The Brown Pundit's Brown, I am back with Richard H. I. Dude, I don't know, I can't do the last name also here with I ideally might jump in at some point, but. But but but, Richard, we just had an election in the United States of America. Did we just have a result or not? I want to ask you just a general specific questions about the returns or the results of the demographic patterns.

But what is your point? Estimate that there will be a, quote unquote, coup in the United States in the next three months, two months, two and a half months?

I think it's very unlikely. I mean, I think that, look, Trump is has never done anything that radical. I mean, he said that if you just go by what he's saying, you'd think he would have pulled out of all American alliances and he would have done a thousand different things that are sort of just outside the norm, particularly when he's opposed by his own party and people in his administration. And, you know, even the Republican senators today, James Lankford and some others, not just Romney and the normal people, are sort of inching away from his position that he really won the election.

So I don't know how to handicap it, but I'd say the odds of not having a transition to a Biden administration is pretty low. All right, that's what I figured out, that that aligns well with what my own intuitions.

So in terms of the results, I guess, what was your biggest surprise?

It was much closer than I thought it would be. I mean, I'm a believer in the polls. I mean, I know they're not perfect, but generally, you know, the people who are pollsters, they get paid. That's their full time job to figure this stuff out. They have skin in the game. So their reputation depends on it. So, you know, they can make mistakes. It's hard. I mean, you have one hundred fifty million plus votes to get that within a few percentage is no trivial task, but their record is pretty good.

You know, people don't you know, people have maybe too high of expectations, but usually they're off by for four or five. They were they were off by that in the national polls, but much closer for for Trump in the Midwestern states. And so they were wrong and sort of the same pattern that they were wrong in 2016, which people didn't really expect. And so these states like Ohio and Idaho are I'm sorry, Ohio and Iowa people thought they'd be tossups and then they ended up being Trump plus seven or Trump plus eight, basically same thing as 2016.

And then these other states, Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which we thought wouldn't be all that close, ended up actually being close. Now, there's a little bit of a mirage because the the returns came in on election night and everyone who was paying attention to this stuff actually knew that they were going to count the same day ballots first and the same day ballots we knew from the polls were going to be overwhelmingly for Trump. So it's a little bit of a mirage about how off the polls were when the when everything is counted, they're not going to be that bad.

But they were off in the same way that we that they were in 2016. And that's concerning for pollsters. That means there's something probably there that, you know, that it's going to be hard to figure out. And, you know, a lot of it. If the other thing about the result that really, really struck me is, you know, a lot has happened since twenty sixteen.

So I was one of the people who believe that Biden is just a much better candidate than Hillary. And if you look at things like your approval rating versus Hillary Clinton and, you know, just likeability in these things, Biden was a much better candidate. Trump did poorly on the coronavirus. The vast majority of Americans believe that there was you know, there's other things going on, like after the George for Floyd protests, the country's become more woak. So I just thought based on that, you would see maybe a bigger swing towards Biden than we saw four years, you know, independently.

But what the polls said and the polls agreed with that. So I thought it made a lot of intuitive sense to me. But it wasn't that big of a swing. Right in the states, in the Midwest went from Biden, Trump winning by a point or two to Biden winning by three or four.

And that makes me think that, you know, politics in this country are pretty preferences are pretty sticky, not a lot changes from election to election based on circumstances. OK, so here is the thing. That, I won't say, was surprising to me because I kind of you could kind of see that it was happening, but. I think an interesting. Notable thing about the election returns is, of course. Trump ended up doing significantly better with Hispanic and even black voters than rednecks Latin backs, right?

Well, actually, they don't they don't actually like that.

So Latinos or however you say it. So Trump did a lot better with those voters. In fact, if you trust the exit polls, which granted there are some issues with the exit polls.

All right, so you know you know, the issue with the exit polls and the Latisse is that, you know, I don't totally trust the exit polls. We all your political science, Richard, you know how that works. But if you look at the swings in results and returns, they're pretty striking in the Rio Grande Valley of South Florida. There's even been some analysis in cities like Houston and in areas like Massachusetts where, you know, precincts that had more Latinos or latex or whatever you want to call them definitely were more Trump friendly, that expectation.

Whereas, you know, like white suburban areas, it was a mixed record. But definitely like in Texas, it's very obvious. You look at the Texas results and it was the white people that were striking out against white supremacy basically is like where all the white women at. That is where the swing against Trump happens. All the Austin, the suburbs around Australia have too many suburbs, suburbs around Houston, suburbs around Dallas was really striking. And that you see the southern area of Texas, which is traditionally strongly Democrat.

It was far less Democrat. So it went from deep red to an all light red.

So, I mean, whatever the exit polls say, you know, the race is flipping in South Florida. That was obviously happening.

So I guess what I'm looking at Hannah Jones is trying to tell us is that Latinos, people, brown skinned Mexican Americans in Brownsville are politically white supremacist.

Yeah, I guess so. Just to complete my thought to Trump, Trump did better with. Minority groups, I think, than any GOP president since maybe nineteen sixty, so he did pretty well and a lot of people have been celebrating that. Of course, the difference between this time and last time is despite doing so much better with those groups, he still lost. Right, because he did as you as you mentioned, he did slightly worse with white voters.

And there are more white voters in the country and they tend to be. The swing states are disproportionately filled with non Hispanic whites as compared to Hispanic voters in particular, other than other than Florida. So that, you know, I think that's kind of an interesting thing, because you could see it in the campaign Trump last time in 2016. Immigration was one of his big issues. He didn't really talk about it almost at all this time, even though, you know, the Biden campaign had made a number of potentially politically awkward promises.

What they they're going to do no deportations for, I don't know, 100 hundred days or something and repeal all this stuff, repeal to remain in Mexico policy, other things like that. And then, of course, he he did he had a kind of weird back and forth messaging where on the one hand Trump was he was the law and order candidate. He didn't like the riots and all that sort of stuff. But at the same time, he was hitting Joe Biden for authoring the nineteen ninety four crime bill and touting his criminal justice reform.

And it's possible to square that circle.

Right. You know, as an analytical matter. But I wonder. Just in terms of political messaging, some some of it seemed kind of like an awkward fit, and so I wonder what that means for the ability of the GOP to create a winning majority going forward. Yeah, I'm fascinated by the immigration question and the issue it played in the election or didn't play, so twenty sixteen immigration was the main issue for Trump. He came down the escalator and that was his very virgin controversy was the first thing he said was they were you know, rapists are coming over the border, people like Ann Coulter.

