Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds. And Donald Trump's closing argument on the
Speaker 1: campaign trail was a ten minute story about golfing legend
Speaker 1: Arnold Palmer's Genitalia. We have such a great show for
Speaker 1: you today, the Lincoln Projects. Rick Wilson joins us to
Speaker 1: discuss everything the state of the race. Then we'll talk
Speaker 1: to politifacts Bill Adair about his new book Beyond the
Speaker 1: Big Lie, the epidemic of political liars, why Republicans do
Speaker 1: it more, and how it could burn down our democracy.
Speaker 1: But first the news.
Speaker 2: Mally So, there's a lot going on in the race.
Speaker 2: When Trump's not discussing genitals, he visited the McDonald's, big
Speaker 2: big event. What'd you see here?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: I am without words. I guess the thinking here was
Speaker 1: that visiting a McDonald's would somehow make Trump more relatable.
Speaker 1: There's slightly more than a than two weeks left before
Speaker 1: election day and Donald Trump is in Pennsylvania working at
Speaker 1: a McDonald. Now he's doing this to troll Harris because
Speaker 1: she said she worked in a McDonald and he believes
Speaker 1: she didn't actually work in a McDonald's.
Speaker 2: This is his new truther thing, the McDonald's working. It's
Speaker 2: like when he didn't believe Obama's bre certificate.
Speaker 1: Maybe there are some people for whom a quote unquote
Speaker 1: billionaire cause playing working at McDonald's, you know, moves the needle.
Speaker 1: I just don't see it. But maybe I'm wrong. He's
Speaker 1: had some problems, canceled a lot of interviews, but today
Speaker 1: he did do an interview with the very Trump friendly
Speaker 1: Howard Kurtz, and Kurtz actually asked him some hard questions.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of shocked while.
Speaker 4: We listened to this one listening you're a famous line
Speaker 4: about Springfield, Ohio, and I take your point that fifteen
Speaker 4: to twenty thousand legal hation imemberrant sitting in that area,
Speaker 4: a lot of friction. But when you said, you know
Speaker 4: it's gone viral, they're reading the dogs, they're reading the cats.
Speaker 4: You said, you're just reporting what had been said. But
Speaker 4: why not say, now, well, look that turned out not
Speaker 4: to be true.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know if it's true or
Speaker 1: not to it.
Speaker 4: I read to that you don't know if it's true
Speaker 4: or not true.
Speaker 5: You know it's been the monk by, well, it's true.
Speaker 1: What about the goose, the geese? What about the geese?
Speaker 3: What happened there with him?
Speaker 5: They were all missing.
Speaker 3: It was one listening with hell.
Speaker 5: How he howly I have no idea and I said.
Speaker 1: Something, yeah, I mean okay. So Howie Kurtz manages to
Speaker 1: somehow ask and I think, look, this is always what
Speaker 1: I think about interviews. When you get someone feeling comfortable,
Speaker 1: you get much more from them. Another question, Howard Kurtz
Speaker 1: asked him, your defense secretary and top general are warning
Speaker 1: that you are the most dangerous person ever to America,
Speaker 1: and Trump said, I don't respect them as soldiers, never
Speaker 1: did so. I actually think how Kurtz did a very
Speaker 1: good interview there. So up is.
Speaker 2: Down left going to say words I never thought i'd
Speaker 2: hear Eddie would say, especially you or I.
Speaker 1: He certainly got him to say stuff that was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: He did, however, scrap his interviews with NBC, CNBC squad Box,
Speaker 1: a bunch of other things, and then also on Friday,
Speaker 1: it looked like he was dozing off an event in Michigan.
Speaker 2: Mike, what do you think now that the It seems
Speaker 2: like the Harris campaign just put out an ad about
Speaker 2: his unraveling mental state.
Speaker 3: The AP just put up an article.
Speaker 2: It seems the mainstream media is finally doing what we've
Speaker 2: been begging for months, to talk about his unraveling mental state.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know that it matters, and I
Speaker 1: actually think that at this moment, the Harris campaign is
Speaker 1: bigger than much of the mainstream media. Remember it's a
Speaker 1: billion dollar startup, and so they are sort of their
Speaker 1: own media at this point, just like on the Republican
Speaker 1: side too. But I do think like the contrast of
Speaker 1: him working at McDonald's not to show that working at
Speaker 1: McDonald's is an important and the sanctity of work kind
Speaker 1: of thing, the way that Shared Brown did a whole
Speaker 1: tour about how important work is. Donald Trump did this
Speaker 1: to troll Harris. Whereas Harris was in Detroit on Saturday
Speaker 1: with Lizzo, in Atlanta later on on Saturday with Usher,
Speaker 1: then on Sunday, she's going to be with Stevie Wonder
Speaker 1: and then she's also going to be in two different churches.
Speaker 1: So it feels like a radically different kind of campaign, right.
Speaker 1: He is trying to just attack her for saying she
Speaker 1: didn't do something she obviously did, and she is just
Speaker 1: trying to get voters.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the other I think very bizarre bizarre dudes. And
Speaker 2: one of the only people who is a worst public
Speaker 2: speaker than Donald Trump these days is mister Elon Musk,
Speaker 2: and he's doing a lot of speaking in Pennsylvania. What
Speaker 2: are you seeing here?
