Guilty verdict sends Trump world loco – plus, right-wingers fight themselves
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Hello and welcome to American Friction, the new weekly US politics podcast from the makers of Oh God What Now, The Bunker and Papercuts. I'm Jacob Jarvis. 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 big vote in November. And if you've been paying any attention over the last week or so, things have just got a whole lot tastier.

Joining us, as always, is the raddest Rolling Stoner you ever did meet, politics reporter Nikki McCann-Ramirez, and she actually joins us in London today. Nikki, how are you and how's London? Amazing. I am minding the gap and taking names. Nice. I'm really glad you're real, man. It's good. It's good. You're not like an AI that's just been zooming us all this time. It's a real relief.

Yeah. So in this episode, we're going to talk about the fallout of the Trump verdict. Now we've had a bit of time to process it. Then we'll round up stories like what's going on with the Freedom Caucus, election denial getting cranked up and attacks on Anthony Fauci. You're listening to American Friction.

Quickly then, before we begin, we want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has listened to American Friction so far. We're going to be here every step of the way until the US election, and we need your support to spread the word. If you can share this episode with a few of your friends, drop them a WhatsApp, tell them about it over a brewski or a ballgame or something like that. America. So on to the stories. First up, the Trump world is going crazy. Well, more crazy than it was before after the Trump trial verdict.

Nikki, what has Trump said since being found guilty beyond his initial, I'm a very innocent man line? I mean, he still maintains that he is a very, very good and innocent boy who has been wrongly maligned by the American justice system. I think the biggest thing we've seen so far is him...

posting on Truth Social that the Supreme Court should intervene on his behalf. Basically, he wrote out that, you know, this judge is super corrupt, that it makes like no sense that a president can be indicted in this manner during a campaign. And the United States Supreme Court must decide.

And this really echoed something that Speaker Mike Johnson had said in an interview with Fox News over the weekend where he also basically said that like, oh, I know a lot of the Supreme Court justices and they're very concerned and they'll get this resolved, but it might take some time, which also raises a lot of questions about like why the hell are Supreme Court justices communicating so directly with the Speaker of the House? If anyone saw last week...

Chief Justice John Roberts refused to meet with Democratic members of the Senate regarding, you know, all the ethical stuff we've talked about about Justice Alito because he said it would be inappropriate. So there seems to be this growing narrative amongst right wing leadership in Congress, Trump himself, that the Supreme Court will intervene in this case.

Obviously, before that happens, before a case of this nature could be escalated to the Supreme Court, it would need to go through the criminal state appeals process. We expect that any day now. Trump, his legal team have all made it incredibly clear that they plan to appeal. So that's like the big legal logistical stuff. The other silly thing he said was he claimed he never said that Hillary should go to prison. Yeah. Which is like there are hours and hours of tape. Yeah.

Also, he never said when his supporters were chanting, lock her up. He was never like, oh, guys, don't say that. Yeah, he was never like, no, no, no, don't do that. Locking up a candidate is bad. No, he was fully for it. Yeah, it's very strange. The hypocrisy on show I have found massively baffling and the constant, oh, the deep state's out to get me, but then I'll use the deep state when I become president again to get my revenge is just...

Doesn't make much sense. Fox and Friends though, they gave him a really softball interview, didn't they? In this framing of it, because he's been quite bombastic, but do they want him to look like this kind of, this weird dichotomy that on one hand, he's a super strong leader sent by God and QAnon to sort shit out. But then he goes on Fox and Friends to be like, oh man, I'm just a guy, a normal guy.

And they fucked me over. And how sad for me is that? Like how he's playing in just a really weird way, isn't he? It's it's been really funny. One of the jokes that's been going around on the Internet is that Republicans are going to do more for criminal justice reform in the United States in the next hundred days than they have in the last hundred years. Because I think it's really obvious that Republicans like especially in the last 50 years have

have been the tough on crime, really aggressive,

almost cruel party when it comes to how they view the justice system and how criminal defendants should be treated. And all throughout the last weeks of the trial, especially as the jury was deliberating, you saw every anchor on Fox News talk about the poor plight of the incarcerated American whose rights are consistently being violated. And to be clear, the American justice system is fucked up in a lot of ways and criminal justice reform is

is absolutely necessary. White-collar crime, like what Trump is accused of, is like bottom of the list in terms of what sort of criminal justice reform needs to take place in this country. If anything...