And I think people like Breitbart, a Drudge, I think they threw in with Trump, they threw in with Trump based on that issue, a lot of the populist right energy and a lot of people who got banned from Twitter since then. We're really just caring about the immigration issue more than anything. And then if you look at policy, he's I think, you know, I don't I'm skeptical of this idea that Trump changed the GOP a lot or has been governing unlike a typical Republican administration.

But everything he could do, I'm not going to say everything, but he did a lot through the administrative state to slow down immigration. And it was even before covid net migration to the US had plummeted. I don't have the numbers offhand, but he you know, if you just want four fewer foreigners into this country, Trump was doing the things he could do directly, like refugees. That's in the executive branch. He can set the the number and brought it down from something like one hundred thousand to fifteen thousand.

So if you understand the Trump, you know, if you understand Trump the Trump administration's position on immigration by what actually did, it was hawkish on immigration. And you might think, well, Hispanics, Hispanics might not like that. You might you might think that. I mean, I don't know if that's that's necessarily what they vote on. But the rhetoric. Right, the rhetoric just completely disappeared. I look at his rallies every once in a while and there's just nothing about immigration.

And I think Biden maybe didn't want to talk about that issue either, because maybe it wasn't his most popular issue. The Democrats have gone pretty far left on it. And so there's one you know, one way to look at this is rhetoric, sort of impressions matter more than reality. And that's something I've always believed about politics. Trump is seen as a populist, non college whites like him better his economic policies. I don't think there's much difference between him and Paul Ryan except when foreigners are involved.

He doesn't like trade and he doesn't like immigration because it involves foreigners. Besides that, it's basically it's basically Paul Ryan's agenda. The only the only legislation he passed during his whole first term was the only major piece of legislation was a tax cut. Right. A corporate tax cut, the high income tax cut. And the second thing he tried to do that just fell by by one vote in the Senate was to try to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.

So so I don't think there's anything populist about his economic agenda except immigration, if you if you want to consider that. But Trump is still seen as this populist hero. He still liked by lower income whites and disliked by college educated whites. And it just shows how much and Hispanics, I would say, are sort of like that in the sense that Trump was, I think, as tough on immigration as you can expect the executive branch to be.

But then he just stopped talking about immigration and then, you know, twenty, twenty, he gets a larger share of the Hispanic vote. I think there's a lesson in there. How much about how much our politics is reality and how much of electoral politics. Politics is just about image and PR.

Yeah, I mean, Richard, I would feel like you come back to cynicism. I do wonder so I listen to an interview recently Glenn Lowry had with I don't remember his name, but it's ethnographer sociologist who studied working class. I think it was a Appalachian community and Italian American community that flipped from Democrat, historically very, very Democrat to Trump in 2016.

And a lot of the discussion had to do with his personal affect, where he just strikes a lot of educated people as uncouth in a very visceral way.

And, you know, he reflects kind of a macho on our culture, a bullying attitude that I think really, really turns off a lot of college educated women, whether they are Republicans or not.

Personally, I have talked to many women. I know many women where their reaction to Trump is less about policy and more about emotions, about reacting to the way he behaves, the way he talks, the way he frankly struts and prances in public.

And so it's a little weird because, you know, I know Romney had a pretty hawkish immigration policy, but he did get the same kind of reaction. And I think partly it's just the affect, the flip side of that, as I believe that that affect is also attractive to working class males of all races. Now, there are differences among the races in terms of party affiliation and culture that cause of these, you know, just variation and whether they're going to vote Republican or not.

But definitely with young Latino males, with Latinos, working class Latino males, it seems like I think they're attracted to Trump's personal affect and his persona, whatever his views are, is it they're attracted to Trump's persona or has the Democratic Party, the way it's gone, become sort of repulsive to working class men?

I mean, there's I talked to some Richard Richard, working class man. That's that's a code word for toxic masculinity.

Yeah. Those working with those working class. Yes, I talked to I mean, I talked to like I talked to like, you know, people I knew growing up who didn't go to college. And the gender stuff is so huge for them. They'll say stuff like, oh, you know, there's a kid up and let my kid choose gender. Ha ha ha.

It's like so absurd to them that, oh, that's that is problematic af. Well that's that's what they say. I'm not, I'm not. Yeah.

But even quoting that if it got a good I said well you know I was just say they have problematic views on gender and I don't know if it was Trump or because the chef, the working class, you know, the white working class shift towards the the Republicans has been happening for a while.

And, you know, we all know about the Great Awakening. We know that what know all the stuff, all this identity politics stuff has accelerated in recent years. And the other thing, I mean, you could look at is not just Trump, but Trump actually underperformed, I think most of the Republicans in Senate races, Joni Ernst in Iowa, Susan Collins is especially, you know, so the Republicans did a lot better in the Senate than people thought.

And I just wonder how much of it is just anti Democrat rather than something about Trump.

So one thing that I think Trump has brought to politics, which is new ish or just kind of I mean, it's sort of a return to form, and that is the element of politics is spectacle. And it's kind of like entertainment or show.

Helen Andrews is a writer writers, not an American conservative.

She had an essay many, I guess, like six, seven years ago called bloodless moralism, kind of defining the nature of the modern technocratic left or whatever.

And one of the things that she one of the points that she makes in there is that if you go back to the 19th century, early 20th century, one of the ways that politics was able to engage working class voters was by making it entertaining. I mean, she talks this is back before anyone was talking about Trump, but she talks about these rallies where there would be an almost carnival atmosphere and bombastic speakers and things that are not boring. Right.

The way that a lot of politics, particularly policy heavy stuff, is boring to a lot of people. And I don't think Trump is unique in that all of these things. I think a lot of these things, I think you see.

Echoes or resemblances in other countries, but it definitely does seem like he has you know, the turnout in this election was really, really high. Trump has gotten the he is already gotten the second most votes of any presidential candidate ever. Right. It's just huge, all sorts of new people who had never voted before, I don't typically vote. They came out. Yeah, and I think that might be part of it is that people have talked about the game show or the reality TV aspect of the Trump presidency or whatnot, which is separate from any sort of policy thing.

It's just it's a new way to say that people who wouldn't ordinarily care or get engaged get engaged to it. And that is something that I see other people trying to pick up on mostly.

Yeah, well, but well, I got to say, Josia, twenty twenty four.

You know, I believe BITD will be a one term. All right. So things will be open. And, you know, in that light, I got it. You know, can you smell what the rock is cooking in twenty, twenty four?

