Unburdened By What Has Been

has always been that despite the odds and the obstacles, We push to move forward, that we are guided by what we see that can be unburdened by what has been

it's Wednesday, July 24th, 2024. And welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast, examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy fellow. Back as your moderator today, glad to announce that I'm joined by our big three, our trinity of good fellows. That would be the historian, Niall Ferguson, economist, John Cochrane, former presidential national security advisor, Lieutenant General H. R.

McMaster. All three gentlemen are Hoover Institution senior fellows. So guys, I've come to the conclusion that I miss one good fellows episode and Niall, thank you for moderating in my absence, but I miss one show and all hell breaks loose. In the time since I've been on this show, what has happened? Donald Trump merrily, narrowly avoids assassination, walks away miraculously, not being gunned down in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Two days later, something of a surprise, he adds Ohio Senator J. D. Vance to the Republican ticket. He's the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a first term Republican senator. Bit of a surprise in that Vance is neither a ticket balancer nor puts a new state into play. I know Niall and John have thoughts on this.

We'll get to that in the second portion of our show. We then saw a very organized Republican national convention with Republican conventioneers walking out of that convention on a champagne high, determined they were going to crush Joe Biden in November. And three days later, guess what? Joe Biden, rather unceremoniously by a statement released on social media without telling a lot of his staffers, by the way, announces he's out of the race.

And now we have confusion. Enter a very confused Democratic Party, which is notorious for being disorganized. You might remember, as Will Rogers famously said, I'm not a member of any organized party, I'm a Democrat. Guess what? The Democrats neatly line up behind Vice President Kamala Harris, and now she is a presumptive Democratic nominee, with the Democrats to hold their convention in Chicago later in August in John Cochrane's hometown of Chicago, I might add.

What else has happened in my absence? The airlines melted down. The stock market had a big old hiccup today. Bibi Nate and Yahoo addressed a joint session of Congress, which brought the pro Palestine circus to town with him. You might have seen the flags flying over Union Station and Hamas sprayed it and spray painted it everywhere.

That's a lot for us to unpack in a relative short period of time, so I'm going to stop running my mouth and turn to Niall Ferguson. Niall, a simple question. Joe Biden runs for president in 2020. He tells reporters that his will be a transitional presidency. That is a wink and a nod. That's a way for him to addressing the age issue.

He was 77 going on 78 at the time, his way of saying, I will pass the baton, I'll pass the torch to somebody much younger in 2024. Indeed, that's what's happened, Niall, but not in the way you might've imagined. My question to you, Niall, Kamala Harris is now the nominee. She's been on the company letterhead for the last four years.

Is she transitional? And is she transitional ways that don't apply to gender, to identity, to youth, to energy? What direction, Niall, will she take the Democratic Party? What direction will she take the nation, Niall? What direction will she take the free world?

First of all, don't take another vacation because I don't think I can handle either another couple of weeks like that or a monologue like that from you when you come back from vacation.

Secondly, I think Joe Biden meant to say transformational, but it just came out as transitional, even with the auto cue there. And that was, if you remember what was supposed to happen back in 2021, there were very high hopes. Expressed at the time that Joe Biden was sworn in that it would be a transformational presidency, and they threw a lot of money at transformational policies not least the Inflation Reduction Act, wonderfully misnamed the transformation, unfortunately, as Professor Cochrane foresaw, was to the inflation rate more than anything else.

And that, of course, is a large part of the reason why Joe Biden's re election plan unravelled. Because the issues, and the issues are, after all, still important, of inflation and immigration, have just been really bad. For the Democrats and one reached the point earlier this year when the polling started to look quite nasty for the Democrats, not just at the national level, but if you went state by state night, that explains a lot of the panic that was triggered by the debate between Joe Biden.

And Donald Trump, it wasn't that we suddenly realized that Joe Biden was senile. Most of us had been aware of that for about three and a half years, but it was that the Democrats decided to come out of their collective delusion that they could get him reelected and and frantically scramble to persuade him to step down, which obviously was not easy.

And then to rally the party around Kamala Harris, which, was probably just about as difficult. If Kamala Harris were to be elected to answer your question, it would once again be hailed as transformational because obviously she would be the first woman president and the first woman of color president.

And that always gets Democrats tremendously excited. The question for this show is surely, is Kamala Harris Can that really happen? Given her up until this week, pretty lackluster performance as a politician capable of winning votes, because Kamala Harris did not rise to the vice presidency of the United States by being a major league election winner, that's not been the key to her success.

And I'm still skeptical, as I gather former President Barack Obama also is, that she can beat Donald Trump, given, as I said, that the issues really aren't going the way of this administration, whoever is on the ticket. John?

You said the Democrats were disorganized, and I actually think, I think it was on this show that I was fantasizing about a devilish plot to keep Joe Biden in.

Just long enough for the Republicans to have committed to Trump, then get rid of him and anoint somebody else quick before we had a, and then have an election before we have a chance to really look at it. I don't think it was intentional, but boy, oh boy, did they achieve it. And they and their allies in the media, of the big lies we've been told for the last four years, holding this one in, Oh, he's fine.

He's fine. Until just, it was convenient enough to execute the coup was pretty darn amazing. So the, organization of the Democratic Party, of their, of the administration, of the media allies to keep this whole thing going until just the right time, and then to organize a coup, and then to install Kamala Harris so we don't have to have any policy discussions, please on the way I think was pretty remarkable.

Now, yes, the question is this going to be an election about issues? Or identity. Is it going to be on the first blah, blah, blah? Or is it going to be, Oh, let's look a little bit at Kamala Harris's record and her statements and which part of the party she represents. I think we'll have fun with the rest of the show on this.

