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July 19, 2024 23 mins

In this week’s episode, Michael reports from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He and James discuss the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Has the shooting transformed the former president’s image within the GOP? What does this mean for the trajectory of his campaign? What else did Michael witness on the convention floor? Tune in to find out.

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Speaker 1 (00:04):
I mean, if you wrote this, here is the Iron
Man and he's shot in his ear, that would kind
of be a joke. Wound people might otherwise make fun
of you. It's kind of like being shot in the ass,
although actually better, but it doesn't make any difference. Of course,
he goes in with the bandage on his ear, and

(00:25):
then everybody in the convention is wearing a mock bandage
on their ear.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah, the size of the bandage seems to have overbranded
the wound. Yeah, it's a compelling visual.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
I'm Michael Wolf and this is Fire and Fury.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
The Podcast, and I'm James Truman. Good morning, Michael, James
are I'm good. Thank you. So you're in Milwaukee. I
am on Long Island in a community of people who
think we're just about to fall into the abyss. What
does it feel like over there?

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Well, Milwaukee turns out to be actually nice. It seems great.
Who knew? Which is an interesting contrast because you know,
the whole Trump message, and especially with Dvance, is about
the hollowing out of the Midwest industrial base. Well, Milwaukee
turns out to be entirely gentrified. All the nineteenth century

(01:33):
buildings are now filled with boutiques and coffee shops. The
whole city has been converted to I don't know, mid
tech and financial services. So we should all be moving
to the yuppified Midwest.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Apparently does that jibe with the mood in the convention hall.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
The mood in the convention hall is the happiest I've
ever seen human beings. So the Republicans are at their
appog of their time has arrived. Having said that, I've
been going through this in my mind last night, but
I think that I've been to, if not every convention
since nineteen eighty, I've been to a hell of a

(02:15):
lot of them, and I seem to at every time
forget the thing that I learned, which is that conventions
are excruciatingly boring. I mean, you want to kill yourself.
Everything is scripted. What the people do here is what
they have done at every other convention. Nothing, nothing happens

(02:37):
out of the ordinary, but it's interesting and important. I
think to step back a second and just look at
where we are, because events are moving so rapidly, one
event undoing another event that it's really hard to stay
focused on any kind of context of what's happened here.

(03:00):
So just if you go back a little more than
a month ago. Trump was convicted of thirty four felon
accounts and scheduled to be sentenced on July eleventh. So
within just the past weeks, there was a scenario in
which the Republicans were going into this convention with their
standard bearer quite possibly carrying a jail sentence over his head.

(03:25):
Then the debates occurred and the Democrats went into complete
meltdown and became the drama. Then there was suddenly the
immunity decision putting his convictions into doubt, and then the
assassination attempt, and then the convention begins on the heels
of that rather than the heels of a jail sentence.

(03:46):
And he's a different kind of martyr, world class historical
martyr and historical figure. Oh and even before the convention begins,
the a federal judge rules that the special prosecutor is
unconstitutional and therefore his federal indictments are probably lost, and

(04:06):
then the convention opens.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah, it's the most remarkable example I've ever seen of
the revolving wheel of fortune. I mean, in two weeks,
the Democrats are suddenly in disarray and the Republicans are
in unity, and Trump, who was the liability, the candidate
they were incumbented by, has now switched and Biden is
the candidate that the Democrats are incumbented by. I've never

(04:31):
seen anything like this.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
I think the wheel of fortune maybe the paramount subject.
And I think the thing to talk about the greatest
political factor at this point is luck, and it's Trump's luck,
and it is almost unfathomable that he has so much
of it. So I think it's worth asking the question,

(04:53):
is it luck, which is caprice? Or is there something
else going on here? But do you think.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
When the wheel of fortune moves in you favors so
consistently it begins to look like destiny? And that's from
watching some of the convention that seems to be a
sentiment now that is enshrined that Trump is America's destiny.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
I mean, the old Hemingway thing, you make your own luck,
which I believe, because otherwise I guess you're believing as
Trump seems to say that it's all in God's hands,
which I don't believe. So the Trump thing, I mean,
I think that you can kind of see something. I mean,
this guy from the beginning has just imposed himself on events,

