Trump and JD Vance take over the GOP — plus, how did American politics get so volatile?
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Hello and welcome to American Friction, the new weekly US politics podcast out every Friday from the makers of Oh Good What Now, The Bunker and Papercuts. I'm Chris Jones. And I'm Jacob Jarvis. Every week in the up to November's US presidential election, we'll be here unpacking everything you need to know ahead of the vote. And helping guide us through is Rolling Stone magazine politics reporter Nikki McCann-Ramirez. Hello, Nikki, and what you been up to? Hello.

I have been covering the RNC. Yuck. Yes. Having a very fun time doing that, I'm sure. Well, as soon as you've been covering it in this episode, we're going to be talking about it. We're going to discuss how Trump has returned to the public eye at the RNC, his vice presidential pick, and how Biden has handled things in the aftermath of that attempt on

former President Donald Trump's life. And we're going to take a look at another story which has been getting less attention than it perhaps should have, the classified documents case. Plus, Nikki and Jav are joined by American history professor Gary Gershaw about the changing landscape of the United States and the rise of populism and even more. Welcome back. You're listening to American Friction. American Friction

Quickly, before we begin the show, we want to say a massive thank you to all of you who have listened so far. We're going to be here every step of the way until the election, and your support really does mean the world to all of us. But we do have a very quick favour to ask.

If you're enjoying the show, please do go rate and review us on your podcast app. It'll get us more attention, more people listening, and you can even do it whilst you are listening to the show. So, on to that. Trump and his tiny ear pillow bandage appeared at the RNC this week in his first major public appearance since being shot at in Pennsylvania. Nikki, it kind of felt exactly like what you'd expect, didn't it? Trump has essentially become even more of a godlike figure now.

in the eyes of the party faithful, hasn't he? And this RNC, this moment just felt like if his takeover wasn't complete, it is now. Oh, absolutely. This RNC has been effectively just one big coronation of Trump and the MAGA movement as like the dominant force in Republican politics. It's fully cemented their control of the party. In 2016,

Republicans were incredibly divided. Trump was not sort of the consensus candidate. Former presidents skipped the convention. It was incredibly controversial. Republicans really thought that Trump would destroy the party from within. 2020, COVID happens. Neither party has a convention. So this year, it's really a big old party celebrating Trump, his cult of personality, the...

shift of Republican politics, as we are going to talk with Gary later, from sort of the neoliberal model to this really populist strongman image that is now guiding the party. I don't think there's any question about where Republicans' loyalties lie, what their ambitions are. And then you contrast that to the Democrats who...

are in turmoil, turmoil that we usually expect of congressional Republicans. I think Democrats for the past couple of years have generally kept a pretty united front and the table has just completely turned, especially in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Saturday. Republicans going into this conference were just incredibly galvanized around Donald Trump and

The the general vibe of this RNC feels incredibly jubilant, incredibly celebratory, and pretty much like Republicans feel that they've already won, that it's a done deal.

It also just feels incredibly religious to me from the outside looking in in so many ways as well. I saw Marjorie Taylor Greene speaking about how you could see something that looked like an angel protecting Trump when he was missed with that bullet and no one seems to be quite sure whether Trump is the father, the son or the Holy Spirit but he

He's somewhere in that mix for everyone, isn't he? Some sort of God and religious figure. It's been, yeah, it feels like watching one of those kind of conventions of religious meetsups. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And Mike Johnson, so many people have kind of taken on this attitude that, you know, the hand of God shifted Trump away at the last minute.

I don't love it on multiple fronts, but I especially don't like it because one other person, one audience member was killed and two other people were critically injured. And it just seems like a really...

kind of icky thing to be like, oh, this man was saved because he was godly. Forget about those other people. I also feel like the whole, I'm not super religious, but I did think the whole false prophets thing felt like a bit of a... Thou shall not worship false idols. Yes, that's in there. That's the thing, isn't it? Yeah. And maybe...

They do be doing that a little bit. I don't know. Chris, on the shooting side of things, obviously we recorded on Sunday and spoke at length around that. If you haven't listened to that episode, I would suggest go back and give it a listen after this. But what do we know about the shooting at this point that we didn't know before? Because as we said in that episode, the conspiracy theories were very frustrating. There's a lot of them around.

some more detail is starting to come out now, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, drip by drip. And just to go back to that fatality, that person who was killed by the gunfire was Corey Comperatore, who was a former fire chief. And a lot has been said about his politics online. But ultimately, I think one thing I'd like to say is that no matter your politics and your beliefs, everyone has the right to go to a political rally and return home safe afterwards. So, I mean, God knows what his...

his family are going through right now, especially after the reports that he had thrown them out of the way to save them from the gunfire. Just horrible. But also we've heard from US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheetor as well. She spoke to, I think it was ABC in an exclusive interview. And she basically said that the Secret Service was...

was responsible for the inner perimeter, therefore leaving the outer perimeter, which the building that Crooks positioned himself on, that was the responsibility of the local police. However, since that interview, the Pennsylvania authorities, the police force, have said that they didn't have the resources to guard that building properly, and they'd let the Secret Service know that beforehand. So there's a failing there.

