should take them as seriously as you take any other pronouncement from Donald Trump, which is not seriously, right? Donald Trump is not an honest person. And so, you know, it is, do I think that he sat down and went over page by page what Project 2025 is and what it suggests? No, because he doesn't care about policy, right? Like, I totally believe that he was not intimately involved in the creation of Project 2025 simply because he doesn't care about policy and he never has. And in fact,

in 2015, I remember being at an event in Iowa, in which he's just like, people don't really care about policy proposals. And it's true, people really don't, but we do expect our politicians to, and he doesn't. So no, I don't think that he had an active hand in shaping what Project 2025 looked like. But that said, I do think that it reflects

very much what people who are around him and the people who he would empower should he become president again do want to see have happen. And as such, is indistinguishable from him. We have this documentation. CNN, for example, did a great job of figuring out how many of the Project 2025 authors had already been tied to Donald Trump. And it's a significant portion of them. These are the people in his sphere. And since he doesn't care about policy, that means more likely

that these are the sorts of things that would occur if he were president than if it were just this outside group that was writing a list of recommendations because these are the people that he relies on to tell him what he should do because he doesn't care about what he does once he actually gets that power.

I'm also interested in sort of the like staffing question, this idea that like Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation were creating a like preemptive staff database to fill out the administration should they win, particularly in the context of the 2016 election when kind of infamously Trump won the White House and the campaign like didn't really know that they were responsible for staffing, you know, the entire executive branch. So I'm curious about your thoughts on that.

Yeah, no, you're right. Yeah, there's that famous anecdote of Jared Kushner showing up at the White House and being like, oh, how many of these people are sticking around? They're like, well, no one, dude. They're all leaving with Obama. They don't want to work for you. So yeah, that was one aspect of what happened in 2016. Then there were two other aspects, which is A, Trump didn't expect to win in 2016 because the polls suggested it wasn't going to. And then B,

B, no one wanted to work for him, right? Like, that was his problem for the entire course of 2016. That's why he ended up with, like, Paul Manafort running his campaign is because everyone was like, this guy's toxic, I don't want to touch him. And then he won, and they're like, eh.

maybe it's not that toxic after all. Right. So we see, uh, in project 2025, as part of the heritage foundation's efforts, they are trying to put together this database of people who would be potential maga loyalists who come work in government. They're not the only ones to do that. I wrote a book that came out last year and I spoke with a guy who works for an organization, uh, that was already doing this. Uh,

independently from the Heritage Foundation. They are trying to get ready a cadre of people who could come and serve in the Trump administration, who would be loyal to MAGA-esque politics and loyal to Donald Trump. This is happening on a number of fronts. From the standpoint of Trump and his allies, it makes perfect sense, right? You want to get people in there who aren't going to

be beholden to the establishment, yada, yada, yada. But from the standpoint of people who are concerned about what a Donald Trump presidency looks like, having both A, more people who are loyal to Donald Trump in positions of power in the government is disconcerting, and B, particularly when you consider that one of the things that Donald Trump wants to do is expand the number of people who he has power over in the government and therefore can place more loyalists throughout the executive branch. Is a worry around Donald Trump that maybe doesn't get

acknowledged as much. Obviously, the things he says are worrying and a lot of his positions are concerning. But this idea that he's just such an empty vessel as well. I look back on his last presidency and it felt like, for example, Jared Kushner was very influential in some of the aspects of policy, which seemed at all to be robust, looking at policy towards the Middle East and stuff like that. Jared Kushner is not going to be around this time. And the people around him just seem to be complete sycophants. And Trump just seems to be

on the one hand, incredibly toxic and have these toxic positions, but on the other hand, he's just a shell which people who will be smarter than him and know how things operate can be filled. And is that maybe the concern that Project 2025 has highlighted? Not just that they're trying to fill it, the idea that people feel like they can just get this guy to do anything they want if they put people in the right room at the right time. Yeah.

