On this week's episode of The FiveThirtyEight podcast, Rich Lowry joins Betsy and Amanda to discuss the latest in the Trump administration, including the latest travel ban, and the latest on the controversial Karine Jean-Pierre situation.
00:04:29.320It was the worst executed conspiracy in the history of America because no one believed the conspirators.
00:04:35.580It doesn't mean they still weren't hiding stuff, right?
00:04:38.060And it wasn't shameful what they were doing or trying to do.
00:04:41.040I mean, the basic playbook was to gaslight everyone until the election, hope he wins, and have them die or become senile in office and say, well, here we go.
00:04:51.980Kamala Harris is president of the United States.
00:04:53.760A shameful conspiracy against the American public and the American public interest.
00:05:00.560Having a president who wasn't up for it and was just going to get more not up for it as time went on and have someone who wasn't elected take over.
00:05:07.640Would have been terrible for the country.
00:05:08.780And she was the front woman for this conspiracy.
00:05:12.480So I have a lot of time for conversions.
00:05:14.440If she wants to write a book saying, dear God, I regret what I did.
00:05:21.960I hate the people who convinced me to do this.
00:05:26.320You know, George Stephanopoulos sort of wrote a memoir like that after his time with Bill Clinton.
00:05:31.520But to do this, to say politics is broken when you had a huge role in breaking it and aren't going to acknowledge it, it's absurd and shameful.
00:05:38.780I mean, we're seeing this from a bunch of news organizations as well.
00:07:10.580One of my favorite tweets, ex post, whatever, was there's that Trump reply guy.
00:07:15.220I'm not going to say his name, but he tweets, Joe Biden's going to run on stage, slam a water, grab a water bottle, chug it, slam it on the table and say, sup, bitch.
00:07:25.200And then after the debate, he said, what did I just watch?
00:07:28.360And I feel like, yeah, I think there's a lot of older people who are just watching, say, like CNN or MSNBC that lived in that narrative reality.
00:07:40.400But I guess the issue now is it were in the Trump era.
00:07:43.420Trump's popularity is growing, despite the fact the polls seemingly make no sense because some have a minus 11 and some have a plus 13, which is weird.
00:07:51.540Well, as long as we look at the aggregate, he's at minus two point by 2.3 right now, which is really good.
00:07:59.860Even YouGov has him slowly improving and they call this the slow return of Trump's popularity.
00:08:11.800I mean, we can rag on, you know, Axios or CNN or these other outlets that claimed they couldn't tell that Biden was sick.
00:08:19.300But either way, people are waking up and they're losing confidence in that party.
00:08:25.440And once party loyalists are turning their back, how like what do you have a prediction of where this goes into 2026 or what happens to the Democratic Party?
00:08:34.680So I think the advantage they have, Tim, is that in a midterm election, when the other party controls all elected branches of Washington, you usually do well no matter what.
00:08:48.260So that's what they have to go on is no matter what.
00:08:51.000They'll probably take the House, right?
00:08:53.020It's hard to imagine they won't pick up two or three net seats.
00:08:56.080That's just not a lot in historic terms.
00:08:58.740And they can probably do that without having figured anything out and being as pathetic as they are now, even though Trump's approval rating is ticking back up.
00:09:05.520To my surprise, after the terrorists first came out, polls went down.
00:09:09.300I was like, now he's in a different phase.
00:09:11.280But he's ticked back up to his credit.
00:09:14.300Then they got it figured out in 28, right?
00:09:16.220That's the big question, because you need someone who's compelling, who's interesting, who's different, who has a different theory of the case.
00:09:23.260No one wins the presidency by running the conventional playbook, whether it was Obama or Trump.
00:09:30.280Maybe Biden's a slight exception in 2020, but a lot of other stuff was going on, confounding variables in 2020.
00:09:36.940And they need someone who just seems reasonable, right?
00:09:39.260Who's not into this woke stuff, who can say, no, boys shouldn't compete against girls in sports.
00:09:45.240And yes, we should have a sealed border and all the rest of it.
00:10:32.060And I think the issue they're taking, probably why they rag on me is because you've got Tulsi Gabbard, you've got RFK Jr., you've got Elon Musk, you've got Donald Trump himself.
00:10:40.440You've got people like me and all of those other people who consider themselves to be liberal.