Speaker 1: So Elon Musk is doing town halls. He's moved to
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania for the next two plus weeks. He's doing these
Speaker 1: town halls where they're basically like Elon town halls, and
Speaker 1: he's doing them in the name of Donald Trump. But
Speaker 1: from what I've talked to some reporter who are who
Speaker 1: have been writing about this, it seems much more like
Speaker 1: it's sort of Elon making the case for Elon unless
Speaker 1: him making the taste for Trump. Now, he has spent
Speaker 1: a lot of money on Trump's campaign. But you'll remember
Speaker 1: that there was just a piece from Hugo Lole that
Speaker 1: just came out yesterday at The Guardian where he talked
Speaker 1: about how like as much as a fourth of all
Speaker 1: the door knocks that could remember, they're doing these paid canvassers,
Speaker 1: and about a fourth of all these door knocks may
Speaker 1: have been fraudulent. So there's a sense in which a
Speaker 1: lot of this is actually not working the America Pact
Speaker 1: and they're not really connecting with voters on the ground. Always,
Speaker 1: door knocking is not a science, and it often, you know,
Speaker 1: it often is hard to quantitate. But supposely Elon is
Speaker 1: paying about sixteen dollars a door, which is crazy high
Speaker 1: for canvassers. Yeah, so I meing that's significantly more So
Speaker 1: definitely Elon is being taken advantage of.
Speaker 2: As somebody who's done a lot of door knocking. That's
Speaker 2: the type of number where you'd want to fact check
Speaker 2: it like ten times, because it seems inconceivable anyone could
Speaker 2: run something that that.
Speaker 1: Usually it's four dollars a door. Yeah, but it again,
Speaker 1: it incentivizes fraud because the companies don't want to have
Speaker 1: to give the money back. So I think we'll see
Speaker 1: more of that. I don't know if it helps. And
Speaker 1: then also you'll have to remember that Elon is sort
Speaker 1: of a desperate move. Yesterday said he'd give a million
Speaker 1: dollars every day to a register in Pennsylvania voter who
Speaker 1: signs his petition that says that a you voted in
Speaker 1: the swing state and b that you support the first
Speaker 1: and second amendment, which I mean, does Elon really support
Speaker 1: the first.
Speaker 2: No, he definitely does not. But you know, I don't
Speaker 2: know if you've read any of the cravid readings of this,
Speaker 2: is that they're trying to make a list of angry
Speaker 2: Trump voters that they're going to rile up after the
Speaker 2: election if it's contested.
Speaker 1: Well, I certainly think that they're going that there's data
Speaker 1: harvesting going on here. Why this data is being harvested,
Speaker 1: who knows, but there certainly is yes. And also Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: Governor Josh Shapiro said law enforcement should take a look
Speaker 1: at the Elon Muss voter payments. It's not clear whether
Speaker 1: this is legal or not. It seems very murky. Again,
Speaker 1: you're technically paying them for signing the petition, so maybe
Speaker 1: it's okay, but it certainly feels like vote buying.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, University of California election lawyer Richard L.
Speaker 2: Haysen does say it's definitely illegal, which I think is interesting.
Speaker 1: Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and
Speaker 1: the host of the Enemy's List. Welcome Back, Too Fast Politics.
Speaker 1: Rick Wilson, Molly.
Speaker 3: John Fast, Happy happy day to you.
Speaker 1: We are in the tightening of the election. We're what
Speaker 1: two weeks away?
Speaker 3: A little more than two weeks, but yeah, close enough,
Speaker 3: a little more. Yeah, and Donnie is very tired.
Speaker 1: I have to say. He really does look terrible and
Speaker 1: he might have been better off just not going to
Speaker 1: the Alsmth dinner.
Speaker 3: The first mistake of the Ausmeth dinner was he had
Speaker 3: Greg Guttfeld write as jokes a man.
Speaker 1: Who is Is that true?
Speaker 3: Or Yeah? No, it's true, it's true, notoriously not funny. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there are a million comedians in this world, and you
Speaker 3: would think to yourself, who would be a great comedian
Speaker 3: to write for me at a Catholic political dinner? And
Speaker 3: Greg Guttfeld is never on that list, not once in
Speaker 3: the history of ever.
Speaker 1: What I like about Greg guttfeld show, which I've actually
Speaker 1: watched because one of my kids believes in capital punishment,
Speaker 1: is that when you watch it, you realize that, like,
Speaker 1: none of the jokes are funny, but it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: because they rely so heavily on whatever that is sort
Speaker 1: of a laugh track kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Laugh track, Yeah, yeah, listen. Laugh tracks are the last
Speaker 3: refuge of scoundrels. Yes, and if I ever use one,
Speaker 3: I want you to go ahead and just put me
Speaker 3: out of my misery.
Speaker 1: It's just not a normal thing to do anywhere at
Speaker 1: this point in American life, right in the.
Speaker 3: Year of our war twenty twenty four. Laugh tracks are
Speaker 3: or an artifact of the before times.
Speaker 1: Right. You know when to laugh, it's when it's funny. Yes,
Speaker 1: So I got a call from a friend who's a Trumper.
Speaker 1: He made me feel very anxious. He read me some
Speaker 1: poll numbers, which.
Speaker 3: He is Sam.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what it was, right, Okay, So here's the story.
Speaker 1: Sam Number called me this morning when I was really
Speaker 1: sick because I had gone out for dinner and felt
Speaker 1: terrible and was super sick and couldn't get it and
Speaker 1: just was so and I never get sick. And Sam
Speaker 1: Number called me saying that it was about whatever, and
Speaker 1: then he started making me feel terrible. And then he said,
Speaker 1: this one thinks she's going to lose, and that one's
Speaker 1: good thinks she's going to lose, and so talk me
Speaker 1: off the lunch.
Speaker 3: Rick Wilson, Donald Trump is sick, he's tired, he's old,
Speaker 3: he's exhausted, he's not doing well. You see, every day
Speaker 3: this guy gets more and more shaky and infirm this
Speaker 3: is not This is not the race they think it is.
Speaker 3: Would I like to be ahead twenty points in every state?