And I think that's exactly where the Democrats don't want to go. The question I have is in the debates Biden certainly showed himself to be pretty Trump didn't do a great job either. And what I noticed in the debates, he does generalities. Oh, it's terrible. Okay, exactly what is terrible?

Which provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act do you think were money down rat holes? And to go after Harris, you have to Do your policy detail. Now, of course, that's a whole party that's able to do that. But it's not obvious that Trump will be very effective at that. So that's one of the things I'm looking for, whether after this honeymoon, we can start talking about policy and what are actually the changes that we're voting for in the election.

So we have a race now and God forbid we have policy. What does this change on the foreign policy spectrum? And do you expect Harris to go in a different direction than Joe Biden? Or is this just going to be Biden 2 0?

 No, I think she would just double down on the failed Biden policies, essentially, I think that in the area of national security and foreign policy this gives an opportunity.

To the Republicans and to Trump, to to contrast the four Trump years with the eight Obama years that preceded it and the four Biden years that followed. I think the value or the, the success of Trump's certain of Trump's foreign policies and approaches to national security only became apparent to many Americans.

After Biden reversed them. You could really, Hey, how about, what does it look like when you don't secure the border? We've got that. What does it look like when you supplicate to the Iranians and allow them to, and to fill their coffers with 80 to a hundred billion dollars of unenforced sanctions revenue that became because of unenforced sanctions?

Hey, you get a much more intense. Wars much more intense wars across the middle east and you get october 7th What happens when you reinstate funding to the corrupt organization unruh? Or or rejoin the human rights council, which now russia is chairing it's all the fecklessness of the administration is has been astounding, in these areas and the one area of continuity with the trump administration is I think what they've done best at and That's the approach to china.

So so hey, I think that You I think that there's a strong hand to play if President Trump and his surrogates and, and JD Vance and others, if they talk about real differences in policy between the eight Obama years, the for Trump years and the for Biden years.

Hey, can I start a fight?

I want to start a Niall versus HR fight because I haven't seen you guys in too long. And the fight is over Ukraine. Niall had a very good New York Post op ed yesterday. Niall's op ed said that what you can expect from Trump advance is not retreat, but what Niall called realism, basically let Russia have what it has.

You sign a deal, Ukraine gets to be, is going to be neutral. We're going to help them. That's certainly better than the Biden administration, which is keep spilling blood and don't let them win, but don't let them lose. It's not as good as what I think is a realistic option, which is get them to win, wars should be won.

Or ended I think is one of the main lessons of history. So I want you guys to go at it do you think that's going to be terrible? Do you think that's what can I what can happen hr? I think it would be

terrible. I think it would be terrible And the reason to be terrible is because putin won't stop right?

So what you have now The russians throwing in every last thing they can into an offensive operation because that what they think trump will do is what he's what they read in You An America first policy institute paper in that the way trump would end the war in 24 hours is he would say to the ukraine is okay.

Go to the negotiating table and agree to a ceasefire or i'm not going to give you any more assistance And what he's going to say to the russians is well, go to the go to have the ceasefire go to negotiating table or ukrainians everything that we can and the reason it won't work is because in war the diplomatic settlement You is going to be consistent with what the realities on the ground are.

The way that Ukraine wins is to convince Russia it can't win at the very least. And if you look at really where the battle lines are now, if there was a ceasefire there, right? Ukraine is a rump state. That is literally under fire by the Russians would not have the economic viability the power infrastructures in the Eastern part of the Eastern part of the Donbass.

I think it's a terrible idea to pursue a ceasefire or to try to coerce Ukraine into a ceasefire. And the problem with the ceasefire is the cost of a ceasefire to the Ukrainians in their minds, and I think the right is much higher than the cost of continuing the war.

I had better explain my argument now that it's been rebutted because I No, hey,

Niall, to be, to be fair to Niall, I just want to say that's not Niall's argument.

This is what this I'm criticizing the American First Policy Institute paper, although you do allude to, the pursuit of some kind of a ceasefire. I think you would prefer, what I would prefer, is give the Ukrainians everything that they need so that Russia comes to the conclusion it can't win the war.

The

piece I wrote for the New York Post was to say the isolationist view, which a year ago seemed to be getting the upper hand in the Republican Party, has actually been quite signally beaten, I think. And one can see that in the most recent things that Donald Trump has said, and J. D. Vance has said, and Speaker Mike Johnson has said.

There's been a real shift, I think, in Republican politics. Thinking about the Ukraine question, what's happened is that people have been persuaded by the argument that we've made on this show that there is an axis, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, that they act in concert, that a win for Russia would be a win for China, a win for Putin, be a win for Xi Jinping, that argument has, I think, prevailed so far as I can tell, and it's been prevailed at the top of the ticket in that now when you, for example, read Donald Trump's interview in Bloomberg Businessweek, which came out just after he'd nearly been killed, or read J.

D. Vance's interview with the New York Times, they don't say isolationist things, they don't propose to throw Zelensky under the bus and to force the Ukrainians effectively to surrender. a large part of their country. In fact, I think what's likely is that they will do as you would argue for HR and John step up the pressure on Russia, because that's the only way you're going to get Putin.

into a real negotiation. And I think that's the critical thing that's been lacking with the Biden administration. They have never exerted sufficient pressure on Russia. They've never made the cost of the war so high that some kind of compromise could be attainable. Now I use the word compromise advisedly because of course, nobody in Ukraine wants to compromise with a colonial invader and war criminal.

But if you talk to Ukrainians, and I've spoken to a number in recent weeks, they will admit that they are stretched pretty thin that the advantages, for example, technological advantages that they had at one point in the war really don't exist anymore because the Russians have very quickly copied the drone warfare that the Ukrainians pioneered.