They also said that they had identified a suspicious person with a backpack and a range finder 26 minutes before the shooting happened. They also took a picture and it turns out that person was Crooks.

And what reports say is that Crooks was identified well before the shooting as being suspicious and the Secret Service lost sight of him, essentially. I think it was 19 minutes. That might be incorrect, but I think it was 19 minutes they lost sight of him for, and we all know what happened next. Cheetle, though, did concede in that interview that what happened was unacceptable, and

and that the book stops with her. That's a direct quote. And obviously she's facing a hell of a lot of criticism right now, as is the Secret Service. And so far, she said she's not going to resign. She's not going to step down. Which is absurd to me. She has been summoned to testify before the House Oversight Committee on Monday. So there will be a lot of tough questioning in the coming days about what the Secret Service did.

or it didn't do. Yeah, there just seems to be so many obvious failings that we didn't need a week to really wait for it to come out. You could see them in plain sight. The former president got hit by a projectile of some sort, whether that was from a teleprompter or whether that was an actual bullet, we don't know yet. But either way, the former president's life was put very much in danger and that's just... How does it get to that point? I failed to see how the book can stop with you and you can remain in your job and not accept the...

perhaps someone else should come and pick this apart in some way. We mentioned it in our Sunday episode that we still, at that point, we didn't have a timeline. We didn't really know the details of how this was handled and communicated. And now that we do have sort of the rough sketches of a timeline, it does not look better for the Secret Service. It is not exculpatory in the slightest. We also do have some new tidbits of information about Matthew Crooks.

We know politically we still haven't learned much new. The FBI got access to his cell phone. They've been interviewing family members and people who knew him. They've sort of gotten confirmation that he was pretty conservative. But from his search history, what we know at this point seems to indicate that he was kind of just looking for the closest Trump or Biden rally to execute some sort of plot. And Trump's just happened to be the closest.

As of now, obviously, we're still waiting on more information, but it doesn't seem like he had a particular target in mind other than the president or the former president. We still have next to nothing in terms of a motive, in terms of what drove this man to do this. So we'll see. We're still learning a lot. As you would expect at the RNC, this...

this is clearly dominated things and it's felt like there's been as we as we mentioned there's quite a strange vibe around it and clearly

you know, your candidate surviving something like this and coming into a big open public forum is going to, that's going to be the narrative arc that everyone follows. But with the RNC, has there been anything, we're going to go on to JD Vance and the VP pick, but aside from that, has there been anything particular of substance that we have missed because of this focus or has it been essentially all negative?

All vibe, it's been all Trump. I mean, there is still a very marked focus on policy. Yeah. Each day has a theme. It's like, make America safe again, make America prosperous again, those kinds of things. Or sorry, it's once again, make America safe once again. One of the things that we've been really watching and where this sort of idea of, you know, unity and toning down the rhetoric is,

has been tossed out the window is on immigration. The RNC has been airing some really gross, highly produced videos attacking immigration, attacking Biden for his immigration policy, accusing him of throwing the doors open to murderers, rapists, drug dealers. There was one video where they literally had just stock footage of bodies in morgues and

And we're kind of blaming it on Joe Biden. Yesterday, during the nighttime speeches, they distributed signs that said mass deportations now. So I think there's this surface level call for unity. There's sort of this surface level we need to...

galvanize and tone down the rhetoric. But with every passing day, the focus seems to be less on that and more on we need to unify the party around Trump and around Trump's agenda. And obviously we've

Touched on a lot of those policy proposals, we've touched on the horrific implications of Trump's policy agenda and Republicans are going to try to stick to this veneer that critiquing Trump's policies is equivalent to inciting violence against him. And it's simply not true. And it seems like.

That by the end of this convention, they will probably be back to, you know, the usual working order in terms of attacks on Biden, in terms of rhetoric. Yeah. All the thing that can can happen is that Trump is becoming such a figurehead. But the movement has been so galvanized behind him is that Trump can be this useful distraction in a lot of ways. And we ignore that.

the horrific messaging of the grassroots and everyone else because it's all the Trump show. So we don't pay attention to Greg Abbott and we don't pay attention to perhaps even JD Vance as much as we should. Coming on to that then, JD Vance, he is the VP pick, not Nikki Haley who had to give a speech where there was actually video of Trump kind of seem to openly take the piss out of her for going up and speaking about him. JD Vance is...

Perhaps the least soft edge figure that could have been picked, isn't he? Just tell me a little bit about who is he? J.D. Vance. All right. So J.D. Vance is the junior senator from Ohio. He was elected in the 2022 midterms and he has served less than two years in elected office. This was the first political office he ever ran for.

Obviously, before he ran for the Senate, J.D. Vance gained a lot of fame in political circles throughout the country at large after the publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which was basically his political manifesto through the retelling of his early life. He grew up in suburban Ohio. He had family in like real rural, poor Appalachia.

