Interview: Cenk Uygur

My next guest – this one is going to be exciting for me – I'm excited to welcome, Cenk Uygur. He is the founder of the Young Turks. I formerly worked for the Young Turks in a previous life. I always respected and appreciated the autonomy that I was given within the Young Turks to do my own thing, even when it rustled some feathers and maybe everyone didn't always agree, so, Cenk has my admiration for that. And Cenk actually technically ran for president for the Democratic primary nomination in 2024. Largely, he says, because he was so insistent that Joe Biden was going to be a disaster electorally. So, I want to check in with Cenk and see what he makes of the current DNC machinations to corner Kamala in this bizarre, private, process and see if that, satisfies the grievances that he articulated. 

M. Tracey: So, Cenk, welcome to System Update with Glenn Greenwald although I'm not Glenn Greenwald, I'm Michael Tracey, and I am filling in for the time being. So how are you? 

Cenk Uygur: I'm good. And I'm familiar with both of your work, so I'm pretty sure I know. Yeah. I'm good. Thanks for having me on. 

M. Tracey: As we said, you ran for president. Obviously, you never maintained that you stood a particularly good chance of winning the nomination and that wasn't really the point. The point was you wanted to force the issue and get Democrats to realize that if they pressed ahead with Joe Biden, they were going to be in for a nightmare, that Donald Trump could romp, that Joe Biden didn't have the capacity to run a vigorous campaign. 

Your name was on one of these ballots, along with Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson and, of course, Joe Biden, but conspicuously missing from that list of candidates was Kamala Harris. So, one of the points that I've been making is that Kamala Harris is being ushered to the nomination through a process that has remarkably small Democratic input from voters. She hasn't had to win a single vote, a single primary. She got a grand total of zero delegates in 2020 and zero in 2024, at least, if you go by state and territory primary election outcomes. So, I thought we were going to get this open convention process where they could have a mini primary or something truncated to actually gauge the will of the electorate. And in fact, Joe Biden was denouncing these insider maneuvers against him just in the past couple of weeks, he said that they would thwart the will of the primary voters. We're now even told that the DNC is going to have a virtual nomination, still a virtual roll call before the convention, basically negating the whole purpose of the convention, which they were going to do with Biden, now they're going to keep doing with Kamala so that nobody can even contest it, apparently, on the floor or the whole purpose of a convention has now been overturned. So, what do you make of it? I mean, does this satisfy your criticisms of how the primary process was conducted now that Kamala is just having the red carpet rolled out for her? 

Cenk Uygur: Well, let's start with a fun fact. I received more votes for president than Kamala Harris. 

M. Tracey: That’s a very fun fact. 

Cenk Uygur: Yeah. And not only am I just an online talk show host, but I'm a naturalized citizen. So, that's why I was only on seven ballots. That's a civil rights issue somebody should get back to someday. But that was, of course, not the primary reason that I ran. I ran, as I stated from the beginning, in almost every interview that I did, it was an act of desperation because I felt like we were all on board the Titanic and we all saw the iceberg. Or at least a lot of us saw the iceberg, apparently, and I was actually surprised later in the process to find out that blue MAGA existed and that they didn't see the iceberg at all until the debate. But I saw it. I know a bunch of people saw it, and I thought, well, it doesn't look like anybody's going to do anything about it. So, I'm just going to lunge into the captain's quarters and try to move the wheel, because otherwise we're toast and Donald Trump is going to win and God knows what happens to democracy, etc., etc.. But you know what? All the folks who decided to try to make a difference, whether it was like any strange bedfellows – I don't know anyone who criticizes Nancy Pelosi more than I do and so me and Nancy Pelosi on the same side, that is weird – and Ezra Klein and James Carville and David Axelrod and by the way, let's also note, Axelrod, top adviser to Barack Obama, James Carville, top adviser to the Clintons and no one got the memo. I'm like, it's the Obamas and the Clintons telling you there’s something wrong with Joe Biden, and you knuckleheads aren't getting it right. So, there are old fights, Michael, between progressives versus the establishment. And in this particular election, I sense I'm one of the few Democrats who actually think that democracy is on the line. It led to completely different coalitions, people who were perfectly happy to lose to Donald Trump and people who really, really didn't want to lose to Donald Trump. So, me, Carville, etc. were the ones who didn't want to lose to Donald Trump. Blue MAGA was like, who cares, as long as we obey Democratic leadership. That's what “Morning Joe” taught me, Oh, I had to bow my head, the top, value of the Democratic Party is obedience, right? I'm like, man, you guys have lost a thread. You completely forgot what the Democratic Party was supposed to be about. 

