Trump’s Supreme Court victory - Plus, why do so many Christian voters support a convicted felon? 01:05:33

Hello and welcome to American Friction, the weekly US politics podcast out every Friday from the makers of Oh God What Now, The Bunker and Papercuts. I'm Chris Jones. Every week we'll be discussing everything you need to know in the run up to November's vote. Recently, things have gotten pretty dark.

Usually I'm joined by former Newsweek reporter turned woke podcaster Jacob Jarvis, but he's decided to go on holiday again. But don't fear, the only person who really matters on this podcast is here to give us all of her wisdom, no matter how tired she is. And that's, of course, Rolling Stone magazine's Nikki McCann-Ramirez. Hello, Nikki. Top of the morning to you, Chris. Very good. How tired are you, actually?

Not so bad today, you know. Not so bad. Not so bad. It's slightly earlier than we usually record, but not so bad. Not like last week. Great. So it should be a stellar episode today then. And speaking of today's episodes, what are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about the Supreme Court, believe it or not, which has decided to grant Trump impartial immunity from prosecution. What does it mean? How serious is this? And can Trump now legally order an assassination of a political opponent without punishment? Last

Last week, Jav and I sat down with a former senior advisor to George W. Bush, Peter Wehner, to discuss Trump, his religious fans, and how he feels about the direction the GOP has taken over the past decade. And we'll wrap up some of the other stories you may have missed, including Steve Bannon's new podcast studio, A Jail Cell. Welcome back. You're listening to American Friction.

On Monday, the Supreme Court moved to grant the presidents of the United States partial immunity from criminal prosecution. As you can probably imagine, that's music to recently convicted Donald Trump's ears, who faces more charges later this year and into the next. In a post to his Truth Social account, he called the decision a big win for our Constitution and democracy. President Biden disagreed, stating that this ruling sets a dangerous precedent –

Nicky, can you please set out what this ruling means and what actually constitutes an official act?

Yeah. So essentially what the court decided was that the president has presumptive immunity from prosecution for acts that are considered official duties in the office of the presidency. They did concede that unofficial acts are not covered by this immunity. I think it's really critical here to note that the court ruled that the president has presumptive immunity, meaning that he operates with the expectation that he has immunity from prosecution. Right.

Obviously, the big question here is what counts as official? Well, as the court stated it, they mean any action that's, quote, not manifestly or palpably beyond his or her authority. Again, what the fuck does that mean? To which the court basically said, we don't know. The lower courts need to determine that on a case-by-case basis. So, essentially, the presidential powers are enumerated in the Constitution, and the

Through the court's decision, what we're basically looking at here is that if a president can in any way, shape or form argue that an action that he took was done through official government channels controlled by the president, through the powers of his office, through staffers and administration members that are part of the executive branch, he could theoretically argue that those qualify as official acts and are therefore covered by immunity. Right.

I think another really important thing here is that the court also decided that prosecutors seeking to charge a president can't introduce evidence or testimony related to the president's official conduct

in a case prosecuting unofficial conduct. So like, for example, testimony from administration officials or documents produced by the office of the presidency could now be theoretically barred from being used as evidence in criminal proceedings against a former president. So I think the big takeaway here is that the president can now theoretically use the official powers of the presidency in

in furtherance of criminal conduct and enjoy the presumption of immunity. The idea here is that if a president seeks to abuse the powers granted to him by the Constitution and uses those powers to commit crimes, well, as long as he can plausibly argue like, oh, well, that's like official conduct of the presidency because like I did it through the Justice Department or I did it through the military or

Courts then have to go and prove that there was some form of unofficial conduct that they could prosecute. And that would be incredibly difficult because as long as the president had a conversation with someone who was a member of his staff or used official channels to organize whatever the theoretical thing he did is,

A, prosecutors wouldn't have access to that evidence, but then the court could simply argue or the president could simply argue, no, that was official conduct. You have no standing here. Yeah. So all this is nice and straightforward then. There's no loopholes at all. Yeah, super clear. There are no pending questions. We know exactly what we're doing. Yeah.

Yeah. Just as a sidebar, where has this come from? Because I don't know if it's just me not paying attention, but this seems to have just almost come out of nowhere. We haven't really mentioned it too much. Has this come out of nowhere or have I just not been paying attention? No, no, no. It's...

It's come up a couple times. I think we've talked about it briefly because the reason this case made it to the Supreme Court was because when Trump was charged by the Justice Department, there are two Justice Department cases. In the election interference case, he argued that he was actually immune from prosecution because he was simply investigating irregularities in the election through the powers of the presidency that he as a president has—

the responsibility to ensure elections are safe and secure so that this was official conduct covered by, you know, the presumptive immunity granted to the president. But the reality is that no such thing

immunity is really outlined in the Constitution. So it became a constitutional question. The D.C. Appeals Court earlier this year ruled against him, said he was not immune. And then he took it up to the Supreme Court, which is obviously controlled by conservatives. All six conservative justices ruled in favor of granting him immunity. Shock. Shocker. A shocker. You know, whomst amongst us could have seen it coming? But essentially...