Speaker 3: Of course I would. We live in a closely divided country,
Speaker 3: and that's just a hard reality for us that we
Speaker 3: have to have to endure. We don't get a vote
Speaker 3: on that, We're going to live in a tough divided country.
Speaker 3: And for all of this bullshit, okay, for all of this,
Speaker 3: all this noise and agita and people getting wigged out
Speaker 3: every single fucking day, which I just look, Donald Trump
Speaker 3: is doing base only activation right now. He's not getting
Speaker 3: new customers. As I like to say, you.
Speaker 1: Have got a Stuart Stevens accent when you say it,
Speaker 1: which is how we know.
Speaker 3: I stole that from Stuart Stevens, so I'll give him
Speaker 3: full credit. Trump's not getting new customers. But no, Stuart's
Speaker 3: very wise about that. It's like this guy is not
Speaker 3: out getting additional support. He's not out getting new people
Speaker 3: coming out of the woodwork saying, you know, I rejected
Speaker 3: Trump in twenty twenty, but now because of his ad
Speaker 3: about communism, I'm going to go back to him. Nobody's
Speaker 3: saying that, nobody's waking up in the morning, thinking that
Speaker 3: the way to victory is is more Trump right right.
Speaker 1: No, I think that's a really good point. I also
Speaker 1: think that one of the internal divides, which I think
Speaker 1: is interesting that's happening in Trump world is there certainly
Speaker 1: a feeling like who gets to take over once he wins.
Speaker 3: What you saw today with that release of that email
Speaker 3: from Susie to Chris Losovita, the forwarding of an email
Speaker 3: from Corey saying I run the budget, I run expenditures. Now,
Speaker 3: I mean, these people are there in their own little
Speaker 3: mini Trump civil war, and it is delicious. It is
Speaker 3: delightful how much they are buddy fucking each other. And
Speaker 3: for all of the idea that Donald Trump runs his
Speaker 3: own campaign, wake up people, not even close. Donald Trump
Speaker 3: isn't even He's barely conscious of his own campaign at
Speaker 3: this point. I think it is kind of remarkable that
Speaker 3: all these rats in the sack are fighting with each other,
Speaker 3: and as of right now, there's no good upside for him.
Speaker 3: There's nobody who's got like a breakthrough moment, Like Elon
Speaker 3: Musk is out there running around using an app that
Speaker 3: is notoriously buggy and shitty to to try to canvass
Speaker 3: all these voters. We're picking up today in a couple
Speaker 3: of articles that the app over twenty five percent of
Speaker 3: the doors they claim to have knocked on using this app.
Speaker 3: That are they're just being ripped off by the vendors
Speaker 3: who are sitting running taco restaurants going yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: knocked on seventeen doors today for sure, man or whatever.
Speaker 3: These are not smart guys.
Speaker 1: It does feel like this Hugo Lowl reporting from the
Speaker 1: Guardian about how they may have knocked on about a
Speaker 1: fourth less doors than they're claiming.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the thing I was referring to. Yeah, I mean, Molly, listen,
Speaker 3: there's another part of this. I think it's important. The
Speaker 3: Trump campaign is playing severe catch up right now. They
Speaker 3: do not have a field program. Field programs do not
Speaker 3: emerge overnight. You don't go down to political Mart and
Speaker 3: buy a field program. They take months and years to develop.
Speaker 3: Elon Musk hired a bunch of Ronda sand contractors, and
Speaker 3: as we all know, Ron DeSantis is the apotheosis of
Speaker 3: excellent campaign technique to run their field operation and to
Speaker 3: put them together with all this stuff for their field program,
Speaker 3: and it's just not working.
Speaker 1: So tell us what you're seeing right now.
Speaker 3: We're seeing right now that these early vote numbers are
Speaker 3: telling a good news story, not unequivocally everywhere one hundred percent,
Speaker 3: like oh it's done, because we're not done.
Speaker 1: But where are you seeing good stuff?
Speaker 3: I'm seeing good stuff in Pennsylvania. I'm seeing good stuff
Speaker 3: in Michigan. I think Trump is now headfaking Michigan for
Speaker 3: weirdly like almost sentimental reasons.
Speaker 1: Interesting because of his winning the Man of the Year.
Speaker 3: Well obviously, duh, we're.
Speaker 1: Referring to the fake Man of the Year thing that
Speaker 1: he made up.
Speaker 3: Yes, that Trump claims that he was named Man of
Speaker 3: the Year in Michigan. All this comes down to a really,
Speaker 3: i think painful recognition that the divided country is divided.
Speaker 3: We're not going to wake up any day for the
Speaker 3: next sixteen days of this campaign and go, wow, it's
Speaker 3: in the bag. Got to fight this thing to the finish.
Speaker 3: You got to run through the tape, you got to
Speaker 3: push it all the way down. Somebody yesterday said, I
Speaker 3: watched a video of you. You looked really tired, And
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh, you think really, you think I'm fucking tired. Yes,
Speaker 3: I'm fucking tired, and you should be you know, there's
Speaker 3: two rules in campaigns, die broke and die tired.
Speaker 1: One of the things that this is this sort of
Speaker 1: impossible new phenomenon again who knows, was that in twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen there were these secret Trump voters and in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four there are perhaps secret Harris voters, an underground
Speaker 1: of people.
Speaker 3: We believe that to be the case. And i'll tell
Speaker 3: you why. This goes way back to Margaret Thatcher, where
Speaker 3: the Labor Party did not believe Margaret Thatcher could win
Speaker 3: that race. She was just not as popular as that
Speaker 3: as she should have been on paper to win that race.