There is this, I think, common misconception that J.D. Vance was a hillbilly. He wasn't. He grew up in the suburbs of a decently sized city and spent his summers vacationing with his hillbilly relatives. And when this memoir was published in 2016, I think a lot of liberals treated it as sort of a guide to understanding disaffected white Republicans in rural America, which

And if you read the memoir as like a political text, Vance's ultimate conclusion is that the reason the hillbillies are doing so bad, the reason the people in Appalachia are like suffering and struggling is because they have a bad attitude and because they've internalized all the stereotypes about themselves and that if they, you know, broke those stereotypes and had a better attitude, they would be successful people capable of living the American dream.

It's not the political philosophy he's espousing now as like a populist who likes to publicly critique government and corporations. And of course, it is impossible to talk about J.D. Vance's career trajectory without talking about his relationship to like Wall Street and major corporations.

In 2022, billionaire Peter Thiel attempted to essentially purchase two Senate seats in the way that rich people do this, which is they give a ton of money to campaigns because money is pretty directly correlated to electoral success in politics within the United States. So Thiel threw a ton of money at a Senate race in Arizona behind Blake Masters and then $10 million in Ohio to J.D. Vance.

Both Masters and Vance were former employees of his. Obviously, you know, he was one of the founders of PayPal. He runs Palantir. Like, Peter Thiel is an incredibly influential figure in Silicon Valley. Blake Masters lost, but J.D. Vance won. And in Ohio, Vance, he won, I think, by like six points against his Democratic opponent. But he...

severely underperformed when compared to other Republicans who were running state-level races in Ohio. He was not incredibly popular within his own state. And in the year and a half he's been in the Senate, while Vance likes to posture as a populist, as someone who dislikes corporate power, dislikes the influence of major corporations and government,

He was put into his position by powerful Silicon Valley oligarchs. He's a former venture capitalist. And again, his voting record is really limited because he's served less than a third of his term. But he's pretty much voted against every major economic labor oriented policy that has come before the Senate.

On his hypocrisy as well, I mean, in terms of something that he's flip-flopped on too, he's not always been a fan of Donald Trump, has he? No, he has not. I mean, you've done a little bit of digging into this as well, Chris, I think, haven't you, that he's been...

quite insulting of him in the past, doesn't he? Yeah, I'll be honest, it didn't take much digging. Literally just Google, what does J.D. Vance think of Donald Trump? And the things that come up, there's two quotes that I found almost immediately. Which, the first one was that he apparently referred to him as cultural heroine.

And also, he was worried that he was becoming America's Hitler. So, yeah, fairly soft on his thoughts with Donald Trump there. I mean, yeah, if you've called someone...

It's pretty, pretty far on that, Nicky. So Trump is, you know, maybe can't be criticized as harshly as he once was because Biden accidentally said the word bullseye before he was shot. And now we can't ever say anything mean about Donald Trump ever again. Yeah.

I'm disputing whether that's necessarily true. It was, again, reiterating, awful he was shot at doesn't mean you can't ever say a bad thing about him ever again. Exactly. But J.D. Vance does create the opportunity, at least for the Democrats, and seems to be

He's the new person who they can go, well, we can't necessarily be so harsh about Trump, but fuck this guy. And they've come at him over massively on abortion. Has he presented some sort of opening there? Yeah, for sure. And I think to answer that question, it's a little important to look at the reasons that J.D. Vance was picked. Mm hmm.

Electorally, he wasn't the strongest choice. We've talked about this before. Presidents, when they pick their vice president, they're usually going for someone who can help them win swing states where they're polling a little weaker or win a constituency that they don't have a lot of credibility with. The reason Trump picked J.D. Vance this time around, in my view, primarily, is because he's

J.D. Vance has said pretty openly that he wouldn't have had a problem doing what Mike Pence refused to do on January 6th of 2021. I think J.D. Vance realized incredibly quickly after he won his Senate race that as things stand now, a Republican has no future in the party in its current form unless they are fully beholden to Donald Trump.

Yeah. Vance said in an interview a couple of years ago that if he had been in Mike Pence's position, he would have told swing states that were really in question in the 2020 election that they should produce alternative slates of pro-Trump electors, which is something that we've discussed, that whole fake elector scheme. So I think what Trump is really looking for is a loyalist who won't question the directives that Trump gives him. And I think

The other angle here is who was advocating for J.D. Vance? It was Don Jr., Tucker Carlson, and Silicon Valley tech overlords who kind of want to see the old guard of the conservative donor money machine phased out and instead bring in sort of the more modern...

California, new right, rich types who are scared of regulation have very...

philosophical ideas about how technology can be used to reshape the political economy in this country. And they want to be the power brokers in American politics. And I think Vance provides a very convenient link there. He is well-liked, obviously, by Peter Thiel. Elon Musk has been very enthusiastic about this. So I think in Vance, not only do we see a Trump loyalist,

But we see someone who's going to help usher in sort of a new cohort of powerful conservative power brokers who want all that much more influence in D.C. On a final note in this first section, I want to ask you very briefly about

Joe Biden and how he has handled things in the aftermath of Donald Trump's shooting. And for me, on a political level, it looks like things just are on a slide, which he's failing to stop. And now he is also, he's having to isolate due to having COVID-19, which when you're already down and then something happens, which essentially puts a halt to you doing anything else.