This case was about Donald Trump trying to get out of the criminal charges against him, but it's fundamentally going to reshape the powers of the presidency for future presidents. Supreme Court decisions aren't four-year things that expire when a president leaves office. They stand as president for decades and decades and decades. So I think the court did a lot to expand the president's powers, but really didn't

or explain what the guardrails were other than saying like, oh, well, unofficial conduct isn't immune. But so much of what the president does during a four-year term is,

can be placed under the umbrella of official conduct, that now it's going to take years to really figure out what qualifies, what doesn't, where the red line is. And of course, the court is still controlled by conservatives. So any lower court that says, actually, no, that's not official conduct, a prosecution can proceed. Well, then the president can once again appeal to the Supreme Court, the conservative-controlled Supreme Court, and have those decisions potentially overturned.

Biden obviously had his say on this and released like a dissent speech type reaction in which he said that future presidents, which you've kind of touched on there, future presidents could essentially just ignore the law. And there's been lots of conversation about, you know, if Trump were to get in in November and win the election, could he theoretically then order the assassination of a political opponent?

How true could that be? Or is that just a massive talking point amongst the media to kind of get views almost? Okay. First off, I think calling it a dissent speech is a little generous. Following the disastrous debate performance last week, which we talked about last week and we're going to talk about later, Biden needed to really make a strong show of force and

And he basically got on stage and said, yeah, this sucks, but I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm going to respect the court's decision. And we've talked about this before, where there are options that lawmakers, Democrats have been pushing Biden to take, right?

in order to sort of balance out the court. The big one that no one thinks is going to happen is expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court. There is no real constitutional limit to how many justices can be on the court, but that would be like a really drastic measure.

The other option that people have been pushing for is ethics reform on the Supreme Court. We've talked about this before. And that would be a really easy thing that Biden could throw his support behind. There's already legislation in Congress that has been written that Democrats are trying to push. And it really would have looked like he was taking a decisive step to be like, this court is out of control. We need to do something about it. And he didn't do that. And the fact that he did not do that

in a moment where he is probably the weakest he's been politically in his entire term. Like, that was just very frustrating for a lot of people. On the question of ignoring the law...

I don't think this means presidents can outright ignore the law. Rather, they've now been granted a massive legal exemption through which they can exploit existing laws surrounding the presidency to do whatever they want. As we said, as long as they can argue, even in the vaguest terms, that what they did was done through the office of the president.

It's not saying that presidents can just be like, these laws no longer apply to me. I am the God King Emperor. It's that now there's going to be, there already are in a lot of senses. Trump has a crack team of lawyers who's trying to figure out how to exploit election, existing election laws to, you know, once again, challenge the results of the 2024 election. But that's going to become more common. You're going to have,

attorneys in the White House, people who are pretty actively looking for ways to exploit presidential powers, especially if Trump wins in 2024, in order to further an agenda that may run antithetical to the principles this country was founded on, two constitutional norms on the question of assassination. So the thing here is that it's not necessarily just like a media talking point, right?

Trump's attorneys argued twice in two different courts, the D.C. Appeals Court and the Supreme Court, that a president could theoretically order the assassination of a political opponent and be immune from prosecution. Trump's argument before the Supreme Court was essentially that in order for a president to be tried criminally, he first needed to be impeached.

That, like, the president has blanket immunity and that the Congress would first have to determine that something was a high crime or misdemeanor before he could impeach. And when asked directly, like, could he assassinate a political opponent and get away with it? Their answer was a qualified yes, right?

Under this Supreme Court decision, like I said, it's kind of vague. The Supreme Court has basically said, no, the lower courts have to decide if an assassination qualifies as official conduct. We'd have to look at that specific assassination. So, like, theoretically, if the president ordered an assassination, like,

through his powers as like commander in chief of the military. Yeah. A court would have to decide like, oh, does this qualify as an official act? If you did it through the official channels of his office, he'd have to basically like run a military coup there. But who's to say?

And that's the big thing here, that the court didn't actually draw any definitive lines. These things would have to be tested in lower courts in order to determine what their character is. And then once again, those decisions could then be appealed to the Supreme Court, which has been captured by conservatives. So I think that's why I say that Biden's speech on Monday was really disappointing because we have...

over the last month in particular, see the court make these really insane decisions. Yeah. To name a few off the top of my head, they loosened the laws around bribery. They ruled that, yeah,

Yeah, no, straight up. It's just crazy, isn't it? That we're having these conversations and these actual real topics that affect real people's lives because of this very real Supreme Court. It's just, it's bizarre, isn't it? You've got to pinch yourself sometimes. No, all the time. I wake up every day and I'm just like, this cannot be real. This cannot be the life I am living in.

But yeah, they made that ruling on bribery. They overturned a longstanding precedent, Chevron, that basically said that when there was a question of regulation or policy within an administration, courts should defer to the interpretation of the statute that the agency was making.

Basically, what this now says is that courts can overrule pretty much like any federal agency's regulations or like bylaws, things like that. So this is going to have a disastrous impact, for example, for environmental regulations, for the FDA and the legality of abortion drugs.

Those kinds of things are all now up in the air. And for Biden to come out and just be like, oh, yeah, this is really bad. But like, we have to respect the norms of the court. It's like, are you are you serious, my guy? It's not great.