Speaker 3: And when she did, they discovered the presence of what
Speaker 3: they called shy Tories. We tories were people that were
Speaker 3: going to vote for Thatcher. They were going to vote
Speaker 3: for her, and it was going to change the ballgame. Well,
Speaker 3: they didn't pick them up in they're polling now. In
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen, there were shy Trump voters. They were mostly
Speaker 3: Republicans and moderate Republicans who bought into the oh god,
Speaker 3: it's Trump or communism, okay, And this year we're starting
Speaker 3: to pick up and I'm not going to say it's
Speaker 3: like a complete, utterly apparent and abundant polling phenomenon. Yet
Speaker 3: we're not going to see it. I mean, that's part
Speaker 3: of the definitional thing of this. It's harder to pick
Speaker 3: it up because it's hard to.
Speaker 1: Pick it up right because they're not telling you what
Speaker 1: they're going to do right right.
Speaker 3: We believe there are going to be a lot of
Speaker 3: Republicans who say, Okay, you know what, I can't fucking
Speaker 3: do this. I just can't. I can't do this. I
Speaker 3: can't or I won't because you know what, if you're
Speaker 3: right now at this point in this election, you haven't
Speaker 3: made up your mind publicly, it's because you have problems
Speaker 3: with Trump. That's that's where it's at. If you're not
Speaker 3: declaring who you're with right now, it's because you have
Speaker 3: problems with Trump. M The race is coming home for Harris.
Speaker 3: Democrats are coming home. Even the worry spots on the map,
Speaker 3: African American male's, Hispanic males, they're coming home. We're still
Speaker 3: going to win a majority of their votes. Now, that's
Speaker 3: not as much as we should because there's a lot
Speaker 3: of work to be done in those categories in the
Speaker 3: next couple of years. We can't fix the whole problem today,
Speaker 3: but if you're a shy Harris voter, there are a
Speaker 3: lot of incentives to be that way. If you're a
Speaker 3: Republican or independent, you don't want your husband to know,
Speaker 3: you don't want your friends to know, because you're probably
Speaker 3: surrounded by people who will call you a communist, a pedophile, terrorist,
Speaker 3: an ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter fan, all that shit that
Speaker 3: they pile on people to keep them in line.
Speaker 1: So tell us what you're seeing in Florida on the ground.
Speaker 3: Look, the early vote here in Florida is just starting
Speaker 3: to come in the mail in early vote is actually
Speaker 3: starting to come. We're going to see in person early
Speaker 3: voting start next week. That'll be something that I'm going
Speaker 3: to keep a close eye on. So right now, it
Speaker 3: looks tied up in some of the early data for
Speaker 3: requests of ballots of Republicans and Democrats. That's a good
Speaker 3: news story. That's a good news story for Democrats.
Speaker 1: Because many more registered voters in Florida, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Many more. Yeah, And the Republicans took a million Democrats
Speaker 3: basically out of the voting roles in the last two years.
Speaker 3: Surprise Ron de Santis and the election police yay, which
Speaker 3: you know, we can litigate that another time. But if
Speaker 3: you're seeing tied numbers, you're looking at something that's pretty
Speaker 3: probably pretty good for Democrats. You know, there's going to
Speaker 3: be a lot of attention on it. I still, as
Speaker 3: I've said, you know, Florida is in sight, but it's
Speaker 3: not fully in play. Now. Again, this is going to
Speaker 3: come down to the last week of the campaign and
Speaker 3: where Trump is mentally, physically politically in Florida in a
Speaker 3: way that will help decide not only the continuation on
Speaker 3: the early vote totals, which right now, look Democrats are
Speaker 3: at forty two point six and Republicans are at thirty
Speaker 3: six point nine as of Sunday afternoons data. That's about
Speaker 3: a million votes turned in. So we're going to have
Speaker 3: a struggle in Florida for the Republicans if Trump continues
Speaker 3: to behave like he's behaving this week, if he keeps
Speaker 3: wandering around on stage and it's DJ Donnie's dance party,
Speaker 3: or he stares out into space or falls asleep. I
Speaker 3: really believe this race. And interestingly, in most races, the
Speaker 3: die is kind of cast about six weeks out. Not
Speaker 3: this one. It started so late for Harris, there's such
Speaker 3: a growing understanding of what Trump had. What's broken with
Speaker 3: Trump that I think it has become very evident, very evident,
Speaker 3: how badly off he is physically and mentally, and that's
Speaker 3: gonna and that's going to continue to shape the race
Speaker 3: later and later. This will be a late decided race.
Speaker 3: And look, the likeliest scenario is that we're going to
Speaker 3: come down to election night and it's going to look
Speaker 3: an awful lot like twenty twenty, and she's gonna squeak
Speaker 3: out a win, and that is amazing and wonderful and historic.
Speaker 3: And yet then we go to war for seventy six
Speaker 3: days because I think these fuckers are going to burn
Speaker 3: this country to the ground. So everybody's like, I know
Speaker 3: how tired you are. I'm like, yes too, So why
Speaker 3: aren't you going to take a vacation after the election?
Speaker 3: I'm like, what in the spring of twenty five? Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: I think that's a really good point. And I do
Speaker 1: also what you're talking about with the contrast between the two.
Speaker 1: Last week, right, you had Trump on the Al Smith
Speaker 1: dinner making jokes, looking sweaty. You had him on the
Speaker 1: curvy couch with the Fox and Friends crew sort of
Speaker 1: struggling to get through an interview them trying to give
Speaker 1: him advice, right, like maybe you should campaign with NICKI
Speaker 1: Haley like everything they've been talking about, right, and him
Speaker 1: being like, no, fuck you. And then you had Harris
Speaker 1: right back and forth to different swing states giving speeches,
Speaker 1: doing rallies, an interview with Fox News. I mean, sort
Speaker 1: of going into trying to do Joe Rogan. I mean
Speaker 1: it's a pretty star contrast.