It just seems like things couldn't have gone much worse for him in terms of how he's been able to handle this situation. Yeah, I think the Biden campaign and the White House made several unforced errors in the aftermath of the shooting. They came out really strong with the condemnation of the shooting, the calls for unity, the multiple addresses from the White House, the briefings to the public.

I think if they had just stopped there and sort of continued in that vein, let things sit for a little bit, sort of focus their calm strategy on the RNC and, you know, responding to the allegations and the claims and the policy proposals being made at the largest gathering of Republicans that takes place in the country, that would have been fine.

Biden had two interviews in the aftermath of the shooting, one with Lester Holt and another one with BET, Black Entertainment Television. He didn't do well in those interviews. He, again, made rhetorical mistakes, tripped over himself. He was really combative with Lester Holt. And that sort of brought the questions of Biden's health issues.

ability to handle the rickers of the office back into question. I think in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and we talked a little bit about this, there was sort of the sense that like, oh, well, that's it. Biden's going to be the nominee. This is going to completely redirect the conversation away from that. And the Biden campaign in the White House had the opportunity to sort of ride that out. And then the other big unforced error was that earlier this week, reports started emerging that the Democratic National Committee was

and the Democratic National Convention were moving forward with plans to hold a virtual vote to officially confirm Biden as the nominee before the scheduled convention in August. And that set off alarm bells throughout all of Democratic Washington. It was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? We're not done having this conversation. So that just revived everything. And now...

With COVID, which, you know, again, extremely unfortunate. It sucks to have COVID. But again, we know from everything we learned in the pandemic that older people are much more susceptible. The effects could be much more intense. It once again raises the questions of his health and perceived frailty there.

So it now seems like there's a very serious push from Democratic leadership to try and move Biden to step aside, usher in a new candidate. I'm sure Chris has some polling, so I won't

get into the numbers, but there's been some very abysmal polling this week showing that voters would really like to see a change. And there's also been reports that donors are continuing. Some donors have already pulled funding, but more donors are threatening to withhold money if they don't see a change on the ticket. So I think all of the pressure factors that we've previously discussed that would be needed to move Biden to make a decision are there. And it's only a matter of time.

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With every new shocking event, it does feel like we're living in a slightly new world every day. America and its politics have rapidly changed and leaders, institutions, and those of us following it have, at times, failed to keep up. Our guest today is Gary Gersel, who has charted a raft of changes in US politics. He's the author of the book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, and the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge. Gary,

Gary, welcome to American Friction. Thank you. It's good to be here with you. Gary, my first question I'd like to ask you in terms of the system in America that we're operating in.

Does where we are in US politics feel almost like the result of a system that had quite distinct winners and losers, and maybe the losers had simply had enough, or there had become too many so-called losers within the system for it to contain in the political model we had?

Well, I think we are living through the dissolution of an economic system or a political economy to which I attach the word neoliberal, which refers to the primacy of free markets, globalization. This dominated politics in America really from the time of Reagan through the time of Obama. And the belief was that if you open markets globally,

If you had a world without friction in terms of trade, if you allowed people, goods, information to move freely across the world, economic development would occur everywhere, growth would occur everywhere. And the claim was that everyone would benefit. There was an acknowledgement that this system would probably heighten inequality between the rich and the poor, but there was also the argument that inequality wouldn't matter that much because all boats would rise, everyone would benefit.

And this was a system that dominated both political parties for 30 or 40 years, and it began to unravel with the economic crisis of 2008, 2009. And then it became clear that there were winners and losers in the American economy. And 2016 is when the losers in the American economy began to

make their voices felt most prominently in the campaign of Donald Trump, who became the voice of forgotten America, the hollowed out manufacturing districts, places of distress and devastation. And he brought a lot of these people back into politics who had not been voting at all, which is one reason why his support ended up being so much greater than anticipated in 2016.

But you also had a very prominent figure in 2016, Bernie Sanders, who I call the second most successful socialist in American history after Eugene Victor Debs, who operated 100 years before him. And his message and Trump's message, in some respects, were quite similar, that too much had accumulated for the rich, too much suffering had been experienced by the poor.

and America had to change. And change involved moving away from free markets, globalization, thinking much harder about how to spread wealth fairly through the economy. We are living in a world in America in which there's an acute sense of loss and gain, and the people who have felt like the losers

angry and mobilized and have rendered American politics very dynamic and very volatile. Is that what is upending things there then, that the system hasn't quite caught up with the change there? But in terms of politics, it does to me feel like those groups that once at one point maybe had been disregarded are now

I know Biden won the last time out, but in terms of the Trump side of it, they're more politically powerful, even if in their day-to-day lives they aren't necessarily as powerful or benefited as you might expect. Yes, he has mobilized them. He has given them voice. He has made their aspirations, their concerns relevant. It's important to recognize that he only represents a portion of the poor, and his America is very much

primarily a white America, and the populist anger in America has an ethno-nationalist inflection. The anger and resentment is not just about economics. It's about culture and one's place and one's nation and who has the right to be honored as an American. And there are many white Americans in Trump's camp who are angry about immigrants coming into America, people not of European descent, people of color,

