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Good evening. It's Friday, July 19.
Tonight: The four-day Republican National Convention concluded last night with a quite lengthy and sometimes genuinely emotional speech by the former president and current Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump. Typically, the purpose of a convention is to present a clear, unified and coherent vision of America and the policies that will facilitate it to the public – sometimes it is the genuine policy and ideological preference of that party, and sometimes that is simply the image the party wants the public to hear – but either way, there is usually a highly coordinated, scripted and tightly controlled message that the party wants the public to hear and on which the party intends to campaign.
As was true for the first term of the Trump presidency, there were many clearly expressed views and perspectives that we heard during the Republican National Convention, but they were anything but tightly coordinated. In fact, there were often very contradictory speakers from one night to the next, or even from one speaker to the next. Trump's choice for vice president, JD Vance, for example, delivered a very populist anti-Wall Street message only for many traditional members of the Republican Party, from the more traditional wing, to demand the standard, subservient policies of the GOP when it comes to serving large corporate interests. Several speakers gave rousing and sometimes rather radical denunciations of U.S. support of the war in Ukraine, such as Tucker Carlson and David Sacks and even JD Vance alluded to that, while others were brought onto the platform in order to invade prominent speaking spots to urge the traditional hawkish GOP view about the war in Ukraine and about foreign policy in general. People like Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton, those worlds and those views could not have been further apart. And yet both of them are accommodated within the Republican Party. That incoherence was one of the biggest mistakes of the first Trump presidency, in my view. Trump won in 2016 on a clear platform of rejecting Bush-Cheney war policies, but then empowered people on the highest level of his government such as Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, who are classic neocons who are pursuing exactly the opposite goals of the ones Trump won the campaign on.
Given that Trump, by all accounts, has a very good chance of winning the 2024 election, it is very worthwhile and, I think, very important to examine what kind of presidency Trump will have this time around, or more to the point with which faction of the Republican Party he will align.
Then: the Democratic Party, by contrast, is embroiled in what can only be described, without hyperbole, as an embittered civil war, the likes of which we really haven't seen inside a major party for several decades. On the one hand, a huge segment of the Democratic Party leadership is using cowardly, anonymous leaks, highly coordinated ones, to make increasingly clear that they want Joe Biden out of the race as soon as possible and are doing everything and will continue to do everything possible to force his hand. While other members of the party and the party's base, as well as those closest to Joe Biden and the White House, are making equally clear still that they have no intention of withdrawing, but instead are quite enraged by the efforts of people like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and now Barack Obama to attempt to force Joe Biden out of the race.
For a while, it seemed Biden was almost certain not to leave. Then it started to look like the momentum for his expulsion was growing so much, and the league started claiming that he was on the verge of softening up and almost agreeing to leave. Now, it's hard to know if those leaks were just further designed to pressure him, and they were just lies, or whether they were real. But either way, we're now back to a situation of utter lack of clarity and even growing enmity within the party over these conflicting leaks. We will look at where everything is regarding the viability of Joe Biden's ongoing candidacy as the Democratic Party nominee.
And then finally, we have a journalistic scandal that is just almost too good to be true. It just brings me so much pleasure to be able to report and talk about all of this. The fanatical neocon and Washington Post columnist, Max Boot, has been basically making a living over the past several decades, recklessly accusing anyone he disagrees with of being a clandestine agent of some foreign power, usually Russia. He is the author, for example, of endless screeds in the Washington Post claiming, obviously falsely, that Donald Trump secretly works for or is subservient to the Kremlin. He certainly says the same thing of anyone who has questioned the war in Ukraine and spent much of the War on Terror accusing the people who disagreed with him of being on the side of Saddam, secretly working for al-Qaida or Assad or Gaddafi, etc. He used that accusation of foreign disloyalty or secretly serving a foreign power any time anyone questioned the Bush-Cheney and then the Obama War on Terror policy that he supported.
Yet now, in a turn of fate so karmically perfect that I can barely believe it's happening – you rarely get karmic justice this sweet and perfectly constructed – Max Boot's wife, a former CIA agent named Sue Mi Terri was just indicted by the Biden Justice Department for criminally serving as an undisclosed agent of the South Korean government and helping that government infiltrate the U.S. with South Korean spies, all without disclosing any of this. To make matters much worse for The Washington Post and for Max Boot, the duo often coauthored op-eds in The Washington Post that were not only about South Korea but also, according to the DOJ, were written after Sue Mi Terri explicitly requested instructions from her paymasters in Seoul on what she should say. In other words, many articles published by The Washington Post and even the New York Times about South Korea, written to advance the interests of the South Korean government, were being published in her name and her husband's name at the same time, according to the Justice Department, those articles were specifically constructed not to express a genuine opinion, but to advance the interests of a foreign government that, unbeknownst to any of the readers or perhaps to these papers, was paying her not only to do that but to help it contaminate the U.S. government with its spies. We'll examine the implications and the fallout of this delicious but highly revealing journalistic scandal.
Next week I will be traveling on a family vacation for the next 8 or 9 days or so, but we will not be off the air. We will have at least one guest host, perhaps two, at least one of whom will be here in the studio. We'll have our Tuesday and Thursday aftershow as normal and everything else perfectly normal, except somebody else will be sitting in this very spot, so we hope you'll watch. I think it'll be people who obviously will have a slightly different view than I on a variety of issues. Nobody, I think, sees everything the way that I see them. That's very rare to find and this isn't MSNBC or CNN where everyone is forced to agree to the same things but, certainly, there are people who have compatible fundamental approaches to how to think about politics and journalism. I think the show will benefit from an injection of something a little bit different but, obviously, we'll be back right after that week and we will resume the show regularly.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
