Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
I look at this more in story terms than in
political terms, because this is the story that I've been
telling now for so long. This is that moment in
the plot when it all goes to ship and all
the expectations are thwarted. You were facing the ultimate test.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah, it's eleven fifty nine and all could be lost
in the classic story structures.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah, welcome to Fire and Fury the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
I'm Michael Wolf and I'm James Truman. So good morning, Michael.
I was driving over here this morning to this secure
location where we record our podcast, and a song came
on the radio, and it was the song by Harry
Styles called as it Was in this world It's just us,
(01:06):
you know, it's not the same as it was. That
caught this mood of poignance and sadness. I bring this
up because in the last week I've been reading what
some of the opportunities still are for Trump and why
many of his supporters still believe in him, and I
caught this incredible note of nostalgia that people wanted things
(01:28):
to be as they were. But also in listening to
Trump this week, it seems that he has become backward
looking too. He's still got his attacks. The talking points
have not changed, the fury has not changed, but the
fire seemed somewhat diminished. And I was very curious about
what you thought his state of mind might be. That
(01:51):
perhaps his best shot now is nostalgia. He seems to
have very little to say about the future.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Well to some degree, that's what the pitch has always been.
And make America great again is emphasis I guess for
him on again. We don't know what it. Hearkens back
to sometime that surely never existed, but is almost the
media notion of I guess, white people on television. So
that's always been the sort of anchor on this. And
(02:17):
I go back to this discussion that I once had
with Roger Ayles, the founder and of Fox News, who
ran for twenty years, who explained to me once he
was kind of dismissive to me. He says, and the
people you know live in twenty sixteen, he said, the
people Fox is four live in nineteen sixty five. And
(02:39):
then he had an interesting thing at the speed of culture,
and it moved at a different rate for different kinds
of people. In the nineteen sixty five people, it was like,
why do they have to go along? At the rate
of other people. Trump himself is in so many ways
a figure from another time. He came of age in
terms of coming to Aim in the nineteen eighties, and
(03:02):
even that his swagger was a kind of nineteen sixties
rat pack swagger. He even looks out of another time.
His whole affect is kind of pre contemporary, which I
think is clearly part of the attraction. And now he
has this other thing which I think is hardly germane
(03:24):
to this point. I mean, he is nostalgic for a
month ago or six weeks ago, when he was looking
at certain victory. Now suddenly he's looking at the reasonable
likelihood of defeat. I mean, that's an extraordinary reversal. You know,
I feel myself heading toward a sports metaphor, which I
(03:46):
know nothing about, but I think it is transparently the
eighth inning and it's been zero to nine, suddenly in
the eighth inning it's ten to nine, where this other
team suddenly came up live. And that's certainly what we've seen.
And I noticed I went down and did the sports metaphor.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Anyways, Well, I don't know if it's accurate or not.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Nor do I but the point is you have this reversal.
And one of the things like this is it's not
just we've got to do what we've done and figure
this out, but the reversal means that the wind has
been taken from you. The psychological act of recovery is
perhaps more difficult than the campaign that you've waged so far.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yeah, we also know from Trump's business career that reversals
have been a common theme in bankruptcy's businesses. Just folding.
Why is this different?
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I might is he saying, let's catch as we don't
know if it's different. I mean, this is a reversal
at this point in time. I mean, everything that we
know about this election so far ought to tell us
to count on nothing in all reasonable political likelihood. This
race will tighten up, and we should come down to
(05:07):
the last two weeks and then I'll go back to
the Steve Bannon formula. In these tight races, nothing matters
until the last two weeks, and then the other thing
is and it must be you know, from his point
of view, I mean, he has this new opponent who
is not new at all, who has been on the
scene for four years, and who he counted on to
(05:30):
be if this person was his opponent, a weak opponent,
and suddenly the reversal of fortunes for her has been
as dramatic as the reversal of fortunes for him.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Right, and what accounts do you think for Trump basically
taking August off.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Well, I think there are a couple of things here.
First of all, Trump doesn't work very hard. Trump is
I think safely the laziest presidential candidate probably since Joe Biden.
So I think this is suddenly extremely confusing to him
that this is a real hardcore race. When you run
for president, you basically do it eighteen hours a day.
(06:09):
It is the most exhausting thing you can possibly do,
which brings us up against this factor that he's too
old to do that kind of schedule. Yeah, and even
people in the campaign have said that there's a marked
change in him from sixteen and twenty twenty, when he
could do multiple events in a day. You know, now
(06:29):
one event a day is about his limit, and he
would prefer to be playing golf. He needs that golf,
those four or five hours playing golf in the morning,
and that's an impediment to a presidential campaign.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
But as recently as July, he was doing multiple events
a week, sometimes multiple events a day. I listened to
some of his interview with Elon Musk, and I don't
know if he had a different microphone, but I was
very struck by the change in his life everything.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
I mean, that could just be the dysfunction of Twitter,
the increasing dysfunction of Twitter, in which everything about the
Twitter is failing to work. But in addition to its
various technical problems, it seemed like Trump got nothing out
of it, was able to make no points. I'm not
(07:23):
sure who he was speaking to. It didn't seem like
his people. I mean, it seemed like he has to
get out there and stroke Elon. I didn't see any
other real purpose for this, and I'm not sure that's
a great look for him.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yeah, I mean it felt very much like an Elon
Vanity production. And I guess to demonstrate the value and
seriousness of X, which obviously was a fiasco because X
didn't work properly.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
I mean, he has never gotten along with these guys.
