00:09:50.440Which is, you know, this is something that we know the American people are capable of because they've been doing it with the previous president beautifully, who also, frankly, people are like, oh, he confused Putin and Zelensky.
00:10:01.620It's like Trump does that daily, right?
00:10:03.300And we've learned to look away from that, right?
00:10:05.900But he's hoping to kind of very clearly benefit from that same effect now too, which I have mixed feelings about, but I just want to analytically make the point that this is about a way in which in our gerontocracy, we deal with masculinity in its wane.
00:10:24.120Yeah, this is a situation in which Joe Biden has lost the capacity to convincingly perform
00:10:32.820masculine domination, right? But he is still making claims on masculine prerogatives.
00:10:39.220And this is, I think it's fair to point out all the operations of an incredibly sexist logic of
00:10:45.140power and the legitimacy of power that we don't have to endorse in order to describe, right?
00:10:51.080But something that bugs me a little about people trying to compare Donald Trump's own, like, robustly evident mental unfitness for the presidency, mental and moral unfitness, is that Donald Trump has not lost the capacity for masculine domination demonstrations, right?
00:11:07.820He is still able to be boorish and belligerent.
00:14:17.060He seems very tired all the time and he cannot make a forceful case.
00:14:22.260I think some of his, you know, verbal inarticulateness, his loss of his train of thought, I think some of that is not necessarily something we could classify as senility.
00:14:40.760There was a piece that I've been trying to find and I haven't been able to, maybe you'll remember what this is.
00:14:45.080I think came out on Slate, where someone pointed out that like in the same way that like a lot of people have pointed out that the relationship of America to the Access Hollywood tape was entirely shot through with their own familial relationships, right?
00:15:00.800Like we, not all of us are familiar with someone like that in our family, but more Americans than not probably live with someone in their family who, you know, is a predator of some kind and whom they've made their peace with.
00:15:12.320So this has like always been a part, I think, of Trump's effectiveness is that people recognize the pathology, but want to push it away because they're scared of having to reassess their own lives.
00:15:23.280And this writer, and I wish I remember who this was, was making a similar case now for Biden saying, look, it's obviously much sadder, much more tender aspect.
00:15:33.220But like, we know what decline looks like.
00:15:35.660And we know that, yeah, he's not senile.
00:15:38.240This is not, he does not have Alzheimer's probably, right?
00:15:41.420But we know those moments of skipped beats
00:16:07.380where they have gotten to in life's cycle.
00:16:09.600But on the other hand, I also think it makes it really hard to tell the American people they didn't see what they saw, right?
00:16:18.280Because we may not have the perfect, like, right, like someone running around like, oh, did a Parkinson's doctor come to the White House?0.99
00:16:24.560Like, probably, like, that's not what's happening here.0.99
00:16:27.340But we all know or have an intuition of what is happening here because we have seen it with every one of our relatives and we are afraid to see it in ourselves, right?
00:16:37.900This is time. These are the ravages of time. And it's hard to tell people the thing that you universally know to be true about human life is miraculously not happening here, right? Like this is a deeply human thing we're connecting with, meaning that like, this isn't a bad debate performance, right? This isn't a scandal. This isn't a, right? Like the Republicans are going to try and make it into a scandal.
00:17:22.900That these people that are admirable and brilliant
00:17:25.060most of the time have moments where they're not, right?
00:17:29.740Where things sort of are not clicking anymore.
00:17:34.000But like by the same token, I think that makes it very, very hard to kind of, I mean, gaslighting is a strong word, but to kind of tell people like, oh, this is just like the Access Hollywood tape.
00:17:52.740I think part of what we have an obligation to do as citizens, as, you know, sisters, spouses, voters, human beings is reckon with these inconvenient realities in our personal lives.
00:18:06.580Although I do agree with you, it's very painful precisely because it reminds people of the sort of event that would prompt them to have a conversation with their adult siblings, right?
00:18:17.400Like we need to take dad's car keys away.
00:18:19.080He really can't be driving in this state anymore.
00:18:22.740Because he is not reliably alert, because he is not reliably energetic in the way that he needs
00:18:30.260to be endowed with the authority and independence that he has previously enjoyed. And it's so sad.
00:18:39.160But I think this also speaks to your point that I don't totally believe what has been suggested
00:18:45.600by some that this is evidence of a conspiracy to hide the reality of Joe Biden's condition
00:18:52.880from the public. I think this is probably something that has been a gradual decline.
00:18:57.820He has visibly declined from the last time he was campaigning, right? At which point he was already,
00:19:02.100you know, less energetic and prolific in his schedule than some of his competitors.