It's pretty bad. No, it's not great. You kind of mentioned it a little bit there, but I wanted to look at what ordinary people, I guess, what normal people thought of the Supreme Court. I've looked at some polling, believe it or not, because there's no actual polling from this last Supreme Court decision yet that I can see. But there was something from a few days ago from the Associated Press, a center for public affairs research,

And it found that seven out of 10 Americans think that the Supreme Court uses ideology to shape law over impartiality. And what was also interesting was to see that more Republicans actually think that, 50% to 48%, which I thought would be the other way around. But judging by what we've seen in the latest ruling and the way that the justices voted, which we've talked about, it does really appear that they do make decisions based on ideology rather than

impartiality. So it really seems as though the public largely, no matter their persuasion, aren't really massive fans of the Supreme Court. Yeah. And I think on the conservative side, that in part is because from like, I think probably Reagan forward, Republicans have really argued that the president's role in

is to a point ideologically motivated justices to the Supreme Court. That was the whole debacle we saw when Obama was leaving office, that Justice Antonin Scalia died. He was a very conservative member of the court. Obama was still in office. And Republicans under Mitch McConnell refused to entertain any of Obama's nominees, or

until after the election because they were basically saying, oh, if a Republican gets elected, then that's a Republican who can appoint a conservative justice to the Supreme Court. And that was pretty unprecedented in the history of court appointments. And Republicans have been making that argument for years that under a Republican president, you get Republican Supreme Court justices who are

for example, would overturn Roe v. Wade. That was the big selling point for many years that we were going to get pro-life judges on the court in order to overturn these existing presidents and rulings.

So yeah, I think that's partially why you see a lot of Republicans be really clear-eyed about the ideological nature of the court. Just finally then, Nikki, obviously we've got Trump's other court cases coming up. What does this mean now for these cases, especially if he weren't to win the election? Do they basically just get thrown out in essence? Does it remove some of the real guts of actually what is in these cases?

It doesn't mean anything good for you if you're a prosecutor. We already saw that the New York case got delayed. Well, not the case, the sentencing. Trump was supposed to be sentenced for his conviction in the hush money trial on July 11th. That has been pushed back to September. I think that case is a little different because the payment to Stormy Daniels took place before Trump was president.

Essentially, it's another delay tactic by Trump's attorneys. They're basically arguing that, oh, like in light of this new ruling, we need to review what evidence was used in the case because the Supreme Court did rule on what kind of evidence can be introduced. And they're basically going to challenge some stuff. I don't think they'll have that case thrown out entirely because the bulk of the case rests on Trump's actions through the Trump organization and his actions pre-presidency. Yeah.

However, the DOJ, the Department of Justice, Jack Smith, they're in a bit of a pickle. The case is already pretty delayed.

The most direct impact will be on the election interference case. The court basically said that the judge in that case, Tanya Chukin, will now need to determine what within the scope of the DOJ's case against Trump constitutes official conducts. Another one of the really big issues here is this question of what evidence can be introduced because –

A lot of the evidence the DOJ has secured comes from former Trump administration officials, people who worked for the president. So now it's what testimony can we use? What documents can we use? So I think the DOJ is probably going to have to spend a couple months recalibrating their case, potentially recalibrating their charges in order to accommodate the Supreme Court decision. It's a huge win for Trump in that sense. He is

over the moon about it. I also think the head of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that is producing Project 2025, called it a massive win in the bloodless second revolution. He used the word bloodless, which implies that there is the potential for a bloody one. Anyway, the Georgia case is in a similar situation as the DOJ election interference case.

Trump previously tried to have that case dismissed on the grounds of immunity. And, you know, given that that case is about the election, is about a time period when Trump was in office, they're going to have to do a similar thing.

overhaul, revisit of what evidence they can use, what testimony they can use. And once again, this is all going to delay the cases, delay how long it takes them to get to trial. If Trump wins in November, he now has way more tools in his arsenal to shut down these cases, especially the Department of Justice ones. The Mar-a-Lago documents case, that one...

Like the hush money case is a little less clear cut because Trump wasn't president anymore. Yeah. When...

this whole debacle about classified documents became an issue. However, I think one of the big issues here is that the judge in this case, Eileen Cannon, has been criticized for being really friendly to the Trump team's arguments. She's been accused of kind of slow walking the case, entertaining frivolous motions that just delay, delay, delay proceedings.

So even if Trump's lawyers have a less obvious argument for why this case should be dismissed in light of the Supreme Court ruling, they can once again just level the

A bunch of new motions that will further delay the case, further push back when it goes to trial, fuck with evidence. And Rolling Stone reported it out earlier this week. The people around Trump are calling this Christmas in July. Like it is far above and beyond what they expected. They weren't even sure the Supreme Court would take up this case.

And for them to be handed a win like this, it's bigger and better than they could have imagined. Yeah. So just to sum it up really in one sentence, the whole thing's a bit of a shit show, isn't it? It is in fact a shit show. A shite show, if you're on the other side of the Atlantic. Ha ha ha.

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Simply put, Trump's most dedicated followers are a massive cult. No matter what he does, no matter what he says, no matter any evidence which could prove him to be maybe a questionable character at the least, let's say, they still continue to love him.