There's quite a lot of anxiety. In Ukraine, that they just can't keep this war going on. The great fear in Kiev is that the Biden administration strategy of keep this war going. It's great. Let's keep it going. It's really eating away at Russian military capability. This is a strategy that could end in Ukrainian defeat.

And that of course would be the worst case scenario. So I think the outline I tried to sketch in my piece was, it's a little bit like the Korean War. After a period of attrition, both sides ultimately need to stop fighting. That doesn't mean peace. That doesn't mean the Ukrainians are going to agree a peace deal where they give up substantial territory.

But it means an end to the fighting, which I think they will need. By the middle of next year, if not sooner and that of course creates the South Korean opportunity for Ukraine. If, but only if, we provide them with the kind of guarantees we provided South Korea with after 1953, which were vital for South Korea's transformation, one of the great economic miracles of the 20th century.

So that's really the argument I'm making. The key point for me is, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene are much less influential on the foreign policy of a likely second Trump administration than Europeans fear they are. In reality, there's a new and quite hawkish realism, and it's going to end this war, and it's not going to end it on Putin's terms.

That's my hope.

So Niall, I want to flip this back to Kamala Harris in this regard. You're going to go back to England, and at some point your friend's going to say, What the heck, his sister sold you. And Sister Soulja was a character who emerged in the 1992 U. S. election. Bill Clinton went to the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Jackson's group, gave a speech, and this was an ambush by Clinton.

He stood in front of Jesse Jackson, and he denounced the Rainbow Coalition for giving an award to Sister Soulja.

I defend her right to express herself through music, but her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with the kind of Hatred that you do not honor today and tonight.

A rap artist who just earlier than a couple days before had said that it's perfectly all right for Black Americans to kill white Americans.

This was in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And Clinton just tore apart the Rainbow Coalition in that speech, but it was a calculated measure, Niall. He wanted to pick a fight with Jesse Jackson. He succeeded, and by doing so, he reinforced his brand. He was a different kind of Democrat. I mention this because there will be pressure under Kamala Harris to show that she is indifferent in some way, that she has the courage, the political moxie to poke the bear.

Now, did she miss an opportunity, Neal, to do that today? You had Bibi Netanyahu in Washington. We win, they lose. But Kamala, A, did not meet him at the airport, B, did not sit in on the joint session of Congress as a vice president. She could have sat there. Joe Biden did not do so in 2015. Kamala could have done it this time and didn't.

She's meeting him, but in private. Now what did Bibi talk about today, Niall? He talked about anti Semitism on college campuses. Niall, was this a missed opportunity for Kamala to either go after what's wrong with American campuses to talk about anti Semitism? Do you think she has it in her to pull a sister soldier?

I do not. Bill Clinton came from Arkansas. He knew what red state America wanted to hear from a centrist Democrat. The problem Kamala Harris has is that she's Californian Democrat through and through. And that means that she has quite a track record for Republicans to run against. Yeah, she was a prosecutor.

But there wasn't much of the prosecutor in the way that Kamala Harris responded after the murder of George Floyd when the country was in a state of mayhem during the Black Lives Matter protests. And I do think that means it's quite hard for her to do that. Kind of Clinton move where you signal that are actually I'm near enough to the center that voters in Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin are going to feel comfortable with me.

It's very hard to sell the Californian brand of democratic party politics. To the American heartland, because even if those people haven't visited California lately, it's quite easy to make them aware of what's been going on in this state and why the ultimate nightmare would be to have California Democrats running the whole country.

So I think that's the problem. And it's a question once again, of issues, the great temptation. For Donald Trump, and I guess also J. D. Vance, will be to get personal. And unfortunately, you can see on social media already a very, I think, unpleasant and unhelpful strain of ridiculing Kamala Harris As a woman of color and not going after her on the issues where I think she's very vulnerable.

She's vulnerable in the issues of the Biden administration that we already talked about because she was vice president. It's her administration as well as Joe Biden. They even called it the Biden Harris administration after all. But I think she's even more vulnerable. I think she's much more likely to be impeccable on that Californian track record and that tendency to play to the Progressive Gallery whenever the Progressive Gallery is in uproar.

It's in uproar over the Palestinian question. I dare say they'll show up in Chicago and try to reenact 1968 around the periphery of the convention. And I think she's much more likely to play to the protesters and the progressives than to take a hard line. And that will be, I think, her Achilles heel if she wins.

Only Republicans can aim at it.

Hey, HR is the resident Pennsylvanian on this show, and your pal Dave McCormick, who's running for the Senate in HR, he's already put out a Kamala ad. It's a very clever ad. He just has her speaking with her own words on issues like fracking and healthcare, and to the extent he makes it personal, he takes the Kamala laugh, but he puts it in at the very end and sounds like the Joker in Batman.

I think that's a smart way to go, but HR is Pennsylvania, so goes the nation, correct?

Yeah, I really think so. It's a really critical race there. And for that, David Corr is running against a Democratic incumbent with a lot of name recognition based on who his father was and everything as well.

But, so it's a consequential state like, like it always is, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona, we know this, Georgia. But, I think that's the way to do it is to do it on policy, and also, if Americans want people to begin to, politicians on both sides of the political spectrum of both parties to start to get beyond the vitriolic discourse and talk about substantive issues they care about, you could also just so clips of Vice President Harris saying that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to national security in the world.

Bigger than Putin in Ukraine, bigger than the supreme leader. And or bigger than the Houthis, who they undesignated as a terrorist organization under the Biden administration, bigger than China. So I think, I think there, that's the way to do it is on the substance and, hey, it's hard to refute primary sources, just use the primary sources, I think.

And she's made a lot of statements, and acted in ways in terms of, encouraging bail and reinforcing a fundraising for bail of people who had lit one of America's cities on fire. So I think there's a lot of material there that the Republican party can use primary source material

where issues people.