Prosecutors need to be focusing more on white collar crime than like prosecuting petty low level nonviolent criminal offenses. That's just my view. There are way too many people in Rikers. Trump is not going to be one of them. It's been made pretty clear that the odds of him going to prison are incredibly slim. Fox News since October.

Trump's arrival to the presidency has basically operated as a revolving door for his administration. Former people who were hosts at Fox News advised the White House. Some of them go on to work there. People who worked at the Trump White House now work at Fox News. It's an incredibly incestuous little cohort. Essentially, they're just like trading talking points with each other. And yeah,

Fox is a place where Trump feels safe. So obviously he wasn't going to go to a CNN or an MSNBC to give his first big interview after the trial. He was going to go to Fox News because he knows that it's not only a network that is friendly to him, but there won't be pushback.

There won't be critical analysis of the trial. It'll just be a nice little platform for him to spew the same kind of messaging he's been putting out this entire time to an audience that's already receptive. And I think it worked well for him. He's putting out this image of like, oh, poor me. This is so unfair. The criminal justice system is so corrupt. Trump is the same guy who called for five teenagers who were falsely accused of a rape and a murder to be executed. Right.

Yeah. Like the fact that anyone would buy this also like boggles the mind, but here we are. So we'll talk about a lot of the online reaction, but I saw this meme going around that was an AI generated image of Trump looking really, really jacked with tattoos and stuff. And people were like,

You think Trump going to jail is going to make him weaker? No. It will just make him stronger. He's going to grind whilst he's in there or whatever. But yeah, Trump won't go to a... He's not going to go to a horrible jail and rot even if he does go to jail, is he? So in the public eye, it's not like one of those people who...

get sent to jail on something that maybe they shouldn't have, and then the justice system is so fucked and their opportunities for recourse are so bad that they get stuck in a system forever. Trump's not just going to get stuck, is he? So it kind of doesn't work in that kind of way. On him being a bit of a tough nut, as he seems to want to act like he is, he's basically threatening the nation in some ways, isn't he, by saying...

If I do get sent to jail, which, as you mentioned, doesn't seem all that likely necessarily, but he's saying if I do, my supporters won't, they won't accept that. And we've seen the political violence that they've engaged in, which he denies riling up despite him now saying stuff that would be riling that up.

Does he actually think that bullying the judges and bullying the public will work for him in the election? Does he think that maybe some people will go, oh, shit, well, I can't not vote for Trump or I can't vote for Biden because, well, the world's just going to implode if I do. Like there's the lesser of two evils is like having Trump in the White House or having civil war. I think there's a couple of different factors at play here. I think obviously Trump riles up his base. It's a tactic that's used...

Pretty ubiquitously throughout the right, we've also saw it a lot with Tucker Carlson where these figures with massive platforms will target individuals that they don't like. And knowing that their supporters will go out, harass them, potentially try and commit violence against them. We know that Michael Cohen's mother was swatted.

Like the day after the trial ended or like a couple of days after the trial ended, I think during jury deliberations for people who don't know, swatting is basically when you call the police and make a fake report saying that like someone was murdered or there was a shooting or a bomb threat.

with the intent that the American police, which are highly militarized and don't really ask questions before shooting, like show up to a person's house, break down the doors. Like there's always the potential that they might harm someone in the process of responding to it. But even if they don't harm anyone, it's an incredibly scary, incredibly like violating event to do to someone. And there's not a lot of recourse for it. So that happens fairly often. And then, of course, we have like

larger scale instances of violence by Trump supporters, like the most notable one being January 6th. And this whole notion that like, I think Trump

in his mind, like, does believe that he can mobilize his supporters in this way. The thing I think it's important to remember is that in the aftermath of January 6th, when we saw all the conspiracy theories about the, like, riot being orchestrated by, like, undercover federal operatives, and then, of course, all of the prosecutions of January 6th participants, there has been a really interesting trend within, like, right-wing social media spaces where, like,

whenever there's a major event that Trump is like come out, protests or like Republicans are like, we need to stand up against this. Trump's supporters themselves will say, no, no, no, don't do that. This is a psyop. They want you to do that so they can crack down on us like they did on January 6th. And it's by no means a full break. But I think in the aftermath of January 6th, the legal response to that event was

has really made a lot of Trump supporters pump the brakes on how much they themselves want to be involved in actions of political violence. Because I do think on January 6th, there was definitely a contingent of people who showed up to the protest and ended up in a riot. It was an all-day event that began at the mall. It moved and like organically...

crowds like are shaped and respond to stimuli differently and I have no doubt that there were people who showed up thinking they were just going to a protest and then all of a sudden it was like wait holy shit they're breaking down the doors of the capitol that is not to excuse the people who beat up cops it was a massive crowd and I think those kinds of people who are like uh if I show up to this action and they crack down and start arresting people or start like you know

Going after the people who were present. Do I want to be involved in that? So I think obviously it's a scare tactic by Trump. He knows that if he phrases his words carefully, it'll be interpreted as like, oh, he's inciting violence. But then at the same time, he's also preserving that political cover of saying like, oh, I say my supporters won't be happy, but I just mean they're going to vote for me at the ballot box.