Well, I think that the distance between what Donald Trump wants, which is not very much, and what his allies want, which is a lot, I think that that should be what Project 2025 highlights. I think it's not. Donald Trump was never going to be the sort of president who goes to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, sits down with the cabinet secretary there and says, tell me what your plan is for expanding access to affordable housing and urban centers in America. That's not Donald Trump.

So the question is, when there is someone who is the head of HUD and doesn't have to worry about what Donald Trump, you know, Donald Trump's not going to care what he's doing. I say he could be she probably going to be, you know, Donald Trump wins.

And so what's that person going to do? And this is always the issue. The issue with power is always what are the people who you put in power going to do when you're not in the room? That's always the consideration that politicians should keep in mind when they're making these appointments. And these people who Donald Trump would likely appoint have explicitly said, here's what we're going to do in this document. That's what makes the document important.

A concern on focusing on Project 2025 so much as the Harris campaign is, is for, say, for example, they double down on this being the conservative policy and what it is, whether that link is completely solid, you know, it's up for debate, then they lose, Trump wins. Well, Project 2025, if nothing else, their outlandish statements, it's shifted the often window of what feels acceptable in conservatism. And is that also maybe part of the point of some of the more

outrageous things they're suggesting is because it just stretches that conversation, which then makes something that we thought three years ago would have been incredibly outrageous seem less outrageous because it's not as far as that. And it kind of moves the goalposts. Is that part of what they're trying to do as well? It's possible. I don't really think so, in part because Donald Trump is already so far at the fringe, right? You know, if American voters...

select Donald Trump to be the president, Donald Trump has already made very extreme comments. I mean, you know, this is a person who has said, I want to deport 10 million people from the United States, right? Like, you know, the shifting the Overton window on more microcosmic aspects of governance is pales in comparison to what he's already said. And so, you know,

I think that one of the things that occurred when Donald Trump was elected in 2016 is there were still a lot of Americans who viewed him as probably going to be moderate, and he existed as a blank slate. No one knew what he would do once he got in office. He became president and very quickly moved to do some of the more extreme things that he said he might do. For example, put a ban on immigration from certain countries with heavily Muslim populations. I remember in January of 2017, sitting in a courtroom in Brooklyn in New York,

watching a judge adjudicate whether or not certain people should be allowed into the United States immediately after Donald Trump took power. There were the protests at the airports that took place in that same time period, right? Very quickly, people saw, oh, Donald Trump is not a moderate, and he's going to do these extreme things that he said he wanted to do. Eventually, he got around to trying to figure out how to do the wall. All of those things, like, that has already shifted. If you are coming to this and voting for Donald Trump without awareness of that, which a lot of voters probably are, but I think

Anyone who understands how Donald Trump ran

the White House when he was president, none of this stuff that's included in Project 2025 is going to shift their view of what might be possible because Donald Trump has already demonstrated that he's willing to go farther than voters might have assumed he would. Do you think he'd move even faster this time if he were to win again? We saw how quickly he moved last time, but this time, is it going to be another level? Because this time as well, once he comes in, he does already know how things work to an extent. So he'll go even harder. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I wrote a piece about this a month or two ago that was basically that point, that he will be unfettered, right? And there are a lot of ways in which he would be unfettered should he return to the White House. One is that he's not going to bring with him people like, you know, his chief of staff, John Kelly, or James Matt as the Secretary of Defense. He's going to bring with him people instead who are both sycophants and loyalists, right? And who will do what he wants them to do when he wants them to do it, even as they're sort of

advancing their own agenda when he's not paying any attention to them. He's going to be unfettered, too, by understanding that the Supreme Court is going to be allied with him to some extent. He appointed three of the six conservative members of the Supreme Court. We've already seen how they've granted him this sweeping immunity, which was

frankly shocking to a lot of people in the legal community. There are all these ways in which Donald Trump, you know, he's not going to have to worry about reelection, right? To the extent that he even worried about reelection in his presidency, which was fairly small, uh,