But when they're thinking about Trump, are these people actually ignorant or are they actively so, deliberately ignoring what they know to really be the truth? Well, Peter Wehner is a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, a senior fellow for the Christian non-profit organisation Trinity Forum, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and the author of several books, including The Death of Politics, How to Heal Our Afraid Republic After Trump. And his latest article for The Atlantic titled

motivated ignorance of Trump supporters sets out the destruction caused by MAGA World and suggests a vote for Trump at the next election would set the US up for yet more harm. Peter, thanks so much for joining us. You bet. Thanks for having me on. Peter, sometimes I worry with maybe people we disagree with politically, you can kind of patronize them or suggest they are ignorant or that they're stupid. And that's sometimes happened. We've

Here in the UK, maybe people when it came to Brexit, that happened. And it seems in the US that happens around Donald Trump.

Can you explain to us though what you mean by motivated ignorance and how that actually seems to give people who follow Trump maybe a little bit more agency rather than just saying, "No, they're stupid," or, "They're silly for following him." They are actively doing something, aren't they? Yeah, I think they are. Motivated ignorance is a concept from psychology, which is essentially willful ignorance.

The theory behind it is that there are some things, some information, some arguments, that when we hear them, we perceive them as an attack, not just to an idea, but to a core identity. And I think all of us experience that to some degree or another, and we experience it in different domains of our life. I think we experience it in politics.

We experience it in faith. I'm a person of the Christian faith. I've seen it there. So I think it's part of the human condition, but it's on a spectrum. And in terms of how to morally think about this, it seems to me one has to think through the degree to which one is willfully ignorant, willfully looking away from arguments that are really much right before their eyes.

The magnitude of the lies or the conspiracy theories that they're being asked to embrace or themselves willing to embrace. And then the damage that is done by embracing a particular set of lies or ideologies or conspiracy theories. And in my experience in American politics, I've never seen it as acute as I have today.

with Trump supporters. And I say that in part because this person is not a black box. This is not a man hiding his views in the shadows. His cruelty, his illiberalism, his pathologies, his sociopathic tendencies are in bright neon lights virtually every day. And I've had enough conversations with people who are Trump supporters, and I know a lot of them because my previous

life. I was in three Republican administrations, and I grew up in the conservative world, well, shaped by the conservative world. So I have a lot of friends in it. And so when I have these conversations with them and I challenge them on an empirical basis, it strikes me sometimes like I'm shooting BBs against a brick wall. They just bounce off. That, I think, is a problem. I think it's certainly a political problem, but I also think it's a moral problem. At some point, you become complicit in

in a movement that is so transparently malicious that you yourself become complicit in it. And I think for a lot of Trump supporters, that's the case. Is this something that Trump has done rather successfully that makes him very hard to push back against in the election and for Biden to do similar?

is, as you're saying around that, the identity side of things. So people will identify as their religion, say, as Christians, or as someone being a vegetarian, or Chris and I supporting Leicester City Football Club, and that's part of your identity. That's something that you hold dear to yourself. And Trump has managed to make people feel like that about him in a way that no matter that there's a lot of people who want Biden to be president, I don't feel like many people think

I'm a Biden supporter and I'm going to be a lifelong Biden supporter. And that's part of my identity. That's who I am. They more likely think, oh, I'm a Democrat and I'm a liberal. And I believe in that sort of thing. Whereas for Trump, he's really, it is that sort of gut belief. He's almost, he is like a sort of demigod of some kind. Yeah, I think that's a very insightful observation. I think it's undoubtedly true. My sense is that Biden supporters are

are Biden supporters for a variety of reasons. But if you were to use a metric to measure the intensity of support throughout, say, my lifetime in American politics, I'd say he's on the cooler side. I mean, if you examine, for example, or listen to Biden supporters versus Obama supporters in 2008, it is a world of difference. There was tremendous enthusiasm, especially

in Obama's first term in 2008 when he ran. There's nothing like that for Joe Biden. Now there wasn't in 2020.

So I think he's on the cooler end of the passions of American politics as a general matter. Trump, on the other hand, either inspires tremendous amount of loyalty, devotion, and allegiance among his supporters, a lot of them anyway. At the same time, he's an enormously alienating figure for a lot of Americans too, and it may cost him the election, we'll see. But

More than any other major figure in American politics, certainly in my lifetime, but I'd say arguably in American history, there is a cult-like following about Donald Trump. And weirdly and tragically, I think the more depraved he acts, the deeper the allegiance for him is for a lot of his followers.

his supporters. What was once considered, there's a term in this country, you know, a bug rather than a feature. It was sort of a negative you're willing to accept rather than something that deepened your loyalty to a person. And we've seen this transition over the Trump era, which really began in late 2015 and 2016, which is

that people were reluctantly willing to tolerate back then, they've now enthusiastically embraced. So in some respects, the cruelty is the message. That's what they want. When they see the Trump show,

it seems almost life-giving to a lot of them, animating, vivifying. And that's really dangerous because it means that the passions are out of control. With that almost religious-like sense that he's brought around himself and the cult-like following, Trump, to me, seems to, in terms of wanting to lead America, he thinks in the very long term, and maybe that's because of his dictatorial tendencies, but you said about the passion for Barack Obama, for example, and

And Barack Obama did get a lot of passion, but he was also very clear that he was the right president at that time. And he didn't think, "I'm going to be the right president for every single situation and for every single time." And to look at leaders we've had in Britain and Winston Churchill, for example, was the right leader maybe for us for World War II. That didn't mean he was the right leader forever.