And it's like, you know, it's very careful language that serves multiple purposes. Chris, on the ballot box side of things then. So how does it seem that Americans on the whole from polling, we spoke about polling in the past, but it was obviously all in the theoretical, like how would you feel if Trump was convicted? Now we actually know that.

how people are saying they're feeling now Trump has been convicted. So what are we seeing there? Well, to just go over how Americans in general are feeling about this right now, I've been speaking to two former colleagues of mine, Sally Patton and Benji Haya, who are two excellent journalists and have been covering this from the start. And they're Brits as well, so they have a curiosity about this, have been asking lots of Americans how they feel about

And it really is mixed. There's a lot of people who just don't give a shit, to be quite honest. There are more people that care about, for example, how childcare is going to get better and who is the candidate that's likely to improve childcare.

To give that some perspective, childcare is considered affordable in the US if it costs around about 7% of household income. But according to care.com right now, the average spent on childcare is about 24%, which is mad. So this is an issue that's massive that people actually care about. But you asked me about the polling, so I'll tell you about the polling.

Thank you. Yeah, you're very welcome. It's part of this podcast, I guess. So I looked at Ipsos to see how people really felt. And you could spin this data a few different ways. You could say that half of Americans think that Trump should end his campaign now that he's been convicted. You could also say that half of Americans believe that the trial was politically motivated. So it can be spun in both ways. There's so much conflict in data, so many headlines that conflict each other. It just depends on who you trust.

And there was also some more data from Reuters that suggested that one in 10 registered Republican voters were less likely to vote for Trump now that this conviction has come forward, which I think Alex Andreou mentioned on ogle.now in our recent episode.

And that's quite important to take note of. Yeah, well, is that worth looking at? Because a lot of the headlines have been, yeah, a load of Republicans are still going to vote for him no matter what. But those people were going to vote for him no matter what, no matter what, weren't they? So that one in 10 actually could become more significant than the however large amount of number who are saying it's not changed their vote. Yeah, look.

Trump is unlikely to really have gained much support from this. He has, as we can tell from these polls, lost one in 10 Republican voters. But what we can't tell from these polls is where these people's votes might go elsewhere. They might just not vote. They could vote for Kennedy. Who knows? We also don't know... Yeah, exactly. We also don't know where these people who took part in this poll are. So to put

To put it bluntly, their vote might not have even mattered anyway. There's lots of ways that you can look at this, but as I say, Trump hasn't gained any support from this, but I think it's really interesting to look at what independents are thinking. Polling suggests that over half of them, as I say, just don't care.

And 25% of independent voters said that this conviction would make them less likely to vote for Trump. So I think it's worth paying attention to independents and how they're taking Trump at the moment, rather than perhaps GOP voters, because we know how they feel. Yeah. You've given me a lot of nice statistical stuff there on America at large. Let's get to the anecdotal side of things a little bit though.

There's just been some really deranged stuff. It's crazy, isn't it? Yeah, in the kind of like the really hardcore Trump supporting world. I mean, I mentioned the weird AI images, which are just like, you know, really, really strange. But it's quite dark, isn't it? What is being said in certain places. It's really dark.

You look at some of these chat rooms. Is that still the term? Chat rooms? Yeah, chat rooms on the internet. Message boards. Message boards. And some of it is just wild. For example, I looked at... There's a website called patriots.win. Okay, nice. Yeah, yeah. Really cool sounding website. And I've picked out three comments. There's worse. And there's also a lot of comments that have been removed around what's been said in terms of this conviction. I'm not going to name the users themselves.

But I'll read what they said. The first one says, the people applauding this verdict all deserve to be rounded up in concentration camps.