(05:39):
So you make yourself so large that the world revolves
around you. Events react to you rather than the other way.
And you can see that in Joe Biden, which obviously
events seem to be surrounding Joe Biden and about to
crush Joe Biden, and he has no control on them
and no impact over them. But does this other thing

(06:01):
and every turn this willful act to be.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
The performer, I suppose, and the storyteller. It's interesting how
Trump's story that he's composing now at the convention, the
family drama, the mantydam. This is a compelling story against
which Joe Biden, who actually probably has a better story.
I mean in his losses, the deaths of his loved ones,

(06:26):
the fuck up of his son. I mean, that's pure
soap opera in its own way, but no one cares
Trump has devised the better story.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Well, before we move on to that, I just want
to come back to luck again, because as much as
you might design this and say we make our own luck,
and Trump certainly has made much of his own luck,
there is just also luck. I mean to be shot
in the ear. You can't make it up. So I

(06:55):
mean to be shot on probably the single safest place
if you are to get shot, the single safest place
on your body to get shot is kind of magical.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Do we know if the bullet actually hit the air
or if it glanced off the teleprompter and it's just
a shot of glass wound that's what I'm eating. Yeah,
that better luck?

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah. Completely. There is one detail of the shooting that
seems to be glossed over, and I want to try
to preserve an amber, and it's that he lost his
shoes when he went down. One of the things that
he says is get my shoes. So somehow he fell

(07:39):
out of his shoes, which I don't want to be
kind of sacrilegious because this is an assassination attempt and
people died, But nevertheless, how did he fall out of
his shoes? And it took me back throughout the primary
campaign against Ron de Santis, But this was nisconstant meme.
This is perhaps what defeated Ron DeSantis, which is the

(08:01):
suggestion that he wore lifts in his shoes. And I
just want to throw out a conspiracy theory that I
think Trump was wearing lifts and they were precarious enough
for him to be knocked out of his shoes.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Interesting.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
I was in the convention last night and I was
very close to Trump, kind of disconcertingly close and closely
observing him. I've spent a fair amount of time with Trump,
and for the first time, I thought he looked really
old under the tan and under the hair dye. It
really stopped me short. There was another thing that I saw, also,

(08:39):
that the people around him were talking to him last
night and he was listening. And Trump never does that.
Trump is always the guy talking. Everybody else is listening.
That's all they can do. So I was wondering, you know,
and this is just from observing someone at I don't

(09:01):
know how far I was, you know, thirty fifty feet away.
Was there a change? There was he suddenly old? And
this is obviously a theme of this election, but it
may be even even a larger theme. And this may
have been magnified because of vance. Not only is he
thirty nine years old, I mean he had to grow

(09:22):
a beard because he's so baby faced.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
Were you there in the convention when he first arrived
on Monday? I was what did it feel like on
the floor.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Everybody reacts like they're supposed to react. It's like a
studio audience, there are people who come through and they
tell you what's going to happen, and then they tell
you sort of what to say. I mean, last night
when Peter Navarro came on stage, who had gotten out
of jail yesterday morning, quite a theatrical set up before

(09:54):
he came on stage. You know, there were those people
who leave the laughter and the applause in a studio audience,
came through and say when he comes on, say welcome home,
welcome home.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
So that was all choreographed.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Yes, it's really hard to tell what's spontaneous in these situations.
And these people on the floor are all there, they're
just poised to react.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
Yeah, it's been funny watching the feed and I don't
know if this has been edited, but when it goes
out onto the floor, mostly what you see is middle
aged women, which was something you don't really expect to
see from this convention.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
I mean, almost everybody is middle aged. But more importantly,
there's so much going on that it's very hard to
focus on what you're seeing here, including people in costumes,
and the dress of these people is so yes, it's
spectacularly unnerving that it's hard to focus. But when you
do focus. What I saw was an extraordinary white crowd.