Donald Trump, it would appear to me, doesn't think there is a single situation which America could face in which he still wouldn't be the best person to lead the country. And is that a sort of way that he's managed to win over his supporters too?

He lacks that humility in any way. So his supporters have actually bought into that, that no, no matter what happens, whether it be COVID, whether it be war, this is the guy. He can do it all. Yeah, that's an interesting observation. I'd say two things about it. The first is, I think a lot of people who get into politics by nature have a tremendous amount of self-confidence and think that they have a range of skills that they could adapt to any situation. So that, I would say, is a given. Where I think you're onto something is that there's...

something distinct and different about Donald Trump, which has to do with what I think is just clinically as narcissistic personality disorder. For context, I was saying in 2015, certainly by early 2016, that he had a disordered personality, which I think is sociopathy, clinically so, not here using it as an ad hominem. I don't think he's well psychologically, and I think it's pretty clear by now that

that he's suffering from some version of narcissistic personality disorder. So if you have that personality type, that mental condition, that mental illness, and you have the power of the presidency, it's a very explosive combination. And there's no question that for Donald Trump, I'm not even sure if he thinks he's the right man for every moment. He just thinks every moment is about him. And

he's looking for immediate gratification and power. I don't think he cares a whit about the country because I don't think he's capable of caring about anything other than himself. I think it's part of what makes him so dangerous. It's an interesting distinction that I draw in terms of moral complicity. In some respects, I probably go a little easier on Donald Trump because I don't think he's capable of seeing life in moral terms. I think for him,

It would be like asking a person who's colorblind to explain colors to you. I don't think he can see the colors of morality. His supporters, on the other hand, certainly Republicans in positions of power and in Congress and so forth, they can see morality and they can see immorality and what so many of them have done.

is they've embraced the immorality that is transparent and obvious for their own reasons. In many cases, it's for political ambition and power. In some cases, it's fear. In some cases, it's other stuff. So in some respects, not all, but in some respects, I consider them more morally complicit than Trump. You spoke about morality there, and I want to kind of switch the subject slightly to religion.

Morality plays a big part in religion and faith, and I know that's something that you write about a lot. Donald Trump is someone who's barely religious, I think is fair to say. He's been divorced, I think twice. He's married three times. He's now a convicted felon. But he has a lot of support from highly religious white evangelical Christians, for example. According to Pew Research, actually, I saw that white evangelicals and Protestants favor him over Biden. Why do you think that is?

Yeah, they not only favor him over Biden, they favor him overwhelmingly against Biden. He won 80% of the white evangelical vote in 2020, and he's likely to do that again. He may even exceed it.

Yeah, that's one of the puzzles of American politics. For me, as a person of the Christian faith, it's the most personally painful thing that I've witnessed in this moment. It would be a mistake to underestimate the tremendous feelings of grievance and resentment that a lot of Christians have had over decades. It's a sense that the elite culture has looked down on them,

had patronized them, condescended toward them, was at odds with a lot of their values, particularly in the area, I would say, of sexual ethics. And they heard that and they felt dishonored and they felt disrespected.

I think there's some basis in that. I think it's also overstated. But here I'm just being observational. Those feelings of resentment were there for a long, long time. And Trump came in and he tapped into them. Right. And I think he tapped into it in a way he understood that in ways that a lot of other people didn't.

The other thing that is important to keep in mind, and there's a scholar, a historian at Calvin University, Kristen Dumais, who wrote a book called Jesus and John Wayne, and she makes the point that Trump is in many ways the personification of the world.

of a certain kind of man, certain kind of political figure that the white evangelical world has long been looking for. It's kind of a warrior mentality. And so,

What a lot of people look at Christians, they would say, well, gosh, isn't this guy sort of a walking contradiction of the teachings of Jesus, certainly the Sermon on the Mount, the notion of the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control? Isn't this guy the opposite of that? And of course, in many ways, he is.

But if what you're really looking for is a person who is going to go to war, who hates the people that you hate and will destroy the people that you want to destroy, that creates an enormous bond. A third thing which needs to be said is that for a lot of Christians, they view the enemies of Trump as enemies of them, whether it's on policy, on abortion, on a whole range of issues. They're more aligned with Trump than Biden is.

My criticism of Christian evangelicals, I've never been a Trump supporter. I never voted for him. I never would. I understood the argument in 2016 if your analysis was, look, I think the man is morally degraded, but I think his policies will do more for the good of the country and promote the causes that I believe deeply in. That's a fair argument to make. Where I would call them out is

is that they never really said that publicly. They couldn't hold two concepts at the same time, which is I agree with his court appointments.

But his moral depravity and the cruelty is not allowable. What happened is that they bought into him and it became a zero-sum game. They didn't have the moral or intellectual independence to call him out when he deserved to be called out. Then they became his strongest defenders. Is it a sort of case of maybe moral pragmatism there that's gone a little bit wrong then? Evangelicals ranking things, they went, okay, so abortion is the most important thing to me, and

and i'm going to look at that and say okay so morally i've got to rank certain things and i've got to pick the best option that there is there and as you say maybe in 2016 that worked but now they're failing to reverse that pragmatism it would appear to me because look i'm i'm not a religious person you know i wouldn't say i know very much about christianity but i would say that

It would appear to me there's an overarching narrative of how you treat people and care about people and respect people and want the best for people who surround you. Donald Trump simply doesn't seem to pursue that. Surely the pragmatism now needs to switch and go, "Okay.

there are some issues which Biden is wrong on, but overarchingly, holistically, he seems to care about his fellow man more. So that switch, and why don't you think they can make that switch? If one time it was based upon, as you say, pragmatism and based on some issues, how come that just can't seem to flip? I think there was moral pragmatism early on, but I think there were other things that are going on and I'll touch on them as I answer that question. How did that switch happen?

