In an interview on 'The Charlie Kirk Show," Glenn Greenwald breaks down why the Democrats lost the presidential election and why they still don't get it.
CHARLIE KIRK: Glenn, your journalism has been terrific over the years and your commentary as well. I want to get into this Pod Save America story because I think it's hilarious and delicious, but I want to get you on the show here. Just your reaction and takeaway.
First off, President Trump's triumph. The intel agencies were against him, the apparatus of the government and the regime was against him, and the American people spoke. What is your initial takeaway, three weeks now removed from President Trump's comeback victory?
GLENN GREENWALD, SYSTEM UPDATE: I thought the most important and beneficial outcome of the 2016 election when Trump won was that it had so severely undermined the leading institutions of authority, which up until that point had seemed almost invulnerable.
These were the people who controlled the flow of information, who dictated public opinion without much dissent, who controlled the policy and ideology that governed Washington, regardless of the outcome of election. It was that D.C. bipartisan consensus, and Trump's victory shattered so much of their sense of invulnerability because they were all united against him. They were all guaranteeing everybody that he was going to lose.
He was completely anathema to the sort of person that they expected would and had been and would always be entering the presidency. But I think there was almost a subconscious level, even though it damaged them, on which they wrote it off as an aberration. 2020, despite all the challenges in the world that every incumbent globally faced because of COVID, he almost won again.
And then I think this time, they really devoted themselves. They tripled and quadrupled their effort in so many different ways, calling him Hitler, and a fascist, and a white supremacist, all the way up until the day of the election, only to realize, and I think this is the most traumatic part for them, not just that he won, but that so many of the groups that they believe they own, lock, stop, and barrel, who have an entitlement to obey them, migrated in huge numbers away from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the person that they've been saying is a white supremacist, black voters, Latino voters, nonwhite voters. And I think they're finding now, starting to internalize that nobody listens to them.
Nobody trusts them any longer. They have zero influence beyond the people who already agree with them, that this kind of power over information has been decentralized because deservedly they've lost trust because of how often they lie. And Trump has been, more than anything else, and there's a lot of things he's been, but he's been a disruptor of status quo institutional authority. And I don't think there's anyone who could do anything other than celebrate that.
KIRK: Without a doubt. So that kind of is a nice segue to the Pod Save America conversation.
For people that don't know, Pod Save America is like regime-approved sarcastic political chatter on the left, right? It is one of the top podcasts on the planet. It's all the former Obama bros. They got all the guests.
They think they know so much. They had General Malley Dillon on the program who was kind of walking through how things happened. I want to play some tape, but first, Glenn, just set the table for the audience. Why did you find this conversation so illuminating?
GREENWALD: I was just joking with your producer that in a million years, I honestly never thought I would ever be able to sit through an hour and a half of a Pod Save America episode, and yet I proved myself wrong because I could not take my eyes off of it. These are people who all come from Obama world. So even though Obama was a very talented candidate and won national elections, underneath Obama the whole time, the Democratic Party was crumbling.
They lost governorships and state houses, and it was really a party in complete disaster, just kind of with the stench covered up by the shine of Obama. These people came away from that thinking that they were the greatest geniuses in all of politics, and they were the ones who exercised the most influence over Kamala's campaign. The purpose of this episode was to convene the geniuses who ran Kamala's campaign and try and ask them honestly, hey, what happened? You just raised a billion dollars, infinitely more than Trump, far more than any other candidate, and you got your asses kicked up and down every one of the swing states.
You've lost major margins in the most blue states like New York and California and New Jersey, and you even lost the popular vote. So you would expect there to be at least some symbolic or feigned acknowledgement of error. Here are things we probably did wrong.
Here are reasons why the electorate has rejected. There was none of that. It was all, we did the best campaign we could possibly have run under the limited circumstances.
There was a lot of implication that it was the voters' fault. There was a lot of suggestions that just the structural conditions of the economy and Biden's unpopularity made it impossible to win. The whole time I'm thinking, whose fault is it that your candidate ended up being imposed on the public with no primary vote, no mini election within your party, someone who had been long considered to be one of the least politically talented people on the planet? They were acting like these were externalities over which they had no control when they were the ones who did it.
Charlie, as somebody at the top of your profession making millions of dollars, which they do up these campaigns, walk away from one of the most devastating defeats in a long time to Donald Trump, someone they consider a Hitlerian figure and a white supremacist, and not have an iota of self-reflection or self-doubt about what they might have done to contribute to that loss. But that's exactly what it was, 90 minutes, not just of refusing to admit error, but congratulating themselves. We ran a spectacular campaign under the limitations, no one knew who she was.
We really made people excited about her. We lost with less margin in the swing states than we did in the other states, which proved that some of our work actually had I mean, I always want to watch it again because of just how simultaneously mind-boggling it is, but also how revealing it is about how this rotted political class thinks.
KIRK: I want to play James Carville's reaction to Kamala's staffers here. Play cut 57.
CARVILLE: The vice president was thinking about going on a Joe Rogan show, and a lot of the younger progressive staffers pitched a hissy fit. Supposedly the campaign said that that wasn't a term de facto, but they did.
When you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, let me tell you exactly what you tell these people, what I would tell them. Not only am I not interested in your opinion, I'm not even going to call you by your name. You're 23 years old. I don't really give a sh*t what you think.
KIRK: What James Carville is getting at is that they were unwilling to even go sit down with Joe Rogan. You've been on Rogan many times, Glenn, and the whole joke, they're like, well, how do we get a new Rogan? Well, you guys used to have Rogan. Glenn.
GREENWALD: First of all, just let's recall when we're talking about James Carville, that he wrote article after article, including in the New York Times, saying that not only did he believe Kamala was going to win the election, but he didn't think it was going to be close, that he had no doubts about it, that he had absolute certainty about it, and maybe that was just some activism. But that is what he said repeatedly, and he turned out to be just as wrong as anybody else.
Maybe he should be listening to people a little bit more. But I think one of the things that's so funny that people have forgotten is that for all this talk about how the left needs Joe Rogan, as you said, the left had a Joe Rogan whose name was Joe Rogan just in 2022, not two decades ago, four years ago, Joe Rogan said his favorite candidate was Bernie Sanders, and his second favorite candidate was Tulsi Gabbard. So Joe Rogan endorsed the most left-wing socialist candidate who's viable for the presidency in decades, this far-right, radicalizing into fascism voice for young men, four years ago was on board with Bernie Sanders.
One of the things that happened was when the Sanders campaign did what, of course, they should have done, which was touted Joe Rogan's endorsement in their advertisements, because those were the voters they need to attract, they need to undermine this view that only far-leftists supported Bernie Sanders, people in the party led by AOC were so offended that the Sanders campaign would even speak with, let alone tout the endorsement of, Joe Rogan that AOC for months refused to have anything to do with the Sanders campaign. She stopped campaigning with them. She accused them of promoting transphobia.
And so when you have someone like Joe Rogan, who has so many classically left-wing positions, he's probably the loudest, most prominent advocate of same-sex marriage. People go on his show and say, we need traditional marriage. He'll pound them for hours about why that's wrong.
So many different views like that. He's anti-corporatist, he's anti-war. To take somebody like that and just malign them and attack them and exclude them and say, because there's a couple of positions, whether trans women should be able to play in sports or young children should get experimental sex reassignment surgery, we're going to declare you far-right. That's why they alienate everybody.
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