Another one said, any reasonable response by Trump should he regain the presidency results in all of their deaths already. All of them. They are in for a penny, in for a pound. And the third one is kind of a conversation between two. And it says, they won't be able to walk the streets. And the response is, why not? And then the response to that is, duh? And that is about the jury. Lots of talk about...

people wanting to find out who the jury is and hunt them down, but also about the judge as well. It's really scary stuff. It's really dark stuff. And I think it exemplifies just how loyal Trump's supportership

on the really far right really is, and it's really scary. Yeah, and it's not even just on these sort of message boards where people maybe feel anonymous. There's kind of been podcasts, haven't there, from high-profile Uber right-wingers also kind of quite gleefully saying, yeah, yeah, people should be rounded up and killed. Yeah, people aren't scared to say...

really, really harsh and controversial, but also massively incorrect things without punishment. It's really quite scary. Yeah. Could, you know, there's this one in 10 Republican side and this drop in support aspect, though. Could it just be temporary? We're very much in the immediate aftermath. There's still a long time to go until November. And also people have just got used to him doing awful stuff over and over, haven't they? This, to me...

unfortunate though it is, could just fall into the wash of, oh yeah, Trump does that stuff, but I like him. He could maybe negate that one in 10 by saying, oh, well, I'm going to do this thing you like.

And then they'll go, "Okay, I can forget about that thing because now I like you." I mean, Trump very infamously said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn't lose any voters. And I think he hasn't shot anyone, but it's held pretty true. Yeah, there was a poll after that as well, which did say that, that was like people agreed. I mean, obviously it's theoretical because he hasn't shot anyone yet.

But people did say, yeah, if he shot someone, I possibly would still vote for him. So yeah, there's a long time to go where people can change their mind or reframe this decision

Yeah, I think that's the point. There's a long way to go still in terms of campaigning in this election. But this poll that I think you're referring to from CNN asked Trump supporters if they would reconsider voting for Trump if he's convicted. And 24% said yes. But the wording of that is really interesting. The wording reconsider, it's not necessarily, I'm not going to vote for Trump because of this conviction. So we have a long time. There's lots to think about for these voters.

But they might still vote for Trump. Who knows? Nicky, on a final note on this side of things. So Biden, we've spoken about plenty in the past, obviously, but we spoke about saying he had to be somewhat cautious in how he reacted around this because the big thing he can't do is feed all the conspiracy trolls who go, see, it was unfair, it was politically motivated, and Biden was really orchestrating everything. How do you think he has played it since the convention?

the conviction came out. As we talked about in our like immediate reaction to the Trump verdict, there was some chatter that Biden would like come out and like address this in a speech or something. It turned out not to be a speech. It was just a statement put out through the Biden-Harris campaign being like, you know, Justice won today. This is like the American system at work. But regardless of this conviction, Trump is going to be the nominee in November and we still need to vote and we still need to mobilize. That was their messaging earlier

He addressed it, I think, yesterday or Sunday at a rally, but very briefly. And then the one moment where you could tell that, like, Biden is probably being reined in by his staff a bit was he was speaking at the White House and he was, like, leaving the podium. He was, like, walking away. And some reporter yelled a question about the verdict at him. And he, like, paused. And he, like, slowly turned around.

And he like gave this smile. It was like a very knowing smile. It was one of those like, you know, you know, kind of smiles. And then he like paused and like stopped and was like, I'm going to say something. I know I'm not going to say something. And then he walked away. And everyone was just like, oh, he fucking knows. And some right wingers were like, oh, you see, this is proof. This is proof that he knows and that he orchestrated it.

I don't know. I think Biden, as a politician, like ever since he was in the Senate, has always had a bit of a reputation for putting his foot in his mouth and saying things when he's not supposed to say them. The kind of funny one was when the Affordable Care Act passed.

that Obama was giving a speech and he like turned around to shake Biden's hand. And Biden says, this is a big fucking deal into like the hot mic, not knowing the mic was still going. So, you know, he does tend to be a bit impulsive. But I think overall, the campaign strategy has been to keep the messaging on this extremely tight and like pretty strategic about when they bring it up, because I don't think they just want to go super loosey goosey on it and risk it.

becoming the meat of the campaign, because at the end of the day, even from their initial statement, what they are saying is that this conviction is not going to stop Trump from running or potentially assuming the presidency. Like if they want him out of office, Biden needs to win the election. So I think that's going to be their big angle going into this.

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Now it's time to round up a few other stories that you might have missed amid, well, everything that's been going on. First up, the Freedom Caucus has a little bit of drama within its ranks. Nikki, first of all, very quickly, can you just tell me, like I'm an idiot, what's going on?