And from their perspective, taking a place that rightfully belongs to them. I was just listening to Vance's vice presidential speech last night, and this was a very important theme. So when we talk about the losers who Trump represents,

We have to include this ethno-nationalist dimension, a sense of restoring people of European descent to their rightful place in the American republic. Another striking feature of Vance's speech, again and again, he talked about standing up for the little guy, the American worker. Again and again, he condemned Wall Street traders, multinational corporations,

the Lords of Silicon Valley. But the question is, to what degree is the Republican Party converting to this program? And how much is that a distraction? It's interesting in this regard that someone like Vance spent four years

venture capitalist firms involved deeply with the Lords of Silicon Valley. He was put in the Senate by the Lords of Silicon Valley. Yeah, and Peter Thiel is a big supporter of his. And I'm just wondering, how has the Republican Party got to balance its historic embrace of Wall Street, venture capitalism, free markets with this new populism? I would say in regards to Trump,

He actually did very little for the average working man during his presidency, except to give them a sense of cultural pride. If you ask how much he materially improved their lives in his four years in office, he did that very little. To listen to Vance is to think he's much more serious about this, but we don't yet know

how this will play out if Trump and Vance are back in the White House. Will they follow through or will they abandon this as soon as they get into office and resort to a more traditional kind of Republican Party politics? Yeah, I think we have a fairly good record in terms of Trump on that front. Obviously, he ran as a populist. He's running again as a populist. But as a president, you know, tax breaks for corporations, tax breaks for the wealthy. He just announced, you

that he wants to once again lower the corporate tax rate. So I think there is, to what you're saying, like a major tug of war within the Republican Party

about what direction they're going to take in terms of their economic philosophy. Let me sort of leapfrog a bit here. I think in the vein of these populist movements, of sort of the rhetoric that Trump is bringing to the table, Democrats have historically had pretty much an electoral monopoly on many minority communities, including Latinos, Black Americans, immigrant populations, like

like blue-collar labor union types, and they're rapidly losing ground in these demographics. I'm curious from your perspective, what is driving these shifts? Not only what is the Republican Party doing right, but where is the Democratic Party failing? What are they letting Republicans get away with that's driving this electoral shift? Well, first, let me say, I don't think we know yet how far that shift is going. Clearly,

support for the Democrats is eroding. If Vance and Trump promote an intensely anti-immigrant campaign, that might restore Latino votes to the Democratic column and may appeal more to African Americans. And we also should not assume that African Americans and Latinos are united. Often their interests are quite different. Absolutely. The discourse in America is that people of color are united, but in fact, in many instances, they're not.

It is true that the Democratic Party is becoming more a party of the university-educated classes. And it seems that in this incipient realignment, cultural issues are coming to the fore and coming to define the supporters of the Democratic Party more and also the supporters of the Republican Party more. That's what makes this emphasis on economic populism in the Republican Party so interesting, because they think they have an opportunity to play in a major way

for constituencies that, as you had suggested, have been bound deeply to the Democratic Party for generations. If we are, in fact, seeing the beginning of a profound shift along those lines, that would be a major, major development in American politics. But I think we don't know yet the breadth and depth of that shift. As to among the minority groups who are being drawn to Trump, what is drawing them? I think that's a fascinating question to which we have

Very few good answers. I think the drift is much more pronounced among men, Latino men and African-American men than among women. And I think Trump is seen as modeling a certain masculinity that transcends racial lines and appeals to men of all races who feel that something about their manhood has been lost. I think to understand the incipient success that Trump is having peeling away

some Black males and some Latino males, I think we have to understand this as part of a crisis in masculinity. And we also know that certain patterns that were much more pronounced, say,

in the Black community have now become characteristic of the white community as well. Men having poorer employment records than women, men having less educational achievement than women. This used to be seen as a Black problem, and now it's as much a poor working-class white problem. So we may be seeing Trump's ability to articulate a resurgence masculinity that

Men in crisis in the United States are finding quite appealing in a world that they see as getting away from them. Among Latinos, I'll just mention one other factor, and this crosses the gender divide. Latinos in America tend to be a very religious population. And here, the religious foundation of Trump's support might be quite appealing to them. On talking points that might be slightly less...

divisive say for Biden. I do feel like on the culture wars, for example, it does feel like progressives often let the right wing wrestle the argument away from them in one thing. And then looping back to something we discussed earlier in sort of the economic model of the country and stuff like that we're seeing, Joe Biden seems to have let the argument around the economy

kind of get away from him despite actually maybe the way he's treated and dealt with the economy been far more impressive than he would seem to let on or his critics want to let on. It also seems around sort of

immigration and discussing that, he's also let the impetus of who gets to discuss that get away from him. Now that it's going to be harder for him to be quite as punchy towards Trump on a personal level, because there has been this kind of cloak thrown over it that you've got to turn down the heat there, do you think that where Biden, perhaps if there is some way for him to turn this around or grab the agenda back,

there are some tangible places like the economy and things like that, that he actually needs to be better at selling what he's done on. It's not the fact that he hasn't done the right things there. It's just that he hasn't communicated that particularly well. Well, let me first say that I don't think Biden can be an effective nominee anymore. And I say this as someone who's been a big supporter of his and think that his presidential administration is

has accomplished a tremendous amount. But I think he can no longer perform the presidency. There has been very serious decline over the last half year, and I don't think he will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. I think we're seeing a process being put in place that is going to end with him

not running. I can't be certain about this, but if I look at the trend of what's happening, that seems to be the direction of travel. And the power of the GOP ticket is causing deep consternation and panic in Democratic ranks and creating a sense of urgency that they're going to have to do something more very quickly.