I agree with Niall. It's not likely to happen in part procedurally for Kamala Harris to take to have a coherent policy platform that took a history that's quite in the far left progressive wing of the Democratic Party steered it exactly triangulating to a middle that would appeal to American voters without it.

Totally saying I was lying back then. That would take not just a personal thoughtfulness rather than the usual word salad, it would also take a policy shop, a factory, a group of people ready to go in a matter of weeks to define where this is going to go and articulate carefully delineated policies in a way we haven't seen from her or the Democratic Party in a long time.

Conversely, though, again, I was disappointed at the debate and disappointed at Trump's great chance in the Republican convention to be specific, to show he'd read the policy blueprints, to remember them and go after them. And they seem inclined to go after personality rather than policy. And maybe we live in a bubble, guys because this seems to work on both sides, the personality stuff as opposed to the issues.

I hope we're wrong. I believe in America, I believe the average person I talk to out, out in the middle of nowhere actually has issues and thinks about issues, but that doesn't seem to be the way that the rhetoric is going to go on either side of

this. John, I think you're being a bit unfair with President Trump, actually.

I took the time to read the interview that he did with Businessweek, and then to go through carefully that rambling acceptance speech. And it struck me that in fact there was quite a lot of substance there. You may not agree with it, but it isn't just personalities, Trump likens himself to William McKinley in the interview, which must puzzle quite a lot of voters who probably never heard of him and argues that he represents a return to the protectionist, tariff imposing tradition that McKinley personified when he was president in the late 19th century.

Trump says he's thinking of cutting the corporate income tax. His answer to the inflation problem is drill baby drill. He wants to increase American hydrocarbon production. He wants to remove, he's very explicit about this. Some of the subsidies that in they're in the green new deal and so on.

It's actually quite an ambitious policy program, not up your street on the trade side for sure. And not up mine either. But there is, I think, a coherence to what Trump is arguing for, more than was true eight years ago, when the policies were really very simplistic. This is a more sophisticated Trump.

I know viewers or listeners might be skeptical about that, but take a look. And I think the same is true in foreign policy. At the end of that interview, Trump said, and he said things that sounded like things we've said. I'm worried that between now and January, we could even get into world war three because of the threats to Taiwan, the Taiwanese aren't taking their defense seriously enough.

They have to do more. And Trump has even has a theory. John get this on currencies. He argues that the reason he has to impose tariffs is that the Asians engage in currency manipulation, not under the Chinese. But also the Japanese and the Taiwanese. So I don't think Donald Trump can be accused of shying away from the issues.

The interesting thing though, is that the Democrats really don't want to debate any of those issues. The one issue that Kamala Harris can be guaranteed to bring up is abortion. And I sense that part of what this election is going to devolve into is two candidates talking past one another. One talking about the economy, about inflation, about immigration, about energy, and the other talking exclusively about abortion because the Democrats calculate that's the issue that can mobilize the swing voters, particularly get women to vote for them.

I think it'll be abortion and Trump is a threat to democracy. And we can debate who we think is a threat to democracy. Let me just, because I want to apologize. And you put me exactly right. I was disappointed by the rhetoric of Trump's speeches, but one thing that I do know and I agree with you, Trump personally, and there's a policy shop going that is, is ready with what they want to do.

There is an intellectual coherence. We may see that. Disagree with some of it. Agree with other of it. But there is a genuine policy program and a plan to put it in place quickly that if we don't devolve into utter lawfare will actually make a big difference. And we'll probably get to that. But I wanted to apologize.

You're exactly right. And I'm guilty of just being disappointed on the rhetoric and not paying attention to the deeper substance.

Yeah. Hey, I just wanted to ask you guys a question, right? So a lot of what people they have trepidation and concerns about Trump, but do you think that a counterbalance to that now is what I think is one of the most important extensive coverups and scandals in recent American history, which is to create the illusion that President Biden was competent for an extended period of time.

It's not really supporting democracy when, the head of the executive is, is unable to function. So I just, it's a sad state of affairs. But do you think this is a, this is a lodestone around their necks? This is not my area of expertise, domestic politics, but it does seem that it's to, to some degree, a counterbalance.

To people's, sometimes disappointment with Trump's behavior, his brash nature, his erratic, what they perceive as his erratic nature.

I just say 100%. And there was a great Barry Weiss column on this recently. This was the last, the most recent of a series of lies. And the average American knows they're being lied to.

Masks are vital the schools have to be closed down. The Trump Hunter's, Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. I just go on and on on the combination of the media and the Democratic Party lying to you and Americans are sick of it. And I think a lot of the votes for Trump are our votes to throw the bums out.

They know where the threats to democracy are, and it's not the ramblings on Twitter of Trump to say nothing of the lawfare business. So I think you put your finger on it, and that is one of the most visible slaps in the face to the American public. If you hadn't been paying attention, boy, oh boy, yeah they've been lying to you.

What did the vice president know? And when did she know it? Everything and three years ago. It seems to me like one pretty good way to wage this election campaign. It also gets me back to my favorite topic of late Soviet America, because there was something impeccably late Soviet about the way in which this was done.

This was not 1968. Cause if you remember in 68, Lyndon Johnson decided not to contest the election very early on. Early in the primaries after he did poorly in New Hampshire, and then there was a contest. Whereas what's happened here is, as you said at the beginning, Bill, they waited the last possible minutes and truly Soviet sequence of events took place in which the president was invisible for days in communicado, apart from a JPEG of a document saying I'm not running that appeared on social media, and I believe one phone call.

To Vice President Harris in which she could just about be heard. This is bizarre. And if it wasn't for the fact that events move at such a breathtaking pace, one might have time to reflect more deeply on how deeply undemocratic this whole exercise has been. So when Democrats say that Trump's a threat to democracy, I think there's a pretty good counter argument that can be made right now.

