‘Platner Is Vile.’ McConnell Is Missing. Welcome to American Politics.

17:59Michelle Cottle:Like - Other than that, he's a great guy. That is not, and a lot of people started to even make fun of the people who sort of brought up the Nazi tattoo. Like, well, he already explained that. I'm thinking, and you bought that? And you bought that explanation. You actually did. I'm gonna tell you, if you did, I'm talking to somebody who had incredible ideological blinders on. Because I guarantee you, you would not have bought that explanation with a Republican. You wouldn't. I know you wouldn't. You would have said, this is the most obvious, clear thing in the history of the world. And this is just sort of like so obvious and pedantic to say, but it's also very true and very hard.

18:36Michelle Cottle:And that is to apply the exact same standard to somebody on your own side when you find out about a scandal allegation that you apply to somebody on the other side. And instead, here's what we do. What we basically do is we say, this person that I like, they're for Medicare for all. So I know that like, man, they're with me on this and I like them. And then when you hear the scandal, you go, well, man, an otherwise lovable guy is just, you know, nobody's perfect. But then you find out somebody on the, you know, you have somebody on the other side and maybe they have a more free market oriented approach to health care.

19:08Michelle Cottle:And you're like, you're horrible. You're a terrible person. And then you find out that they had a scandal and you go, yup, that's confirmation. That's confirmation. And so we just can't be in this loop. It's driving this country mad to be in this loop where you just have these continual grace for the horrible actions of somebody on your own side and absolute swift condemnation for the other. Now, I will say this. At least the Democrats said no. It took way too much. It took way too much. Way too much. But finally, they did say no. And, you know, one of the grievous things, there's this other guy hovering around out there, Ken Paxton.

19:51Michelle Cottle:Ken Paxton. There are a whole bunch of Texas Republicans right now who are going, those Maine Democrats are horrible for voting for, you know, Graham Plattner with all the waving red flags. And, oh, by the way, you're not a Christian if you don't vote for Ken Paxton. And that is coming. You're going to see that all over Texas for the next several couple of months. is Christians have one option, and it's to vote for the adulterer over Tallarico. And it's to vote for the corrupt politician, so corrupt he was impeached by a Republican House. He had his own very conservative staff resign out from under him in protest.

20:28Michelle Cottle:That's how corrupt he is. But you have to vote for him. But other than that, he's a great guy. But other than that, and they're going to stick to it all the way, all the way, Michelle.

20:37David French:David W. Well, I think there are a lot of different actors in this saga, right? There's Plattner himself who was, you know, dissembling, you know, misleading the public, misleading his staff. Dissembling. That is a sweet word. Like, that is a very sweet word. The only way he wasn't flat out lying is if he was always too drunk to remember any of it. And I'm not sure that's a defense. There were, you know, the people who sort of found him and didn't vet him properly. There's his campaign staff. Then there are a lot of enablers in the media. But I also think that, you know, we shouldn't look away from the fact that he won the primary.

21:15And the voters actually did see much of this, not all of it, but see much of this behavior and nevertheless voted to make him the nominee. And there are, you know, that's in a particular situation against particular other candidates. We can't read all that much into it. But the thing that concerns me about it is that I don't know how much of that is, as David said, extending grace to someone who shares your ideology and how much of it is voters liking the roughness of his presentation. And that's not to say that a large share of Democratic main voters wanted someone who may have raped an ex-girlfriend or wanted someone with a Nazi tattoo, but they were able to make sense of the narrative in a way that made Plattner look like an outsider, like a fighter, like someone who is angry, and that those elements excited them about his candidacy.

22:17Not just things that they could excuse, but things that actually drew them to Plattner as against Janet Mills or any of the other candidates. And I do think that that is one thing, again, as David was saying, that applies across the country here, not just within one party, not just within one wing of one party, which is to the extent that the country is surly, as you said earlier, Michelle, to the extent that the country is angry, there are going to be some number of voters who want to see their politicians expressing the same sentiments. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to turn to a monster.