Speaker 3: It is at given that she has the pace and
Speaker 3: energy to keep it up and he doesn't. I suspect
Speaker 3: we're going to end with Trump being off the road
Speaker 3: at least a day or two this week. He is
Speaker 3: not sharp. He is not doing well, and I think
Speaker 3: it's important for the campaign. If they're going to sustain
Speaker 3: this thing, they're going to really have to deal with
Speaker 3: his problems. And it's tough for them right now. They
Speaker 3: are not having a good time. There is no fun
Speaker 3: being had it.
Speaker 1: I feel like, as you say this, you could hear
Speaker 1: this sort of like salivating from Rick Wilson.
Speaker 3: Do I have to plan to fuck with him in
Speaker 3: his physical and mental well being in the next two
Speaker 3: weeks every mother fucking minute of every motherfucking day.
Speaker 1: So, Rick, one of the things I wanted to ask
Speaker 1: you about was when Trump was on the Curvy Couch
Speaker 1: this week, he was talking about how he didn't want
Speaker 1: Fox to air any more negative campaign ads about him,
Speaker 1: or to have liberals on the station. In my mind,
Speaker 1: I was thinking, Fox is what, at the most four
Speaker 1: million viewers US listen.
Speaker 3: Fox is the largest cable outlet in the country, right, but.
Speaker 1: How many many.
Speaker 3: Millions it dwarfs everything else? Everything else together is smaller
Speaker 3: than Fox. Okay, Trump wanting to do that is a
Speaker 3: sign of his enormous political weakness right now. This is
Speaker 3: not a strong candidate with a strong campaign. The idea
Speaker 3: that you have to shut down the media for him
Speaker 3: to win tells you an awful lot about how fucked
Speaker 3: up and how weak and how broken his campaign is.
Speaker 3: Part of that is just Trump doing what Trump naturally does,
Speaker 3: which is trying to stack the deck in his favor.
Speaker 3: But part of it is this autocratic model that they
Speaker 3: think will win this for him, and I find it
Speaker 3: absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1: The other thing that I thought was interesting about this was,
Speaker 1: I mean, even if Fox still is a lot, the
Speaker 1: cable numbers are large people watching television. Cable television is
Speaker 1: not a huge group right. I mean that's three hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty million people in this country.
Speaker 3: In terms of likely voters. There's going to be a
Speaker 3: lot of TV watching, okay, I mean just real talk,
Speaker 3: but this just being waged on people's phones.
Speaker 1: Right. So that's why my point in this is that
Speaker 1: you're really seeing that the audience of one ads are
Speaker 1: affecting him because he's watching a lot of Fox News
Speaker 1: and he doesn't like the negative ads.
Speaker 3: He has said that before about us. I'm going to
Speaker 3: sue the Lincoln Project and Fox for showing bad ads
Speaker 3: about me. Okay, great, you should do that, don But
Speaker 3: for all that, I think it's really important to understand
Speaker 3: that again, this is another sign of Trump's incredible weaknesses.
Speaker 3: He's a broken, brained, sick old man. The campaign isn't.
Speaker 3: It isn't the kind of thing that they had in
Speaker 3: their heads in the beginning of this because they thought
Speaker 3: it was going to be Joe Biden. They thought the
Speaker 3: old man Joe was going to be easy to beat
Speaker 3: and that nothing could go wrong. Well, as we've seen,
Speaker 3: a lot can go wrong for Donald Trump, and so
Speaker 3: much has gone wrong that it's hard to go through
Speaker 3: this thing and go, oh yeah, this is the logical
Speaker 3: outcome for this campaign. It's going to be a psychotic
Speaker 3: Trump looking more and more senile and deranged on stage
Speaker 3: every day, and a competent, confident Kamala Harris out there
Speaker 3: beating the doors down in what has frankly been a
Speaker 3: quite good campaign. And one part of that good campaign
Speaker 3: is again, they are running a field program. They are
Speaker 3: running an operation. They're not outsourcing it to Charlie Kirk
Speaker 3: the human flounder hybrid and Elon Musk. And by the way,
Speaker 3: again just remember Elon Musk is using Ron DeSantis's political
Speaker 3: team for this campaign. I mean, come on, really, it's
Speaker 3: just like I keep going back to that. I'm like, no,
Speaker 3: come on, he's kidding, right. These guys, the guys around
Speaker 3: DeSantis were exceptional with de Santas at making. They spent
Speaker 3: about two hundred million dollars and their profit margin was
Speaker 3: about one hundred and sixty And they're going to do
Speaker 3: the same thing to Elon. The greater fool theory is
Speaker 3: playing out with Elon right this minute.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 3: You are welcome as always, my friend.
Speaker 1: Are you concerned about Project twenty twenty five and how
Speaker 1: awful Trump's second term could be. Well, so are we,
Speaker 1: which is why we teamed up with iHeart to make
Speaker 1: a limited series with the experts on what a disaster
Speaker 1: Project twenty twenty five would be for America's future. Right now,
Speaker 1: we have just released the final episode of this five
Speaker 1: episode series. They're all available by looking up Molly John
Speaker 1: Fast Project twenty twenty five on YouTube, and if you
Speaker 1: are more of a podcast person and not say a YouTuber,
Speaker 1: you can hit play and put your phone in the
Speaker 1: lock screen and it will play back just like a podcast.
Speaker 1: All five episodes are online now. We need to educate
Speaker 1: Americans on what Trump's second term would or could due
Speaker 1: to this country, so please watch it and spread the word.
Speaker 1: Bill Adair is the founder of PolitiFact and the author
Speaker 1: of Beyond the Big Lie, The Epidemic of political Lie,
Speaker 1: is why Republicans do it more and how it could
Speaker 1: burn down our democracy. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 5: Bill, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: Molly.