So you might not want to go all the way. to calling it a coup, but what happened there, what has led to the coronation of Kamala Harris well before the convention, that's certainly a pretty pale imitation of democracy and it has all kinds of Soviet overtones that the American public will not miss.

I neglected to mention that my rambling monologue that Niall took me to the woodshed for that, that Joe Biden went dark for about three days.

Basically, America was run by Howard Hughes for three days. We didn't know where he was. The internet went nuts with theories that he was dead, that he had a stroke, he's in a hospice and so forth. And it just ties to the institutional constant. We haven't talked about the Secret Service and this incredibly incompetent director who rather than getting fired within 48 hours has to go through an incredible circus of a congressional hearing before she falls on her sword.

There's no institutional competence in America.

Let me show you Your monologue, Bill, was not rambling. It was the fastest thing I've heard since Ben Shapiro. And in fact, I began to wonder if you'd been hanging out with Ben and honing your high speed talking skills. That was not rambling. I think President Trump rambled a fair bit at the convention.

And that was why I went back to the transcript to see what he'd actually said. Because it was easy to lose the thread if you were listening in. But nobody's gonna accuse you of rambling, Bill. Not on this show.

Thank you, Niall, very much. Wait for the next show, instead of my initials, I'll put Red Bull up here on my label.

Let's talk about J. D. Vance for a second in this regard. John said something very trenchant, I thought, in the last episode, the one I was not on, where you were all talking about age, and John said that essentially age is but a number. I've been thinking about this with regard to J. D. Vance. He turns 40 on August the 2nd.

If he is elected vice president, he will be the second youngest vice president in American history. That honor falls to the illustrious John Breckinridge back in the early 19th century. But we're talking about age being a number. Richard Nixon was 40 years old when he was when he took over as vice president in 1953.

Teddy Roosevelt was 42 years old when he became vice president in 1901. Those who know the record history speak on McKinley. Know that Roosevelt was actually on the ticket because Republican bosses wanted to stifle his political career. Didn't turn out that way. My question to the three of you, do you think J.

D. Vance is qualified to be president of the United States?

He's better qualified than Kamala Harris. Let's just put it that way. One of the things about J. D. Vance that most impressed me when I first met him was his intellectual firepower. Hillbilly Elegy is an important book. If you haven't read it, go ahead.

I urge you to read it. He has been on quite an interesting political journey since he came out of the services came out of college and wrote that book. And it began with him as a critic of Donald Trump and his evolution to something of a Trumpist has, I think, been a genuine.

political education So I'm impressed by him. I've been impressed by him since I first met him And I think there's no doubt about his capability and the passion he feels For the people in the parts of america. He is closest to, and that's what, that's the importance of Hillbilly Elegy. It was a kind of biographical version, autobiographical version, of Charles Murray's coming apart.

So age here I don't think is the issue by, of course, British standards. He's getting on a bit to be to be shooting for high offers. We like him even younger than than 39.

I think he's been through a hell of a lot in his life. And I think I've been reading Hillbilly Elegy. I think what comes through there is his strength of character, his resilience, his ability to transcend his conditions.

He was in it from a broken family in many ways, an abusive family that suffered for his mother suffered from an addiction. He not only overcame that but he did well in school, despite the disruption within the, within his home, joined the Marine Corps, worked his way through. Ohio State University, got into Yale Law School went into venture capital.

So he understands to some degree, the innovation ecosystem. In our country and then ran for office his devotion to his family, his mother in particular in the book is a really important part of the story. And I think illuminates his personal character. I think I would, happily debate him, probably disagree with him certainly on Ukraine, but I think he's a person who is determined to serve his country.

He did so in uniform and out of uniform. And I think, I think character really matters, and I think he's an effective communicator. I would have rather maybe president Trump picks somebody else who could help him get more to the politics of addition. I was thinking something like Doug Burgum or something like that.

But but Hey, it's, he's, I think he's somebody who's worthy of respect. And could help the president if the president is reelected.

He's also, Trump is also picking his successor in a way that picking Doug Burgum would not be. You can tell J. D. Vance is going to be a major figure in the Republican Party for decades to come.

I agree. Go read Hillbilly Elegy. I found it a wonderful book. It was very much a social book. Picture of the struggles of working class America in that way, similar to Murray's falling apart, similar to Tom Soles, you social dynamics as it was not all about how China came and took it away from us.

It was about the problems of this community of people who Moved from Appalachia to industrial cities and were dysfunctional and how among other things, the military saved him from dysfunctional along with one aspect. I know. And it's really, he's

he lives, John, don't you think he lived what animates Trump's base?

He lived it, right? So this is, I'm thinking of George Packer's book, the unwinding as well, which is on this kind of subject.

Whether you like or not his policies, he channels this part of deplorables working America that the elites have left behind. Now, he may come, I think, to some of the wrong policy conclusions.

China did not cause the troubles. Of the hillbilly elegy people when we were strong in manufacturing, it was not because we lived under protectionist and subsidized banners. It's because we were better than everybody else. And in the news also last week, China just started running the first. I think it was a liquid sodium, but a meltdown proof reactor.

And there's also in the news last week about their wonderful AI super computers for AI, that's the way we're going to get ahead and not by building big walls. That's a little policy disagreement, but he hears those people, channels those people. If he's a little bit isolationist, it's because he went to Iraq and that war did not, was not run well and turned out well.

His people fight and die for wars that then we abandon midstream. So we may not like the isolationism to the extent that's still there that comes out of it, but listen hard because it's not the, it's those people who are doing so. I also see in him great intelligence. And yeah, he's evolving.

