We’re getting closer and closer to the election. And a lot of weird stuff has been happening. Our guest this week points out that Trump has been going “all in” for the “weird vote,” by choosing JD Vance as his running mate and elevating figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Dave Weigel covers politics and writes the “Americana” newsletter for Semafor. He’s written about how the Trump-Vance coalition has aimed to cobble together contrarians, dissidents, conspiracy theorists and people who are distrustful of the so-called establishment into a majority coalition. Weigel joins WITHpod to discuss paranoid-esque low trust thinking at the core of the Republican Party base, Trump elevating figures from niche anti-establishment circles and what this all means in such a contentious election.
Chris’ latest book, “The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” is now available for preorder. Read about it and preorder by visiting sirenscallbook.com.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes, MSNBC Host: Hey, WITHpod listeners. Before we get into today’s episode, I wanted to let you know about something that I’m extremely excited to share. If you’re a listener to the podcast, or even if not, maybe if you watched the show, you may have noticed that I have made mention a number of times of a book I’m working on. I’ve been working on this book for about three years, thinking about it, researching and writing. And that book is now available out in the world for pre-order. It’s almost here. It’s going to come out in January 2025, but you could already order it.
The book is called, “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.” You could pre-order it from the website, thesirenscall, one word, .com, thesirenscall.com.
It’s a book about how attention became the world’s most important and endangered resource, how its extraction often against our will leaves us feeling alienated and exploited, how it warps public discourse and even the most precious, intimate moments of our inner life.
I think it’s a really central question of our age. I’ve worked really hard to try to create a framework for thinking about and understanding it that will be generative, that will inspire other people to have their own reactions and critiques. And I’d love to hear what you think of it.
If you pre-order the book at thesirenscall.com, you can gain access to a special early conversation between me and Andrew Marantz, the brilliant New Yorker writer. And I promise you’ll probably be hearing a little bit more about the book as we approach its publication date in January.
Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. We are getting close to election, and something had happened in the last few weeks that was a weird development that got attention, but I don’t think we quite reckoned with how weird it was, is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was running ostensibly an independent bid for president dropped out of the race and endorsed Donald Trump.
And the reason I think that’s weird is that, for one, the reason this usually doesn’t happen is that if someone’s running in a race this late, it’s because they have actual ideological differences with the other two candidates and aren’t willing to just trade that for a mutual endorsement or a promise of something.
I mean, if you’re undertaking something as quixotic as an independent run for president, you have some set of true beliefs that you want to get out there and, you know, consequences be damned. So, from Kennedy’s perspective, it was weird, but it was really weird from trust perspective.
The reason that I don’t think this usually happens is that even though politics is about addition and inviting people to your coalition, when you actually do a joint event with someone, you then onboard responsibility for their views and RFK Jr. has a bunch of bad and odd views, including spreading one of the most dangerous lies of our time, which is that vaccines cause autism, that the COVID vaccine was unsafe, that other various vaccines were unsafe and not effective, that has resulted in an incalculable number of deaths and illness and misery.
And yet, for Trump, it made perfect sense, because as the very, very astute political reporter Dave Weigel pointed out in a piece for Semafor, the theory of the case for the Trump-Vance coalition is basically to cobble together contrarians, dissidents, people with weird views, conspiracy theorists, people that are distrustful of the so-called establishment into a majority coalition.
And so, RFK was a key slice of that coalition. You see it in the podcast he goes on. You see it in the kinds of people that he wants to be around. You see it in this sort of way that the online low-trust, anti-vax, anti-COVID restriction, 9/11 was an inside job.
Ideological tendency has coalesced around Donald Trump, but I think this is actually one of the most interesting dynamics and developments in both politics in the last eight years, nine years in the Trump era, but also a really important dynamic for this campaign, what you might call the kind of like the island of misfit toys theory of electoral dominance that is essentially the explicit Trump-Vance campaign.
And so, I wanted to talk about it with Dave Weigel, who covers politics for Semafor. I think he’s one of the great campaign and political reporters we have, and that’s been true for a very long time. I’ve been reading him now for decades and he is just absolutely unmissable. So, Dave Weigel, welcome to the program.
Dave Weigel: Oh, it’s so good to be here. Thank you for saying that. I think I first was reading you when you’re writing about the NAFTA Superhighway —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Dave Weigel: — in The Nation, which is very easy, if that was still in the ether to imagine Republicans now talking about as a going problem.
Chris Hayes: Well, that’s a great place to start because I wrote about the NAFTA Superhighway, which was this invented conspiracy theory, that was partly the work of the John Birch Society and the publication that they used to put out and they may still put it out.
It became this kind of right-wing conspiracy theory. And I think like 2007 that there was going to be this enormous four-football-wide highway that stretches all the way from Mexico to Canada and run through the core of the country and tear up all this farmland.
And it became this thing that Republican politicians got asked about. But it was an early premonition of this version of kind of, you know, paranoid-style plus low-trust thinking that I think has become kind of the dominant core of the Republican Party base.
Dave Weigel: Yes. I think the conditions for this got better over time and they’re still getting better probably. We have both been in the old-school media our whole careers, but the dream of conservatives for a very long time, I think since Nixon and the Powell Memo in the ‘70s, Nixon ‘68 campaign and Roger Ailes having town halls for him, was making the media irrelevant and creating your own programming —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: — your own networks, your own trust circles almost. And that’s been very successful. Trump did some of that, but he also inherited a lot of that. Would the media environment of 1980 been as good for Trump as the media environment in 2016? Probably not. The 2024 environment where just local media has collapsed, where you’re going to small towns and now, there is in Springfield, Ohio a newspaper that’s able to do some reporting, but is it as robust as it was 10 years ago? It’s not.
And so, that’s, I see, as the meta theme running through everything. And I’m not being smug in saying, well, there used to be monopoly on truth and everyone agreed on it, and it turns out that, you know, John Galbraith was right about everything, I’m not saying that, just people who consume media stopped caring about the difference between an article that had been reported and the person got time to respond, it held up when the lawyers read over it to just a guy on a screen telling them something that might be fake.