(11:02):
I mean people you say this, oh the crowd was
so white, but it's not white like this. And then
focusing further, I thought, people don't even really look like
this anymore. But it really took me back to this
is what people looked like when I was a kid.
I mean, there are no black faces, no Hispanic faces,
no Asian faces. I think it's possibly there were no

(11:23):
Italian faces. There were certainly no Jews. This is the
America that I actually can remember quite well, but it
is as though the America of the last fifty years
had not occurred. I mean extraordinary to this degree. People
say that, well, this is the Republican Party, but to
see it up close, I mean I had that moment

(11:46):
of feeling I have stepped back in time. We'll be
back right up to the great.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
A question we left off last week, and you were
very coy about answering it because you had some inside information.
Was about Milania's speech. It appears she's not going to
be giving one.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Okay, so this is a big deal. And again with
the value of the assassination attempt means that people are
not paying attention to this. But Milania was set up
to give a major address at this invention. I mean,
that was always part of the plan. That was the
way they were going to deal with the fact that

(12:35):
she has never made one campaign appearance or one courtroom appearance.
And then she and I think this was about two
weeks ago, she just adamantly refused, I'm not going to
do it, and that threw them into you know, how
do we deal with this? I mean, this is going
to be glaringly obvious, and it is still, I mean,
if you're not looking away, glaringly obvious. So I understand

(12:59):
that she is going to make an appearance but will
not speak. And you know, the where's Malania question for
Donald Trump is a threatening one and he's managed to
avoid this. I don't know how, but can he avoid
it forever? I mean, I think it's a question that
weighing on his mind.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
Was there anything in the choice of vance that was
in anticipation of a new candidate? The thing I found
peculiar about his speech last night was it hit so
many traditional Democratic talking points. You know, it was pro
working man, who's pro union, his anti corporate interests. In
some ways, it's a highly non republican speech.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
Well, the Republicans have become in the last you know,
ten years, highly non republican, and in some sense the
Democrats have become highly Republican as the party of the
elites and the bankers and wealthy people and the Ivy League.
That was the old Republican profile. So for the past

(14:04):
six weeks eight weeks, Dvance has been the clear front runner.
Vance Bergham Rubio is how it went, with Trump not
making up his mind, Trump being deeply ambivalent about this choice,
and even there was this Bobby Kennedy call Sunday the
day after the shooting, totally fascinating. There was a leak

(14:26):
from the Kennedy side. So Trump is there calling him
on Sunday, this ingratiating kind of thing, and I felt
that it was not unlikely that he was, once again,
for the last time, feeling out Bobby Kennedy on becoming
the vice presidential choice, which he had wanted to over

(14:46):
the last number of months. Trump went around and saying,
Trump Kennedy, just repeat that. Can you hear the sound
of that? I love that sound, Trump Kennedy. It's interesting
to listen to that call is perfect. Donald Trump monologizing Kennedy,
who can't get a word in edgewise except in agreement. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(15:07):
And then if Trump was calling to feel him out,
he never got to the point finally, which always happens
with Trump too. But the Vance thing, I mean, one
of the hesitations that Trump had about Vance is in
fact that he was thirty nine, that he would in
fact inevitably make Trump look like the older guy, the

(15:28):
much older guy. But in the end, I think Trump's
view of the vice president is finally, it doesn't matter.
And in the middle of the Vance speech last night,
which I thought was terrible, because Vance is actually a
good writer. You can pick apart his book as almost
everyone is now, but it's actually pretty good and it

(15:48):
is quite well written. It's the book that made him famous.
It is a book that transformed his life and career.
Just to think that books can do that is kind
of amazing. Anyway, he was doing this speech. It was
a terrible speech. It was flat footed, it was hackneyed,
it was clearly written by someone else. Anyway, about midway

(16:10):
through and I was with another journalist, I said, I'm
getting out of here. I want to avoid the crowd,
and this person seemed appalled that I would walk out
on the main speech of the evening of potentially a
historic speech, and I said, having been to many of
these conventions, this is the high point of Vance's vice

(16:31):
presidential career. Yeah, I wants to ask you that vice
presidents are forgotten after tonight. He just becomes the adjunct, unless,
of course, he becomes the president, which given Trump's age,
is also a very distinct possibility.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
How quickly does he become the threat to Trump who
has to be sidelined.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
Well, that's interesting, and I think we've discussed this before
but worth bringing up again because it actually people don't
is that Trump, if he's reelected in November, will immediately
become a lame duck president. He's already had one term.
This is effectively the second term. He can't run again

