The Trump phenomenon has been puzzling people ever since Donald Trump popped onto the political scene and started making waves and drew enormous amounts of support from members of the conservative base. Why is the Trump brand so durable? Why is it that so many people feel connected to Donald Trump? And why does it matter that he's facing a bevy of indictments and is facing the possibility of losing the primary race to Joe Biden? In this episode, Alex Blumberg and I discuss why so many Republicans are so devoted to Trump and why it matters so much to the rest of the country. And the answer is that it has to do with reaction to leftist elites and the "instant gratification" that comes from being a part of the "blue-blooded" middle finger directed at the entire left-wing establishment. The single best summation of the Trump phenomenon is: "Get ready to get ready with the f-bleep button" because Donald Trump is ready to "get ready" here with the "bleep" button. The question is: Where does the general mood in regard to President Trump in 2024 come from? Where does it come from, where is the mood in the general toward Donald Trump in 2020, and where is it going to be in 2024? where does it stand in relation to the Trump mood in 2020 and beyond? And what does it tell us about the mood of the general election in that election? in terms of Donald Trump's appeal to the broader American public in the next two decades, and what is it's going to mean for Donald Trump s chances of winning the 2020 election in 2024 and beyond that year? And why is it so important that Donald Trump has such a good chance of being re-elected in 2020? What does it mean for him in 2024, and why does he have such a strong chance of winning in 2020 and why is he so important to the Republican primary in 2020 in the first place? and what does that mean for the country in the second half of the election in the midterms in the future? Why does he really matter so much? ? And what s going to happen next year, and how important it matters to the American public What is it really mean for 2020 and why he s so important in 2020 & beyond in the coming years what s really going to matter to the country why is the most important thing that matters to him?
00:00:00.000Well, the Trump phenomenon has been puzzling people ever since Donald Trump popped onto the political scene and started making waves and drew enormous amounts of support from members of the conservative base, from people who are high school graduates in Ohio, from people who are college graduates in Florida.
00:00:14.000Where was Trump's support base coming from?
00:00:16.000And the left was utterly puzzled by this.
00:00:19.000After all, Donald Trump was not historically socially conservative.
00:00:21.000Donald Trump was not somebody who's historically even really a Republican.
00:00:24.000Donald Trump was merely a major cultural figure who didn't seem to sneer at those people.
00:00:29.000And so ever since, people on the left have been trying to figure out why is his brand so durable?
00:00:33.000Why is it that so many people feel connected to Donald Trump?
00:00:36.000And it's particularly true because Donald Trump continues to poll extremely highly among Republicans, despite the fact that his shot at beating Joe Biden is probably weaker than that of other Republicans, despite the fact that he's facing down a bevy of indictments.
00:00:47.000You know, all of that happens to be true.
00:00:49.000Trump right now is vulnerable mainly in the early states.
00:00:54.000If you look at the early states, Iowa in particular, Donald Trump's lead in Iowa is 24 points as opposed to 37 points nationally.
00:01:02.000So that is a pretty significant difference.
00:01:05.000And Ron DeSantis is in second place with 20% versus Trump's 44 in Iowa.
00:01:10.000Tim Scott earning nine percentage points, Ramaswamy at five, Haley at four, Pence at three, et cetera.
00:01:14.000Okay, so there are some vulnerabilities there, but the polling stats on, for example, the indictment surrounding Donald Trump, Show a disconnect between what conservatives think the rest of the country thinks and what the rest of the country actually thinks.
00:01:26.000So conservatives think that people are going to immediately react to news of this spurious Trump indictment in Washington D.C.
00:01:36.000That people like me believe that Donald Trump is in fact being unfairly targeted by legal enforcement.
00:01:42.000Well, Hunter Biden is being let off the hook, and this is really happening because, of course, he's the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and because Democrats hate the guy, and also because Democrats would like to see him elevated to the nomination.
00:01:53.000And so we tend to believe, okay, well, you know, if Donald Trump is the nominee, many people in the middle will resonate to that argument, that he's being treated unfairly, therefore he should be elevated to the nation's highest office.