And that is just much more prevalent than it used to be. And not that every podcast is running fake stuff, but if you look at some of the stories that the Trump campaign’s been gliding on this cycle or even the bet J.D. Vance is making with the Springfield story or the RFK phenomenon. This is somebody who, when he had a network interview, he usually didn’t go that great, he was not stupid, but he would get factchecked on something he said. He had a habit of forgetting that he said some very definitive quote and then having read back to him.
On a podcast, they just riffed for two hours and he seemed like a fun guy to hang out with. And so, that has been helping the Trump just in ways that Republicans have dreamed of for decades, like I was saying at the top. And I just covered the campaign in that context, there’s just going to be Trump content or right-wing content going out over channels that it does not matter if they’re factchecked or even litigated. It just doesn’t. And look at the aftermath of 2020.
Chris Hayes: It’s funny you said that because I think you’re viewing this primarily as a story about the media environment and information environment, which I think is true. But to me, there’s two things going on. There’s the media information environment and then there’s a kind of realignment coalitionally around —
Dave Weigel: Right.
Chris Hayes: — high trust, low trust. So the way that I think of it and the reason I wanted to talk to you, because I thought this piece that you wrote about the kind of “Coalition of the Weird” was so interesting was you and I are roughly the same age, roughly the same cohort. You know, people that I would say were the kinds of folks who talked about vaccine is a conspiracy by big pharma, they would show you the like Illuminati symbol on the dollar bill and, you know, 9/11 was an inside job.
Those people, when I was 22, were left-coded, they ran around left-wing circles, they would be at anti-war protests. Now, those folks are really right-coded, and not just right-coded, like Trump people.
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: This realignment is really interesting to me because it seems to me a key part of understanding this sort of interesting dynamic of kind of weird versus normal and how that’s ideologically coded, but what do you think?
Dave Weigel: Yeah. And I didn’t want to make it sound like I was just saying it’s a media phenomenon. I’m just saying, this wouldn’t have been possible without the way that —
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Dave Weigel: — media has been restructured. But you’ve got the order of things, right, which is that a lot of people who had a lack of trust in the media just checked out completely. And so, where would you have gone 20 years ago, get what you get on Facebook or next door or just an X account right now that has bought a blue check and is giving you spam? You would’ve had to search a little harder, and now, it’s everywhere.
But, yes, the trust in government, this is a thing that, again, the Republican Party had spent a very long time, is generally good if you are at the Conservative Party for people to believe that the government is not very good at managing things, military, sure, police, law enforcement, yes.
But if people think the government’s so incompetent and it’s always lying to you, that you shouldn’t trust it, well, that’s generally good. You’re going to have the coin flip and land on Republicans more often than not if the electorate thinks that.
The specific sorts of beliefs out there that have now been mostly moved over into Trump world, especially with the Kennedy decision, yes, I was covering 2008 (inaudible). The fact that there were any 9/11 truthers at all in the Republican firmament was blamed on Ron Paul. It was Ron Paul is crazy, he’s not part of our movement.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: He needs to be kicked out of the party. Why are these people following him? If you were paying attention at the time, there was a little more diversity where the 9/11 truths guys were going.
The pandemic supercharged this, but not to the extent where I think the people in these media spaces think it was going to. Kennedy’s a great example. I do think Kennedy, who’s not stupid, did think there was a realignment possible, that so many people —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: — like him who used to be progressive would realize that the government was trying to censor some accounts, and that should have opened your eyes and said that, we cannot trust a leviathan state. We need to go in there and disrupt corporate capture. He’s saying lots of things that I could have imagined hearing on a college campus or —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: — at a sort of left-wing event in 2008, 2009. But he’s saying that you need a basically conservative disruptor to do it. He’s given up the idea that a progressive party is going to get in there and end corporate capture. I’m not sure how effective he’s going to be for Trump in general, but he is certainly the most credible effective messenger for that idea, which Trump has not backed up. He’s not asking for much proof from Trump and neither of these voters.
If you are an anti-government, anti-establishment podcaster, it should maybe seem a little strange that a guy who spent four years as president and didn’t do a bunch of stuff he’s promising will get elected and do that stuff.
I mean, another story I wrote a couple weeks before this one was about, you know, Trump saying, he’s going to release the JFK files, which he had four years to do and didn’t, that he was going to free Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road. He had four years to do and didn’t. He then made a lot of promises that were specifically to anti-government, anti-establishment constituencies, and he didn’t do them as president. And where I realized, a little bit obvious that the monomyth around Trump this time is, well, he’s unencumbered by the deep state. He saw how bad they were the first time. They have tried to stop him by any means necessary, and his legal problems and people trying to kill him from time to time, that’s folded into this. Therefore this version of Trump, when he comes back, is going to blow up the establishment.
And that is the kind of thinking, you know, you did see more with the sorts of conspiracy theorists who will say something is going to happen and it doesn’t happen and they push their calendar back and say, well, now, it’s going to happen.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: Or vaccines are giving kids autism. Once you take out the thimerosal you’ll see, or okay well, that what didn’t happen, but trust us. There’ll be more research that’s going to happen. Again, I don’t want to seem too smug about it because I don’t know everything.
The other side of the political legend now are among Democrats, people who are, I think, more responsive to events and things changing and then they’ll give up on something if it didn’t happen.
The Trump coalition has absorbed the people who are willing to believe again and again that the destruction of the establishment is around the corner and they trust Trump to do this. This is, I think, a powerful thing that he has going for him. If we were talking about anti-vaxxer 15 years ago, it’d be, you know, moms in Marin County, California.
He’s made a little bit less of that transition. It’s more younger voters who never had a strong relationship with the media or trust in the mainstream media, who get their news from other sources. And, yeah, the fact that, you know, everyone who got the COVID vaccine was supposed to die two years ago and didn’t doesn’t matter that much because you feel like you don’t —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: If you start —
Chris Hayes: You’ve moved on.
Dave Weigel: — trusting the media then you’re going to be misled like all the sheep who trust the media. You have to keep readjusting your priors because maybe one day this thing’s going to happen.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I just want to make one clarifying point, not that you misstated this at all, but when you said that, you know, he saw how bad the deep state was and they did everything they could and they even tried to kill him. That is the very common view of this certain kind of sort of conspiracy prone members of the base. It’s even a thing that J.D. Vance has said, Trump himself has alluded to, but you’re not saying nor is it true that the quote, “deep state” tried to kill Trump, these were two disturbed individuals, but it has been wrapped into the narrative that that’s all of a piece with what a threat he poses to the, quote, “establishment”.