You are an idiot. Thanks, man. Damn. What is the Freedom Caucus? Listeners, being in this room and experiencing this dynamic is quite different. So, well, first of all... What do you mean? The Freedom Caucus has kind of always had drama. Yeah.

It's never been a chill caucus. And a caucus, for those who don't know, is obviously like there's the Senate, there's the House. The House has hundreds, hundreds of members. So there's Democrats, there's Republicans. And within each party, legislators will form kind of smaller little clubs, little groups, little caucuses around Congress.

Yeah.

are a mechanism of coalition building. Like, for example, on the Democratic side, you have like the Progressive Caucus. So if you want a certain bill to pass, you might go to the Progressive Caucus and be like, OK, what can we give you to get the votes of your members? And there is an official process for forming these caucuses. So the right, the Republicans in the House,

have always had a very, at any point in time, there's always been just like really one extreme right-wing caucus amongst the many. It used to be the Tea Party. That one was like the big one. I think it started under Bush. It was really big under Obama. And then the Freedom Caucus was formed in 2015 by former Tea Party members who were like pissed off with the Republican leadership and

And it's an interesting thing because it's very cyclical. The Tea Party used to be what the Freedom Caucus is today. It was like the most powerful caucus in the House of Representatives. And now it's like irrelevant. I'm not even sure it exists yet. Like I haven't Googled it in ages. But anyway, it started out as a legislative group.

They were trying to come at the Republican leadership of the House from the right. And then when Trump was elected, it really stopped being a legislative coalition and became a pro-Trump group. All it does, it's literally a Trump surrogacy coalition within the House of Representatives.

One of the notable things about this caucus is that virtually from its inception, it has been fighting with whatever Republican speaker of the House exists. They were instrumental in the removal of John Boehner. Boehner? Boehner? Boehner? Boehner. I think it's Boehner. Anyway, it just comes out of the gut, you know? You read it and it doesn't read like it sounds.

They were instrumental in his removal. Paul Ryan really had to negotiate with them to become elected speaker. And the Freedom Caucus really came into what it is now. The big pivotal moment was when Kevin McCarthy became speaker in 2023 because the Republican majority was so narrow after the American midterms in 2022 that

That McCarthy needed virtually every Republican vote to get elected. If you remember, it was like upwards of a dozen votes for him to get elected. And the Freedom Caucus basically came to him and said, we will vote for you if you give us all of these concessions, amongst them being the rule that they eventually used to kick him out, basically saying that like any member of Congress could like introduce a motion to vacate against the speaker.

the requests they made really stripped the speaker of a lot of the powers that they had. But also what it did was members like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene,

Because they chose to back McCarthy, one of the things they got in exchange was when Republicans took over this current Congress, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and here we go, we mentioned her in another episode. She's coming up later as well. She is coming up later. They were granted positions on very powerful House committees, which is why now you see Marjorie Taylor Greene

fucking up the House Oversight Committee every other week. These people, through these negotiations, the Freedom Caucus ended up holding a ton of really powerful positions, like Jim Jordan, also a member of the House Freedom Caucus. I do have to point out that Marjorie Taylor Greene did get kicked out of the Freedom Caucus. I think it was last year because she called Lauren Boebert a bitch on the House floor. And it was like a whole thing. So she got kicked out. But they're all fighting each other right now.

So specifically then on the Freedom Caucus at the minute though, Chris, what is the drama that's going on? There's this guy, Bob Good, who... Bob Bad. I can't say... Yeah, Bob Bad. Oh, Nicky! I've literally written that down. Oh, absolutely fuming. Ka-chow! So Bob Good's been bad.

Is that right? What's happening? Yeah, Bob Good is now Bob Bad, according to Trump. And I'm actually furious that both of you have ruined that joke, that very niche joke that only I could have come up with. But yeah, Trump's fallen out with Bob Bad.

I'm going to call him that from now on. So basically what's happened here, just to bring some context actually into this, good slash bad is the Republican representative for Virginia's 5th District. He's also basically leader of the Freedom Caucus right now. He's the chair. He's the chair, yes. He's the chair, so he's a very influential figure. And he's running for re-election. And to aid his chances, he's been using Trump's face...

and also his Trump's name and all of his campaigning on posts outside houses, which are all over the place, which I didn't really realize would be the case until I went to the US and I drove around New England and they were literally everywhere. It was ridiculous.