Speaker 1: I feel bad saying this to you, but I think
Speaker 1: it is your field of expertise. As far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, you are an expert on politicians lying.
Speaker 5: It's an odd thing to be an expert in, but
Speaker 5: I think that's a fair statement.
Speaker 1: It's sort of one of those things where it's like
Speaker 1: it is definitely true, but very relevant for this moment
Speaker 1: in American life. So you've written a book, but you
Speaker 1: have a long history of being a sort of source
Speaker 1: for fact checking. So explain to us about that.
Speaker 5: I wrote the book Beyond the Big Lie because I
Speaker 5: have a long history. I guess you could say I
Speaker 5: started off This actually goes back to when I was
Speaker 5: in college. I was a student at Arizona State University,
Speaker 5: and I wrote my senior independent study on the need
Speaker 5: for more fact checking. And it was because I had
Speaker 5: seen a lot of lies in campaigns curly in Arizona.
Speaker 5: It had to do with a initiative that was on
Speaker 5: the ballot to regulate hospitals, and I was just really
Speaker 5: struck that the media was not doing fact checking. And
Speaker 5: so I wrote a paper that said that the media
Speaker 5: should do more fact checking. And so as I got
Speaker 5: into journalism, I did lots of different kinds of journalism,
Speaker 5: but was always somebody who was bored with the ordinary.
Speaker 5: And so by the time I got to Washington and
Speaker 5: became a Washington reporter, I decided to sort of put
Speaker 5: that passion to work because I felt covering Congress and
Speaker 5: the White House, that there was not enough fact checking.
Speaker 5: This was now two thousand and three, two thousand and four,
Speaker 5: and so I went to my editors I was then
Speaker 5: working for the Saint Petersburg Times, a newspaper in Florida,
Speaker 5: and said let's start a fact checking website. And so
Speaker 5: I started PolitiFact, and PolitiFact ended up becoming a great success.
Speaker 5: It won the Pulitzer Prize. It spawned a lot of
Speaker 5: other fact checking organizations, and we actually scaled it sort
Speaker 5: of like a franchise restaurant. We had PolitiFact in different states,
Speaker 5: and so I'm very proud of what we did. But
Speaker 5: along the way, I saw a lot of politicians lying.
Speaker 5: And so by the time I left PolitiFact and came
Speaker 5: to Duke University, where I now work as a professor
Speaker 5: of journalism and public Policy, I decided that I needed
Speaker 5: to write a book, particularly because we had not been
Speaker 5: completely honest with people about what we saw in the lying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's do a minute here to talk about that.
Speaker 1: It feels to me like we are in the golden
Speaker 1: age of political lying.
Speaker 5: It's great to be in that moment, isn't it. Molly
Speaker 5: Like we'll look back on this and we'll say it
Speaker 5: was the Golden Age.
Speaker 1: And you make a real point of pointing this out,
Speaker 1: which is that it's not a both sides problem. Though
Speaker 1: it's not that every Democrat doesn't lie, right, it's just
Speaker 1: that Republicans have weaponized it in a way that Democrats
Speaker 1: have not. Maybe they will someday, but I mean, do
Speaker 1: you think that's a fair assessment? And say more?
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 5: So Beyond the Big Line begins with a scene of
Speaker 5: me on c Span. This is in twenty twelve, and
Speaker 5: so I'm on c SPAN and it's one of these
Speaker 5: call in shows, call a program called Washington Journal, and
Speaker 5: a guy named Brian from Michigan calls in, and it's
Speaker 5: like and calling in on the Democratic line, Brian from Michigan,
Speaker 5: what's your question for Bill Adair? And so Brian from
Speaker 5: Michigan says, mister Adair, I read in the Nation that
Speaker 5: if you add up your fact checking and also the
Speaker 5: fact checking in the Washington Post, that Republicans lie more.
Speaker 5: Is that true? And so I say, oh, Brian, we
Speaker 5: don't keep score. If we kept score, that would be
Speaker 5: like an umpire who would tell you if the Yankees
Speaker 5: or the Red Sox are out more at home Plate. Well,
Speaker 5: I was lying. We did keep score. We kept score
Speaker 5: by politician. That was one of our innovations at PolitiFact.
Speaker 5: And I knew because I had seen it, that Republican
Speaker 5: politicians got more false and pants on fire ratings from
Speaker 5: PolitiFact than Democrats did. And so I lied to Brian
Speaker 5: from Michigan about lying. And so, reflecting on that, you know,
Speaker 5: I've looked at why I said that. I said it
Speaker 5: because one of the things fec checkers do is try
Speaker 5: to deal with both sides, and we treasure our nonpartisanship
Speaker 5: and we try to not show any favor for either side.
Speaker 5: And so we all duck that question. And so I
Speaker 5: wasn't alone in ducking that question. Glenn Kessler, the Washington
Speaker 5: Book fact checker, also has routinely ducked it. But I
Speaker 5: wrote the book to be honest about that. And yes, Brian,
Speaker 5: Republicans lie more, and so I wrote the book to
Speaker 5: explore the patterns of lying, not just why Republicans lie more,
Speaker 5: but why all politicians lie and what they get out
Speaker 5: of it?
Speaker 1: What do they get out of it?
Speaker 5: It was fascinating, you know, I thought about all the
Speaker 5: time I had spent as a Washington reporter. I'd covered Congress,
Speaker 5: I'd covered the White House, I'd covered a lot of
Speaker 5: state races for governor and attorney general, and I had
Speaker 5: never heard a reporter ask a politician.
Speaker 3: Why do you lie?