Dave Weigel: Yes. The monomyth around Trump is that, if he is in trouble, it is because They, capital T, are out to get him. And whatever —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: — he’s accused of is because They, capital T, are out to get him, whether it’s a picture of him and Jeffrey Epstein or whether it is a guy outside Mar-a-Lago in the bushes being nabbed by the Secret Service.
And again, in these media spaces, if you make a claim and it doesn’t get backed up, doesn’t really matter. Like if it’s in the service of this story about Trump as a figure who, capital T, They want to take out, that makes sense to people. You don’t need to dig that much deeper. Not to me perhaps, but to the point we’re talking about.
Chris Hayes: Right. And this, I think, gets at this point of, Hannah Arendt said this about the sort of gullibility of the kind of totalitarian mindset. But just this sort of weird combination of ultimate cynicism and ultimate gullibility, right?
So, like, you get into these trust relationships, and I think this really speaks to this part of the coalition we’re talking about. The They, the capital T, They, is everyone. It’s Pfizer, the CIA, the Democrats, the professors, the woke mob, blah-blah-blah. They’re all lying to you. But what it then means is that you become incredibly credulous —
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — about the other sources, which is some random person on a podcast said or some verified X account or Elon Musk or Donald Trump.
Dave Weigel: Yes. And Musk, I don’t know if it’s possible to underrate him because he’s pretty well-rated, but having a very wealthy person, wealthiest person in the world, boost things he sees on the internet, has been really enlightening.
There is a gullibility, Bill Ackman does some of this too, by people who are not stupid. They’re very influential, but they are willing to believe that there are massive conspiracies that are being knocked down all the time by people with intelligence that they don’t want you to see. Actually, whenever I say They, at this point, assume it’s the capital T, with like a dose of sarcasm.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: But, yes, and that is potent, that is Musk saying that he’s going to support Trump and help him, for example, be on a committee that will cut government spending. If you are a New York Times reading news consumer who remembers the supercommittee, you might say, well, all right, a blue-ribbon commission led by Elon Musk, that wouldn’t do anything. We have a record of this. If you believe that Elon Musk is a powerful, free speech fighter who will elevate the things that the media doesn’t want to hear about and that the government is afraid of him, oh, then sure, then you trust this.
And so, you don’t trust the institutions, you don’t trust the people who work for the federal government, the media, et cetera. Your trust got freed if it existed. And I had met voters like this who had a little more assumption that the government was working for them and got very angry over lockdowns during COVID.
But there’s also been this retconning that helps Trump, and I think Kennedy helped a little bit. I was going to some Trump speeches in 2020 for a story, and very common refrain in Donald Trump’s reelection speech in the 2020 was that he was working on a vaccine, and if he got elected, the vaccine would be distributed within weeks, and if Biden got elected, he would slow the vaccine and not approve it. All right, well, that’s been kind of memory hold because it’s inconvenient. It’s possible —
Chris Hayes: You’re right.
Dave Weigel: — for no matter how skeptical you are, people do have this ability to sluice out the information they don’t want and stick with the information that makes the universe make sense to them, and that the bad guys that they assumed were bad guys five years ago remain bad guys.
Chris Hayes: It’s funny, too, because, I mean, obviously, you know, when you’re talking about presidential politics, you’re necessarily talking about the largest election that happens in a huge country, which means that each coalition is extremely capacious and contains multitudes of folks that disagree with each other, right, tens of millions of people.
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But to oversimplify what I think has been interesting about the Tim Walz, they’re weird, and then —
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — the kind of counterresponse of, “Well, we’re going to get RFK Jr.’s endorsement and go on a bunch of Bitcoin podcasts is this kind of political valance of normie versus weird shifting.
You know, my youth, it was like normie, the suburban mom, you know, the soccer mom was the kind of like bedrock suburban Republican voter, small C, conservative. And the weirdos were, you know, the way that the Republicans would talk about the protestors, the Iraq war protestors and the protestors outside, you know, the RNC.
And now, you’ve got this, I think a little bit of the switch of the kind of political valance of normie versus weirdo where this sort of very intentional attempt to capture normalness by their Democratic ticket and a kind of embrace of weirdness by the Republican ticket.
Dave Weigel: Yeah. And there is a heuristic for this too, which is that, no matter how many things Donald Trump talks about that sound weird to you, either the media’s misrepresenting them, or they don’t matter, the media’s focusing on that because they want you to be divided and they don’t want you to notice the good things he did. And this has boiled down into a bumper sticker phrase, I’d take a mean tweet and $2 gas.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: It is, Trump will bring up stuff that makes people pissed off, but he’s effective at the job, and that’s been pretty powerful. I think that’s a reason why he’s more popular this election than he was in 2020 or 2016.
Part of that is the usual mental entropy, the nostalgia you have for the good things, then you’re forgetting the bad things. Part of it is that, it’s just drilled into people’s minds that, “Yeah, well, he rambles about something, that it’s in the service of being an effective president.” The media wants to focus on that because they don’t want to admit the other thing.
Chris Hayes: I want to say something about that bumper sticker because I think it actually captures something really important. “I would take mean tweets and $2 gas.” What’s amazing about that is the $2 gas.
Dave Weigel: Right.
Chris Hayes: That is, to me, the $2 gas as a reason Donald Trump is great is the perfect encapsulation of the remarkable retconning that’s happened around 2020. Gas fell under $2 because the entire global economy shut down and we were in a once in a century pandemic that killed millions of Americans.
The idea that the takeaway of that was, gas was cheap under Donald Trump is so insane. Gas was cheap because no one was using gas to drive anywhere —
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — because we were hold up fleeing the plague. And it’s an amazing bit of jujitsu to turn that around and brag about $2 gas, but they have successfully done it. There is this thing in the memory which is all the bad stuff of COVID was not Donald Trump’s fault. All the good stuff, which is, you know, some of the checks that went out, $2 gas, things were really cheap in 2020, because of what was going on. There was, like, you could buy a lot of stuff, you just couldn’t go anywhere.