Did you see the hay bales if you were driving around the countryside? I didn't see the hay bales. Oh yeah. If you're in rural areas, they'll spray paint Trump 2024 on them. Yeah. Well, they're everywhere. All of these campaigns are everywhere. And basically, Bob Good has been using Trump to boost his chances of getting reelected.

But there's a massive problem with this because Trump hasn't endorsed Bob Good, who actually went to Manhattan to support Trump in the trial. But Trump has endorsed his opponent instead, John Maguire. And the reason he's not

endorsing Goode is because Goode has endorsed DeSantis or Meatball as Donald Trump refers to him and I know you very much enjoy that. He's just so good at making up nicknames. It really does frustrate me. Yeah, and this one really fits, doesn't it? Meatball Ron. Yeah, exactly. Meatball Ron. Anyway,

Trump's team has now sent a cease and desist notification to Good's team. And Trump even posted on Truth Social, he said, the damage has been done. I just want to, he puts this in capitals, make America great again. And the person that can most help me do that is Navy SEAL and highly respected state legislator,

John Maguire, a true American hero. So Trump's fallen out with Goode over this and Goode hasn't got Trump's endorsement, which is a big blow to him. Yeah, it's strange how Trump is bragging about someone being like a veteran, even though we kind of know

he's not really particularly nice about veterans. He's not nice about anyone really, is he? No, but I feel like in America, correct me if I'm wrong here, Nicky, but being nasty about veterans, that's kind of like a step too far for everyone, right? You know, Trump's mean about veterans and no one's happy with that. We thought it was a step too far, but he's still out here. No, it was like,

whole thing like the very infamous moment where he like said about John McCain who very famously was a prisoner of war in Vietnam that like he prefers to see war heroes who don't get captured I don't know if that's the exact quote so it's not unexpected I would also know there's some circling briefly back to good two very important things here Trump did endorse good in 2022 so there was like I think also the expectation that he'd get the endorsement again and

Good. Did endorse DeSantis in the primary. But then once DeSantis like dropped out back Trump. Another thing that kind of went on under the radar in April was that one of the reasons the Trump campaign is sending this like cease and desist being like you're not allowed to use our name and image is that.

In April, the Trump campaign actually sent a letter to a bunch of like down ballot Republicans, like congressional campaigns, Senate campaigns, local offices, basically being like, you need to pay me if you want to use my name, face, image in your campaign materials.

And we've talked a lot about how Trump is financing this campaign, but this idea that Trump is now collecting royalties from other candidates in local elections to use his name and image to me is just so fucking weird and funny. And the RNC also gets a cut of that. So it's a whole thing. Bringing it back to November in 2024, though, then, does the fact that he's able to do that and people kind of roll over and are like, fair enough, just show...

you know, how much of a key figure he is, not just when it comes to the presidential race, but beyond that, he's just like so, so powerful. Yeah, I think there is this perception in Republican politics that like Trump's endorsement is like the magic touch that you'll win whatever local race you're in. Blibbity blabbity. Um,

I think I killed Chris. I legit just spat my drink out and bibbidi-bobbidi. Bibbidi-bobbidi. Bing bong. That's the official term. I think that was Latin that you were speaking. That's right. That's right. You know, look, it's this country. It's rubbing off on me. I don't know your words, and so I'm inventing them for myself. But if you look at, like...

The midterm elections that have happened since Trump left office, the backlash to Roe v. Wade.

The argument that Trump is like a fully dominating force whose endorsement is like a guarantee of a win, I don't think it necessarily rings as true as people think it does. I think especially we talk so much about independent voters in this country. Like where do those independent voters – they don't all live in like Washington, D.C. We are literally the pinnacle of taxation without representation. They're spread throughout the country and they are voting in local elections and they are –

seeing the candidates who are representing them on school boards, in their state legislatures, in the House of Representatives. And I think for a lot of districts and a lot of people, Trump isn't doing much for them. Trump isn't the person they want to see. If anything, like a Trump endorsement could be potentially damaging in some districts. We saw after 2022 when Republicans were convinced that

that they were going to have this major red wave. They were really expecting massive gains in the 2022 midterms, and that did not materialize. And the Republican establishment really stamped it out pretty quickly. But for like a week or two, there was a lot of chatter about like, is Trump still the person that we want to be putting this party behind? Because we can't necessarily make the argument that we are getting the electoral gains from

that we're selling to people. So in the case of Bob Good, Bob Bad, his race with...