The tech set is not his people. And I understand
that every money problem in the campaign now says the
crypto guys will take care of it. Just let's go
speak to the crypto guys. But historically he has not
gotten along with these people. He's not really interested in
(08:10):
the tech world. He obviously has no conception about what
the tech world actually is, particularly what their interests are,
and in fact has seldom been sympathetic to their interests.
They're not his billionaires. I mean his billionaires are you
know that oil guy Ham has been in the news recently.
(08:33):
That's his kind of person, A real slug it out
kind of guy. You know, Elon who's a slug it
out kind of guy, but who is a competitive guy too.
So Elon is clearly competing with Trump. And I actually
think that's why a set of these tech bro guys
(08:53):
now are drawn to Trump, because they see a future
for themselves and some variation of Trumpiness which is just
going to piss him off. Ultimately. The other aspect of
where we are in August is that he is monumentally perplexed,
and perplexed is not the right word. I think he's
(09:15):
on the floor. You know, he is either in full aggression, yes,
or in a fetal position, and I think the latter
is going on right now. But there's also this other
side of it, which I think for the campaign is
incredibly confounding that every time he goes out there for
one of these rallies, it's a catastrophe. He produces negative
(09:39):
news cycle after negative news cycle. Now there's a subtle
difference there, because this is the same old Donald Trump
going out there and spouting off and saying these incendiary things.
But where once was Wow, that's so incredible, it suddenly
doesn't read like that anymore. One of the things is
(10:01):
that it's all sort of focused on a black woman
and his fundamental antipathy to her because she's her, and
her because she's black is the underlying thing here. And
also in the past it's been him as the dominant person,
and now he doesn't feel that way anymore. She feels dominant,
(10:24):
he feels impathetic. I suppose we'll be back right after
the break. I want to sort of open up a
theory here. So here's a man standing there in Butler, Pennsylvania,
(10:49):
on the stage, and he, by just a fluke, isn't
killed people around him. One person around him has killed.
Other people are wounded. This is the kind of experience
that none of us could recover from, or at least
not immediately recover from. For all of us, it would
(11:09):
have a lasting, profound, determinative effect. And so I think
this idea that he just gets to step away, he survives,
and then gets to walk away from this is naive
at best and probably preposterous. This is the major event,
(11:31):
certainly of this campaign for him, possibly of his life.
So what does that mean at this point? I mean,
I think one of the logical things it means is fear.
I mean, if it happened once, you know, I mean,
he is in a position now, and every rally puts
(11:52):
him in position, every public appearance, and even more so,
if he becomes the president of the United States again,
he becomes a target. I think it is very possible
at this point that his will to win has been compromised.
I have never been sure that he really wants to
be the president again in any sense. I think his
(12:14):
life in mar A Lago has been fantastic for him,
and it hasn't been that much different from his life
in the White House. I think that he set out
to run this time around to avoid going to jail.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Can we say that you're feeling a first flush of
empathy for Donald Trump? I have always felt a oh really,
a little tell me about that.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
A little drawn in the direction of him. Well, I've
always seen him as a guy on the stage and
he's at libbying most of the time. And I think
that's one of the attractions of many people to Donald Trump,
that he's naked out there, that he could fall on
his face at any second, and in fact so often
(12:56):
has fallen on his face and then gotten up again.
But it's a life lived in public, completely exposed. Just
think of him as a stand up comic, and you know,
it works until it doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
I'm thinking of a stand up comic who desperately needs
some new material. Who's going to give him that new material?
Speaker 1 (13:16):
It will only come from within. Because he literally does
not listen to anyone. I mean, I've never seen anyone
quite like this. He's always talking at someone, you know,
so it always goes one way, which is why at
the convention in Milwaukee, and I was not far from him,
I really noticed that he actually seemed to be listening
(13:38):
to people, the people around him in the VIP box, yes,
which was entirely unusual. And then I thought, okay, yeah,
and that was of course, he had been almost assassinated
just days before, so I thought he's still in some
kind of post traumatic stress situation there.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
I mean he's doing his greatest hits in every speech now,
and one notices that they become less and less relevant,
less and less potent.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
But he has always done his greatest hits. That's part
of the act, and in his understanding, that's the act
that people want. So he gives that and then tries
to add something else to it. So what's happened is
a larger change in context. He was the disruptor before,
now she has effectively become the disruptor. He was always,
(14:30):
in some profound way the challenger, Now she is the challenger.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
It's interesting where she's really challenged him as the rallies,
which had always been his province, and she's getting bigger
crowds than he is, which for a show business act,
that's terrible. When you filled medicines.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah, no, in it's devastating. In his previous opponents, Hillary Clinton,
Joe Biden, I mean, they druggled and it was an
uphill struggle to get five hundred people to listen to them,
And now she has crowds that rival his teny fifteen thousand.