But if we turn from Biden's ability to become president for another term or even to convince people that he ought to be allowed another term, he's had, by any measure, an enormously successful presidency, the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, which Trump talked about endlessly and could not legislate, the biggest investment in green energy in American history, the massive reshoring of chips manufacture,

a decisive break from the neoliberal economy where you prize free markets and globalization above all else, and you say the government needs an industrial policy, which means government, the state, the federal state has to intervene in the private economy to make sure that America is getting the manufacturing it needs and that the fruits of capitalism are spread

fairly over a much larger part of the population than historically has been the case. So if you look at these pieces of legislation, they amount to an extremely impressive record. And it's been a mystery to me why he's gotten so little credit for it. And even before serious doubts began to be raised about his health, I wrote a piece in May where his support on the economy, is he doing a good job on the economy?

a third of the American people answered in the affirmative. Unemployment's been below 4% for almost his entire presidency. The stock market is at 40,000. If you look at the American economy from the outside, the robustness, the dynamism of the American economy is the envy of the world right now. Certainly, Biden had something very important to do with this, and the fact

the fact that he's getting no credit at all, to me remains one of the mysteries. Now, part of it is that he's not been an effective messenger. And part of it, I think, is inflation and the seriousness with which that hit the American people. And anyone under the age of 50 has never experienced a period of high inflation in your entire adult life. And so you've never been through this before and it doesn't feel very good, especially whenever you go to the grocery store or go to fill up your car.

things cost a lot more and day to day you don't know whether you can make it. So I think inflation has hurt him. And I think one other thing has hurt him as well. The end of the emergency relief, the $2 trillion package that was passed soon after his presidency, which put more money in the hands of more Americans than they had ever had before. And

allowed them to glimpse a different life for themselves, for all the people at the bottom who've had pretty lousy jobs and maybe bad bosses, but had no choice about whether they could quit those jobs because they had to support themselves and their families. Suddenly, they were getting checks that allowed them more autonomy. You don't like your bad boss? To hell with you. I'm going to quit. I can live for a few months without employment until I find

better job. I have two or three kids I got to take care of and I can't handle a job at the same time that I'm taking care of my children. Well, I'm not going to work for a few months. The government has given me the resources to do this. And remember all the talk about the great resignation and also people not wanting to come into the office anymore. What was this about? This was a profound moment of rethinking of the relationship of work

to life. And the Biden administration gave people an opportunity to rethink that relationship in ways that they found very appealing. And then suddenly all that was over. Not through Biden's fault, because Biden wanted to make, especially the child credit, a permanent part of the welfare state, but he couldn't get it through Congress. He just didn't have enough support. But the fact that this ended under Biden

I think, and ended the moment of great, let's not call it great resignation. Let's call it the great reimagining of life and its relationship to work. It was a profound moment in the lives of a lot of Americans. Suddenly this ends. People don't understand why it's ended. And I think because so much hope was invested in this policy, Biden gets a lot of the blame. It was a really interesting moment because it really...

I think in the years before that, there had been a ton of chatter about the idea of universal basic income. You know, there were arguments on both sides, the economic feasibility, what it would do to work, things like this. And we got to live through that experience for like six months. And it turned out the results were an overwhelming success.

And then I think the rug did get pulled out from under a lot of people. I mean, I still work from home, mostly because Rolling Stone doesn't have an office in D.C., but I cannot imagine myself going back to an office at this point. It's it's my life. Yeah.

Yeah, suddenly that, and the broader contours of that life suddenly get snatched away because it was not just the ability to work at home, which workers like yourself and others have to a certain extent maintained, but it's the ability to imagine a different work-life balance. And it represented a blossoming of the possibilities of life and then suddenly snatched away. And I, so I think some of the anger at

Biden is about that snatching away, which is not his responsibility except that it occurred under his administration. As we discuss profound moments, there's a moment we've not actually gotten to very much with you, which is the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Just on a final question, something I'd like to ask you about around that. I know you've been asked about the impact of other assassinations of near misses and how that could have altered things.

I'm going to ask a kind of strange thing, I suppose, which is kind of the history of the future. Do you think Trump's near miss is going to massively impact the course of history? And then again, in something that you have been asking, just how much do you think things would have been different had it not been that near miss? You mean if he had been killed? Yeah.