He doesn't have to worry about that anymore. He's not going to have another term in office. There's all this conversation about, oh, he'll seek a third term anyway. I don't think that's likely. There are so many ways in which a new Donald Trump presidency would be an empowered Donald Trump in a way that we didn't see the first time around. Just looking at the optics of this in the moment that we are now building up to the election,

Even though Trump says that he has no hand in the recommendations that have been put forward as part of Project 2025, does that...

necessarily not matter because a lot of people are associating this with him anyway and probably won't do the research to find out that it actually isn't his plan. I was looking at some polling that most independents don't actually know that much about Project 2025 to begin with. So I guess my question is,

How does Project 2025 actually impact Trump in the run-up to the election? Is it negative? Is it positive? Or because people don't really know about it, does it not really matter? Well, I think it's one of those things which...

when you dig into it, is a reflection of how poorly informed a lot of people are, which is just the state of politics, right? I think the process works like this. Project 2025 gets your reputation as a compilation of toxic and bad things. Whatever those things are, right? You know, you can pick out particular things or, you know, it's

certain people fixate on certain things, but it just has this vague vibes-based impression of this is a bad thing, this is a thing Trump wants to do, therefore I'm skeptical of Trump. I think that's sort of the pattern, regardless of what it actually includes. I think the easiest way for Donald Trump to be able to rebut this, honestly, would be to go through and say, here are my actual policy proposals, but

He's not going to do that because he doesn't really care. He himself helped write what the actual platform of the Republican Party was for the convention, and he kept it very vague. He likes to be vague. He said in the past that he doesn't like to say, here's exactly what I'm going to do, ostensibly because it gives him more room to bargain and make his deals when he's not tied down to what he says he wants.

That would be an easy way to offset this. If you could just come out and say, here's actually what I want to do and here's why Project 2045 is wrong, but he has no interest in doing that and he's not going to do it. And so then we end up back in the pattern that I just explained, which is that there's this thing that is perceived as bad and is tied to Trump. And then that is certainly not going to do him good, whether or not it costs him the election, I think is a different question. In that vein, though, obviously, like the Harris campaign has been centering this, you

My concern, and I will concede that they've been expanding beyond it in the past week or so, especially now that like Walsh is on the ticket.

is if they're kind of shooting themselves in the foot by making this a centerpiece of their attacks on Trump versus, you know, honing in on specific issues like abortion, economic rights, things like universal child care, like child tax credits, things like that. Because, like you said, the messaging around Project 2025 is kind of this vague catch-all for everything bad about Republican policy without necessarily getting into the specifics about why Democratic policy is good.

Yeah, I think that's right. But it's also August, right? You know, the Democratic Convention hasn't happened yet. I think one of the things we're going to see at the Democratic Convention is that sort of articulation of what it is that Harris and Walz want to do. You know, what, Harris has been running for president for two weeks. She just.

Yeah. Vice president. This certainly is plenty of time for that. And once we see I doubt that the weekend before the election, for example, you're going to see a campaign ad that is simply Harris. We must stop Project 2025. I prove this that that's not going to happen. Right. There's going to be a more positive message. And in part because Harrison Walls are running this campaign now, which is very positive.

and sort of surprisingly optimistic in just making positive change, I think they're going to want to get away from that anyway. So we'll see what happens. And I think that's probably likely to happen, though.

Philip, you mentioned a book that you had written earlier. Just for our listeners, what's it called and where can people get it? You can get it at book places, Amazon, et cetera. It's called The Aftermath, The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America. And it looks at, we've sort of forgotten how big the baby boom was and how much of an effect it had on the American population, economy, and politics. And it looks at what happens as the baby boom ages into retirement and then is replaced by millennials and Gen Z.