I think there was a psychological accommodation. And again, I think this is a human tendency, which is once you begin to accommodate yourself to certain moral rule cutting, every time you do it, it becomes easier to do it. And it always becomes easier to begin to cut corners morally in other areas too.

And you often don't see it day to day, but if you see it over months or over years, you see how somebody started at one point and ended up at a very different point. But I think what in many respects was going on was that there was a core identity that was fusing with Trump. And as I said, Trump began to embody certain things that they liked. And I'm not sure they wanted to admit that they liked it.

But over time, it became easier for him. The other thing that I think is a frustrating thing to me is that there is this false template that is set up, which this is from the Christian Trump supporter view, which is, yeah, maybe he's morally depraved in his personal life. But in terms of public life, you know, he's much better on policy and so forth.

The main arguments against Trump as a president is his public morality. This is a man who tried to overthrow an election, who inspired a mob to violently attack the Capitol, who encouraged his supporters to hang his own vice president, who blackmailed a foreign country, Ukraine, trying to get them to intervene in the 2020 election, who invited a power hostile to the United States, Russia, in the 2016 election.

He's been found liable of sexual assault, which the judge in the case said was rape.

He's a man who's committed extraordinary fraud in his life. He's spreading deadly conspiracy theories, including during COVID, which costs hundreds of thousands of lives. And then even if you took an issue that matters a lot to evangelical Christians, say abortion, I mean, this is just not well understood. But if you look at the abortion numbers and rates in the United States, they peaked around 90 or 91.

They went down almost every year for 30 years. And do you know when the largest decrease in abortions happened in the United States? During Barack Obama's two terms, they decreased 28%. You know what happened during the Trump era? Abortions went up 8%. Now, even if you don't argue cause and effect, and it's a complicated question,

This idea, which is part of the narrative, which is if you're pro-life, if you vote for a Democrat, you're voting for more abortions, is actually not empirically true. And that data goes back even if you go to the 1980s. So if you go through objective metrics of the condition of the country and just did a side-by-side comparison of Biden versus Trump on a whole series of metrics, you

The country is in better shape under Biden than Trump. Now, COVID intervened, but even if you factor COVID in, that's still the case. So that narrative, which they build so much on, is actually, I don't think, quite true. I just want to ask one more question on religion, really. And that's a statement that Trump made about two weeks ago. And I want to put that statement to you,

And the statement is, if Joe Biden gets back in, Christianity will not be safe. As someone who is a Christian and writes about politics, how does that statement make you feel? But also, how do you think that statement will impact people who will take that line as gospel and

Well, the line is insane. I mean, I actually live in Joe Biden's America, and I'm a Christian. And there's no threat to me. The religious liberties protection in this country for Christians and others is as strong as it's ever been. You would be hard-pressed to find a better country or a better era for a Christian to live in than in America in the 21st century.

I mean, the history of Christianity is history of real persecution in many cases. That is not what we're facing here. So this is what Trump does. It's not just that he lies. He lies preposterously. And the lies are often so grand that they're almost disorienting. But in terms of what that statement does for his supporters, yeah, absolutely it resonates with them because it plays to these feelings of persecution, grievance, resentment, and

I would say for a lot of Trump supporters, there is a Manichean worldview. It's a sense that the children of light against the children of darkness. Angels against the demons. God against Satan. I mean, they see it very much in these spiritual terms, these black and white terms. They often put a kind of spiritual, almost Pentecostal.

overlay over it and say that this is really some sort of grand spiritual battle. And again, I think what this is doing is people are searching for reasons to validate what they already believe.

to strengthen their core identity. In the case of Christians, to proof text the Bible. They're just going to go out, they're going to find certain verses that fit their preordained views. You know, Shakespeare said in The Merchant of Venice that the devil can quote scripture for his own purposes, and that was true. So,

I don't think you can understand Trump's appeal to Christians through an actual Christian prism, because I think he violates that. He is so antithetical to Christianity in so many important ways. I think the way to understand it is that Christianity is secondary. It's almost a pretext for certain core identities that are sociological, cultural, political, partisan.

But the way it's presented, the way they present it, and the way that I think a lot of them have convinced themselves is true, is that this is the proper Christian view, or this is what Jesus is calling me to be. So it's complicated, and you really do understand the nature of the complexity when you have conversations with people who are Trump supporters.

And in a way that's non-provocative, but empirical and direct. You ask them these questions, it's fascinating to see psychologically what happens. Sometimes I have the sense that asking Trump supporters to look at arguments or data that's counter to what they believe is like asking somebody to stare into the sun. Mm.