He listens. Heavens to Betsy, how terrible. Somebody listens and changes his mind. My great pleasure on this show is that Niall and HR tell me I'm wrong about something and I learn something. And all politicians. Are there to listen, he's trying to put together a set of ideas that will lead a party to coherence and don't expect them to be the perfect ideas that would come out of us because we're just trying to be right But that's what a politician does and if you know that's what they're supposed to do and

that's what he's doing So Niall are you suggesting that christian nationalism is more than a passing phase in republican politics?

Because if you watch that convention what I noticed The two Bush presidencies never got mentioned. John McCain never existed. Mitt Romney didn't exist. It's like we went from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump and nothing happened in the interim.

Yeah, I think a number of things have changed pretty profoundly in the party.

Its attitude towards foreign policy amounts to a complete repudiation of neoconservatism and the general sense that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a mistake. So that's a big part of what has changed. And the other thing that has changed is that embrace of globalization, which Really was one of the common threads from Clinton to George W.

Bush. That's gone too. I see Donald Trump, unlike many commentators as a very 19th century figure, and it's interesting that he does too. Now, the idea that we should be thinking of him as was Hitler. The new Republic had Trump as Hitler on its cover just weeks before the assassination attempt that's deplorable if you want to use that.

President Biden said MAGA is a pseudo fascism, right?

And he, and that has become a recurrent theme of the democratic smear campaign against Trump. In reality, Trump represents a return to a style of republicanism that goes way back to the 19th century when tariffs were A big part of what the Republicans believed in, and there's this revival of the Christian dimension, which was always an extraordinarily important part of American politics in both parties.

And I don't think that's a tall novel. I think that's a revival of something that's been there all along. And Donald Trump always seemed an unlikely hero for evangelicals for people in the Bible Belt. He's become a more plausible one since his near death experience, and one has to ask oneself if that changed Donald Trump in some way.

I don't know, but it doesn't seem completely inconceivable that he sees the world in a new way, having Survived that assassination attempt by what an inch. Having talked to Dave McCormick, who was there and was supposed to be on the stage when the shots were fired who was right in front of the the fireman who did die.

I think everybody who was there that day in Pennsylvania was shaken up and every American. With red blood in his or her veins was much more moved by that event than by anything that has happened since. I know the news cycle is supposed to give us a sort of permanent attention deficit disorder, but the fact remains that just days ago, a former president and candidate for the presidency escaped death by an inch.

And I think we all dodged a bullet. I can't emphasize enough how disastrous it would have been for this nation if Trump had been killed. Can you imagine the atmosphere at the Republican convention in Milwaukee if Trump had been killed? Can you imagine the feelings of bitterness that his supporters would have towards those who called Trump a threat to democracy who compared him to Hitler?

I don't think many people have taken the time to think. Just how close we came to a really dangerous state, not just a polarization, but of deep division. So there was something providential, I'm not going to overstate it, but I'm going to say it, providential in his survival. We're having a much more normal election, a much more normal in the sense of 1968 ish election than we would have had if he'd been killed.

I want to talk about Joe Biden, but first a question. I'm going to see John Cochrane cringe when I ask this cause he hates punditry questions, but here's the question. Donald Trump picked a reflection of himself. Somebody who sees the world as he does. Does Kamala do the same? Or does Kamala act a little more real politic and go after a fellow Democrat who perhaps balances the ticket or brings in a state?

You're making it sound like she'll make the decision. But remember the democratic party is still controlled by the donor crats. It is still controlled by a relatively small number of very wealthy people who live either in San Francisco or in Chicago or in New York. They're currently in Aspen or some of them are in Hollywood.

Don't forget Hollywood. Don't forget. Yeah, absolutely. And this elite. determined that the big lie about Biden's being sharp as a tack could no longer be sustained, and they collectively decided that the only viable option was Kamala Harris. And if she starts polling really disastrously, which I, couldn't rule out, though it doesn't seem that plausible, then who knows what they'll decide to do.

But they're the ones who will decide who her running mate is, and they will decide it on the basis of electoral calculation. They will be looking very carefully at the candidate, and they, not Kamala Harris, will decide.

It is interesting that they who bleat about dangers to democracy, their own convention isn't very democratic with superdelegates.

It's an oligarchical policy. Their own procedures are now completely ignoring it. The Republicans, the problem is we let the voters pick in democratic style. And the whole threat to democracy business, does not come. Democracy doesn't end because of one person's tweets. Democracy ends when someone uses the tools of power to stay in power.

So democracy ends by who runs the FBI, the Department of Justice, who's censoring the media who goes after their political opponents and throws them in jail. I think Americans realize this, and that's why that rhetoric isn't going very far. But that's why I think the rhetoric will have about three weeks of, oh, we overdid it, and then we'll be right back to where we were.

All right, so once again, Sir Needle has taken me to the woodshed, so let me rephrase the question. Whom should she pick?

I'm not gonna go there. That's that is above my pay grade. Anybody let's try to, you

know, let's try to, I think Neal's right. So who do we

throw two obvious names at you and let you guys weigh the pros and cons. One is Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona. Navy captain HR, sorry astronaut and married to Gabby Giffords, who survived the assassination attempt.

He can talk about guns and he puts Arizona in play. The other interesting name, Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, but gentlemen, he's Jewish. Do you think a Jewish governor can run on the democratic ticket, given that party's various positions toward Israel and toward college?

What you're suggesting is that a standard pick somebody who fills some identity baskets and then let them go enjoy a warm bucket of spit for four years, which is, Sorry for the crass analogy, but that's what by president Garner called the job of the office.

Probably, since they believe in identity politics, that's probably what they'll do.

I've been enjoying some of the old deep clips that have been going around.

But I know both of those gentlemen, I think I, I respect both of them. I don't know if I'd agree with them on policies and so forth, but I respect both people. I think they're both people of strong character who have a high degree of competence and would serve the country well if they were to be elected as vice president.