All of that somehow is like Donald Trump’s credit and none of the COVID stuff is his fault. And I think that is the key to understanding. This retconning is the key to understanding why you’re right, he is more popular now than 2020.
Dave Weigel: Yeah. And the normalcy message from Democrats is very recognizable. It’s 1984 Reagan, it’s 1996 Bill Clinton.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: It’s 2012 Barack Obama, it’s, to an extent, Bush 2004, things were bad and we came together and got past it and a couple things were tougher, but we’re going to get through it. That is the overall Democratic message.
But there is a more robust population of voters who hear that and say, well, no, you relied to, and actually, we could have that cheap gas because Donald Trump said, if we drilled more, we could get it back down in $2, leave aside why that didn’t happen when he was president.
You’ve seen also, there’s just generally more attention paid to, and this has always been true, the new negative story than the follow-up or the end, which might be a happy ending. And the simplest way of describing this is the egg prices.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: You hear a lot about how egg prices have surged since Trump was president. There was a point when they were surging because of an avian flu that knocked out a lot of the supply of birds. Eggs were more expensive. There was a reason for it that was reported in the media.
But it was easy to find people who were saying the reason these egg prices are going up is there are these fires at these factories that I saw a video of. Why are the fires in the factories? Well, here’s a speech from Klaus Schwab at Davos and here’s a speech from an elitist globalist who says that people should eat less meat. Therefore I bet the eggs are going up because the globalists want egg prices to be higher.
Cut to now, they’re cheaper again because more chickens, the circle of life is complete. More chickens are born and they laid more eggs. And people have not gone back and said, well, in my Facebook post of September 2021, I was incorrect. That’s not how it works.
And you have the Republican Party led by somebody who engages in that, is very happy to embrace something. It turns out it’s fake or it doesn’t happen anymore. And it is left on the cutting room floor, it doesn’t matter.
That’s the stuff where I do see people who don’t trust the media. The most compelling reason I ever hear for not trusting the media is they sensationalize things. And I’ll say, well, that can be true, it’s absolutely true. If it bleeds, it leads. There’s not a leading a block
tonight. More babies were born today and they’re —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: — beautiful. Why then do people who dropped out the media often choose these accounts that are saying, global catastrophe, imminent.
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Dave Weigel: Sell your positions, buy gold, buy survival seeds. Like, that seems pretty sensational. I feel the warm aura of a news broadcast is actually kind of nice compared to a guy on TikTok pointing at a fire and saying, this was started by the globalists.
Chris Hayes: But that’s —
Dave Weigel: I don’t know why that is except for deep psychological reasons that people want simple answers, but they have been freaking themselves out more than probably necessary.
Chris Hayes: Well, I mean, I have a theory for that, that’s developed in, at length, in my forthcoming book, “The Sirens’ Call,” which is about attention and the attention age, which is that attention markets have gotten way more competitive than they were.
And when you’re competing for attention, the sort of sensationalistic and particularly the kind of like catastrophically negative has a kind of biological advantage that’s similar to the biological advantage of sugar and fat in foods.
And so, at some deep level, you know, that sensationalism is born of an attention market that is more competitive where that stuff rises to the top. And you’re totally right, like, this sort of negativity bias, which has always been true of the news, right, if it bleeds, it leads. The slogan we have is, “We don’t cover the planes that lands,” that’s my favorite one, right, because it’s true.
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like —
Dave Weigel: I like that one, yeah.
Chris Hayes: You know, it is true that it’s a miracle. Every plane that lands is a miracle. Modern aviation safety is a miracle. We don’t cover it, right? That negativity bias, which is already present in the news has been wildly, I think, exacerbated by the social media era and the more intense attentional competition.
And so that point is such an important one, like the eggs, there’s a million examples of this. Remember the great supply chain crunch that was going to cancel Christmas.
Remember the baby formula shortage, right? There are all these things that were genuine issues. You know, when gas spiked, when gas was over $4 or $5 a gallon, but then they go away and then it’s like, where did we end up on that?
I just saw a thing today about the fact that like fentanyl overdoses have gone down considerably this year. Now, again, that’s reported by NPR. It’s a story reported by the mainstream media, but it really is the case that I do think this negativity bias in the attentional marketplace is eating people’s brains a bit, particularly the kinds of folks who tend to not trust the, quote, unquote, “mainstream media”.
Dave Weigel: Yeah, absolutely, and people will backfill in. Generally, people do not like to be wrong or be embarrassed. And so, people will fall for something and then try to backfill and say, well, actually, it wasn’t that bad. I heard a rumor that this is true.
Not to be too generic about this, the Springfield, Ohio case is a great example, and it’s a really good test of this when it’s all over, because there was reporting in Springfield, Ohio that was not explosive and not sensational.
“The New York Times” was there a week before J.D. Vance said anything about it with a story about Haitians integrating into the community in Springfield, Ohio and the difficulties there, including a Haitian migrant who killed a kid in a van collision with a bus.
A1 in “The New York Times” is if you work in media, not many stories are on A1 of “The New York Times.” The premise that Vance had when he started elevating this, what he said were reports of Haitian migrants eating people’s pets was that you need to be intense, you need to create stories, as he put to CNN, to get the media to focus on this.
And I, as somebody who was just kind of going back and saying, well, the media was, it wasn’t leading.
Chris Hayes: Yes, it was A1, yeah.
Dave Weigel: But in order to get it to lead network broadcasts, you need to find something crazy and offensive and get people talking about it. That’s a very good understanding of how the media works.
If it’s not necessarily a good answer, if you’re the kind of person who says, I don’t trust the sensationalist media, well, —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: — the media was not very sensationalist. It was the Republican candidate who was sensationalist. And half of the Republican Party is remanding him in Ohio saying, please stop saying that. We have a problem we can deal with in terms of how many people have moved into this city, but you are making stuff up and it’s hurting us. But the premise is, yes, well, people started paying attention once I invoke this nightmare scenario. It could happen to you. It could happen to your neighbors.
The Trump campaign generally does a lot of this. And because I think of these changed incentives, changed trust structures, just it does stuff that I think would’ve gotten a backlash 10 years ago and it doesn’t anymore.
I’m obsessed with these memes they’ll share on usually, I think, X, but I might not be on enough, social network, you see it everywhere. One is a photo of a nice suburb and then a photo of just a dilapidated, it looks like a bunch of people are waiting in an airport or outside begging for money.