00:02:01.000But that's not actually what the polls show.
00:02:03.000When you look at how voters see the indictments, what you see is that on the 2020 election indictment, 52% of voters approve of the federal indictment, the same number on the classified documents indictment, which suggests that it's really not about the topic or even about the legal case against Donald Trump.
00:02:20.000Basically, 52% of voters want to see Donald Trump in the dock.
00:02:24.000That is really what that comes down to, which is a sheer majority, because the classified documents case is a much stronger case legally than the 2020 election indictment case.
00:02:33.000Now, among independents, there actually is a difference.
00:02:37.000Among independents, 59% say that they approve of Donald Trump being indicted on the 2020 election stuff.
00:02:47.000Only 49% say they approve on the classified documents stuff, which is, again, fascinating.
00:02:51.000You would think that it would be the reverse because, again, the classified documents case is much stronger, legally speaking, than the election stuff from 2020.
00:02:57.000All it really shows is that independents really don't like Donald Trump talking about the 2020 election.
00:03:01.000They really don't like what he did in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
00:03:05.000OK, but there remains this massive disconnect between the conservative base and independents and the rest of the country with regard to President Trump.
00:03:13.000And this raises questions like, why is it that so many Republicans Are really, really behind Trump in deep and abiding ways.
00:03:22.000And the answer is that it has less to do with Donald Trump than it has to do with reaction to leftist elites.
00:03:28.000That really is the and that's always been the answer.
00:03:30.000I've said since the beginning of the Trump phenomenon that Donald Trump has always represented two conservatives and two traditionalists, a giant pulsating middle finger, an orange middle finger.
00:03:40.000Directed at the entire left-wing apparatus.
00:04:12.000And the answer is it is a direct reaction to a liberal elite who have decided that their values are more important than your values.
00:04:19.000Who have decided that their priorities are more important than your priorities.
00:04:24.000And frankly, it comes from a group of people who could theoretically be called values traitors.
00:04:30.000Okay, so to understand what exactly is going on here, You sort of have to think of the framework of history, broad read.
00:04:38.000So Karl Marx famously says at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, along with Engels, he says, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.
00:04:48.000Now, that phrase has shaped nearly every theory about politics in the modern era.
00:04:54.000Everybody ranging from Francis Fukuyama to the Marxist theorists of the early 20th century is shaped by the idea that everything is about class.
00:05:02.000Today's politicians, left and right, Bernie Sanders, and on the right, people like Tucker Carlson, very often tend to conflate issues that are values-laden with issues that are economic-laden.
00:05:13.000So the idea is that the forgotten man is actually the person who's being left behind by the new meritocracy, by the economy, that everything is about class conflict.
00:05:20.000And if only we could redistribute, if only we could subsidize, we could do all of that and we could create solidarity again.
00:05:25.000All we would have to do is change the economic systems by which we live and this would magically fix everything.
00:05:31.000The history of existing society, for all of human history, has not actually been about class conflict.
00:05:37.000In fact, virtually no conflicts in the history of humanity have been fought purely over class.
00:05:42.000This is what World War I did to the Marxist idea.
00:05:44.000World War I completely defeated the Marxist idea.
00:05:47.000The Marxist idea in World War I is that there would be, Europe-wide, a class revolution to end World War I. In fact, the home of Marxist revolution was not supposed to be in Russia, which basically had no classes.
00:06:01.000It had like a group of a few elites, and then it had a giant, giant proletariat.
00:06:06.000Basically, farmers, serfs, people who are very poor.
00:06:09.000It wasn't supposed to happen in poor countries.
00:06:11.000If you look at Karl Marx's writings, it was supposed to happen in, like, Great Britain.
00:06:15.000It was supposed to happen in richer countries, where the excesses of capitalism would eventually cause so much income inequality and wealth inequality that lower classes would rebel against upper classes.
00:06:24.000And thus, when World War I broke out, Marxists were utterly befuddled.
00:06:28.000Because instead of the conflict breaking out between lower classes, middle classes, and upper classes, the conflict instead broke out between nationalities.