Speaker 5: And yet we accept lying as sort of this inevitable
Speaker 5: part of politics, but no one in the media ever
Speaker 5: asks politicians about it, including me, And so I decided
Speaker 5: to do that, And so I just would ask everyone
Speaker 5: I interviewed, whether it was a politician, a political operative,
Speaker 5: why do you lie? Or why do politicians lie? Now
Speaker 5: most denied that they themselves lied, because you know, they're
Speaker 5: all angels, but the answers liars, But the answers were interesting.
Speaker 5: So the common theme overall was ambition. Politicians lie to
Speaker 5: get ahead, and it's a calculation that they believe they're
Speaker 5: going to gain more from a lie than they're going
Speaker 5: to lose. And that's more true today, I believe, than
Speaker 5: it used to be, because partisan media, jerrymandering, the echo
Speaker 5: chamber have all combined to make it more rewarding to lie.
Speaker 5: You're not going to pay a penalty for lying. In
Speaker 5: the old days, a politician would feel shame for lying.
Speaker 5: But now if you're in a Gerrymander district. If you're
Speaker 5: only going on partisan media, you're not going to be
Speaker 5: held accountable, most likely for your lives the other big Wise,
Speaker 5: it sort of varies. It can be because you're lying
Speaker 5: to raise money. You know, there's often you'll lie in
Speaker 5: a fundraising appeal. People lie, they have self defense lies,
Speaker 5: denying some misdeed that they're accused of. So those are
Speaker 5: sort of the basics for that. Then I got into
Speaker 5: why do Republicans lie more? And this was interesting because
Speaker 5: I talked to a lot of Republicans and former Republicans
Speaker 5: who were willing to be candid about this, and a
Speaker 5: lot of them trace this to a turning point in
Speaker 5: the early nineties when Newton Gingrich took over the House,
Speaker 5: that that was a point when the culture changed. Others
Speaker 5: took it a little farther back to Nixon and Roger
Speaker 5: Ayles that that really changed the culture. The culture when hey,
Speaker 5: we need to get ahead. It's okay to lie on
Speaker 5: this one because we need to win this battle. One
Speaker 5: Republican Congressman, Denver Riggleman from Virginia put it to me,
Speaker 5: Republicans see their cause as part of this epic battle
Speaker 5: and in that anything is justified. That really struck a
Speaker 5: chord with me. And then one final thing that really
Speaker 5: empowers the Republicans is conservative media very much not only
Speaker 5: looks the other way when they lie, but echoes their
Speaker 5: lies and often profits from them. We saw this after
Speaker 5: the lies about the twenty twenty election, you know, Fox News,
Speaker 5: because it didn't go along with the big lie about
Speaker 5: the election lost viewers.
Speaker 1: Right, So then they eventually did.
Speaker 5: And recovered their ratings. So lying for Republicans is part
Speaker 5: of the ecosystem.
Speaker 1: So basically they lie because they.
Speaker 5: Can, Yes, And I think that's more true today there
Speaker 5: are fewer journalists that are holding them accountable. Local media
Speaker 5: has been depleted, the national media has also been depleted,
Speaker 5: and so you don't have as many journalists that are
Speaker 5: holding them accountable.
Speaker 1: Yes, And I am so profoundly irritated by where we
Speaker 1: find ourselves as a country. That could have been avoided
Speaker 1: at every turn, had we just had a tiny bit
Speaker 1: of foresight. So I want you now to go from
Speaker 1: mainstream media, which is now a very small piece of
Speaker 1: the pie, to social media, which is now a very
Speaker 1: large piece of the pie, and make it make sense
Speaker 1: when it comes to lying the trajectory where we are
Speaker 1: right now, and also my head is going to explode.
Speaker 3: You bet.
Speaker 5: I've got some ideas that actually some of them come
Speaker 5: from my students. I taught a class at Duke called
Speaker 5: Lying in Politics, and the final assignment was to solve
Speaker 5: the problem. Okay, you've spent a semester hearing about the
Speaker 5: problem lying in politics. Come up with a solution that
Speaker 5: could reduce lying, and several of them involved social media,
Speaker 5: and one of my favorites was this simple. You have
Speaker 5: to think about lying as sort of part of a
Speaker 5: political economy. That politicians lie because it pays off. So
Speaker 5: what do politicians need advertising because they need to reach
Speaker 5: their voters at election time, and so they depend tremendously
Speaker 5: on social media companies and ad networks to reach those voters.
Speaker 5: So what if one of my students said, the ad
Speaker 5: networks and the social media companies charge differential ad rates
Speaker 5: based on the track records that the politicians have with
Speaker 5: fact checkers. Very simply, and she created a scale charge
Speaker 5: more to politicians who have worse records for lying, and
Speaker 5: charge less lower rates for politicians who have good records.
Speaker 5: And there's an incentive to lie less. Now you probably
Speaker 5: also have to bolster political fact checking. You would also
Speaker 5: want more fact checking from conservative media organizations. There is
Speaker 5: some now from organizations like The Dispatch. There needs to
Speaker 5: be more, but that could be done. To me, that's
Speaker 5: a really intriguing idea. And you know, Facebook at one
Speaker 5: time was bold about this, started the third party fact
Speaker 5: checking program on other kinds of posts, not politicians. It
Speaker 5: has exempted politicians from that program. But you know, if
Speaker 5: Facebook got bold, if the ad network companies got bold,
Speaker 5: this could happen.
Speaker 1: Yes, Facebook is going to get bold against lying. It
Speaker 1: has no incentives, all.
Speaker 5: Right, all right, Okay, so that's dreaming, Molly.
Speaker 3: But you know it's like.