So, am I satisfied with the result? Well, I'm enormously satisfied that Joe Biden is out of the race, because we went from about a 0% chance of winning to about a 50% chance of winning. So hard to not be satisfied with that. What about the process of democracy? Was that fulfilled here? Of course, not, but, look, democracy has a number of issues in current day American politics and then I'm going to get to “Yes, but that's the best we can do.” Right? So, number one, come on, the donors control everything. We don't have a real democracy anyway, right? And I talked about this in my book, “Justice is Coming”. You know, a person in Northwestern did a 20-year study, 1800 policy issues. The bottom 90% of Americans have zero effect on public policy. Absolutely zero. Okay? The top 10% don't control everything, but when they want something, they get it 45% of the time. So, already is hilarious.

Reid Hoffman, today, gave $7 million to Kamala Harris and demanded that Lina Khan be fired. And guess what? She'll be fired. That's AIPAC. And when, you know, bought all of Congress, Netanyahu, notorious war criminal, one of the most evil men of my lifetime, getting standing ovation after standing ovation. So what? Democracy? 

Secondly, when you get into the primaries, the Democratic primaries are a joke and have been for a long time. Under the bullshit rubric of unity, notice they never have unity around progressives. There's never any unity other than corporate democratic leadership. So, and this was a sham primary, again, I know, because I was in it and, in Florida, they just canceled the election. North Carolina, Tennessee, they didn't just take me off. A lot of states took me off because of the naturalized citizen issue. That's a totally different thing. But they took Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson off of the balance in North Carolina and Tennessee. So, a joke of a primary, and I kept saying the whole time and mainstream media just didn't pay any attention because running against Joe Biden was a violation of etiquette. And so, I was a bad guy. I was a radical for wanting democracy. And I would say, if you're going to try to defend democracy in a general election, wouldn't it be nice if you had won in the primaries and people in mainstream media were like, how dare you bow your head to Joe Biden? He's the most young, dynamic guy that anybody's ever seen. 

But, Michael, at this point, that ship has sailed. So, then the next layer of it is, okay, I call for an open convention, as Ezra Klein did and others did. And that's obviously the last vestige we have of democracy at this point. And, at this point, Kamala Harris has gotten the majority of the pledged delegates. No one's even running against her. I mean, this Democratic Party, it's just incredibly frustrating. So, she's going to be the nominee. Let us at least go to the convention. No, no, they're lying about how Ohio this and we can't get on the ballots that. So, they're going to do a virtual roll call on August 7 and snuff out any delegates changing their mind before the convention because the DNC is authoritarian by nature, so they just can't help themselves. But with a straight face, they'll say they're wanting to protect democracy and these same guys who wanted to keep their job because Biden hired them were willing to totally risk democracy and have given Donald Trump about a 99% chance of winning. 

M. Tracey: So Cenk this was a letter that Joe Biden delivered to congressional Democrats on July 8. This is the same day that he had his infamous Defiance Morning Joe column. Here's what he wrote in that letter. And maybe I'm on my usual because I actually read the letter and I remember it. It was only a couple of weeks ago. I know everything. We just throw down the memory hole at warp speed nowadays.

But he says, “It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned, the voters – and the voters alone – decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.” And this is the kicker: “How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party? I cannot do that. I will not do that.” 

