276. Why Joe Biden must step down

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1:50Welcome to the Ressences Politics Emergency Podcast on the Biden Trump debate with Mee Rouri's Jurt. I'm being honest to Campbell, and I fear Rouri is an emergency. It's a real emergency. And I mean, it's it's shattering. Absolutely shattering. As I say, I've got my American mother -in -law staying, and she is the most passionate Democrat. And I've been saying, as you know, a little bit over the last few months, that I think Biden's age is a big problem, and she's been loyally standing up for him and saying Trump has cognitive problems. But I'm afraid even for the loyless Democrat, that debate was the disaster.

2:26I didn't stay up to watch it. I've watched it since, but I woke up to my phone with a American. Are you watching this? It's horrific. Another one. This is worse than anything I ever expected. Another one, and this is really interesting. The only good thing about this is that every who will now see this has to stop. He has to go. Now, as you know, and by the way, if I play to you, you've been saying this for over a year, and I've always been loyally defending Joe Biden, his record will come through, et cetera. But I think it was truly horrific. There were half a dozen moments that I'm afraid will now be part of history, because we're talking here about, you know, presidential elections.

3:08These things get books written about them, films made about them. And it was like watching your very elderly grandfather. And the fact that the only time that they ever seemed to really get passionate about anything was when they were arguing about their golf handicap. The killer moment for me was when Joe Biden was talking, I think about health policy, and he was getting confused between COVID and Medicare and Trump, who whatever else he's got, and we both agree as a vile human being, but he's still got energy despite his age. And he just sort of looked rather pitifully and he said, I don't understand what he just said.

3:48And I don't think he understands what he just said. And then cut to Biden, just looking like he really didn't know what he just said. Yeah, so just quick explainer for people who haven't yet watched it. And it's in it's pretty painful for watching. There's that big moment that you're talking about there, which is a moment where relatively early on where he's supposed to be talking about child care and eligibility. And he says, you know, we dealt with the COVID and then he realizes he's not supposed to be saying COVID. Then he says everything we need to. And then he pauses and then he says, look, then he pauses and then he said, we finally beat Medicaid.

4:22And which of course also gives Trump the opportunity to say, yeah, you did beat Medicaid. But as the debate goes on, there's a moment where he pulls it together a bit. So there's a bad moment, very bad moment at the beginning, pulls it together a bit in the second, third, but the fundamental problem is that Joe Biden has clearly been made to memorize a lot of lines. He's fine in the immediate sort of 10 -second reaction where he can say to Trump, you're a liar, that's ridiculous. But he's frequently not using his time. So again, and again, the person has to say I'm afraid this person, you know, you've got another 75 seconds left.

5:03No, what would you say to that? Because obviously what it's memorized is line up. And I just sort of wrote down some of the things that are going wrong. So there's the voice, very stumbling voice. Just to give a plug to our American podcast, RESTIS POLITICUS US, Anthony Scaramucci made the point that he sounded like the voice, I mean, I've got a problem with my voice, but his sounded like you might have been ill. And Anthony was saying they should have briefed that out to expect his voice to be weak, because it was quite shocking. That's what I mean about looking at your grandfather, you're a very elderly grandfather, his voice sounded incredibly weak.

5:38At times, I was leaning forward trying to listen, trying to hear what he was saying. One problem in these debates is just the physicality, almost regardless of the content, Biden's voice is frail, he's closing his eyes, his movement is not competent, whereas Trump, even when he's talking nonsense, looks vigorous, looks coherent. The second thing I thought was interesting is that we were expecting, because of the way that Trump normally behaves, that what he would be doing is interrupting continually. And do you remember they tried to deal with that by getting the mics muted? Trump doesn't really interrupt.

6:13Trump seems to sense, I suppose, quite early on, that Biden is doing more damage to himself than Trump needs to. So even when there are quite open goals of Trump saying, there was one example there, but generally, Trump doesn't point to the fact that Biden is getting stuff wrong, and he's just letting the audience see it, isn't he? Yeah, I remember talking to Hillary Clinton about, I felt we talked about this on the podcast when we did Hillary Clinton or leading, and what it was like being on the stage with Donald Trump, and she said that he has an animal instinct, and I think the animal instinct that he picked up very, very quickly was that Biden is not in good shape here, and almost the more he talks and the more that the focus is on him, the better it's going to be for me.