I mean, I think it's really hard to deny that high probability that we're not going to go back to the pre celebrity era after Bidart. But who knows?

You know, it was a debate. I saw some Democrats debating this. If Trump had come along and our party would have worked, you know, we saw I always thought that, yeah, a lot of, you know, rich people are going to look at this and they're going to see the opportunity and they're going to say, you know, I'm rich, I'm famous. Maybe I can just swoop in here and do something. So we saw something similar to that with one Kanye West this election cycle, and it didn't work out well.

I think he's going to end up fifth place behind both the Green Party and the and the libertarian. So I don't know. I you know, I don't know if it's just celebrity or there's something about this particular man in this particular party at this particular moment.

But, Richard, to be fair, I'm assuming that the person that will get a nomination is not bipolar.

Yeah, well, I mean, he's got other problems, too.

He started he didn't even want, you know, like someone like someone like Schwarzenegger was a celebrity, but he also had a business background. So obviously, it's not going to be just any celebrity. I mean, Kim's butt is not going to be voted president of the. Well, maybe it would be, but you know what I'm saying? I mean, there needs to be some serious seriousness.

So, for example, like a whatever, Tom Selleck is not a celebrity anymore, but like Howard Schultz, Howard Schultz put up with just savaged in the media. I think this is a difference. This is an asymmetry between the parties and that Republicans don't trust institutions and don't trust their leaders. They don't think that's fair. That's fair. All right. Well, if The New York Times tear somebody apart, you know, it seems like the Democrats actually listen to that.

Well, Howard Schultz was also trying to mount a third party campaign, which is I mean, it never works. So so it's kind of it's a different I don't think Howard Schultz would have been able to successfully capture the nomination if he had chosen to run.

Well, but there wasn't there was a period where it looked like Mike Bloomberg was a was going to be able to swoop in and do well in the Democratic nomination, despite not being a Democrat and having said and done all sorts of things that Democrats hate and that that didn't ended up happening. But I don't know that that you couldn't see something like that if you had someone who was a little bit more it was a little bit more aligned.

Well, I mean, arguably, arguably, you know, McCain tried to make the case that Obama was a celebrity candidate because Obama did become a celebrity in 2004. He did, you know, like whatever like fire people's imaginations before he even was elected to the Senate. And his Senate stint, as we all know, was very, very short lived. So I think that that's kind of a hybrid. And Obama was definitely an exceptional politician insofar as I mean, he won Iowa both times.

You know, I think he took thing. He took Ohio both times.

He lost North Carolina and Indiana the second time. But I mean, maybe there was a particular conditions that we don't know about. But maybe he was just a really good politician who was good at packaging being a reasonable liberal, which is not AOC, you know, I mean, so at Biden seems kind of of the lesser just almost out of it. So we don't have a politician like that on the left. There's a lot of geriatric politicians in the Democratic Party.

I want to go back to the Rio Grande Valley. One of the reports that I have said is the turnaround for Trump in the Rio Grande Valley was partly not voters. So he brought a lot of people to the polls who traditionally in South Texas did not vote. They were excited by him. They were energized by him. Could about the stimulus checks, could have been his support for oil and gas or just could have.

Yeah, or it could be his celebrity, you know. Yeah, I mean, the Rio Grande Valley, the Hispanic numbers, you don't need to exit polls for that. I mean, I posted something on Twitter from The Wall Street Journal the other day, 20 border counties shifted at least 10 points to Trump since twenty sixteen four shifted over 20 points. So it was it was massive. I don't know how do we know that received that that they were nonvoters coming out?

I mean, it seems possible, but I think I think what I was seeing reported was the numbers were too high based on previous years.

Right.

So, like the number of voters were coming out was higher than.

So basically the difference between Trump's twenty sixteen and twenty twenty was like a greater turnout of these non, non, non voters.

So, I mean, I could follow that up. But that's that's what I heard on on election night. That's what people were hearing from just the polls and stuff like that, that it was just people who are excited about Trump. And they weren't very political. They were just excited about Trump. You know, it's sort of like I was there was all these articles before the before the election about what was going on in the media, in Cuban Spanish language media in South Florida.

There was one from Politico about how sort of Kuhnen and the conspiracy theories. And, you know, the media has sort of a broad definition of conspiracy theory, like talking about George Soros and all this stuff. And apparently, according to the mainstream media reports, these things were huge in the South Florida media. And it sort of reminds me of during the George Floyd protests, where, like the countries where a lot of people spoke English, had these major protests and they were basically just repeating the slogans that were coming out of the United States.

And while people a little more culturally distant maybe were not and you sort of maybe see that within the United States, where white people are sort of subject to the mass media, and then you have these groups and the the Rio Grande Valley is more isolated from mainstream American culture. And same with South Florida than a lot of a lot of other Hispanic communities. And so it just might be something like that. It's like you need to speak English. You need to be plugged in.

And the more plugged in you are to this like broad, you know, New York Times, Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC culture, the more likely you are to be horrified by Trump, because that's just what you're consuming. Yeah, so I guess I guess a question that I have, though, is like, so we have these results, we have a likely Republican Senate. We're not 100 percent sure. But it seems like, you know, it's not like the two Senate races in Georgia right now that are going into runoff are independent probabilities.

So if you assume there's a seventy five percent chance each of them are going to win, probably they're kind of joint probabilities. Even so, less than seventy five percent. But, you know, definitely above 50. I think the prediction markets are giving it like 70.

I don't know. So whereas I mean, you've got the Republican Party, which has this weird mix coalition that Josia was talking about, that you have the Democratic Party, which is like a mix of like these old school Sadaa left people like Joe BITD and then the the the the WOAK faction, the Kennedy ites or the Kendy. Yeah. What how do you say, you know, that want to basically crucify white America on a cross of white supremacy or something.

I don't know, you know, what's going on in the next couple of years.

Like what do you see as a political scientist? Because the election results are fresh and I feel like people are just a little shell shocked right now. Disoriented knows, but no one is running in a particular direction yet. It's I mean, I'm fascinated to see what happens, for example, when so, you know, we certainly assume Biden comes in legislation. You know, if it's going to be a divided Congress with a Republican Senate and a Democratic House, you're not going to pass legislation anyway, could even pass legislation when the Republicans had full control.

You know, before the election, we thought there was a chance that Democrats would pick up the Senate with a few seats to spare. And maybe you wouldn't even have to rely on Joe Manchin. You could talk about quarterbacking, which I never thought was a real possibility. But more likely, you could have thought you could have talked about getting rid of the filibuster and then you could have done some stuff on taxes. You could have done some stuff on climate change.