His race with John McGuire is close enough that the Trump endorsement might actually be like a pretty critical loss for good. But I don't think Republican candidates across the board can just bank on a Trump endorsement as the winning ticket for their race, especially like how we talked about last week when abortion is such a big issue, when there are so many disaffected independent voters, when you do have this conviction and all these other trials hanging over the head of the Republican Party. Yeah.

Candidates are going to have to bring a lot more to the table than just Trump likes me to convince independent voters. If you're in a like plus 24 Trump district, you know, that's like solidly read. Sure. Fuck it. Why do you even need the endorsement at that point? But I think people need to be strategizing a little harder.

In related issues, if you can't win electorally, there is always the option of just pretending that elections don't count, even though you ran in them. So you obviously think they count enough to bother running. But then, you know, it counts if you win, but it doesn't count if you lose, seems to be the thing. Election denial hasn't ever gone away, has it? But it seems to be ramping up.

even more at the moment. What groundwork is being laid for election denial down the line when it comes to November?

Oh, my goodness. Where do we even begin? Obviously, the big lie continues to exist. The idea that like the 2020 election was stolen and Joe Biden is not the legitimate president. That is still a thing. Trump has been asked multiple times at this point if he would accept the results of the 2024 election. And he has really hedged on giving an outright yes. He's basically said that, yeah, I'll accept it if I think it was honest.

Which, as we know, Trump's opinion is incredibly subjective and oftentimes completely opposed to reality. We also know that a lot of his cadre, his advisory committee, his inner circle. His group of mean girls. His mean girls, exactly. Posse. Posse. Posse comatose. Grabbed Trump by the posse. No.

No. No. Canceled. Cancel culture. So people like Stephen Miller, who was a very prominent Trump advisor in his first administration, they have been exploring a lot of different legal avenues through which they could once again raise challenges at a state level, escalate things to the Supreme Court, mess around with state electoral laws. I think the thing to remember here is that

There hasn't really been widespread accountability in the aftermath of 2020. We've seen isolated cases like the prosecutions that we talked about in like Arizona, Michigan, Georgia about the fake elector scheme. We've seen, you know, people who participated in the January 6th riot get arrested, convicted. But we haven't really seen a widespread, really holistic response.

effort to not only analyze like what went wrong at each state level in terms of like vulnerabilities that Trump and his allies tried to exploit, but also what are we going to do about like the more than 200 lawmakers in Congress who voted to overturn the election in 2020? Yeah. There haven't been safeguards put in place. And the reality is that Trump and his team have

learned from their mistakes. They know what went wrong, what didn't work in 2020. And now they are definitely devoting resources to seeing, OK, that didn't work. What can we try at this time? What do we do to ensure that we win? So there is sort of like the six month period right now where I think not only just Congress is

but also state election offices have to think like really long and hard about what are we going to do to ensure the security of the election? What are we going to do to ensure that this is an independent process that

That has the level of oversight needed to ensure that not only that these claims that the baseless claims of election fraud do not gain traction, but that our electoral process is unable to be sabotaged from within. And it's a massive question. There are just like layers and layers and layers to it. I do know from conversations I've had with people that it is weighing on lawmakers minds and that.

A lot of people feel that not enough has been done in the aftermath of 2020 to boost up election security. And I think the thing is we're still seeing visual signifiers of that now outside of politics. For example, I mentioned earlier, Patriots.win, that website. I went on there and after the conviction of Trump was announced,

There were so many people saying that they were going to go home and put their flag upside down and fly the flag upside down, which is obviously a Stop the Steal slogan or signifier. And you have people like Justice Alito as well, allegedly flying his flag upside down.

But you have all these visual signifiers, so I'll be interested to see if that has any impact, especially on the people who just aren't decided who they're going to vote for. Because there are a lot of people who just don't know who they are going to vote for or who they even want to vote for. I think that's a big thing in this election as well.

To wrap up this section, which has basically been let's look at all the people who have been utterly batshit this week. So, Chris, Dr. Anthony Fauci, remember him? He's been facing questions from Republican lawmakers over his role during the COVID-19 campaign.

seems to be showing that COVID and anti-vax sentiment and that sort of side of things is still very much present and going to be playing a part when it comes to this election. So what's going on there? Yeah, well, he, as you say, was hauled in front of Republican lawmakers earlier this week.

over basically allegations of severe mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic during Trump's presidency, it should be added really. And Ohio Republican Brad Wenstrup, know him? No. Me neither. Sounds very American. Yeah, it is very.

