Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…mp’s popular vote victory was the smallest popular vote victory since 2000 when Al Gore beat George W. Bush by 17 dogs and three old men or whatever it was. And so, attention works really differently. And while I think some of the Rogan of the left discourse has been frankly overstated, because honestly, the most parsimonious model of 2024 and 2020 is in 2020, you have a 4848 nation, something like that. Or maybe you have something that’s more like a 49 Democrat, 47 Republican nation. And in 2020, because of the pandemic, Donald Trump suffered a, let’s call it a 2. 5-point incumbent penalty. People are mad about the pandemic, they’re mad about things being chaotic, so he loses 2.5 points that given the natural split of the electorate, Joe Biden, a 4.5-point popular vote victory. In 2024, people are mad about inflation. They’re somewhat mad about the border. You have a 2.5-point penalty applied to the incumbent administration. Now it’s Harris, and you get a 1.5-point popular vote victory for Donald Trump. I genuinely don’t think, and this held internationally too, right? I generally don’t think you need a lot more to explain the election right now than that, but you do need something more than that to explain. Donald Trump’s now since 2016, almost decade long dominance of all attention in American politics. Starting when he came down the golden escalator in 2015, American politics from 2015 to 2020 when Joe Biden won was about Donald Trump. And then from 2020 to 2024, when Joe Biden was president, it was about Donald Trump. And then from 2024 on, it was about Donald Trump. Joe Biden was an attentional void, be it his age, be it their strategy. They agreed that the topic of the nation should be Donald Trump, right? When he went back to begin his campaign in 2024, he goes to Valley Forge and gives a speech about January 6th and Donald Trump, right? It wasn’t about his own achievements, it was about Donald Trump. Joe Biden didn’t do the Super Bowl interview in 2023. That’s when I did my thing about this is not going to work. Probably because at that point, he was not capable of good extemporaneous interviews. I mean, I think that was my view of them, that the revealed thing here was that they didn’t trust him to do interviews. I didn’t have some inside information about anything, I just looked at what they were doing, what they weren’t doing. They’re behind in the polls. They weren’t doing things like the Super Bowl interview. If you can’t turn your candidate into the product, if you don’t trust your candidate to be the product in an election, you’re fucked, right? And so that was to me, the tell, but attention is the coin of the realm. Now, there are better and worse ways of doing it. I don’t think Donald Trump is doing himself huge favors right now. I think they had, there was a path they could have walked to be a majority party. . Now, there are better and worse ways of doing it. I don’t think Donald Trump is doing himself huge favors right now. I think they had, there was a path they could have walked to be a majority party. I think that if he was more restrained, more inhibited, if he was able to not do a bunch of things that are mobilizing opposition to him, you could talk about what they would or wouldn’t achieve that way, but I think they could be in a much stronger political position that would make them stronger for the midterms. It would eventually make JD Vance stronger as a successor. I think they’re running a very high-risk strategy that has a very reasonable chance of if they don’t make what I would call an autocratic breakthrough, they might completely blow up their own movement. It’s all very high risk. So, for them, for everybody, for everything, what makes them good at politics is also what makes them bad at politics. But for Democrats, the caution, the bureaucratic culture, the fear of saying anything that will make anybody mad, it is optimized for a different attentional era. One of the things I’m watching when you’re saying about leaders, one of the things I’m watching in the people coming up, the ones who want to run in 2028 is who seems like they have adapted to this era not in the way Trump did or Vance did or Musk did. I think they’re going to need something different. They fully represent the Twitter era of politics. I mean Musk bought Twitter. I think sort of all in on what politics right now, what online politics feels like. I think the thing that will come next is someone who’s able to synthesize both the lessons of it, feeling that we all have that it’s kind of sick and poisoned, right? That Twitter’s not a good place, X is not a good place. TikTok politics is not a good place that we’re all being turned on each other somehow. You need to be authentic and authentically angry at what we’ve all become in the way that Obama ran as a political reformer who hated the red and blue cut of America, who hated what political consultants and pollsters were doing to us. You’re not going to have somebody who just echoes. There’s not going to be, there’ll be no Joe Rogan of the left. There will be no Donald Trump of the left because the left is different than the right, but it’ll have to be something authentically of this era, but also authentic to the backlash to it, which I think as we enter into this period where the president and everybody around him fully embraces this attentional economy, I think people are going to want something different from this attentional economy in four years. And be okay with a negative attention that comes with being authentic.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.