Michael Lewis: Don't Bet Against the Country

Tim Miller (0:12)

Hello and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We'll get to our guest here in one second, a few programming notes. We got a sale happening. It's an October surprise. And our surprise for you is you can get The Bulwark Plus for cheaper. 30% off, go to thebulwark.com/surprise. You get to comment.

I read the sub-stack comments on the podcast. So, you know, if you have some complaints, it's like an open complaint box for you to share with me or a compliment. I take those too.

You get the secret podcast, JVL's newsletter, the best in the business is sometimes paywalled. So you always get that. It's worth it. And you just support the mission. Help us go out and find new audiences, get the message out to new people. So go ahead. Join this October, thebulwark.com/surprise. Just a news item, I guess. Can we call it that? Our demented and depraved president gave a speech yesterday in Nebraska. And en route to and fro, that speech was bleeding on his social media site. And a couple of things I just wanted to flag. He was discussing, kind of doing the weave, the pain that his war in Iran has caused people domestically. And he said something that raised some eyebrows in the speech last night. He said, I want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did.

And remember, with the war, it's just artificial. It took me a second to figure out what he's talking about there, but I think he's talking about gas prices being up. It's just artificial. So we'll repeat it with that in the context. And remember, with the war, it's just artificial. It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping the country safe. They can take a city, let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego.

It's a very small price to pay, and it's going to be over with very soon. So our president's brain is so adult that it's a little bit hard to translate, like whether he wants Iran to take out San Diego because it's a liberal city or something, so that he can rationalize further war, or whether what he's trying to say is that these gas prices, the high price at the pump, the high price at the grocery store, the economic pain that he inflicted on your families at the war of choice, has a small price to pay because otherwise the Iranians might take out Los Angeles or San Diego.

That's the more generous way to interpret it. I assume that's what was trying to happen in his brain, like the three little flies flying around inside the light bulb. But even if that generous interpretation is true, it's pretty strange. Nobody thought that Iran was going to attack Los Angeles or San Diego, and they can't reach Los Angeles or San Diego with their missiles. If Iran was going to attack something in the West, it probably would have been Europe, like Italy, they could maybe reach.

I would assume that the East Coast would be more concerned than the West Coast. The whole thing is preposterous.

What you see here is a man that has nothing, has no good arguments, has a broken brain, and always drops to the lowest common denominator, whether it be talking about this war or domestic issues.

On that front, it was interesting. There's some news I know about both of the long shot candidates that Bill Kristol and I picked yesterday. Neither of us saw any of this coming. Sometimes I get a little tip, a little inside info from a friend, working on one of these campaigns, that they're seeing some private polling. I usually share everything that I get with you guys, but sometimes I get things that are private. That wasn't true yesterday. I just happened to have been in Lexington and was interested in that district as a stretch goal. Bill Kristol being Bill Kristol, obviously goes straight to Dr. Andy Andrews and South Carolina as his long shot candidate. In the subsequent hours after we taped, we saw some interesting news items. Number one, the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, went in with their first ad in that Kentucky 6 district, Zach Dembaugh. I think it was the 166th most Republican district. So if the Democrats could win there, I know they would have a majority they haven't seen in quite a long time in size.

And so I think it's interesting that the Democrats, the people that see the polling, think that was also in play. Conversely to that, more interesting, more fun, more delicious. The Republicans put in 5 million in the South Carolina Senate race. They are now not spending money on Georgia. They've given up on Georgia and they are spending money on South Carolina. Again, if this was the polls were fake or whatever, this was a blue mirage, then we'll see what happens on election day. But the Republicans' internal polls are saying the same things the public polls are saying if they feel like they got to spend money in South Carolina. So the Republicans are panicking, putting an injection of 5 million dollars into South Carolina. There's some conversation that they need to give up on Texas to shore up Iowa and Kansas. And meanwhile, that information is trickling to the president because he posted on his social media feed calling Annie Andrews, Tranny Andrews. These guys have like two jokes left.