I don't think that they can do it. I think they look at it and then they immediately look away. Yeah. You once penned an article titled, Why I'll Never Vote Donald Trump. And obviously you're not a Democrat, so voting Biden, I guess, in this election is also not an option for you, which is similar to a lot of Americans. If we look at the polls and we look at what the research is saying, a lot of people don't want to choose between these two men. Right.

So my question to you is, in this election, is there anyone else out there that you think is worth voting for or someone who perhaps has a future that you could see yourself or lots of Americans who are undecided now voting for later down the line?

Well, you know, Nikki Haley is a person that I could have voted for and Chris Christie, too. So there are a number of Republicans to the extent that they were pre-Trump Republicans would have been fine. I mean, Marco Rubio is a perfect illustration. Pre-Trump, Marco Rubio was a reform minded, responsible, conservative member of Congress. And now he's he's a Trump acolyte.

In terms of the situation now, no, there isn't anybody that I would consider voting for other than Joe Biden, really for a simple reason. The next president's either going to be Biden or Trump. And while I am a conservative, not a traditional Democrat or progressive, I think Biden has done reasonably well as president. But beyond that, I would say he's in the traditional 40-yard lines of American politics, and

Trump is something that we've never faced before. And I think he is a threat far beyond Joe Biden or any other presidential candidate we've seen. I mean, the third party option that is discussed in this country besides Biden and Trump is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And he's as much of a lunatic as Trump, at least in important respects. He's more of a conspiracy theorist. Yes. And he's really the author of.

of conspiracy theories that have cost a lot of lives. I mean, he is an anti-vaxxer to his core and has been

for decades and arguing against childhood vaccinations and so forth. So he's a really pernicious figure as well. He's just pernicious in a different way, but he's not going to be president. He's not going to win a single state. So given the choice between Biden and Trump, it's an easy one. I described my vote for Joe Biden in 2020, and I will in 2024 as the vote that I was least enthusiastic about and proudest of.

because I think the stakes have been and remain so large. Peter, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Next up, some of the stories you may have missed because of the Supreme Court's ruling and that dominating the news lines. First up, former Trump aide turned podcaster Steve Bannon. Well, he's off to jail, isn't he, Nikki? He is. That was the one news birthday present I got that kind of counteracted all the other shit. Yep. Bannon reported to prison in Connecticut, I believe, on July 1st.

He is at a low security prison to serve a four month sentence after being convicted on charges of contempt of Congress. No one's surprised. No, no one was surprised. He really tried. The conviction happened in 2022. And he's been trying to delay this sentence for two years. And I think we talked about it before.

If he had just served out the sentence, he would have been out of jail by now. He would be able to participate fully in election year shenanigans. And now he cannot. Yeah. Well, how big of a blow do you think that is? I mean, I know we've talked about it before, but now it's realistically happened and we're in a different place.

You know, he has his War Room podcast, which I assume has a lot of listeners, but there's no record of his listenership, so we can't find out exactly. But I imagine it's fairly influential over a certain group of Magellan voters. So really, this must have weakened Trump in some way as far as his arm of propaganda goes.

I mean, I think it's marginal. He has such a robust propaganda arm that while Bannon's War Room is influential, it does feature plenty of Republican commentators, influencers. I will not name her this episode. But...

I think he has such a big alternative media apparatus around him that losing Bannon for a couple months will at this point be marginal. Bannon said before he went to jail that the show will continue. They're going to have just like rotating hosts coming in to host the podcast. He from prison is not allowed to run a business. Yeah. So he kind of has to like relinquish the reins of

He says he's going to keep contributing when he can. I think he might write stuff for the blog attached to War Room on a pretty frequent basis. And then he gets, I think, a daily 15-minute phone call. So they might, you know, have him answer some questions from time to time. Imagine the audio. I can imagine producer Simon would be tearing that out. If he had any. Scringing.

Producer Simon's laughing at me. I can see him. But it seems mad that you said that you can't run a business from jail, but you can campaign to become president from jail. You can be president from jail. Yeah, exactly. The priorities are all wrong, Nikki. Well, here's the thing. The thing is, like, the founders really didn't anticipate...

That, you know, Americans would want to vote for a dude who had been convicted of crimes and was in jail. Like, it's one of those things where, I guess, like, I don't know, if you're in the 1700s and you're like, oh, I'm writing a document that will last 100 years, hundreds and hundreds of years. Yeah. You're just kind of like, oh, no, that's weird. That's insane. No one would ever do that. We'd never be in that situation. But here we are. Yep. Here we are. Here we are. Moving on to...

The fallout from the debate, which I'm still not quite over. Although, I'm told it got better after I stopped watching. I only watched about half an hour because it was too painful. But I'm told it got better. I don't know. I don't know how it could have got worse, really. It didn't get better. How?

How do you feel about it now, actually? Do you still look at it with dread? Do you still cringe every time you see a clip from it? Is it still playing on your mind? Oh, absolutely. No, it's dominated discussions for the past almost a week. We're almost a week out. And to your point...

Maybe it got marginally better toward the end. There was definitely more fighting between the two candidates toward the end. But you, like a lot of people, probably only made it through 30 minutes and then were like, this is awful. I can't watch it. So does that really help you? Not really. No, no. In the aftermath of this, it was awful. It was undeniably one of the worst debate performances, if not, no, it is the worst debate performance I've ever seen that a lot of Americans have ever seen. Yeah.