He said Americans were aggressively bullied, shamed and silenced for merely questioning or debating issues such as social distancing, masks, vaccines or the origins of COVID. Marjorie Taylor Greene, she was there as well. I said I'd mention her. Yeah, great. Here I am. She went as far to say that Fauci should have his license revoked and that he should be imprisoned. I don't think that's something that a lot of people, even Republicans,

necessarily agree with. But also to note during these questions, Trump wasn't really brought up at all, which is interesting because of how closely associated Fauci is with Trump, especially on his COVID record.

And some have said that they're trying to make Fauci basically into a scapegoat, which essentially seems to be the case. But if you look at Trump's record on COVID-19, a Columbia University report estimated that between 130,000 and 210,000 deaths were attributed to the failures of the U.S. government under...

under Trump. So he really can't hide from that record. That's going to play a big impact into how people will look at this election because people won't forget that. There are millions of people that have been impacted in the U.S.,

by a death that could have been avoided, and that report shows it. It's just interesting that they've decided to go as hard, the Republican Party, as hard as they have. And someone like Kennedy is taking advantage of this, basically. He had a T-shirt that says, "Vote for Trump/Fauci 2024," with the slogan that said, "Give us another shot."

So yeah, pretty rough. But we can already see how this is impacting the election, as you say. Well, I suppose the weird thing for Trump there is that he, on one side of it, didn't handle the pandemic well enough. So people on that side go, well, yeah, this guy, I somewhat blame him for deaths in my family. But on the other side, Operation Warp Speed and the vaccines was actually something that he bragged about. Yeah.

And but now he kind of can't revel in that. Well, I think the interesting thing there was that the vaccines only really became a force in pandemic mitigation toward the very end of Trump's term. By the time widespread vaccination was available to the public.

It was under Biden. And at that point, you had that forced switch amongst Republicans in their messaging about like, OK, how do we make the pandemic about Joe Biden? How do we make the failures of the American health care systems handling of this pandemic about the current Democratic president? Because under Trump...

If you recall, so much of the Republican messaging was like, oh, they're being so unfair to Trump that Trump is like putting all this money into developing the vaccine. Republicans didn't really have that much of a problem with social distancing measures early on in the pandemic until it really became a long term thing that extended into Biden's presidency. Because by that point, their entire apparatus switches to like, OK, we now have a Democratic president. We need to make him look bad. So.

I think there were some very interesting moments between like 2022 and 2023 where Trump tried to bring up his record on COVID and say like, oh my God, the vaccines, we did so good on the vaccines. And he does that every once in a while.

But there were a couple instances where he mentioned it and he got a ton of backlash. And I think his campaign at this point is kind of like, no, we don't really want to remind people about what we did with the vaccines because conservatives hate them so much. Yeah, he's basically trying to have it both ways. He's trying to... Like abortion. Yeah, he's trying to say, you know, he did everything right. But then at the same time, he's distancing himself from Fauci, who is facing...

the rap basically from this. And it's also really interesting because Fauci was an advisor on the White House's COVID response task force. But most of the decision making about like pandemic social distancing guidelines came from the CDC, which Fauci is not really directly involved with outside of an advisory role. And so the idea that like Fauci is a scapegoat, I think is incredibly accurate because he was on this advisory task force. But at the same time, I think his role is

in the American public health system overall has been vastly misrepresented. Yeah. Well, there we go. Anthony Fauci, we feel a little bit sorry for you. And that brings us to the end of American Friction. And there's something that Chris wants to say here. Bibbidi-bobbidi, that's the potty.

I was hoping you'd say that. No, it's in your column on the script. You wrote it and that's what it is. So yeah, there we go. Well, Nikki, it's been very good to have you here in person, mate. Thank you. I am so excited. Guys, we're going to go eat fried bread now. That's the way, man. And that's what we do every day, isn't it, Giles? It is. That's Britain for you. So yeah, Christopher, thank you, mate. And thanks to you, Jacob. Thank you so much, Charlie. Don't worry, guys. I'm here.

Well, we're glad you are. And an even bigger thanks to you listeners. We're glad you're there as well. If you want more from us, we're out with a new episode every Friday, early afternoon if you're in the UK and in the morning if you're stateside. You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Our name on each platform is at American Frick. And if you've got something you'd like us to answer on the podcast, send us your question to American Friction at podmasters.co.uk and we'll do our best to answer it on the podcast.

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