Speaker 1: Maybe Republicans will stop lying. I mean, it's a completely
Speaker 1: insane notion. You cannot stop lies with the carrot. You
Speaker 1: have to use a stick. I'm sorry, but go on, yes,
Speaker 1: tell me or other idea.
Speaker 5: All right, Well, here's another carot that works for Republicans
Speaker 5: in other ways. So a very powerful person in the
Speaker 5: Republican Party is Grover Norquist, who runs Americans for Tax Reform.
Speaker 5: So Grover has this way of pressuring Republicans not to
Speaker 5: raise taxes. They calls it the pledge Republican candidates and
Speaker 5: elected officials sign a pledge that they're not going to
Speaker 5: raise taxes, and it's incredibly effective and it's become part
Speaker 5: of the culture of the Republican Party over the years.
Speaker 5: It's been around for thirty years. So imagine if someone
Speaker 5: with Grover's clout took that same approach about lying and
Speaker 5: had a very simple pledge that just said I'm not
Speaker 5: going to lie. You know, there's nothing in the Republican
Speaker 5: Party's conservative doctrine and its foundational beliefs that means it
Speaker 5: has to lie. It could turn around and say, hey,
Speaker 5: we're the Party of honesty, and it could challenge the
Speaker 5: Democrats and say, you guys are a bunch of liars.
Speaker 5: It could transform itself on this issue. There's really nothing
Speaker 5: that means that the Republican Party has to be the
Speaker 5: lying party that it is today. And I'd like to
Speaker 5: challenge the Republican Party on that because it really has
Speaker 5: nothing to do with the party's beliefs.
Speaker 1: Okay, hot take. The Republican Party is not lying as
Speaker 1: much as they probably should if they want to win
Speaker 1: this election. So let's play a game here. We know
Speaker 1: that Republicans want to ban abortion, at the federal level.
Speaker 1: We know this to be true. Okay, maybe some Republicans
Speaker 1: say they don't. Maybe Trump in his head right now
Speaker 1: doesn't want to. But we've seen that there's a lot
Speaker 1: of machinations behind the scenes, including two of the Republican
Speaker 1: Supreme Court justices Thomas and Alito, both of whom have
Speaker 1: expressed a sort of willingness to ban methapristone using the
Speaker 1: Comstock Act. So we know that this is happening behind
Speaker 1: the scenes, whether or not Trump is conscious of it. Again,
Speaker 1: like can't read his mind. This is a loser for Republicans.
Speaker 1: Would be smarter for them just to lie. But as
Speaker 1: we saw in Georgia yesterday where they've re enacted the
Speaker 1: six week ban, they cannot lie about this for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: maybe because the base is so religious, maybe because this
Speaker 1: is impossible to know, So talk to us about that,
Speaker 1: because that's something where they'd be incentivized for lying, and
Speaker 1: they're not well not lying in the zeal that you
Speaker 1: could see them possibly. I mean, I've seen Republicans live
Speaker 1: stuff in a much more brazen way, right.
Speaker 5: Right, Or are they lying when they say they want
Speaker 5: to allow states to make individual decisions to get back
Speaker 5: to your original point. So you know, as a journalist,
Speaker 5: I'm skeptical every time I hear that, So that argues
Speaker 5: against my optimism to be candid that because if indeed
Speaker 5: you're right that they have a broader goal of outlawing
Speaker 5: it on a national level, then we can't believe what
Speaker 5: they're saying. And this gets to one of the challenges
Speaker 5: that fact checker's a friend was pointing out the other day,
Speaker 5: which is, if you're fact checking a Democratic claim about
Speaker 5: Trump and somebody says, well, Trump wants to do this
Speaker 5: on abortion, and the fact checkers say, well, he says
Speaker 5: now that he doesn't want to do that, therefore half true.
Speaker 5: And my friend pointed out, how can you believe this guy,
Speaker 5: Donald Trump is the greatest liar in the history of
Speaker 5: American politics, probably in the history of politics all over
Speaker 5: the world world, And so how can you do affect
Speaker 5: check based on anything he says? Any of those prospective
Speaker 5: fact checks are really tough. And this has always been
Speaker 5: a challenge for political fact checkers because what we've done
Speaker 5: is said, well, one party will say, well, the other
Speaker 5: party wants to do this thing, and so the fact
Speaker 5: checkers will say, well, here's what that party has actually said.
Speaker 5: But in the case of Trump, can you believe anything
Speaker 5: he says? I have a hard time believing it.
Speaker 1: So interesting. Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 5: Thank you for having me, Molly. This has been great.
Speaker 2: No moment second, Jesse Cannon, Molli Jung Fast. We were
Speaker 2: talking about Elon's terrible pack before, but a lot of
Speaker 2: people have been really really jaw dropped at this being
Speaker 2: one of the most gross things that's happened in this
Speaker 2: election cycle.
Speaker 3: What are you seeing here?
Speaker 1: Elon has this plan and he's going to target the
Speaker 1: pro Israel voters and the pro Palestine voters by making
Speaker 1: Harris look bad so to the Muslim population. He's running
Speaker 1: an ad that portrays Harris as a fast friend of
Speaker 1: Israel whose beliefs are tied to her Jewish husband. In
Speaker 1: the Jewish parts or the pro Israel parts, He's running
Speaker 1: an AD that shows her as pro Palestinian. Look, this
Speaker 1: is so unsurprising, and it is trying to divide choose,
Speaker 1: trying to divide people who are pro Palestine and trying
Speaker 1: to somehow serve Trump. And we all know that Trump
Speaker 1: will be worse on both Palestine and Israel. But of
Speaker 1: course He is fast friends with Natan Yahoo and n
Speaker 1: Yaho would love to see him reelected. That's it for
Speaker 1: this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday,
Speaker 1: Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics
Speaker 1: make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast,
Speaker 1: please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.