00:06:36.000And Germans who are very poor sided with Germans who are very rich to fight British people who are very poor and British people who are very rich.
00:06:42.000And it didn't cross-pollinate across class.
00:06:47.000But his idea continues to be the motivating factor in nearly all thinking politically still, which is the idea that economic circumstances determine class solidarity, which in turn determines politics.
00:07:09.000If we were going to rephrase Marx, what we would come up with is the history of all hitherto existing societies, the history of community struggles.
00:07:16.000Struggles between creedal communities, religious communities.
00:07:20.000People who have a common interest because they live together, because they share certain values.
00:07:25.000That is the real struggle that is taking place in America, and that is the real reason that Donald Trump is a representative of a particular class.
00:07:31.000He's not a representative of the lower classes, Donald Trump.
00:07:34.000Because there are a bunch of people, like me, who make a lot of money, who would support Donald Trump against Joe Biden, and did in 2020.
00:07:42.000There are a bunch of people who are middle class, who are supporting Donald Trump against Joe Biden.
00:07:48.000And there are a bunch of people who are lower class who are supporting Donald Trump against Joe Biden despite the redistributionist promises of Democrats.
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00:09:53.000It really is about communities of interest.
00:09:55.000Historically, that has often been religious community.
00:09:57.000If you're talking about historic wars, basically, from the dawn of time until the Peace of Westphalia, virtually all war was religious in nature.
00:10:05.000Then afterward, it turned into nationalistic war.
00:10:09.000And now we are sort of back to religious war.
00:10:11.000As it turns out, wars are very rarely fought on the basis of pure economic ideals alone.
00:10:17.000And if it is an economic ideal, it's not because it's an economic ideal.
00:10:38.000It is a cleavage between people who have more traditionalist values with regard to the United States and people who do not.
00:10:44.000And that has led to a class conflict as people who are high-income earners have essentially left behind their church and their community of interest and have formed a new community of interest with other people who earn.
00:10:55.000So we are now transmuting what were values conflicts into class conflicts.
00:10:59.000Which is weird, because, again, if you actually go over to Silicon Valley, widely perceived as a leftist hotbed, and I know tons of people in Silicon Valley, I talk with them regularly.
00:11:08.000If you actually go over to Silicon Valley, and you talk to the heads of social media companies, the same people who are promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, environmental, social governance, those same exact people, in their own homes, they are practicing conservatives.
00:11:23.000They don't let their kids play with the social media apps that they themselves create.
00:11:28.000The values they actually live out in their daily lives are fairly conservative.
00:11:31.000This is a point that Charles Murray makes in Coming Apart.
00:11:34.000All the same people who are preaching liberal nonsense directed at the very poorest in society who they see as essentially playthings of the gods, the gods being themselves.
00:11:43.000Those very same people live values that are much more consistent with conservative middle class Americans.
00:12:30.000The person at the bottom of the spectrum is the person we ought to focus on.
00:12:32.000And this has defined Democratic Party policy for a very long time.
00:12:35.000You combine that on an economic level with the idea that liberal social policy ought to prevail, and that basically defines the Democratic Party today.
00:12:41.000According to Democrats, the Forgotten Man is the poor guy who must be given money and then preached to about the virtues of transgenderism and social justice.
00:12:49.000And then there's another concept of who the Forgotten Man is.
00:12:51.000And that's the actual original concept of who the Forgotten Man is.
00:12:54.000So there was a Yale University professor named William Graham Sumner.
00:13:00.000As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B. And A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X.
00:13:21.000What I want to do is look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is.
00:13:35.000Generally, he prays, but he always pays.
00:13:39.000So who is the Forgotten Man, according to Sumner?
00:13:41.000That is the person who has the traditional values.
00:13:43.000It's the person who goes to church, the person who supports his community, and the person who is targeted by the people in the elite class On a values level.
00:13:52.000Because they don't care about his values.
00:13:55.000And he's always the person who they are taking from, both in terms of values, for themselves, and then attempting to destroy the values and institutions upon which he relies.