22:51I think of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. He seems, you know, he's selling much the same politics that Plattner is, but I think is a much more honorable figure. We'll see how that campaign goes, but he seems like a kind of contrasting figure. Or Mamdani in New York, who has his enemies, but is also, I think, in an interpersonal way, kind of an obviously good person who is interested in trying to improve the world. Plattner was cut from a different cloth. But I think that as we go forward, failing to address the latent anger of many millions of people around this country, we are likely to see more politicians whose main qualification for higher office is rage.

23:35David French:Okay, so this is – I can feel my blood pressure rising as we're discussing this. So this is where I just want to jump in and say – Go, Michelle, go. So for starters, Plattner is vile. If even like even what we know about him is just like he's vile. I don't want to hear from him ever again. You don't get to set the joint on fire and then have a say in who's going to come in to clean up your mess. Not every jerk who's angry in a flannel shirt is a working class hero. And this is where the people who really need to be slapped are the people who decided, oh, no, we don't need to vet him. We don't need to worry about the red flags.

24:18David French:We don't need to pretend that the rules of politics apply to our guy because he's so freaking charming and has interesting facial hair. I am sorry, but it's not just a question of whether he could get elected. I mean, this guy in the Senate would have cut a swath across Capitol Hill that we would have been hearing about forever. So I like I get it. I get that people are angry, but not all angry jerks are the same. And a guy who likes to pretend he's a working class hero is not automatically who you want to throw in with. So do some due diligence. That said, and here's the thing. Chuck Schumer should be embarrassed that the choice in this race was Janet Mills, who was way too old and way too tired.

25:09David French:She didn't want to be in this race. For the people of Maine to have basically had to pick between too old and too vile is inexcusable. But I just want to underline something that you said about the people who found him and halfway vetted him. They didn't fail to do their due diligence. they wanted someone who broke the mold. I mean, that was the language they used. We didn't want someone who has grown in a vat. We wanted someone who has lived experience. They did this as a kind of central casting. Here's someone who looks like an outsider who donated to Bernie Sanders. And how's that working out for them?

25:42I'm not making a positive case for it. I'm just saying it's notable that what we're seeing here is not exactly, you know, oversight. People having a perfect candidate who has skeletons in his closet. They chose someone who looked like they had skeletons there.

25:55David French:You can vet someone. and not expect them to, like, be some kind of bland, milk-toast model that could survive, I don't know, like in the McKenzie boardroom or whatever. So, okay, they got what they asked for. Congratulations. Now step aside and let someone clean up your wretched mess.

26:17Michelle Cottle:And can I just say something real fast about this? Oh, please. Please do. We have got to stop confusing assholery for courage or assholery for conviction. And so I see this on both sides of the spectrum, especially amongst the angriest part of the base, is they're looking at somebody who's going to give them, you know, who's basically extending the middle finger to the world and demonstrating just this sort of like raw fury and anger, often in a way that's deeply cruel and dishonest and casting that as, well, they are a fighter, okay? They're a fighter. Well, you know, that is not the only model for fighting, guys.

26:55Michelle Cottle:Look throughout history. If you're going to look at the people who led in difficult times, who demonstrated and history has vindicated for their courage and their resolve and their conviction, often they were people who went out of their way to try to extend olive branches, to win people over who are wavering, who had to demonstrate a tremendous amount of moral character. This is something that is a huge problem that I've seen on the right for the last decade. And that is they don't they view you as weak unless you're cruel. And all of your scandals, as David was saying, they're a bonus. They're a bonus because they what they mean as you don't care about norms.

27:38Michelle Cottle:You're willing to go as far as you need to go. And and that is down that path lies madness. and there is no path in which that is going to unify this country or achieve the justice and prosperity and equality and all of the things that you're looking for. That is not the path for it. And I just, I'm longing for a moment where America, especially the bases of the parties, wake up and they say, you know what? Sometimes the most courage you can demonstrate is to demonstrate humility or kindness in the face of an arrogant and cruel age. Well, we're going to have to wait until Trump's out of the White House

28:17David French:before that's even a possibility. But David W. did bring up a less gut-wrenching, soul-crushing primary situation. And we're going to move for now to Michigan. So the stakes there are sky high in the Democratic Senate primary on August the 4th. State Senator Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the contest this week, And it's cleared the field for a tough race between Representative Haley Stevens, who's the establishment favorite, and Abdul El-Sayed, an anti-establishment crusader whose very edgy progressivism is making some in his party a little nervous. Now, no Republican has won the U.S. Senate seat in Michigan in over 30 years.