So. I just think that those would be too smart picks. I don't know how smart they would be politically. That's not my field. But I think in terms of who they are and what is their base motivation, I think, which is to serve their country, I think those would be two solid.

I think Bill, I think you're overdoing it.

I'm going to, I'm going to object to the punditry Bill. There's a moment where a lot of what politics does in a democracy is amuse us. So I think this is a moment to sit back, open a bag of popcorn choose your favorite beverage and watch the show.

Yeah, we have about 10 minutes left, so let's talk about President Biden.

He is a unicorn of sorts in that he is a retiring one term president. Most one term presidents are associated with defeat at the polls, but not Biden. You have to go back to 1848 and James K. Polk, for example, a first term president who left on his own terms, but Polk had a pretty impressive record. He essentially set out and achieved everything he wanted to do when he ran in 1844.

The challenge now is for Joe Biden to sell himself as a successful president. Niall, let's talk a bit about Biden presidency here. I'm going to criticize your craft is one of the takeaways from this. Beware of historians who come bearing gifts.

There were some historians mentioning no names who I thought talked in a somewhat overexcited way about Joe Biden's prospects right at the beginning of his term.

And the problem was that they underestimated just how slim his margins were in Congress compared with Lyndon Johnson who of course had destroyed Barry Goldwater in 64 and had handsome majorities in the Senate and the House. So I think part of the problem about 2021 was there was a certain hubris amongst the democratic historians.

And they told Biden, you are, you're going to be up there with Johnson. You're going to be up there with Truman. We're going to do these great society type things with the economy. And of course it turned out to be a tremendous self harming strategy because it produced the inflation spike in 2022 that has done the most to damage the administration's popularity.

And that 9 percent peak in consumer price inflation is still the thing that voters feel resentful about when they're polled. That's the issue, cost of living that's up there with immigration. And the immigration thing was another self harming policy decision made almost At the outset, almost as if to say we're so unlike Donald Trump that he wanted to build a wall, we're going to tear the border down.

So I, I think that those were the mistakes that condemned Joe Biden to being a relatively unpopular president who ultimately could not get himself reelected. I don't think it was just his age that was the kind of catalyst for his departure from the stage. I do think they made those fundamental errors right early on.

And I don't think they have ever been able to sell the story that the economy's done well. Now, by some measures here, I'm going to hand the baton to John. The economy has been strong, way stronger than the European economies in the last three and a half years. And there is an argument that says that if you just look at the standard measures, inflation has come down from that point.

Peak, I mentioned unemployment's been extremely low levels by historic standards. If you just look away from the fiscal disaster that has propelled this growth, the huge deficits, even at full employment, there's a good story to tell. And the voters haven't bought it. The amazing thing is that the polling on the economy has been consistently bad, even when the numbers have steadily improved John?

Yes. And I think it's because. No, from the left, the standard thing is, oh, those stupid voters, they're too dumb to notice how great and how good things are. In fact, voters are smarter than you think they are. The economy is doing quite well. We're not having urosclerosis like Europe's having, but they understand that it was despite Not because of.

And it's funny that the spin has been, Joe Biden, look at all his path breaking record of accomplishment. Too bad he's getting a little old now for the next four years. Oh, his path breaking record of accomplishment was to throw trillions of dollars down rat holes, to send a regulatory juggernaut after the rest of us, and to try to lose three wars.

And, uh, the average American voter understands things are pretty good, but these guys made it a whole lot worse than it would have been otherwise. So three cheers. And the

voters, he made, he didn't make it easy on himself either. President Biden, when he said that, no, no servicemen or women have died on my watch, and forgetting those who were killed in fighting terrorists.

But those who were killed during the disastrous. Withdraw from Kabul, as well.

I think that was the beginning wasn't it? Hr of a series of failures of deterrence the following year a failure to deter putin from invading ukraine That was a series of very obvious Mistakes and it culminated with the failure to deter iran, which you already mentioned on the show and I think When Donald Trump says, I worry we might get a world war three before we even have an inauguration in January.

He's talking about the danger of a final failure of deterrence over Taiwan. And I think the foreign policy failures are one reason that many American voters are looking for strength. They understand just as they understand real wages have not grown. They also understand that de escalation is the opposite of deterrence and an administration that has overused that word has actually presided over a pretty disastrous foreign policy.

And it certainly compares very unfavorably with the foreign policy of the first Trump administration, which our learned friend, HR contributed so much to in redrafting the national security strategy. So I agree with John, the voters are rational. It's even if Joe Biden was hot. his age, he would still have been very hard to reelect on the basis of his track record.

And that's the name of Kemal Harris. Can I play moderator just a second? Maybe we should think a little bit about what we think is going to happen next year. Is that an okay moderator question? I was going to

ask what's going to happen in the next seven months because in theory Joe Biden is still president unless he steps down in a few minutes, which anything can happen Wednesdays, but yeah, go ahead, John.

2025. I was going to think

past I think our job is to think past the who's going to win, who's going to lose the horse race thing. So yeah. What do you do with a president who clearly is not right on top of for the next seven months? Let us simply pray that all the bad people out there.

We'll stay asleep for seven months and we could well have a crisis on the way which would make things very exciting.

Even asking us to predict the next seven days is a tall order when you think of what's happened since our last show. I think you can't be certain. That Biden's going to go the distance.

He's clearly been very ill. I don't think it was just a kind of PR stunt that kept him out of sight when he was recovering from COVID.

I just want to interrupt you to emphasize how remarkable this was. A president who's not going to stand for reelection. What does he does? He gets on national TV and says, My fellow Americans, you address the audience.

She's a moment. Johnson did that. This really stings that the movie version of this will make the death of Stalin look light when it comes out and what it means about who is running things for the next seven months is really,

I'm sorry. Yeah, it's really hard to be sure that he has the physical and mental stamina to continue in this role.