00:14:04.000And they're also taking from him economically in certain ways as well.
00:14:07.000But it's really more about the values than it is even about the economic takings.
00:14:10.000Because the truth is, in the United States, the people at the very top of the economic spectrum pay nearly all income tax.
00:14:14.000It is not the middle class paying income tax in the United States.
00:14:17.000It is the rich people paying income tax.
00:14:21.000It is a values conflict in which you have an elite group at the top who are promulgating a set of values that is absolutely destructive and that they themselves do not live by to people in the middle class and people who are in the lower economic classes.
00:14:40.000And this is what is undergirding David Brooks's column today.
00:14:44.000It's a fascinating column in the New York Times where he's trying to grapple with the Trump phenomenon.
00:14:48.000He can't quite escape the sort of Marxist tinge to all history being described by class conflict, but it is starting to dawn on him that perhaps attacks on traditional Judeo-Christian values are in fact the defining feature of our politics right now.
00:15:03.000And that when America is dividing, it is not dividing along class lines, it's dividing between people who believe that traditional Judeo-Christian values are good and people who believe that traditional Judeo-Christian values are really, really bad.
00:15:13.000You wonder why culture wars are first and foremost in everybody's mind?
00:15:15.000Because the things that we actually care about It's not actually predominantly our pocketbook.
00:15:31.000Economics determine what jobs we take.
00:15:33.000They may determine where we live, but it's values that determine how we live.
00:15:37.000And that's the thing in the end that actually matters the most to us.
00:15:40.000When you have an entire cadre of elite liberals who presumably do not even live their own values but are cramming down an alternative set of values on all of America in the name of the quote-unquote marginalized.
00:15:50.000When that happens there is going to be a backlash and that backlash is taking the form of Trump.
00:15:54.000Not because Trump is a great representative of traditional Judeo-Christian values but because when you are assaulted enough all you want to do is throw the bird.
00:16:13.000and my baby son, a couple months old, he's got a cough, he's got a cold that as you know if you have small babies that's actually can be kind of dangerous because babies are obligate nose breathers.
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00:17:35.000Why is this guy still politically viable after all he's done?
00:17:38.000We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that.
00:17:41.000It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Mark
00:17:44.000Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas Edsel recently quote,
00:17:47.000Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast and they want to slow it down,
00:17:51.000maybe even take a step backward. But if you're a person of color, a woman who values gender
00:17:54.000equality or an LGBT person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.
00:17:59.000In this story, says David Brooks, we anti-Trumpers are the good guys,
00:18:02.000the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians.
00:18:06.000Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day, he's still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentment, and that's what matters to the most.
00:18:14.000I partly agree with this story, says David Brooks, but it's also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.
00:18:19.000This elite self-satisfaction really took the fourth Barack Obama.
00:18:22.000There's a fascinating interview over at Tablet Magazine all about Barack Obama and his value system.
00:18:26.000And all the things the media ignored about Barack Obama, including the fact that he was like a bleeding anti-Semite back in his college days and all this.
00:18:32.000But he's a member of the liberal elite who hated the values of the so-called bitter clingers.
00:18:36.000And it became a sort of cultural cachet to rip on people who had traditional Judeo-Christian values with regard to life.
00:18:46.000So David Brooks says, let me try another story on you.
00:18:49.000I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys.
00:18:54.000And here is where David Brooks, some of what he's about to say is right, and some of it is a conflation of sort of Marxist theory with the actual history of humanity, which is the story of community struggle.
00:19:02.000Quote, this story begins in the 1960s when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam,
00:19:07.000but the children of the educated class got college deferments.
00:19:33.000By the way, disproportionately white people.
00:19:35.000All the myths about how Vietnam was a bunch of poor black people who were dying, that's actually not true.
00:19:40.000It's like 88% of all casualties in Vietnam were white people.
00:19:44.00050% of all people who were serving in Vietnam were middle class.
00:19:48.000So it was not all kind of poor brown people as the platoon myth would sort of suggest.