00:19:07.200But it has a visible decline over the last four years. But I fully believe that it has been
00:20:40.000Now, Ettinger Mentum makes the case that like he's actually uniquely poorly positioned, that you could really run a turnip with a D in brackets behind their name and do slightly better.
00:20:52.460So, but this idea that he is, in fact, uniquely qualified to take on Trump, which may well have been true in 2020, I guess, but there is this kind of like real kind of bunker mentality, it seems, when we get to that point, right?
00:21:07.960We say like, oh, we don't know whether he should drop out.
00:22:33.240Specifically because of his generational disparity from the principal and specifically for his tendency to gaffe, right?
00:22:44.320He said things he was not supposed to say famously about his personal support for gay marriage before Obama was willing to stick his neck out on that issue.0.99
00:23:28.260And he ran on something like that, right?
00:23:31.440Being like, I have a non-threatening persona that is intimately tied up in the fact that I am white male that is able to allow me, a white male, to embody the principle of dignified pluralist Republican government in the face of the Trumpian autocratic threat.
00:23:53.760I think that was always a little bit of a contradiction, right?0.75
00:23:57.260The idea that it really needs to be an old white guy in order for women and non-white people to retain citizenship.0.62
00:24:05.720I think that was always a little bit of a contradiction in terms, right?0.76
00:24:08.900For you guys to be citizens at all, you need to be not in the biggest role because putting you in the biggest role will scare the electorate into backing authoritarianism.
00:24:19.600I think that it always undermined itself a little bit, right?
00:24:21.940Yeah. Well, and a thing that I think intensified with 2022, which I think Biden read as a vindication of him, when in fact it's about, as you say, people who have never held the presidency being highly mobilized by the Dobbs decision and other sort of atrocities, right?
00:24:39.840But it's very clear that Joe Biden interpreted this as like he was able to buck this trend.
00:24:45.100It's like, well, no, women voters really bucked this trend and they happen to support you, which is good, but not sure you're the one who did the magic here, you know, but he clearly thought he did.
00:24:55.780Yeah, he thinks because he beat Trump once that he is the only person who ever will be able to, which raises the question of what we're going to do when Joe Biden dies, you know, what does he think is going to happen?
00:25:09.840Because in his best case scenario, he seems to be seeing his own presidency as a restoration, right?
00:25:17.860But the restoration of the American Republic from this like Trumpian anomaly in his worldview needs to be bolstered by keeping him in power seemingly forever, right?
00:26:05.760Or is it just that, you know, the republic really is in crisis and that's why we're noticing these kinds of ego trips people go on?
00:26:12.940But it is, you know, it's just manifestly untrue that, right?
00:26:16.960If RBG had stepped down two years earlier and been replaced by, you know, left-wing jurists, we'd be in a very different position right now.
00:26:26.540You know, things are working better without Dianne Feinstein at the helm, I would say.
00:26:32.160And similarly, the polling suggests that other Democrats can absolutely do, they're not much better than Joe Biden against Trump, but they're not worse necessarily.
00:26:43.400So it's just this idea that like, as you say, like there is a, how much of a Republican ethos, small R Republican ethos is it really if it all ends up being tied up with personal rule, right?
00:26:55.300It's like, oh, I must stay in charge or else the republic falls.
00:26:58.560As you say, that's the king's two bodies.
00:30:41.040And he definitely seems to understand abortion not as an issue of civil rights, of citizenship, of dignity, but as an issue of, at best, public health, at worst, a real paternalistic, condescending protection racket by which male authority figures.
00:31:07.380can benevolently exercise their authority
00:31:11.080over women who are not quite esteemed as adults.
00:31:14.560You know, so like his answer on that abortion question
00:31:17.360was that he preferred Roe's trimester framework,
00:31:22.620which has in fact not been good law since 1992
00:31:26.000when the Supreme Court and Planned Parenthood
00:33:53.180Because he's operating on this old-timey misogyny with which he is absolutely squandering the political salience of Dobbs and of the abortion question.
00:34:04.700Yeah. I mean, as you were already alluding to it, I guess the unspoken calculus that sort of the Biden dead-enders, I guess we could call them, will always sort of turn to is the idea that, well, there are a lot of voters who see it the same way and who would feel threatened by the alternative.
00:34:25.480if we were to make an affirmative case
00:38:50.260That's why they keep putting her, passing the mic to her on this issue, because she is just more cogent on the most salient single issue in this election, or at least what was the most salient single issue on this election before that debate, which so now it's Biden's age instead.