Can you go to twenty thousand. So we haven't seen
(15:14):
this since Barack Obama on the Democratic side, and he
has never had to face this.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Do you think she's smart not to do interviews? It's
such an old media idea that the candidate has to
run that gauntlet of interviews with the Washington Post, the
New York Times, and Trump broke it. Now she's breaking
it and Trump is trashing a funnel doing it.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Well, I mean, clearly, so far that's the right thing
to do. The media has cast her into this Trump
killer role. Great, but at some point they still need
a content. This is beyond ideological. They clearly want her
to win and not Trump to win, but the media
is programmed. We need a drama. Now, this is the reversal.
(15:58):
Is the drama. But how long does that go? We
can start to plot that out. The Democratic Convention starts
next week in Chicago, so that will be an entire
week of the inflation of this balloon. I suspect is
going to be so stunning.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
We're going to start to question it at some point soon.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Okay, So the free ride ends.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
I think the free ride ends probably two weeks after
the convention.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Okay, around the time of the first debate.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Around the time of the first debate, I think that
makes dramatic sense. Suddenly we have another one against one,
a face off. Now the interesting thing is that debate
is on the tenth. Remember the Fox debate that he
announced that there was a Fox debate. She ignored him basically,
(16:51):
and then he agreed to do the debate that he
had previously agreed to. He renegged on it, then he
agreed he'd do it. But there is still that Fox
to So I think that he will show up for
that debate and she won't show up for that debate.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Are we going to have an empty chair again?
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yes, we'll have an empty chair kind of thing. But
then I understand that there's plans then for a third
debate univision, I think, And he wants it in late September.
She wants it in October, I believe. So I suspect
we'll get two debates.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
I can't visit a scenario with the two in their
present forms where Trump can win a debate. I can't
see how Trump can create a major victory over Paris
in the present forms of how they're presenting themselves to
the public and what they're doing and the different energies
(17:44):
that they have and the different commands of the facts
that they have.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
You know, that was always the Hillary thing. You know,
how could he possibly win against Hillary? And everybody, every Democrat, said,
he's surely lost against her.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Fair enough. Yeah, and she was judged to have won
the debates quite hand the right.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
I mean, one of his weird gifts or part of
his genius is this conversation he gets to carry on
that none of us here.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
What exactly do you mean by that.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Well, he's talking to his base or you know, in
a way that we clearly don't get. That's been true
since twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Superior artry does not actually carry the day.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
And matter of fact, it turns out to be the opposite.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
So to sum up, where do you think we are now?
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Last week, I think I characterized that we were back
before the debate, but then the wind was at his back.
Now it's at her back. Yeah, I mean I think
we've qualitatively moved on. I mean, she's in an incredibly
strong position now as of today, as of this moment,
she wins. Wow, And I suspect at this point is
(18:51):
going to take a mistake on her part. They thought
they had a mistake that they had something on walls
and his military.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Records have a swift boating attemption.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Yeah, and they were very confident about that. Got this.
You know, he's a dead man. Even I heard Trump
was saying, let's not go too hard on him because
they'll replace him and they'll put Shapiro in and there
goes Pennsylvania. We need Pennsylvania. I mean, they were really
confident about this attack, which appears to have gotten no
traction at all. It's that old thing of fighting the
(19:22):
old war. Chris Lasovita, one of the co heads of
the Trump campaign, was the swift boat guy. It was
his television ads that did that. They have this kind
of thing. Oh, a military record. You can always assail
a military record, which is interesting against Donald Trump, who
clearly has no military record. But actually the problem with
(19:44):
that analysis is that, well, the problem is that it's
not true. And remember the Democrats tried to assail the
very assailable George Bush record. So that worked in the
John Kerry situation because he was an anti war guy,
so you could pin that on him in a way
that I think it's going to be incredibly difficult to
(20:08):
pin on a guy who did his nation.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
His Yeah, I mean spent decades in the national Guard.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
National Guard weekends for twenty four years. So I'm not
sure what that mistake is, but that is what they're
going to need at this point. A mistake.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Absolutely. Thank you, Michael, Thank you.
Speaker 4 (20:37):
Fire and Fury. The podcast is hosted and executive produced
by Michael Wolfe and James Truman. The producers are Adam
Waller and Emily Maronov, executive producers for Kaleidoscope. Mangesh had
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Speaker 3 (21:03):
W