And it says, you know, this is what’s going to happen to your suburb if Kamala Harris wins, or the Aurora, Colorado story where there are Venezuelan gang members terrorizing people in a block in a suburb of Denver. It was, here’s a picture of MS-13 members. Meet your new building managers if Kamala Harris wins.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: And I think that that is intensifying fear about something that’s pretty explainable, that the media ironically is there trying to explain. But if your impulse is, the media’s covering up for something then you’re going to trust the threatening, scary, your life could be in danger version. It is a strange choice people have made to be way more terrified than they need to.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, we should also note the racial subtexts or texts here is that —
Dave Weigel: That too. I’m not trying to be —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: — blow past it, but, yeah.
Chris Hayes: No, no. If people are listening to this and they haven’t seen the memes, there are deeply racist images of like a bunch of basically desperate Black people, it’s usually migrants who are in some lot and they’re, you know, in sort of like clothing that they’ve had on for a while and it just looks like sort of retched of the earth kind of images. And it’s like, that’s going to be your suburb in Kamala Harris or the MS-13 Latino guys with the face tattoos.
I mean, there are always these very like, you know, sort of starkly racist images, which, again, I do think, you’re right, would have gotten more blowback, you know, partly because I think that gatekeeper effect is basically gone.
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I think that the sort of conception of shame has totally altered. And it’s funny because at the very beginning of this conversation, you mentioned Ron Paul.
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Ron Paul, for those who don’t know, is a Texas congressman who was a real libertarian ideologue and a bit of a crank, and he attracted this kind of cross-ideological coalition. He was kind of on the outset Republican Party. But he very much, I think, ended up winning that factional battle. I think we kind of almost live in his party now in certain ways.
And what’s interesting to me is that one of the big things that came out about Ron Paul is that he was, you know, circulating this newsletter. He published this newsletter that had, like, you know, racist stuff in it.
And the stuff that was in it, that was actually genuinely a scandal that he had to kind of distance himself from, it did dog him. It was a real problem for Ron Paul, you know, as kind of iconic, clastic and heterodox as he was, like, yeah, you did publish, like, textbook White supremacists, like, race science in your newsletters.
That stuff is like not different than like the memes the Trump campaign now officially shares. Like the level of what will sort of pass in the mainstream discourse, I think, is just really changed.
Dave Weigel: Yeah, and that’s where it gets to the electoral goal of all this. And when Paul was publishing that stuff, I should say, because part of the story I was writing at the time was who was ghosting it, there was a theory on the American right that there, you could turn the White working-class into a Republican constituency and Republicans were too wimpy and afraid to do it, but you need —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: — to be very stark about the threat of mass immigration, very stark about the country changing faster than anyone could handle. And there was caution about that as represented by Ron Paul doing it, but not other Republicans. It’s the Murray Rothbard’s theory, Pat Buchanan’s theory of politics. Buchanan, who, Vance has said, he read “Death of the West” when he was a kid.
I’m not a, let’s censor this book because it has controversial ideas. I try to read the most controversial things I can, very widely know what people were talking about. But that’s been the change, is that you now have a Republican Party that was very nervous about alienating people with Pat Buchanan as I’m looking at the electorate and saying, well, with these politics, you’re getting 70% of the White working-class vote in the Rust Belt, you’re getting maybe 60%, you’re getting 80% in Southern states.
The more you make some working-class voters vote like they do in Alabama and South Carolina, White working-class voters, the more electoral power you have. That’s not been wrong.
Chris Hayes: No.
Dave Weigel: And so, that’s not to get too far away from the believing in faith (ph). The 1965 Immigration Act was real. It happened.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: And immigration increased after that. But in the ‘90s, it was, you know, Peter Brimelow and Pat Buchanan saying, and it was bad and we should stop this. And now, it is mostly the Republican Party, Donald Trump, saying we need mass deportation to slow down the rapid change happening in the country. That is what changed. And that news is not fake. You can look at the immigration numbers. You can look at the ways —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: — that there are levers that Joe Biden has turned, for example, protections for Haitians, that, yes, indeed, Donald Trump can get elected and turn them off.
Chris Hayes: Oh, totally, yeah. I mean, we did a WITHpod, one of the first WITHpod, I think the first WITHpod. I think we were doing this special series called, 2024, the stakes about comparing the presidential records of Biden and Trump because we had two people who both been president.
And like, you know, Joe Biden turned the levers up on legal immigration. He granted more temporary protective status.
Dave Weigel: More refugees.
Chris Hayes: There’s many more refugees. Like there is a clearer policy difference of, you know, whether we want people coming or not.
You bring up immigration, which I think is a great segue to this sort of other thing I’m sort of obsessed with. So, there’s this sort of like, I don’t trust the media kind of coalition of the skeptic weird, you know, podcast people.
And there’s this like weird kind of counter establishment of it, of, it’s like, you know, it’s Musk and it’s Bitcoin and it’s anti-vaxxers. But it’s very adjacent to really anti-immigrant and anti-immigration stuff.
And one of the things that’s really striking to me about the Trump-Vance campaign is not just the centrality of immigration, but almost it as the monocausal theory of everything. And what it reminds me of is, I spent a lot of time in the aughts reporting on sort of the anti-immigration folks.
And one of the things that was striking about them is they had a kind of monomania about immigration. So, across the political spectrum, they’d be like, what’s your issue? You’d be like the environment. They’d be like, here are why immigration is the problem for the environment.
If you were like, crime, right, so, like, environment is kind of left-coded, crime is sort of right-coded, but if you said crime, they’d say, well, here’s why immigrants are bad for crime. Everything came back to immigration, Social Security and Medicare, taxes, traffic.
And at a certain point, you’d be like, there’s something else going on here with your monomania that you think every single problem comes back to immigration. Like I don’t quite buy that every problem is being caused by immigration.
But I was reminded of that monomania when I watched Trump in the debate. I mean, it really is like, how do we get prices down? Whatever the question is, it’s immigration. The answer is immigration. It’s build the wall. Deport people is the or answer It’s literally, to me, it is the kind of central ordering policy principle for them in the whole campaign.