Politics is so volatile right now that it's very hard to predict what's going to happen. Clearly, the fact that Trump was nearly killed, that in this moment of panic, he showed power and strength, that he made a bold choice as VP, not what I would call a safe choice, but a bold choice. And clearly,

This has got to complete his takeover of the Republican Party. All alternative voices are now silenced. They will have no further voice in the Republican Party for the foreseeable future. But he can't win on the basis of his base alone and on the basis of the Republican Party alone. And he needs to pull in a lot of independents to win a majority of the popular vote, and I think also to be successful in the electoral college.

His bold move now demands from the Democrats that they make a similarly bold move. If they stick with Biden, their safe choice, they're going to lose in November. And Trump is going to have a second term. And I do fear for the future of democracy in America if he gets a second term. So I think in the short term, it has enhanced his chances of winning.

But whether that short-term enhancement is going to turn into a middle-range success is really going to be dependent on how the Democrats respond. You know, he has thrown down the gauntlet, and they have to respond with a similar kind of boldness and then strive for a similar kind of unity. And I think that is possible, but they have to understand that that is their task, not staying loyal to Biden. If he had been killed, I shudder to think of

what would have happened over the next few months. And I think in an environment as feeble as the United States and the degree to which the Republican Party already had seen Trump as a messenger of God, even though what we know about the assassin suggests he was a Republican and not a Democrat, it would have intensified the war between the tribes of America and may have not been

manageable. Can you imagine anyone in the Republican Party calling for unity after the killing of Donald Trump? Very, very hard to imagine. And I do fear the intensification of political violence as a mode of politics in America. We see that in many ways, but we also saw it in a very dramatic way on January 6th, 2021. And the degree to which

the Republican Party has now essentially defends the actions of that day. I think a killing of Trump would have been a license for more events like January 6, 2021, and would have led to a very fearful moment in American politics, even more fearful than the one we're in now.

Well, let's hope with how things have gone, we don't see any more moments like January 6th at any point in our near future. Gary, thank you so much for talking to us today. Really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. Now it's time to take a look at another story that's been breaking this week, but you might have missed. It's actually really quite a biggie, to be honest. The big story is so big that

even things like this can be underreported. The classified documents case then, Nikki, what's gone on? As far as I can see, it just seems to be the short take of it is that Trump will now no longer get in any trouble for any of this. Yep. Florida Judge Eileen Cannon dismissed the case outright. She argued that the Department of Justice did not have the constitutional authority to appoint a special counsel.

which is an incredibly convoluted legal argument, especially given that the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the Justice Department's authority to appoint a special counsel.

Where we think this came from is when the Trump immunity decision came out from the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas, very conservative judge, issued a concurring opinion. He agreed with the majority that Trump should be given immunity, but he expanded on it in his concurring opinion and suggested that

The Department of Justice lacked the constitutional authority to appoint a special counsel. And it seems from Justice Eileen Cannon's opinion that that statement, that analysis from Clarence Thomas is.

was sort of the permission she needed, the permission she gave herself to dismiss the case. And to be clear, Trump's attorneys have repeatedly tried to have this case dismissed and Cannon struck them down. She has been delaying the case, slow walking it. We already knew it wouldn't go to trial before the election. But that statement from Clarence Thomas seemed to be like the trigger point.

The Department of Justice, Special Counsel Jack Smith have challenged the ruling. They've basically said, like, we are going to appeal this. It will likely get turned over on appeal. But then Trump can appeal that back up to the Supreme Court. Whereas we've seen he has very friendly justices who are willing to side with him on a lot of issues. And given that Clarence Thomas has already indicated his belief about special counsel authority issues,

It might just be another opportunity to hand him a boon. So it's bad. Essentially, the case is dead in the water now. It will be months and months, probably not until like the next Supreme Court term that we actually get a final decision on this. Well, electorally, then, is it also is this kind of allowed for this new newfound dominance of all conversation that Donald Trump has had?

Is this in part allowing that? Do you think that's what the consequence of this might be? So I saw, for example, the Washington Post reported that Trump reporters said the shooting had made Trump court cases last week's news. And as friend of the podcast, Jeff Jarvis kind of pointed out on social media,

is that not somewhat the Washington Post fault? They should be following up on things like this. But in terms of this one, this is one that is tangibly dropped. It's just giving Trump more and more space for it to be the Donald Trump show and the bad things are becoming a distant memory. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it was necessarily the shooting that relegated these cases to the back burner. I think the biggest dynamic was...

All of the efforts Trump's legal team took to delay these cases. I think the only one that we were kind of like, maybe we'll still get a trial before the election was the Georgia case. That also seems to be in question now. Essentially, the Trump legal strategy of just throwing motions, throwing shit at the wall until something stuck to push these cases back did succeed in removing them from the calculus of the election. It really did.

Did kind of take them off the table, and I don't necessarily think that's the media's fault. I think the coverage of these cases and the developments has been comprehensive. It's been widespread. There's been a ton of analysis done, but.