You could have done some stuff to make it easier to vote. And people like Ezra Klein and sort of the box liberal side was getting really excited about this. And I think their hopes were sort of dashed by by the Senate races. So I think we're going to I mean, I think we're going to see a lot of gridlock. I don't think anyone has I don't think I haven't seen a good contrarian case for what would happen. You know, there's sort of this, you know, if the Democrats just get 50 and Republicans at 50, Kamala's tiebreaker, you can see overwhelming pressure coming on Joe Manchin, you know, whether he gives into it or not.

But if there's 50 50, two Republican senators, it'll be fascinating to see what happens. For example, if there's a Supreme Court seat opens up in Biden's first year with the rules on the Supreme Court become more and more sort of realpolitik, less and less about paying attention to norms, you can imagine them holding the seat, the entire board.

I don't think that would be that, because I do have a question about that. What you guys both you think because Jose is a lawyer, so maybe he's got some lawyer. I mean, you're a lawyer, too, right, Richard?

I have a JD. I've never practiced law. OK, so I'm sorry I'm three years.

Yeah, I'm outnumbered here with the JD people, but J.D. squared, so let's do so.

52 Republicans, 48 Democrats.

How is it not that Murkowski, Collins and Manchin will not be able to just rob the Senate? Well, yeah, so I guess there are there are two things. One is that on certain issues. They may be able to do that. You may recall back during the. Late years of the Bush administration, there were all these Senate gangs, the Gang of 14, the Gang of Eight, that sort of thing, and those were basically collections of moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans who would get who together held the decisive balance of power and they would get together and come up with some compromise or something on a particular issue to try and try and get that through.

So you could see a return to that. I think on individual issues. It is the case, however, that Mitch McConnell will continue to be the Senate majority leader if there's more Republicans than there are Democrats. And if there's if it's 50 50, then Chuck Schumer will effectively be the. Majority leader and there's a fair amount of power over agenda setting that comes from that because control over what can come to the floor is largely in his hands, formal de facto, if not Dajarra, and then the committees he has control over, like who?

Who is going to be the chairs of the committees? It's going to be the senior members of the majority party. And so that those are going to be real power blocs regardless of whatever, you know, centrist group comes together with. Yeah, I mean, it's important to ask what the Senate is important for, so it becomes much more substantial, their leverage becomes much more substantial.

In the case that the Democrats actually win the Senate than mentioned mentioned becomes a very important person then because he's you know, you have a Democratic president, you have a whole House of Representatives and you have exactly 50 Democratic senators. You can pass that. You can pass things. And I think you could get some you know, you would have to do something procedurally radical to do things that are popular. So I think Manchin would probably would like to do a lot of populist things like bigger stimulus, you know, covering people for health care, anything on economic issues.

I think he's going to be with the Democratic Party on that. But the thing is, to get to that point, you have to eliminate the filibuster, right, for these for these big legislative changes. And he I think he's come out and he's actually said not only know quarterbacking, but know eliminating the filibuster so that Casey wouldn't be able to you know, then you're just not going to get the stuff. The Republicans will just filibuster everything. And so, you know, what it matters for, I think is for judges.

I mean, it's going to be huge if you get and you mentioned will, by and large, go along with Biden's judges. I don't think he voted. I don't think he voted. He voted against. Yeah, he voted. He bought a difference with the Democrats on on these things on there might be some battles over over cabinet appointments. There's discussion over that. So that'll matter to some, you know, Manchin far. But if it's 50, if it's fifty to forty eight, which looks like more likely than not in the Republican side, then it's just gridlock all the way down where, you know, you say, well, why don't they, why don't they, why don't they just run the Senate, these three centrists?

Well, first of all, they don't agree on they don't agree with each other that much on the on the judges, which is the most important thing coming out of the Senate. They tend to be on the they tend to be on the same side. But if it's Republican control, fifty to forty eight, then you're not even getting legislation. You're not going to even be voting on anything. Right. Everything is going to be foreign policy and what you can do on immigration through the through the administrative straight and then and then judges, you know, judges will be fascinating to see what going what's going on.

But, you know, their power is going to be limited regardless because the Senate's only going to do two or three things. All right, let's let's let's talk about the big T. So do we know do we all agree that that he is unlikely to be able to flip the election back to his favor and that the next president will be Joe Biden?

And I gave I mean, I said, yes, I think it's going to be Trump, I mean, I wonder if Jesse has a different view. So looking at the map, in order to prevail, Trump would have to flip three states, right?

Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania is not enough, Pennsylvania plus Arizona is not enough, he needs he needs some combination of of three states and it does not seem it's hard for me to see how that would happen.

I, I, I have noted that if you look at the betting markets, they still give Trump about a 10 to 15 percent chance of winning.

And, you know, people always triggered me.

Yeah, right. Well, you know, people have different opinions about how how much weight to give that. But it's certainly like, you know, even even 10 to 15 percent, that's pretty small maybe in the grand scheme of things. And that is probably the metric that you could point to that, you know, gives Trump the best shot.

Right. So I think it's probably I mean, I would say it's pretty unlikely.

However, I do think that we have to remember that we're still in twenty twenty.

And if somehow something crazy were to happen that Trump were to end up winning, I don't know that that would be the craziest thing that happened in twenty twenty. So I guess I guess that would be my perspective. Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about mechanisms of how you would do this, so one way you're not going to do it is have recounts and all these states and then all these states get overturned by the recount and then Trump wins.

You have to do it in several states, usually recounts there's going to be a recount in Georgia, maybe elsewhere. And recounts generally don't change that many votes. They change a few hundred while these are ten thousand or more. And I think the Georgia's the closest in Georgia is is something like fourteen thousand votes. So that's not going to happen. You know, there's a way where, like people like Mark Levin in these people who say you go to the state legislatures and you look at the Constitution and it says the state legislature shall the state legislature should appoint the electors.

And I guess that could be interpreted by I haven't read the legal analysis, but might just reading on the surface was like, you don't even need the governor. So that matters because I think in Michigan, maybe in Pennsylvania, too. But I know at least in Michigan, the the Republicans control the the legislature, but not the not the governor. Right. Yeah, that's true.

Of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They're all OK.