So how are the Democrats, with a straight face going to start screaming, as they have incessantly forever. You apparently agree on the substance of this point; I might quibble a little bit, I think a lot of the rhetoric around democracy and Trump overturning it tends to be a bit histrionic and overblown, but that's like more of a substantive conflict we may have. But in terms of the consistency of the Democrats own messaging, Joe Biden himself is the one who said that it would be undermined if they allowed this insider putsch to go forward. So, are we just going to memory hold this letter? Is Joe Biden really now going to be so cast by the wayside that everybody supposed to forget? Ezra Klein, not Matthew Iglesias, Thomas Friedman, The Washington Post, Vox, name your Democratic aligned pundit or media outlet, are they all going to forget that? You know, two and a half weeks ago, Joe Biden said that if you go through with this ouster of me, it means that our own party, the Democratic Party, is thwarting democracy. I mean, I feel crazy. 

Cenk Uygur: Yeah. Look, Joe Biden wrote that same letter for the same reason that he said, You know what? I demand to have a primary in Florida. I can't believe they canceled that election. And I demand that all everybody be put back on the ballot in North Carolina and Tennessee during the primaries. And I demand that we do debates during the primaries so the candidates can be tested and that the voters get what they want – Oh, right. You didn't do any of that? No. He's monumentally full of crap. He loved that. The primary was totally authoritarian, totally rigged, to not only make sure that he was a candidate, but that he was protected and hidden in a basement and that he wouldn't have to actually run against any of us. I mean, look, they were hiding him from me, Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips. They knew he was going to lose! If you can't beat us in an open debate or in an open and fair contest, of course you're going to get your ass handed to you even by a moron like Donald Trump. So, that letter is garbage. It's trash. He never meant a word of it. So, I don't really care about that letter just because I already know that Joe Biden's a hypocrite. But look, that goes to the point that I'm making. So, I'm one of the few people who actually believe it, because I think Donald Trump had fake electors and, and that's a real coup attempt against democracy. And he's a spoiled little brat, and he wanted to take his toy and go home when he lost. And so, he's a super dangerous guy to have in charge and just never believed in democracy. Praises dictators at every check. So, but I have proven that I'm not a hypocrite on that, that I actually believe in democracy all the way through the process. And I actually believe that he's a danger to democracy. That's why I did the desperate thing that I did, which helped a little bit in setting the party in the right direction. But everyone else who pretended this is the most important election of our lifetime and democracy was on the line. They're like, yeah, we don't mind losing as long as we're obeying Joe Biden. Those guys apparently never meant…

M. Tracey: So, let's delve into this notion that Donald Trump represents some profound threat to democracy. This couldn't be more standard rhetoric among Democratic partisans. And you say you believe it. I believe you that you were sincere in your contention on that and I will also acknowledge that you're consistent in matching your actions with your words, because you took the rather drastic steps you've been running yourself to try to make clear that you thought the threat was so severe that it compelled you to throw your own hat in the ring. So, I fully acknowledge that. But I don't know. Should we step back for a moment? Does Donald Trump throwing a hissy fit after the 2020 election and trying to come up with cockamamie theories as to how Mike Pence could potentially take a different set of electors than the one sent by the states, and that was denied by Pence, and then he, you know, he whips up a mob of yahoos who really had no ability or even seeming intention to overthrow the United States government, I mean, temporarily delaying a legislative proceeding on January 6, 2021 – never even had the ability or the possibility of in any way implementing a coup in the United States government. That's outlandish rhetoric to underscore the preexisting grievances that people have about Donald Trump. So, I agree – and people on the right get mad at me all the time because I don't buy into the election fraud stuff that I don't feel has ever been remotely empirically proven – but Donald Trump throwing a tantrum and then leaving power? And now running again. I mean, so let me ask you this. What would Trump do if he were to win this time that would actually sabotage democracy? Would he not obey the Constitution and leave power after a second term? Would he defy the 22nd amendment? I think that's the correct amendment. Like what tangibly would he do that would flush democracy down the toilet? That's what I'm not clear on, the specifics of what people are alleging when they make this argument.