(17:13):
in all second terms for presidents. Very quickly the world
begins to line up to foresee the opportunities that will
arise as this term inevitably ends and the president will
no longer have power and begins from the beginning to
have that power dissipate before everyone's eyes. So that's going

(17:37):
to happen, and yes, Vance will be there now I
think that there is a kind of a theory which
Advance as this willing Maga convert, setting himself up as
the MAGA heir somehow will let Trump's power continue, that
Trump as the foundation of the Maga party. Advance will

(18:01):
only exist as Trump's proxy. I mean, I'm not so
sure about that. Advance seemed like an incredibly ambitious and
wildly figure. Yeah. I mean, case in point, his complete
and utter abject conversion to Donald Trump, a man that
he over and over again, as Hitler has made it

(18:25):
clear that he did not think was a serious person
in any way.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
It was a fantastic visual that first night that he
was there. You saw him, and then you saw Don
Junior and Eric sitting behind him, and they Bill had
exactly that same feral look and that same beard, and
you almost got the feeling that they could have had
at least one parent in common, do you know what
I mean? It looked like Donald Trump had adopted another

(18:52):
son who he was going to rub his other son's
faces in because this son was capable of being VP.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
Well, or I had the other feeling, which was that
he just regard Advance as another like his son, somebody
he doesn't have to take seriously at all someone who
is a lackey essentially.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
So Michael, our weekly Trump promiser got a little bit
complicated now with so many diverse scenarios possibly opening up
even over the weekend. So first off, Trump against by.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
One hundred percent, given how many variables there will inevitably be.
And in the context of this race where everything shifts
on a dime, as one hundred percent, Joe Biden cannot win.
And I know that in the Trump camp now it
is a sweep of every swing state plus taking Maine,

(19:46):
New Hampshire and Virginia from Joe Biden. So virtually looking
at the possibility of a landslide.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Wow and Trump Kamala.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
That's a difficult race the Democrats, for all of the
obvious reasons. To rebrand her is easier than rebranding Joe Biden,
but is also difficult. But it's not one hundred percent
at least, and I think that's what the Democrats are thinking.
Joe is one hundred percent. Kamala, you know, is a climb,

(20:20):
but at least we have a chance. So our depression
is not going to ever lift, but will be slightly
less depressed with Kamala.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Are there any Democrats that provide more hope?

Speaker 1 (20:34):
I think any other Democrat literally, any other new face,
and I think new face is the secret. Here is
the potential magic for someone who Donald Trump has not
been hammering, you know, the Trump machine of being able
to characterize someone in the simplest, most basic, most visceral terms,

(20:56):
really a kind of profound political gift, has not had
the opportunity to work on the unknown. The fact that
an unknown goes into the media sphere as someone whose
character has to be made. They are the story. Trump
is an old story. So that would make this very

(21:17):
much a horse race again. I don't know if we
go back to fifty to fifty, but we go back
to a serious horse race with any new Democrat.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
And other Democrats nurturing a hope that Kamalo will stay
on as VP. Or does it involve throwing her off
the ticket to bring in a new face.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
I don't think she would stay on as VP. There
are two scenarios for Biden leaving the race. Throw it open,
open convention, and here's a plan for how we're gonna
stage of an effectively many primary or bake off or else.
Joe says, I'm getting out, but I'm going to endorse

(22:02):
Kamala and then everybody's going to have to be grudgingly
rally around her. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
I mean it's astonishing the odium and the contempt that Democrats,
liberals have for Joe Biden at this point. It's kind
of out ways that discussed the toward Trump.

Speaker 1 (22:19):
It just turned on their.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Own in a quite violent way.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
Well, the prospect of a certain loss will do that.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
Yeah, you blame an advance.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
I think the media too, is an interesting thing of
the mainstream media, which has been so focused on its
disdain for and hatred of Donald Trump for so long,
also shifted and pointed that disdain to say the least
that Joe Biden. We'll be back next week with well,

(22:51):
we don't know what next week will hold, but will
be here Fire and Fury. The podcast is hosted and
executive produced by Michael Wolfe and James Truman. The producers
are Adam Waller and Emily Marinov. Executive producers for Kaleidoscope

(23:15):
are Mangesh headt Together and Os Valashian. Executive producers for
iHeart On, Nikki Ittour and Katrina Novel
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