Yeah. So OK. So that's all you need is to convince a bunch of state Republicans and arguably. Right. Did you do it. You a state Republican politicians now you know, so that's that's the word. If it was going to happen, that's the only way it's even imaginable. I, I, I just can't imagine. But, you know, there's nothing like a lot from logic, logical or like, you know, there's no absolute force that makes that impossible or unthinkable.

All they have to do is sort of buy into the, you know, buy into the you know, buy into the arguments made in the echo chamber and do it, you know, what would happen to the rest of the country. You know, the left would go to the streets. They'd make the George Floyd protest look like nothing. And I don't see how we can fight horrible from there. But, you know, it's funny to think that I just sort of and the courts would have to uphold that.

The courts would have to say, well, that reading of the Constitution is correct and it's OK to do this. And you'd have to imagine, like the governor and the AG of these states is not going to like, you know, try to resist somehow it'll be a mess. It's not like legislators can do it themselves that easily. And you can't lose many legislators either, because some of them are, you know, some of them there's obviously Democrats and these legislators do and they might not go along with it.

But if there was going to be a path going forward, you know, that would be it. And I think everyone focusing on the recounts and these lawsuits that aren't going to mean anything are sort of missing the point. You know, I don't think it's 10, 15 percent, whatever the betting markets say, you know, maybe there's like a one to five percent chance that if it does happen, I think that's the path that's going to have to be.

All right. So let's let's assume that that Trump. Does not win this election. There is talk now Reuters is reporting he's telling people he's going to run at twenty, twenty four.

I am not a political scientist. I have no deep knowledge, but my own suspicion and belief is he will be seventy eight years old. He is a rich man. He doesn't seem like he enjoyed all aspects of the presidency. He did enjoy some aspects, but it seems like he enjoyed being a reality television celebrity that was cashing in a lot more. Frankly, even if he was less powerful on paper, I am skeptical that he will ultimately decide to run again in twenty twenty four, especially in light of the political ambitions of Junior.

What do you guys think?

Oh, I disagree. I look at this man and everything about him tells me he's going to want to he you know, people say he doesn't want to be president. He just wants the he just wants the attention. It's like, yeah, being president is a great way to get attention. Right. I mean, he's he's just so driven by, you know, this sort of spite towards people. He thinks he's wronged. He's got this sort of uncontrollable urge for attention and praise and vindication.

He'll be old. Yeah. But I mean, he might not be making sense all the time. That doesn't appear to be a handicap given the given the two candidates in this election cycle. So, yeah, I would be I'd be pretty surprised if health permitting, he didn't run.

Yeah. And I also think just given Trump's personality, if he were to side. No, I don't think I'm going to run. And then Don Junior were to get in and start doing well. I feel like he would feel a compulsion that, oh, well, if people are supportive supporting me. So I need to come in. The the one issue that I see for Trump is once he is out of office, I think that there's going to be an attempt to prosecute him for various stuff.

They'll come up. You know, there's all sorts of things that people have claimed and for cynical and nonsensical reasons, I think there's a high likelihood that he may spend the next couple of years dealing with that. And it's possible I guess it's possible he could even go to prison. And you can, of course, run for president from prison. It's been done, but. That could complicate things you wouldn't be able to do the rallies, which he really likes if you're in jail.

Well, so I have a question about Trump and his fans. He obviously has a really close connection to his base. But, you know, this wasn't he was a celebrity. He was famous. He was well-known in his popular.

But before he won the Republican primaries, it wasn't as clear that he was, you know, the like you know, he was like a Reagan like figure that Republicans are going to cite forever.

I mean, is it possible that once he's out of office, his appeal is going to fade for a lot of these voters because he doesn't have the power that he did. He's not the official leader of the party. I think there's a lot of prestige and being a former president, so, you know, he has I mean, if you have if you're in a primary and you have 30 percent, 40 percent die hards, I mean, in a split primary, that's more than if that's what he had and that's what he had in twenty sixteen.

And, you know, I, you know, I this is I mean, this is a unique situation. We don't have a lot of examples of a president losing his first term in recent history and coming back and trying to win again. But I think that in 2016, a mistake a lot of people made was saying, oh, look, Fox News is going to attack Trump. The people on the establishment are expressing their discomfort. Eventually, his support is going to melt away.

And I don't think people realize that he has a deep, genuine connection with the Republican base that other people, that other people can't match these people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, who they barely even like, if they like at all. And then on top of that, you get so he's still that guy and he's still got he's still got he's going to have the prestige of actually being president. The, you know, sort of the party line is becoming among Republican circles that he won the election but was cheated out of it by the by the deep state.

So he goes and he goes in with a lot of advantages. You know, it sort of feels like he's not going to be a good candidate. And when he's more senile and four years after, you know, after losing. But, you know, so you're assuming some kind of self-preservation among Republican primary voters. But that's what people assume, that 2016 everyone, every single every single person who was talking about politics said there's no way Trump could win.

And so you think if they were, you know, had this sort of rational self-preservation of their party and wanting to win, the Republicans wouldn't have picked him in 2016. They did. So, yeah, I don't I don't see, you know, I don't see a lot standing in his way on. I mean, to be honest, I you know, you're you're going to have to have somebody at some point sort of pierce that bubble and say, you know, we need to move beyond Trump ism and he's got a hold on the base.

And it's not everybody in the Republican Party, but it's enough to be a highly cohesive, you know, substantial minority, maybe plurality. And you can easily you can easily ride that to the to the nomination.

Yeah. And it is the case that Trump is in a somewhat unusual position where even if he officially loses and is out of office, a lot of Republicans, it doesn't it doesn't feel like he lost. Right on an emotional level the way that it typically does. And a lot of Republicans will legitimately believe that he really won. Right. So he doesn't you know, the thing that. People would always say about the possibility of Trump losing and then coming back again later as well, his big his big thing is that he's a winner.

And then he'll if he loses, then he'll be a loser. And he somehow he somehow seems to have made it where he's a winner, even though he didn't win. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, so. You know, we would talk about like horse race stuff, politics, personality, let's let's go back to our policy and just ideology.

Is ideology ever going to be a thing? I mean, you know, Republicans had the Tea Party of 2010, Contract with America in nineteen ninety four. The Democrats have all this great New Deal. These all these like, you know, they always got policy ideas, you know, nationalize everything, socialized everything, whatever. Abortions for everyone across the country, free, you know, I don't know Republicans tax cuts for every plutocrat on the face of the earth, you know.