7:02And the other thing, if you were thinking about how you would have prepared Joe Biden for this debate, you know that Donald Trump is incapable of telling the truth, you know that he's going to lie. There should have been four or five moments. Now Biden did keep saying that's a lie, but he didn't have Atty's fingertips in his head, the factual rebuttal that said that's a lie, and these are the facts. So Trump was able, and his campaign now pushing this stuff out, where he's talking about, you know, I left the economy in great a statement it's ever been, there are now more immigrants coming through the border than ever at any time before.

7:34So Biden's just there going to say, that's not true, but the facts were not there, and because CNN decided not to do real -time fact checking, the fact checkers are basically saying Trump, I saw one that said Trump told a lie in every single answer, but that is lost, because the only thing people are talking about now is Joe Biden. And there's an added problem on the fact checking, because this is another problem, which is that Biden is frequently getting his figures wildly wrong. So he's saying there are thousands of trillionaires in the country, and then he's like, I'm sorry, thousands of billionaires.

8:07He said at one point, he said at one point he created 15 ,000 jobs. He made 50 billion. Yeah, and then another point, he said he created thousands of millions of jobs. So about an hour and a quarter, he said he created thousands, you know, billions of jobs, much more than the population of the US. So part of the problem with the fact checker is that if they were fact checking Biden, they would have to be saying this guy claimed to create thousands of millions of jobs, and of course there's only 300 million people in the US. Absolutely. Anyway, let's sort of step back for a moment and just look at it from the point of view of these two campaigns.

8:39The Trump bet, which I'm afraid was validated, is the Trump campaign has been saying for some time, we welcome this debate because Biden will lose it as soon as he walks on stage. They thought he would just be so frail, just walking across the stage. That turn out not to be true. He walked across the stage fine. But I suspect that one of the reasons why Trump was restraining himself as their fundamental strategy was based on their idea that Biden is much more frail, which is what they've been saying, much older, much more incoherent than people acknowledge, they just need to let him do it. What do you think the Biden's view was?

9:16Why do you think they pushed? Because actually, this debate is partly because the Biden team pushed for an early debate. What were they hoping to do through it? I think capitalise on the fact that Trump is emerging from a period where he's been convicted of these 34 felonies, and they thought that had him on the back foot. Added to it, now the only thing, let's imagine there is a kind of Machiavellian democratic party strategies to his hovering in the background of this. The Machiavellian me says, is it possible that person or people thought, we know the truth about what's going on. We know that actually Joe is not going to be able to stand up to the rigors of a really horrible presidential campaign.

9:58If we get him out early in a TV debate and the public see what we know, maybe we can actually make the change that needs to be made. That could be completely wrong. But what I think the problem with this for the, not just for the Democrats, but for the political health of America, which is not strong at the moment, is you've had a whole load of surrogates out for the last few weeks saying, yeah, but you don't see the Joe Biden, I see. You don't see the guys on top of the detail working around the clock dealing with these big issues. If that's the case, how come he couldn't stand up to a one hour debate with whatever it was, one -and -a -half worry now is, and frankly, the most alarming thing for me, well, there were a lot of alarming things, but one of the most alarming things was the site of Jill Biden welcoming Joe Biden back into where all their supporters were hanging out watching the debate, where she welcomed him like a conquering hero and sort of said, you know, you got all the facts right, you landed all the points, you were fantastic and then turned to the crowd and said, and what did Trump do?

11:04He lied, they all shouted. And I thought, surely, let's just imagine, when you did your TV debate with Boris Johnson et al, and you had that moment of ripping off your time, I reckon when you came out, Shashan, who loves you very dearly, we've probably said, Roy, that can go really well. Likewise, if I'm on television, or I'm doing something, and I'm not on form, Fiona is always going to be the first to say to me, listen, that was shit, you know, that was shit. Now, somebody has to be talking to Joe Biden and telling the truth, because if not, he is falling victim to the same kind of hubris that we've been talking about, and so is Jill, and that is very, very dangerous.

11:47I'm afraid that's right, it's the inner circle that's keeping him going, because there've been a lot of people trying to get him to step down. So a lot of the big donors to the Democratic Party tried to make him do that a year ago. Quite a lot of his close allies in the Democratic Party in Congress came to him to try to get him to step down. But when we were talking to some of these people towards the end of last year, they said, okay, it's too late now. And one of the reasons they said that he was staying was that Jill Biden, Jill, his wife, had convinced him that it was fine and that he could run.