Well, listeners, we'll put a link in the show notes for you to go and have a look at that, should you wish. But Philip, thanks for your time. It's a pleasure as always. Of course. Thanks much.

Okay, so time to talk about more Trump madness. He has suggested that Biden, for some unbeknownst reason, could crash the DNC and try and take the nomination back. This has been reported a lot of places, Nicky, and it kind of got front-end reported here by The Telegraph, an amazing newspaper here over in Britain, always really straight to the point, which said Biden could try and take the nomination back, then went doggone it.

Donald Trump says. And you went, oh, okay. So it's not really that serious. How stupid is this? How stupid is it? He couldn't do this. And even if he wanted to, could he? It's just, it's really very silly. I saw that post. And as someone who reads a lot of fan fiction, I recognize a fan fiction writer when I see one. And that was electoral fan fiction. Kamala Harris has been certified as the nominee for

Biden was the first person to endorse her when he dropped out of the race. Like, it's bullshit. And all it shows is that Trump is scared. He's scared of what the polling is showing. He's scared of the attacks being made of his campaign. I think at this point, there is a growing consensus among Republicans that picking J.D. Vance was a fuck up. And, you know, Trump is seeing the walls closing in. If he...

wants to keep up the pace, wants to keep this race competitive and close that gap that is growing between him and Harris as Harris continues to sort of rack up wins in the polling, his campaign is going to have to undergo a major strategy change. It's just been wild to see how much they've struggled

to keep up with everything the Harris campaign is doing. And Trump, when he's freaked out, he lashes out. He's just been ranting on Truth Social. He called like an impromptu press conference today at 2 p.m. because when he's like freaking out, he has to get in front of the cameras. So we'll see how that goes. This is today being Thursday, Thursday.

It's like, you know, when your ex breaks up with you and you didn't really see it coming and you're trying to process it. And in your mind, you're just like fantasizing scenarios about how maybe you could like make it work to make them take you back. Like that's what that post was. And it was really pathetic. So not that I feel bad for him, but.

Biden's not coming back. He's done. He's done. He's dumped you. We'll all be laughing on the other side of our face when he comes back and Jesus comes back and anoints Donald Trump president and all the QAnon stuff. I think you mean King. And King. Yeah. Yeah. World King. John F. Kennedy Jr. rises from the dead.

I think not the dead. He's just hanging out somewhere. He's in Dallas somewhere. With Elvis, I imagine, and maybe some other unsavory people from history. But anyway, on to another weird story then. And we've got a Kennedy segue as well. So RFK Jr., I'm sure most people have seen the bear story by now. But Chris...

In case they haven't, very, very quick recap then. What has been going on with the bear? And then also just more generally, what's RFK up to otherwise? And does anyone give a shit politically or is it just the weird photos of the dead bear? I mean, very briefly, he found a bear, put it in his car, wanted to skin it and eat it, decided didn't want to do that. So he buried it in Central Park.

He didn't bury it. He just dumped it there. He dumped it. He just left it. With a bike there, though, because there'd been a spate of bike crashes. If anything, it would have made more sense if he'd buried it, you know? Nice to give it a burial, a funeral, a nice send-off. You know? That would have been nice. I've attended many a bear funeral in my time, and they're always... It's a nice ending. I'm sensing sarcasm, and I don't appreciate it. By the way, when you segue to a segue, you don't then say, this is a segue, idiot. Anyway...

so this story is weird. RFK Jr. was already a pretty strange guy. Yeah. And his campaign has been going just terribly. Just really not good. I mean, I think the two things that you can pick out and relate to him in this campaign is a dead bear cub

that he wanted to eat, that didn't, he didn't eat it, but he wanted to. Yeah. And then brain worms, we spoke about it before actually, that he said he had a worm removed from his brain. They're really the only two things you can think of from... Well, also eating dogs. He eats dogs. Eating dogs. I didn't even see... What? You didn't see this? I've not seen that. Bring us in. The thing that people are talking about with this bear story, because in the UK, y'all wouldn't have known this, but...