29:01David French:But if Democrats lose this race, it's going to pretty much kneecap their chances of taking control of the Senate in November. Who do you think is going to give him the best chance? I don't have any detailed knowledge of the race on the ground. I just look at the polls. And what I've seen lately suggests that Abdullah Syed is maybe has a little bit of an advantage there. That doesn't mean that that'll hold over the course of the of the, you know, the general election. But, you know, I think that a few months ago, even we would have looked at the polls and said that he was the much weaker candidate.

29:35And I think the behavior there, you know, voters behavior over the last couple of months suggests that he may well be the stronger one. And I do think that that would be a major event in American politics. He would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. He would be, you know, a sort of natural successor figure to Bernie as a as a lefty in the Senate. I do think that he's a more, as I said a minute ago, more admirable character than Plattner. I think he's sort of gotten under, you know, less attention over the course of this race than Plattner has. And that's a little bit, you know, a little bit of a shame.

30:09I think he's a more interesting. He just doesn't look as good in flannel.

30:13David French:I'm sorry. Well, I mean, I don't know if you've seen him in the gym. He's quite fit. But he's he does. He does seem to cut a bit of a different figure, which I don't think we know as easily what to do with. I mean, Plattner looked this part. He wasn't exactly, as you were saying, Michelle, a white working class figure from generations left behind by globalization. That wasn't his actual background. But he looked like that. And that meant that to voters, he scanned very easily as a familiar archetype, one that they could dump a lot of rage and political enthusiasm into. Abdul El-Sayed looks like a less familiar archetype, which is one reason why I think it's possible that he does crack open American politics in a pretty interesting way going forward.

30:56I'm not going to say I think it's a safe bet that he wins the primary or if he does, that he'll win the general election. But it's a very consequential race, not just for who controls the Senate in 20 starting in 2027, but in terms of where the country and the Democratic Party goes going forward.

31:15Michelle Cottle:Damod F. You know, Michelle, growing up in the South, did you ever hear this for this phrase? We used it a lot in law. Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.

31:28David French:I'm afraid I have. You have. I have.

31:31Michelle Cottle:So essentially what that means is if you reach too far, if you become too, if you try to get, you know, it would have come up in settlement negotiations, like you're just asking for too much. And when you ask for too much, you break off the settlement negotiations and you might then lose the case. And so I think one of the things that we have seen is that when one of the parties is weak and the Republicans right now are weak, they really are, Democrats may end up overperforming their 2024 numbers very substantially, which could hand them control of the House, which means that even a Michigan Senate seat, which has been in Democratic hands for a really long time, odds are almost no matter who they nominate, that person is going to be, it's going to remain a Democratic seat.

32:19Michelle Cottle:These are very favorable tailwinds right here. However, however, if you then take that moment to say now is when we can push the envelope with our candidates. In other words, this is the opportunity maybe to really, as David was saying, put a successor to Bernie in the Senate coming from a swing state. that's pretty risky and and i keep flashing back to uh the 2022 midterms and there was very high inflation uh joe biden's approval rating had already gone below 50 and was not coming back uh there was just all of this talk of a red wave and i then it never materialized and i and i put it into, I used two Ds to describe why it didn't materialize, Dobbs and Doofuses.

33:12Michelle Cottle:Dobbs was obvious, right? You know, as somebody who's pro-life, I regret this deeply, but there is very much a pro-choice majority in the United States. It galvanized a pro-choice majority. And then the Republicans nominated MAGA candidate after MAGA candidate in these statewide swing state elections and lost and lost and lost and lost in a very what would have been a very favorable environment. And, you know, I think that's instructive. And so I really do question the way in which a lot of people seem to view Donald Trump and the unpopularity of Donald Trump as an as a political opportunity to sort of press in and lean in to deeper and deeper progressivism.

34:00Michelle Cottle:And I just feel as if I'm sort of getting this sense of deja vu that, you know— I hate it when you do that. I'm getting that deja vu. But, you know, one thing that I think is important to note in this context is, you know, who we're talking about when we're talking about making this decision. Like, in a previous era, the party might have exerted a stronger control over the race, either in candidate selection or in funneling money. And these days, you know, the Republican Party is weak because of Trump, but the Democratic Party is weak as well. And one thing that we're seeing is simply voters' choice.