And the Biden campaign, the administration's tactic on this has been to accuse people who are now very concerned of being bedwetters, of just like pissing their pants in fear. And it's like, yeah, after seeing that, people are pissing their pants. Like, you guys have spent the last four years saying that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, that the republic will fall if he wins in 2024. And this is the guy we're running up against him? Yeah.

Like, yeah, people should be afraid. All of the polling is showing already just a week out that Biden is losing ground in key swing states, that voters are even more concerned about his health and fitness for office after that debate. And...

The campaign in a call to donors on Monday was just like, oh, everyone needs to breathe through their noses. Like, oh, just relax. It's fine. It's not fine. It really makes me angry because it's incredibly condescending. You're looking voters in the eyes and telling them, like, the don't believe your lying eyes thing, the George Orwell shit. Like, oh, yeah, you guys are fucking stupid. We know better. We know what's going on. We have everything under control. They don't have everything under control. They do not. And anyone who tells you otherwise...

is lying to your face. So we've seen over the past couple days, you know, they had Biden in South Carolina the day after the debate. He gave the speech responding to the Supreme Court. And I think...

What they're trying to do is have him do these like very controlled, high profile speeches where he's reading off a teleprompter, not really having to answer questions or produce answers out of thin air to be like, no, see, he's fine. He's totally fine.

But then you have all the stories about the behind the scenes, like, oh, all of his advisors and his family are meeting at Camp David. The White House is organizing a call with all of the governors because everyone's really nervous. They're talking to donors. They're trying to reassure people. And it once again feels like the Biden campaign and the White House are trying to pretend that

or believe that they can pretend that voters are just going to get over this in a couple of weeks. That as long as they present this front, that Biden is fine, that it was just a fluke, that everything's going to be okay, they can on the back end then soften up lawmakers, donors, staff members who are freaking the fuck out and ride out this wave. The way riding out this wave is going to end is with Trump winning in November.

The concerns about Biden's age did not manifest overnight. This is something that we have been talking about for months since this podcast started. We have been talking about how voters are worried that Biden cannot handle a second term, that he cannot handle this campaign. Thursday's debate ripped back the curtain on everything the White House and the Biden campaign have been trying to sell people about Biden's current physical state.

You can't go back. The genie's out of the bottle. Everyone fucking knows. So now it's a question of what do we do next? Exactly. And it's a question that no one seems to know the answer to, really. But it's been a really tough race so far. Mm-hmm.

And Biden and Trump have been neck and neck. And I was looking at 538's presidential poll recently. And that shows that after that debate that Trump has now pulled into a 1.4% lead over Biden. So it's now 41.8% to Trump to 40.4% to Biden. So we can see there is a realistic and a physical change there in the polls after that debate. Just very quickly, Nikki, does that shock you? No, not at all.

No, not at all. No, I didn't think it would. Zero percent. So you mentioned it earlier, Nikki. Where do we go from here? We've seen talk of people wanting Biden to be replaced. And that doesn't seem realistic. Not really.

with how close we are to November now, there doesn't seem to be someone naturally who could step in right now and take on the reins. Someone that has been mentioned that I saw was VP Kamala Harris. Do you think that's a realistic shout? That's probably the most realistic option. If Biden were to step down from the campaign...

especially this close to the election, the first thing you run into is the issue of ballot registration. So the Biden-Harris ticket is already on the ballot in pretty much every state. There are a couple of states where they're still debating it. But if you were to bring in a completely new nominee, then you would run into issues about can we even get this person on the ballot in time? Kamala, she's part of the ticket. I think it would be easy to convince people

delegates at the convention if Biden were to pull out before the convention to go to her. But you'll love this, Chris. A really interesting poll came out today showing that Congress

Kamala actually performs better than Biden against Trump. Interesting. Yeah, it's a new CNN poll. It literally just came out yesterday. So in these conversations, you did have one Democratic representative put his name on a call for Biden to step down yesterday. He was the first one to do that.

And we're seeing a lot of anonymous statements being like, oh, Biden should really reconsider this. We're seeing statements from donors, from other people who are like, oh, this is really concerning. So I think there are discussions taking place about like, who would we run if he stepped down? Kamala's first in line. And I think it would compound the issues if Democrats were to skip her over. Yeah, it's all quite doom and gloom, isn't it? It is doom and gloom. This has been a really bad week. It's just, it's really been miserable. This has been a really bad week. Yeah.

But we hope, listeners, that you've enjoyed it as much as you can, really, I guess. That's all we can say. But what I will say is thanks, Nikki, for joining me to talk all about it. Thank you, Chris. And thanks so much to you, listeners. If you want more from us, we're out with a new episode every Friday, early afternoon if you're in the UK and the morning if you're stateside. You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Our name on each platform is at American Frick.

And if you've got something you'd like us to answer on the podcast, send us your question to americanfriction at podmasters.co.uk and we'll do our very best to answer it on the podcast. You've been listening to American Friction. See you next week. American Friction was written and presented by Chris Jones, Jacob Jarvis and Nicky McCann-Ramirez.

Audio production was by me, Simon Williams. The group editor was Andrew Harrison and the executive producer was Martin Boitosch. Artwork was by James Parrott and music was by Orange Factory Music. American Friction is a Podmasters production.