12:22And so, by the end of last year, they were like, okay, it's too late. We haven't convinced him to step down, we're just going to have to keep our fingers crossed. Yeah, but I think I think this changes that I really do. Well, the whole thing, the whole thing I suggested in retrospect was mad, because even if he was, if you thought he was no, that he was in trouble in the autumn of last year, the idea that all you had to do was get him through to the election was mad, because he was then going to have to serve a four year term as president. Yeah. And nobody looking at that debate, I'm afraid, thinks that in, and this is the problem that in four years time, this is somebody who can be as it were, the leader of the free world, and I think, and this is what the Trump campaign will now remind people of, which is that this job really, really matters.

13:06And you cannot have somebody who's not fit and not thinking clearly doing a job of that scout.

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15:14He said he'd sent it to Joe Biden personally. But sometimes in this world, people exaggerate their access and so forth. But he does, he's somebody who does work for the Democrats. But it did say, you know, note to the president. And essentially was saying, you've been an amazing president, you've got a really great record. You also did the world an incredible service by stopping Donald Trump getting reelected. And you've had a lifetime of public service. But the fact is there is now this, the num, you look at the numbers and virtually any other credible candidate that we get will beat Donald Trump.

15:50The final act of public service you should do is to step down and make way. And I said, well, what was the response? He said the response was basically I was kind of slightly expelled from me in a circle. James Carville, who in a sense is the, is the US version of you, the kind of great communications genius of the Democratic Party has been saying for a long time now that it is criminally irresponsible of the Democrats to run Biden, that it's helping Trump into office. And that his view was that if people were to look back with a benefit of hindsight, that would be seen as this act of criminal responsibility.

16:26Well, you also, you need, you need, you know, we talk a lot about when we've been talking about the UK debates. And we say, you know, well, that wasn't the game changer. And there aren't many game changes. But I would argue that last night was a game changer. And the change that then has to come is to produce another game changer, which is a new candidate comes in and you just imagine. And there are some good people there. People talk a lot about Gavin Newsom. I see he's now third favorite in the, in the, in the government of California, California. There's some other good people that could come in.

16:57But the steps of this, because it's not like the Conservative Party with the men in grey suits, it's not like the Labour Party where you can actually sort of, you know, there are structures there. The, the, the Democrat Party doesn't really work in the same way as the political parties, we understand it. The first step that has to happen is that Joe Biden, Jill Biden, have to accept that this is not working. Can Kamala Harris, because she's not doing well in the polls either, she has to accept that the constitutional position that she sort of steps up is not going to happen either. And then a process has to be developed very, very speedily for a new candidate to emerge.

17:30Now, you imagine if that new candidate was a strong candidate, fresh, young, energetic, with a, you know, your famous backstory that doesn't crack up under pressure and able to come with a clean pair of hands and basically make a fresh the story that Donald Trump had a terrible record and he's a terrible human being. And here's a fresh start for America. That could be incredibly powerful for the Democrats, but they've got to get their act together and get it done. And their conventions coming up. It's a risk, but they have no choice, really. They, they cannot now run the Senate. It's very interesting, though.

18:03I mean, for people who are interested in kind of the way that events suddenly turn everything on their head. There's a kind of Millen's great cliche about events, dear boy events. I mean, what's so strange about politics is the way that in a few days, everything can flip on its head. You and I have been doing a lot of live events where we've been asking audiences who do they think is going to be the president. And the answer has always been either Trump or Biden in a 50, 50. And I've been trying to say for some time, it could be a third candidate. Could be somebody who's neither Trump nor Biden, but I rarely got more than one out of a thousand people sticking up their hands.

18:41Do you know what? I've noticed a bit of an increase on that one recently. Right. And I think after today, because the other thing about American, let's be honest, the soon -act starma debates got a lot of coverage in the UK. We talked to Hall of Thawning Schmidt, the former Danish prime minister for the podcast for leading yesterday. And she was making the point that our election is getting its to no coverage in Denmark. Very little, but but Trump Biden, that debate last night is leading the news in virtually every country of the world today. And what's more, here's the other tragedy about it, Rory, amongst the many people laughing this morning, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, the Iranians, that was a terrible, terrible advertisement for America.