But I mean, so what do you guys think about the policy implications of the next four years? Yeah, there's going to be gridlock. But like, what is the ideology of the Republicans? The Democrats are going to be are they going to keep going? They're, you know, divergent directions. The Republicans kind of be more, maybe more towards downscale worker downscale, you know, demographics. So chill out on some of the economic libertarianism and, you know, maybe not be so churchy because I think they have a lot more secular working class white voters now that the Democrats, are they going to go forward because the awakening is going to burst?

I mean, we don't have enough evidence right now whether the Wilkening will end with the by the election. But I mean, that's what some people are hoping. Some people are predicting. What do you guys think?

Well, I've seen little evidence of Republicans actually becoming, you know, a Worker's Party. I mean, just not to repeat myself, but the legislative priorities that were undertaken during the Trump administration were tax cuts. And I don't think this is necessarily bad policy. I'm not saying they should be a workers party. I'm not not expressing an opinion on that either way. But I think it's been a lot more substance than style. I think the immigration stuff is a good way to sort of appeal to people who just don't like immigration for cultural reasons and people who see it as an economic issue.

So I think you're probably going to get a hard line on immigration enforcement. But besides that, I don't see you know, I don't see the Republicans changing and I don't see an honest I don't see them as seeing an incentive to change. I think they think if they had you know, it's amazing how polarized we are because, you know, the how a little change between 2016 and 2020, despite all the things that happen in the world, if, you know, it's probably true that the Republicans maybe could do marginally better if they shifted their economics.

But the people, you know, people sort of have a hard time. And I say the people at the top Republican Party actually believe in small government economic libertarianism. It's not like a trick just for just for the rich. You know, it doesn't appeal to donors, but a lot of them are true believers in this stuff. And, you know, I don't see indication of that changing. I feel the same way about foreign policy, where it's been more talk about change rather than rather than substance.

So this is an admission against interest. Since I work for a think tank, I do policy, but I think I agree with Richard.

It seems like policy from a political electoral perspective is a lot less important.

Than people at least thought in the past. So what you know, what you campaign on? Is doesn't necessarily have to match how you govern, and even many, if you think about what were some of the big issues right there, things like. Should athletes stand for the American flag, right, that was a big polarizing political issue, really doesn't have anything to do, like there's nothing the government's going to do about that one way or the other.

Even some of the text censorship stuff, you know, has tended to be a little bit policy lite in terms of what you're actually going to do about it. I guess there are there's a little bit of stuff that people talk about. But one area where I think it would probably help the Republicans at the margin if they were able to do something is health care. That is obviously an issue that is kind of. It's hurt them to the extent that Democrats have been able to say, well, you want to remove protections for people with precondition pre-existing conditions, and the Republicans have not, I think, been able to come up with a.

Successful counter message on that. But, Richard, was it was it you who tweeted that it would have been better for the Republicans if they instead of fighting Biden's laptop, they'd found the laptop with their health care plan?

No, that wasn't me. No, they yeah, they didn't have a health care plan. But and, you know, Democrats really think they have the advantage here, because I remember Amy, we Barrett harrying. They made it all about the you know, the very unlikely possibility that she would help overturn the Affordable Care Act instead of the abortion stuff, or they might even have the majority or plurality on that. But they thought health care was much safer for them.

I think if you look at public opinion polls, like I think this is the party, the argument is that their whole lives are looking at public opinion polls and you find that the public opinion polls, people are far to the left of where the Democratic Party, where the Democrats are right, not just the Republicans. Some people point out Paul Krugman tweeted, you know, I understand less and less as I grow older or something like that. Trump won Florida easily, but the state also easily passed a 15 dollar per hour minimum wage.

Like how is this how does this even compute? So you could say, well, the Republicans can move left on health care and they could be a little better off. But I almost feel like it doesn't matter. Right. If on a scale of one to 100, the Republicans are 40, the Democrats are 60, the average voter. Seventy five higher being more socialist and Republicans go from 40 to 50. But people are not paying attention to the fact that Republicans are all the way over at 40, I don't know, 40 to 50 or to 60.

It matters. I just think this cultural stuff just sort of dominates. And, you know, I don't know how much it matters. All else being equal probably better to be for the four point five percent of voters who actually might think about the health care plan and might read about it. But, you know, if I was advising just a politician to how to maximize your vote, you know, that's not where I'd go. I wouldn't I just wouldn't go policy.

Well, I mean, I do wonder if the culture will change so much by twenty, twenty four that if Trump doesn't run it, Josh Hawley introduces himself as the debate and he just says, my pronouns are he him, you know, because I feel I feel like I know you use nonconforming pronouns.

I think. Yeah. Like maybe maybe Marco Rubio will come out and say he's genderqueer.

You know, I did pick Marco for a reason, but now, you know, I do wonder about like what's going on with the culture because I feel like, you know, between twenty sixteen to twenty twenty.

Am I wrong or is it just who I interact with because of my, you know, college educated, blah, blah, blah, you know, socioeconomic circumstance that I feel like the culture is much more radical and far to the left and kind of pushing in my face like these anti-Bush zwar norms, way more than what Trump was elected. I mean, am I wrong?

And so next four years, like, is it going to get better? Is it going to get worse? Is it going to stay the way? Am I going to have to tattoo my pronouns to my forehead? I don't know.

The the pronouns thing is fascinating. I did a simple statistical analysis at the beginning of the Democratic Party primaries where I calculated how many of them were had their pronouns in their Twitter bio, how many didn't, and the ones who didn't have the pronouns in their bio were doing much better in the polls. Sanders and Sanders and Biden were the two big ones. And then come all, I think, and and Warren, of course, and Castro. And these people had, you know, had their pronouns, I don't know.

People assume, like, you know, it's interesting question how much? You know, there's a couple of theories of wackiness. Right? One is that a sort of this this is Chris Caldwell's argument in this book, The Age of Enlightenment, that it's our entitlement. I'm sorry that there is this you know, that there's a civil rights law. You know, they push stuff like training, diversity training. Corporations are afraid of lawsuits. And Trump, like, pushed back on that a little bit like near the end of his administration with the critical race theory, executive order.

And we went actually beyond critical race theory. I mean, I think that order was actually, you know, somebody who actually was paying attention, actually drafted that order.

And then, you know, there's a there's an idea sort of independent of politics, if it's independent of politics and policy doesn't matter much, then I think Republicans clearly just make it worse because they sort of unify the left and they give them Trump especially gives them a bogeyman. And the extent that it's independent of actual policy is just cultural stuff, then, you know, that's you know, it's it's as if anything, it's a it's a case for voting Democrat instead of Republican because they know the Republicans are just going to piss them off and then and then not do anything about it.