34:38Now, it may be that Democratic primary voters are doing themselves a disservice, as Republican primary voters have done in the past, by choosing people that align with a harder ideological line than the median general election voter would be. But it is also not the case that, like, you know, Abdul El-Sayed is being anointed by anyone in particular. He is, you know, neck and neck or ahead in the polls. And that tells us something about the Michigan electorate, maybe not determinative for the fall, maybe just indicative. But it is also the case, I think, that there's a real signal there. There's still something on the ground happening that we sort of need to be paying attention to.

35:19David French:Okay, now I love a good primary fight. I know that the political class does not because it costs some money and they're worried about splitting. But I'm all for a good primary battle. So, you know, let's go forward. We'll see how that goes. But before we go, I want to pivot to Washington just briefly and the question of how open elected officials need to be with the public about their whereabouts. And I'm bringing this up because Senator Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old former Republican leader, has now been hospitalized for several weeks. And we have yet to get any kind of clear explanation about what's going on.

35:59David French:This has sparked crazy rumors about whether something already happened to him that's horrible and it's being covered up by his team for political reasons. And the McConnell drama is coming hot on the heels of another medical mystery, which is that New Jersey Republican House member Tom Keene disappeared for over 100 days, during which time the public was told only that he was receiving medical treatment for something. It wasn't until after he returned to the House in late June that people were told he had been treated for depression. Now, I'm always grateful when members of Congress talk about their mental health challenges and we get honest about that sort of thing.

36:46David French:But really, shouldn't the public have been given more information on this earlier? Like the same thing with McConnell. How much can we expect to know about the health and well-being of our political officials, guys?

36:59Michelle Cottle:Can I propose something quasi-mathematical equation here?

37:02David French:Ooh, you're going to get specific. I like that.

37:04Michelle Cottle:The greater the power the public official exercises, the greater the obligation to disclose to the public their physical condition. So at the very top of that is the president of the United States. And I think we've now had a couple of presidencies, including this one, by the way, where you don't really feel that they're all that transparent about like what our, you know, what our president, what the truth is.

37:26David French:Healthiest president ever, David. Healthiest ever. Healthiest ever. Fittest, cognitively sharp, whatever. Yeah.

37:32Michelle Cottle:So we're approaching sort of Soviet levels of opacity here. Is that the right word? that you remember back, you know, Michelle, you probably you might you might remember back in the days when a Soviet leader would get a cold. And next thing you know, you had a new Soviet leader. They were completely unforthcoming with information. Right. We're approaching almost like Soviet levels of concealment here when it comes to senior, senior elected officials. And look, elected officials are human beings. Human beings, no matter what, there are zones of privacy. But when we're talking about life and death situations, capacity to do the job for which you were elected, we are owed transparency.

38:18Michelle Cottle:I'm sorry, we are. We are owed transparency. And this actually should be a consideration. If you're somebody who's wanting to keep serving and you're deep into your 70s, you can't have this thing both ways. The more powerful you are, the more transparent you have to be. I mean, that's. I would just one other variable is the last one I think that David mentioned, which I think is really important, which is age. If you're in your 40s, you know, your voters, your constituents can probably trust that unless there's some surprise, you will be capable of managing the job. Once you're in your 70s or your 80s, people are just the question is much more normal to ask, you know, some large share of Americans in their 80s.

39:01are not capable of something like running the United States from the White House. And so the older you get, I think the more natural it is to ask these questions too, which ties it back to, you know, the broader question of gerontocracy and what it means that we're living in a world that is governed to some large degree by much older people. Now, it looks a little bit less that way on the surface than it did a few years ago. We have a vice president who's quite young. A lot of Trump's cabinet is relatively young. than, you know, by the way, it's Trump, Bush, W. Clinton. We're all born within one year of each other.

39:36Like they're all exactly the same age. So the next cycle, we're going to be in a different generational phase here. We're going to be at least in the presidential contest looking at members of a different generation. And there is turnover. Gen X, Gen X.