00:10:44.700But now we're like, I'll take Trump because y'all are nuts.
00:10:48.060If they're going to rebuild brand while people are quitting the party, they have to make a case for why people like me are wrong and the party is good.
00:10:55.900Well, not just me, but like Tulsi, they've gone after for years.
00:10:59.580I just don't know how they convince a new generation to attach themselves to a brand that doesn't have any genuine personality or policy or anything like that.
00:11:30.180You know, you're a part of this phenomenon, Glenn Greenwald, Elon, Bill Maher.
00:11:34.920Now, you know, Maher's never going to be pro-Trump.
00:11:36.420He's changed his tune a little bit or his tone since that meeting in the White House.
00:11:40.980But people who realize the left has gone insane and also just reject this, the legacy media, the way it controls information, the way it attacks dissent, right?
00:11:53.280Just we're talking about it right now.
00:11:55.120There's a reason they're going after you and have a more liberal attitude towards debate and discussion and think it should be more freewheeling.
00:12:03.860So now you guys are with with us over over on on the right.
00:12:08.180But it's not really you're doing wasn't something you sent out deliberately to do the whole context and environment change.
00:14:50.320With Trump's approval rating increasing, this likely indicates that regular voters are looking at what he's doing and they like what he's doing, especially in immigration.
00:14:59.360What ends up happening is these liberal personalities, they don't actually have a fact basis by which to oppose Trump.
00:15:07.080So let's take a look at, you know, he just did this travel ban.
00:15:10.620What is the logical argument to say that what he did was egregious and wrong?
00:15:17.680You might argue maybe it's bad for relations with that country.
00:15:22.020But what we end up seeing is these liberals, these personalities come out, act like Trump is literally Hitler for doing this.
00:15:28.200I think regular people are going to look at it and they're going to be like, I honestly don't care.
00:15:32.460So all they're proposing is whatever Trump does, it's bad.
00:15:35.900But what happens to a party when people actually like what Trump is doing?
00:15:38.580Yeah. So on the travel ban, people tend to forget he got dinged the first two times with his travel ban the first term on process grounds.
00:15:48.940Then when they fixed it, the third time they go up to the Supreme Court and they win.
00:15:52.820Right. And they've taken on board the information how it went the first time.
00:15:55.960This one is going to be I haven't looked at it closely, but I expect to be more carefully done is going to withstand court challenge.
00:16:02.200Ultimately, you know, it'll prevail in the Supreme Court, whatever a crazy district court judge does.
00:16:08.160And, yeah, it can affect your relations with these countries.
00:16:10.460But how much relationship do we have with Somalia or Afghanistan or with Haiti?
00:16:14.580And I think the White House fact sheet was very compelling.
00:16:17.280If you have visa overstay rates from these countries, 50 percent or above, you're just letting them in.
00:16:24.580If you give them a visa, you're just letting them come in the United States and stay forever more.
00:16:28.400Now, if we want to do that, fine. You know, Congress can pass a law saying everyone in Haiti wants to come, gets to come and they stay forever.
00:16:34.260But we don't have that law. That law wouldn't make sense. And that's what that's what we're we're not going to do that.
00:16:40.340So it's fine letting Canadians in because they're by and large, they're going to go home.
00:16:44.200But you let in someone from Afghanistan. I have a lot of sympathy for Afghans and lived a nightmare, hellish nightmare for decades.
00:16:51.080But they're going to stay. So that's a mockery of the visa program.
00:16:54.840And that's why it makes sense to cut it off.
00:16:56.660And so my point is, largely, the only argument against it is a is a light maybe.
00:17:04.000Right. Like like I mentioned, maybe it's bad for relations.
00:17:07.640That's still not a strong argument against the national security interest Trump has brought up with immigration being basically is number one issue.
00:17:15.400You need to convince voters to vote against those policies.
00:17:20.180Amazon presents Lisa versus the mosquito surviving 100 million years.
00:17:28.280Mosquito shook off the plate tectonic breakup of Pangea, the asteroid that eliminated the dinosaurs and the ice age.
00:17:35.720But Lisa shopped on Amazon and bought a can of repellent, a cute long sleeve shirt and a citronella candle.
00:17:42.320Hey, mosquito, Lisa just bodied you. Save the everyday with deals from Amazon.