00:19:53.000Virtually a huge percentage, like 86% of everybody who served in Vietnam was actually a volunteer, not drafted.
00:19:59.000But put all that aside, what David Brooks is missing here is that Vietnam was a values conflict.
00:20:05.000It was a community conflict between a bunch of long-haired, hippie, left-wing, Judeo-Christian, values-rejecting elites on college campuses who weren't even serving who objected to the war.
00:20:16.000It was not all the people who went to church who objected to the war.
00:20:18.000It was all the people who dropped out of church and dropped acid who objected to the war.
00:20:22.000That was the actual cultural breakdown that we now try to rewrite into a history of class conflict.
00:20:27.000He said it continues in the 1970s when the authorities imposed busing on working class areas of Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves live.
00:20:35.000That part, again, that's a communities conflict, right?
00:20:38.000The idea here is that a bunch of liberal left-wing elites went and lived in super white areas and then imposed forced busing on a bunch of poor white people and poor black people.
00:20:47.000That part is true, but that's not, again, a class conflict.
00:20:49.000That's a community conflict because if those liberals actually believed their own values, they would be imposing it on themselves as well.
00:20:56.000The ideal that we're all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there.
00:21:03.000He is right about this, but on a values level, as I'll discuss more in just one second.
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00:22:10.000Okay, so back to this David Brooks column.
00:22:12.000He says, Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
00:22:18.000This is again true, but the reality is that it's not even that they build systems that serve themselves.
00:22:24.000It's that the systems that they themselves build are not intended for themselves on a values level.
00:22:30.000So, David Brooks has this thing against the meritocracy, and this is where I don't like the conflation between the Marxist history of class struggle and the history of community struggle, which is not the same.
00:22:41.000I mean, just to take a quick example, John J. Rockefeller used to go to church, like on the regular, and he gave tons of charity inside his own church from the time he was very young.
00:22:51.000He was more in line with poor members of his church than he was in line with many members of his own social class.
00:22:59.000Ripping on meritocracy doesn't solve the problem.
00:23:01.000It's a Marxist solution to a spiritual values problem.
00:23:05.000Because here's the thing, what's the alternative to a meritocracy?
00:23:08.000When I see people both left and right ripping on the meritocracy, meaning like the people who are most meritorious get the job, and right now in an information age that is going to benefit people who have more facility with information than other people.
00:23:20.000But it's also true in construction where people who have more facility with machines are going to do better than people who do not have facility with machines.
00:23:26.000People who have facility with plumbing are going to do better in that industry than people who do not have facility with plumbing.
00:23:46.000The best system is a system in which, economically speaking, meritocracy does obtain, but also that is backed by Judeo-Christian values of community, wherein we all care about each other because we share a set of values.
00:24:24.000Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs, and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other, and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
00:24:34.000He's conflating a bunch of stuff here.
00:24:56.000The thing that we share is we're pretty good at business, and we're all pretty smart, but it ain't the credential, it's the performance.
00:25:02.000When he says that this is a pathway that's unavailable to anyone, by the way, I challenge him to look at the entire Asian community in the United States, which wildly outperforms, based on class data, where they should be.
00:25:31.000For the record, I grew up until I was 11 years old in a two-bedroom, 1,100-square-foot house in Burbank, California, with six people sharing one bathroom.
00:25:38.000I shared a bedroom with three younger sisters until I was 11 years old, okay?
00:25:41.000That doesn't mean I was poor, I was solidly middle class.
00:25:44.000But that's like solidly middle class, not solidly upper class.
00:25:47.000The point here is that, again, he's conflating class struggle with the actual struggle here, and so he's missing the point.
00:25:54.000Here is the part where he is totally right, however.
00:25:58.000He says, And when he gets beyond all of this, quote, armed with all kinds of economic, cultural, and political power, we support policies that help ourselves.
00:26:06.000Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China.
00:26:10.000Again, he's messing up the economics here, but here's the part where he gets to the part that actually matters.
00:26:14.000Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others.
00:26:19.000Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx, and intersectional is a sure sign you've got cultural capital coming out of your ears.