But when that dead bear cub was found in Central Park, it was a giant news story. Like, bears do not live in Central Park. It was like a huge fucking deal. It was like a citywide cold case. And the thing is that RFK keeps doing this thing where, like, someone will try to interview him about something else, and he will just reveal anything.

an insane anecdote about his life completely unprompted. So a while back, there was another article. Basically, the journalist obtained a photo of him on a trip to

I think like somewhere in Southeast Asia where he was eating what looked like a dog that had just been like roasted. He claimed it was a goat. It definitely did not look like a goat. But then, so that's the whole thing. But then he gets on TV. They ask him about this and he just like completely unprompted goes, yeah, yeah, I wouldn't eat a human. And it was like,

No one asked you that. And then like yesterday, he was in like Manhattan court for something-a-ma-bob. And a journalist asked him about this like bear thing, if he'd picked up any roadkill lately. And he just goes, yeah, I have a giant freezer at my house. It's like full of roadkill. Oh, good. Yeah.

Essentially, what we're taking away from his campaign is that there's just mad animal content in his life. I have to respect his dedication to protein consumption because he's jacked, to be fair. Yeah, he is. And particularly for his age, he's really rich. He is jacked with muscle, but he's not jacked with money or campaign funds. That's how you segue.

So I was looking at OpenSecret, and he's raised $103 million through his campaigning so far, which is basically like less than a quarter of everyone else. So he's got no money. And also in terms of polling, he's polling about 5.5% according to 938, which is way off the two main candidates are all 40%-ish. So...

It's not very well. Well, Newsweek also then, they suggested that Trump for some reason needs RFK Jr. to drop out. Why are they saying that? What's their reasoning and logic there? Because he started running as a Democrat and then he transitioned to independent, but...

when he announced his candidacy and his candidacy was very centered around opposing Biden, Republicans really propped him up. So he also leaned really hard into Republican messaging. And I think what was originally a campaign intended to siphon Democratic votes away from Biden turned into a campaign that was siphoning votes away from Trump.

OK. And like I think I wasn't last week. I think it was two weeks ago at this point, right after the RNC. There was a video leaked by RFK Jr.'s son of RFK talking to Trump on speakerphone because apparently RFK doesn't put the phone near his head because he's afraid of like the waves. Yeah, naturally. Naturally. So he's on speakerphone with Trump and they're talking about like anti-vaccine conspiracies.

But there's one line in it that suggests that Trump was kind of pushing RFK to drop out of the race in exchange for like a position in his administration. It wasn't explicit. But what Trump says to Kennedy is, anyway, I would love for you to serve. And I think it would be so good and so big for you. And we're going to win. We're going to win. We're way ahead of these guys. Yeah.

It sounds like when I was a teenager asking someone to be in a band of me or something. Just being like, yeah, it'd be so sick. It'd be rad. It'd be well good. It'd be really, really great for you. We're going to be the next Slipknot. Oh, God, I wish. But another use for tampons as well that maybe the conservatives could get on board with. Put them in your ears to protect yourself from the 5G radiation.

There you go. And stub your brain. So there's all sorts of reasons. And they come in different sizes in case you have wide set ear canals. Absolutely. Well, Chris has one in his nose right now because he got a nosebleed. He was a little bit stressed earlier in the pod. Did get stressed.

Finally, then, last section of the show, we're going to do our poll roundup. But actually, I'm really sorry, Chris. You're normally the guy I defer to on the numbers. Any number problems, any time, day or night, you text Chris. He's the guy. I haven't used a calculator for months. I've got Chris around. Like Carol Vorderman. You are. And I would say, Chris, you're more glamorous than her as well. So, yeah, fair play there. Yeah, that is fair. But, Nicky...