The reality is you can't continue covering an event that's not going to take place for six, eight months. It's a breaking news event. It's something that's happening right now. And again, it was an incredibly intelligent legal strategy by Trump's team. And he got everything that he wanted. Chris, Democrats, how are they reacting to this? Oh, they're not happy. No. I imagine they're not happy, but are they actually, are they getting much cut through with their happiness? No, not really. It's

The thing about this case is it's really confusing. And unless you know what the Supreme Court has said previously about special counsels, it's quite hard to get a grasp on. It's just really confusing. I was trying to read the 93-page report that Cannon released making her judgment. And it's just like, it's really, it's really odd, Joff. Yeah. Couldn't stick with it. You're not a lawyer. You wouldn't be here if you were. No, no. I'd be a very rich man, not a poor podcaster.

But yeah, Democrats are not happy. Senator Chuck Schumer released a statement. He's had his say on it. And he said that it's breathtakingly misguided and the ruling flies in the face of long accepted practice and repetitive judicial precedents. And he also called for an appeal to be made immediately after.

Biden also said that he wasn't surprised by the ruling and basically blamed it on the Supreme Court and suggested that this was kind of like a trickle-down kind of effect. And Nikki, you were very kind in your description of Clarence Thomas. Ida used a different C word that ends in erupt. Yes. But yeah, Democrats not happy, as you can imagine.

And I will note that I think it was Matt Gaetz who tweeted something about, like, future Supreme Court Justice Eileen Cannon. So...

Yeah. Make of that what you will. I think that's something that some Democrats have basically mentioned as well, that this is an audition for her to be appointed into the Supreme Court. However, Biden has hinted at reforming certain parts of the Supreme Court, which would basically include lifetime appointments. Whether that's going to happen, though, very much remains to be seen.

Before we end, let's take a look at some of the polls of the moment. I'm going over to poll man, podcaster, connoisseur, Chris Jones over here. Chris, tell me about the polling. What stood out to you? Well, coming back to something that Nikki said earlier about people not thinking Biden's fit anymore. Uh,

I think it was an AP- Speak for yourself. Yeah, well, an AP-NORC survey found that 70% of Americans, including nearly half of Democrats, said that they weren't confident that Mr. Biden had the mental capacity to be president. That's a recent survey. Thought it was interesting, thought it'd share. It was, Mr. Jones.

Mr. Jones, we're going formal, are we? Bloody hell. What are you doing with Mr. Biden? Well, that's his name. But no, the other bit of polling that I wanted to talk about came out after the assassination attempt. And this is from Emerson College Polling. And it's sponsored by Democrats for Next Generation. So it picked out some battleground state politics.

And what it shows is there has been a spike in support nationwide since that failed assassination attempt, which I think we probably all could have predicted. So, for example, in Arizona, Trump is now at 46% compared to Biden's 36%. Nevada, Trump's 43%, Biden 40%.

Wisconsin, Trump 46%, Biden 43%. So support very much gone up for Trump since that assassination attempt. And that was rounded off by Spencer Kimball, who's the director of Emerson College polling, and said that recent polling shows Biden losing support more significantly than Trump, gaining it since the attempted assassination. This raises questions about whether Biden's decline is still influenced by the debate

bait or if Trump has reached his support ceiling. Either way, it's not good for Biden. No, that should be the tagline of American friction from now on. It's not good for Biden. It's not good for Biden, unfortunately. I've got another slightly depressing poll here to flag quickly before we go on, but this is from Gallup that I saw.

So, essentially, the highest percentage of people in the US want immigration levels to be reduced since 2001. So, significantly more adults than a year ago, 55% versus 41%, would like to see immigration to the US decreased. And it's the first time since 2005 that a majority of Americans have wanted there to be less immigration.

I just think in the context of the RNC and what we've been speaking about and how vicious that rhetoric is becoming, it's just quite sad but also scary to see that clearly the motion is going that way. We can speak all about there maybe needing to be some reform around the way that immigration is conducted in America. It isn't working properly. That's just whether you're a progressive or on the other side of things, things aren't working out so well with it.

It just depresses me that we see people saying the sort of things that they're saying at the RNC and unfortunately that perhaps more people are at least leaning towards that way of thinking that this has to be reduced and that blunt messaging may be catching through a little bit more than it would have in the past. Do you know what I'll say to that?

It's not good for Biden. Yeah, it's not good for Biden. Nikki, is it good for Biden? It's not good for Biden. It's not good for Biden. It's not good for Biden. Sounds bad.

And that brings us to the end of this episode of American Friction. Thank you very much, Nikki. Thank you very much, boys. And Jacob, thanks for coming back from your very long holiday to help us out. It's good to have you back. You're very tanned. And I hope you're nice and relaxed and we can do more and you don't go away. I've not got any more holidays planned. So for those of you who like listening to my voice, you're welcome. And for those of you who don't, I'm kind of sorry, but not that sorry. It's my voice. It's his voice.

Christopher, thanks to you always as well. You've not been on holiday for a little while. You should take it. Yeah, I should go on holiday, shouldn't I? But if some people would stop taking holiday, maybe I'd get a chance. But yeah, thanks, Joel.

And, you know, after we thanked everyone, and we have thanked everyone now, an even bigger thank you to you listeners. If you want more from us, we're out every Friday, early afternoon if you're in the UK, and in the morning if you're stateside. And why not also leave a review and a like? It helps us out. It might even push us up the charts, which would be very good and also very nice. And we'd very much appreciate that. 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.