00:17:50.020The only thing they do is say, oh, well, Trump's a fascist.
00:17:53.040It's like, give me a policy. They don't have anything.
00:17:57.360This is something, immigration, that largely, if they're just considering their own political interest Democrats, they should just concede on.
00:18:04.560They should say, yeah, Biden was was had a de facto open border that was very bad for our country, bad for big cities and big city mayors.
00:18:12.460A lot of them were complaining at the time. Never should have happened.
00:18:18.940It's bad for gang members to be in here.
00:18:21.880Let's get every single one of them out of here and make sure there's no policy to let them in ever again.
00:18:27.220People overstaying visas is wrong. It's illegal.
00:18:30.520If it's just a conduit for visa overstays for this country, let's shut it down from this country.
00:18:35.480And then you can argue about the kind of legal immigration we can have or maybe, you know, an amnesty for people who've been here a long time.
00:18:41.520But they have no credibility on immigration.
00:18:44.220So even when they advance a view that I probably disagree with, but is reasonable, most people are just going to figure, oh, there they go again.
00:18:49.980They're in favor of illegal immigrants.
00:18:52.600I think that their only actual path towards victory would be to bring a person up there, you know, on the stage who just says, yeah, Trump's right about everything.
00:19:28.700So the challenge for Democrats is going to be how do you even try to say Trump is right about immigration without also irrationally hating the guy and sounding like you're just inauthentic?
00:19:39.600Yeah. So I would say he does genuinely offend a lot of people.
00:19:45.200So I think the strategy of calling the dick and saying he's in favor of the rich no matter what he says would make much more sense than what they're doing now.
00:20:00.340Occasionally you'll get some center on Meet the Press saying, oh, yeah, yeah, Biden shouldn't have done that at the border.
00:20:05.400You get Gavin on his podcast saying it's not fair for guys to compete against girls.
00:20:10.700But these are just real small concessions.
00:20:13.180Or with the Biden stuff we started talking about with KJP, yeah, I should have dropped out sooner.
00:20:17.700But none of them will just actually rip the Band-Aid off and tell the truth about these issues and get in a much more reasonable place.
00:20:24.500And if they wanted to, like take immigration again, for example, the ACLU, all these pressure groups would viciously attack them and call them racist.
00:20:42.740And that's why they end up kowtowing to the positions of these folks, even if they don't agree with them themselves or truth serum and say, maybe we shouldn't do this.
00:20:50.440They're too scared to break with them.
00:20:53.100I wonder if the issue for Democrats was that there's a huge bifurcation between generations in how they consumed media and how they viewed the world.
00:21:01.580So they're trying to balance this old school establishment kind of Democratic Party, which is, say, the Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi, with this new progressive AOC type.
00:21:13.120So you try and bring policies forward that the American people largely like.
00:21:20.240Let's say, you know, two to one restrict the border.
00:21:24.580The younger generation is pro-open borders.
00:21:26.580We had Nick Shirley's reporter in Minneapolis, the FBI was doing a drug raid or I think it was a human trafficking and drug bust.
00:21:35.200And leftist protesters were trying to obstruct the arrest.
00:21:39.100Now, if you go on a debate stage and say, we're going to support our FBI as they stop these human traffickers, almost everyone's going to agree.
00:21:47.280And then the weirdo progressive left are going to be like, boo.
00:21:50.720If the Democrats try to go the moderate route, I feel like they'll lose eight to 10 percent of the vote and they can't win.
00:22:24.580To be what I would say is if you don't actually follow the news, you might consider her to be more authentic just because she's a better personality.
00:22:35.260But for someone who follows the news, you're like, she's full of it.
00:22:47.800So, again, my take is they need to have an open process, and they need to be open to someone coming in and disrupting it who they don't know or they're not comfortable with.
00:22:55.960Again, this happened with Republicans in 2016.
00:23:55.120But I think the problem is he's Jewish.
00:23:58.520And there is a wing of the Democratic Party that, although many of them try to purport that it's actually about Zionism and Israel, they're just, they hate Jews.
00:24:09.400I think that was the calculus with why they chose not to have him as VP.
00:24:13.480What I had read was that Dearborn, Michigan, largely Muslim, would not vote for a ticket with a Jewish man on it.
00:24:22.180Nothing personal, very religious, and they could potentially lose a state.