00:26:25.000Meanwhile, members of the less educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we've changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
00:26:33.000We also changed the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others.
00:26:36.000For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedoms.
00:26:46.000After the social norms eroded, a funny thing happened.
00:26:49.000Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock.
00:26:52.000People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that.
00:26:56.000As Adrian Woolridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, The Aristocracy of Talent, quote, 60% of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with 10% to women with a university degree.
00:27:08.000That matters, he continues, because the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.
00:27:13.000Does this mean I think people in my class are vicious and evil?
00:27:16.000Most of us are earnest, kind, and public-spirited, but we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive.
00:27:22.000Elite institutions have become politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.
00:27:29.000It's easy to understand why people in less educated classes would conclude they are under economic, political, cultural, and moral assault.
00:27:35.000And why they've rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.
00:27:38.000Again, it is not really about the educated class.
00:27:40.000It's about a cultural class that has decided, writ large, that the morality of the forgotten man, the person who actively holds together the community, who provides the glue, who provides the nationalism, patriotism, and allegiance to traditional Judeo-Christian values that undergird any sense of social solidarity, it's those people they're attacking.
00:27:57.000It's that glue that they are disintegrating.
00:28:00.000And those people, by the way, are living off the fat of the land because they are benefiting from all of those things.
00:28:05.000They are still living inside solid two-parent households, taking care of their kids and sending them to private schools.
00:28:10.000The limousine liberal is not a limousine liberal because he takes a literal limousine.
00:28:16.000He's a limousine liberal because he lives a set of values that he then rejects writ large.
00:28:21.000When you say at your church, I want my kids to get married, Go to church, have children within wedlock, and get a job.
00:28:28.000When you say that, and then the person who does virtually all of those things in San Jose says, no, no, no, that's bigotry.
00:28:35.000We need to set up a system where if you don't get married, you have kids out of wedlock, you don't go to church, and you don't get a job, we pay you.
00:28:40.000Then of course people in the middle are going to say, what in the hell is going on?
00:29:01.000of a famous book by Thomas Frank in the middle of the 2000s called What's the Matter with Kansas in which he said, Why are there all these poor people in Kansas who keep voting Republican when they could be voting benefits to themselves?
00:29:10.000And the answer, of course, was they're not voting based on the benefits.
00:29:12.000They're voting based on the values which matter more to them than the actual government handouts.
00:29:17.000But that's how the left tends to think.
00:29:20.000The reality is that we shouldn't be talking about class traitors.
00:29:23.000We should be talking about values traitors.
00:29:24.000People who live a set of values and then promulgate a completely different set of values to other people who are too stupid and too poor to actually live those values.
00:29:33.000The assumption is that everybody who is not living in San Jose, everybody who's not living in Uppercross Manhattan, all those people are too stupid to actually live values that most of these people themselves actually live.
00:29:46.000And that's, by the way, why people who live traditional Judeo-Christian values, they tend to have stereotypical beliefs about people living in San Jose and New York.
00:29:54.000They think that they're all in polygamous gay relationships because they believe that that's a set of values being promoted by San Jose and Manhattan, when that actually is not what they're actually living out.
00:30:04.000And then people in San Jose and Manhattan are like, well, why do they think all this stuff about us?
00:30:07.000Well, maybe it's because you make the mark of virtue flying the Pride Progress flag from your house.
00:30:22.000Maybe the way that social solidarity was actually created and promulgated in the United States used to be rich people, poor people, and middle class people all went to church together.
00:30:29.000They all sent their kids to the same schools.
00:30:31.000They all actually interacted with one another and had very similar sets of values.
00:30:34.000Again, John J. Rockefeller went to the same church as the poor janitor down the street.
00:30:42.000Do you really believe that, say, Jack Dorsey or Susan Wojcicki Or any of the bank leaders?
00:30:51.000Do you think those people are going to church with poor people?
00:30:53.000Or do you think they are hanging out exclusively with people at their country club who are members of the same socio-economic liberal elite?
00:31:04.000And that means that they've cut themselves off from the same value system that used to actually create social solidarity.