Dave Weigel: Yes, especially when it comes to a question they get a lot, they, being, in this case, Trump and Harris, get a lot, is, how will you lower prices?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: The answer that Vance and Trump give is, well, you deport people, you reduce demand, you have more houses that can be opened up for heritage Americans and natural born citizens to buy, and that lowers the prices.
And not much interrogation of the, what would happen if people who are currently very low wage, below legal wage workers stop picking crops. They feel like that is a distraction, that is what the Cato Institute, MSM, all these well-funded thinktanks that have been lying to us but, in fact, this —
Chris Hayes: That you can’t trust. Yeah, exactly.
Dave Weigel: You can’t trust them.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.
Dave Weigel: And there is a war of anecdote data. The data says, well, actually, America are committing fewer crimes. There are less drug addiction. Yes, but the anecdote is, look at this migrant who, if he was not here, would not have committed this crime.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: Well, that’s hard to argue with. And that’s another thing that a lot of Republicans did not want to do before. Trump really elevated, Trump with elevating angel moms, as he called them, he didn’t coin it, but then he mainstreamed it, saying that there are people whose relatives were killed by migrants, and if they were not here then by extension, Joe Biden has blood in his hands because he let them here before that Barack Obama had blood on his hands.
Again, very right-wing idea, that was really in its own field in the ‘90s that Republicans would’ve been afraid to talk about. They’re just not afraid to talk about it anymore. Yes, you can take your data about the effects of immigration, but look at this, and can you deny that if the butterfly effect, if —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Dave Weigel: — this guy had not gotten into the country, this kid might be alive. Well, you can’t. Like finding an emotional argument to overwhelm the data that might say, actually, the country’s doing pretty good and we were able to incorporate a lot of these immigrants, that’s pretty potent, and Trump keeps using it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And I think it’s interesting too about, you know, the angel moms. This goes back to the kind of, like, weird gullibility of, like, Trump’s —
Dave Weigel: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — responsible for nothing. It’s like, it’s Joe Biden’s fault or Barack Obama or who is in between them, oh, right, Donald Trump. And, like, did that same thing happen when Donald Trump was president? Yes, in fact, he would talk about it. It’s like —
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — well, but you’re president now. So —
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you know, like, the idea is always, like, your ideas can only be failed, they can never fail. You know, and that’s why I think it’s both so cynical and sort of effective on the people, it’s effective, which is the problem can never be solved, you know what I mean, at some level, like —
Dave Weigel: Yeah. I mean, there was an idea for a long time on the right that Democrats didn’t want to pass an immigration bill. They wanted the issue to run on because they thought it would motivate more Hispanic voters to vote for Democrats. And I say, I think, confidently that is flipped whereas this —
Chris Hayes: Yes, totally —
Dave Weigel: — very literal example of there being a Republican bill that does a lot of things that the immigration left, all told, does not like, and Democrats are ready to support for it, sorry, to vote for it. Kamala Harris is running on it. She said she would sign a border bill with no past citizenship, and Trump is against it because he wants to run on it. That’s flipped.
And a lot of this stuff, I should say, like, because there are a lot of non-White voters who voted in more greater numbers for Trump last time despite him saying that. I mean, that’s why a lot of this space opened up.
Chris Hayes: Oh, absolutely.
Dave Weigel: And going back to what you were saying about Kennedy and all the trust in media, yeah, I’m very into the idea of the shut up and let me grill voter who just doesn’t want to pay that much attention to politics. And yeah, they can put up with a lot of rhetoric that seems loopy to them or, oh, RFK Jr. is going to be appointing NIH, whatever that is, as long as the economy’s a little bit better.
And that definitely has opened up space Republicans to do an and say some things that I think could be alienating in an old media environment, and they’re just not right now. I mean, the flip side of this is that where people who are not Donald Trump and run on these policies in swing seats generally lose. J.D. Vance is much less popular than Donald Trump. He did not inherit that power.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk about that because that’s the other thing that is such a stark dynamic. You know, Doug Mastriano got his butt kicked in Pennsylvania by Josh Shapiro. You know, pretty extremist guy, was at the Capitol, didn’t storm the Capitol, was at the Capitol in January 6th, you know, pictures of him playing a Confederate soldier, which, again, you’re Pennsylvanian, bro. You know, just an oddball and an extreme right guy.
Kari Lake, odd and not just sort of extreme right, but also the same kind of taunting, I don’t want, you know, McCain people, we want you to leave the coalition, sort of constantly trying to divide everyone in a ways that almost seems self-wounding. Blake Masters, cut one of the creepiest and strangest ads in electoral politics that I’ve ever seen where he goes to a gun range with a gun and a silencer and literally looks like a serial killer in the ad. He lost as well.
Mark Robinson right now is probably the most prominent example is right now, who’s running for governor of North Carolina, who’s the current lieutenant governor, who’s just said all sorts of genuinely vile things. The top for me is that the “Black Panther” movie was a sort of conspiracy by the Jews in Hollywood.
All of these people have had basically the kind of electoral tax you would think, you know? And J.D. Vance, whose numbers are upside down. You know, he’s not popular. What is your theory of why this stuff does seem to bite for other people in a way that it doesn’t bite for Trump?
Dave Weigel: It’s pretty simple. It’s just that Donald Trump has been famous forever. If you’re under 70, I think you’ve been aware of Donald Trump’s celebrity your whole life and he was president so he has that record that we’re referring to before, a very changeable record. If you’re RFK Jr., you’re suddenly convinced that he’s going to do a 180 on his environmental policies and keep chemicals out of the water. But, yeah, he had that president. He had that record.
Incumbent right-wingers are able to do some stuff and get away with it if the economy’s doing pretty well. But for everyone else, yeah, it is still alienating to this Democratic coalition that exists right now that incorporates a lot of independence, which is college educated people, non-White people, a certain number of White working-class voters.
It’s called on the left of the race class narrative. The idea that people in these right-wing spaces are elevating immigration and fringe issues so you get distracted by the economy, that’s still pretty powerful in lots of races because Democrats are generally running on, I’m going to improve your schools. Maybe we’ll raise some taxes to do it. And if Republicans are only famous for talking about more fringe things, they don’t get heard. Yes, it is not a majority of voters, even though it’s a majority of voters who don’t trust the media, don’t trust the government, still not a majority of voters who want to blow up the entire system. They don’t like it when systems are ineffective. They didn’t like some COVID lockdowns that lasted too long. They liked the first months of them, not everybody, but there was not a huge political backlash to the more heavy-handed response to COVID in the first place.