So it'll be interesting to see where it goes from here. I think it's maybe it's a way to test this theory because you're going to get the administrative state sort of putting the pedal to the metal a little bit and then but you're going to have Biden, this boring old white Democrat instead of Trump the supervillain and. So if it's just all a cultural phenomenon and not really about economics and government incentives, then you might expect it to come down a little bit.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I think that my guess is that it's probably a mix of both, I don't know, which is more dominant, the cultural or governmental stuff.

Biden Jizya does that well in the background. What is his PR. What is it he can.

Can you hear my my my my son is very high level.

Yeah. OK, very. He had. OK anyway. Go on. Yeah.

Let's not, let's not talk about pronouns for my son.

Yeah I get that. Yeah.

So I don't know that they're some of the stuff I expect to kind of burn itself out or backfire a little bit. You, I think you've already seen some of that with like early on Latin X also it takes Ruben Gallego, right.

Yeah.

Yeah exactly. Yeah. Lettings. There was maybe a flirtation with some of the, the violence and whatnot during in the summer and the and if it wasn't violence they only burned down buildings building.

That's not violence. If you burned down things.

Yeah right. Right. And you know, the whole defund the police movement, I think there's been a sense that even though Biden won, that hurt them, that hurt the Democrats and they may and also like a big issue with a lot of that stuff is you've seen the liberal mayors in these cities like Portland or St. Louis or whatever, who say, oh, I'm with the protesters. You know, I agree with all the aims and whatnot. And then the protesters start protesting them.

And I think Ted Wheeler has had to move houses, know a number of other places. These liberal mayors have had to like get security or other things. I can't imagine that that's that pleasant. So that part of it. I wonder if they might. Sour on or people might get it might get old or whatever, but there's that's kind of a more of a bottom up thing, you know, a street thing.

As opposed to what you see, like the WOAK capital or corporate weakness or whatever, the HRR type phenomenon, and if I had to guess, I I suspect that that will continue and. Probably even intensify. I mean, the fascinating thing about Portland, I was watching the mayoral mayoral election there, and Wheeler, you think, you know, if you're watching on TV what's happening in Portland, you think you might get a challenger from the right?

No, he actually got a challenger from the left and it was close. It was he won for 40.

And also there was a write in candidate from the far left. Really? Yeah. And that's. Yeah, that's what. Yeah. So that might have been that might have been the reason the Maoists lost because the Maoist was the Maoist or the capitalist roader.

That's incredible.

Yeah. Trump is not going to be re-elected. Trump is not going to change, is not going to change. Portland I that that's that's that's about the electorate there. Yeah, I mean, yeah, so I right, that was that was just so weird. That brings to mind the old H.L. Mencken line about how democracy means that the people will get to decide what they want and they should get it good and hard or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah, I I'm from Oregon. I, I totally 100 percent agree with that. I think Portland needs a taste of of Maoism to to never want Maoism again. That is my belief. I think they need to elect a far left mayor.

That usher, you know, they need a little bit of the Paris Commune to vaccinate themselves from this stuff because there's way too much, I don't know, tolerance, experimentation with this, like, you know, radical bohemianism. And it's just bohemian right now. But, you know, if they concretize it, that'll be that'll be some interesting times, some good TV, you know, I mean, it's like the best reality show ever. Portaledge twenty, twenty two crazy town.

But it doesn't look like it totally happened. We'll see.

You know, as we close out, I want to ask you, Richard, the Cassandre of our times, Peter Turchin, is predicting chaos in this decade, in our time of I have you can't see it see it right now because, you know, we're doing this audio. But I just grabbed a piece of paper and I took a pencil and I scrolled a chart.

You yeah. My tweet was quite a literature there.

So I have I have a chart with an x axis in a y axis. Now I have a label variety X, but the slope is very, very high.

And in fact, I see some exponential trends that you factor in with school enrollment has dropped in the last year or so. So, yeah, I have I haven't computed the third moment about the distribution, but I mean, it's partly because it's not really a function. I just close my eyes and pretended to draw Saloni.

And you know what, our thoughts are the listener. Can you give the context, some listener?

Can we just close out with a little boy?

Hey, did the pediatrician come on the line or, you know, I thought you were going better because he got a big write up in the Atlantic by grab what I just did. I don't know if it was friendly or skeptical, but he got a lot of attention. So Peter Church, it I mean, for those guys for those of you who don't know, is a guy who thinks that political instability and violence within societies goes in cycles. I think that's wrong.

I have a critique of church and in in my Twitter feed, which I think really you can share when you post this. And the also I have an article in The Washington Post on civil wars, and it's just not consistent with the Civil War literature. So we're just we're just having fun with church. And I have no problem with you know, as far as I know, he's a very, very nice man. I've never had interactions with them.

I'm I'm I'm friends with Peter. I can say that I've known him for a while and he is very Russian in his ability, ability to take alcohol.

You got to be, I guess, some of those some of those graphs. Perhaps he was, you know, I don't know, like what stadiums.

But I make it I mean, I will I will post the link to the tweets. I'm making fun of the grass partly because, like, you know, I like Peter. I like his theories. I found Richard's caricature of the graphs, one of the funniest things I've seen on Twitter the last couple of months, because he just drew some funny graphs.

It was like to look at this macro social trend. I just drew a dip it in the paper. You have x axis, which is time.

The the Y axis is just bad stuff.

If you follow the definition of what bad stuff is, can be anything from the polarization in the legislator to like civil war, to like crime to just about anything you want. So yeah, you could you can draw that and you could do the entire history of the United States civil war. And then it goes down and then, I don't know, Great Depression, World War two and then and then the nineteen seventies and then, you know, Trump twenty twenty.

That's that's basically Tahitians theory of course, of of course a straw man and having a little.

But it is, it is a cyclical theory. So he does things you can go back to several decades in the past and that we are due for in the 20 twenties for some, for some instability based on the fact that it hasn't happened since the nineteen seventies. Now, whether how you measure that instability, I mean everything seems crazy in twenty twenty. But if you look at like things like crime rates and you know however you would measure it, you know, it's hard to see what actually was going on, like why you would count like he comes riots, which we got a lot of thanks to the George Floyd stuff.

But you know, if you look at crime, for example, in the late 80s and early 90s was a lot worse than 20 twenties. And I don't think we're going to get a civil war. We didn't have one in the 70s. We're going to not have one today. So, you know, you've got to be careful how you define these things. You can't just say that stuff is going to happen and then say, oh, bad stuff happened.