00:31:10.000Okay, and that is now being telescoped.
00:31:11.000All that's being telescoped into Trump.
00:31:13.000Because, again, the way that virtually all politics works is that even unconsciously, we all just look for symbols.
00:31:19.000And the symbol right now of resistance to these liberal elites who have decided to make virtue signaling the most important thing among themselves, that is the thing that matters more than anything, there are two symbols today.
00:31:29.000That this has happened, and it's amazing to watch it happen.
00:31:49.000Republicans, Democrats, Independents, everybody supported the idea that Ukraine should be able to fend off a Russian invasion.
00:31:54.000And then, the minute that the left transmuted that into a values conflict about upholding, quote-unquote, liberal democracy with pride progress flags, an enormous number of people on the right went, oh, now we see what you're doing.
00:32:06.000They said, oh, the minute that a conflict that was not actually a cultural values conflict was transmuted into a cultural values conflict in which the same liberal elites who hate your church suddenly love Ukraine, a bunch of people went, nope, not interested.
00:32:19.000It's that reactionary and understandable reactionary politics that's driving everything right now.
00:32:24.000The answer to all of this would be a re-engagement in social solidarity by the liberal elite.
00:32:28.000But that would require them to understand that their quote-unquote pursuit of justice for the marginalized It's not about pursuit of justice for the marginalized anymore and hasn't been for a very, very long time.
00:32:38.000What it's really about is a transgressive notion that if you destroy the center, you have made the world a better place.
00:32:45.000Okay, the Cultural War was not started by the right.
00:32:48.000It was not even remotely started by the right.
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00:35:06.000It is a communities conflict, which is why you are seeing churchgoers who are Latino and churchgoers who are black and churchgoers who are white all supporting Donald Trump.
00:35:27.000Probably is gonna happen when he gets arrested in this Georgia case surrounding January 6th.
00:35:32.000The cases I've been describing is really, really spurious.
00:35:35.000Politico describes what it was like inside the courtroom.
00:35:38.000They said if you blinked, you missed it for a fleeting moment.
00:35:40.000Thursday, Donald Trump and special counsel Jack Smith appeared to make eye contact as the former president prepared to fend off charges that he sought to subvert American democracy itself.
00:35:47.000That shared grants crystallized the historic weight of Thursday's arraignment.
00:35:50.000The third in recent months for the former president was fighting federal and local prosecutors, even as he appears to be coasting to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
00:35:58.000Smith said nothing audible during his hour in the room, but repeatedly shot glances at Trump, who occasionally shot them back until their eyes briefly met.
00:36:04.000Even before Donald Trump entered, a federal courtman declared himself not guilty.
00:36:07.000The weight of history was evident in Washington, D.C.' 's federal courthouse.
00:36:12.000Minutes before Trump entered the silent room, several federal judges filed into the public gallery, turning themselves into spectators in a building they typically rule.
00:36:19.000After a day of anticipation, the atmosphere darkened the moment Smith strode into the wood-paneled chandelier courtroom from a nearby antechamber.
00:36:25.000Smith was flanked by Assistant Special Counselor Ray Hulser and several FBI case agents as he made his way to the back of the courtroom as well.
00:36:32.000Moments later, there was Trump, seated at a table that has in recent months been occupied by some of the very people who stormed the Capitol and are now paying a legal price.
00:37:47.000When you look at what's happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent.
00:37:52.000This was never supposed to happen in America.
00:37:55.000This is the persecution of the person that's leading by very, very substantial numbers in the Republican primary and leading Biden by a lot.
00:38:05.000So if you can't beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him.
00:38:22.000It is obviously true that he is, in fact, being hit with a variety of charges that no one in the Democratic Party would ever be hit with without a doubt.
00:38:31.000He then added later on another show that would be very dangerous if he were jailed, which, of course, is also true.
00:38:36.000We have not seen in the United States a former president of the United States thrown in jail.
00:38:41.000Is it something that concerns you of, you know, of the people making sure that they don't go out of their right mind if something like that happens?