Just, again, I think of the voter who just wants to grill. There is a lot of people put up with that they feel generally like things will be fine for them and their family. They can send their kid to the school. The school will perform well.
Texas is a good example of this because a real weakness in Texas is sort of universal school choice, a Republican policy that ends up alienating a lot of people who vote Republican for other reasons.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: And so, that’s why they lose. I think just Trump has still benefited. I think he’s run almost out of juice on this, but the idea that somebody with his background could not be that right-wing.
Other Republicans who emerged on the scene with no background and are just, I’m a right-wing MAGA candidate. There’s no softness, there’s no idea that they’re going to do anything for your life apart from act on ideological grounds.
And I think for Trump, there is because, yeah, well, he was president and some of my taxes went down. So it’s not all the thing he’s yelling at the rally about.
Chris Hayes: I think this gets to the heart of it.
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: When you look at Mark Robinson and there’s an ad right now playing North Carolina of him saying all these extremist stuff, you’re a 100% convinced, which I think is correct, that he believes this stuff, like, he’s not —
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — saying, like, some people need killing as some savvy message. He thinks some people need killing, right? Like this is a genuine zealot, right? Say whatever he wants.
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You like his zealotry or you don’t. The thing about Trump is that I think everyone realizes he doesn’t believe in anything or that he BSes a lot. And what it allows is for everybody’s got their own decision about what to listen to, what not to. So you can say, like, well, he’s not really going to appoint justices and overturn Roe.
You know, if you’re a business Republican right now, he’s saying he’s going to raise trillions of dollars in tariffs, trillions of dollars of what would be a sales tax on imported goods. And you could tell yourself, if you’re a certain kind of Republican, he’s not really going to do that.
You know, because of sort of his cynicism and because so much his salesman patois, even on the mass deportation thing, I think there’s a lot of folks who don’t want national guardsmen and U.S. Army forces walking through American cities grabbing people by the scruff of their neck and throwing them into vans and putting them to large camps.
Dave Weigel: They wanted to at least be not visible. Not to be too cynical about this, but when did public support for immigration and public distrust and how Trump was handling it peak? It was during family separation.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: When did it decrease? Well, a lot during the Biden term. But when Trump was president was when they figured it out how to do remain in Mexico policy, so you were not seeing footage —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Dave Weigel: — of migrants —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Dave Weigel: — being put and rounded up.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: It was not in front of them.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Dave Weigel: People were willing to put up with some amount of policy that might affect somebody negatively that they’ve never met before. And, yeah, the leading with we’re going to have a huge deportation force is going to be amazing, that still is, I think, alienated to some people.
There might have been too much speeding away from, like, the idea that as Americans, we should welcome immigrants on the right.
Chris Hayes: Oh, no, I just think on the point of, like, mass deportation though, to me, that’s the perfect example of this kind of Heisenberg’s cat of Donald Trump, which is to the people that want mass deportation, it’s like awesome. To the people that don’t want mass deportation but think there’s too much immigration and don’t like it, it’s a sort of signal.
And to people who, like, maybe that they want the 2019 economy, which I think is, like, what a lot of this is about, like, we had finally emerged from the great financial crisis and we hadn’t hit COVID in 2019 was like a pretty good economy macro terms. For people that want that and are going to vote for him because of that who don’t want mass deportation, it’s like, it’s just something he’s saying. And so, everything he says can exist in this liminal space of, like, it’s all kind of BS because he doesn’t believe in any of this, but some of it might happen. And I do think it’s actually hard from my perspective of coverage, like, what promises to listen to and what not.
You know, a lot of it —
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — is BS and then some of it isn’t, like I really think he’s going to raise a ton of tariffs. I think people are underestimating how much he genuinely believes in tariffs, how much unilateral power the United States president has to raise tariffs, how obsessed he is with tariffs.
And I think he’s going to raise a ton of tariffs and it’s going to come as a real shocking wake-up call to a lot of people, both at, in terms of when they buy stuff and also the Republican establishment.
Dave Weigel: Yeah, because what is the accountability mechanism for what he said on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t do as president versus what he is going to do. I don’t know how much one there is.
But one dynamic that’s also different in the new media versus the traditional media is I think traditional media asks some pretty fair questions about how a candidate will pay for things or how they would get a policy through Congress.
Harris has a set of policies that I think you can imagine how they might get into reconciliation bill. And Trump has proposed week after weeks of some things that are incredibly expensive. He wants to get rid of the SALT deduction cap that he installed. He wants to get rid of all —
Chris Hayes: That’s the latest.
Dave Weigel: That’s the latest. But before that, it was getting rid of all taxes on tips, on Social Security, two things that were created to increase the life of Social Security. And there is a sense from —
Chris Hayes: And overtime.
Dave Weigel: And overtime.
Chris Hayes: Don’t forget.
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s like an Oprah giveaway show with tax cuts right now —
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and different constituencies. It’s just like, there’s no rhyme or reason. It’s just like every week, it’s like tips, Social Security, overtime. I’ll be going to get rid of SALT. Like you did that now. And you know what, it’ll keep going. Like, I’m sure there’ll be new stuff every week.
Dave Weigel: But if you are that kind of Kennedy to Trump voter, the fact that he’s doing that is another, does it matter that the math isn’t there? No. The fact that he’s doing it means, yeah, he can say what he wants and the deep state is not going to tell him what to do and he’s unleashed. And if you are a donor who just wants him to win to do this stuff you think will happen, you can like blur that out.
Chris Hayes: Of course.
Dave Weigel: He’s not going to do it, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, like the guy that runs Ways and Means for the Republicans in the House. He keeps like sort of getting asked about these things and he just says, he kind of tries to sweep under the rug.
But, like, that guy has ready to go on the shelf the corporate tax cut and, like, the real stuff that they’re really going to do. And maybe some of these campaign things make their way into that bill, maybe they don’t.