00:39:06.300But it is something where he clearly thinks there are set political realities that are A, unchangeable, B, discernible, and C, must be catered to at all costs.
00:39:18.960Yeah, and I mean, it's not shocking he would think that
00:39:21.660because that's why he has the nomination, right?
00:39:23.900In some way, he is one of those white voters
00:45:06.960They're all either, you know, 20 Congress people and one senator have come forward publicly
00:45:12.060to say that they don't think he should run.
00:45:14.280As of this recording, there will be more probably by the time this comes out.
00:45:17.560But the rest of them are leaking like a tank, like a fish tank, to every reporter they can find to say off the record, none of us think he should be running, you know?
00:45:27.940And that is going to be a stain on Biden.
00:46:26.580And that really makes Biden's term over the past four years look to me less like what he pitched it as,
00:46:34.160which is a restoration of the American Republic and more like an interregnum between a nascent and then a mature Trumpism, right?
00:46:42.580like this is not the restoration of a normal functioning democracy. It is a time where the
00:46:49.800old order sort of revived a little before it was finally killed. Because even if, say somehow they
00:46:56.420pull it out and a Democrat is sworn in as the president next January, that is also a scenario
00:47:03.260that kind of merely delays the inevitable, right? Because the constitutional crisis remains. You've
00:47:09.040got a judiciary that's captured by Republican extremists. You have an executive that they have
00:47:17.220really weakened, even as if they have expanded the president's power to like straight up commit
00:47:22.560crimes. They have really lessened his ability to make policy. Murder is fine, regulation not.
00:47:27.740Yes, exactly. And you have a Congress that everybody knows doesn't do anything,
00:47:34.200right, that is incapable of actual law and policymaking. So this is a constitutional crisis
00:47:41.240that is much bigger than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, or for that matter, Donald Trump, right?
00:47:48.180We are lurching towards the failure of our form of government that this election itself cannot
00:47:53.920heal. And Joe Biden is just, you know, throwing sand in the gears, making sure
00:47:59.580that this slide into authoritarianism happens as quickly as possible.
00:48:04.200God, that's depressing. I mean, nothing here is not depressing, but that is particularly depressing.
00:48:08.260And I mean, the way that like these institutions can be hijacked, right?
00:48:12.700I mean, like this is what this is, right?0.98
00:48:13.980Like you have John Roberts kind of doing basically pirate shit with the court.0.91
00:48:20.380You've got Donald Trump, who already kind of has indicated that he will not, you know, abide by any constitutional safeguards and that he has the enablers to make that possible.0.99
00:48:31.000But then you also have Joe Biden, who frankly, after miming the institutionalist for years, is showing his kind of like, you can either have me be the pilot of this plane or I'm going to crash into the goddamn mountain kind of thing.0.96
00:48:44.880And you're like, shit, like, that's not good if, like, all these institutions just kind of basically fuse with, sorry, but the narcissists that happen to, like, have fused with them, right?0.89
00:48:57.060Like, this is, you know, I don't understand how anyone who believes in strong institutions looks at that and thinks, right, like, why do we have political institutions if not to say, oh, the person who is doing the job seems to be no longer be totally up for it.0.99
00:49:11.000Let's talk about how we can get someone else in that job, right?
00:49:13.680Like, that's, I mean, there are other reasons to get rid of kings, but that's a big one, right?
00:49:19.400Like, oh, I'm sorry, a king thinks he's a horse.
00:49:21.440So I think this war is going to go terribly.
00:49:23.440It's like, no, you don't have to do that in a democracy.
00:49:26.500But like, well, it turns out that like the heartbeat of octogenarians seems to be like the number one thing keeping our institutions going.
00:49:36.160And like, that's, it's not a sign of, not a sign of health, it seems to me.
00:49:39.660No. And like, listen, I want to dwell very briefly before we wrap up on the fiction that Joe Biden and his campaign seem to want us to believe that that guy will be president at 86.
00:51:01.140You now have a Donald Tusk, a government prime minister who is taking pretty bold steps to try and reverse that.
00:51:08.980Now he has the EU sort of as a framework to work with, but I know people in poli-sci world are looking at it with great interest because it's like, oh, this is the first time someone's really trying to be like, how do we unwind this?
00:51:22.240And there are some fairly obvious lessons there, I think, that Americans and that Joe Biden, frankly, has not been willing to heed.
00:51:30.380Like one thing that he does is he does use some of the illiberal powers that his predecessor had taken for himself and uses them to kind of reestablish norms, right?
00:51:41.680Like, which I think, you know, that this would argue for something like court packing for something, something like that.