And I think there's a legitimate argument that if you can't run for reelection then why is he president of the United States? The most onerous job in the world, apart from being the moderator of Goodfellas. So I think even short run predictions are extremely difficult this year, as they say in economics, the tails of the distribution have gotten a whole lot fatter.

We don't know how Pat Harris is going to poll after the initial bump that inevitably took place. Has happened. We got to ask ourselves, how is she going to look in four weeks time after it's after all the excitement has died down? Will it turn out that Vance was a mistake? That's certainly the chatter that one hears in some Republican circles.

So I'm not even sure the next seven days are predictable, much less than it's seven months.

Let me go with what you were saying. And HR will have something to say between now and November. There's likely to be some major vent that the Biden Harris administration has to react to.

I would say the chances of that are close to, chances that are close to 100%.

And I think that, what we've all been talking about, I think you mentioned is what is provocative is the perception of weakness. And I do think this axis of aggressors which we've been talking about is getting more bold right now. I don't think we have to wait. I think it's very likely that there's going to be a major escalation of the conflict.

In israel especially involving southern lebanon Already what you've seen are rumors and I think they're more than rumors that the russians are going to provide a more advanced Shorter ship capabilities to the houthis. I think iran quite I think I could envision iran shutting down the strait of hormuz As part of a much larger aggressive act against, its arab neighbors maybe direct attacks on oil facilities in eastern saudi arabia and I you know, I think what you're seeing already happened in iraq is israeli.

i'm, sorry iranian proxy forces have resumed attacks on american forces people aren't paying attention to that. I think It's quite significant The hood has

landed a drone in israel and fatah and hamas got together And brokered a deal brokered by china and now they have a power sharing arrangement nobody is sitting around waiting to see what happens.

Absolutely. I think it's already

happening and I think there's likely You Niall has a couple more too.

Don't forget all of this is playing out while the AI hype bubble is bursting or at least deflating and the economy, just look at the labor market, is slowing. And so things are going to look very different in just a few weeks time, both geopolitically and economically.

And economically, and I think also politically. Can you believe it? They decided to have their convention in Chicago. You'd have thought that after 1968, they'd never have another convention there again. But another thing that I think is quite easy to predict is that the same protesters who were disgracefully burning The Stars and Stripes in Washington today and vandalizing national monuments will show up in Chicago to apply pressure to the Democrats to ensure that Kamala Harris's foreign policy, if she's elected president, is to the left of Joe Biden's.

And I, that, that's a very high probability scenario.

And I want to go on to if it's a, if it's a wipeout election one way or the other okay, now we can go on to thinking about our President X's policy plans. But I foresee a very close election. And if Trump wins a very close election, the and if he doesn't get the House and the Senate as well, the the lawfare is going to escalate to civil war levels.

And I just want to put in one plug for the Supreme Court. We don't talk about Wayne here enough because this has been incredibly consequential, but the Supreme Court just saved Joe Biden. They're all in how they made Trump a dictator, but no, the Supreme Court just saved Joe Biden because what Tom's going to play back, you can be sure the first thing he's going to do is try to indict Biden.

For I don't know, spending 400 billion on student loans, even without congressional author authorization and the Supreme Court just stopped him from doing that. So three cheers for the Supreme Court for putting a little bit of this in the bottle. But if it's a narrow election, it's going to be really chaos.

By the way, speaking of which, Donald Trump's head will at some point implode when he realizes that Kamala Harris gets to sit over the electoral vote count on January the 6th of next year. We have one minute left, gentlemen, so let me ask you a very quick question as we talk about shocks to the system.

What is the major shock that you expect between now and Election Day? And let's look at your respective fields. Niall, do you think it will be a major shock on, say, a US campus? Some terrible protest run amok? H. R. I., do you think it'll be a large scale terrorist event like 9 11? Or John, do you think, given today was a pretty awful day in the market, Alphabet having a bad report do you think it'll be an economic shock?

All of the above, but remember the lesson of 1968. Not only will political violence quite possibly reoccur, but also remember those third party candidates who decided the outcome. Of that election, and we never talk about them when the elections close, and I agree with John. It's going to be close now that Biden's been taken off stage when the elections close.

It's the votes cast. That was two and 68. I think it'll be doing 2024 for the third party candidates that have the unintended consequence of deciding the outcome.

The definition of shock is that it's unpredictable. So it's a contradiction in terms to forecast a shock. We have volatility. We have the chance of large shocks and all of those, and especially the reflection of any shock in, I worry about the political violence.

No hey, Bill, I think I already said that I think there, there's going to be a major event. What I didn't talk about is how aggressive China's been getting in the South China sea, vis a vis the Philippines, which is a A us a u. s ally.

Okay. Gentlemen, thank you very much for a spirited show Thanks for disrupting your summer routines to come on and do this emergency goodfellas if you will we're mustering again in early august a couple show notes for our viewers We will be doing a regular goodfellas in early august.

We also are doing mini goodfellas That's one on one conversations with Niall, John, and HR. Look for those as well. And you'll find those by getting by subscribing to our show on YouTube and getting alerts. Also, you should subscribe to the Hoover Institution's daily report, which keeps you abreast of what what Niall, John, and HR are up to.

Also, our three good fellows are available on X. And by the way, if you want to set in questions for future shows, go right ahead, you do that by going to hoover. org forward slash ask good fellows. On behalf of the good fellows, Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, HR McMaster, all of us here at the Hoover Institution.

We hope you enjoyed the show. We hope you're having a great summer and fingers crossed. When we get through this year alive, take care, talk to you soon. Thanks for watching. Bye bye.

If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring H. R. McMaster, watch Battlegrounds also available at Hoover. org.