You, you're going to talk me through some poll stuff. So, J.D. Vance, basically, you wrote about this. Don't worry. So I'm not putting you two on the spot. I got this from something you wrote about. OK, perfect. Even Republicans think J.D. Vance is weird, don't they? Yeah, this was an insane poll. Yeah.

So this was a poll that was produced by the University of Massachusetts and Amherst. And I will caveat by saying that what they found in this poll, and it's also why this poll is so shocking, their survey sample actually leaned pretty Republican. But what this poll found is that 51 percent of Americans voted

strongly disagree with the statement that Kamala Harris not having biological children would hinder her ability to serve as president. That number jumps to 64% when one includes respondents who said they somewhat disagree with that statement. Only 10% of respondents agree

agreed that Kamala Harris not having biological children would hurt her ability to serve as president. And that is a really insane split because what it shows is that all these attacks about like childless cat ladies and like all the claims by Vance or like proposals by Vance suggesting that like people without children are essentially like second class citizens are not just angering Democrats. They are not sitting well with Republicans. And I think it's

really rare to find an issue where either the support or opposition is so bipartisan. So that was a really interesting poll. And again, it goes back to this idea that

J.D. Vance, the reasons he was selected for this job was because he had a lot of corporate Silicon Valley interest behind him. They thought he would be the kind of guy that would like stick it to the libs. But in reality, his messaging is weird. His proposals are weird and off-putting. And it's it's becoming increasingly clear that he's not super popular, even with Republicans. The people who conducted this poll said,

Also did like a thing where they asked people to give like a one word description of each of the candidates. The word cloud things. Yeah. And then they made a word cloud. And the two biggest words in J.D. Vance's word cloud were unknown and weird. Oof.

Yeah, there are two words you don't want to be your biggest ones as a politician, I would say. Yeah, it's really strange that he was brought in clearly to kind of push these wedge issues and break people apart. But actually, he's unifying the country on what a dick he is. Yeah. So that's a silver lining of picking someone who's quite so off-putting. Chris, then, chill out, calm down. I hope you're all right. I'm sorry I did that, Chris. Yeah, well, fuck you. But anyway...

Um, he's got two tampons in his nose now. Yeah. The nose bleed was just going off the chart. Yeah. Blood everywhere. Um, anyway, nice and simple, but it's a big one. Uh,

Harris has overtaken Trump in the national average polling on 538. So she's now leading Trump 2.2%. She's averaging about 45.5% compared to Trump's 43.4%, which is pretty big considering, you know, Biden was very much behind before he

He dropped out of the race and Harris replaced him. So, yeah, she's now in the lead. But it is worth noting that 2.2% is very much within the margin of error for most polling that's out there. So it could be very close. Trump could even be ahead. But what we're seeing at the moment is Harris averaging above Trump. Okay, thank you.

Thank you very much. And on that note, then, that brings us to the end of this episode of American Friction. Nikki, thank you so much. Always my pleasure. Chris.

Thank you, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart. Yeah, well, you're welcome. And I guess thank you as well, Jav. I'll actually thank you this week. You're very welcome. And listeners, I was doing a little bow to Chris there to show him. I didn't like it, but he did it anyway. That made me uncomfortable. It made everyone uncomfy. Even the listeners who can't see him. That's how uncomfy we are. I'm so uncomfy, you guys. Yeah. And listeners, if you want more from us, we're out with a new episode every Friday, and

That comes out early afternoon if you're in the UK and in the morning if you're stateside. You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Our name on each platform is at American Frick. And as we've proven today, if you ask us a question there, we'll answer it. We will. We might not answer it exactly how you'd want or really, really well, but we'll try. We'll give it a go. We always try our very best. And also then, finally, if you could try your very best for us.

If you enjoy what we're doing, please do rate and review us wherever you're listening to the show. Go down, give us five stars, say something nice about us. That'd be great. It will get more people listening to the show and push us up the charts, which is what we really want to do. You've been listening to American Friction. We'll 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.