19:23Yes. So maybe that's right. Let's step back for a second. This increases, I'm afraid, at least in the short term, the chances of a Trump presidency. And that's the big story here. Trump and Biden, basically a neck and neck in the polls, was all going to come down to few tens of thousands of votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan. And we know that Trump 2 .0 will be different, because he's no longer going to have these more experienced people like General Mattis, who was defense secretary or Rex Tillerson, who he had a section state. Kind of old guard has disgusted by Trump left. He now has that a bunch of much more fanatical inner circle.

20:02He said that he's going to rip up the US Civil Service. He's a convicted felon who's rejecting the root of law. So we're going to see this great democracy, which is really the kind of corner state of our whole system, under Trump, beginning to internally become much, much less democratic. And Rory, and Rory, as as as Cateke and Anthony Scaramucci, and we should put it in the in the newsletter, even though it was a few weeks ago, they had a fantastic discussion about this project, 2025 thing, which is this very, very highly organized political project, where essentially, unlike the last time if Trump wins, they've got a plan ready to go to do what ultimately Trump makes a joke about it, but actually is a form of the editorial authoritarianism, where you basically wipe out opponents.

20:49And as you were saying about Cian Putin, it's not just the terrible impacts on American and American democracy. It's that he will very, very quickly sign up to a pro Putin puppet in Kiev. He will signal that he doesn't really care about protecting Taiwan. I'm sure that we will then see Serbia attempted to do stuff in northern Kosovo or eastern Bosnia will be seen as a by Jan making moves against Armenia. This whole world of strong men and polarization and conflict will be accelerated if the Trump presidency comes in. So the stakes for us all are so high, and that's why the Democrats, guessing a credible candidate in immediately, is so vital.

21:36Yeah, I mean, it must be incredible to be Joe Biden this morning to know that the whole world is talking about you in this way. And including people like me, I have incredible fondness for him. I think he's an amazing public servant. I think he really is somebody very, very, very special. But I don't think any human being could watch that last night. And the point you made about four more years, if that's him today, you and I have all known people who have lost cognitive ability to stage in their life. You don't see much improvement once it starts. And the idea of you imagine the state of the world in four years time, America has got to have somebody in charge that the world can look to with trust and respect.

22:24I think through his career, you can look to Biden with trust and respect, but I don't want to see the Joe Biden of five years time in charge of the Western world. And likewise with Trump, I don't think I could ever look at Trump with trust and respect. So somebody else now, I think, has to emerge. And it's going to be very, very tough. You're probably going to, and the other thing which we haven't mentioned, Rory, is that in the short term, you said this is good for Trump. In the short term, it's probably also good for that, you know, Waco RFK, the third independent. So, you know, the abomas are going to have to step up, the Clintons are going to have to step up, the big donors as you say are going to have to step up.

23:01And it'll be horrible. If Joe Biden doesn't want to go, it will be a horrible, horrible, horrible process. But the best thing is if he and Jill could sit down, have a cup of tea and say, do you know what, we've had a great life.

23:16Let's go. It's going to be brutal. I still remain optimistic that America can do it, that they can move Biden on and get a better candidate, because I think if you work backwards, there is only one solution. The answer is obvious now, you have to get a different candidate. People will say that that's risky, because the reason that, of course, people liked Biden is that he'd shown that he could deal with Trump and debates. And you saw little glimpses of that, actually. There were moments even in this debate where Biden had a good tone, knew how to turn around and say, this is ridiculous, you're lying again, this is absurd.

23:52He knew how to do that. And people will be worried, because they saw it with Trump going up against Marco Rubio and others, and Hillary Clinton, most famously, that if you get slightly wrong candidate, Trump can makements meet with them. Big advantage of the Democrats have here is they absolutely know who their opponent is going to be. So you get you sit down, you work out, who is the best person to beat this guy? It's not who is the best person, even to be president of America, it's not the best person, who's the best democratic leader we could get? The question on the exam papers, who is the best person in our party right now to beat this guy?

24:30And that is a very, very, very specific and special question. Alex, thank you. Emergency pod. I really encourage people to listen to Anthony Skyrimic, in Kathy Kaye. I thought they were brilliant, by the way. I thought their analysis, especially as both of them really a bit like us, really, really, really want Trump to lose and want to Biden to win, but I thought they were very objective, really clear headed, terrific instant analysis. So I really do strongly recommend that people listen to theirs. And I think maybe to just just finish, you know, we've talked a lot about how debates don't seem to really matter in the UK.