39:49David French:Isn't there some theory that we're going to skip entirely over Gen X? It's got to be. There has to be. You just got to let that dream go. Let it go. No, I can't. I can't let it go. No, let it go. But I think part of the story here is just what it means when older people stay in power, hold on to power. They're going to be more secretive because the things that they're trying to hide are more serious. And the public is going to be more agitated about that secret keeping because they suspect rightly that these are genuine, important questions to ask. And, you know, I don't think that, like, we should be launching a congressional investigation into the bruising on Donald Trump's hand.

40:27But it is an enormous area of like internet obsession that he has this bruise on his, this running bruise on his hand. It would just be better if we had, I mean, better in a million ways if Donald Trump was not the president. But even keeping, even putting that aside, it would just be better if we didn't have to worry all the time that our geriatric leaders were sliding down, you know, the slope to real old age.

40:53David French:Okay, so now I'm going to put, for those listening, I'm going to put David Wallace-Wells' email directly into the feed so that all of the people who want to yell at him for ageism can do that directly. Because I feel that I get yelled at for that plenty. And David, you will come back for us when we do our next gerontocracy episode because this is one of my favorite topics. So we're going to leave it there. And we're going to do recommendations. What do you have to get us through the peak summer heat? David Wells Wells, you first. The book that I've been reading the last few days is a book called In Trees by a writer named Robert Moore, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

41:35It's a sort of a strange book to describe in summary, but it's part nature essay. It's part work of philosophy. It's part personal essay. And it's an effort to make sense of the tree, not just the forest landscape, but the idea of a tree, the intellectual structure of a tree, what it means to think through the metaphor of the tree as a sort of new model for thinking about rootedness and what we used to call cathedral thinking, that is to say, things that outlast human life. It's a beautiful book. It's impossible to put down. And ever since I picked it up, I've been recommending it to everyone I know.

42:14So I'll recommend it to all of you as well.

42:16Michelle Cottle:All right, David French. So first, let me just say, I love that David came in here with something of true interest to intelligence and sophistication, carrying the Jamel torch. I can't wait to hear what you're going to recommend. How about this? How about an Apple TV show about fact checkers who are trying to solve the murder of like a male OnlyFans star. He stole my heart. Or OnlyFans. Tell me more. The show is called Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. It's on Apple TV. And the way that I discovered it is, so we were loving Widow's Bay.

42:52David French:Yeah.

42:53Michelle Cottle:And Stephen King tweeted out, I love Widow's Bay, but there's an even better thriller on Apple TV called Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. And the story you have is a single mom recently divorced. She's a fact checker for a fictional publication. And she is interacting with a cam boy, like a guy, you know, a guy like OnlyFans. It's not only they have a different name for it, of course. And she sees him apparently get kidnapped and brutalized. And so then hijinks ensue. But what's funny is it's centered around a trio of fact checkers who are on the case and On the hunt. And they're a delightful trio, like a delightful cast of characters.

43:37Michelle Cottle:They're quirky. They're funny. And I just find it hilarious. And, you know, shout out to all of our awesome fact checkers at the New York Times who make our work possible. Doing God's work. Doing the Lord's work. But maximum pleasure guaranteed. It's... What a title, too. Yeah. It's great.

43:55David French:Leave it to French to keep it highbrow. Okay. I'm going to go in kind of a geeky direction for any puzzle people out there. So my household likes to order these murder mystery case files that you can get. They are these mysteries. It's often it's cold case files or they have themes like, you know, somebody gets killed at summer camp or somebody gets killed at the theater. and they send you this package of clues, you know, like autopsy reports, witness statements, crime scene photos. And it's one of these things where two people can do it or five people can do it. We'll drag our kids into doing it when they're home from school.

44:39David French:Some of them are just easy breezy. You can, and they rank them according to difficulty. You can do them in like a couple hours. Some of them are really hard. We have failed on a couple of occasions. I'm not too proud to admit, but they're really fun, And especially if, for whatever reason, you might not want to stream a show one night. And that's it. That's all I got. I feel that we've solved so many problems in the world. Really appreciate it. David Wallace-Wells, thank you for joining. And you will be back, remember, at least for the Gerontocracy episode. David French, always a pleasure. Guys, have a great weekend.

45:16Michelle Cottle:You too. Bye, Michelle. Bye, David.

45:25Thank you.