00:38:51.000Because I know what I'm thinking of could happen if that, for example, they do, say, Jack Smith says, OK, I'm going to put Donald Trump in jail.
00:39:00.000I think it's a very dangerous thing to even talk about because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters and I mean maybe, you know, maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty.
00:39:15.000Much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016.
00:39:21.000Okay, so of course the left is taking this as a threat of violence.
00:39:23.000Trump himself is vowing revenge if he takes office in 2024.
00:39:26.000He posted on Truth Social to that effect and said, Look, it's not my fault.
00:39:30.000My political opponent in the Democratic Party, crooked Joe Biden, has told his attorney general to charge the leading Republican nominee and former president of the United States, me, with as many crimes as can be concocted so that he is forced to spend large amounts of time and money to defend himself.
00:39:42.000The Dems don't want to run against me or they would not be doing this unprecedented weaponization of quote-unquote justice.
00:39:46.000But soon in 2024, it will be our turn.
00:39:50.000Um, so, you know, that's what this battle is going to come down to.
00:39:53.000And of course, this is the language that's being spoken by a lot of the Republican primary electorate, because that has always been the language spoken by the Republican primary electorate.
00:40:01.000The problem, of course, is that independents don't actually hear this call.
00:40:04.000And this is the thing that I'm warning a lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives, a lot of voters in these primaries.
00:40:08.000Just because you feel and believe the thing doesn't mean that political independents and swing voters are going to feel the thing.
00:40:15.000We have to get out of our own heads a little bit.
00:40:20.000I also understand that I'm not the only voter in the 2024 election.
00:40:24.000The Donald Trump case here is going to come down to, in the end, basically one issue with regard to this legal case.
00:40:32.000The issue is going to be whether Donald Trump actually believed that he lost the election.
00:40:35.000If they can prove that Donald Trump believed that he lost the election, it'll be fairly easy for them to convince a D.C.
00:40:41.000jury That Donald Trump was lying, that it was fraudulent, and all this.
00:40:44.000Now, I don't think that the elements of this crime are tailor-made for this.
00:40:47.000I think it's very difficult to see how this fits into a civil rights violation, or how this fits into a fraud case, or even how it fits into an obstruction case.
00:40:55.000But, at the very least, they're going to have to prove that he knowingly did all these things, knowingly gets into Donald Trump's head.
00:41:11.000There's testimony and there's a number of aides that have said that the president was made aware that he lost the election and yet continued to argue that it was stolen from him.
00:41:22.000How do you reconcile those two things?
00:41:24.000Well, I think that everybody was made aware that he lost the election, but that doesn't mean that that was the only advice he was given.
00:41:30.000As anybody understands what happens in the Oval Office, there are a numerous amount of advisors and politicians and lawyers, not just one or two, that are giving you advice and telling you what they believe is true.
00:41:40.000So, he may not agree with Mike Pence, he may not agree with one of his lawyers, but that doesn't mean that there weren't other people advising him exactly the opposite.
00:41:50.000Okay, so, again, they're taking her out of context and they're suggesting that, yeah, yeah, yeah, he was told he was told so he knew.
00:41:58.000He was told lots of things that he doesn't believe.
00:42:01.000Meanwhile, Ty Cobb, who's a former Trump lawyer, he says that, well, you know, if he actually pursued a conspiracy knowingly, then that is violation of law.
00:42:14.000He's been out insisting that they're criminalizing speech, where the simple counter to that is you actually can facilitate and further a crime through speech and be prosecuted for it.
00:42:28.000I saw an example in some of the reporting today where if Tony Soprano tells one of his guys to whack a witness, well, that's speech, but that's a crime.
00:42:43.000Okay, well, that's true, but you actually would have to have him do that, which is not exactly what happened in this particular case.
00:43:00.000They can be going after Trump unfairly.
00:43:02.000And also, Trump may not be the best person to run for the Republican Party while facing indictments every other day from now until the election, while independents look at him and scoff.
00:43:12.000Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show.
00:43:14.000We'll be back here on Monday with much more.