You know that you've got to have sort of a consistent definition over time. So, Peter, people should read Peter's I'll probably link to one of his books, but they should read this stuff. It's just your caricature was so funny because I think when Peter engages with the media, sometimes it's it's not like the media knows anything about, you know, secular cycles or differential equations that like second order, all these phenomenon.

And so it's like it does reduce down to Peter's like bad stuff will happen. Look, here's this chart that I scrolled two seconds ago, and then they kind of like turn it into a fancy info graphic. And so there's a lot of thinking and thought and it just gets reduced out to this caricature. So, yeah, I think it is it is very interesting and funny to make fun of. I will say that, you know, Richard, like I did want your opinion on this because you obviously have, like, contrary opinions.

And Peter has kind of blown up in the media as a public intellectual where, you know, he has a lot of people's ears, you know, in terms of, oh, it's going to be like the 1970s and there's going to be chaos and civil war and we have to be really scared. So you're contrary view is is useful, I think, to er to to think about. I guess like talking about you would desire, the current sense that I have is, you know, basically we're going to get gridlock, it's going to be president and just like high level of uncertainty.

But really, we're kind of in for a snooze fest, assuming there's nothing crazy in foreign policy for the next four years, is that correct?

Yeah. I mean, there's not you know, there's a market and all was doom and gloom.

And there's sort of to say, you know, you know, things are not going to be that interesting. And, you know, we're not going to have a civil war. We're just going to have more polarization and sort of stupid culture war politics. You know, that's that's not the not the sexiest message. But, yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't bank on pilots. Tyler Cohen brings up that, you know, the futures, you know the stock market.

It doesn't there's not an indication that anything like that is going to happen. And yeah.

Yeah, I don't I don't see it. I mean, I think, you know, the world kind of stuff, I think politics is becoming boring is probably the best thing that can happen for those of us who are uncomfortable with their weakness. I think it just the sort of good versus evil narrative that people have sort of, you know, has sort of come to dominate everything. Just, you know, people will go back to their life. Sports can be sports.

It'll never go back. I don't know if it'll ever go back to the 1990s, but to a greater extent, sports can just be sports. Movies can just be movies. And, you know, you can have this liberal culture.

But just ADMET and men will be men and women will be women.

And we're beyond that. I don't know. Yeah, ideally, a couple more Biton administrations maybe.

All right, any thoughts? Well, I mean, we are still in the midst of a pandemic, so that will be kind of eventful in its own way. And I don't know that either of these things will happen in the next couple of years or even in the Biden administration. But. I think the US is facing some serious medium term challenges. Both in terms of dealing with the relative decline versus China and also. Well, up until this point, we have basically, I think a lot of political conflict, as bad as it seems, has been Semin low stakes because we have the ability to basically run up as much debt as we want and there just don't seem to be any effects for it.

And there are people who will say, yeah, that can just continue indefinitely. And there's other people who say, no, there's got to be some kind of reckoning. I'm not an economist. I don't know which of those is right, but that I think is also out there. Yeah, the foreign policy thing, the rise in China is interesting, you know, China's I have some papers coming out on this soon.

I mean, China is rising. China is by PPP is the is the biggest economy in the world now. It'll pass us and market exchange rates. And it thinks it thinks Taiwan is part of China. And we you know, the United States. This disagrees or sort of ambiguous on the question. And, you know, eventually, you know, this may come to a head now.

It could become where, you know, I think if I if I was in Chinese the Chinese position, I think I would just wait, because the trends are China's is a middle still a middle income country. The US is a higher income country. The US has these internal problems. I think it's the trend line is for China to grow wealthier and wealthier. And then, you know, eventually you can you know, you can sort of Finland, Finland, days, Taiwan, you know, if you don't actually take it over, you could sort of use diplomatic pressure and economic coercion and other things.

But, you know, you can never discount the possibility of a you know, of a miscalculation and a war over these things.

And, you know, if China wants to push, it's like a little bit more than it has been. You know, you could see a snap back. You know, people always these doomsday scenarios that if the US is committed to defending Estonia and committed to defending Poland, what we would do if Russia invaded. You know, I I don't think Russia is going to invade. But if they did, I think it's a lot easier to make a guarantee than actually go to war over these things that I don't know how solid it is.

But I think that American foreign policy does create a lot of unnecessary risks, tail events that probably won't happen. But if they could, they'd be disastrous.

I want to make one last prediction. I believe that we will see the first child of a president of the United States transition, gender transition. I believe that Hunter Biden will resolve his life issues of a God.

I don't know if I don't know if I should even tell the story about Hunter Biden. But there was a you know, the miles go, you know that guy, the Chinese billionaire. Yeah. So he's he's the guy who hangs out with Bannon and he has he has this website, which is like the craziest stuff in the world, like Q and on like, you know, just like a completely off the wall.

And there was a there was a sex video that came out with Hunter Biden when the lab stuff, laptop stuff came out. And it goes into great detail. It's sort of his anatomy website.

And I don't know, I just you just maybe think of that because I don't think he's going to be transitioning. If if this description is accurate. I have I would see the.

You know, look, Richard, this is 20, 20, your gender identity is not about your anatomy.

I think you're totally misunderstanding what's going on in our culture here. You are you are a dinosaur, sir.

You're a dinosaur. You've seen what you see. You see a person. You see personal qualities of Hunter Biden them that are stereotypically female.

So you're saying what I'm saying is I don't question his future gender identity. That's that's up to him.

What are you basing your your your judgment of his future gender identity on? I think I think you know what, though?

You know what? You don't get to judge my prediction because you don't question this hour graph and I'll believe you.

Was like all about. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I'm just I just want to put that out there because the Brown pundits broadcast I have made a prediction, Hunter BITD will gender transition and Biden Joe Biden will support that transition because he is a loving father and he is a progressive and he believes the trans rights are the next human rights, you know, frontier in the 21st century.

Hey, I didn't want to say that I. I had to step away for family reasons for a minute. So I haven't heard anything that was said in the last couple.

Oh, you're you're you're you consider yourself fortunate. I don't know what was said. If it was anything problematic or cancelable. I did not hear it. So I just want that on the record. All right, all right, that is that is very prudent of you, Mr. Daley, Esquire Daily ad, and I guess like that's enough for us today. Hopefully we will live in less interesting times to do next week for Brown.

Yes.