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Maybe they make them into all sorts of weird ways, but it’s mostly like, that’s where I think the other thing that I keep telling people is, A, he’s got a record, and, B, when it comes down to it for all the talk about like the deep state wouldn’t let him do things, you are empowering one or the other political coalition, and that coalition does have interests and relationships. And it has people in Congress and like the House Ways and Means guy knows what kind of corporate tax cuts he wants to push through.
Dave Weigel: Yeah. And that’s one of my frustrations and people just get out of reading mainstream media and go online because just online is not serving that very well. Like if you’re a very sensationalistic media, you’re not pouncing on these topics because why would you? People aren’t going to click on them. They’re not very good for YouTube thumbnails? And it’s the more utrei (ph) or controversial stuff that you can talk about that’s more fun to talk about.
So, I think even the discourse you get in some of these spaces is just it’s not very full. It doesn’t get into the everything a president has the power to do or might do during four years in office. It’s been very smart by the Trump campaign to reach out to a lot of this media, Shawn Ryan’s podcast, the Theo Von’s.
They’re not going to drill down into those details. Well, I don’t want to read their minds, but a lot of their listeners, they’re not interested in hearing ultra specifics about that, more about how he’s going to take on the establishment and then an assumption. Well, if he’s fighting the establishment, he’s probably doing the right thing. That’s what you need.
Now, if such a thing would happen, I mean, like on Andrew Sorkin show or something, asking how he’d pay for it. In the newer media that just says like, yeah, we don’t trust the establishment, they have a lot of room to run.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I actually think, you know, they’ve been doing all these, the podcast hosts you talked about. And I think Shawn Ryan and Theo Von are in different categories.
Dave Weigel: Oh, sure.
Chris Hayes: And both of them, to be honest, like Shawn Ryan and politics are really not mine at all, but, like, I’ve heard him do interesting podcasts for sure.
Dave Weigel: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Same with Theo Von. But what I would say too about this sort of, what I would call their podcast strategy. And I actually think Kamala Harris should do a bunch of podcasts.
Dave Weigel: Yeah, I agree.
Chris Hayes: Theo Von is not grilling him about the cost of his tax cuts. But it’s also like podcasts, if you’re going to listen to something for an hour —
Dave Weigel: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — people arguing for an hour, contentiousness for an hour just doesn’t work. And generally what —
Dave Weigel: No, you’re right. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — all those podcasts are, is just like, you’re riffing, you’re talking, you might press someone here and there, but it’s not a “60 Minutes” interview. It’s not an adversarial cable news interview, like it doesn’t work in that format.
So, fundamentally, what those hosts are doing, and this is super true of Rogan, right? Rogan doesn’t really press people very hard. It’s not really what he does. It’s not what a Rogan podcast is. When he had in the beginning of the pandemic good public health experts on who talked sense about COVID, he let them just talk their sense about COVID. When he had people who have nonsense views on COVID, he lets them talk their nonsense views.
It’s a perfect pairing for Trump, which is that he’s just rifting. He’s talking. And these are formats where that’s what you just do. And it’s just a different thing than what, quote, unquote, “the mainstream media” is doing with a principle with a politician, and there’s not going to be that kind of like cross-examination.
Dave Weigel: Yeah, it’s just a much better environment to run in if you are, I almost say, a conservative candidate, but, yeah, conservative Trump-style candidate. It’s different. Not that different, though. I mean, some of this is being copied down the ballot by the Republicans. I mentioned incumbents have an easier time. There are more Republicans who just do not talk to mainstream media and don’t need to talk to local media because it doesn’t exist anymore.
And so, when you hear them speak, well, two kinds. One, what we’re talking about, the fun discursive podcasts. And I’m not, by no means, demanding these podcasts grill them on every part of their tax policy with it, but there’s that. And then there’s ideological media that just kind of want to know how they can help and how do you agree with me? Are you keyed in on what I’m thinking? The limits of this were revealed a lot by Kennedy because Kennedy was doing a very podcast-heavy campaign with interviews that were just interesting. He’s an interesting guy.
And it turned out there was not an electorate, a gettable, huge electorate that was turned on by that. He thought he was building a giant audience outside the mainstream media. It turned out to be pretty small. Now, small, if folded in a Trump coalition, powerful. But the audience people who, just that’s all they want to hear from politicians is a conversation without much follow-up on how things would work. The only times that happened, the Kennedy campaign, and it wasn’t very frequent, but when people would just go back and say, so, this housing policy rolled out, how would it work? How would it be paid for? If they didn’t have an answer, there was a turnoff by the voters who were kind of paying attention saying how will this affect me?
But it’s hard to compare a third-party candidate and what a major party gets away with. One event I was at with Kennedy in February, I think, he was still running for president. He was looking for the libertarian nomination. Didn’t try very hard, but making various kind of transactional promises to libertarians if he was the nominee.
But then also had this riff in a candidate form I saw in California where he said, look, you’d think that baby boomers would be really into this campaign because they know the Kennedys, they know my father’s name, et cetera, but they still watch the mainstream media and they hear bad things about me, where it’s young people who don’t trust the media are the most interested in me.
And Kennedy, it definitely felt listening to him and talking to him like he thought he could be 35%, 40% coalition around the country, and he kind of couldn’t. But somebody who already has a major party nomination who has that attitude can do pretty well. Yeah, CBS is going to factcheck me. Who cares? Doesn’t matter if Elon Musk is tweeting about the thing I just said and saying it’s real. And for many people, no, it doesn’t matter. CBS, why they got a story wrong 20 years ago about George Bush’s National Guard documents were Elon Musk, he’s a genius. So like —
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Dave Weigel: — if he’s riffing on something —
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Dave Weigel: — there’s got to be something to it.
Chris Hayes: And that question of like, you know, is that marginal group that comes with Kennedy or sort of is in this tent now, if that can build you a majority coalition, it’s one of the sort of central political questions in this campaign. We’re going to find out very soon for good or for ill.
Dave Weigel covers politics for Semafor. He’s one of the best, most well-traveled political reporters in the entire country. His newsletter at Semafor is called “Americana”. You should definitely check it out. Dave, thanks so much.
Dave Weigel: Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Dave Weigel. Really learned a lot from that conversation. And I would really urge you to follow his writing over at “Americana” at Semafor.
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“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Cedric Wilson and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the Executive Producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening?